Slashdot Mirror
YouTube Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation
Invisible Pink Unicorn writes "University of Toronto researchers have uncovered widespread misinformation in videos on YouTube related to vaccination and immunization. In the first-ever study of its kind, they found that over half of the 153 videos analyzed portrayed childhood, HPV, flu and other vaccinations negatively or ambiguously. They also found that videos highly skeptical of vaccinations received more views and better ratings by users than those videos that portray immunizations in a positive light. According to the lead researcher, 'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination. Our study shows that a significant amount of immunization content on YouTube contradicts the best scientific evidence at large. From a public health perspective, this is very concerning.' An extract from the Journal of the American Medical Association is available online."
I don't see why the fact that this misinformation is on youtube is a big deal. It probably just reflects actual public perceptions of science. Educate people, don't act shocked when uneducated people say stupid things.
Currently hooked on AMP
I'm not one to support eugenics, but... this might be nature's way of working out its own kinks.
Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything? I mean, I get why people might use something like Wikipedia for this (with all the pitfalls that can bring), but this just plain does not make sense to me.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
We have to remember there is a large sub-culture in the US/Canada and Europe who still think that evolution is a myth, and the world was created 6,000 years ago.
They make YouTube videos as well.
Just because they can use tech doesn't mean they grok tech.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
A study found mis-information... on.. the internet...? Where's the shocker here?
Slashdot is too nerdy for me.
Unfortunately, like many other places on the web, it's prime for disinformation -- not necessarily from mischievious glac elves, but religious nuts, bigots, etc.
We must be cautious.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
You'll die from having the wrong information and the collective gene pool will get just a little bit cleaner.
You honestly have to wonder how people can make super-important decisions for their children and themselves using _YouTube_ as their main provider of information. It's sad, but it's just like all those folks getting burned on their million dollar homes with sub-primes - you made a bad decision because you didn't do enough research, and you should be the one paying the price.
You are simply never going to protect all the stupid people from themselves, and making the effort often only punishes the smart people who didn't make those mistakes. That's the unfortunate realization I've come to in my adulthood.
Plausible conjecture should not be misrepresented as proof positive.
I can't help but think that it could only help the gene pool if the type of people who would think "hey, let's go look up important medical information on YouTube!" were given bad medical advice. Darwinism and all that.
(Except, of course, that this is more about misinformed parents harming their children. But still - I can't imagine why anyone would think "hey, I wanna find out more about immunization on YouTube!" I suppose they could be starting on a search engine and winding up at YouTube. But that ruins the joke.)
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
Seriously.
Those people that go to YOUTUBE for HEALTH ADVICE?
Kind of like the age old:
Mr. Idiot has joined #IRC
Idiot: Hey guys, I hate this stuff 2 hours ago and my eyes are starting to turn green, any ideas?
IRC1: Go to a Dr.
IRC2: Go to a Dr.
IRC3: Go to a Dr.
IRC4: Call poison control THEN go to a Dr.
IRC5: Take pictures and post them for us!
Who does Mr. Idiot listen too? IRC5.
Let em die.
(no, I am not ACTUALLY suggesting eugenics by not educating these idiots, it is just tempting)
Do Or Do Not, There Is No Spoon, There Is Only Zuul. Everything in the above post is probably opinion.
ON my medical application, I coined the new word "Google-gnosis" describing the problem with people self-diagnosing based on information found on the internet, making the point that Doctors are now going to have to make more of an effort to know what information and misinformation is out there, and how Doctors are going to have to spend more time teaching people correct information to dispel popular myths that get spread around. This is case in point for me. Maybe I should bring this up in my next interview...
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
Well, duh. Why would I produce a video and/or watch a video that says something mainstream that everyone already knows? That's not news. I'm going to produce something that is different from the norm. And people are going to gravitate toward videos that tell them something they don't already know.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I have a simple question .....
Do you trust Pharmaceutical Companies to give you all the information you need to make an intelligent decision?
Personally, I don't trust any of them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I have never found YouTube to be a key stop on my information gathering process. I'm sorry but watching some idiot talk about electricity and how it works, then having his buddy traser him to demonstrate does really stand out as good science. It looks more like stupidity. All be it funny.
Journals that don't share their information should not complain when people are ignorant. The abstract does not convince me of anything other than four MDs spent some time looking at YouTube and fear people will use YouTube as a substitute for their doctor.
Next article, Insurance Company Complains that People Can't Afford the Doctor and Cost too Much to Make Well.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
At first my reaction was that people who get medical information on YouTube deserve what they get. Then the light went on. They're getting bad information about vaccinations. That means they won't get immunized, and that behavior leads to outbreaks of illnesses and epidemics. It can put a lot of us at risk.
Misinformation about science bothers me in general as well.
..as evolution in action.
(see also "Darwin Awards")
-- Alastair
Hopefully they aren't including videos such as this one in the group that portray vaccines in a negative light.
Seriously, if you're going to NOT get vaccinated for something as a result of having watched a YouTube video, then it's probably better for humanity if you increase your risk of being removed from the gene pool.
To quote bash.org:
" The problem with America is stupidity. I'm not saying there should be a capital punishment for stupidity, but why don't we just take the safety labels off of everything and let the problem solve itself?"
In this case it'll be the _kids_ who die because they didn't get their shots.
My kids however WILL get their shots, which means while the kids of misinformed, ignorant morons are dying of measles, my kids will be be in school, walking around immune to the diseases decimating their classmates.
It'll probably give them a God Complex.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
...enable them to post their opinions on the internet, and what do you get?
Slashdot?
Of course, as we all know the medical/pharmaceutical industries will always play down risks associated with vaccines (which there are many, as is well documented).
I think this isn't so much proof of ignorance, but rather evidence that the "average" American actually has doubts about what we're being told and injected with.
And I can't blame anyone one bit for feeling that way.
If mainstream MDs and researchers care about getting their point of view out to patients, so that people who find out they have a disease don't have to learn about it from YouTube, spam, and pharmaceutical company sites, they're going to have to start using more Open Access journals or get their existing journals to go Open Access.
Someone has the nerve to complain about the scientific quality of information found on YouTube??? WTF All I can say is these people haven't been watching much of anything from Hollywood or from mainstream news media. Here, again, we have the opportunity to show that teaching and guidance are required for just about EVERYTHING in life, and that includes what to believe of what you hear/read/and see. Check your source, get a second opinion, buyer beware, you get what you pay for. Seems like all that crazy old s**T that grandpa used to say might have some truth to it? hmmm
I'm willing to bet that at least one of these concerned researchers went to a school where he was told that masturbation will make him crosseyed or make him go blind. Misinformation has been around since the advent of spoken language, and possibly before. It was only relatively recently that we all agreed (well most of us) that the earth is round.
It is not medical information that needs to be filterd, or the fscking Internet... we need to teach people how to get through life without falling prey to every scam and rumor that falls into their world. I remember recently the many people who recommended Chantix to me to help me stop smoking... Guess what Mr smart research scientists.. they were doctors and experts, and I had no reason to not believe them till people started having psychotic episodes and killing themselves.
Lets all just sing in 3 part harmony about the evils of not educating your kids, the public, your friends, and the world in general. The problem is not that there is misleading information out there, the problem is that people are so willing to be mislead.
While we are on subject... ehh, people who are willing to be mislead are also willing to believe that the government's "need" to encroach on their rights is necessary. An EDUCATED public is a strong one, but that is hardly what big business and big government want.
Educate people in general, not on just one little danger. Teach a man to fish..... nuff said
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What makes these "researchers" think that people are coming to YouTube for medical advice? I'd bet that a lot (if not most) people are watching these videos for the absurd entertainment value they provide.
It's one thing to simply count hits. It's quite another to infer the reason(s) behind them.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I can't be sure of that, but I have an impression you somehow suggest these researchers blame youtube. It isn't so - or at least TFA doesn't say anything of the sort. Rather, they simply state the facts.
My interpretation of these facts is that the general public is uneducated, panicky and superstitious. And, more importantly, it has been like that all along. It was just that superstition and dubious reasoning never had a forum that powerful. And now, it is all for everybody to see and appreciate. The famous(?) SF author Lem is reputed to say: before the Internet, I had no idea how many idiots were out there.
I would like to die like my grandfather did - sleeping. And not screaming in terror, like his passengers.
Human stupidity knows no bounds, but getting health advice from youtube?
In the good old days, when i was just a wee lad, and delivering the newspaper with my bike,
or selling home made onion juice, or whatever, those things tended to correct itself.
The gene pool weeded itself out. Now with the government prescribing us, what to eat,
what to wear and keeping us safe all around, except those pesky terrorists, this whole
stupidity-movement grows out of control. Next thing you now, a new bill is passed, banning
any kind of health related statement not made by a certified position.
in terms of reliability, youtube is no different than those magazines that you can buy at the cash in any superstore accross north america, where you can learn the latest "news" on the lives of hollywood stars and such. who would use that as a reliable source of information? why care at all?
If you get health and medical info off YouTube, you deserve all the malaria you can get.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
I agree with others that YouTube should not be viewed as an authoritative resource. However, it can be used to get a range of opinions that are not present in a sterile scientific study. Opinions can be just as important as scientific studies in determining a course of action. If a person really wants to know more about the adverse reactions of treatments, they can then seek out the studies showing how 1 in 10,000 instances of treatment X have negative results. YouTube and other personal views are much more accessible to the general public than trying to read a scientific study.
On the flip side of the argument, how many "opinions" voiced on YouTube are actually placed there by pharmaceutical companies under the guise of an impartial opinion. How about the number of people who are being misled by those claims?
In the end, we are all responsible for our own actions. The more information I have to make that decision, the better, as long as the information is weighted appropriately.
Aren't youtubers and myspacers and other trendy sitegoers a predominately younger crowd? Whoever could have imagined that teenagers would be rebellious or have posts that conflict with the establishment, I mean that is just unnatural!
Maybe people turn to these resources because we are tired of being lied to by companies and governements that only see profit in making drugs rather than cures?
We have seen that living things are too improbable and too beautifully "designed" to have come into existence by chance.
Yes yes, before the internet everyone was a nuclear rocket neurosurgeon. It started with idiots shouting on street corners, sometime around the signing of the Magna Carta they started getting involved in government, then there was that fucking printing press, books, magazines, the boob tube, and now the interwebs (not to be confused with the boob webs which is exactly what it seems). Just remember they used to sell radioactive heavy metal "health tonics" out of magazines, which promptly killed the people who drank it. You're to young to remember the fantastic stupidity of the past and surrounded by people so ingenious you can't imagine it. People are still stupid, but they wear it better now (which I grant isn't saying much).
I see more and more conference talks copied to utube, or video adendums to published scientific papers.
-b.
Although this is being reported as YouTube users hate vaccination, the actual numbers are less compelling. Quoting the actual study:
We identified and analyzed 153 videos. The weighted statistic for agreement on classification of videos was 0.93. Seventy-three (48%) of the videos were positive, 49 (32%) were negative, and 31 (20%) were ambiguous
As to whether YouTube videos contain misinformation, the actual study was disappointingly vague.
In their statistics, the authors group "contradicts" in with "unsubstantiated". In particular, they apply "unsubstantiated" to claims of particular permanent injury. Well, naturally the reference standard that they're using isn't going to discuss particular claims of permanent injury. Suppose some parent makes a video claiming that his kid got a serious absess from a vaccine, is that "unsubstantiated"?
Even when it comes to "contradicts", the authors are quite vague. For example, "Frequently causes serious adverse events" is listed as contradicting the reference standard. The problem is, when it comes to making medical decisions, both "frequently" and "serious" are subjective. Is it "serious" if a child develops permanent scarring at the site of injection? If a child develops permanent scarring in 1/10 cases, is that "frequent".
Finally, the authors of the study claim that YouTube users are more interested in the videos that make the negative claims. Well, sure, if the medical establishment only provides information about the upsides of vaccination then people are going to look elsewhere for information about the downsides. To the extent that there is a problem with misinformation about vaccines on YouTube (and the authors don't exactly make an airtight case), the solution is for the medical establishment to be honest - if the medical establishment provides accurate information about the risks of vaccines then YouTube won't have to.
does not lead to a conclusion that viewers are actually using the information. It may just be that the negative medical videos are MORE funny.
Its the same as early WWW days. Eventually "authoritative" sites will emerge with links to utabe-like sites as video-servers. Anyone who searches the video server directly, without review, is askign for trouble.
I'll spout some anecdotal evidence, though YMMV.
Being an old-timer, I can tell you that when I went to school all we had were polio vaccinations and tetanus. Out of a class of about 200 kids, 1 in 25 may have had bizarre allergies, (milk, grass, wheat, eggs etc.) Now it seems that most kids have some type of allergy or asthma, yet we live in such sterile times. It's not hard to conclude/perceive that something happened in the 70's and beyond. Was it in the vaccinations?
It's probably very easy for a lot of trepidation about vaccines because of past experience, anecdotal it may very-well be, however it does not help when polititians, school boards, professional organizations (AMA) AND big drugcos all gang up and require new vaccines mandatory as soon as the trial period is complete. I'm glad I don't have children in school (or children at all for that matter). I'd be leery too. (hope my tinfoil hat isn't showing)
Do you get the flu shot every year? That's a vaccine. Do you realize it's a crap-shoot as to whether -or- not it will even be effective against the "projected strain" the powers that be are pushing? I thought not.
No wonder a good portion of society distrust vaccines in general.
Now, get off my lawn.
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
"YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination."
Hilarious.
Sadly, this will continue to happen for a lot of reasons, but mostly, like all conspiracy theories, it actually is comforting to believe that a shadowy world government is in charge. Or to think that the reason people are autistic, or get cancer, is because of vaccines. It lets people know that there are reasons for otherwise random events, events that could happen to them any day now, or to those they love. But if you can have something concrete to blame it on, instead of just the randomness and uncertainty of life, well, then you can get angry at whatever tangible entity you want.
And things like youtube are perfect for the type of disinfo that these theories represent. The question now is how do we counter these claims? I would highly suggest listening to the Skepticality podcast ( http://www.skepticality.com/p_listentopast.php )ablout the documentary Flock of Dodos. The main theme is a discussion about how real science needs to learn to present its information and findings in a far more entertaining and easily digestible format. Just throwing facts and numbers at people, while it makes me happy, turns off the majority.
This is kind of like the whole 9/11 truth issue. People who have seen the conspiracy videos on youtube can be almost immune to evidence about physics, metallurgy, demolitions, and such. Their eyes just glaze over when you try to use facts and numbers and evidence. But if you point them towards a source like http://www.youtube.com/user/RKOwens4 which is comprised of simple arguments against the 9/11 truth theories, in easy to understand 3 minute chapters, then you start to make headway.
This is the course science must take with the public. Like it or not. The alternative is far to dangerous.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Of course does that mean I would go to god damn YouTube to figure out which or even if vaccinations are a good choice? Not god damn likely. Bob's homepage for self diagnosis of terminal Hyperkeratinization? Wikipedia even? No.
I would go consult at least a couple of medical professionals, or respectable peer reviewed literature before trying to make an informed decision.
Then again... maybe people should get their health information of YouTube. Might cull the herd, weed the genetic garden, skim off the gene pool, maybe cleanse the stains off our collective genetic sleeveless undershirt.
How ironic. I just put this up this morning. Back in the mid-1990s, just for fun, I reimplemented Tierra ('ancestor' to Avida) myself, and I detailed the results I found. Finally converted it to HTML. Source code is there, too, if you want to play with it. Vanilla ANSI C, should run on practically anything/
Basically, you've got little programs that compete to survive. No other fitness function, just: do they reproduce? You get parasites, optimization, and other such things. The little suckers figured out features of the instruction set I implemented that I hadn't thought of.
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
This is a matter of education. I think a large section of the population think vaccinations are unnecessary in this day and age, and have no inkling of what would befall us if vaccinations stopped. Even now, the majority of the population needs to be vaccinated for things that rarely appear, or they will resurface in force. This fact is either unknown to many Americans, or is disputed outright due to ignorance and lack of education on the subject. We need to address the problem at its root, by teaching people about the subject, at least minimally.
It wouldn't hurt, however, for pharmaceutical companies to stop using questionable ingredients in their vaccines. Just the other day my daughter was denied a flu vaccination at the drugstore because their brand of vaccine contained mercury or something crazy like that. She had to go to her pediatrician where they have vaccines for kids. Perhaps there is some really good reason why they need to put mercury in vaccines, but aside from some financial reason, I can't see what that might be. My daughter was able to get a vaccine that had nothing "bad" in it, so it's obviously not strictly necessary. Crazy stuff like this only adds fuel to the ignorance, doubt and distrust surrounding the growing trend of people not getting vaccinated.
On an aside, my young daughter cried when she couldn't get her vaccination at first. She loves getting shots. I had to laugh, because she's probably the only kid in the world to get that broken up about not getting a shot (they had to forcefully pin me down to get shots when I was her age). But at the same time, it made me a little verklempt that she really gets it, even at her young age. Why can't so many grown adults understand?
This weekend I had a chat with a fine gentleman who is one of the youngest polio survivors in the USA. He's in pretty good shape (he's in his 50s) but from visits with many others he knows what his future is like. Apparently, those who recover from polio do so by "swapping in" spare neurological paths -- the same ones that keep the rest of us functional as time takes its toll. Well, his "spares" are already used, so any additional losses as he ages are coming straight from function.
Measles? Look up the numbers. Case mortality for measles in the USA has been steady for over thirty years at 2/1000. In 1964, there were about 400,000 cases reported. Back when it was nearly universal, every state had well-filled schools for the deaf and blind -- most of them there thanks to neurological sequelae to measles, and which are still just as common as ever on a per-case basis. Those schools are empty now.
I have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm, and wear it proudly. Most of you don't. You're welcome.
If you listen to the anti-vaccinationists, the vaccines are immeasurably worse than polio, measles, and smallpox. The best answer to that was stated by George Santayana. The rest is commentary; go and learn it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
I say hurray for free thought, freedom of opinion, expression, and belief.
People who go to YouTube for medical advice (and their spawn) will be less likely to pass on that trait. Hopefully, the situation will correct itself in a generation or two.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
I have a problem with the conclusion of this study. The study concludes that people who watch and positively rate these videos are taking the information spewed out as the truth. There are many reasons to give a video a high rating, for example, the video is funny or the video shows a provocative POV. Actually, I think truthful information is probably pretty low on the reasons why one would give a video a positive rating. Look at TV. Which has higher ratings, NOVA on PBS or "insert new reality show here" on "some other network". That doesn't mean that the population of the united states feels the information NOVA is untrue or that the lessons learned on reality TV should be applied in life. They are merely looking for entertainment value.
The popular website known as "Slashdot" is riddled with questionable legal advice.
Though it *is* the best place to find a poorly constructed car analogy.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
There are a lot of people (see above) that are just saying "Whoda thunk there's misinformation on the internet," but this is not the point of the article. The point is that misinformation is being ranked higher than videos showing the scientific truth. Now for entertainment sake, that's fine. In this case however, many of the videos were meant to be informative or persuasive instead of strictly entertainment.
We'll take a parallel into Hollywood. The fact that there's entertainment based off of lies or misinformation is no big deal. I don't know of too many people who think their car will randomly transform into a robot or their body is being used as a battery to power a giant ai network. The problem the article is hinting at is many of these videos are supposed to be informative and we break into the realm of documentaries or informational movies (i.e. Fahrenheit 9/11, An Inconvenient Truth, etc.) Now I don't want this debate to get political (although I think it may) but we'll further examine Fahrenheit 9/11. I personally am a democrat and when I saw this movie, I believed much more than I should of to be the absolute truth. Later on a fair portion of the movie was debunked, but because it was a compelling story in line with my own viewpoint, it was easy to believe.
To add to this, I have heard many people tell urban legends to me (which I knew to be untrue) as the absolute truth. The point is that humans tend to believe what makes a good story and not necessarily the truth, which in many cases is too bad.
I don't think it's unlikely or unheard of that there's misinformation on the net and I really don't feel that's what this article is getting at. Instead the article is pointing a blame-ful finger at the gullibility of human kind.
Sometimes lies may be fun, but take them only at face value.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
If the only casualties were the idiots, I might agree. The problem is, they're screwing with our chance to flat-out eliminate some pretty scary diseases. The vaccines don't always work, there are people who really can't tolerate them, etc. -- which makes herd immunity all the more important.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Nutters, conspiracy theorists, and idiots putting stuff up on the internet. That's unheard of.
"Who is stupid enough to go to Youtube for authoritative information about anything?"
The same people who go to Wikipedia. Oh, wait, the process proves it is right, not the result (sarcasm).
Go ahead, mod me down for not drinking the technology as a savior party line.
Why would you take medical advice from a stranger on the internet?
And that's cool. Really it is. The problem I see here is that unlike Wikipedia, for instance, where you search for a topic via keyword and get an overview article on a topic (like, say, vaccinations), YouTube videos are searched by name most often (or sometimes tags) and those names often reflect the biases that the viewer was looking to explore/confirm.
So, unlike the Wikipedia article which, while very likely flawed, gave a significant amount of background, history, and relevant scientific information as well as the controversies associated with the topic, a YouTuber looking for "Vaccine controversy" videos are likely to get a video that cuts straight to the controversy portion, without the benefit of context. Likewise, that same person is unlikely to ever see the scientist with his scholarly video if that is not what they were looking for to begin with.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
When Jenny McCarthy goes on to Oprah, to the delight of millions of viewers, to say that "science" is wrong because "my son is the science" that proves vaccines cause autism ... I don't think YouTube is really a significant factor in this discussion.
Who do you think would be more successful at passing on their genes: dumb people who don't get vaccines but breed normally, or nerds who get their vaccines (and make fun of those who don't), but don't breed?
We now have an object lesson. Most of the comments up to this point appear to be from people with limited personal experience of the phenomenon under discussion.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
There's all kinds of crap on YouTube, and lots of good material as well. When you see crap, flag it. Don't bother arguing with the idiots.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's STRESS! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7YS2BaMPGSQ
A lot of people are asking, "who goes to YouTube for medical advice?" I think
what's really happening is that people search YouTube for other things, and a
propaganda video shows up in the search listings.
I have several times done a search there and got a "9/11 truth" or Holocaust
denial video showing up on the first page, either by a fluke of text matching,
or by overt tag abuse.
Youtube is a pretty decent vehicle for spreading conspiracy theories and other
anti-science ideological movements.
Going back to the first quote, let's just say for sake of argument you're right, about being a single person in the population who does not get immunized. Let's just say at that point you run a higher risk of getting the disease from the vaccine than from another source.
How do you know when you're in that situation? How do you know, you're the ONE person, of all the people you may come in contact with, the one lone person who has system beat? (And of course that the only vector by which the disease will spread to you is through another unimmunized person.)
Oh, that's right, you don't. So you've set up some fantastical situation that will never occur, even if your conclusion is correct.
As for the chills and fever, the flu vaccine isn't a live virus vaccine. No infectious agents involved.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Folks are going to YouTube for medical information? Isn't that like taking investment advice from the (few remaining) music videos on MTV?
Ah well, I guess this will speed up Darwinian selection, so it's probably a good thing.
I can get investment advice from stock spam, legal advice from Slashdot, and now medical advice from YouTube... however did people manage to make major life decisions before the Internet?
YouTube has everything, so saying "oh look YouTube has THIS" makes no sense, you can substitute the "this" with everything you want. YouTube is a reflection of people's interests and mind chatter.
So, since it has everything, why focus on the negative and not the positive stuff? YouTube has many stupid creationist videos, but it also has many very good pro-evolution and pro-Darwin videos that show the scientific evidence.
If academics are concerned about YouTube videos spreading misinformation they should eact the open-source way: Grab a camera and create their own scientific videos, posting them for all to open their eyes.
Not that I have any relation to YouTube, but I am fed up with every Web 2.0 site being criticised for stupid reasons, often by people who have little understanding of the social processed in said sites.
Now it seems that most kids have some type of allergy or asthma, yet we live in such sterile times.
*ding* *ding* *ding*
There's quite a bit of evidence to suggest that allergies and asthma are related to the sterility of the environment in which we tend to raise kids. There's absolutely no evidence it's related to vaccines.
Now, I'm not entirely convinced we *need* all the vaccines we get. And there are sometimes side-effects that are glossed over. And you are certainly right-- big medical companies push vaccines to maximize their profits, just as they push drugs to maximize profits. That doesn't mean we should stop administering vaccines for high-risk diseases like hepatitis.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
but i do get my political advice from slashdot comments"
which is worse?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You should trust the JAMA because they won't let you read their journal.
Funny they should worry about ignorance.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Lovely response. How many of those YouTube mis-infomercials did you produce?
Way over 45% of the videos on youtube about the WTC attacks have "harmful scientific misinformation." It's probably closer to 99% of those.
And no wonder. People with degrees in economics (if any degree at all) make a slideshow with a narration denying engineering phenomena that have been documented for around a century like metal creep at elevated temperatures, and youtube viewers lap it up like water.
Sorry to make a Godwin's law topic change, but no one should be surprised that there's a disappointing amount of misinformation in youtube videos. There's seldom any expertise consulted in making them, and almost never any scientific method utilized in the original statements. Seriously, you might as well ask the dog that rides a skateboard for medical advice as refer to an unaccredited youtube production.
It is interesting how people want so much to believe that they have been "let in on a dirty secret" and then feel empowered to not immunize their children, then turn around and give their kids more-than-recommended doses of OTC cold meds which have been shown to have no benefit. Or, they take God-Knows-What (not FDA scrutinized) herbal supplement that the Huckster of the Month has shilled yet has no data at all showing safety, let alone benefit. How many people have tried magnet therapy? How about chromium? People are so thirsty for a magic bullet that they will risk their health taking some herbal, potentially harmful therapy, then turn around and ignore something that has been studied and while may have some potential harm, at least the potential is known and can be weighed against a known potential benefit. The brain is truly strange in weighing risks. (Someone please quote the books/authors that have expanded on our inability to accurately assess everyday risks...)
Say the same thing when it's your daughter or grandmother getting and acting on that information..
Our primary source of knowledge, except our own faculties, is second-hand, and the fact that we as a race are still alive proves that this works.
There will always be parasitic elements on working structures. But it is something else when the de facto standard of social networking (which the net is to a growing number of people) is seething with deliberate misinformation.
Society is one body, and if one part is harmed it affects the rest. E.g your offspring not getting proper medical treatment due to propaganda.
Education is the key, and not the kind of self-righteous pseudo-evolutionary fascism you portray, mr Bastard, which reveals your lack of insight.
Defining Statistics and Social Research
Noooo they be stealin' my Bucket o' Vaxnashens.
There is increasing concern about vaccination. Before the Internet even discussing the issue was difficult, due to various reasons, including the influence of ad dollars of the pharma companies. The same happened with "alternative medicine" - and generally with many "alternative" things. With the vaccination the basic concerns are that on the long run it might weaken the natural immune system, vaccination programs cover huge segments of population, if anything goes wrong, extreme number of people are exposed to risk, just to name a few.
Pharma, pharma supported government departments certainly have huge financial, etc. resources to support engagement in convincing people in open discussion, instead of demanding bans for videos on the Internet.
What is at the heart of the issue, is that pharma and governments are facing trust issues with the public. The public clearly understands now that pharma and the "medical industry" has vasted financial interest, which leads to increasing number of drug, medical procedure-related demages, death. It has created in the past long-term, high impact problems, like overdescribing antibiotics both directly in humans and indirectly in meat production for human consumption.
Confronting competing ideas is good: it keeps everybody on their toes.
Not too long ago patients were not supposed to ask too many questions from doctors, the relationship was pretty paternalistic. It has changed a lot - for good.
Thanks for the comparison... I think we're all flattered to be considered livestock.
And no, I don't think governments in general always are interested in the health of their citizens. I believe the GGPP was talking about the Canadian government specifically, and I don't know much about that government. I do know that ours in the US seems all too eager to sell us all down the river for short-term commercial interests. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies developing immunizations more than I have to. I still believe in immunizing my kids, but I don't believe we should be doing it at the rate they're telling us to. And I don't believe that combining 3 or more immunizations into a single shot is always such a great idea.
I do think that immunizations are important, though.
And considering that most medical research is funded by grants issued by government agencies, yeah I think they're pretty well qualified to provide such advice.
...widespread misinformation? Hasn't the American system of medicine been doing this for years? PM
The problem of course is not YouTube, it's that people don't know who to trust for medical information.
I know a mother whose young son was killed by a reaction to vaccination. Despite apologies and reassurances from doctors there is no way that she'll allow her other children to be vaccinated. In her estimation the risk of her kids catching one of the subject diseases is less than the risk of the shot itself.
I do accept vaccinations, but on the other hand before I take any medication I spend an hour or so reading anecdotal accounts of other people's experiences. My history has been that neither the doctor nor the pharmaceutical companies can entirely be trusted to offer complete and unbiased information. On at least a couple of occasions it was end users accounts that pointed out side effects that the "official" sources just glossed over.
There have been enough problems with prescribed drugs like thalidomide that it's reasonable for patients to be cautious, and to sometimes opt to not take the first thing that a doctor suggests.
Ultimately that informed but cautious approach may be the best for all concerned.
Three Squirrels
Almost 1% of the US population is now Autistic (1 in 150 people), Fact!
Many of these children that become autistic show large behavioral changes within days of getting vaccinated, Fact.
As a result many parents believe it was from vaccinations, Fact.
People posting video about this seems fair, and stating "Breeding Harmful Scientific Misinformation" is just plain wrong! Down right infuriating really.
Only some sleazebags would put out deceptive articles that lump these upset parents in with the UFO nuts.
There has been a lot of scientific information pointing to the mercury based preservative Therimosol that was in many vaccinations as a possible cause.
Therimosol has even been link to neurological problems in pets that have been vaccinated. And is the stuff we are legally required to have injected into all of our new borns and small children. WTF!
It's it remarkable to me that any company would put a toxic heavy metal into anything being injected into infants, even after there was some questions about it's safety.
There was one of the largest class action lawsuit ever against the drug companies producing Therimosol based vaccines. But we never hear about it because it was stopped in 2001 by the Patriot Act that prohibits lawsuits against companies that make vaccines! Somehow I just don't think this was purely a coincidence.
I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. - Pablo Picasso
Everybody just takes it as fact that the scientists are correct and the videos is misinformation and not the other way around. Science is just another religeon and can and is manipulated. There is enough data to support the fact that vaccines is harmful. But who knows... I don't believe anyone, I just keep an open mind.
You Tube is a beacon for the tinfoil hat crowd. Its surprising that slashdot would allow a story like this to come through. After all, many of the liberal nut-jobs from this forum regularly cite You Tube in their whacked out reasoning.
But they do, check this one out;
http://youtube.com/watch?v=qmRv9FLDBmE
Came in handy for our Thanksgiving day meal.
Website: http://www.householdhacker.com/ has a grant from the NIH
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Yes, there is some good science on Youtube. I'm a fan of music played over Tesla coils personally.
But the Brainiac clip of alkali metals in a bathtub was admitted to be fraudulent. The producers didn't think the real reaction had enough bang, so they actually used explosives. You can catch more information about this from Bad Science or from a guy that actually did the reactions. The second link has a decent explanation too.
The stupid and gullible people will avoid vaccinations and they and their spawn will die off from infections leaving behind the smarter population. The problem with this is?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
that they aren't. They're going there to be entertained, and both
(a) laughing at the stupid things stupid people say and
(b) works of complete fabrication
are both far more entertaining on average than scientific documents. For example, I watch loads of the "the lizard men are among us" videos because they are hilarious and so retarded that they border on self-satire, that's (a) for you, and I enjoyed the "yarr! I can set water on fire!" videos even though it's obvious that it's just cut with ethanol, because it's (b).
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
Beginning med students and residents frequently thought they MIGHT have the diseases they were hearing about in class or seeing in the clinic. You become aware of all those little nerve endings and bumps in your belly you never really thought about before if it wasnt painful. Its part of a doctors education to learn what is normal and what is anomalous.
University of Me researcher has uncovered widespread misinformation in Internet tubes. Oh noes.
I think these folks would go to Youtube for authoritative information ..
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
... forward some hilarious videos about people claiming that the earth is expanding or that the moon landing are a hoax. Youtube is about fun. True information, I usually get that somewhere else (often from Wikipedia links). I believe that people who watch videos, just want fun. Information transmission is better done through text.
There are of course the Masses of the Dumb, who take Youtube as an authoritative source but that just proves that it becomes closer to a regular media. (I kid you not, some people think that Fox News is an authoritative source)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
"Hun, I have a really bad rash on my testicles. What should I do?"
"I don't know. Look it up on Youtube."
This boggles my mind...
"Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much." - Oscar Wilde
This just in, people, when given access to public communication often say stupid things out of ignorance or personal/collaborative agendas! Even more shocking is that people occasionally believe the things that others say in such a format!
Obviously the format is to blame, so therefore we need to look critically at the regulations involving sharpie markers, cheap paint, and posterboard. Oh, this is about Youtube, er, uh, yes, computer...security...validity...media...something-or-other...meh, nevermind...
you cannot dodge the quad laser. jumping is useless.
It is good to know that youTube is no less trustworthy than other sources. It would have been more honest if the authors of this article placed it in context with other public media information sources. This way they are as bad as the sites they mention as far as distorting information is concerned.
I do. I guess that's because I'm smart enough to realize, as would be the "politicians", that we're not talking about your health, or my health, we're talking about PREVENTING A FUCKING PANDEMIC.
Not individual infections. Not a small outbreak. A worldwide, humanity crushing pandemic.
Let that sink into your tiny little brain for a second. Hopefully, you'll realize why your post is so ridiculous.
Forgive me for being so confrontational, but when your idiot ass decides to put me at risk because you're afraid of vaccines, you deserve to be called to task on it.
In order to quell the current skepticism about childhood immunizations, they need to do a lot more work to explain why some children seem to turn autistic overnight after getting certain vaccinations. And even if they haven't linked it to disease, they also need to stop putting ethyl-mercury in flu vaccinations. Just because they haven't come up with a disease caused by it, that doesn't mean injecting mercury is good for you, and it certainly isn't necessary for the vaccine to work. Given the controversy about these things and the effort to "sweep it under the rug" by many agencies, I'm not surprised at all people are skeptical...
I think a plausible explanation is that most people already know the "party line" on vaccinations. Their doctors have told them what the government recommends and/or requires. Pamphlets lay around various locations where new parents tend to frequent. Some people though are looking for alternatives for various reasons and go searching... thus it would make sense that they would be more interested in watching the "alternative" videos, and happy to see them. The question still remains regarding the medical validity of particular videos, of course; but i think it highly likely that the majority of those viewing them are the relatively few people already skeptical for various reasons. I don't think there is any evidence that the majority of people are even aware there is any significant controversy regarding immunization.
That being said, it's interesting that this study was done in relation to a particularly intense hot-button medical issue within certain subcultures; which again makes it a lot less surprising that "alternative" views resort to and are sought in non-traditional media outlets.
Next they might try doing a study on 9/11 videos on youtube. Do you think there's any possibility that most of them are not explaining the government approved "truth" also? Think of the "public service" issues this raises! Shall we be concerned?
In a world where Everybody Votes, telephone poles are made from wood by-products, not tall trees.
People.
There is controversy over some vaccines, particularly those in the MMR vaccine. Vaccines can and do have side effects in some people that can include things as serious as stroke and death. Additionally, the medical community always takes a position of "greater good" rather than "individual good" when discussing vaccines. That position makes people very suspicious. And there are serious questions about whether the "Greater Good" is impacted by 1 individual declining.
The fear in the medical community is not that 1 person declines to be vaccinated for their individual personal reasons, but that a lot of people will decline and some of these diseases will take hold again in the U.S.
As a father, I vaccinated my son, but there was the lurking fear that he would have a bad reaction and suffer neurological or serious physical affects. Those are possibilities that the research supports. Death is a statistic that can result from vaccination as can neurological damage. The US Government has setup a national vaccine injury compensation program ( http://www.hrsa.gov/vaccinecompensation/filing_deadlines.htm ) which confirms there are risks involved.
So it really is a roll of the dice. The chances of having those side affects may be slim, but the number of cases of all of the diseases we are vaccinating for in the US has reduced to the point where some of the vaccines should be advised as optional or eliminated, as we have with Polio.
I guess what I'd like to see are good honest statistics on the deaths from each disease we vaccine for, along with open and honest statistics on deaths and complications from the vaccines themselves. I don't want to see news of forced vaccinations- which is simply unconstitutional. That has got to stop before anyone is going to trust what doctors are saying.
What do you guys think about my video?
The truth about artificial colors they did not want you to know about:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zjpN8ZtNxbE
Wow. Who are these idiots looking for medial advice on YouTube? Before this article I would never even have considered it!
Next stop, MySpace for financial advice, and Slashdot for relationship advice. Ha!
Really, you get what you deserve people. Darwin awards for all of them.
Do you really think the JAMA or NEJM is the appropriate resource for medical information for your average consumer? They're not. What is in there isn't written for that audience, nor should it be.
I think this is a non-story. There are people who are suspicious of to downright hostile towards immunizations. Those people are probably not that bright. So where do people who are not that bright and wouldn't be taken seriously by any mainstream media go to air their 'information'? YouTube. Where do people who share their opinions go to get video of the opinions they want? YouTube.
There's a reason the videos with poor information are rated higher. And it's simple. It's because only the idiots who believe it are watching videos about immunization on YouTube and rating them. People who are not idiots are not watching these videos at all.
There have always been dumb people. The only difference between the 'old days' and now is we've made communicating easy enough that even dumb people can do it, so you're now more likely to run into a dumb opinion or bad information. But smart people can continue to do the same things they've always done: Ignore it.
paintball
This is simply a consequence of a confirmation bias. People who understand the benefit of vaccines don't go looking on youtube (or most other resources) for information. People who have a bug up their ass about it, for any number of reasons, search out resources that support what they want to believe. Therefore, the people watching these bs videos want to believe them, and mark them as "good." They also watch the accurate videos, and mark them as "bad," because they don't want to believe them. The same goes for the people who post the videos in the first place - they don't find what they want to find, so they make it (up) themselves.
First off, YouTube is not "breeding" anything. I hate to break out the old "Guns don't kill people...." line, but idiots post stupid things on YouTube, YouTube does not create its own content. There are also some very informative videos posted (though the signal to noise ratio is still rather low.) Second, scientific journals hold a lot of blame. YouTube is viewer generated content available for free to anyone interested to watch. I can post great, informative videos, or a video of my cat playing with a ball of yarn. But anyone can watch it if they want. Peer review, informative journals are usually kept behind locked doors, unless you are willing to pay an admission fee. If more scientific studies were available for free and written so the common person could understand, then that could counter balance much of the disinformation spread on YouTube (or Google Video for that matter) or through Blogs.
...along with a willing legion of dopes can buy it all hook line and sinker for a variety of topics like-
Global Warming in any way shape or form
9/11 Conspiracies where its a Bush or the jews
OSS, the solution to all the industries problems hands down
Microsoft, the real evil in the world
Universal health, the govt does such a good job in all other areas, why not
Racism, how the man is still keeping you down, now who's my nigga
Fox News, the only Bias worth talking about
Catholic Priests invented child molestation and no other denominations do this
NPR, what a good National Propaganda Resource can do for you
Islam, piece is central to our beliefs in a piece of you, or a piece of me, a head or 2
And my favorite, DRM is whats killing the music industry and not bilions of illegal downloads!
Free Kool Aid, drink up
Vaccines should only be used during epidemics or when someone is specifically at high risk.
The flu vaccine has to be updated constantly to account for all the new strains of influenza.
All we're doing is breeding stronger bugs.
Expect the same to happen with HPV.
Sure, we can stop a few strains of HPV that MAY cause cervical cancer (and colon/rectal cancer, but the vaccine is marketed at young girls, so it won't be approved for any uses that may help men as well...), but that vaccine will become less and less effective over time.
With the broken moderation system of Slashdot, posts are moderated by ONE reader of unknown bias, education or qualifications. It only takes one such moderator to bury a post on Slashdot.
With Digg, it takes quite a few negative impressions to get a post buried.
Been there, Done that, Sold the t-shirt to the next idiot in line
You honestly have to wonder how people can make super-important decisions for their children and themselves using _Their_Parents_ as their main provider of information. It's sad, but it's just like all those folks getting burned on their million dollar homes with sub-primes - you made a bad decision because you didn't do enough research, and you should be the one paying the price.
You are simply never going to protect all the stupid people from themselves, and making the effort often only punishes the smart people who didn't make those mistakes. That's the unfortunate realization I've come to in my adulthood.
Unless, of course, you were on /., then you could get a lot of it because everyone knows that computer geeks are masters of just about every science.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
I can see using YouTube for finding "don't taze me bro" or "Star Wars Kid" or any number of other entertaining or interesting bits of ephemera, but seriously, if you're getting your health information from YouTube, you need to be seeing a MENTAL HEALTH expert.
The Digital Sorceress
Was "2 girls 1 cup" one of the videos studied?
Basing medical decisions on YouTube videos is the equivalent of asking a random person on the street what they think about it. If someone wants to do that, good for them, hopefully they will get weeded from the gene pool. If they make decisions that way for their children, they should be prosecuted and have their children taken from them and given to responsible parents.
The problem will be once all those idiots realise they are a lot and start to team up and vote.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Why would a grown person be stupid enough to get ALL of their health information from one source?
Save the "tin-foil-hattery", you sound like a tool.
'YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination.'
And some people plan their day (and more) around their horoscope. Are we to blame the newspapers that print them for this?
Rather than try to protect the persistently ignorant from themselves (a futile endeavor that makes the 'authority' into an irrational bully and feeds the conspiracy theorists), better to take the high road and actively publicize more accurate sources such as the NIH/National Library of Medicine's Medline Plus (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/) for laymen's language and PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez) for scientific abstracts.
The latter actually quotes some research that supports the stuff on YouTube, but it says specifically why it comes to that conclusion, as does the research that comes to the opposite conclusion (or none at all). It was, after all, NIH that called for a re-evaluation of the prior research, and further work and replications to be done, to more clearly come to an accurate conclusion if not consensus.
Yes, PubMed abstracts are often difficult to read. Those who want to understand them will educate themselves along the way. This is what the AIDS groups of the 80's and 90's did when the medical community was dragging its feet. This shamed the medical researchers into action, and the work done by the 'amateurs' contributed greatly to their progress, as well as forcing the media to admit it wasn't a "gay" disease. For those who want their answers easy rather than right, and emotionally laden like they're used to getting from the media, there's YouTube. Such people have no intention of learning anything. They seek only to justify the fear from ignorance with anything, no matter how ridiculous, that feeds their fear, in accordance with the principle of cognitive dissonance. It's just a damn shame they're using their children's lives as chips when they gamble on this.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
So what? Vaccines aren't 100% effective, and EVERYONE else being sick isn't that much better. Then there's different strains that develop. Use your fucking head guy...
but please excuse me for being a bit skeptical of what the government thinks about medical advice... Does anyone honestly believe that politicians know what is best for our health? Or that they care one whit about what is in our best interest?
"The government" is not just politicians. In fact it is mostly not politicians, fortunately. It is made of career scientists, engineers, and medical doctors among others. Many of them know more about vaccines and studies involving vaccines than anyone else in the world (I personally know some of them). JAMA does not publish articles by pure politicians in general.
You're a liar. That never appears anywhere in your link, except as speculation by a group of parents.
Why does it not surprise me that you'd openly lie?
Thanks.
Anybody caught consulting Youtube for health information should be sterilized. I kid of course, but seriously, who does that????
Not all concerns on vaccinations are invalid. We have to be careful not to fall prey to making "science & progress" a religion and deifying it.
1. Vaccines are a great thing and have saved millions of lives.
2. They have a great track record but not a perfect one. Overall they are well worth it for society.
3. Just because a study shows no signs of claimed issues does NOT mean such claims are invalid. Anyone having worked in a production environment is aware that some production batches are sub-par. QA is designed to catch most of these. But anyone that has bought a defective product knows it's never perfect. So a study merely shows that a good batch does not have harmful effects. It is very difficult for a "scientific study" to take into account the effects of those who have received vaccinations from sub-par batches of production.
4. Many claims of concern are circumspect, baseless and without merit. While others are more indeterminate. A few throughout history have after much criticism, denial, etc been shown to in fact pose risk.
5. Another valid concern is the tendency to apply too many vaccinations concurrently to a young child who's immune system is still in development. What affect does receiving three or even five or more vaccinations in a short period have on a very young child? Furthermore, the assumption all children will respond the same is not valid. And to some parents too great a risk. (ie: there has been evidence that some children have more difficulty metabolising certain agents than others - likewise, some may have more difficulty handling numerous strong immune responses simultaneously). Simply spreading out the vaccinations a bit might a wise thing to do.
But it can be far too easy to merely criticize such parents concerns on the basis of the dogmatic belief in science. Decrying them as heretics in what should be science and not a religion.
sorry, I forgot to close the italics properly.
My bad.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
He's lying about public health issues and your idiot ass mods me down for saying so.
Nice job, you must have gotten Thimerosal in your vaccines...
Most things humans do effect the entire society. By that rationalization, you could justify pretty much any government control over our lives.
People getting fat? Health care costs go up. Ban pizza. Mandate vegetable consumption.
Auto accidents? Ban private cars. Mandate public transportation use.
I've got two children, and I've had them both vaccinated. But lets not pretend that there are no dangers with vaccines. Our doctors were, to their credit, very upfront with us about that. You're essentially taking a chance, playing the numbers when you take a vaccine, as a percentage of people will always have adverse reactions. Those numbers of adverse reactions are statistically low, and your chances are pretty good, but I do have a friend whose daughter lost the use of her legs from a vaccination. It does happen. And as for the HPV vaccine, you can't call all those parents nutjobs when Gardisil has had some unexpected side-effects. And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?
Non-vaccinated people are a danger to no one but themselves. If everyone else is vaccinated, they're safe. And far from under-vaccinating, the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that we may be over-vaccinating . Increasing disease resistance to drugs and immunizations is a far greater threat to the populace than any parent withholding a vaccine.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
First, there is a very big line that separates science from public policy. This line comes into play in issues like climate change, as well as whether people should get, or be forced to get, vaccinations. I don't know which videos this research is looking at, but there needs to be a clear distinction between science and evidence, and any dictation of what actions our institutions should take as a result.
Ever since UofT's board of regents sided with drug maker Apotex and against their own whistleblower, Dr. Nancy Olivieri, I've been very hesitant to trust any of the conclusions announced through the entrenched medical establishment at UofT and it's semi-commercial "partnerships". I'd urge interested readers to google up on that affair, because I think it's instructive to the entire collapse of public trust in the way science is carried out.
Further, I think there's some disengenuity lumping in "childhood vaccinations", which have 20 years plus of widespread use, fine-tuning, and knowledge about their long-term effects, with these brand new vaccinations which are being literally rammed down the public's throats. Dr. Wilson's own research has shown serious cause for concern regarding flu vaccinations, for example.
----
Not to be confused with Col.
The people who are going to 'YouTube' for medical information ...
Are exactly the people who you want to not be vaccinated from deadly diseases.
This is a self-solving problem.
- Roach
Look at this latest shooting incident,and previous ones like columbine...see any connection? How about dangerous "legal" drugs being prescribed? Look at all the returned vets who went batshit crazy after getting stuck with who knows what drugs, experimental or otherwise. How long before they acknowledged gulf war syndrome? Look at all the reports of people who got their little kids the three in one jabs and minutes later their kids are damaged for life. But none of that matters, the "official" health authorities (the asses who get fat checks after they "retire" and go back to wwork for the same companies they are supposedly monitoring) and the big drug companies say it's "safe" and the cult of snopes fatkid cheetos full of yellow dye number 17 "safe food ingredient" addicts parrot that rubbish. Bribery and corporate advertising and brainwashing work. Harmless agent orange, delicious, how long did the bribed off white lab coats push that big fat lie?
Just because it has a white lab coat on doesn't mean it can't be as corrupt as the most greedy black suited wallstreet jerks. There's billions of dollars at stake, BILLIONS AND BILLIONS, plenty of reasons to hide or alter or fail to do proper research. Want research grants? You'd better believe it will dry up once you start reporting that "legal" drugs are not safe.
In other words, don't have a knee jerk reaction against people who are desperate and trying to report actual damage to actual human beings like their own children from these "products".
Why would so called misinformation be a bad thing? Everybody has right to express their opinion, or things they consider fact. There is no such thing as universal truth, some opinions may be better argumented and supported, but that doesnt make them absolutely right.
The general feeling I see in other forums is that the Internet represents the sum total of all human knowledge, and if it's on the Internet, it's gospel.
The first is nonsense. The second is scary.
...laura
...unless you make it amusing as well as educational. I mean, seriously? Check out this Disney Video for combating VD. If they could make an animation like THAT for inoculation, it would be more popular that the lies.
[End Of Line]
Idiots get their health info. from idiots, they die off and evolution continues.
Between misinformation from YouTube, Microsoft, Slashdot and most importantly religion? I don't know about the rest of you, but the FUD all religious groups spread scares me more than anything else. Nothing is more responsible for death, hate and anti-progress than religion.
I think a lot of it is the drug lobby. When I was a kid, you didn't get the hepatitis vaccine. I got mine on the way to college. Why? Because there was no need to get it. What are the odds of you getting hepatitis in this country? 1.5 per 100,000 and most of those are "high risk" people, because it's hard to catch without having sex with someone who has it, or using a dirty needle.
But now I've got my doctor telling me I have to get my infant kid vaccinated quick quick right now! He could get hep at any second!!! What a crock of crap. It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
Likewise the chicken pox vaccine. The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart, but none the less, unless I wanna home school my kid, I have to get them the shot.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
I think a lot of people are getting leery of having their kids turned into pincushions to meet an arbitrary timetable attached to low risk infections. I think it's 15 vaccinations before 1 year? Out of those, easily half could be pushed back a year or two or three (or 18 in the case or the 3 course goddamn hep vaccination), so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Here are some facts:
Polio is still a problem in other parts of the world, specifically India and Pakistan.
After polio was irradicated in the United States, it is true that the live-attenuated vaccine at the time caused more disease than it prevented.
Only the inactivated Polio vaccine is currently used in the United States, which does not cause disease. Almost every American baby receives it.
The quack stuff is not at a simple reading level either. A lot of it is harder to get through than the articles written for MDs.
once our herd immunity falls below a critical level, outbreaks can occur and then you'll see them drop like flies. hopfully they all catch mumps and become sterile to prevent their stupidity spreading as well.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Since we are talking about how valid the information on YouTube is, what do you guys think about my video?
The truth about artificial colors they did not want you to know about:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=zjpN8ZtNxbE
...you know, Youtube is the new TV. If you see something there, it's got to be true.
I see more and more conference talks copied to utube, or video adendums to published scientific papers.
That's all well and good, but what about material that isn't about tubes and pipes? I doubt Universal Tube will offer to host that for free.
Researcher discovers that freely available material is misleading average people. And publishes his findings to a non-open-access journal where it cannot be read by average people.
*facepalm*
The kinds of people who are interested in consensus medical opinion on the matter aren't going to turn to YouTube for their medical advice. The kinds of people who think the medical establishment is a conspiracy are much more likely to do so.
The article seems to imply that people are getting medical advice from YouTube with no preconceived notions, and therefore that the higher ratings of "alternative" viewpoints are spreading misinformation, while it's much more likely IMO that they're going there with preconceived notions and seeking out the information that reinforces them.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Andrew Keen would have a field day with this story.
"After polio was irradicated in the United States, it is true that the live-attenuated vaccine at the time caused more disease than it prevented."
And you know why they used the liev virus vaccine? Because sometime after WWII, parents turned into pussies and didn't want to subject their kid to a shot, and a sugar cube with the live virus made things so much easier. This was the generation that raised the baby boom as well.
The "Greatest Generation" may have kicked ass at war and worked hard at peace, but their child rearing skills kinda sucked.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Stupid people say stupid things it is as simple as that. What we need to do is educate the young and hopefully they will be able to tell what their parents are saying is wrong. We don't teach any where near enough science in the states.
WTF?
I don't believe for a second that in any serious way "YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information". People simply don't go to YouTube looking for medical information... that's stupid.
A stupid premise is no less stupid simply because a researcher from the the University of Toronto says it.
I was stunned when my first child was born how many acquaintances (including medical doctors) had latent anti-vaccination opinions. I've literally had people say to me: "Oh what a beautiful baby...I hope you're not vaccinating her."
But the shocking thing (to me) was that these folks have pediatricians who support zero vaccinations. One grandmother told me that none of her children had been vaccinated and that her grand children's pediatrician was a very careful man who studies all the outbreaks of various diseases and would only vaccinate her grand children if there was a nearby outbreak.
It's my understanding that these unvaccinated children cannot attend public schools - legally - but they do.
The reason it is unlikely we will have a vast deadly outbreak of, say, measles is that the vast majority of parents do vaccinate. (Although you can find recent outbreaks in American cities: http://www.boston.com/yourlife/health/diseases/articles/2006/06/10/measles_outbreak_shows_a_global_threat/).
And so as long as the percentage of non-vaccinators stays very small, few of their children will die.
Despite the dozens of posts in this thread (many at least partly in jest) this is not darwinism, yet.
Further, some childhood diseases (most notably autism) show signs of onset some time during the rather lengthy vaccination cycle (often beginning at around 18 months of age).
With little hope of cure, even intelligent parents may be tempted to grasp for vengeance, even if the data is quite shaky.
Unless they are or become a sizable minority, the chances of any individual unvaccinated child dying a preventable death will remain pretty small. My question is not how many videos there are on youtube, but how many people don't vaccinate their children. The unvaccinated population may be quite significant already.
And, at the end of the day, that is why I know I made the right decision in vaccinating my child.
a war on terrorism? How can we end a war on a method?
So how does this make YouTube different from "official" sources of information again? If you remember, the government at one time told us that both Iraq and Iran had or would soon have nuclear weapons. The same government is now telling us the opposite. I'm sure I could come up with plenty more examples, but that was the quick and dirty one.
When the government tells us lies, the message is so overwhelming and echoed so much in the media that the few descenters don't get a voice. With YouTube (as well as other Internet-based communications), at least all voices have a chance to be heard. True, having more choices makes it difficult for the average Joe decide what to believe, but it's better than believing the "official" story because it's the only info out there.
Different voices, including inaccurate ones, simply help people to stop being so conditioned to believe everything they hear and get down to the business of finding the real truth.
The group does better when all of it's members are vaccinated. There might be individual cases where the vaccinations *might* be harmful to the individual.
It would be interesting to compare the rate at which individuals are being verifiably harmed by a vaccination versus the chance of catching the disease.
I have been vaccinating my kids but I'm trying to spread the shots out over time, making sure that there is no thimerosal being used and generally looking at alternative vaccination schedules (from places like Canada and Scandinavia).
It's one thing to engage in a behaviour that is self-destructive and yet another that can be group destructive.
"It was not the church but also the established astronomers of the time that condemned Galileo. The majority of physicists rejected Einsteins Special Relativity Theory in 1905. Einstein himself would not accept anything in Quantum Theory after 1920 no matter how many experiments supported it. Edisons commitment to Direct Current electrical generators led him to insist Alternating Current generators were unsafe for years after their saftey had been proven to everyone else." - RAW "Prometheus Rising It's very hard for people involved in science to accept the reality that maybe a cherished theory could be wrong, just the same as with a Religious Fundamentalist, in fact the two have some strange similarities to one another when one delves into their so called "laws" or "truths". I find Science to be just as limiting as faith, slightly less insane but insane for reasons other than "faith". If one may be so compelled to believe only what one views in front of their eyes, data graphs, telescopes, microscopes, and various other instruments, then one has taken in a kind of faith in not just the the technology being used but other's eyes, or in the individual's case their own eyes. Just because you can't measure something or view it with your eyes doesn't mean it theoretically can't exist. A UFO or UMO(unidentified moving ground object) occur almost indefinitely on a regular basis, I'm sure all of you can be mistaken from time to time via your own perception of reality, does that mean that you didn't see what you thought you did? I don't know. How rare the sound of those three words in the mouths of a fairly egotistical religious or political or scientific person. We often embrace logo's, figures, organizations, heirarchy, beliefs, theories, specualtions, without much thought as to there actual probability of their actual existence in reality. Much of what passes for education in public schools amounts to commandments to respect your teacher, school, government, church, corporations and parents unflinchingly, and we are somehow shocked that people would say "no thanks" your all unworth my energy and time, leave me alone. Oh, but that means the person has a problem or is ignorant or something according to those that have to define everything in existence, catagorize, classify, compartmentalize and structure existence into something that can be understood in their own nervous system to be "reality". Sorry, I guess we offended your nervous system by not placing you above us in the heirarchy of power. Sometimes people use Science, Religion and Politics as a will to power(Nietsche), over others, sometimes others try to warn of this abuse of power and it's relation to your position or punishment in life(Foucault). The better observation would be to propose that maybe vaccines cause autism or maybe they don't, maybe mercury is toxic, maybe it's harmless, maybe some people have problems with Aids vaccines that increase propensity for acquiring HIV or maybe Bayer Asperin gave tablets with HIV to people in western Europe which caused many to lose jobs and go to jail while excutives that authorized the sale in the US suffer no consequences, maybe somebody that put forth the time to get a PHD in health could be on to something about vaccinations not being needed in such great quantity, maybe we should just create and inject vaccines into people focibly as in Prince Georges MD. Ivan Illich wrote a book called "Limits to medicine" many of you should try to find in your library and also another called "Deschooling Society". In some ways we now have a new Inquistion and it's aimed at the throat of challengers to the status quo, in the same way incumbents go after a challenger in politics, many vested interests play a part, and information may be censored through the use of extended copyright creating a "Intellectual Feudalism" as another writer put it so succintly, if not brought to the people's attention, we could very well have as we do today the technology to advance consciousness but yet sit at the feet of a "scientific oligarch" unwilling t
Don't any of you dare contradict what some scientists and/or medical doctors say! Don't you dare think for yourselves, or post revisionist material for public consumption! Let the scientists handle these complicated issues themselves and then whatever majority group wins out can tell the rest of us what to think; we have no right to dispute it or be skeptical. Free thinkers are once again the enemies of mankind.
__
Support Ron Paul for the Republican Presidential nomination. Live free or die.
Personally, I have no problem with retards using youtube for their "wast medical knowledge. Maybe it will catch on, and less of these retards will have kids who live past the age of three before they die of mumps, measles, rubela, the common flu, cervicle/throat cancer from HPV(which is common among 50% of Americans 18-35), whooping cough, and a host of other illnesses for which there is preventative medicine.
I'm sure there are hundreds of millions of people in Africa who gaze in disbelief that we turn down these modern miracles, which aren't even available to most of them. They would probably say, "Hey! Send those vaccines here! At least let my child live past the age of five!"
Don't correct these asshats, and let nature take its course. When their children die, one less tree of ignorance has a chance to grow.And so I'm waiting for the part where the medical profession realizes this, and then doctors/hospitals/etc start providing accurate information by qualified professionals on YouTube as a form of free advertising.
Stupid people lead the way on spreading FUD, but rational people follow when it garners enough attention.
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Maybe if the AMA were a reputable source of information instead of a corporation to make doctors richer I'd listen or care what the AMA has to say. But hey, it's free speech for them and for Youtube.
And a large population of people believe in creationism (they have a great big 'ol museum in Kentucky), that we've never been to the moon, and that the world was created 6,000 years ago; despite science giving overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Interestingly enough, these same people are posting their beliefs on the internet via technology that's based on the exact same fundamental understandings of science which explains how we've evolved from earlier primates, how to get to the moon, and that the world is a whole lot older than 6,000 years.
But hey, they have every right to ignore what's in front of their own two eyes and believe the Bible, YouTube, or whatever else they want to believe. That's what's so cool about this country.
"YouTube is increasingly a resource people consult for health information, including vaccination."
Sorry, but the fact that the negative or disinformative videos have "more views" does NOT mean people are "consulting Youtube for information" about vaccinations. Rather, people are attracted to sensationalist headlines (or in this case, sensationalist video titles) and watching them. This does not mean they are believing what the videos contain, nor does it mean it's seriously swaying their opinions on vaccinations. All it means is THEY WATCHED THE VIDEO.
Post a video about Moon hoax evidence and I bet you'll get way more views than a video about Moon Science Facts. It's just human nature to be attracted to the sensational, controversial, or stuff that fires our imagination.
Could they please make it into a video clip and upload to youtube? Thanks.
So there is bad information on YouTube. So what? Only a fool depends on random heresy for important factual information. Are we to censor all information sources to protect fools? Are we to censor information sources to only those officially licensed to present the "proper" information? Tell the would be censors and busybody nannies exactly where to stuff it.
I know a mother who has 2 children. The first child got immunized, and shortly thereafter was diagnosed with autism. The second child was not immunized, and shortly after the time he would have been immunized, he was diagnosed with autism. She still insists that the first child's immunizations led to that child developing autism.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
I guess nobody remembers ScienceHack. I'm not sure how successful it is yet(or how accurate), but the idea is interesting - an independent (and hopefully qualified) screening system for informational videos on the web. So, if you're looking for good information you don't have to wade through as much crap.
- Cats playing piano ....yeah, clearly, that's where I'm going to find the best medical advice! And it's FREE!
- fart videos
- stuff crashing & people hurting themselves
- a study in the limitless narcissism of humanity
-Styopa
...tolerance for anyone who dare contradict them. This is about a bureaucrats looking for valid reasons to expand their power. We (NIH, CDC, Health and Human Services, FBI etc. ) need to protect you from your bad decisions. The greatest threat to civil liberties is not a political party, an administration. It is some pale little career weasel buried in some bleak maze looking for some way to impress his superiors and justify his existence. Imagine all the other decisions you can't make. IE the sub-prime mortgage mess...
Anyone who takes medical advice from you-tube deserves to die, it's called evolution. Unless it's because a brain tumor has impared their judgement, in which case they're a gonner anyway.
The mercury-in-vaccinations and autism link is a straw that parents of autistic children grasp. Very sad. They want to think it could have been prevented. They want to think they can save other children. Close, close friend of mine fell victim to this misinformation.
Truth is for those who have eyes to see, ears to hear.
Do a little studying outside AMA textbooks and the Lancet. There are plenty of studies pointing towards big trouble with our faith in vaccination. Look into it with an open mind.
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
OK, maybe I spoke too soon about the slashdot moderation system. My original post which was more on topic (commenting on ambiguous moderations, stars and thumbs) is now "offtopic" and my off topic reply to a troll is now "interesting".
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
9 out of 10 US Marines in Iraq think that checking YouTube for medical advice is stupid or retarded. The other Marine is all for it. Natural Selection in action... (Also 3 out of 10 Marines in Iraq read /. at least every other day.)
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
The best thing about this story? Those idiots will lemming themselves over the edge.
As Robin Williams once said...
You! Outta the gene pool!
i would really appreciate someone with the necessary background giving us the actual calculations showing that this is good for the individual. bonus if you can show that its good for society but possibly not for the individual..
eg risk of one person catching small pox without vaccine vs risk of many people spreading small pox spread over that population.
thanks
Consider the control rods in a nuclear reactor. They don't absorb all of the neutrons. They absorb some of the neutrons; enough to keep the overall reactivity down. To keep the reaction going, each neutron emitted spontaneously has to have a fairly high chance of reacting and creating another neutron. Control rods give each neutron a higher chance to be absorbed, which lowers the average "new" neutrons each spontaneous one emits, and so on.
Vaccination is the best control rod we have against communicable disease. Vaccines don't give perfect immunity; heck, even catching the disease doesn't provide 100% protection against catching it again. But it doesn't have to be perfect individually to give nearly perfect protection to a large population, *if* everyone is vaccinnated. Anyone who does get sick is unlikely to infect more people, if everyone around them is vaccinated. If the average number of people each patient infects is under 1, then the disease "fizzles". If a sufficiently high percentage of people are unvaccinated, though, the number of new cases each person causes will be over 1, and then you have an outbreak. The closer it gets to 1, the longer it will run (and the more people will get sick) before it finally fizzles. Being unvaccinated not only increases your risk, but it puts everyone around you at risk as well.
A concrete example of this was observed with influenza in Japan. Flu shots used to be mandatory for Japanese schoolchildren. Hence, few of them caught or spread the flu. In 1994, this requirement was dropped. Although young people tend not to die of the flu, old people do, and the schoolchildren were giving it to the elderly. Comparing mortality rates from before and after then change, it is estimated that every 420 vaccinated schoolchildren saved 1 elderly person from dying. Not getting sick, but dying. (A journal article about this is "The Japanese Experience with Vaccinating Schoolchildren against Influenza" by T. Reichert, N. Sugaya. et. at. in NEJM).
It doesn't take many unvaccinated people to cause a small outbreak; a handful of children in the same classroom who are unvaccinated can make the percentage coverage in that classroom too low. One of them gets sick, then nearly all of the unvaccinated ones do, then a good chunk of the vaccinated ones as well. Then their parents get sick, their parents co-workers, etc. People forget, but all of these "childhood diseases" we get immunized against used to be big killers; they aren't anymore because of vaccines.
People are scared of vaccines for three reasons. First, they seem to think that the plural of "anecdote" is "data". A few horror stories and they stop thinking rationally; they weigh the measured data of a 1 in 4300 risk of death if an infant catches whooping cough against a 1 in 110,000 risk of life-threatening adverse reaction to the vaccine, and choose the riskier course based on the stories they've heard. Second, anyone who has a bad reaction to a vaccine shouts it from the rooftops; how many people make impassioned cases about how when their son or daughter got vaccinated, *nothing happened*? All the widespread "stories" prove is that the stories spread well. Finally, people are bad at identifying patterns. Actually, they're good at it, just so good they see patterns where none exist. If I gave 1 million infants "disaccharide" pills, and told their parents about it, well, about 500 of those children would later be diagnosed as autistic, and the parents would blame those evil disaccharide pills. Except that disaccharide is just a fancy name for... sugar. For my next evil experiment, I'll give 1 million old people a small injection of dihydrogen monoxide, and see how many get Alzheimer's (I expect about 14 thousand).
These three things together create a hysteria about vaccines. People see bad things happening after the vaccine, and assume it is because of the vaccine. These people are hugely and disproportionately vocal about it. In turn, people give credence to anecdotes over d
I respect those concerns, but would like to address the implications of one of your rhetorical questions:
And should a vaccine for a sexually transmitted disease be mandatory anyway?When 90% of the population gets a disease by the time they die, and when that virus often causes cancer, I think it's pretty much irrelevant how they got it.
In fact, it's almost certain that you have been infected with HPV (me too). It's not some exotic venereal disease.
It seems whenever something bad happens to someone as a result of sex, everybody starts acting like they don't fuck. We go around ignorantly infecting each other while pretending we don't know what a vagina looks like. You're married, so you don't need to worry much about getting new STDs, but understand that even personally-conservative singles are at a real STD risk.
Also, HPV is not just an STD. Yes, that's how you get it genitally and that's how you get cervical cancer. But you also spread it by kissing, sharing a drink, or doing other things we're allowed to show in a G movie. It's like herpes that way. Socially-"innocuous" behaviors spread a "horrible STD."
You know the "cold sores" half of all midddle-class kids get from their parents? It's herpes, and you can spread it to someone's genitals. That's right: If a sexually-inexperienced girl gives me a blowjob, I can still get genital herpes from her, because she engaged in the oh-so-risky prior behavior of getting kissed goodnight by Mom.
I offer this as another example of how STDs are everywhere. So rejecting a vaccine because it is "for a sexually-transmitted disease" is just naive.
If anything, society is being stupid by pretending HPV is a "women's disease" and not inoculating boys too.
I get your point, which is that it is up to scientists to prove that the things we inject into our bodies are as safe as possible. And scientists and doctors take that responsibility very very seriously. There may indeed be as-yet-unknown negative side effects to vaccination, and scientists acknowledge that possibility and try their best to study and look for it. But so far, they have not found a connection to things like autism or asthma.
Maybe they will find problems in the future. But at worst that will create a tough question of trade off, because there is simply no question that the vaccines are very effective at fighting their respective diseases. If your child has a 0.0001% chance of developing a debilitating disease FROM a vaccine, or a 1% chance of dying from a different disease WITHOUT the vaccine, that is not such a clear-cut decision.
Consider this tradeoff:
a) We know for a fact that vaccines are extremely effective at preventing many nasty, often deadly diseases in children. Numerous studies have demonstrated clear evidence, as has our common experience with the dramatic decline of deaths due to diseases like polio, smallpox, measles, hepatitis, tetanus, etc.
vs.
b) Some people think some vaccines might be factors in the development of certain diseases, but numerous studies have failed to find a linkage--either it does not exist, or is such a weak connection that it is easily missed in the data.
Please vaccinate your children.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
This is just one concrete example of where poor understanding leads to incorrect and dangerous conclusions.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The wisdom of crowds is great.
Unless they get it wrong...
What are the odds of you getting hepatitis in this country?
Dude, I've had heppititis as a kid (no I'm not "high risk") and it is Not. Fucking. Nice.
For the sake of a pinprick that costs the NHS (or profit making insurance company if you are US'ian) a few Euros, its worth it. Both for your own health and the economy that has to look after you when you are puking and turning yellow for a month or two.
The mortality from chicken pox is off the bottom of the chart
But it kills and is nasty. A vacination costs fuck all so why take the risk.
I'm sure by next year, they're going to be calling for all infant girls to go ahead and get the hpv shot, because you can never be too careful about protecting your infant from STDs.
So you would rather thay die? Stop talking shite.
Cervical cancer is caused by a sexually transmitted virus and vacinations are going ahead here for kids without murmor. http://news.independent.co.uk/health/article3101929.ece>
so why subject your kid to that kinda crap?
Because you are a rational beleiver in science?
It's even less likely now than it was when I was a kid, because the infection rates are still dropping.
LOL! Why do you think infection rates are dropping? Because people are getting vaccinated YTC !
Ugh, so it's not just youtube - now unscientific BS is being spread on slashdot, too.
Well, big news: Vaccinations don't make you completely immune, but reduce your chance to catch a certain disease by quite a lot. You can still catch it if you're exposed to enough of the microbe/virus that causes it. And who's more likely to mass-produce the bug - a vaccinated or an unvaccinated person ?
That's quite simplified, but at least that way even someone who doesn't have a medical/biology background might get it.
In my post I cited a 90% HPV infection rate. The US Center for Disease Control actually puts the lifetime infection rate at 80%.
I don't think it really makes any difference... for this discussion it still means that basically EVERYONE gets infected with HPV at some point. But I did want to get my figures right. My 90% quote was careless.
-
- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Scepticism without any rational argument to back it up is just as retarded as blind faith. In fact, they're just the same. To be sceptical about A without a good justification is equivalent to blindly trusting NOT(A). Did you get that? To be sceptical about the earth NOT being the centre of the universe is just the same as believing it is.
It is quite remarkable how many people fail to understand that scepticism is just a belief in itself. Apply that logic to ID, Global Warming Sceptics, Radiation fearmongering... It is all the same. The "sceptics" are promoting a belief without justification, claiming they don't have to give any evidence because "the burden of proof is not on the sceptics". This is of course nonsense.
Your entire post can be summarised as: "Think of the children!". The irony is that refusing to vaccinate your kids is many times more likely to cause them harm than the vaccination is. There's good reason to be sceptical about your scepticism ( and here "good reason" is a major understatement ).
"Non-vaccinated people are a danger to no one but themselves."
Not so. Like Windows-users, their vulnerability troubles others.
Youre sound quite biased yourself.
Getting sick is a perfectly natural thing.. And I would be more sceptical of 100% of the population getting vaccines for everything and never getting sick.
If the vaccines dont work, maybe you should look at ways to improve general health and habits, rather than giving a "cure" before the disease. Im not saying vaccines and medication should never be applied, but its becoming alarming when were trying to "cure" every illness and sickness, without proper understanding that getting sick is perfectly normal, and often a way for the body to purify itself (ie with fever) and build normal resistance.
Um, wow. What else is there to say? Except that at least this may slightly counteract the proliferation of stupid people. Darwin: on you mark, get set, go.
For the hard-of-thinking out there in SlashdotLand (you don't know who you are, and if you could figure out how to use a mirror, you'd still not recognise yourself by that description), that means : the parents and or guardians who are so gullible as to base child-care decisions on TV programme snippets on youTube (edited out of context by people whose sole knowledge of the topic in question is most likely to be the whole programme they've edited), are the caregivers who are most likely to kill their charges through their stupidity. This will have the beneficial (if unintentional) side effect of raising the average intelligence of the population, through culling the bottom end of the population. This is the same effect that makes the average rabbit somewhat faster at running than the average fox.
Some might contend that this is terribly unfair on those who are too poor to afford proper health advice. To such a charge, I respond "So what?"
I have yet to see league-high letters of fire in the dawn light spelling out "the world is a fair place", or any other evidence to support an assertion that the world is a fair, or even nice, place. There were no guarantees given on conception, and the systems that run the world (quantum chromodymamics, gravity) don't necessarily cause the development of fairness. Worse - I find it hard to believe that people can afford the computing power and bandwidth to view a YouTube video, but be unable to afford some sort of access to quality health advice or education. So there is a serious problem of prioritisation of expenditures there too.
[I'm assuming that TFA was written for an American audience who expect 40% of their population to have no healthcare provision, and who expect half of bankruptcies to involve medical bills. Again, this is tough - being born in the uncivilized world, or being born poor, has always been bad for your life expectancy. So being born poor, in America, to stupid parents who value entertainment more highly than the value investing in health information, is likely to be detrimental to your health. "Film" as the saying goes, "at eleven."
(BTW, I'm not saying that it's impossible for there to be significant problems with vaccinations, or other complex medical technologies ; but there are much better places to get information about these things. If you know enough about the internet to know of YouTube, then one would hope that you'd already committed "www.cdc.gov" to memory as a starting place for health-related enquiries. It took 14 characters typing and two clicks to get to some useful information.)
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
Or is it just that there are so many gullible PHBs out there that the idea's so obvious it's occurred to pretty much everybody?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I really used to like Metacafe.com but they have gone a little downhill with the quality ever since quantity really kicked in.
Anyways, they now have producer awards for movies where they promote bogus instructions to build supposedly cool things (or insctructions for magic tricks) that simply dont work. The best/worst thing I found is a self made laser cannon build from a cd burner:
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/756433/laser_flashlight_hack/
No, they're evolved from them.
No, that would make you a moron who didn't bother to read the reams of scientific evidence that would easily allay your fears, were they based on genuine concern over efficacy vs side effects.
But they're not, they're based on your own ignorance and paranoia, coupled with a lack of cognitive ability.
Then READ THE FUCKING STUDIES. You haven't, or you'd realize why we're so vehement in deriding your moronic choices regarding vaccination.
No it isn't. That lie alone is enough to determine that you're not the least bit interested in truth, but in forcing your agenda down our throats.
Isn't the summary accurate only if one presupposes that HPV and flu vaccinations work as advertised? Personally, I've been pretty surprised how unscientific the medical profession can get. For example, the hospital where we had our sons had posters claiming "100 reasons to breastfeed" that looked something like this. As "reasons", you get every possible logical fallacy, from claims from authority ("The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends breastfeeding") to confusing correlation with causality ("Formula Feeding is associated with lower I.Q."). I'm not surprised to find such material on the internet, at a site called "ProMom, Inc", but having it posted in the hospital by medical professionals is a different matter.
Flu vaccinations provoke an equally irrational response from the medical profession. You hear arguments like "Almost all people who get the flu vaccine have no serious problems from it, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention." Well, guess what? All people who don't get the shot have no problems from the shot. In fact, almost all people who get the flu have no serious problems from it either. None of this proves anything.
I can't speak about the HPV vaccine, but I wouldn't be surprised if it evoked the same response.
Anyone that would get medical information off of YouTube has got to be a low-grade moron. It would be better if those people failed to reproduce.
in one easy step. Just follow the music and we can all waltz to our doom!
Don't blame me, it's usually 2 in the morning when I post
> And you know why they used the liev virus vaccine?
Because it gives better immunization than dead viruses, of course. Who would want to take reshots every ten years, in case of decreasing immunity, when one sugar cube gives lifetime immunity, guaranteed?
The Salk vaccine is not better than the Sabin, until the vacination rate nears unity. Even if he DID do all his work at my alma mater.
I heard from my best friend, that her sisters, boyfriend's cousin read in a blog that those video's are right on the money. The worlds governments are just trying to cover up the fact that they are actually imbedding us with RFID tags.
First, the article linked to is not in any way scientific research results. Instead it is a press release issued by the American Medical Association. Second, anyone living in a civilized country (one where health care is a right, not a market opportunity) recognizes the fact that the AMA spends billions on its own disinformation campaigns to prevent the U.S. from adopting coherent national health care strategy. Like that old chestnut about Canadians dying in line for medical treatment (despite the fact that it is far more prevalent, even on a per capita basis, in the U.S.) and ignoring the fact that Canadians live longer, healthier lives despite drinking more, smoking more and getting into more accidents. Canadian doctors may not have cabin cruisers, but Canada has an infant mortality rate that's a fraction of the U.S.'s. Third, we're not talking polio vaccines here. The University of Toronto is in Ontario, a Canadian province that wants every last man, woman and child to have an annual flu shot ...even if they are at no particular risk, regardless of how small the global supply of flu vaccine may be, and despite the contribution this may make to breeding vaccine-resistant flu strains. It's a nice little gift from the Ontario government to the Big Pharmas who set up camp inside their borders.
In regard to all the replies you will see here, they discount several key issues, including:
:-) One can also think heavily about the profit motive to reduce apparent childhood illnesses (so parents don't have to stop work) but potentially produce long term consequences like autoimmune disorders and cancers where others pay the cost.
* Diseases evolve, so today's vaccinations may not work against tomorrow's illnesses, and even when they are effective, other diseases may take the same ecological space (thus the proliferation of new vaccinations, while the old ones remain on the schedule just in case),
* It is not clear just how many pathogens a human immune system can be sensitized to without collapsing,
* Vaccines are not side effect free, they have been linked to lots of things even when prepared and dispensed directly.
* When improperly administered (injected directly into the bloodstream by mistake) there can be other hazards.
* Most vaccinations (unlike natural immunity) wear off in a decade or so (even if they are at all effective) -- this requires "booster shots" ad-infinitum to keep resistance.
* The previous way many people developed immunity was by extended nursing and low levels of infections in populations, where the mother's immune system scanned for threats and passed antibodies onto children to help them deal with threats, conferring life long immunity. Vaccines break this cycle of "software" memory. Pediatricians promote shots but when was the last time you heard one recommend nursing to age three or four like most of humanity has done historically?
* For many disease, improved sanitation and better nutrition have been reducing them greatly -- anyone hear of a "scarlet fever" vaccine, yet it has dropped along with all the rest (in part also by improved treatments).
* Whether vaccines work or not, there is a vast conflict-of-interest in the entire vaccine industry and its regulatory body (fox guarding the hen house) which has been long standing and is poorly addressed.
A fundamental aspect of medicine is to treat the individual and to "do no harm". Vaccines attempt to treat the population. Many diseases (though not all) take mostly the weak and sickly and badly nourished -- who are most at risk of serious complications but who also should have numerous other interventions in their lives (think health insurance and a social safety net). The whole premise of vaccine -- treat everyone in case a few are at risk -- is itself ethically problematical. An alternative emphasis is to come up with better ways to treat illnesses when they occur.
Another aspect is to accept that compulsory education is a primary vector of disease transmission and shut it down for that reason alone (beyond all the other good ones).
Anyone hear of Simian Virus 40 (SV40) contamination in polio vaccinations given to about 100 million US Americans?
http://www.cdc.gov/nip/vacsafe/concerns/cancer/default.htm
Can't happen again? The Amish produce many of the vaccines used in the USA (cultures in eggs which they keep) -- yet ironically enough they avoid vaccines themselves usually.
The state getting involved in forcing medical procedures on people "for their own potential long term good" is just a huge can of worms.
Modern vaccination schedules entail approaching 200 different batches of produced materials to be injected in a person's lifetime (if you include annual flu shots, and assume booster shots on a decade schedule) each of which bypass the body's normal mechanisms for developing immunity for many infectious disease (general first response in the tonsils, moving from there). Doesn't that general idea just bother people? But then a lot of people run Windows.
Also, each batch may be very different, and even if one tests safe, there may be "hot lots" and other issues as production continually changes to cheaper approaches, with conflict-of-interest oversight.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Yeah right, like you tube would be the first place I would look into my ills?
Paul E. Bahre
The level of diagnostic effort I've noticed in the US is abyssmal.
I was having some pretty severe stomach problems. By severe, I mean "nothing I've ever felt before in my life", "constant heartburn", "partial vomiting", "acid reflux", "general weariness", etc...of the consistent variety (almost 24/7 over a period of months). Nothing life threatening, but for someone who had never had such symptoms before, it was rather disturbing to me, especially since I didn't want the problem to get worse, whatever it was.
And it was seriously having a deleterious effect on my life.
So I go to a general practitioner, who generally blew me off. I had to practically beg him to get me an appointment with a Gastroenterologist. Well, after seeing said new doctor, I quickly learned that unless you're practically dying of stomach cancer, they won't even listen to you or look twice in your direction.
I've had similar experiences with Dermatologists (I've been to three different ones at this point)...I have pretty severe psoriasis and until I did internet research I didn't realize that these jackasses don't really know anything. They simply guess with different creams or techniques until something works. And they certainly don't tell you the potential negatives before doing something (ie extended topical steroid use _can_ be bad for you). Hell, _I_ can guess. I pay you to figure out what the hell is wrong. If you're incapable of that, tell me so and I'll keep my damn money.
It's any wonder people seek the internet for medical wisdom...doctors simply don't care to diagnose, explain, or do anything other than send you away with some sample products in your hand.
I'm amazed at the stupidity of the responses, and the moderators moderating it down to -1. How could you not see that I was explaining WHY people don't want to get immunized? The selfish response is to not get immunized. YES, IT IS THE TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS, YOU DOPE.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It's my belief that it was more emotion than reasoning. However, the reasoning, such as it was, basically amounted to ''post hoc ergo propter hoc'' (i.e., the autism happened shortly after the inoculation, therefore, the inoculation caused the autism).
As for the second case, I think she just chalked it up to coincidence (which she couldn't do for the former one presumably because she had already emotionally invested herself in her previous explanation).
I believe she ''knows'' there's a genetic component, but that the autism wouldn't have happened to her first child if it hadn't been for the inoculation. (I.e., that it was a combination of factors.)
As far as I know, there's no news story. This is someone I've interacted with personally (really more of a friend of a friend, although I've been over to their place myself).
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?