Medical untruth serum

TVScope: Dispatches, Channel 4: Health scares come and go but the one that exploded from a press conference in London in 1998 has had a profound impact.

Sitting before a bank of reporters, Prof Andrew Wakefield announced the results of a study that he said finally proved the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The following day, headlines around the world screamed that a link had been found and, overnight, Wakefield became a media star.

A cornerstone of Wakefield's theory was that it was the combination of the three-in-one that was the problem. The measles vaccine, he claimed, lodges in the bowel and sparks off a chemical reaction that results in autism.

In Dispatches last week, Channel 4reporter Brian Deer went behind the headlines and Wakefield's research data, and his findings, in this profoundly disturbing documentary, were shocking. At the time of the press conference, Wakefield had filed patents for what he claimed was a safe vaccine for measles and also for the treatment of inflammatory bowel disease and even autism. Deer didn't have to spell out what was clearly a conflict of interest.

The other name on the patent documents was that of US Prof Hugh Fudenberg, who Deer referred to as "the grandfather of the MMR scare". Deer interviewed the elderly professor: he says his name was put on the patent document without his consent.

Deer took the patents to a conference of inflammatory bowel specialists who, one by one, looked at his "invention" and proclaimed it to be "really strange" and nonsensical.

The most damning evidence against Wakefield came from his then laboratory assistant at the Royal Free Hospital, Nicholas Chadwick. It was Chadwick who conducted the tests on the bowels of the 12 autistic children in Wakefield's study and he did not find a single case where the measles vaccine was still present. The science simply did not support Wakefield's theory.

All this would sound like an interesting spat between science and medicine were it not for its potential impact. An epidemiologist spoke of the danger of a measles epidemic. To see what that is like, Deer visited a Dublin family who lost their little girl to the illness in the measles outbreak that hit north Dublin in 2000. Over 100 children were seriously ill and three died.

Meanwhile Wakefield, who left Britain at the end of the 1990s, is still involved with the "autism business". As a director of a health foundation in Florida, he markets expensive "health" supplements which claim to tackle the symptoms of the condition.

Wakefield was not the only person to pinpoint a link between autism and the MMR - in the US, Fudenberg had been saying it for over 10 years. But the programme didn't deal with that - instead, it shone a chilling spotlight on one man's ambition and, it suggested, his greed.