LAST WEEK, researchers at the University of California opened a Pandora’s box that British officials have been trying to keep the lid on for years. The team claims that the dramatic increase in the number of children with autism in the state — the numbers have tripled in the past 15 years — is a genuine increase that is caused by some unknown factor, not by greater awareness of the disease.

If this is true, it is dynamite. Doctors and officials in America and Britain have long tried to explain away the increases in autism by claiming that we just had not diagnosed the disease properly before.

It remains to be seen how people react to the new research, but there is no question that it has finally opened up the debate. Dr Robert Byrd, who led the California team, said that it was now important to investigate possible causes of autism, including vaccinations such as the triple mumps, measles and rubella (MMR): “A large number of our families believed vaccines were to blame. Until we can definitively answer that question it seems the research in autism is stuck.”

Will this finally make British officials take autism seriously? Although the Medical Research Council says that the disease now affects one in 166 British children under the age of eight — a tenfold increase since 1988 — the Government has been strangely reluctant to investigate this crippling brain disorder that often leaves children unable to speak, rocking compulsively and unable to form normal social relationships. This is because the Department of Health is terrified of undermining confidence in its vaccination programme. But its dogmatic approach has already lowered confidence in the very vaccines it wants to protect.

Scientists who have dared to suggest that autism and MMR are linked have been treated as heretics — the Prime Minister has accused them of “scare-mongering”.

So far, so medieval. But the Inquisition isn’t working. The more the Government insists that MMR and other vaccines are safe, the more alarm there seems to be.

More than a thousand families are going to court next year claiming that their children have been damaged by the MMR vaccine. Cases are pending from a further 100 who claim that their children have been damaged by the vaccine for diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus (DTP). Vaccination rates for MMR have fallen so low that the Department of Health is predicting a measles epidemic. An ICM poll in July said that only 55 per cent of adults have confidence in the MMR vaccine and that 76 per cent would support an inquiry into whether it is linked to autism.

Scares are created when people sense that they are not being told the whole truth. “Pretty much the first lesson you learn in medical school,” says Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, “is never to use the words ‘never’ or ‘always’. There is no absolute certainty in medicine. The Government is being dishonest by saying MMR is totally safe.”

David Thrower, whose son Oliver deteriorated into autism after receiving first a measles/rubella jab and then the MMR, says: “The Department of Health suspends common sense. The main objective of the department seems to be to preserve public confidence, rather than investigate suspected adverse consequences. People are scared to strike a match in case the whole thing explodes.”

No one has proved a link conclusively between autism and vaccines, but there is a small but growing body of research that raises serious questions. What is strange is the Government’s refusal to take this research seriously.

The first scientist to raise the alarm was Dr Andrew Wakefield, a consultant gastroenterologist at the Royal Free Hospital in London, who published his findings in The Lancet in 1998. He had noticed a huge increase in cases of inflammatory bowel disease since the 1970s and closer examination showed that many of his patients were infected with the measles virus. Astounded by the findings, he investigated and concluded that the measles virus alone was not causing the illness — it was the presence of the mumps virus that made the disease possible. His later research suggested that many children developed autism shortly after receiving the MMR vaccine and that 24 in 25 autistic children he examined had traces of the measles virus in their gut.

The Department of Health went to great lengths to rubbish Dr Wakefield’s research, and officials have insisted that no other study has replicated his work. But in June, Dr Arthur Krigsman, from the New York University School of Medicine, told a US congressional committee that in 90 per cent of his autistic patients he had found a pattern of inflammatory bowel disease identical to that found by Dr Wakefield.

Earlier this year Professor John O’Leary and colleagues in Dublin found the vaccine strain of measles virus in the gut of 12 vaccinated children who had both bowel disease and autism. In August, Professor Vijendra Singh at Utah State University found that autism might be linked to an antibody response to MMR.