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It's hard to take seriously a source that says:

- The mechanism of action of vitamin D in infection... suggests pharmaceutical doses of vitamin D (1,000 IU per pound of body weight per day for several days) will effectively treat not only influenza and the common cold, but help treat a host of other seasonal infections, including meningitis, septicemia, and pneumonia, in both children and adults (emphasis added). source referenced in parent post

Personally, if I have septicemia or bacterial meningitis/pneumonia, I will take whatever the sensitivities say I should. If you choose to treat your N. meningitidis with Vit D, please stay at home so that you don't force everyone else to take prophylaxis.

There are may choices that boost immune function. Eating right with more vegetables and fruits, exercising regularly (including treadmill workstations), sleeping well, laughing more, getting sunshine or vitamin D supplements, getting enough iodine and other vital nutrients, taking certain herbs regularly or drinking elderberry juice, being spiritual in some ways, and many other things all boost the immune system (see Dr. Fuhrman and Dr. Weil and many others). So does nursing children through age two years or further, as recommended by WHO. Periodic fasting may also boost the immune system long-term.

There are many lifestyle choices that also weaken the immune system or increase disease transmission risk. This includes things to avoid like smoking, breathing second-hand smoke, excessive drinking, various addictions and other high risk activities, and so on. Long-term exposure to woodsmoke from older wood-burning stove decreases overall health. Choosing to live in a walkable location with sidewalks increases health overall (see the book/website "Blue Zones"), meaning a choice to live where you are car-dependent increases health risks. Homeschooling reduces the risk of the spread of communicable diseases, since compulsory public schools are a huge disease transmission routes. Even the choice to *optionally* go to big social gatherings like DisneyWorld increases the risk of disease transmission (as in this case). Choosing to commute into a city for work on public transportation rather than work from home also probably increase disease transmission risk.

Many people (most) do not do *all* these good things and refrain from doing all the risky things. Why be so fixated on vaccinations -- especially because some, like an annual flu shot, are clearly debatable as risk vs. reward for meany people? Does your family do all those good things above as applicable and refrain from every one of the bad ones? Every single one? If you don't do even one, for whatever reason, should we ostracize you because you have broken the "social contract"?

BTW on the nuances of promoting widespread vaccination: "Govt. Researchers: Flu Shots Not Effective in Elderly, After All"
http://sharylattkisson.com/gov...
"An important and definitive "mainstream" government study done nearly a decade ago got little attention because the science came down on the wrong side. It found that after decades and billions of dollars spent promoting flu shots for the elderly, the mass vaccination program did not result in saving lives. In fact, the death rate among the elderly increased substantially"

Contrast with: "Vitamin D Proven More Effective Than Both Anti-Viral Drugs and Vaccines at Preventing the Flu"
http://www.worldhealth.net/for...

Have you had your vitamin D level checked recently? If not, should we ostracize you and your family as an increased flu risk? If you have an elderly relative who had a flu shot, should we ostracize them (and you, by connection) because a study suggests it statistically negatively impacted their health?

Yes, this on the surface seems like an overreaching nanny state tax. Consider this though.

• 1 in 5 healthcare dollars go to diabetes
• 1 in 4 teens have diabetes or prediabetes
• 1 in 3 people will eventually contract diabetes

So what do you do about this? Let people eat up our healthcare system with obesity related illnesses (no pun intended), or try things out to fix the problem? The government has run educational programs before with little success. Taxing sugar almost seems like a reasonable alternative at this point.

Granted, we now have a bunch of very smart, long-lived, god-awful horny-all-the-time rats running around. You got a problem with that?

But how do the neurons learn how to fly the thing? That's done by electrical pulses into the dish through one of the electrodes. That in effect tells the neurons when they are doing the right thing to keep the plane on course. High frequency, or rapid pulses, stimulate the neurons and enhance the connections between them.

Simply put, by stimulating the neurons the researchers tell them they're on the right track, so they continue to adjust the plane's elevator to keep it from plunging toward the ground during a downdraft, for example. When the plane levels off, the simulator reduces the frequency of the pulses, and the neurons back off from that control surface, allowing the plane to remain on course.

After just a few minutes of that kind of training, the "brain" takes over completely, sending signals to the plane's control surfaces, and using feedback from the simulator to know just which signals to send.

Or start practicing medicine like this:

http://worldhealth.net/
http://functionalmedicine.org/

Functional medicine is defined as medicine that is applied to the patient as a whole being with multiple inter-related systems, not just a batch of symptoms to toss therapies at. Doctors practicing this take into account gut health, endocrinology, and all of the body systems as a whole, and try to figure out the actual root of problems rather than toss band-aids and aspirin around.

Unfortunately, of the 78 "approved" lines, only 11 are actually available and usable, and ALL of the approved lines are contaminated with mouse feeder cells, rendering them useless in human trials.

Where did I get this information? Not from a bunch of liberals, but from a letter written by 11 Republican congressmembers asking President Bush to rethink his policies.

Bush ignored their request.

Text of letter

As another person in this article pointed out we are arguing semantics. We can currently get human skin cells to grow in a lab but no one argues that they are human. We take a nucleus form one of those skin cells and then drop it in an egg and we now have a human being? All the information needed to make a complete human is in the nulceus of the donor cell, the egg provides the machinery to start making the totipotent stem cells.

When we are talking about less than 16 cells total (totipotent cells only exists for the first 3-4 cell divisions) I have a real hard time with considering a group of 12 cells a 'human' any more than I would consider an unfertilized egg that gets flushed out with menstruation a human. For the sake of argument (and I have not heard any one doing this research) would you consider a chimpanzee nucleus in a human egg human? A human nucleus in a chimpanzee egg human?