How should parents best protect their children against measles, mumps and rubella?
Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, and its research partner the Institute of Child Health, support the MMR – it is safe and highly effective and there is no better way to protect children. Any other strategy is second best – less safe and less effective, and more likely to lead to serious illness in children. Measles, mumps and rubella are serious diseases, which used to cause many deaths. We hear much about measles, but mumps can also cause meningitis and permanent deafness. In the case of rubella, it is a serious danger to unborn children, causing deaf-blindness and many other problems. In the 1970s and 1980s, before MMR, 750 seriously ill babies were born with congenital rubella syndrome, and another 7,000 pregnancies terminated because of exposure to rubella. But the scourge of these three illnesses has been vastly reduced by safe, effective vaccination. Frankly, MMR is a success story. We have been closely involved in research around the issue. There is simply no sound evi
