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For that matter, the HPV shot is not recommended for adults, since most of us have probably already been exposed (unless, again, you're a nun.) It's only recommended for pre-adolescents, under the likely true assumption that the majority of them will NOT be celibate.

Actually, it is recommended for adults, at least up here in Canada. It's currently approved for men up to age 26 and women up to age 45.

It's recommended and highly desirable to administer it pre-teen, so as to get maximum protection, but even for sexually active persons, it will still give at least partial benefit, as even if you have had an HPV infection, it's damn unlikely you'll have contracted all four strains the vaccine protects against.

Yay! Be afraid! Look, for any virus to infect you have to have a decent viral payload and a path of infection.

Viral hemorrhagic fevers have an infectious dose of 1 - 10 organisms by aerosol in non-human primates. In blood at least the loads can be billions of viruses per milliliter - I'm sure it is lower in saliva/etc, but the bottom line is that it takes very little to cause an infection. Touch a doorknob, then touch your eye, and boom, you're done.

Cites:
http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/lab...
and
Franz, D. R., Jahrling, P. B., Friedlander, A. M., McClain, D. J., Hoover, D. L., Bryne, W. R., Pavlin, J. A., Christopher, G. W., & Eitzen, E. M. (1997). Clinical recognition and management of patients exposed to biological warfare agents. Jama, 278(5), 399-411.

I've heard that the WHO is reporting 91 laboratory-confirmed human cases and 17 deaths in four Provinces and two Municipalities in China. Sounds real enough to me. I feel safe enough here on the Left Coast in Canada... but there's not much more I can do than wash my hands lots and drink more JD... Some easy reading - http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/eri-ire/h7n9/risk_assessment-evaluation_risque-eng.php

I recently encountered this conundrum as well with a new arrival in my family. Without having been exposed to the recent "controversy" and the usual polarization of "you're either for vaccination or you're with the child pornographers", I did what I usually do and that is question the merits of whatever course of action has been recommended to me. Living in Canada, vaccines are crowd sourced, so money does not factor into my decision making. There is actually a pretty good federal resource here, so it is convenient to inform myself.

The Public Health Agency of Canada recommends vaccinating your child against 13 separate "diseases". My "cohort" has been vaccinated against maybe half that number. Why the change? Why those 13, why not more, or less? What are the risks and benefits for each one? Are they all equal? Are some more beneficial than others? Who made these decisions? What research was used in each case? How long have they been in general circulation? Unfortunately the government FAQ doesn't contain that information.

We ended up getting the DTaP-IPV-Hib (Diphtheria, Tetanus, Whooping Cough, Polio, Hib) and Pneu-C-13 (Pneumococcal disease) vaccines but opted out of the Rot (Rotavirus) vaccine after weighing the risks and benefits. I am still not sure if I have made the right decision; it seems that there are people on both "sides" using emotional arguments to try and sway me one way or the other. The nurses looked at us like we were criminals for not getting the Rotavirus vaccine. In the coming months, we will have to choose whether to vaccinate against Influenza, Varicella, Measles, Mumps, Rubella, and Meningococcal disease. Wait, why are Chicken Pox and the Flu on the immunization schedule now? I don't get the free flu shots every year and I had chicken pox when I was younger, to no great detriment of which I am aware. Do I blindly trust what the health agency recommends? Policy and science do not always go hand in hand -- I'm a scientist and I work for government so I know how that shit works.

I once had a serious adverse reaction to a vaccine and want to avoid that risk for my children where possible, if it is reasonable to do so. Maybe I will only give my child a few of those vaccines... Have I made a horrible mistake? Do I deserve to burn in hell like some of the commenters suggest? Do I get to wear an "anti-vaccine" badge now? In which bi-chromatic "camp" do I belong?

From The Cost of Smoking in Canada, 1991:

"According to this analysis, smokers cost society about $15 billion while contributing roughly $7.8 billion in taxes."

From Canadian Council for Tobacco Control - Tax Revenues:

"Governments are often accused of making money from the sales of cigarettes. While taxation revenues on cigarettes are quite high, as is shown in the table below health care costs are always higher."

And they include 2001/2002 numbers. Where are your 1998 numbers?

Ya know, i'd agree with a lot of your post, but to say the higher death rates are due to guns and lack of health care, that's idiotic.

Canada and the United States share a common culture, same foods, etc, but the murder rate in the US is 3x what it is in Canada (4.2 instead of 1.4). If you remove US homicides committed by guns, the murder rate is the same. This is quite ironic, given that Canada has more firearms per capita then the US - Canada just does a better job of gun control.

As for the lack of health care in the US, the US has more people who have no coverage than the entire population of Canada. People without health care will die of untreated chronic conditions, as well as treatable acute conditions that are not tended to in time.

Canada -- Life Expectancy: 78 years (men), 83 years (women) (UN) - average is 80.4 years.

Also, the US infant mortality rate sucks 7.8 per thousand as opposed to 5.6 in Canada - almost 40% higher.

Yes, we need to get people to take responsibility for themselves. Allow doctors to refuse repeated treatment to smokers who don't quit, Ditto for alcoholics and crackheads and people who thing that "all you can eat" is a order from god, not a suggestion. Give custody to the other parent when one continues to smoke, binge drink, do crack, and/or over-stuff their pie-holes.

Make them "pay at the pump" with additional sin taxes on sweetened soft drinks, junk food, booze and simply ban the all-you-can-eat buffets outright.

Make it as socially unacceptable to be fat as it is to smoke - people get fat one bite at a time, and want to lose it without the hard work that going on a diet calls for. A waist is a terrible thing to mind, but so is seeing a couple of 400 pounders of blubber at the next table in a restaurant. Cows eat more gracefully - and they take more time to chew.

Umm...

You're TOTALLY wrong. WHO-recommended flu vaccines are very effective. See here for an example: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/publicat/ccdr-rmtc/06vol32/acs-07/index.html

And: "...the only thing you got was a chance at a bad immune reaction and a concoction of mercury, detergent and some other nasty compounds..." is just a stock anti-vaccination quackery.

Are you sure? You might want to look at the data*.

In particular: "lifetime number of sexual partners was the best predictor of HSV-2 infection (Bassett et al., 1993)."

* (Warning: They did a Western blot test here, which I understand tends to have false negatives, in which case all of the numbers given in Table 2 are actually underestimates of the real prevalence.)

With this in mind, may I suggest the following revision: " I don't mind dating a girl that has been with everybody, as long as she had a good shower afterwards, and a full STD screening." There are still some things the screening can easily miss (e.g., warts -- they're often not visible to the naked eye), so screening doesn't completely "undo" the statistical significance of lots of partners, but it goes a long way.

(Don't buy the modern feminist bullshit. "Slut" is an insult for a reason: It's shorthand for "statistically more likely to unwittingly cause harm to subsequent sexual partners by spreading disease." Me, I don't call incurable infections "empowering." Feminists shouldn't trivialize themselves with this shit when they could be working to address substantive political and economic issues affecting women. But what do I know; I'm just using science.)

3. Be very conservative with immunizations. How many middle class US children are really going to get exposed to Hep? And since thermerisol has finally been removed from vaccination products, the autism rate has finally stopped exploding (despite the fact that studies show no link between the two).

But just to reinforce your point, I'll add 7. Don't slather on the antibiotic ointment when you get a paper cut. Don't use Lysol in your kitchen - use a bleach solution if soap is not going to cut it.

Don't be so sure that my figures are way off.

Back when I was doing research on this stuff (to see how common my situation was), I saw figures regularly reported that were anywhere from 10% to 25%. With most abuse being adult on child. Some sources are higher - much higher. For instance a major Canadian study estimated sexual abuse at 51% of women and 31% of men. (I highly doubt that figure.) Everyone who was honest cited tons of methodological difficulties ranging from trouble agreeing on definitions to difficulty in getting people to be honest.

Whatever the real figure, and whichever definition you use, there is no question that sexual abuse is a major problem.

As for my calculation, I was estimating children abused per pedophile over a lifetime to be 10. (I have no idea what the real figure is. Some pedophiles don't abuse. Some abuse far more than that. I know of 2 victims of my abuser over a 10 year period, and he'd had others prior to that, so 10 is not too far off for him over a lifetime.) As long as the population structure is constant (which is close to being true), my calculation of what fraction of people are pedophiles is good. If I was estimating children currently being abused per pedophile, then I would need a factor to represent the ratio of children to the general population.

The figure that I came up with was 1%. The real one might be higher or lower, but the details don't matter. My point was that in a random group the size of this one, one would expect a lot of pedophiles to be represented. The odds that one would respond are fairly high.

And for your information, 1% isn't an unreasonable number for an extreme of human behaviour. For instance mental retardation is officially defined as being in the bottom 1%, and schizophrenia also hits about 1% of people. So it wouldn't surprise me if 1% of people were pedophiles.

If you want to know what Kleck thinks about the efficacy of gun control, ./ers can read about it here and decide for themselves if this guy's quote is in proper context (when he mentions the 7 types of crime that are improved but leaves out the 90 that are not impacted or aggravated by gun control). The Chapeldine & Maurice paper (full abstract) isn't an empirical study at all (nor does it claim to be scholarly research of any sort), but a description of the policy position of a Quebecois bureaucracy. Not everything published in a journal is scholarly research; some things may be of interest to the audience for other reasons.

And to keep this more on-topic: Perhaps consumer-priced locks can be made more resistant to bumping by using stiffer springs on the shorter pins (if you used stiffer springs everywhere you wouldn't be able to insert the key, right?), and perhaps a throw weight that locks down an extra pin when the lock is bumped (much like the mechanism that grabs your seat belt when the high g's come). That would re-instate the requirement to have modicum of skill at least, without having to blow $100's per lock.

And moderators, please check the poster's facts before you mod informative. How long does it take to follow links and google keywords for chrissake?

You do not need to be a rich snob to purchase books. Look who the largest percentage of smokers are, people in the lowest quartile of income. If 38% of the people in that income quartile can afford $8/day for fags they can certainly afford books as well. They simply choose to fund their drug addiction instead.

http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpcmc/cancer/publ ications/nphs-sboc/nphs16_e.html

Of course you still can argue which is the cause and which the effect. Do they make this senseless choice because they are poor and uneducated or are they poor and uneducated because of this type of choice...

"Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest."

If they have $50 for an entire month how much interest have you lost? At 4% APR it is a whopping $0.16. I don't think "sane people" spend much time worrying about $0.16.

You do not need to be a rich snob to purchase books. Look who the largest percentage of smokers are, people in the lowest quartile of income. If 38% of the people in that income quartile can afford $8/day for fags they can certainly afford books as well. They simply choose to fund their drug addiction instead.

http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpcmc/cancer/publ ications/nphs-sboc/nphs16_e.html

Of course you still can argue which is the cause and which the effect. Do they make this senseless choice because they are poor and uneducated or are they poor and uneducated because of this type of choice...

"Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest."

If they have $50 for an entire month how much interest have you lost? At 4% APR it is a whopping $0.16. I don't think "sane people" spend much time worrying about $0.16.

You do not need to be a rich snob to purchase books. Look who the largest percentage of smokers are, people in the lowest quartile of income. If 38% of the people in that income quartile can afford $8/day for fags they can certainly afford books as well. They simply choose to fund their drug addiction instead.

http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/ccdpc-cpcmc/cancer/publ ications/nphs-sboc/nphs16_e.html

Of course you still can argue which is the cause and which the effect. Do they make this senseless choice because they are poor and uneducated or are they poor and uneducated because of this type of choice...

"Sane people will not appreciate the library holding their dough unless they credit a decent amount of interest."

If they have $50 for an entire month how much interest have you lost? At 4% APR it is a whopping $0.16. I don't think "sane people" spend much time worrying about $0.16.

Nope, your stats are bogus. The latest Google found for me were from the Public Health Agency of Canada, quoting UN figures from the late 90s:

Gun homocides per million:
UK - 1.3
USA - 62.4
Canada - 6.0
Northern Ireland - 35.5

Looks like you are way ahead of us in that department. Northern Ireland was doing its best to catch up. I wonder where they got the guns?
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