A community at peril

Discredited research and a damaging press campaign left a cohort of children now aged 10-18 years old vulnerable to measles, mumps and rubella. Following the publication of a paper by the Lancet, claiming to show a link between MMR vaccine, autism and bowel disease, and a sustained local press campaign against the MMR vaccine in Swansea, South Wales, MMR uptake rates overall fell 13.5% in Swansea and Neath Port Talbot from a high of 93.8% in 1996 (compared to a 2.2% drop elsewhere in Wales). By 2003 rates in some communities had fallen as low as 65%. For more than a decade health services worked together to re-engage with those parents who had refused the MMR for their children because they feared its link to autism. Although much was achieved over that time period – uptake rates of first dose MMR reached 93% again only in 2011 – one in six children aged between 10 and 18 years were still partially or unvaccinated against measles.