The MMR Fraud

MMR/Autism study was a fraud.
more HERE
and HERE.

the physician involved was paid by a lawyer seeking to make money in a class action lawsuit to "find" problems, so he made up the study...

The "fraud" part surprises me, but my question is why the medical journal involved published it in the first place.... the study was based on only 12 children...the numbers involved were too small to make any conclusions, even without fraud.

Parents with an autistic child needed a scapegoat, and so latched onto the MMR vaccine as the cause, but the cause is probably multifactorial, including Fragile X syndrome, viral encephalitis, interuterine infection, chemicals or lead in the environment, and drug/alcohol use by mom.
Measles encephalitis and prenatal rubella infection are two causes of mental retardation with autistic symptoms, so checking the vaccine made sense, but if it caused the epidemic of autism, why didn't we see an epidemic of autism among the poor kids (such as who came to my clinic) or in the third world?

But luckily not everyone was listening to the conspiracy freaks, and the good news is rarely reported:

3 December 2009 | ATLANTA | Geneva | NEW YORK | WASHINGTON - The Measles Initiative announced today that measles deaths worldwide fell by 78% between 2000 and 2008, from an estimated 733 000 in 2000 to 164 000 in 2008.