NHS Blog Doctor: Bad news from Doncaster

It is starting.

Of all places, it is starting in Doncaster, in Yorkshire. I would not have expected it there. But it is as good as anywhere, and it does not matter where it starts. What matters is that it has started. We knew it was going to but the reality is still unpleasant.

What am I talking about?

Measles. You know, that “trivial” childhood illness. Your parents had it when they were children and it “didn’t do them any harm.” Maybe you had it too. I certainly did. I can remember it. I had all the childhood illnesses, but this is the one I remember because it was the worst. Fortunatly, I made a full recovery.

There were no immunisations against measles when I was a child. There are now. There are also a collection of lunatics and alternative medicine idiots who proselytise against immunisation. They need locking up. Or shooting. Perhaps both. I do not believe in capital punishment but if it is to be re-introduced, the anti-immunisation brigade will be at the top of my list.

And when I have shot them, I will shoot the British Government. This one, and the last one. Not just the Prime Minister. All of them. Or maybe I will set the beast at the Devil’s Kitchen on them. They handled it so badly.

Remember BSE? Remember all the dishonesty, the platitudes, and the patronising, dissembling lies from the government? Remember the appalling John Selwyn Gummer, as reported by the BBC, inserting tainted meat into his daughter?

Greater love hath no man....

Remember Blair refusing to say whether or not little Leo had had an MMR? The man who advocates comprehensive schools for your children but not for his? It would have cost nothing for Blair to say that Leo did have an MMR. Indeed, it would have been helpful if Cherie had taken little Leo for his MMR with a photographer.

Photo-opportunity for the Blair family

But Blair says he will not use his family for photo opportunities.

I do not know if Leo had the MMR or not. I hope he did for his sake. The gossip on the medical grapevine, however, is that he did not. Cherie probably gave him a rectal infusion of ciabatta soaked in Yaks milk.

After the governemnt's shambolic dishonesty, I do not blame the predominantly middle-class, intense, tree-hugging, parents who decided not to give their children the MMR. The Wakefield beast was on the rampage saying that MMR caused autism.

Wakefield

I heard Wakefield speak. He was persuasive. He even persuaded the Lancet. What the government should have done was spend a little money on proper research to show that what Wakefield was saying was nonsense. Instead, they used their “weapons of mass destruction”, dishonest, Stalinist tactics to undermine him politically and airbrush him out of history. Naturally enough, the left wing media and the BBC made a hero out of him. Incalculable damage was done.

MMR does not cause autism. Autism happens to become apparent round about the time that children are being immunised. That does not mean there is a causal relationship. There is not.

MMR and Autism

There have been 76 cases of measles reported in Doncaster alone this year. And MMR coverage in that area is reasonably good. About 90%. The national average is only 81% and it is much lower than that in London and the Home Counties.

Please immunise your children.

It is never too late, however old they are. If you decided not to do it when they were very small, do it now. Phone your health centre and make an appointment for this week.

Please immunise your children.

Giving immunisations in batches is not dangerours. It is preferable. That may not seem intuitively obvious, but it is correct. There is nothing dangerous in immunisations nor in the solutions that contain them. The evidence is overwhelming. See what an American paediatrician says here.

Please immunise your children.

Measles kills. It is not a trivial illness. Children die of measles. We were reminded of this by Another Preventable Tragedy in Grand Rounds earlier in the week. This death was avoidable.

Measles

And some do not die, they get catastrophic brain damage.

Measles induced subacute sclerosing panencephalitis in a child's brain

Please immunise your children.

When Dr Crippen was a hospital doctor doing paediatrics, he worked for a time in what was then the largest paediatric hospital in Europe. The reason it was so large was because it had two wards full of long-stay brain-damaged children. We called it, the “cabbage patch.” Most of the children had been turned into cabbage by measles.

Cabbage Patch

Please immunise your children. It is not too late. It is never too late. Even if they are teenagers now. Take them to the doctor and get an MMR. As well as measles, there is now a lot of mumps around. Particularly in the universities.

Boys who get mumps get orchitis. Orchitis is not much fun. Orchitis can make you sterile.

This little piggy got orchitis

Please immunise your children.

Dr Crippen has put his money where his mouth is. All four of his children are fully immunised. We have ten doctors in our practice. Between us, we have 23 children. They are all immunised. Against everything. We practise what we preach. We know about these things. We would not do anything to our children that would damage them.

All our children are immunised. Please make sure yours are too.