I need your expertise please (mmr related)

[littlec]

I'm gathering info for a friend of mine (mostly pinkbook printouts and package insert printouts) who is trying to decide about vaccines at her child's one year checkup, and I ran across this:

http://www2.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004407.html

Help me out here...is this actually saying that there's no studies of the effectiveness of this vaccine, but since rates lowered following mass vaccination it must work? (not saying that isn't good evidence..but is there more?) Are they also saying that the safety of the vaccine has not been established..or at least not documented?

I get that this is from 2005, so if there's something more current, I'd definitely like to know.

[littlec]

Anyone?

[Delicateflower]

No, they're saying that there are none that fulfilled their criteria.

Selection criteria

Eligible studies were comparative prospective or retrospective trials testing the effects of MMR compared to placebo, do-nothing or a combination of measles, mumps and rubella antigens on healthy individuals up to 15 years of age. These studies were carried out or published by 2004.

You really need to read the whole study to draw your own conclusions, it's here http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/coc...07/pdf_fs.html

But from this short abstract, you can see they excluded lab studies, for example. And as a study of effectiveness, eliminating the disease with the vaccine is pretty conclusive. That actually renders effectiveness studies unethical, because you need to provide the current best practice as the placebo. Giving the MMR is the current best practice, you'd be exposing children to an undue level of risk if you gave a saline placebo to a randomised group and waited to see if they got measles and how many died. If they still only had the urabe -strain MMR then they could do an effectiveness study comparing the Jeryl-lynn strain to it.

[littlec]

Originally Posted by Delicateflower

No, they're saying that there are none that fulfilled their criteria.



You really need to read the whole study to draw your own conclusions, it's here http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/o/coc...07/pdf_fs.html

But from this short abstract, you can see they excluded lab studies, for example. And as a study of effectiveness, eliminating the disease with the vaccine is pretty conclusive. That actually renders effectiveness studies unethical, because you need to provide the current best practice as the placebo. Giving the MMR is the current best practice, you'd be exposing children to an undue level of risk if you gave a saline placebo to a randomised group and waited to see if they got measles and how many died. If they still only had the urabe -strain MMR then they could do an effectiveness study comparing the Jeryl-lynn strain to it.

Thank you! I wasn't actively seeking this information, so I didn't even think about the full study.