GRAPHS OF MEASLES AND MMR RATES 2008

Brian Deer: the Wakefield factor   Materials from a documentary investigation by Brian Deer for the UK's Channel 4 Television exposing the bizarre true story of British gut surgeon Andrew Wakefield and his strange crusade against a children's vaccine

Click here for MMR part 1: The Sunday Times news investigation

Wakefield's patent claims: Nine months before Andrew Wakefield and London's Royal Free hospital medical school unleashed a global scare over the safety of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, they filed, on June 5 1997, the first of a string of patent applications for theoretically vastly profitable products which could only succeed if MMR's reputation was damaged. These included a purported safer measles vaccine - a potential competitor to MMR - and treatments for bowel disease and autism. All were based on claims that measles virus in MMR was at fault A cure for autism? According to Wakefield, measles virus in MMR shots attacked the gut, which in turn led to brain damage. This theory led the Royal Free to make the astounding claim that an anti-measles treatment would reverse the problem, allowing autistic children to be treated, or even cured, by their products. The same technology was intended to produce an allegedly safer measles vaccine, presumably for parents shunning MMR No good cause: Wakefield's call for single shots dropped "out of the blue" Brian Deer: The Dispatches and Sunday Times investigator on the trail of the doctor whose allegations of a link between MMR and autism created a global scare. Prof Hugh Fudenberg: This grandfather of the MMR scare sold autism cures from his Spartanburg kitchen, and inspired Andrew Wakefield with his "transfer factors". Recipe for madness?: Wakefield's claims for a safer measles vaccine, and treatments for bowel disease and autism, were not only bold, but were bizarre. The technology involved is of so-called "transfer factors", a now largely abandoned fringe conjecture based on a curious theory that special substances can be harvested from white blood cells. The Royal Free's recipe advised injecting mice with measles, extracting and processing white cells, injecting the result into pregnant goats, milking them after kid-birth and turning the product into capsules for kids. Mmmm, delicious A price on misery: With medicine and science offering little comfort, a knot of quacks have moved into the field of autism, marketing unproven or worthless products to desperate parents. So-called "transfer factors" have been among the most enduring. When Brian Deer quizzed a vendor at an October 2004 Autistic Society of America meeting, partly funded by quacks, society officials called security guards and had him ejected Guilt tripped: How Wakefield's scare caused mothers to blame themselves

In the Royal Free lab: Even as the MMR scare was launched in February 1998, Wakefield knew that his own lab had rebutted his core theory: that measles virus caused inflammatory bowel disease and autism. The work was carried out by Nick Chadwick (right), who used sophisticated PCR technology to look for measles virus in patients - including children whose cases were used by Wakefield to start the alarm over vaccine safety. Until Deer's investigation, these remarkable results were unknown to the public - but now raise troubling questions Methods agreed: Prior to his work looking for (and failing to detect any) measles virus in autistic children whose cases were used to start the MMR scare, Nick Chadwick had published a series of scientific papers with Wakefield, department chief Prof Roy Pounder, and (right) Greenwich university's Prof Ian Bruce. These set out the agreed RT-PCR molecular methodology for detecting measles virus in gut and blood samples. At this link are two of the key publications Carol the crank: Sick emailer Carol Stott is censured by professional body Dr Nick Chadwick: His research in Wakefield's own Royal Free medical school laboratory rebutted the foundations of the MMR scare, even as Wakefield cranked it up. Prof Ian Bruce: As a senior molecular biologist at Greenwich university, he supervised Chadwick's research and joined him in expressing his concerns to Brian Deer. Paper retracted: Unhappy that his own laboratory had rebutted his MMR-autism theory, Wakefield told Chadwick to send his samples from autistic kids to physician Dr Hisashi Kawashima in Tokyo, with whom Wakefield published a paper claiming to have found vaccine-strain measles virus. But after Chadwick gave a statement, reporting contamination in Kawashima's lab [as would be alleged later in John O'Leary's], Wakefield formally withdrew reliance on the much-quoted paper - leaving more anti-MMR "science" in ruins MMR doctor's "no comment": In response to letters from Twenty Twenty Television, asking to discuss specific issues, Andrew Wakefield responded through solicitors, ignoring every matter raised. Instead, he launched an attack on Brian Deer's integrity. In a letter to Channel 4 Television, Dr Wakefield's lawyers claimed that Deer's reports on him were "in most cases demonstrably false, highly opinionated and clearly defamatory of Mr Wakefield." Cash in hand: Mr Wakefield buys blood at a children's birthday party