With nearly four times as many cases of measles in Australia reported in the first few weeks of 2011 alone, compared to all of 2005, trust in a decade-old fraudulent anti-vaccine report by some parents is risking everyone’s health.

In 1998, a highly respected British medical journal, the Lancet, published a study that linked the Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) vaccine to regressive autism. Over the next 12 years the report and its author Dr Andrew Wakefield became a thorn in the side of immunologists around the world who failed to replicate the findings, and plagued the minds of millions of parents who vaccinated their children in good faith and whose children later developed autism. (In 2005, there were almost 12,000 children aged between 6 and 12 who were known to Centrelink as having an Autism Spectrum Disorder.) In...