http://www.nationalpost.com/todays-paper/Lying+about+autism/4073328/story.ht
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Lying about autism

.National Post . Friday, Jan. 7, 2011
Parents of autistic children face a multitude of special challenges. In
recent years, this has included the challenge of sorting out legitimate
medical advice from debunked quackery. 
The most infamous hoax was perpetrated by a now-disgraced doctor named
Andrew Wakefield. In 1998, he published a flimsy study purporting to suggest
that common childhood vaccinations against measles, mumps and rubella could
cause autism. The study was based on anecdotal accounts concerning just 12
children, but millions of anxious parents seized on it. As a result, a small
but significant number of parents in Western nations are now refusing
life-saving vaccinations for their children. 
Last year, the 1998 Wakefield study was definitively withdrawn by The
Lancet, the British medical journal that originally had published it. And
Mr. Wakefield's licence to practice medicine was justly revoked. Yet on the
Internet, where medical hoaxes and junk-science find fertile soil, Mr.
Wakefield has remained something of an alternative-medicine cult hero -- in
large part thanks to the activism of former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy,
who has been allowed to preach her autism misinformation on Larry King and
Oprah. 
Now we have fresh evidence that Mr. Wakefield was not just an incompetent
doctor and researcher, but a liar and a fraud as well: The British Medical
Journal has published an investigation showing that the disgraced doctor
willfully altered key facts about the 12 studied children in order to
advance his vaccine-autism thesis. For instance, Mr. Wakefield claimed that
all of the 12 children presented normally before vaccination. In fact, five
children had pre-existing developmental problems. 
Will the new revelations finally put an end to the vaccine-autism hoax? We
hope so. But we have our doubts: This urban legend has seeped so deep into
the West's collective lore that it now even permeates parts of the
mainstream media. 
Consider, for instance, the Toronto Star, which recently published a splashy
feature called "A shot in the dark," giving vague credence to the idea that
vaccination might cause more harm than good. As of this writing, on the
afternoon of Jan. 6, the article remains on the Star's website. Under it,
the Star has included a list of "publications that offer a solid grounding
in childhood immunization." These include a junk-science website
misleadingly called the "Vaccine Risk Awareness Network," whose banner
greeting to web surfers trumpets "evidence" supposedly showing that
"vaccines can damage a child's developing immune system and brain, leading
to debilitating and life-threatening disorders like autism." 
Autistic children and their parents deserve our support. This includes doing
everything we can to debunk Andrew Wakefield's hoax, and the bogus reports
of gullible journalists and celebrities who've been taken in by it.

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