It looks like we have a final verdict in the hypothesis that the MMR vaccine is what causes autism. No, it doesn’t.

As background, over in the UK there have been anti-vaccination campaigners just as there are in the US. However, instead of concentrating upon the use of mercury as a preservative in vaccines, they thought it was the measles part of the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine that was going the damage.This contention has now been shown to be false:

A new study has found no evidence to support the idea that the MMR vaccine damages the intestine and in turn causes autism.

Researchers examined the so-called “leaky gut” theory, which suggests that vaccines such as MMR can damage the wall of the intestine.

This causes digestive problems which lead to the production of peptides, which can damage the brain and possibly cause autism, according to the theory.

The study, from researchers at Great Ormond Street Hospital, Guy’s and St Thomas’s Hospital in London, and the University of Edinburgh, found that children with autism do not produce higher levels of peptides, detectable in their urine.

So, once again, we need to put that idea to bed. The MMR vaccine does not cause autism: which leaves us with, as the best explanation out there, Simon Baron Cohen’s postulations about the rise in assortative mating, the inheritance of systemising and empathising brain types and autism as a form of extreme systemising brain.

An interesting aside: it was the more educated parents who stopped using the MMR vaccine on their children during the scare. This isn’t hugely surprising. It would only be the more educated parents who took note of the news in the newspapers about it anyway.

I’m not trying to be fouly elitist or anything, but it’s the more educated who pay attention to just about anything at all, isn’t it, the world around?

But what is also interesting is that it was those self-same more educated parents who used the vaccine more when the scare was pronounced to be just that, a scare.

Entirely rational behaviour I would say: there’s a risk out there, don’t take it until you know it’s safe.