Unlike Annette, I’m a relative newcomer to the US of A, and I’m still fairly attached to my old stomping ground in the UK. And there is a knock-down, drag-out battle developing in the newspaper pages there about a scientific issue that I for one had thought was long gone: the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The debate of course goes back to the Lancet paper by Andrew Wakefield way back in 1998, which suggested a link between the triple measles-mumps-rubella vaccine and autism (though the authors were careful to say that they had not established a causal link). This was followed by a precipitous drop in MMR vaccination in the UK, but in 2004, ten of the original co-authors of paper issued a ‘retraction of interpretation’ of the original paper in the face of increasing doubts about the results and the ethical conduct of the study. And a Cochrane review published last month concluded that there was unlikely to be a link between autism and the MMR vaccine, which should have put the controversy to bed. Instead, as this well-written article by a parent with child suffering from autism suggests, it has led to resurgence of the whole argument, with salvos by both people against and for the original paper.

Quite apart from the controversy about the MMR-autism link, the whole story raises interesting issues about how science is handled by non-scientists, especially the media: most scientists rejected the idea of the link between MMR and autism, but this was enthusiastically taken up by a lot of British media. Can scientists do a better job of communicating the uncertainties inherent in research? Or as the Bad Science column right in holding the media largely responsible for misreported science? And do you think that there are some areas of neuroscience which are particularly prone to this kind of misreporting?