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Oh, and where did these measles infections come from? Third-world immigrants imported by the leftists against the will of these very people who are being targeted now?

We hear all the time how Republicans are the epitome of evil, how the orange man is soooo bad and all.

We *almost* had eradicated measles.

Think about that for a minute: all this hoopla about vaccinations causing autism and such could have been so much less by eliminating the very *need* to get vaccinated in the US, and enforcing vaccination on immigrants and travelers going outside the country. We could concentrate on eradicating the disease worldwide, since measles is one of the few diseases that meet the criteria of worldwide eradication.

Instead we let anyone walk into the country with no oversight *simply because* it creates problems that can be blamed on the president.

Which party is the truly evil one?

"we should have machines learning and alerting on this as they crawl through our electronic medical record systems all day"

CDC already does this, calling it "disease surveillance". There are several systems in place, however none of them is really comprehensive yet. See for example https://wwwn.cdc.gov/nndss/

Measles was eliminated in the United States in 2000.

I hear this meme a lot. The CDC reported 216 cases of measles in the U.S. from 2001-2003. Roughly 1 in 5 of those were of "unknown" origin (i.e., they couldn't find evidence to pin the case on an external source).

That's certainly a puzzling definition of "eliminated" -- it seems more along the lines of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq than any sort of statistical reality.

Speaking of a sense of proportion.... in the United States you're three times as likely to die from a shark attack (1 death per year on average) as you are from from the measles (1 death every 3 years on average from 387 reported measles cases per year).

To put that into further perspective, the U.S. averages 11 deaths from fireworks and 24 from train crashes per year. Death from a literal lightning strike is 141 times as common than dying from the measles in the United States.

So let's not overreact quite yet.

Yes, there are things that kill you other than measles. The difference is that measles is pretty easily preventable - people just have to get vaccinated.

The other issue with measles - and most of the "childhood diseases" - is that they have other complications besides death.

https://www.cdc.gov/measles/ab...

"About one child out of every 1,000 who get measles will develop encephalitis (swelling of the brain) that can lead to convulsions and can leave the child deaf or with intellectual disability."

"Subacute sclerosing panencephalitis (SSPE) is a very rare, but fatal disease of the central nervous system that results from a measles virus infection acquired earlier in life. SSPE generally develops 7 to 10 years after a person has measles, even though the person seems to have fully recovered from the illness. Since measles was eliminated in 2000, SSPE is rarely reported in the United States."

That last line is ironic.

One issue I have heard from people who have concerns is the sheer number of vaccinations. According to the CDC, 19 vaccinations are recommended by the time a baby is 6 months old!

This creates a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water. That is, rather than spread out the vaccinations, or just get the really important ones, get none. When everything is top priority, nothing is.

It doesn't help that there's a ton of mis-information attributing every possible bad thing that may happen to a vaccination. With so many packed into such a short time at a really vulnerable age, there's bound to be a lot of mis-attributions.

Meanwhile, the pharmaceutical industry seems bound and determined to ruin it's own reputation while giving everyone the finger, making it even harder to convince a parent that at least some of these vaccines are really important and not just yet another scheme to separate people from their money.

Sure, this sounds convenient, but is it worth the radiation? https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine/2015/01/the-surprising-dangers-of-ct-sans-and-x-rays/index.htm

If you're worried about radiation exposure you wouldn't get on a plane in the first place.

Flying above the bulk of the atmosphere exposes you to significantly higher doses of ionizing radiation.

California already has the 2nd lowest rate of tobacco smoking, behind only Utah.

Colorado and Washington are well below average.

West Virginia and Kentucky are the worst.

Cigarette smoking by state

Don't believe the conspiracy theories. Vaccines aren't perfectly safe: any treatment has the potential for adverse reactions. Vaccine side effects are VERY well monitored. Reporting is legally required, and the data is public.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesaf...

What is the objective of calling them and treating them like SCUM?

Uh, because they are?

Not vaccinating your child is child abuse, if they can be safely vaccinated. You are setting them up to potentially get very sick, and possibly be maimed and die. That is not ok. Back in the day, about 50% of children died before they were 5. To skip vaccinating your kids because you're scared of the vaccines is both illogical and dangerous.

Did you catch the news this week of the kid who spent almost 3 months in the hospital racking up a $700,000 bill because his parents didn't get him a tetanus shot? The same parents who are still refusing to get him one?

$100 worth of shots at the most and that kid wouldn't have almost died, and wouldn't have taken up the time of a bunch of people who had legitimately sick people they could have been taking care of instead. And that life lesson wasn't apparently enough to bring home to them how damn important vaccines are.

That's fucking child abuse by any other name. And child abusers are scum.

For most vaccines to work, we need herd immunity. If you don't want to play your part in that immune herd, you need to get fuck out of it, and go live by yourself. You have no right to put others at risk of getting sick and possibly dying because you think you're smarter than everyone.

And it's not ok for people to be propagating diseases that we could finally rid humanity of. I would go so far as to say that that is a crime against humanity. Polio in particular is a horrific disease, and there is no reason for it to exit in the world at this point in time. Yet it remains, and continues to maim and kill people because of anti-vaxers.

There is so much we could be spending our time and energy on instead of fighting dangerous, stupid people who don't want to vaccinate their kids, and paying for the results of that madness. How many kids have been hospitalized with the measles at this point? From January 1 to February 28, 2019, 206 individual cases of measles have been confirmed in 11 states. We're on track to have the highest number of measles cases in a decade. And given that one in a thousand people get potentially fatal brain swelling from the measles, maybe a fatality or two as well.

All from a disease that should be relatively noncontagious in the US due to herd immunity, because of a bunch of fucking scum who refuse to get their kids vaccinated.

Wait... you act like this stuff has never happened before. I guess you do not read history. So do tell, what am I being paranoid about?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/t...

It's not really paranoia. There is always an ebb and flow to government corruption. This year nothing happened, next year there is controversy where someone lied to the government got things done. How many times does government get to murder people before you stop worshiping them? How many Mao's, Hitler's, Stalin's, Pol Pot's, Maduro's, Ill's, and Trump's do you need to see in government to figure out that government is not something you can trust and that government does not care about you as an individual?

Governments, Businesses, and other groups are more than happy to turn you into a slime pool the moment it serves their needs, wants, or desires.

Why is is paranoid to want to take steps from preventing something that HAS ACTUALLY happened? Perhaps you are the on missing a few fries from their happy meal?

"There is no information that would support not getting vaccinated against the measles."

A statement of pure ignorance. Here even the CDC would like to call you out on that.

https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/v...

Thankfully the side effects are rare in most cases, and the risks of not getting vaccinated are higher than getting vaccinated.

If vaccines were totally safe they would be sold over the counter available for anyone to pick up instead of keeping them locked behind doctors and regulations. Your should have just stopped at your first post, you were doing good until now.

Just because some govt entity or SJW claims it's a disease doesn't make it so.

Webster's dictionary defines disease as a condition of the living animal or plant body or of one of its parts
  that impairs normal functioning and is typically manifested by distinguishing signs and symptoms : SICKNESS, MALADY

In other words, just because mental illness doesn't spread directly from person to person doesn't mean that it is not a disease. Public health problems are within the CDC's purview, and that includes suicides. Public health also includes factors causing injuries to a large number of people --- this is DIFFERENT from product safety: in that product safety are more proactive in looking at possible risks and hazards in consumer products before such product can even possibly become a Public Health issue... the CDC is more concerned about matters that are already becoming Public Health problems, and Occupational matters, which are not even addressed by other agencies ---- The scooters are considered "safe" as a product, they pass product safety standards, but the CDC notices they are becoming a public health issue anyways, and the CDC has a legitimate role in studying the matter. Product safety commissions may later take CDC research findings into account.

You can look at data from the CDC themself to see that such matters as suicides and depression are major public health issues, and rates continue to get worse and worse. They are suddenly worth studying, and their finding of a five fold increase in suicides based on the mere presence of a gun in a household would certainly seem to make mitigating/reducing guns causing suicides are a legitimate issue for the CDC to pursue.

Sorry but all of that is just anti-vaxxer crap. There does not exist a single controlled peer-reviewed study that indicates that the Mumps vaccine is anything but 90+% effective. E.g we have this one: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...

Recently, numerous large-scale mumps outbreaks have occurred in vaccinated populations. Clinical isolates sequenced from these outbreaks have invariably been of genotypes distinct from those of vaccine viruses, raising concern that certain mumps virus strains may escape vaccine-induced immunity. To investigate this concern, sera obtained from children 6 weeks after receipt of measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine were tested for the ability to neutralize a carefully selected group of genetically diverse mumps virus strains. Although the geometric mean neutralizing antibody titer of the sera was lower against some virus strains than others, all viruses were readily neutralized, arguing against immune escape.

The HPV vaccines are not given to newborns, the lowest age to get it are 9 years of age. And it's 100% vital to give it before the girl becomes sexually active

The flu vaccine story is also fake, or rather there where a single study that once showed a potential link but then further studies where done (this is how science works, you cannot draw conclusions from a single study), that showed that there where no link: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/...

There was one study (published in 2012) that suggested that influenza vaccination might make people more susceptible to other respiratory infections. After that study was published, many experts looked into this issue further and conducted additional studies to see if the findings could be replicated. No other studies have found this effect. For example, this article [99 KB, 5 pages] in Clinical Infectious Diseases (published in 2013). It’s not clear why this finding was detected in the one study, but the preponderance of evidence suggests that this is not a common or regular occurrence and that influenza vaccination does not, in fact, make people more susceptible to other respiratory infections.

Right. I'll just leave these here:

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/va...
measles-canada.jpg

"Finally, we can look at the experiences of several developed countries after they let their immunization levels drop. Three countries – Great Britain, Sweden, and Japan – cut back the use of pertussis vaccine because of fear about the vaccine. The effect was dramatic and immediate. In Great Britain, a drop in pertussis vaccination in 1974 was followed by an epidemic of more than 100,000 cases of pertussis and 36 deaths by 1978. In Japan, around the same time, a drop in vaccination rates from 70% to 20%-40% led to a jump in pertussis from 393 cases and no deaths in 1974 to 13,000 cases and 41 deaths in 1979. In Sweden, the annual incidence rate of pertussis per 100,000 children 0-6 years of age increased from 700 cases in 1981 to 3,200 in 1985. It seems clear from these experiences that not only would diseases not be disappearing without vaccines, but if we were to stop vaccinating, they would come back."

And yet, we have this story from just a few months ago: https://www.ageofautism.com/20... Do vaccines work? Yes. Are they safe? For most, yes. However, some people have had adverse reactions, including death, after a vaccine shot: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/b... Why is it assumed that vaccines are 100% safe for everyone? I can eat a bag of peanuts, but some people can die from just a trace of peanut. Why wouldn't vaccines be the same? Also, vaccines contain some toxic chemicals. I know the levels in an individual vaccine shot should be safe, but how about when a doctor administers multiple vaccines at once? Here's a list of vaccine ingredients: https://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/p... Then we have stories like this: https://www.news-medical.net/n...

CDC has a history of vaccines that have caused issues. I don't remember autism ever being one, but pretending they are 100% safe is foolish.

I think after the polio issues (SV40), medical professionals have taken a lot more care to make them safer.

U.S. drug overdose deaths continue to rise; increase fueled by synthetic opioids

CDC’s analysis, based on 2015-2016 data from 31 states and Washington, D.C., showed:

    * Across demographic categories, the largest increase in opioid overdose death rates was in males between the ages of 25-44.
    * Overall drug overdose death rates increased by 21.5 percent.
            ** The overdose death rate from synthetic opioids (other than methadone) more than doubled, likely driven by illicitly manufactured fentanyl (IMF).
            ** The prescription opioid-related overdose death rate increased by 10.6 percent.
            ** The heroin-related overdose death rate increased by 19.5 percent.
            ** The cocaine-related overdose death rate increased by 52.4 percent.
            ** The psychostimulant-related overdose death rate increased by 33.3 percent.

...
    * Fourteen states had significant increases in death rates involving psychostimulants; the highest death rates occurred primarily in the Midwest and Western regions.

That isn't true. The US government pays out settlements to between 500 and 2500 people each year that have "life changing" reactions to vaccines. This is just for overwhelmingly provable cases. The CDC's own statistics show that some years the people who get hurt by vacancies are more common and severe than the diseases they were trying to prevent.

Sheesh. Lying with statistics much? In fact, having now looked over the numbers, I'll say that you're just outright lying.

If you go back to the actual numbers, straight from the horse's mouth, you'll see on page 3 that over the 12-year period from 2006-01-01 to 2017-12-31, the US administered 3,454,269,356 vaccines. Resulting from those 3.4 billion vaccines, only 4,172 people were compensated due to harm, which—at just 348/year on average—falls well short of even the lower end of the range you were trying to assert. So what is the actual number of settlements per year? Page 7 shows us that the worst year on record had merely 697, not 2500, while the best year had just 9, not 500.

To ground all of this in terms that we may be more familiar with, that's an incidence rate of just 1.2 per 1 million vaccines administered in the US, or a meager 0.00012% chance that you'll experience a "life changing" reaction in response to a vaccine. All of which is to say, while vaccines are not 100% safe (aside: so far as I know, there's no such thing as a 100% safe medical intervention, which makes me question why anti-vaxxers bother with doctors at all), they are literally within a rounding error of 100% safe according to the metric you happened to choose to try and use against them.

As for "the CDC's own statistics", care to link these statistics you've supposedly seen? Because so far as I can find (and I've looked quite a bit), the CDC doesn't break out the statistics you claimed you've seen. Instead, they point the public to "The Health and Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine[, ...] an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public". The HMD's numbers also happen to be what get used in the HRSA report I linked earlier. So, go back and look at those numbers from a few paragraphs back. There were 3.4 billion vaccines administered over that 12-year period. That's about 288 million per year. Since you're saying more than half the people had adverse effects in some years, you're claiming that the incidence rate topped out somewhere north of 144 million instances of adverse effects in a single year, or, put differently, that there was at least one year on record where a number of incidents roughly equal to half the population of the US resulted in adverse effects...and somehow we didn't all start rioting over it.

Actually, there's a possibility that's true, though if it is, it's likely because the far-and-away most common adverse effect monitored by the CDC—with "up to 8 out of 10" patients suffering from it—is that they became "fussy or irritable" after the shot was administered. Mind you, this is a shot typically given to infants, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that they cry after being given a shot, and yet that's logged as an adverse effect counting towards your statistics. No one cares about that. Nor do we generally care that the next closest effects are that 1 in 3 people experience a mild fever or see some redness at the injection spot within a few days of the vaccine. And once we get past the handful of common adverse effects like those, none of which are serious, the odds drop off rapidly, with things like anaphylaxis or worse coming in at 1 i

That isn't true. The US government pays out settlements to between 500 and 2500 people each year that have "life changing" reactions to vaccines. This is just for overwhelmingly provable cases. The CDC's own statistics show that some years the people who get hurt by vacancies are more common and severe than the diseases they were trying to prevent.

Sheesh. Lying with statistics much? In fact, having now looked over the numbers, I'll say that you're just outright lying.

If you go back to the actual numbers, straight from the horse's mouth, you'll see on page 3 that over the 12-year period from 2006-01-01 to 2017-12-31, the US administered 3,454,269,356 vaccines. Resulting from those 3.4 billion vaccines, only 4,172 people were compensated due to harm, which—at just 348/year on average—falls well short of even the lower end of the range you were trying to assert. So what is the actual number of settlements per year? Page 7 shows us that the worst year on record had merely 697, not 2500, while the best year had just 9, not 500.

To ground all of this in terms that we may be more familiar with, that's an incidence rate of just 1.2 per 1 million vaccines administered in the US, or a meager 0.00012% chance that you'll experience a "life changing" reaction in response to a vaccine. All of which is to say, while vaccines are not 100% safe (aside: so far as I know, there's no such thing as a 100% safe medical intervention, which makes me question why anti-vaxxers bother with doctors at all), they are literally within a rounding error of 100% safe according to the metric you happened to choose to try and use against them.

As for "the CDC's own statistics", care to link these statistics you've supposedly seen? Because so far as I can find (and I've looked quite a bit), the CDC doesn't break out the statistics you claimed you've seen. Instead, they point the public to "The Health and Medicine Division (HMD) of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine[, ...] an independent, nonprofit organization that works outside of government to provide unbiased and authoritative advice to decision makers and the public". The HMD's numbers also happen to be what get used in the HRSA report I linked earlier. So, go back and look at those numbers from a few paragraphs back. There were 3.4 billion vaccines administered over that 12-year period. That's about 288 million per year. Since you're saying more than half the people had adverse effects in some years, you're claiming that the incidence rate topped out somewhere north of 144 million instances of adverse effects in a single year, or, put differently, that there was at least one year on record where a number of incidents roughly equal to half the population of the US resulted in adverse effects...and somehow we didn't all start rioting over it.

Actually, there's a possibility that's true, though if it is, it's likely because the far-and-away most common adverse effect monitored by the CDC—with "up to 8 out of 10" patients suffering from it—is that they became "fussy or irritable" after the shot was administered. Mind you, this is a shot typically given to infants, so it should come as no surprise to anyone that they cry after being given a shot, and yet that's logged as an adverse effect counting towards your statistics. No one cares about that. Nor do we generally care that the next closest effects are that 1 in 3 people experience a mild fever or see some redness at the injection spot within a few days of the vaccine. And once we get past the handful of common adverse effects like those, none of which are serious, the odds drop off rapidly, with things like anaphylaxis or worse coming in at 1 i

Going back to my first statistic, around 80% of the deaths in healthy children from the flu each year is in non-vaccinated kids. 4 out of every 5.

For this to be useful, you need to know what percentage of kids are vaccinated for the flu. According to the CDC 57.9% of children get vaccinated, so roughly half. This means that not getting the vaccine roughly increases the chance of death by a factor of 4. While this is essentially what you said, the number could be very different depending on the number of kids getting vaccinated.

Here is what I found about this incident : https://www.cdc.gov/vaccinesaf... , also the EU-wide analysis https://ecdc.europa.eu/sites/p...

I could not find clear conclusions.

Also the fact that Sweden settled with 10M SEK per individual is a terrible idea since it makes people think they admit the vaccine is at fault, where in fact they just don't want to waste their time battling a PR disaster.

CDC claims some vaccines have issues. I'm sure its peer reviewed, and at least one of the cases listed is pretty well known by people willing to listen to other opinions.

To double down on your "I know everything" opinions.
Mississippi has the highest vaccination rate.
CA and OR have the lowest, specifically San Francisco.
So your liberal "we are smarter than everyone else" people are the real anti-vax people, while the deepest red state areas are not.

If he went to a small school, it's highly probable that no one committed suicide at any of his schools, while he was in school. Elementary school children are really unlikely to kill themselves, same for people in middle school. The current rate for teen suicide (in boys at least) is only around 14 per 100,000 according to most sources I could find. Napkin math says you'd need a little over 1,000 boys in your high school before it becomes as likely as not for one of them to commit suicide while you're in high school.

According to the CDC, teen suicide rate is up, but it's a matter of what time scale you're looking at. If you measure from the mid-2000's, the suicide rate is up, but if you compare it to the late-1980's and early-1990's, the suicide rate is down. It had a harder time finding good data that goes way back, but sources suggest the rates were lower in the 1960's, but I can't find much that goes back further than that, at least not for teenagers.

I also didn't have anyone commit suicide in my elementary, middle, or high school while growing up. I don't really see how I can prove that to you though since you'd be asking me to prove a negative. I mean I suppose I could try to get a record of everyone who attended at the same time as me and try to show a lack of any death certificates for those people in that span of time, but that would be kind of hard to cite.

As someone who has a degree in botany and has worked in greenhouses that were maintained at 1500ppm. You should know that CO2 levels become dangerous at 5000 ppm, not 1200ppm.

It becomes dangerous to life and health at 40,000ppm.

https://www.cdc.gov/niosh/npg/...

Story showing all kinds of problems with vaccines.

If you weren't so "smart" you might listen to someone once in a while and learn something. But you usually post liberal stuff, so I have to assume you are unable to learn anything that might be against "groupthink".

Meta analysis of other studies are _extremely_ dangerous. They can be much cheaper, and are much more easily distorted, than collecting real data with detectable, reproducible results. To cite your own example, are any of the newer studies actually measuring life expectancy for people with and without autism? Or are they also meta-analyses, receiving funding becuase the contemporary fascination with autism? And since the definition of autism has been malleable, and the rate of diagnosis of it has effectively doubled between 2000 and 2014 according to the CDC at https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/aut... , how has that distorted the results?

No, it shouldn't count; however, they still lump these products together.

That said, there is some evidence e-cigs help others to quit actual tobacco use, even though the FDA has not yet .

Kids are going to experiment with shit, regardless of controls and limits; we should probably be glad they're experimenting with this delivery method as opposed to what every prior generation has for the last 100+ years.

It's damn nasty though in the complications:
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/ab...

Except immigrants have higher vaccination rates than the USA: https://www.who.int/immunizati... vs https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...

You lost the argument there, buddy.

No, sport, America is losing the argument, and only big pharma execs are winning.

I am sorry that you felt attacked. An extra month of risk is minor in the grand scheme of things.

However, vaccine timing is a very well studied field since there is lots of data. So immunologists have plenty of data to know when and how serious adverse reactions can occur. In fact, there is an entire reporting system for vaccine reactions: VAERS

With that data, doctors can know when it's unsafe to give vaccines. Such as this chart from the CDC with contraindications and precautions of when not to vaccinate. Even further here's a peer reviewed paper on the topic

You're cherry-picking. 38.something K was ALL INJURIES to firearms, including suicides.

Look again. It's not "injuries". 39,000 was the number of DEATHS by firearm. Mortality means death.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/press...

You're cherry-picking. 38.something K was ALL INJURIES to firearms, including suicides.

Homicides (that's ded dead, not injured) 14.4. Suicides the balance.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/...

Stop cherrypicking to try to improve your position. But I understand, it's human nature to do so.

'cause the death by firearm yearly rate is about 13,000 in the US, not "over 39,000."

My figures come direct from the Center for Disease Control, which is part of the Executive Branch of the United States government. Would you care to tell us where your "13,000" figure comes from?

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/press...

https://www.statista.com/stati...

The "over 39.000" was what the Center for Disease Control reported for the calendar year 2018 as of December 28, 2018.

It's well known that gays will lie about their HIV status. As such, all who are HIV-positive should be on a list which can be accessed by anyone.

And BTW how do you even deal with people who have no idea they are HIV positive and have never been tested?

A bigger problem than the anonymous coward you quoted seems to be aware of. Someone who doesn't know they are HIV+ you cannot be treated. Most people who are are aware of their HIV+ status and treated eventually become undetectable, and the consensus is that undetectable is effectively untransmittable (see: "people who take ART daily as prescribed and achieve and maintain an undetectable viral load have effectively no risk of sexually transmitting the virus to an HIV-negative partner").

The risk is much greater from someone who says they're "negative" but only because they've never been tested. As bad of an idea as the poster's "list" would be anyway, it has no chance of helping here, where the greater danger lies.

The non-placebo group got an imperceptible dose, not a 10-strip. That's in the summary. You tell them they can't drive, to have someone ready to pick them up, you get a medical history and screen for mental illness. The test was conducted by having them reproduce a time period by holding a space bar, not by asking if they knew what time it was or how long had passed. That's in the summary. Psilocybin is the best drug for smoking cessation by a large margin ( https://www.hopkinsmedicine.or... ). LSD may have the same promise. You may find that silly, but that could save tens of thousands of lives in the US every year. 70% of smokers want to quit: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/da... 480,000 people die per year from smoking https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/da... If all 70% that wanted to quit took psilocybin we'd be talking about over 200k lives saved per year. And that's not the only thing psychedelics can be used to treat!

The non-placebo group got an imperceptible dose, not a 10-strip. That's in the summary. You tell them they can't drive, to have someone ready to pick them up, you get a medical history and screen for mental illness. The test was conducted by having them reproduce a time period by holding a space bar, not by asking if they knew what time it was or how long had passed. That's in the summary. Psilocybin is the best drug for smoking cessation by a large margin ( https://www.hopkinsmedicine.or... ). LSD may have the same promise. You may find that silly, but that could save tens of thousands of lives in the US every year. 70% of smokers want to quit: https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/da... 480,000 people die per year from smoking https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/da... If all 70% that wanted to quit took psilocybin we'd be talking about over 200k lives saved per year. And that's not the only thing psychedelics can be used to treat!

Measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccines do not and never did contain thimerosal.
Varicella (chickenpox), inactivated polio (IPV), and pneumococcal conjugate vaccines have also never contained thimerosal.
Influenza (flu) vaccines are currently available in both thimerosal-containing (for multi-dose vaccine vials) and thimerosal-free versions.

The problem with your theory is that you can get a disease, that you have been vaccinated for, if you're hit with a huge amount of the infectious agent. i.e. If you sit down next to someone who's leaking measles all over the place

You've kind of answered your own question here. If the intelligent people refrain from sitting down next to someone who is "leaking measles all over the place" then the Darwinian principle would still hold.

It's not necessary to sit next to a measles infected person, or even be near a measles infected person to get infected.
https://www.cdc.gov/measles/ab...
"Also, measles virus can live for up to two hours in an airspace where the infected person coughed or sneezed. If other people breathe the contaminated air or touch the infected surface, then touch their eyes, noses, or mouths, they can become infected. Measles is so contagious that if one person has it, 90% of the people close to that person who are not immune will also become infected.

Infected people can spread measles to others from four days before through four days after the rash appears."

I know it's fashionable for conservatives to pick at the Leftist policies of the United States' most prosperous state ....

The "United States' most prosperous state" has the highest poverty rate in the US

The "United States' most prosperous state" has the highest rate of tuberculosis

The "United States' most prosperous state" has the lowest graduation rate in the US.

Non-whites in California live in the WORST conditions in the US.

But since all that bad crap happens to the non-suburban, non-white population in California, you in your suburban, sheltered, white-privileged, "progressive", I'm-so-much-better-than-everyone-else-because-I-CARE, virtue-signalling, close-minded can't-be-bothered-to-actually-think-for-yourself bubble don't care.

So much for all that useless virtue signalling.

Are you kidding? I really can't tell if this is meant as sarcasm or not, 10/10 troll right there!

These things print money like you wouldn't believe. Almost two decades ago when these things were in their nascent stages a system would have cost $75k to $85k and maybe $5k a month to maintain. I would be surprised if the costs weren't down to around $20k by now and the maintenance costs have to be cheaper unless the system is being regularly vandalized. Anyways there are a number of red light cameras near my home and I see them go off probably 50% of the time I'm at those intersections. Even if we go with the most expensive numbers from 18 years ago, $145k for the first year of ownership and operation. A system would only need to issue 10 $40 tickets each day to turn a profit. I guarantee that any of these speed or red light systems are going to issue at least that many tickets each day just from idiot drivers that aren't paying close attention let alone people deliberately speeding or running lights. Higher fines just make the situation that much more juicy.

https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehic...

https://www.digitaltrends.com/...

...After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.

First off, I agree with your various statements here, but wanted to talk about this specific one to gain another viewpoint. Resource management is a responsibility of every government on the planet, and since we've carved this planet up into countries with borders (a.k.a. "yours" and "mine"), those resources are finite. Failing to create policies that control the population within that country would be a failure of resource management. This is why a product as deadly as tobacco is legal in the US. It creates both massive profits and death, which is a win-win for any capitalist country.

TL; DR - You see a problem to solve. Others see an expected end result and by design.

• It's why we strive to further reduce airliner fatalities when it's already one or two orders of magnitudes safer than any other form of transport. The media gives plane accidents disproportionately more coverage than other transportation accidents, causing the public to demand planes be made safer than they already are.
• Same thing with child abductions. Abduction by a stranger is incredibly rare - only a few dozen cases happen each year. But because the media gives those cases wildly disproportionate coverage, every parent is scared to death to let their child out of their sight for 2 minutes.
• Shark attacks always seem to make the national news, even though on average only about 1 person is killed each year by sharks in the U.S. Meanwhile the approx 100 people killed each year by deer go unreported except maybe as a local news story.
• School shootings are another example - they've actually been decreasing over the last two decades. But because the media automatically splashes any school shooting on the national news, the public incorrectly thinks they're becoming more common. Statistically, more high school students are killed by complications from pregnancy (page 3) than from non-gang, non-suicide school shootings. But I've yet to see a news story take that angle against teen pregnancy.
• Terrorism. If you include all the 9/11 fatalities, you're roughly 4x as likely to die from terrorism than lightning. Exclude 9/11 and you're roughly 6x more likely to be killed by lightning. I think I've seen one news story in 40 years of someone being killed by lightning. Yet every terrorist incident, even the ones which fail and cause no damage or injury, seem to automatically make national news.
• Until the last couple years, the media basically ignored the decade-long rise in drug overdose deaths. It wasn't until it surpassed car accident deaths that they finally began taking it seriously. The day which crystallized this in my mind was the 2016 murder-suicide on the UCLA campus. That story immediately made national news with live coverage on all the major networks. On the very same day 2 people died and over 57 were hospitalized from drug overdoses at a music festival in Florida. But that story barely made it beyond the local papers, and I didn't see any coverage of it on TV. I only happened to see it because I clicked on a different story from a Florida newspaper in Google News.
• After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.

And these are the

• It's why we strive to further reduce airliner fatalities when it's already one or two orders of magnitudes safer than any other form of transport. The media gives plane accidents disproportionately more coverage than other transportation accidents, causing the public to demand planes be made safer than they already are.
• Same thing with child abductions. Abduction by a stranger is incredibly rare - only a few dozen cases happen each year. But because the media gives those cases wildly disproportionate coverage, every parent is scared to death to let their child out of their sight for 2 minutes.
• Shark attacks always seem to make the national news, even though on average only about 1 person is killed each year by sharks in the U.S. Meanwhile the approx 100 people killed each year by deer go unreported except maybe as a local news story.
• School shootings are another example - they've actually been decreasing over the last two decades. But because the media automatically splashes any school shooting on the national news, the public incorrectly thinks they're becoming more common. Statistically, more high school students are killed by complications from pregnancy (page 3) than from non-gang, non-suicide school shootings. But I've yet to see a news story take that angle against teen pregnancy.
• Terrorism. If you include all the 9/11 fatalities, you're roughly 4x as likely to die from terrorism than lightning. Exclude 9/11 and you're roughly 6x more likely to be killed by lightning. I think I've seen one news story in 40 years of someone being killed by lightning. Yet every terrorist incident, even the ones which fail and cause no damage or injury, seem to automatically make national news.
• Until the last couple years, the media basically ignored the decade-long rise in drug overdose deaths. It wasn't until it surpassed car accident deaths that they finally began taking it seriously. The day which crystallized this in my mind was the 2016 murder-suicide on the UCLA campus. That story immediately made national news with live coverage on all the major networks. On the very same day 2 people died and over 57 were hospitalized from drug overdoses at a music festival in Florida. But that story barely made it beyond the local papers, and I didn't see any coverage of it on TV. I only happened to see it because I clicked on a different story from a Florida newspaper in Google News.
• After overdoses and traffic accidents, suicide is the #3 cause of non-disease death. But it's extraordinarily rare to see a news story about a suicide unless it's a celebrity. Which is a real shame because this is probably the most preventable cause of death we have. And if more people knew how common it was, they probably wouldn't feel as alone with their problems to commit suicide.

And these are the

I don't think you fully appreciate just how complicated medicine is. There are a lot of factors in every disease and progress is necessarily slow.

As for factors, what you call "cancer" is actually a few dozen distinct diseases with similar etiology (DNA somewhere in some cell broke) but completely different presentations and treatments. What works for one does not necessarily work for the other. HIV is a retrovirus made of RNA and mutates constantly. There are two distinct strains and several different recognizable subgroups. The flu isn't a retrovirus but similarly mutates constantly. Every year we get a little genetic drift and every few years we get a genetic shift and we get screwed until it gets under control.

As for progress, the progress we've made is incredible in the last decades. Your comparisons are completely off base. If an electrical engineer lets the magic smoke out of a few components on a PCB he just gets new components or a new PCB. If a physician or medical researcher destroys a few organs in a patient he just killed a human being. You simply cannot move fast and break things in this field. Breast cancer (probably the best funded) survival is now over 90%. Want to see truly huge gains? Try leukemia.. HIV has improved, too. PrEP can prevent the spread and maybe in a few generations we won't have to worry about finding a cure for it because we have eradicated it like we did smallpox. Oh! Remember seeing that one recently? No. You didn't. Because vaccines have made it possible to completely eradicated diseases. Polio is only endemic in a handful of countries now. Why? Because medicine DOES work.

Maybe you're not happy with the speed of progress but that's because of your broken standards, not because we're moving too slow.

Also, it is well established that Americans who eat processed meat have a higher rate of colon cancer

So, help me understand how it is that processed meat consumption is up, and colorectal cancer is down...

http://fortune.com/2018/01/02/...

https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/col...

There's an interesting quirk in human psychology that makes negative facts and news seem more salient than positive ones. For media that thrives on reader attention (and that's both new and old media), this naturally leads to more emphasis on the negative.

I think this is a bias worth noting and pushing back on. The world is pretty far from perfect, but there's also huge helpings of good news all around us.

• Continuing the trend, nearly 70M people in dire poverty gain access to electricity
• Extreme global poverty continues its decline, although it's getting harder to make progress on that front
• The US death rate from cancer continues its steady yearly drop. Cumulatively, this has prevented hundreds of thousands of deaths
• The pack of criminals who made a wholesale business of taking sex slaves in war lost their last city
• The world continues its steady march towards universal literacy. You can't embed pictures in /. (for reaaaalllly goatse reasons) but the figures here are really striking
• The Long Peace continues for another year, meaning millions of lives impacted
• Cigarette smoking, a leading cause of totally preventable death, fell to its lowest rate in the US
• Automobile deaths per vehicle mile continued to drop

Most of these (Daesh not withstanding, but threw them in just because they were really vile) follow the same pattern: slow but steady progress. It's hardly clickbait -- in fact these are not even specific events you can point to, they are trends seen on the scale of decades. And on the scale of decades, the world is consistently becoming a less-bad place.

911 will already transfer callers to suicide intervention, plus they can handle all of the related emergencies that require additional immediate support

That is the problem. 911 is advertised as being for emergencies. People suffering suicidal depression rarely consider it to be an emergency. They consider it to be a personal problem, not rising to the level of an emergency which warrants involving other people. We could badly use a hotline that people know they can call if they're just depressed and want someone to talk to.

And This Is Important. Aside from disease, suicide is the #2 cause of death in this country (Table 6).

• 58,335 deaths by accidental poisoning (mostly drug overdoses - the other huge problem the country is facing)
• 44,965 deaths by suicide
• 40,327 deaths by motor vehicle accidents
• 34.673 deaths by falls
• 19,362 homicides (14,415 by gun)

You probably aren't aware of this because the media has been reticent in their duty in reporting facts to the populace, devoting too much air time on their pet issue (gun violence), They've mostly neglected the two issues (suicide and drug overdoses) which have grown over the last two decades to become several times larger than the number of gun homicides. Test it for yourself. Watch the news and count how many suicides, drug overdoses, motor vehicle accidents, and gun deaths they report. You'll find their coverage is skewed heavily towards reporting gun deaths.

I think what this is about is that it is really old news, and because it's rare and been a long time since then, newly trained doctors don't have this on their radar.
The much larger risk is from transfusions and graft material, a few hundred of those have occurred vs the 6 or so from surgical instruments over the last few decades.

overview
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
https://www.cdc.gov/prions/cjd...

Here's the WHO guidelines from 1999 for avoiding and decontamination
https://www.who.int/csr/resour...

Hell, we had a really bad hepatitis outbreak in SD because of our homeless problems. This stuff is actually happening.

Yeah, about that "San Diego Hepatitis Outbreak". It's a nationwide outbreak occurring in rural areas of Missouri, Kentucky and Indiana at a higher rate than in any California city. Also, Utah, Arkansas, Florida, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com...

https://www.cdc.gov/hepatitis/...