A jab too far?

BY the time he was one year old, little Liam Brunskill was a perfectly normal little boy. Mum Mandy doted on him and watched every stage of his development with maternal pride. "He passed all his usual milestones for a child his age: sat unsupported by six months, walked before his first birthday," recalls Mandy. "He was trying to eat with a spoon by six months, and was standing unaided by ten months.

"He could say a few words by about eleven months and enjoyed reading a book with me and was very attentive.

"If we hid toys he would try to look for them. At the christening at nine months, he was interacting with other people and looking to see where noises were coming from.

"He was alert and responsive. Everyone enjoyed chatting to him and he always looked at them when they were talking."

On his first birthday Mandy took Liam to have his measles, mumps and rubella jab - the MMR vaccine.

"You were always told you must go along and get it done or you're not being a good parent," she says. "It's something you feel you have to do. You're not given any information other than that they are safe."

But pretty quickly it became clear something was wrong.

"A few hours after the vaccine he had a raised temperature," Mandy says. "He became extremely irritable and started screaming. The injection site became hot and swollen."

Soon Liam was screaming so loudly it was 'ear-piercing', Mandy recalls. His parents put him into a lukewarm bath, but it had no effect. "I could actually feel the heat from his body coming through the towel. His face was bright red and he was completely inconsolable," Mandy says.

From that day onwards, Mandy says, Liam's behaviour began to deteriorate. He became tired and unresponsive, his appetite disappeared and he began to vomit up any food he did eat. He gradually became more and more withdrawn, wouldn't look up when spoken to and wasn't interested in anything his parents did.

By mid-September, two months after the vaccination, he had a rash all over his body, a temperature and wasn't eating properly.

"He lost words he had spoken and did not understand what we said to him," Mandy recalls.

At playgroup, Liam would no longer get out of his pushchair, and when Mandy took him out, he would just lie on the floor.

Realising something was "terribly wrong", Mandy switched GPs.

Her new GP referred Liam to York District Hospital where, noticing Liam's behavioural problems, a specialist referred him to a speech therapist. Liam was diagnosed as suffering from severe autism.

Autism can cause severe language and communication problems, leaving sufferers shut off in a strange world of their own. It may also cause obsessive compulsive disorder.

Liam suffered from all of these problems, not least by the age of seven becoming trapped in a hellish world of obsessive rituals.

Everything he did became part of a ritual. The simplest actions, like entering the house or sitting down at the table, he would have to repeat over and over again to make sure he got them 'right'. When sitting down to a meal, the rituals would include twisting his face into a certain expression or turning his eyes up before he could eat any food. He'd climb in and out of the bath repeatedly at bath time to make sure he did it just right - and if his parents attempted to stop him, he would scream uncontrollably, then have to begin the entire ritual again.

A video shows the little boy wailing with frustration and weariness because he cannot get a ritual right.

Eventually, he was put on Prozac, which calmed his obsessive compulsive disorder. Now aged eight, he goes to Lidgett Grove School, where he has made some progress. But he remains severely autistic and will need caring for all his life, Mandy says.

She remains convinced that it was the combined measles, mumps and rubella vaccine which caused Liam's autism. Until he was a year old, Liam was a normal little boy, she says. He suffered from eczema and colic and did not sleep well - problems which were linked to an allergy to dairy products. But once he was put on a milk-free diet, these problems seemed to go away.

"I felt it all went wrong after the MMR," she says. "I believe it caused a real problem to Liam. I saw a child disappear. I lost him at a year old.

"I believe some children are born with weak and problem immune systems, but this is not detected before we are asked to pump them full of injections. For some children like Liam, the immune system cannot cope with this. It is a jab too much for their systems to cope with."

Mandy says she has never been given an explanation why her son suffers from bad digestive disorders and severe autism.

She and her husband Rod are now suing the manufacturers of the MMR vaccine in an attempt to make people listen.

Mandy has even sent an emotional letter to the Prime Minister's wife, Cherie Blair, whose baby son Leo is just eight months old, pleading that the money pledged to promote the MMR jab should be used instead to investigate the causes of autism.

In the letter, she writes: "Instead of wasting £3 million on a big publicity campaign, the people would much rather you spent it on investigating why so many 'coincidence' cases are cropping up, why autism is rising. We want answers, and we will not be pushed away."

Medics insist MMR vaccine offers safest protection

HEALTH experts continue to stress that it is vital parents ensure their children receive their MMR vaccines and booster jabs to prevent a real risk of a mumps or measles outbreak.

While sympathetic to parents such as Mandy, they insist there is no evidence that autism is caused by MMR - and say such cases are a coincidence.

Dr Phil Kirby, consultant in public health medicine with North Yorkshire Health Authority, says autism often tends to develop at about one year of age - the age when the MMR vaccine is given. "That doesn't mean that one causes the other," he says.

But not ensuring your child gets the vaccine, he stresses, means there is a 'very real risk' that as the proportion of children immunised against diseases like measles falls, there could be an outbreak.

The Government points to a recent 14-year study in Finland involving 1.8 million people which concluded that side effects from the MMR vaccine were 'extremely rare' - and that no cases of autism or inflammatory disease were found to be caused by MMR.

The Government has just launched a £3 million campaign urging parents to get their children vaccinated. The Government's Chief Medical Officer, Professor Liam Donaldson, said: "Scare stories clearly worry parents, but giving children separate vaccines unnecessarily exposes them to the risk of life-threatening infection. MMR remains the safest way to protect our children."

However, consumer health group What Doctors Don't Tell You has since claimed the methods used in the Finnish study were unreliable - and that it was never designed to pick up cases of MMR linked to autism. The group says more independent research is needed.

u The Department of Health's immunisation website at www.immunisation.org.uk gives more information.

u Alternatively, if you are concerned about the MMR vaccination and want to have your child vaccinated separately, the charity Jabs can give details of medics in the UK prepared to do this privately. Call Jabs on 01942 713565.