Autistic enterocolitis is the name of a nonexistent medical condition proposed by discredited
British gastroenterologist Andrew Wakefield when he suggested a link between a number of common clinical symptoms and signs which he contended were distinctive to
autism.
[1] The existence of such an
enterocolitis has been dismissed by experts as having "not been established".
[2] Wakefield's now-retracted and fraudulent
[3][4] report used inadequate controls and suppressed negative findings, and multiple attempts to replicate his results have been unsuccessful.
[5]
Reviews in the medical literature have found no link between the MMR vaccine and autism or with bowel disease.
[6][7][8]
Most of Wakefield's coauthors later retracted the conclusions of the original paper proposing the hypothesis,
[9] and the
General Medical Council found Wakefield guilty of manipulating patient data and misreporting results.
[10][11] His work has been exposed as falsified and described as an "elaborate fraud
The claims in Wakefield's 1998
The Lancet article were widely reported;
[15] vaccination rates in the UK and Ireland dropped sharply,
[16] which was followed by significantly increased incidence of measles and mumps, resulting in deaths and severe and permanent injuries.[17] Physicians, medical journals, and editors
[18][19][20][21][22] have described Wakefield's actions as fraudulent and tied them to epidemics and deaths,
[23][24] and a 2011 journal article described the vaccine–autism connection as "perhaps the most damaging medical hoax of the last 100 years"
