The findings of the latest study defending the safety of the MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccine have been welcomed by the National Disease Control Centre (NDCC).
However, the independent review of medical research on the MMR vaccine, which was published in Britain yesterday, has been criticised by Ms Kathryn Sinnott, a critic of the Government's "one fits all" vaccination policy.
It was conducted by Dr Anna Donald and Dr Vivek Muthu and scientists at the Clinical Evidence Journal, an international directory of scientific evidence that is updated every six months.
It claims there is no evidence to link autism or inflammatory bowel disease with the MMR jab. Parents should have no safety concerns over the MMR vaccine, concludes the study, which was commissioned by the British Medical Journal.
"We found pretty comprehensively that there is no link whatsoever between the MMR vaccine and autism or inflammatory bowel disease in very reliable research going back a long time," said Dr Donald, of Bazian Ltd, a company that conducts independent reviews of medical research.
Dr Robert Cunney, consultant microbiologist with the NDCC, said it was "a very thorough review".
There were, he noted, "strict criteria that they use in this type of analysis to make sure that they've actually looked at all of the relevant studies, that they look in particular to make sure that these studies were all properly done and that any findings were therefore reliable".
Dr Cunney said it was too early to predict whether the report would lead to an increase in the numbers of children receiving vaccinations, but he hoped it would.
Ms Sinnott, whose son Jamie (24) is autistic, pointed to a recent article in Time magazine, which said there was no evidence there wasn't a link between the MMR vaccine and autism.
She said the evidence of a link was presented to her every day through the Hope Project helpline, which offers support for autism sufferers and their parents.
She claimed the findings of this and other studies were unreliable because they only measured cases where doctors report adverse reactions to the MMR vaccine.
"The Irish Medicines Board cannot accept a parental account of an adverse reaction," she said, "I'm told by the Irish Medicines Board that they have an 'invalid' file and if I wrote to them and told them about an adverse reaction in my child it would go in the 'invalid' file."
The NDCC study also analysed the 1998 Wakeman study, which first raised the link between the MMR vaccine and autism. The doctors found that the Wakeman study was retrospectively small, lacked a control group and was selective in its sampling.