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Monday 13 October 2008

What killed Sally Clark’s child?

Neville Hodgkinson asks why the jury in the Sally Clark trial was told to discount the DTP jab given to her second child, Harry, just five hours before he was found dead

Argument continues over the possible causes of these changes. Some say the increase is only apparent, and is caused through greater awareness, or diagnostic fashion. Others point to medicine’s increasing skill in keeping very premature babies alive. Lisa Blakemore-Brown, a psychologist specialising in autism and related disorders, says she saw the numbers clearly increasing during the 1980s and 1990s and believes many teachers as well as parents and children are suffering intensely as a result — especially when there is a delay in recognising the nature of the problem. Her book Reweaving the Autistic Tapestry was cited in a House of Lords debate in 2003 as ‘required reading in every LEA — and in the Department of Health’. Peers also spoke of how it is often the prison system that finally has to deal with many of the youngsters involved.

Blakemore-Brown now has no doubt that vaccines are a contributory cause, though she did not make the link for several years. Previously, her main concern was with the best ways of diagnosing, educating and treating, at a time when many of the child-ren’s difficulties were not recognised or understood. Gradually, she began to take notice of parental reports of children changing immediately after vaccination.

Sometimes there was video evidence, as when a baby girl was filmed eating with relish, and later the same day — all times and dates automatically documented on the film — lying flat out on the floor after receiving DTP. The next day she was a different child, dribbling and with her mouth moving oddly. Later film showed her with ‘dead’ eyes, as her mother described it. ‘I saw that child when she was eight years old,’ says Blakemore-Brown. ‘By then she had experienced years of learning difficulties, many very subtle, but damaging to her life nevertheless. The fight the parents have had to get education for her has been extraordinary.’ The mother even had to rebut an allegation of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (MSBP), in which a parent invents false illness for the child, sometimes faking or creating symptoms through deliberate harm.

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