The largest measles epidemic of recent times is about to descend upon Britain. Despite the fact that 93 per cent of pre-schoolers get jabbed with the triple measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) in the UK, the Health Department has laid aside £20m to invest in a vaccination campaign aimed at seven million children aged from 5 to 16. Even those who have had true measles (which offers lifelong immunity) or have already been immunized will nevertheless be given a just-in-case booster shot.

In our very first issue of What Doctors Don't Tell You we warned of the dangers of the then recently released MMR shot. This month we're revisiting the subject. Dr Viera Scheibner, an Australian principal research scientist who developed a true breathing monitor for babies at risk of cot death, saw that her product mostly sounded alarms after babies had been vaccinated. This prompted her to study thousands of medical papers on immunization. The medical evidence she has amassed conclusively demonstrates that the measle vaccine doesn't work.

In the US, with immunization rates as high as 98 per cent in some areas due to enforced vaccination, epidemics of measles still occur at three- to four year intervals.

Epidemiologists have a hard time explaining this recurrence, and most arguments over the measles vaccine failure have blamed low compliance (even when more than three-quarters of children are vaccinated); improper storage of vaccines; even vaccination at too early an age. What they ignored over some 30 years of use was the more plausible and obvious reason: the simple inability of any measles vaccine devised to date to prevent measles.

When the measles vaccine was being developed in the Sixties, its detractors argued that measles is a mild disease with rare serious complications and negligible fatality in normal children. About half the recorded deaths occur in persons with serious chronic disease or disability. It is also well-known that measles is an important developmental milestone in the life and maturing processes in children.

Nevertheless, by 1965, several vaccines had been introduced for the prevention of measles, including one killed virus vaccine and two versions of weakened live vaccines.

Atypical Measles

Soon after measles vaccine was first released, a new and serious problem arose: vaccinated children were contracting what became known in the medical literature as atypical measles, an especially vicious form of measles resisting treatment.

A 1965 study in Cincinnati described nine cases which occurred there two years earlier during an epidemic of measles (Am J Dis Child, 1965; 109: 232-7). The authors followed 386 children who had received three doses of killed measles virus vaccine in 1961. Of these 386, 125 had been exposed to measles and 54 had developed the disease. Many of these children were so ill with high fever and pneumonia that they had to be hospitalized.

Two years later, a study described the occurrence of atypical measles in 10 children who had received killed measles virus vaccine five to six years earlier. Nine children developed pneumonia which resisted all treatment (J Am Med Ass, 1967; 202: 1075-80).

Serious reactions also occurred in children originally injected with killed measles virus, and then re-vaccinated with live measles virus (N Engl J Med, 1967; 277 (5): 248-251).