Editorial: President Trump’s unproven claim about paracetamol and autism will cause needless alarm to pregnant women

There is a saying in the scientific world that goes roughly as follows: all medications are poisons, it is the dose that makes the poison.​

The key point is that all drugs are in fact a poison with side effects, but these side effects (from the poison) can be managed. Thus the drug can be used in a way that does more good than harm.

Medicine has come a long way in the 500 years since that observation by a Swiss physician. We now have stunning drugs that have transformed health treatments and vaccines that have seen off some of damaging or deadly infections.

One of the most important and valuable of those vaccines was the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) jab that is administered to young children and has provided protection against these highly contagious diseases.

In 1998 a fraudster Andrew Wakefield published a paper purportedly linking the MMR vaccine to autism in children. While he was rightly struck off the medical register, Wakefield’s lies caused parents around the world to doubt the MMR. He is still admired, indeed lauded, by conspiracy theorists.

Very regrettably, the US health secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr, who has important things to say about the damaging impact of processed foods in American diets, has given weight to such anti vax conspiracy theories. Now President Trump says that pregnant mothers who take paracetamol put their children at risk of autism.

In August, a study from one of the world’s best universities, Harvard, reported that exposure to paracetamol during pregnancy may make children more likely to develop neurodevelopmental disorders. But it concluded that the drug was important for treating fevers and pain in such women, which can also damage babies.

In other words, controlling the dose of the ‘poison’ is key, not scaring women into not using it at all.