"In the UK, parents panicked and vaccination rates plummeted after gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield claimed in a 1998 study that MMR [measles, mumps and rubella vaccine] might trigger autism, although the study was based on just 12 children and later retracted by most of its co-authors. Soon the vaccine was being blamed for the apparent rise in autism...[i]n some parts of the UK, the proportion of children receiving both doses of the MMR vaccine has dropped to 60 per cent. This has led to a rise in measles outbreaks and fears of an epidemic.

...[The new study] looked at the records of 31,426 children born in one district of Yokohama between 1988 and 1996. The team counted children diagnosed as autistic by the age of 7. They found the cases continued to multiply after the vaccine withdrawal, ranging from 48 to 86 cases per 10,000 children before withdrawal to 97 to 161 per 10,000 afterwards. The same pattern was seen with a particular form of autism in which children appear to develop normally and then suddenly regress - the form linked to MMR by Wakefield.

The study cannot rule out the possibility that MMR triggers autism in a tiny number of children, as some claim, but it does show there is no large-scale effect."

(Source:  Andy Coghlan, "Autism rises despite MMR ban in Japan," New Scientist, issue 2489, 05 March 2005, page 16; http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=mg18524895.300; referencing Hideo Honda1, Yasuo Shimizu and Michael Rutter, "No effect of MMR withdrawal on the incidence of autism: a total population study," Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 18 February 2005; http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2005.01425.x/abs/.)

"'If there was a true causal relationship between MMR and autism, one would have expected rates to fall after the vaccine was withdrawn.'

'In fact, the rate continued to rise.'

He added: 'These findings are resoundingly negative in relation to the link between MMR and autism. They rubbish the claim that MMR is having a general effect on the rate of autism.'"  

(Source:  Michael Rutter, in "'No link' between MMR and autism," BBC News, 3 March, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/4311613.stm .)

For health officials responsible for seeing that young children receive their vaccinations on time, the upsurge in out-of-wedlock births cannot be good news.  Distinctively low vaccination rates among the children of unmarried mothers have, in fact, recently been documented in a study published in Public Health Reports.

Examining data collected during 1997-1998 from northern Manhattan, Detroit, San Diego, and rural Colorado, officials from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention looked for social predictors that three-month-old infant children will not have received the recommended vaccinations (for diptheria-tetanus-pertussis, polio, haemophilus influenza type B and hepatitis B).  Among the factors statistically linked to particularly low vaccination rates were "having public or no insurance... and the adult respondent [i.e., the mother in almost all cases] being unmarried."  To be sure, the statistical linkage between maternal marital status and infant vaccination status reached the threshold of statistical significance for only two of the four data sources (Detroit and San Diego).  However, infant vaccination rates ran higher for the children of married mothers than for the children of unmarried mothers in all four sites. 

The authors of the new study stress that "ensuring that children are U[p]T[o]D[ate] with immunizations at three months is important in preventing vaccine-preventable diseases," and they express concerns about "vulnerable children" who have not been vaccinated "early in life, when the risk of complications for vaccine-preventable diseases is highest and the risk of exposure is significant from unimmunized or under immunized siblings." The researchers also warn that "a late start for the initial vaccination series [to be completed before an infant is three months old] has been found to be associated with underimmunization later in childhood."