Parents ask: Am I risking autism if I vaccinate my children?

There is no evidence that autism is caused by any vaccine or any additive or preservative ever used in one. There have been large, well-controlled studies done all over the Western world that have confirmed this finding over and over again. There is no reason for any parent to deny a child the crucial protection today’s vaccines offer out of misguided fear that doing so would increase the risk for autism. Although science can never absolutely prove that something will not happen—we can’t be absolutely 100% sure that it will never snow on Jan. 1 in Kinsangani in the equatorial Congo, for instance—science can reassure us that the likelihood of certain events is vanishingly small. But apart from thinking about how tiny the risk of an action like providing children with vaccinations might be, we also need to think about the risk of taking the opposite action. What are the risks of NOT vaccinating your children? Most parents of children today never experienced any of the classic childhood diseases because they themselves were vaccinated. But I am old enough to remember when things were different. Although I did receive some of the first polio vaccines, immunizations for the other thencommon childhood diseases were not available when I was a kid. Let me tell you about these diseases. Between the time I was about four and about seven, I contracted measles, mumps, what we then called German measles or rubella, what we called whooping cough or pertussis, chicken pox, and scarlet fever. So did my younger brother and sister, but I always seemed to get the most severe case. When I got chicken pox I developed severe scarring, particularly on my forehead, and for my whole life I have always felt I had to wear my hair in a certain way to hide the scars. If you have never seen a child with whooping cough, I hope you never have to, because even though I was only four when I had it, I still remember how painful that cough was, and how scary it was to feel I couldn’t breathe. I can hardly imagine what my parents must have felt hearing me cough and gasp for breath like that for weeks on end. My parents were shopkeepers. They had no employees; they ran their store together and when we kids were sick, my father had to run it alone. Although my brother and sister usually recovered in a week or two, I was down for weeks with each infection. As a complication of one of these bouts, I developed rheumatic fever. I was hospitalized, then when I developed heart complications, transferred from our local hospital to Children’s in Philadelphia, 3 hours from my home. With a toddler and an infant at home and a store to run, my parents weren’t at the hospital much. I was five, and I can still see myself in that hospital bed; still feel the fierce loneliness I experienced during my time there. I developed a chronic heart murmur. I wasn’t allowed to participate in any sports or vigorous activities during my childhood. The murmur had to be monitored during each of children’s births. I still have to take antibiotics whenever I have any kind of potential bleeding, even in a procedure as simple as a dental cleaning. Given the choice, I would never have opted to risk that my own children would suffer as I did. I’m deeply grateful that I was able protect them from these illnesses. But really, I was lucky. My complications were relatively limited. Anyone who has seen the movie The Miracle Worker, knows that Helen Keller was a precocious 18 month old who had already started to talk when she was struck with measles, which was accompanied by encephalitis, leaving her blind and deaf for life. In the 1960s there was an epidemic of rubella, which infected pregnant R. Paul (&) Yale Child Study Center, Yale University School of Medicine, New Haven, CT, USA e-mail: rhea.paul@yale.edu