MONTREAL - In 1998 a British doctor published a paper linking the measles vaccine to autism.
The doctor's research was eventually revealed as fake, the article was retracted, and the doctor lost his license to practice.
However the fear of vaccines sparked by the false paper remains, and Quebec is in the middle of one of the largest outbreaks of a potentially deadly disease because parents have substituted fear for being rational.
Seth Mnookin is a lecturer at M.I.T.'s Graduate program in Science Writing, and is the writer of The Panic Virus: A true story of medicine, science and fear.
He thinks there are two reasons why parents are making risky decisions.
"One is that autism is something that we still don't know a lot about, and that is obviously very frustrating to parents and frightening to a lot of parents," said Mnookin.
The second reason is that science and medicine have been successful at wiping out diseases.
"We are living in an era now which parents don't have that kind of personal experience with polio or measles or whooping cough," said Mnookin.
For the full interview, click the video player to the right.
