MMR- So what’s the Scare?

So, leaving all that aside, what’s my view?

Ok, so I’m not a doctor, I’m not even a parent. But what I am is someone who had the measles proper and had them more than once. In fact not only are people not meant to have the measles more than once but they are certainly not meant to have them ten times. And this gives me a very special opinion on an vaccination against this very deadly and debilitating virus.

Measles makes you terribly ill. It can cause death, paralysis, sensory impairments and brain damage.

We are supposed to have an immune system which recognizes when we’ve had a virus so we don’t simply catch it again. Its like a little cellular memory, Its called, I believe IgG- immunoglobulin G. To have enough of this little memory messenger, you have to have its friend IgA- immunoglobulin A. No A, probably not much G either and that means the body doesn’t know what its already had. In other words, you can’t build immunity to viruses, bacteria, fungi etc.

So I never had the MMR. And even if I did have the MMR, someone like me who had no IgA would not have been able to recognize the vaccination…. And that means, I would not have built the expected natural immune response the vaccine is designed to trigger. Nobody would have come to the party, nobody would have waved a little flag and said, ok folks, we’ve mapped that little virus, now when the big version comes, we won’t ‘catch’ it.

So, I’m one of those very small minorities within the Autistic Spectrum who probably would not have benefited at all from the MMR until I had sufficient IgA to have a hope in hell of producing enough IgG to properly recognise and respond to the vaccine.

Now what happened in my case was that I caught the measles in its full blown form.
This was standard practice in the 1960s. People took their healthy children over to whoever’s home had the virus, or mumps for that matter, and helped the kids to catch the virus so they’d get over it and that would be done with. I was about two or three then. From my photos, it is clear that I was already displaying signs of autism at a few months old. Long before I caught the measles.

I was tested for deafness at 2 ½ (as well as leukemia). I didn’t have an overabundance of white cells.
I was coughing blood and found to be causing it to myself through tensing my stomach muscles and coughing, tic like in good old OCD fashion and basically figured as ‘psychotic’ (for in the 60s, that was the trend though how a baby can be psychotic is beyond me).

Anyway, in my teens, the measles were back. In my thirties they were back again. And this time, not only were they back again but I gave them to several other people and then, six weeks after they’d gone, the measles came back again, then again, and progressively in smaller flare ups over the course of a year. What is clear is I probably carried the measles for quite some time, out there, among unvaccinated strangers, passing it on.

It was in my teens I was told had virtually no white cells and I remember being so happy when I was told in my thirties after years of treatment that my white cell count was low. I thought wow, fab, so I’ve got some, that’s better than before. But it wouldn’t be till I was 37, after 12 years of treatment in nutritional medicine, six years of that with Dr Kenyon at the Dove Clinic now down in Winchester (using a similar approach to the doctor at www.autismmanagement.com) that I’d have my first normal white cell count and another year before I’d have the terrible disappointment that my poor old white cells had no messengers to tell them what to do. I had no IgA. My immune system was a toothless tiger. Then, thanks to Eldon Health Clinic, ( eldon@eclipse.co.uk ) a six week program got me up into the normal range and I went to war with years of stored bugs.

Willis Langford, in his article, A guide to managing autism through functional nutrition, quoted medical studies showing that 20% of people on the autistic spectrum have low IgA and that 8% have no IgA- figures that would perhaps tally with Paul Shattock’s view that the MMR may be linked with autism in 10% of cases. The rate of autism in the population is small as it is and this group is even smaller. Yet we must acknowledge this group exists.

To send someone like me into a world of unvaccinated people to have an even greater chance of catching the full blown Measles, Mumps or Rubella virus will do those like me no good at all and there are some figures saying around 30% of children IN THE GENERAL POPULATION are now unvaccinated. That is one scary world. At the same time, we need to make sure that children with undiagnosed primary immune deficiency are picked up BEFORE they are given a vaccination their bodies cannot cope with. This is such a small percentage of the general population but the test is non-invasive and affordable. It is a saliva test for secretory IgA and even possible with small babies using a swab. Then we know which children might be likely to be at risk, not just from vaccinations their bodies can’t cope with but also from the full blown viruses themselves.

This test should be given in my view to any child with chronic or repeated ear/nose/throat infections or ongoing signs of thrush prior to getting jabs. There are nutritional programs to boost immunity and raise IgA and the test can be repeated to confirm new levels prior to vaccination once the immune system is normalised. Some children with particular immune system vulnerability might benefit from single vaccinations once they have sufficient immunity to cope with vaccinations at all.

I don’t want to see little in my position sacrificed because powerful lobbies make MMR compulsory but refuse to provide a simple non-invasive preliminary secretory IgA (saliva) test prior to vaccination. Just because those in my position are a minority, doesn’t mean we don’t exist. But I also don’t want people in my position to live in a world rife with deadly life threatening and debilitating diseases which we will not only be more likely to catch but also to carry and pass on.

For information on secretory IgA testing and treatment for immune deficiency you can contact Eldon Health Clinic on the Links page of this site.

For what its worth, there’s my view.