But when concerned parents asked pathologists whether they tested for vaccine complications during infant autopsies, they were told "no". That could mean that some children whose deaths were put down to Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), were in fact killed by immunisation reactions.

The problem was discovered by researcher Julena Meroiti, who works with the National Advisory Group on Autopsy Inc, Kirihaehae.

"This question kept on nagging me – what is really causing our babies to die? And I couldn’t understand why, in this age of science and technology, we could not identify what our babies die of."

Meroiti says it was a chance discovery that led her to look at whether vaccines may play a part in SIDS, and she was stunned to find out how poorly vaccines are monitored in New Zealand.

"No one has put a vial under the microscope and quantified what is actually in the vaccines. Not the Ministry of Health, not ESR, not the health officials who advocate mass immunisation. I know this because I asked them.

"None of these agencies or people has done any research to verify what bacteria, viruses or other impurities are present in the vaccines imported for use on New Zealand children. No due diligence, no homework, no facts, no checking it out. Yet all of these agencies will strongly advocate your baby is vaccinated," explains Meroiti.

"The vaccine is manufactured in the USA, put on a plane, flown all around the world and then distributed to GPs and given to a baby, without there being one mechanism in place to verify that it is even the correct vaccine."

Meroiti’s claim is frighteningly true. The Ministry of Health’s pro-immunisation team at Auckland School of Medicine quietly admit that no tests have been done on the vaccines, but are unashamed. They do not, however, shout such important details from rooftops when talking to gullible TV reporters about the dangers of not immunising children.

The Ministry of Health claims the vaccines are tested overseas, but even that claim is shot down by overseas doctors.

"There has never been a single vaccine in this country [the USA] that has ever been submitted to a controlled scientific study," says Dr Robert Mendelsohn MD. "They never took a group of 100 people who were candidates for a vaccine, gave 50 of them a vaccine and left the other 50 alone to measure the outcome.

"And since that hasn’t been done, that means if you want to be kind, you will call vaccines an unproven remedy. If you want to be accurate, you’ll call people who give vaccines ‘quacks’."

Julena Meroiti says the shock of discovering nobody is checking the vaccines led her to question pathologists over whether they looked for vaccine poisoning in SIDS autopsies, and the discovery that they didn’t.

"There is factual evidence that some vaccines, like Pertussis (whooping cough), lower baby’s breathing rates, to the point where they can actually just stop breathing. No trauma, no visible signs of struggle, just stop breathing.

"Dr Viera Schreibner and her late husband, who designed and developed what we no know as the Apnoea Breathing Monitor for infants at risk of SIDS, have documented this. The monitor is currently placed on at-risk babies to sound an alarm if they stop breathing. But quite accidentally, they stumbled on a fact that startled them: babies who had been vaccinated tripped the alarm every time. Their breathing lowered beyond normal. Three years of research later, they surrendered to the fact that vaccines lower breathing rates in babies – dangerously so, sometimes ending in death. Respiratory arrest. Death by vaccine. Marked down as SIDS."

The autopsy advisory group has now raised its concerns with the Royal College of Pathologists of Australasia, asking to have two specific blood tests introduced into autopsies on SIDS babies: Endotoxins and Circulating Immune Complexes. These tests, says Meroiti, are already being used by some pathology labs overseas to identify toxic reactions to immunisation.

So why, if they have no actual hard evidence that proves vaccines don’t kill some children, do the health authorities in New Zealand spin the line to the media and the public that there is "no evidence" to link vaccines with SIDS?

Auckland Medical School, which is heavily involved in the promotion of mass immunisation, says it draws the conclusion from comparison studies between vaccinated and unvaccinated communities, but acknowledges that other social factors could distort the figures.

A leading health insurance company is also concerned at what appear to be major complications caused by infant vaccines, but says privately "the health authorities are very good at not collecting statistics that could be embarrassing."

And the allegation of a deliberate cover-up by medical authorities goes further. One American mother whose daughter died after a DTP injection says the medics and police kept on trying to write it off as a SIDS death.

"After Brandy died, the police and the medical examiner never asked us any questions about what happened to her. The lawyers never asked us how Brandy acted the night before she died.

"I made several attempts within the month following her death to speak to the medical examiner and ask him what he found. Her autopsy report said that her brain was mildly swollen, and all her lymph nodes were swollen. He told me that he had to file her death as 'Underterminable'. When I asked why, he said that she could have been strangled, suffocated, or died from SIDS. I told him I knew that was a lie because if that were true there would have been bruises somewhere on her body and the police would have done an investigation, and I knew that at her age a child doesn't die from SIDS."

But parental concerns have been gravely underlined, in the wake of a new report in a British medical journal last month that alleges the MMR vaccine given to toddlers should never have been released on the market, and may cause autism and bowel disease in children.

Autism rates have increased markedly since the introduction of the triple-vaccine for measles, mumps and rubella, and the new scientific report says MMR should not have been introduced because there was "insufficient evidence of its safety".

Fears about MMR have been widespread for more almost two years, yet the latest criticism from health experts in the UK, just published in the Journal of Adverse Drug Reactions, adds increased weight to the argument that the use of MMR around the world is putting children at risk.

Dr Peter Fletcher, who was a senior professional medical officer for Britain’s Department of Health in the early 1980s, criticizes the decision taken by his successors. In his review, Dr Fletcher says: "Being extremely generous, evidence on safety was very thin, being realistic there were too few patients followed-up for sufficient time. Three weeks is not enough, neither is four weeks."

He adds in his report: "On the basis that effective monovalent vaccines were available, the Committee on the Safety of Medicines could be confident that delay in granting a licence would not result in a catastrophic epidemic of measles, mumps and rubella. Caution should have ruled the day, answers to some important questions should have been demanded and encouragement should have been given to conduct a 12-month observational study on 10-15,000 patients and a prospective monitoring programme set up with a computerised primary care database. The granting of a product licence was definitely premature."

The report’s conclusions that MMR was not properly tested are even more significant in New Zealand where no tests have been done at all.

In Britain scare stories about the MMR injection have caused a serious drop-off in the number of children being vaccinated. Between October and December of 1999, MMR coverage had dropped to 88.2 per cent.

As well as autism, MMR has, in a series of widely-publicised scientific studies, been linked to Crohn’s disease – a particularly nasty form of inflammatory bowel disorder.

The British government insists there is no evidence for the claims and recently launched a $9m advertising campaign to highlight the point.

The controversy first emanated from a group of scientists at the Royal Free Hospital in London who have been doggedly pursuing a theory for many years. Dr Andrew Wakefield and his colleagues have been investigating the possibility that inflammatory bowel disease is caused not by bacteria, but by something else that breaks down the blood vessels in the gut wall. In 1989, he and Professor Roy Pounder published in The Lancet the first of their controversial papers, suggesting that the measles virus was the cause of Crohn’s disease.

In the Lancet in 1995, the team claimed they had found measles virus in tissue taken from the bowel of people with Crohn’s disease. The disease, they said, was three times more common in those who had been vaccinated against measles.

So what about autism? Because of his work on bowel disorders, a number of parents took their children to the Royal Free. A number of these suffered both from bowel disease and from autism. They also had, Dr Wakefield established, developed their autism around the time they were given the MMR vaccine.

Recently Dr Wakefield disclosed that he had identified 170 cases of new syndrome of autism and bowel disease in children who had the triple-dose injection.

"Last week in our clinic we saw nine or ten new children with exactly the same story," said Dr Wakefield. In his first public comments since the row erupted in 1998, Dr Wakfield repeated his ‘serious concerns’.

He adds: "The department says that the safety of MMR has been proven. The argument is untenable. It cannot be substantiated by the science. This is not only my opinion but increasingly the view of healthcare professionals and the public."

At the time Dr Wakefield’s research was lambasted by the government and his peers alike.

"The research has dubious relevance to the safety of the MMR vaccine. Like many other articles by Dr Wakefield, it is vulnerable to scientific scrutiny," said Britain’s Department of Health.

Even Dr Wakefield’s colleague, the dean of the school of medicine at the Royal Free, joined the criticism. He warned journalists eager to sensationalise the story not to overstate the links.

The problem with Wakefield’s conclusion, said Dr Ramsay, was that the autism element was not a study in the proper sense at all. This was a group of children whose parents were worried. They had developed autism at around 18 months to two years – the time of the MMR vaccine, but also the time when autism usually shows itself. There was no control group of children who had been vaccinated but did not have autism.

In the correspondence columns of the Lancet for months afterwards there were criticisms, more or less scathing in tone, of the research. The then Chief Medical Officer commissioned a review of the Royal Free data from 37 experts called together by the Medical Research Council, who concluded there was no evidence that the MMR vaccination caused either bowel disease or autism.

But Dr Wakfield remains unrepentant.

He told the Telegraph recently: "Tests have revealed time and time again that we are dealing with a new phenomenon. The Department of Health’s contention that MMR has been proven to be safe by study after study just doesn’t hold up. Frankly, it is not an honest appraisal of the science and it relegates the scientific issues to the bottom of the barrel in favour of winning a propaganda war."

In a survey of British health workers, 13 per cent of doctors, 17 per cent of health visitors and 13 per cent of practice nurses thought it "very likely or possible" that the MMR vaccine was associated with children developing autism. When asked about a link with the bowel disorder, Crohn’’ disease, 13 per cent of doctors, 11 per cent of health visitors and 33 per cent of practice nurses thought it very likely or possible.

In the US opinion is equally divided and polarised. One leading authority, Dr Mendelsohn, M.D, believes that nearly 10,000 child deaths each year are related to one or more vaccines that are routinely given to children.

Dr William C.Douglass, who was honoured twice as America’s "Doctor of the Year", hits the nail on the head. "The evidence for indicting immunisation is circumstantial, but compelling. However, the keepers of the keys to medical-research funds are not interested in researching this very important lead to the cause of an ongoing, and possibly, preventable tragedy.

"Can you imagine the economic and political import of discovering that immunisations are killing thousands of babies?"

In New Zealand, the evidence is mounting by the week that vaccines are killing more babies than they’re saving, yet health authorities continue to push the official line that it’s good for kids.

Aucklander K Wright told her story to the Immunisation Awareness Society - how her 11 year old sister Michelle had received an MMR booster shot at school. She became ill just a few weeks later with flu-like symptoms, a fever and bowel problems, and died three months after that in Starship Hospital, where doctors point blank refused to acknowledge parental concerns about a possible link to the vaccine. Yet the medics could not provide any other reason for her death.

And a Bay of Plenty grandfather reports how his up-till-then normal 15 month old grandson was given MMR and DPT vaccines, immediately developed a raging 105 degree fever and five months later was diagnosed with autism by the bright staff at Starship Hospital.

"We applied for compensation," reports his grandfather, "but this was refused by the ACC on the grounds of ‘no medical evidence’."

The Immunisation Awareness Society’s files are full of testimony from parents whose children were immunised with dire results, yet little media coverage results.

In Japan a delay of DPT (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus) immunisation until the age of two has resulted in a dramatic decline in adverse side effects. In the period of 1970-1974, when DPT vaccination begun at three to five months, the Japanese national compensation system paid out claims for 57 permanent severe damage vaccine cases, and 37 deaths. During the six year period between 1975-1980, when DPT injections were delayed, severe reactions were reduced to just eight, with only three deaths.

In May 24 1996 in the New Zealand Medical Journal, J.Barthelow Classen MD, a former researcher at the US National Institutes of Health and the founder of the Classen Immunotherapies in Baltimore, US, reported that juvenile diabetes increased 60 per cent following a massive hepatisis B vaccination campaign for babies six weeks or older in New Zealand from 1988 to 1991. The same was true in other countries, including Finland, where cases of diabetes increased 40 per cent between children aged between five and nine.

US doctor Richard Moscowitz, MD, believes we have created a society too dependent on immunisation, which itself is bringing new levels of disease rather than safeguarding us against it.

"What we forget is that millions of years of evolution have taken place on this planet and, up until the last 100 years, humans have lived in relative harmony with microbes," he says. "Yes there have been epidemic infectious diseases in history, but they have always resolved themselves. I don’t think there is any real appreciation for what we may be doing by using so many vaccines to try to eradicate so many organisms.

"If we stay the present course, will mankind be free from infectious disease but crippled by chronic disease? Will eradication of feared diseases, such as AIDS, through mass vaccination, be one of man’s greatest triumphs or will we live in fear of deadly mutations of microbes that have outsmarted man’s attempt to eradicate them?

"We may look back at the crossroads we are at today and wish we had decided to make peace with nature instead of trying to dominate it."