Clearing doubts over the safety of the commonly-used combined vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR), a team of British researchers has reported that there is no evidence to link the vaccine to autism in children. The researchers, led by Dr Gillian Baird, presented their results in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood published on Tuesday, based on their study of 250 children in southern England — the largest such exercise undertaken on the subject.

The results are likely to finally end the controversy surrounding the vaccine, ever since the publication of a 1998 paper by Dr Andrew Wakefield of the Royal Free Hospital in London and some others which suggested the MMR vaccine might have induced autism in some children. Though a number of subsequent studies disproved of any such linkage, doubts continued to persist and led to a substantial drop in the number of children being vaccinated. In the latest research, which was supported by the UK’s Department of Health and took five years for completion, Dr Baird and his team compared 98 children with autistic disorder with 90 who had normal development and another 52 who needed special education but had no signs of autism. All of them had been given the MMR vaccine.