RepsDirect No 269 - 20 May 2004

CPHVA Reiterates Support for MMR Vaccine

The Community Practitioners’ and Health Visitors’ Association (CPHVA) has again reiterated its support for the MMR vaccine in the wake of the continuing controversy about the programme.

The CPHVA, which represents health visitors and community nurses across the UK, said it was against the idea - promoted by some politicians - that parents should have the right to choose single vaccines of measles, mumps and rubella for their children.

The CPHVA believes that certain sections of the media, with their own libertarian agendas of individual choice and parents’ rights, are distorting the strong case for MMR.

The CPHVA has issued seven reasons why it supports MMR.

• It is far better to give a child two MMR injections, rather than separate injections, which would amount to nine in total.
• It has been proved that a combined MMR injection works better than single vaccines.
• No measles or mumps single vaccines are currently licensed in this country. One such vaccine from Europe has been shown to be only 70% effective. Only rubella is currently available in a single vaccine in this country.
• Single vaccines advocates argue that MMR has adverse reactions due to ‘overloading’ of the immune system. However, children can accommodate thousands of antigens - proteins that are foreign to the body - at one time and the MMR has only three antigens.
• Andrew Wakefield, the doctor who kicked off the controversy about the adverse effects of MMR, argues that each separate vaccination should be given a year apart. This would mean a six-year period for the two separate measles, mumps and rubella vaccines to be fully effective, with all the risks that this would entail, as opposed to the two MMR jabs over an 18-month period.
• Where other countries have been forced to offer single vaccines because of supply problems, i.e. Japan immunisation rates have crashed.
• How far do you offer parents the choice in health matters, when it could be detrimental to the health of the nation as a whole? Allowing individual choice could erode the 95-97per cent ‘herd’ immunity for the whole population which is needed to stave off these virulent and, in some cases, deadly diseases.

The CPHVA’s Director, Mark Jones said: ‘The CPHVA continues to be satisfied that there is no proven link between MMR and serious adverse reactions.’

Research from Finland, covering a 14-year period between 1982-96, has shown that three million vaccine doses of MMR only produced a possible incidence of serious adverse reactions linked with the MMR vaccination of 3.2 per 100,000 doses.

Mark Jones said that the length of the study and the numbers vaccinated made a convincing case that the chances of an adverse reaction in the UK were “infinitesimal”.

He said: ‘ However, there is no research currently available to suggest that having the injections by single dose vaccines is less of a risk than having the combined MMR vaccination.

‘But what we do know is that there is a risk that parents would not bring their children for all of the single dose injections. The delay between single dose injections would give a longer period of time when children would be unprotected against these diseases.’

Within living memory polio, diphtheria and tuberculosis were major ‘killers’ in the UK. Vaccination was the only means by which these scourges were eradicated.

Mark Jones said: ‘The last time there was a measles epidemic in Britain in 1988, there were 86,000 reported cases, resulting in 16 deaths. We must avoid a repetition of this scale of outbreak in the future; and vaccination is the best - and only - defence.’




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