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British public "duped" over MMR fears

13:12 19 May 03

NewScientist.com news service

The British public has been "duped" by the media over claims that the combined mumps, measles and rubella (MMR) vaccine is unsafe, according to an analysis of news coverage of the controversy.

During a period of extensive coverage in 2002, over half of the UK public believed that medical opinion was split down the middle over MMR's safety. In fact, the vast majority of doctors and researchers believe the vaccine is safe.

The storm over MMR erupted in 1998 when Andrew Wakefield, a gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, published a paper in The Lancet postulating an association between the MMR vaccine and autism and bowel disease in children.

The study of 12 children could conclude no link and the majority of scientists rejected any association. But the British public has assumed that because both sides of the debate received equal media coverage, there must be equal evidence for both arguments, says the report.

"Our survey confirms that the news media play a key role in informing the way people understand such issues," says Justin Lewis, one of the authors at the Cardiff University School of Journalism. "While Wakefield's claims are of legitimate public interest our report shows that research questioning the safety of something that is widely used should be approached with caution, both by scientists and journalists.

"This is especially the case where any decline in confidence can have serious consequences for public health," such as a rise in measles, he says.

Feeding frenzy

In compiling their report for the UK Economic and Social Research Council, Lewis and colleagues examined 561 media reports on MMR between January and September 2002. Over half these stories were concentrated in a media "feeding frenzy" between 28 January and 28 February 2002.

This period followed the publication of an analysis - "Measles, mumps, rubella vaccine: Through a glass, darkly" - by Wakefield and a colleague which questioned the validity of studies used by the UK government to back MMR's safety.

The focus of the story was the suggested link between MMR and autism - over two-thirds of the articles mentioned this fact, says the report.

Also, while the bulk of evidence was in favour of MMR's safety, only half of TV reports and a third of those in the broadsheet press used this fact to balance the autism claims. "Attempts to balance claims about the risks of the MMR jab tended merely to indicate that there were two competing bodies of evidence," the report says.

The report also included two surveys of over 1000 British people. These showed that almost half felt that on public health matters journalists should wait until other studies confirmed findings before reporting alarming research. But 34 per cent felt that concerns like those raised by Wakefield are newsworthy and should be reported.

Shaoni Bhattacharya