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Measles Resurgent Due To Fear of Vaccination
florescent_beige writes "In the September Mayo Clinic Proceedings, Gregory Poland, M.D. writes that 'More than 150 cases of measles have been reported in the United States already this year and there have been similar outbreaks in Europe, a sign the disease is making an alarming comeback (abstract). The reappearance of the potentially deadly virus is the result of unfounded fears about a link between the measles shot and autism that have turned some parents against childhood vaccination.'"
This follows the recent release of a massive review of studies into the side effects of vaccination, summarized here by Nature, which did not find convincing support for the idea that MMR shots caused autism.
Unfortunately, it's not only those who refuse vaccination that end up at risk.
Stick to getting to your tits out please and leave the science to the ugly people.
Cheers.
I put my books on Amazon, Smashwords, Demonoid, ISOHunt and Pirate Bay. Search for 'Michael Cargill'
Well done you fucking idiots.
'nuff said
This kind of fear is akin to the fear of oxygen and it's fueled by the fear of science by the superstitious.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
The MMR vaccine has not shown signs of causing neurological problems; but Measles, in the not-as-rare-as-one-might-like cases where it progresses to include Encephalitis, certainly has...
And thus we see natural selection at work once again.
You ignorant asshole.
What about people who were vaccinated, but the vaccination didn't take? What about people with allergies to key ingredients in the vaccinations? What about people with compromised immune systems, where the vaccination simply can't take hold?
I wouldn't have a problem with people refusing to be vaccinated if it meant that they and their offspring died. Is that a bit cruel? Yeah, but people die for worse reasons every day, so I'm not going to complain about some idiot letting his kids die because he refused to listen to logic and reason.
But when people die because someone else didn't vaccinate their kids? Because the local vaccination ratio dropped too low for herd immunity to take place? That's when I get pissed off.
Cynical Idealist
Really? Really? How can post here and not be able to read? Why not try the article in Nature or maybe the Mayo Clinic for refutation of Hadwen bullshit. More superstition rather than science.
It is well documented that the measles cures blindness, so I can only congratulate the orchestrators of this anti-vaccine campaign for having the vision to improve America's public health in such a manner.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
This year my wife mysteriously got measles (in Italy). She hadn't been vaccinated because when we were young the vaccine was not available. BUT our youngest child got it, too, because he was at the time younger than the age at which you get the shot.
I don't tell you the trouble of having a diagnosis, since the disease is so uncommon today, that after two visits, my wife finally diagnosed it herself on wikipedia (sic). And the trouble of telling all the authorities, which needed to find the lost protocols for such an infection.
To sum it up: the studies linking the shot with autism were done by an UK professor, who has been on trial for telling false results to help his own company.
When you don't get the shot and you are healthy, you're just selfishly exploiting the fact that most of "other people" will get the shot and you will be protected. BUT measles IS dangerous, and some people won't have your choice, because they are too young or too unhealthy to get that shot. They will risk severe damages by the disease, so PLEASE don't be a wimp and kindly get vaccinated.
An episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit says it, and says it well. Even presuming the cases of vacination causing autism were not bullshit, it'd still be worse to not vaccinate all our kids - more would end up dead than would end up autistic.
Of course, people don't see it that way, they just like their knee-jerk responses. I literally can not believe that people actually still refer to something so discredited. People need to spend 5 seconds doing some goddamn research on an issue - and not just looking for things to confirm what they think.
I blame the rise of the schooling system going all 'no opinion can be wrong' - it's such obvious crap, and yet people seem to believe it. I can say it's my opinion the sky is blue all day long, it doesn't make it true. Sure, some opinions - ones of taste, can not be wrong, as they are something inherant to you, but too many parents, when you try and explain that there is no reason to fear vaccinations, will just refuse to listen, tell you to stop 'telling them what to do with their children' and it's 'their opinion' that the vaccines are bad. It's such rubbish. Not only that, but people have somehow managed to grow up seeing all discussion as someone else trying to force you onto their side. The point of discussion is to try and see where the differences in your opinion are - if the other person can convince you that you are wrong, that's excellent - you have just gained something. Likewise if you can show them. Instead, people just refuse to listen to the other side of an argument.
People need to learn that being wrong isn't something bad - and that you sure as hell do not have a right to never be wrong. I get it, these parents want to look after their kids - and who can blame them for that? What I can blame them for is not actually caring enough to check what is actually good for them.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Im not sure theres ever as clear as a correlation as this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Measles_US_1944-2007_inset.png
I mean, there doesnt even seem to be a shadow of a doubt that the shots are effective, whatever other complaints you might want to make about them.
The fact that it's hard to find anyone who dares to advertise vaccination in public has to do with the risks involved. Although the figures are very low, they're not zero. Who wants to be confronted with the mother who lost her otherwise healthy baby due to an allergic shock incurred by the vaccination process? I think that, apart from laziness or ignorance, these risks (possibly exaggerated in perception) are also the main reason why people shy away from vaccination.
You forgot to ask if we call this weather.
It is probably going to be said a million times but, here goes:
Firstly, no vaccination is a 100% guarantee. The best give some high 90's percent chance of immunity, many much lower. However, even when you are not fully immunized from a vaccine, it can still mean you get a much milder case of the disease.
Secondly, not all people can be immunized. Children too young to have a fully working immune system, people with cancer or some immunodeficiency. They, in stead, rely on herd immunity: If enough of the surrounding people are immunized, they won't get the disease. So, by choosing to not get immunised when you can, you basically make life much worse for children with cancer. I would say that that is a group who could use any break they can get, and does not deserve to be made more miserable.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a4/Measles_incidence_England%26Wales_1940-2007.png/220px-Measles_incidence_England%26Wales_1940-2007.png
Nobody (with standing) has EVER claimed that a vaccine is 100% effective at stopping whatever it is supposed to. It's impossible. For a start, evolution dictates that something stronger and more powerful and able to overcome the vaccine will, eventually, come along (that's what MRSA is, for instance) - and it's actually (in avoiding natural selection terms) worse if only a tiny minority of people are susceptible to the disease/virus/whatever than if everyone is susceptible or everyone is immune. It provides greater scope for a successful mutation to arise.
As always, dickheads with zero medical experience telling people what they should or should not do have been the bane of humanity and cost more lives than the accidents of doctors, or an ineffective vaccine.
You don't get vaccinated for YOU. You get vaccinated for OTHERS. Those with compromised immune systems, those who you would spread the disease to, those you would be an asymptomatic carrier for (Typhoid Mary), etc. You don't get immunised against German Measles (Rubella) for yourself - you do it so that you DON'T give it to that pregnant woman in your family, or who lives down the road.
That said, I haven't had any vaccinations since my school days (for purely selfish reasons that have nothing to do with their safety), but then I avoid almost everything that otherwise normal people think is "essential" in medicine nowadays - including headache tablets, stomach remedies, cold remedies and just about anything that comes in a blister-pack.
In terms of medicine, a vaccination will never be perfect, but that doesn't mean it can't eradicate a disease to the point that it leaves living memory either permanently (smallpox), or in first-world countries (polio).
Yes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfdZTZQvuCo
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
If people want to read something on the internet and choose not to vaccinate their kids against a very real disease, why should I care? My kids are vaccinated, so they can't get sick.
And they stole that from Pink Floyd's lyrics.
.... there are risks associated with any medical procedure, including vaccinations. But vaccinations are among the safest things one can do for oneself and the community. The benefits far outweigh the risks, the science is clear on that. Most of the folk that oppose vaccinations do so out of unfounded fears, i.e. gut reactions, not rational reflection of the facts. Instead, they are swayed by the likes of Ms. McCarthy or Mr. Wakefield that there is some sort of giant medical conspiracy. It is precisely this sort of ignorance why more diseases like polio have not gone the way of smallpox, i.e. been eradicated in the wild. In the case of polio, it's thanks to nutty preachers in the affected remaining hotspots making similarly dreary claims re: the polio vaccine.
I attribute the willingness of parents to take a chance with herd immunity to the fact that they haven't themselves seen the effects of polio, whooping cough, etc. in the community around them. There is a reason that in years past people gladly lined up for polio vaccinations - they'd seen the impact, could better trade off the miniscule risk (especially with the post-Cutter-incident monitoring) with the benefits of not having dead, disfigured, or severely disabled children. Indeed, one of the biggest impacts of vaccination programs is the serious reduction in schools for the deaf, dumb, and blind.
Ironically, having rejected comparatively perfectly safe vaccination options, parents seem to have no issues with then putting all the interventionist methods to use to save their children if they do fall sick. I.e. take them to the hospital, operate, perform lots of heroic work to save the child... all of which would not have been necessary if they hadn't blindly followed quacks advice re: vaccinations. And that's what amazes me, the quacks of the world who promote anti-vaccination messages have yet to prove any causal link between MMR and/or thimerosal with autism, yet they stick to this piece of faith, not unlike the folk who will follow cult religions. It's pity for the kids, they have no one looking out for their interests.
Last but not least, what bothers me most about refusing vaccinations is that there will always be some members of the community that have to rely on herd immunity because their own immune systems are not fully functional, they are undergoing immuno-suppressing therapy, or they are allergic to some of the proteins inherent in the current manufacturing processes for most vaccines. Additionally, no vaccine is 100% effective - so depending on the ability of the virus or bacteria to spread through the community, a very high immunization rate is required to protect everyone in the herd, immunized or not.
I hope that some day the likes of Ms. McCarthy or Mr. Wakefield will own up to their hubris, character assassination, innuendo, etc. and apologize to the world not only for disrupting one of the most successful medical programs of our times, but also for killing, disfiguring, and traumatizing gaggles of children needlessly with their panic-mongering. This is not unlike shouting "Fire" in a crowded theatre - especially in the case of Mr. Wakefield where key aspects of his 'research' were later found to be faked, massive conflicts of interest were not disclosed, and interpretations were drawn without the benefit of facts.
For anyone interested in the subject, I highly recommend the books written by Dr. Offit on the matter, especially "Autisms False Prophets", and "Deadly Choices". He details the characters of the anti-vaccination movements quite nicely and shows in reference after reference what the real impacts of vaccine refusal are.
People need to spend 5 seconds doing some goddamn research on an issue
You're asking too much here.
A lot of people just can't understand the result of their search, or won't realize they should do such a search, or cannot sort through the quantity of information available (lots of dross, even in good science). They need to be told, clearly and unequivocally, what's the recommended thing to do in issues involving science/medicine/etc. Any imbecile who publicly tells them to do demonstrably harmful things should be taken to task, and held culpable to the extent which can be justified.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Dr Hadwen saw through the fraud of 'vaccination' over a hundred years ago, and none of his talks have ever been refuted. Why is that?
A hundred years ago, it was just about still possible to be unconvinced by the germ theory of disease - now, not in the slightest. As for 'seeing through the fraud of vaccination', you do realise that this is basically nonsense?
What am I saying? It's like trying to convince flat earthers or geocentrists, or creationists...
When the champions of anarcho-capitalism say to STFU and get your kids vaccinated, it really does say something. Unlike the OP though, I'm not sure the blame is to placed on the school system. The places I've seen anti-vaccine hysteria promoted was on the TeeVee by Responsible People like Jenny McCarthy (and by proxy Oprah).
would take their children to get Chiropractic. Big pharma wants you all to get vaccinated with their live specimens of the Measles, Mumps and Rubella viruses so your body can learn to deal with these diseases, but it already knows how. It's just being prevented from doing so by poor alignment, non-organic foods, subluxation, voodoo, bad mojo and pesticides.
Chiropractic can save lives, just like homeopathy, acupuncture and faith-healing.
The comments here are perpetrating a myth that those who avoid the MMR vaccine for their children are therefore not vaccinating them. This is very far from the truth. At the height of the scare we decided to avoid the MMR for our two children, arranging instead for them to have three single vaccines, given a little time apart.
When they were due for their booster shots, the doctor tested them and said their immunity levels were way higher then he expected and they didn't need the normal booster. We mentioned that we'd skipped MMR and the doctor confirmed that the single vaccines give a higher level of protection.
In summary, I was suspicious about the science behind the MMR scare but decided not to chance it - all I risked was a little money, by skipping the free government MMR and paying myself for the three singles. Even though the MMR risk seemed very low, it wasn't zero.
Avoiding the MMR was a prudent, sensible choice. The hysteria that skipping MMR must inevitably lead to unprotected children is itself scaremongering. If measles is rising it's simple parental negligence and nothing to do with MMR.
The 'knee-jerk' reaction people aren't the ones that promote vaccines...
No - I'm sorry, but you can't just write it off like that. I'm not saying they should look into every little thing in depth - what they should do is know who to listen to, and when they truly can't decide - then do some research. Everyone should be capable of this - if not, then they should learn. Yes, I know it's wrong to actually expect something of people, but come on..
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
In my opinion, this just speaks to a problem that is rampant in the health care industry: no one REALLY trusts doctors. I mean, they are smart and all, but there's stories I hear all the time of someone being misdiagnosed by a doctor, or being told it's nothing, or the doctors just plain not knowing what's wrong. Add on that the countless number of therapies and drugs that cause problems that are hidden from the public or where the effects weren't fully understood for 10 years and it breeds a definite level of uncertainty when a doctor says something.
For me, when I hear "Don't worry, vaccinations are 100% safe", I'm wondering if I will hear about the real effects of these vaccinations 10 years down the road when we realize we messed up and they actually cause cancer or autism. I'm already thinking about my kids and whether I really should vaccinate them.
Maybe you remember measles parties, but not the measles wards in hospitals, where people with their brain smashed by encephalitis were kept. In that case, maybe you would have gotten a better picture. Kids also were dying more frequently in the past, and that was not as big an issue as today, because it was not avoidable at best and anyway there were many more kids per family than today.
I was vaccinated (my choice at 18) and survived an infection. I lived with people with measles and was ok all the time. I don't see having the virus spreading to my lungs, eyes, skin and brain as a better option. And I've seen the effects, you don't want to try them.
so a load of people latch onto autism as a reason against vaccination, but its not the only concern. A lot of people are more concerned about lower-level negative immune system responses, such as increased allergy rates.
I'm so concerned about allergies that I'm willing to risk the death or serious illness of my child and many of the vulnerable children around him; I'm a fuckshit!!
An episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit says it, and says it well. Even presuming the cases of vacination causing autism were not bullshit, it'd still be worse to not vaccinate all our kids - more would end up dead than would end up autistic.
What this comes down to is selfish people realising that if they avoid vaccination, they will avoid whatever the imagined risk is and also avoid measles because the vast majority of people still get vaccinated so herd immunity is in play. What they failed to anticipate was just how many other selfish people had exactly the same idea. It only works if nobody else is doing it.
This isn't helped by the media playing people fear of risk. You all remember the type of stats they gave out during the Fukushima nuclear power plant break down. Radiation levels are 500% above normal. People watch that sensationalism and panic. At no point did they demand to know a comparative. "Oh, the same as smoking 50 packs of high tar over a year" or something similar. You get the point.
..
In the UK a few years back. They put out a story telling women that a type of birth control pill increased their risk of getting cancer. Many women came off the pill immediately and fell pregnant as a result. A few months later they had a follow up story with a Doctor. They asked him about the risk of the drug and what was being done. They then asked his reaction to the pregnancies (which i don't think he was aware of) by the presenter. His reaction was classic a mix of amused bewilderment and a condescending - You do realise that pregnancy is incredibly more dangerous than any risk of cancer this drug ever posed. .
I think what he wanted to say was "Are you all fucking idiots?"
because contagious diseases preferentially kill stupid people
In this case that's absolutely correct, or should we say contagious diseases preferentially kill stupid people's genes.
People who make decisions about their children's health based on what a celebrity said in the Oprah show are stupid, no doubt about it.
The way the Media twists the truth, can we be sure its not the people that got Vaccines that also got the Measles?, this totally sounds like a "False Flag"
supposing that the increased allergy rates are a direct consequence of vaccines, the cost benefit is still in favour of NOT DYING and getting the MMR vaccine.
you are just talking out your ass. your wife isn't a biologist, i doubt she even exists.
I find it quite morbidly amusing that everyone is jumping on this bandwagon on the presumption that "inadequate evidence to accept or reject a casual relationship" is taken to mean that the link is disproven. Just as Paul Offitt states in the Nature summarization that he is "'uncomfortable as a scientist' with the committee's methodology", I am uncomfortable with people interested in science who refuse to distinguish Can't Prove and DisProven.
Why listen to medical science? Jenny McCarthy kills babies. Jenny McCarthy kills babies
I'm by no means saying schools promote an anit-vaccination agenda (at least, here in the UK, while I was at school - albiet it was a little back, I never saw that). My point was more that they are teaching people to believe that their 'opinions' can transcend reason and fact, and be right regardless.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
You clearly did not read the nature article as this is in no way a strawman. They did not just look at the relation between vaccines and MMR, but about negative effects of vaccines.
They found
We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines
Stop putting out your own knee-jerk reactions and at least read the article you are criticising before putting out dangerous misinformation.
http://montreal.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20110608/measles-quebec-canada-110609/20110609/?hub=MontrealHome
It's getting bad in Quebec with over 250 cases in 2011, for a population of about 8 million.
Good. because the kids of well informed parents who are not paranoid about science are well protected. If the religious fundamentalists declare the Irene to be a sign from god, i ma at least state this.
Up to know parents who did not vaccinate theirs kids where sure that measles are so seldom that it does not matter. They profited from the fact that the vast majority is immunized.
The relevant value is called percolation threshold. As long as the general population is immunized above this threshold, you can afford to be an egoistic idiot and not get vaccinated, because outbreaks will be small and local. If the population is not immunized that well you will get an epidemic.
Deadly. Bullshit is both very funny, and makes a lot of incredibly good points. It's not a replacement for reasearching a subject, but in addition to, and for some comedy, it's great.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
"Seat belts sometimes cause chafing, which under the right combination of sunlight and bacteria might cause skin cancer, so you should stop wearing it. Can you PROVE that seat belts don't cause skin cancer? But Doctor Scamographer said they might! Why don't you come back when there is a consensus!"
*CRASH* *SPLAT*
Never mind, then...
People need to learn that being wrong isn't something bad
No, people need to learn that having been wrong isn't something bad, but that being wrong can be.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Indeed, my poor choice of wording. Learning to correct yourself and not see it as some kind of horrible defeat is important.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Penn & Teller are missing the point. It's not about whether or not it's good for ALL kids to be immune, it's about whether or not it's good to give YOUR child the MMR vaccine. Those are two very different questions.
I researched it before I gave my daughter the MMR, and I can tell you it took a lot more than 5 seconds. Unless you're the kind of person who just looks for things to confirm what they think, of course.
Blame stupidity, or discredited studies, or Jenny McCarthy, or religion, or anything you like, but you'd be wrong. Take a moment for reflection on the whole business of vaccinations. Human nature is all it takes to explain this. It is also all that is necessary to correct the problem.
Measles is a scary disease. When it was prevalent, everyone could easily see the terrible consequences of letting the disease run wild. Vaccinations were implemented as a welcomed remedy even though shots are scary, and gradually the disease disappeared from public consciousness. Fast forward to today. Shots are still scary, and society concentrates on AIDS and cancer. People have no fear of measles that overcomes the scariness of vaccinations. The same goes for polio, rubella, etc.
If the unfortunate trend continues, it will solve itself using the same fear of the actual disease that we had decades ago. Sadly, it will leave a pile of victims, many of which never knew that their parents were failing them.
-d
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
depending on where and how you live the measles vaccine still can have a higher chance of serious to deadly outcome as apposed to the chance of getting measles and having a serious to deadly outcome
Doh... That's because people in those areas are vaccinated!
Having a pediatrician that's used to servicing hacidic(sp) Jews helps as they can have religious issues with vaccines.
This is a clear cut case. Public health trumps religious issues, hasidic Jews children should be vaccinated against their parents dogmas.
No fair! You didn't quote data from 100 years ago!
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Darwinian selection at work.
If you're dumb enough not to get your kids vacinated, natural selection will ensure your genes don't get passed along. Sadly, it'll be your kids who pay the price for your unfitness and you'll get to watch.
I'd call that child abuse - exposing your kid to undo danger. Kinda like dangling your kid over the balcony of a highrise apartment.
So, let's see. If most people get vaccinated then the frequency of measles infections goes down dramatically because of herd immunity. Then idiots start thinking "I won't get vaccinated" because they figure the odds are now low of encountering measles at all.
People are happy to benefit from herd immunity thanks to most people getting vaccinated, but forbid the thought they themselves would take any risk to get vaccinated to protect themselves and the rest of us from them. Not only are they idiots, but they are selfish to everybody else as well.
I can kind of understand when people do stupid things like don't wear helmets while riding motorcycles, don't wear seatbelts when driving a car, or even if they decide to smoke. It's a free country and their choice doesn't really affect anyone but themselves. More power to them. But undermining the immunity that we all gain when enough people vaccinate in a population is amazingly selfish. Every young child that dies or that gets permanently injured due to complications from measles infection is on their heads, because they chose to be a carrier rather than getting immunized. Yes, it's their own body and they should have the choice, but they are selfish, confused, stupid, fearful assholes for not choosing to get vaccinated. And when they don't permit it for their own children the degree of stupidity and irresponsibility is that much worse.
As far as I'm concerned, people who don't get vaccinated for measles and several other easily immunizable diseases should be required to wear some indicator that they are a willing potential carrier of dangerous infectious diseases, so that other people can steer clear of them. It may be their choice, but if they have the right to refuse immunization (which I agree with) then other people should have the right to know about that choice. At the very least they should be legally required to disclose their non-immunized status to schools and other locations where there are interactions with children, so that if there is an outbreak they can be immediately informed and quarantined from the site. That goes for adults and children.
The situation you describe is reliance on "herd immunity": if enough of the population is vaccinated that *your* exposure risk is negligible, then yes, there's a slightly higher risk of harm from the actual vaccine than the disease, because there's little-to-no chance of anyone around you can infect you with the disease.
The situation *now* is that because so many families have skipped the vaccinations because of the Andrew Wakefields and Jenny McCarthy's of the world raising fears of vaccine-triggered autism that the situation is now reversed: enough of the population around you have *voluntarily* skipped the immunization that you're at greater risk of the disease.
Ye fscking godz: I'm enough of a geez to remember the days of closed pools and iron lungs because of polio risk. The idea that a parent would *voluntarily* put their kid at risk for diseases because of some talking head on the TV infuriates me.
In the near future it will become known with certainty that autism is caused by the pairing of parental genetic codes which result in the expression of improper brain development.
In the future it will be understood that a couple needs to take a genetic screening test before making the decision to reproduce, but now we leave all this up to chance. Most parents don't lose this game of Russian Roulette, but those who do learn the meaning of hell on earth. And some of them proceed to want to blame the autism on causes which are external ( like MMR vaccine ) because they refuse to believe that their own bodies are the cause of their nightmare.
The only person I know personally who has an autistic child used LSD regularly as a teenager. Remember what "they" used to say about LSD use causing genetic damage to the user ? Of course this person will never consider that his
youthful indiscretions might have resulted in an autistic child being born, but what if this were true ? Not a pleasant
thing for him to contemplate, is it ? So you can see why this guy would prefer to want to blame MMR vaccine whether
there is a sound basis for doing so or not, because who would want to look inward for the cause of such a nightmare ?
Speaking of getting one's head examined.... "Medical Mafia"? That's a new one. I'm sure it will be catchy enough to entice some other moron into subscribing to your newsletter.
n/t
Set your phasers on "funky"!
By putting out mis-information like this you are part of the reason for the large number of deaths from measels.
No he isn't, that's a fallicious argument... measels are the cause of the deaths, not misinformation, and not the GP.
Its fine to be passionate about something, and I believe you are on the right side... however, using fallicious argument to convince doubters is not the way to go. Lead with the science, they will follow.
The Admin and the Engineer
Oh, if only there was some agency out there who would review all the available research and medical documentation out there to inform us whether or not vaccines carry with them adverse health effects. I mean, if some one would just devote, say, 800 pages of research towards answering these questions in a method that is both scientifically accurate and publically consumable... Why, if there were, say, a 120 page section on the MMR vaccination, with special attention given towards the MMR vaccine and autism, maybe we could make better risk informed decisions.
I only wish such a study were available free of charge. I think a really good place for the study to be located would be at this web address
http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=13164&utm_medium=etmail&utm_source=National%20Academies%20Press&utm_campaign=NAP+mail+new+08.30.11&utm_content=Downloader&utm_term=#orgs
from what a Doctor friend told me one day most of the cases he read about were amongst people from Mexico or Haiti
Measles outbreaks have been reported in Mexico this century
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
You answered your own issue there.
"A lot of people are more concerned about lower-level negative immune system responses, such as increased allergy rates. Note that allergy rates have risen roughly in line with increasing hygiene and health-care in general (eg., hay fever was virtually unknown before the mid-1800s)"
It is not vaccines that is the problem here or likely multiple ones. (Though like any medicine vaccines and combinations therein need to be tested for saftey and efficacy before being used on the general populace.) Here is the deal the human body and its immune system developed in a much dirtier and more parasite and disease laden world. In the most simplistic terms in our modern antiseptic society our immune system is left mostly untrained and idle which leads it to attack things or over react to things it normally would not have. Combine that with globalization where people are exposed to far greater variety of food, flora, and fauna than any human in history and you have the makings of "immune system gone wild". Vaccines are not the problem in fact they actually help train your immune system properly. And since I find it unlikely that we will abandon globalization or healthcare what we need now is to learn how to modulate the immune system properly. Though you are free to go primitive and abandon modern technology. I'll keep my pills and gadgets TYVM.
Obviously I didn't mean a literal 5 seconds. Yes, reasearch takes up parent's already valuable time. So what - that's a responsibility of parenting, if you care, you can make time. Yeah, it hard - but that is parenting. You have to make a choice the child can not.
As to Penn and Teller, they are not missing the point - they knew that argument doesn't apply to the individual child - it doesn't make it less valid.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
There have been recent studies that seem to identify the actual cause. There were several recent reports that suggest a connection between essential fatty acids and autism. In particular, the studies suggest that autism is the result of either a nutritional deficiency when it comes to essential fatty acids or a failure of the body to properly metabolize essential fatty acids. Initial studies have shown a marked improvement in symptons of autism from giving autistic children supplements of essential fatty acids. This is the first line of research suggesting a cause of autism that makes sense to me.
When you consider our society's recent fad toward low fat diets, if a deficiency of fatty acids is the cause of autism, it would explain the increase in autism recently (although some of that increase can also be explained by the increased range of symptoms being diagnosed as autistic). This would be especially true if autism is caused by a failure of the body to properly metabolize fatty acids. A diet that might be perfectly fine for one child, may cause problems in another child that does not process fatty acids as efficiently.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I advocate yanking their kids out of school. No vaccination, by choice? Get the hell away from my kids. Herd immunity can probably take care of the vanishingly small number of kids who can't have the vaccine for whatever medical reason.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Your reply is perfect, but I feel that you missed an opportunity for hilarious irony.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Penn & Teller did a great segment on their show 'Bullshit' about the idiocy of not getting your kids vaccinated.
Youtube link (contains swearing and open comments)
If you smoke after sex, you're doing it too fast.
Heh, I had the same thought just after I hit post.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Ha! It works the other way around too. I never was vaccinated against hepatitis B and now they tell me I have antibodies against it . Suck on that, science ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Then see if more people die from Polio, Measles, etc or Malaria (30 million and counting due to DDT ban in Africa)
Jenny McCarthy vs Rachel Carson: who is the bigger boob?
They need to be told, clearly and unequivocally, what's the recommended thing to do in issues involving science/medicine/etc
Well, they have been. They've been told that vaccines are harmful, and they shouldn't give them to their kids. If we had an educated population used to questioning things and doing research themselves, then ignorant demagogues wouldn't be able to get such traction.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
So you're arguing not to use soap?
The fact is that vaccination programs have been, by any measure, among the most successful public health initiatives ever. Illnesses like polio, measles and smallpox caused untold misery and death, and were major contributors to infant and child mortality rates (which were huge before the end of the 19th century). People today, living in the comfort provided by over a century of public vaccination programs, simply do not understand this. And this garbage about vaccines causing allergies, or whatever it is you're trying to say, even if it were so, would still not be an argument vaccinations. Vaccines, like all medical procedures, carry inherent risks, but the benefits of wide-scale vaccination programs is so large that it outweighs what ultimately are a few relatively infrequent serious side-effects.
Oh, and your whole post reads like yet another idiot who comes up with a pet theory while drinking beers in the backyard with his friends. "Say, y'know Tom, I bet that MMR causes allergies. Little Billy got the MMR vaccine, and now he sneezes all the time."
Look up the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
you sure you aren't thinking about.chicken pox parties?
I hate the knee jerk reaction that somehow Big Pharma is pushing vaccinations on the unwashed masses with help from the government. Most vaccinations are unprofitable especially with the risk of adverse events factored in. Companies would much rather you get sick and need treatment because a one-time shot doesn't make a lot of money. In fact, the government has to specifically create a liability fund to get companies to make vaccines for public use.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
If I can do a small part to save over a hundred thousand kids from death each year by inoculating my kids, then I feel that is worth risking the consequences of your completely unsubstantiated theory about negative immune system effects.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
You're gonna get flamed and deservedl because you're spouting a bunch of rambling bullshit.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I'll play devil's advocate here (my kids have received only the required vaccinations by the way).
First, the species itself grows stronger when it develops natural resistance instead of artificial. Call it keeping the gene pool robust.
Second, assuming the drug companies will continue to selflessly (cough cough) produce vaccinations for the good of mankind, and lobbying to make them mandatory, how many vaccinations do you think will be necessary to attend school a hundred years from now?
Tragedy of the commons at work?
"I don't need to vaccinate because of herd immunity" is pretty damn close to "I can keep grazing my animals on this little plot of public land"... eventually, the whole thing breaks down, and you have *no* grass for your animals -- or immunity in society.
To follow everyone's argument, It's also natural selection for those who die because they cannot handle the immunity. I think what people really want to say is
"dumb people should just die", but instead say "darwin"
How is this modded 5 insightful? Mods, just because someone says "I'm going to get flamed for this" doesn't mean that the person is brave or insightful.
Yes. Vaccines strengthen the immune system. Lack of exposure to the environment increases allergy rates. Vaccines should lower it. Unless you have some kind of evidence supporting your crazy position.
1. Immunity is passed through breast milk from mother to child. This is what your are thinking about. .3% chance of DYING.
2. It sounds to me like you are suggesting letting people get Measels. This is a preposterous position. If people are worried about a tiny chance of getting Autism, they are going to rationally be VERY concerned about a
The more (controlled) exposure to nasties people get, the stronger their immune system, and the less allergic reactions they should have. Vaccines do this. People's responses aren't knee jerk, they are well motivated.
The greatest generation were tough as leather with great big balls of steel, because they hadn't invented titanium yet. The eventually got off their asses and smashed the Nazis, rebuilt the world from the ashes of global war, made said Nazis put a man on the moon for us and ground communism into dust.
Fuckin' boomers, drained out social safety nets by refusing to adjust to demographic realities, lost two wars to a bunch of rice-eaters, ruined the economy repeatedly, shut down useful investment for future generations, turned their back on our manifest destiny to conquer space, engendered an society where entertainers are ludicrously compensated while teachers are vilified for taking crumbs from the mouths of millionaires and started the slide into a new dark ages by embracing ideology over facts and science.
The baby boomer generation is the greatest generation's GREATEST FAILURE.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
But I think there needs to be serious discussion into taking children away from parents who refuse to get them vaccinated.
Endangering your own child is bad enough, but when you start affecting the herd immunity of everyone else because of your scientific ignorance, something needs to be done.
Yes, and letting the weak die off would make the species stronger too - but we don't do it. Modern medicine is used to keep people from dying, and yes, this has adverse effects on the gene pool, but it's better than the alternative.
As to your second point, probably lots - but that isn't a problem in itself - we have to continue to carefully check and control the vaccinations that are mandated to ensure they don't become pointless or excessive.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
But so much of what we do is because of some talking head on TV!
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
Heh. I know. That was the whole joke. You know, in case the multiple winking smilies didn't make it bleeding obvious.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I'll call your idea what it is: Eugenics........
Of course he's responsible. It's the same mechanism as not educating your children not to look left and right before crossing the street with the argument:
"You don't need to check for cars, the drivers of the cars will do that for you!"
I think one of the problems is that vaccinations are *too* successful. Parents today (and that includes me and my wife) have never seen the ravages of Measles, Whooping Cough, Polio and the like. We have it easy because we were vaccinated when we were young. Then someone claims vaccines cause bad, scary things which plants doubt in their minds so they do a risk evaluation in their head. They know autism is bad. They probably have seen someone with autism. They have probably never seen someone with measles or whooping cough, though. Their brain tries to come up with a "bad disease" and they think of the flu. So would a lifetime of autism be worse than a week of fever and coughing? Sure. So skip the vaccines.
Problem is that their risk assessment is highly flawed. If they knew the real risks of the diseases, they'd know that this isn't "fever and coughing for a week" but coughing until you get broken ribs, hospitalization, paralysis, blindness, and death (to name a few things the diseases can cause). And these are far more common than any hypothetical vaccine-autism link. I'd much rather have my child turn out to be autistic than turn out to be dead. (As my younger son goes in for 2 vaccines today.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Damn. strike the second "not"
You sir, are a danger to the public.
What the hell kind of troubled people modded this up?
Our pediatrician is very much a no-nonsense sort of guy. Whenever the medical terror of the week like MERSA or Bird Flu is on the news he is a very nice counter to all the hysteria.
That said he is a firm believer in vaccinations. As he puts it, "If you ever see even one kid with meningitis it will make you run to get your kids vaccinated.".
Is it 100%? No. Are they foolproof? No! Will it greatly reduce the odds that my kids will need to suffer with some nasty disease? Yes.
By putting out mis-information like this you are part of the reason for the large number of deaths from measels. From the WHO.
You clearly did not read the nature article as this is in no way a strawman. They did not just look at the relation between vaccines and MMR, but about negative effects of vaccines.
They found
We looked very hard and found very little evidence of serious adverse harms from vaccines
Stop putting out your own knee-jerk reactions and at least read the article you are criticising before putting out dangerous misinformation.
Note that I mentioned "the West". For measles death rates in the USA see http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2654:united-states-disease-death-rates&catid=55:united-states-deaths-from-diseases&Itemid=55 ... (I assume similar rates in western Europe), note that the rate has pretty well flat-lined since the 1950s. Didn't you realise the point of your third list item "More than 95% of measles deaths occur in low-income countries with weak health infrastructures". Sure, if you have an inadequate diet and crap housing, then measles vaccination probably is a good bet. But otherwise?
Anyway, you are latching on to measles. Check http://www.vaclib.org/basic/japanusa.htm ... "when Japan raised its minimum vaccination age to two years in 1975 the overall infant mortality rate improved"
Oh, and in response to I'm so concerned about allergies that I'm willing to risk the death or serious illness of my child and many of the vulnerable children around him; I'm a fuckshit!! .... I have personally been hospitalised with Asthma, which in my case was 100% definitely allergic. Your concerns are indeed your concerns, but I object to my concerns being dismissed as those of a fuckshit.
You pull Walter Hadwen to the limelight as the speaker against vaccination? Someone who lived a century ago, rejected the germ theory and was a member of the Plymouth Brethren (read their member list, it's quite ... scary)?
Yeah, that's a reference. I'm so convinced now.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The use of anti-bacterial soap has been linked with reduction of a persons immune system's ability to cope with infections, etc..
Reason being, using things like anti-bacterial soap prevents your body from being exposed to them, so they don't fight them, and put away the defenses needed for them.
By all means, use soap, just not antibacterial soap.
All the points you raise are worth looking into. But at the same time, I am pretty sure that these have all been looked into over the last half century, and continue to be researched today. If there was something there to outweigh the epidemiologic benefits, I'm pretty sure we would have discovered it by now. The benefits of vaccinating a population are clear and dramatic. If there were equally dramatic downsides, they would have been seen by now. Perhaps I am simply being naive, but I accept the opinion of the entire public health and medical community when they say that the overall benefits of widespread childhood vaccination vastly outweigh the risks.
There is no safety, in either decision. There's also a nonzero chance that if I go out today I'll get killed in a freak accident (that's also the reason why I'm against the death penalty, there's a nonzero chance that it might be applied to me, whether I did something or not).
What matters is, what is more dangerous? How high are the chances to die from the vaccination, and how high are the chances to die from the disease that it inoculates against?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
lol, the fact that many diseases were eradicated is a fraud?
I'm sorry if I haven't offended anyone
Every single person who intentionally refuses to get their child vaccinated deserves the death penalty for perpetrating what amounts to biological warfare.
Either take the kids away from the parents, or force the family to live in isolation. Stupidity is NOT a right.
That's more our outrage-driven media environment, where telling someone they're incorrect is disrespectful to their opinions and culture.
Oh, fuck it. It's mostly the right-wing nutzoids who are driving this problem -- their insistence that "both sides" of every story include the ignorant, stupid, wrong opinion so that they can teach Creationism and Abstience-only sex education. It's not hard to figure out who the fucking problem is.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Referenced in an other reply above: http://www.healthsentinel.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2654:united-states-disease-death-rates&catid=55:united-states-deaths-from-diseases&Itemid=55 .... note that almost the entire drop occurs *before* mass multiple vaccination. Public vaccination may have been around for over a century; mass multiple vaccination has not. My point was that we *may* have reached the point where the costs of "improved health" outweigh the benefits.
My views - not a pet theory - is based on reading, discussions with my wife (a biologist with experience in immune research), and logical deduction. I'm quite aware that correlation does not imply causation. But, hey, why bother with rational argument when you can fling out a few ill-thought-out points and a bunch of insults.
At the risk of asking a stupid question, who exactly are they catching measles from if the majority of the population is, and has been for a long time, vaccinated?
That is an unfortunate load of bullshit. I love how you fly so far into outer fucking space with your speculation that you forgot to bring your facts.
Please put a sock in it. Your opinion is not revealing anything but your own ignorance.
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
No it isn't. Its the same argument as this thouught experiment.
Its the same argument as me saying you are denying me my livelihood, that you are responsible for my poverty by buying my competitor's product instead of mine. And it is clearly fallicious.
The Admin and the Engineer
Its a nice change
Usually the US have an abysmally stupid meme and a few years later we in the UK tag along blindly making the same mistakes and/or doing the same useless actions. ( the doctor who originally did the 'study' has been struck off for a number of reasons to do with the flawed study )
Just for once its interesting, if a bit tragic, to see the boot on the other foot.
Nope, that's not it at all. You're trying to convince someone that some kind of life-saving procedure is dangerous. Thus if you actually succeed at convincing and the person actually dies due to the lack of said life-saving procedure, you're at least partially responsible for the outcome.
That's not rocket science. It's the same with salesmen convincing someone to buy the latest and greatest which later turns out to be a turd.
It's the same with scammers who convince someone to give them money in exchange for something which turns out to be nothing.
And so on.
You could argue about the degree of responsibility. But responsible you are. You do something and as a result something else happens (or does not happen). That automatically makes you responsible for the outcome.
Don't mistake that for the legal definition of "responsibility".
Umm - allergies can be deadly too. And they can affect people for a whole lot longer than most cases of measles or mumps will. Speaking as someone who had problems with allergies - I would much rather go through having measles or mumps (especially with the modern health care system and the available interventions behind me) and not have to stress every time I try to eat anything that I haven't prepared myself. I agree with the grandparent - how many children have serious repercussions form the chicken pox but it is now becoming a required vaccine? What are the trade offs of vaccinating against diseases that are generally not life threatening? Why is that people feel threatened by asking that research be done on these topics?
And as to the whole vulnerable children around him - just because your child is vaccinated doesn't mean he couldn't be exposed to and spread the germs for the disease to those kids, it just makes it less likely he will get sick from them.
Seems to highlight locations of reported places (when you search): http://healthmap.org/en/
I'm old enough to remember measle parties, clearly people in the 50s and 60s (in the West anyway) were not very worried about it. It was something your kids got, and the sooner the better. Why is measles becoming more serious?
It's not. In the 50s and 60s, it killed thousands of people. True, that was a tiny percentage of those who got it, but that didn't make those who died any less dead.
Then we effectively eliminated measles, with vaccines.
Now, idiots like yourselves who lack a basic understanding of statistics are balancing the known, proven life-saving benefits of vaccines against some nebulous, unproven side effects, the mechanism of which is only suggested about with weasel words like "plausible."
So now people are starting to die again, just like in the 50s and 60s. Measurable, provable numbers of bodies are being put in the ground, for well-understood and preventable causes.
Yes, it's "plausible" that vaccines have some extremely rare, unknown, unproven side effects. It's also proven that vaccines save lives. Anyone with half a brain chooses the smaller danger.
EOM
I don't see any mention of the Jenny McCarthy body count yet. It's a well sourced web-site on the topic.
Have some more chicken nuggets, or how about you sit in the car while I smoke, or maybe lets go out in the sun without sunscreen. But NO WAY IN HELL are you getting vaccinated! People who continue to believe this false connection between autism and vaccines make me sick and I tell them so! No way do I want my son to get these virus. Hell I got chicken-poks (sp) and they weren't that bad, but since there is a vaccine for them, then I am all for it. No sense in causing suffering, or a possible epidemic spreading across a population!
IANA M.D., but it seems to me that when people around your are actually DYING from serious illnesses like cholera, scarlet fever, small pox and many, many more, the medical professionals (who were not in any way gathering statistical information in the 1800s) would tend to disregard all instances of allergies as imagined illnesses. Actual life threatening epidemics sweeping the country EVERY YEAR have a way of sharpening the focus of those who deal human suffering. Are allergy rates rising? Sure, why not. I'd like to see your stats but I'm flexible on this. Are allergy rates higher than in the 1800s? Who knows. There aren't any stats.
Please don't state your OPINIONS as facts. That's what started this mess in the first place.
I am also old enough to remember chicken pox 'parties' where stupid parents would force their perfectly healthy children to 'go play' with fever-ridden children in horrible itchy agony. I bet you never actually contracted measles or chicken pox from one of those 'parties'.
Again, please bring me the stats on the number of people per year who don't 'survive' multiple vaccine injections. I'm curious as to what that would be. Do you think it would be higher or lower than the number of people killed in car accidents each year, or killed by lightning, or killed in trout-fishing accidents, or suffocated by eating too many marshmallows. My lord, lets outlaw Campfire Marshmallows in that case. Talk about your knee-jerk reactions.
Oh, and by the way, I have this for you about Rubella from Wikipedia:
"During the epidemic in the US between 1962–1965, Rubella virus infections during pregnancy were estimated to have caused 30,000 still births and 20,000 children to be born impaired or disabled as a result of CRS (congenital rubella syndrome)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella
Thank you but I for one respect life and want everyone to have a fair chance of being born WITHOUT PREVENTABLE BIRTH DEFECTS. Obviously you feel differently and that's your right.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
How many people in the US that have gotten measles were vaccinated? It's funny that fact is missing from most news articles. It's also interesting that the MMR vaccination was banned in Europe due to adverse reactions, yet the US media is now using fear based headlines to sell more vaccinations. Logic and science aren't even part of the headlines or articles. A parent's choice: Give your kid the vaccination and accept a statistical 2% chance of an adverse reaction that may leave your child disabled, retarded, or simply a little slow. This vaccination has a 65% chance of preventing the type measles the drug company decided was most common 30 years ago. Or skip the vaccination and depend on basic hygiene and decent medicine to handle things. Our pediatrician said she could make $100,000 a year extra if she pushed vaccines like most doctors. She decided to not do that.
I am puzzled as to why if the shots are to prevent the spread of what they claim to protect agaist they why do you care if I give shots to my kid(s) or not. If you have then the shots and your kids have all the shots and they work as well as claimed then you are safe and it is my and my kids that run the risk.
The medical groups and the pharma groups are not helping when for years they kept telling us that the stuff in the shots was OK, and that it was safe. Yes some of the shots in many places have these takin out but what has replaced them. They still need the shots to last a longer time on the shelf so we must put stuff in to help that out. It is better to get you meds out of a single dose vial as it has less of teh extra crap in it, but does your doc give you a choice or worse even know. How many even ask to read the paper insert that is with each shot?
When we had our little girl it took the hospital over 3 days to get us the info on the vitiam K shot. This is in the US in a large city at a place that sends somes of the most early newborns in the area.
Has you seen the lawsuites aginst the drug companies if the law suite is a claim that the shot cause Autisum the case is not going to win, but if the case is files as this shot cased perment nero damage to my child the case has a butter the 50% chance to win, and with a large pay out?
We have read the book noted here and others, and even some that are giving a hard line for shots, and then talk about giving fewer shots to their own kids.
IF the shots are not the cause of autism and I am not sure if they are or are not. If you have 3 kids that you gave shots to and they all got it, and then fourht 4th child arrives are you still going to give that child shots?
I personal have a hard time beliving the lines from the drug company and the medical groups as they all have money to make on this matter.
If the shots were sooo good why whould my first son gotten rotavirus, he had 3 of the shots, then 2 years later got rotavirus. Then his Doc told us well the shots are only 70% if you get all three.
This is not a black and white issue as many would like it to be and with many of us being in the tech area this may be harder get.
This is one topic that no matter which way you go you do not have a re-do. If you give you kids all the shots and you see the signs of autisum it is too late, you can not undo what has been done. From first had I can say I really would not want to have anyone with autisum, but is is real it is out there, our kids look norrmal. You see our kids and you think that we are the bad mom and dad that can not control our kid(s). Until you are in our shoes, do not judge.
how many children have serious repercussions form the chicken pox
Plenty of them, well into their adult life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shingles#Prognosis
Dead virus??? Measle = morbillo in italian?
All my generation (I'm 43) had the measles here in Italy ??????
Now I'm not informed but I think that it is a quite common disease.
What is causing all the BS is the flu vaccinations. Typically there is a big chance they do fsck all. Also unless you are really old, young, or sick your chances of dying of the flu are pretty minimal.
While real vaccinations are important, do work, and protect you from stuff which can kill much more easily.
Add to the fact on the order of magnitude of which vaccinations are administered, there will always be a chance of complications or death, even if it only effects a very small percentage of the population as a whole.
I remember when meningitis was going around, my mom couldn't get me vaccinated fast enough!
So I think a lot of the public perception is being caused by these annual flu vaccinations (regardless of wacky autistic science papers). The worst part for me, is that most of these important shots are given when you are child and can't make the decisions yourself, and have to depend on having sane parents...
> No vaccination, by choice? Get the hell away from my kids.
What about if there's a measles case in too-young-to-immunized kids around them they should be held responsible. I mean - if you choose to be a danger to society you should not be part of it.
First have the Georgia Guidestones dismantled (and academics who urge a population reduction hanged), and then conspirationists may have to rethink their stands.
In the meanwhile, that US-erected monument, and the wealthy people who comissioned it are one of the source for those "crazy nutjobs conspirationnists".
If you think there can be no conspiration by Big Pharma to raise their profit while ignoring the dangers to the public, pass a law stating that their board of directors are penally responsible for doctored reports (instead of the present situation : collective shareholders footing some insignificant bills). It all boils down to who can be milked for profit while friendly lawmakers look purposedly away.
That would be called Economic Darwinism.
This may be an issue of first principles and ignorance, but I have to support their /right/ to do this.
As a society, we've gone way overboard with the "don't risk my life" and taken it to ridiculous extremes. I'd propose the bill of no rights.
* You do not have the right to be unconditionally safe and secure--in particular where such safety requires an action and payment on my part.
* You do not have the right to to vote to take the rights from others (internal contradiction already, a sure sign I'm doing this right)
* You do not have the right to inflict harm on another, save in immediate defense of self or others. Not imminent, not probable, not "statistically certain in the limit" -- immediate.
These ideals are things people are not comfortable with. It is natural to act to promote our own safety in the face of real and perceived threats, and even to direct aggressive (kinetic ? ) energy at things which cause them. Tough. Shit. Part of functioning in a civil, modern society is recognizing that not only do we have differences, but that we promote the ideals of speech, logic, education and choice over violence. It means you avoid resorting to violence yourself, or through the ultimately lethal force threatened by exercise of law. It means you don't coerce, intimidate, blackmail or resort to argument by appeal to power of authority. In short, those are the ideals of civil society.
But the bottom line is... many don't give a damn about civil society if injustice helps them.
Let's appeal to reality--for every new action, injection, whatever...that you require--There's /always/ going to be idiots who doubt it, and there's going to be (idiots? ) who refuse if only to attempt to prove to themselves that they still have a choice. If you prove them right that there is no choice, we'll just make it worse for everyone. There's going to be stubborn people. There's going to be people who abuse it. And while your system of mandated whatever might make it better for a bit, it will just obfuscate the problem and make it impossible to discuss scientifically.
Once that happens, you can't measure it, take metrics, or analyze the success of your education... you can only continue charging down the same path and hope the inevitably required course deviation doesn't destroy you when it comes, all while accelerating your program faster and faster to chase that vanishing Pareto curve your crap measurements are finding for you. Because there's always going to be a threat of the next epidemic, pandemic, typhoon, or plutonium laden asteroid... and there's always going to be a way to mitigate it at a cost people prefer to place upon others.
Establishing an optimal system requires one of two things:
1) Eliminate the cheaters, and then build an optimal system
2) Disincentivize cheating, and maintain a system still optimal in the face of expected cheating.
Yea, you.
When I was a child I had mumps, measles, chicken pox, rubella and an assortment of other such minor illnesses. In fact when a local kid got something new all the local kids used to be sent round for a party so that we'd all get the disease. I also played out in the dirt and would visit a local farm regularly. Vaccinations were a rarity and were for things like Polio.
So now at the tender age of 45 my immune system is quite frankly as "hard as nails". I never get colds, I never get flu, I'm not allergic to anything. I do not have asthma or any breathing problems (despite smoking for twenty years)
Recently I also got bitten by an insect (probably a horsefly) which gave me a really nasty leg infection and caused me to actually go to the doctor due to my calf swelling up severely (6cm wider than the other) and turning red.. I was prescribed some antibiotics and was asked to come back in three days to see how things were. The doctor was quite suprised to see that the infection was almost gone (but I did finish the antibiotics as per instructions)
Quite frankly a lot of vaccinations are simply not required. Polio, Small Pox and their ilk yes. Mumps, measles, chicken pox, etc. no.
The vaccination "industry" is now, like most medical practice, mostly a con to make "big pharma" money.
Furthermore who knows exactly what is in your vaccination ?
href ="http://www.naturalnews.com/025760.html"
Or, a virus that we commonly immunize against becomes prevalent enough in the population that it can mutate into a form for which there is no vaccine.
God is imaginary
Nope, that's not it at all. You're trying to convince someone that some kind of life-saving procedure is dangerous. Thus if you actually succeed at convincing and the person actually dies due to the lack of said life-saving procedure, you're at least partially responsible for the outcome.
First of all, I'M not arguing against vaccinations. I am arguing that there is no moral imperative to get vaccinated, and it is silly to waste time trying to guilt people into vaccinations when THERE IS SCIENCE to serve the rational argument. Secondly, If SCIENCE tells you that you are sick and need medicine, and some non-expert tells you something different, and you listen to the fool, the fool is not responsible for your actions. Not even a little bit. Ultimately, you are responsible for your decisions and your actions. If the fool was your boss, or your commander, and ordered you, or held you at gunpoint and you were obligated to follow... only then can you begin passing blame around.
The Admin and the Engineer
I see no rebuttals still of anything Dr Hadwen said... Did you bother to READ what he said? Of course not - you're all a bunch of sheep who stick with whatever the TV tells you, thinking you're 'safe'...
"Everybody else believes it, so it must be true"...
I'm still waiting for you all to show me the PERCENTAGE of those infected who had been 'vaccinated'...
Why can't you do that? Why are those figures so hard to find?
"the fact that many diseases were eradicated is a fraud?"
You obviously didn't bother to read the Dr Hadwen talks, did you, where he clearly explains how the incidence of TB was reduced by SANITATION, and INCREASED by 'vaccination'.
Yet that doesn't bother you, because you aren't interested in truth, you're interested in hiding behind everybody else, as if that makes you right...
WHAT PERCENTAGE OF THOSE INFECTED HAD BEEN 'VACCINATED'?
I don't see why there's such a big screaming panic about a disease that gives you spots and a bit of a temperature, and a couple of days off school...
Because for about two per thousand cases, it causes meningitis which kills about half of the affected patients, leaving many of the survivors brain damaged for life. For quite a few who don't get meningitis, it causes blindness and deafness (measles was the #1 cause of both in the 50s.) Because it causes pneumonia of the "hospitalized for days" variety in up to 30% of cases (and before oxygen therapy, IV fluids, and antibiotics killed about 10% of patients.)
I had measles before there were vaccines for it. All I have to do is mention measles to get my mother worked up -- she remembers spending a couple of weeks terrified for me, because she grew up before those treatments and even in a small town in rural Illinois she knew families who had children die of it and others who were handicapped for life.
Talk to people from India about measles, or any of the other vaccine-preventable diseases. You won't find any of them who will tell you those diseases are no big deal, because they know them. In the USA, we've mostly forgotten how bad they are. Thanks to vaccines.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Wait, and this isn't Darwinism at work either?
Actually, the people most at risk are those who cannot be vaccinated: the very young, and those with weak immune systems.
I never really looked at it that way. I suppose eventually evolution will select against the "youth" trait and nobody will suffer from it any more.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Also, in places where the mercury containing ingredient was removed, the autism rate did not go down
You're missing the best part of that: the MMR never did have any mercury in it.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
While you're technically correct (the best kind of correct!), you're also rather myopic.
People are thinking about their kid. Suppose, as they did in your P&T show, that vaccinations really do cause autism. Yes, the diseases are worse, but what happens if your kid, not someone else's kid, does get it from the vaccine? Current estimates on raising an autistic kid peg the price tag at around 5 million dollars. I make a very high income, relatively and even with pretty standard insurance and the school system kicking in some minor therapy (the real kind, not the BS kind) you can easily spend over a thousand a month.
So in our libertarian fantasy, all for oneself, bullshit society, you're asking people to do something unselfish with a perceived (real or not, it is a fact that many perceive it) high cost and maybe small benefit to them but big for society (socialism); but should they get unlucky, it's "fuck you, deal with it sucker". You can't have it both ways, if you want to socialize the risk you need to socialize the costs for the unlucky ones (again, we're speaking hypothetically, but this will be generally true in any similar situation where there's a perceived risk directly to one's own welfare, but the majority of the benefit is perceived to go to society).
I can tell you, autism is rough when it's in your family, even excluding financial costs. You don't have to spend very much time around parents of autistic children to become scared shitless of that happening to one of your kids.
I heard a doctor on NPR say that if you want to know where the people who aren't getting vaccines are do the following:
-Find a Whole Foods
-draw a 10 mile radius around it (it was either 10 or 20, so I'll go with 10)
He was completely serious.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
We mentioned that we'd skipped MMR and the doctor confirmed that the single vaccines give a higher level of protection.
Find another pediatrician. The one you have is at best incompetent and at worst a quack.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Getting measles = potential death.
Measles kills about 600,000 kids a year.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Measles outbreaks have been reported in Mexico this century
The USA has had several measles outbreaks not only this century but in the past year. Oh.
All of the outbreaks have been traced to unvaccinated travelers to Europe, in particular Switzerland. (Not a big source of brown-skinned immigrants, by the way.)
Mexico has an extremely thorough measles vaccination program and treats outbreaks far more aggressively than the USA does.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
...at least locally, we have a number of Hmong and Somali immigrants (quick, guess which US city!) who for various reasons refuse to be vaccinated - cultural, religious, etc. that have nothing to do with the autism nonsense.
-Styopa
1. Immunity is passed through breast milk from mother to child. This is what your are thinking about.
No, it wasn't. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immunity_(medical) and search for "placenta". There is an open question (unless someone can point me to some studies) whether vaccine induced immunity results in passive immunity as well as infection induced immunity. This should be testable with the current population in the UK. So far as I'm aware, it hasn't.
2. It sounds to me like you are suggesting letting people get Measles. This is a preposterous position.
Where exactly did I say that? I am suggesting that measles is not - and in the west in say the 50s and 60s was not - the killer it is portrayed as. My preference would be to drop multiple vaccines; to vaccinate for measles later that the current 12-15 months; and to vaccinate against mumps and rubella later as needed based on an antibody test.
These figures are extremely easy to find.
Take, for example, polio. The Salk clinical trials tested 401,974 patients, splitting them into two groups (vaccine or placebo).
57 people who had the vaccine out of 200,745 got polio.
142 people who had the placebo out of 201,229 got polio.
Run any statistic you want on these data (my favorite is the chi-square = 36.12; off the deep end of significance) - clearly the polio vaccine dramatically decreased the incidence of the disease.
Hilarious. You do realise that Jenner came up with his FRAUD of 'vaccination' a HUNDRED YEARS before Dr Hadwen gave those speeches? So, according to your 'logic', Jenner's ideas must be discounted even more! You idiot...
"you do realise that this is basically nonsense?"
What a convincing rebuttal.
Isn't it strange that nobody in the entire world has bothered to rebutt anything Dr Hadwen said. Why is that? Don't tell me - it's just 'so crazy' that nobody needs to? How 'scientific' of you...
Smallpox vaccine failure:
http://www.whale.to/vaccine/smallpox3.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1FkOj1nJWk
Still, who needs to worry about FACTS when you can all hide behind the "Everybody else believes it, the TV told me so" excuse...
Although other forms of allergic disease were described in antiquity, hay fever is surprisingly modern. Very rare descriptions can be traced back to Islamic texts of the 9th century and European texts of the 16th century. It was only in the early 19th century that the disease was carefully described and at that time was regarded as most unusual. By the end of the 19th century it had become commonplace in both Europe and North America. This paper attempts to chart the growth of hay fever through the medical literature of the 19th century. It is hoped that an understanding of the increase in prevalence between 1820 and 1900 may provide an insight for modern researchers and give some clues into possible reasons for the epidemic nature of the disease today.
Everybody conveniently forgets that measles vaccine is no longer available in the US. I used to be available up until two years ago. Which is why we see this resurgence of measles.
When I say measles vaccine, I don't mean MMR. I mean measles vaccine by itself.
IANA M.D., but it seems to me that when people around your are actually DYING from serious illnesses like cholera, scarlet fever, small pox and many, many more, the medical professionals (who were not in any way gathering statistical information in the 1800s) would tend to disregard all instances of allergies as imagined illnesses. Actual life threatening epidemics sweeping the country EVERY YEAR have a way of sharpening the focus of those who deal human suffering. Are allergy rates rising? Sure, why not. I'd like to see your stats but I'm flexible on this. Are allergy rates higher than in the 1800s? Who knows. There aren't any stats.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1365-2222.1988.tb02872.x/abstract "It was only in the early 19th century that the disease was carefully described and at that time was regarded as most unusual"
Please don't state your OPINIONS as facts. That's what started this mess in the first place.
I am also old enough to remember chicken pox 'parties' where stupid parents would force their perfectly healthy children to 'go play' with fever-ridden children in horrible itchy agony. I bet you never actually contracted measles or chicken pox from one of those 'parties'
Pre-vaccination, chicken pox and measles are far better as a child than later in life. I don't know whether I got them at a party or elsewhere, but neither chicken pox nor measles were "horrible itchy agony". Maybe they were for some, but don't misrepresent on groups experience for everybodies.
Again, please bring me the stats on the number of people per year who don't 'survive' multiple vaccine injections. I'm curious as to what that would be. Do you think it would be higher or lower than the number of people killed in car accidents each year, or killed by lightning, or killed in trout-fishing accidents, or suffocated by eating too many marshmallows. My lord, lets outlaw Campfire Marshmallows in that case.
No idea, and I have no need of those figures. My question - for what its worth, since you don't seem to be able to read my posts - is what are the negative effects; and I don't mean autism, I mean auto-immune problems in general, such as allergies (which also kill).
Talk about your knee-jerk reactions.
Oh, and by the way, I have this for you about Rubella from Wikipedia: "During the epidemic in the US between 1962–1965, Rubella virus infections during pregnancy were estimated to have caused 30,000 still births and 20,000 children to be born impaired or disabled as a result of CRS (congenital rubella syndrome)." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubella Thank you but I for one respect life and want everyone to have a fair chance of being born WITHOUT PREVENTABLE BIRTH DEFECTS. Obviously you feel differently and that's your right.
No, I don't feel differently. Test girls for rubella antibodies pre-puberty and then vaccinate as needed; there is no need for this blanket forced medication.
unfortunately because there are no real medical trials with vaccines, effectiveness is not tested in a scientifically valid way the way that pharmaceuticals are.
When testing is done in such a way that is scientifically valid and the claims made by producers can be analyzed in earnest, then the general public will be better equipped to make good decisions regarding vaccinations as a whole and individually.
When you can see the numbers... how many inoculated get infected with the disease they were inoculated against, how many not inoculated get infected, how many inoculated suffer from xyz (autism, immune problems, neuro problems death, etc) , how many not inoculated suffer from same etc etc... when you can see these numbers, people will have a clearer picture of the risks and rewards of vaccination.
The question then, is why hasn't this been done and made public?
Making the species stronger shouldn't be a goal of public policy. If doing that is really important, though, I can think of plenty of absolutely horrifying ways to do it. You'll want to put me up against the wall after I do that, but my own policies will probably put me up against that wall myself. :-)
That is where we go wrong. If vaccines weren't mandatory then people would see this as a situation where one needs to make a rational decision. That doesn't mean people would get it right, but they would feel the weight of the responsibility.
If everything that happens to be a good idea is forcefully required, then thinking becomes a bad idea, because all you can ever hope to get out of it, is trouble.
And we wonder why people are being stupid about vaccines?
BTW, I "get" the arguments in favor of mandatory vaccines. Yes, it affects more people than just who is being vaccinated. Yes, there's a multiplying effect. It doesn't matter. Those are performance issues, and performance issues are secondary to things like liberty. Being against mandatory vaccines isn't the same as being against vaccines; it's about creating a situation where people want vaccines (and want to do a thousand other smart things, and have the flexibility to change their mind about what's smart).
The kind of attitude that makes governments mandate vaccines is the same attitude that could get vaccines banned over some bullshit pseudo-science. Stick to what you know, government, and we can do the rest.
http://www.wwtdd.com/2011/08/jenny-mccarthy-is-still-an-idiot/
Bullshit. It's not sexist if that IS her only qualification. Seriously, Jenny McCarthy launched her career pretty much just on looking pretty naked in Playboy, and not much other qualifications. And frankly most of her career from then on revolved around being a sex symbol, including repeated working for Playboy in various roles. Her appearances in movies also have more to do with being a sex symbol than any kind of great acting talent, and it's doubtful she'd even be there at all if her husband didn't help launch her in that line of work.
But be as it may, being a sex symbol IS her only qualification. There is nothing sexist in noticing that. Nobody said that all women should stick to showing their tits, but merely that Jenny McCarthy should stick to showing her tits. Because objectively that's the only thing she ever showed any aptitude at.
Her attempt at sounding smart about anything else, from parenting to medicine have shown her to be someone surrealistically stupid and delusional. And quite dangerously so, for both her child and everyone stupid enough to listen to medical advice from someone whose only qualification is being a sex symbol.
It's not just that she picked a cause as damaging as ruining herd immunity with her anti-vaxxer idiocy, but also pushed something as irresponsible as chelation as a treatment for autism. As in, in addition to possible lasting damage, botched chelation done by "alternative medicine" scammers against autism, has actually KILLED a number of preschool children.
I don't see anything sexist to tell Jenny McCarthy to get the fuck out of giving batshit-crazy medical advice and stick to the only thing she's competent at, namely showing her tits. Not because of any kind of gender generalization, but because she's Jenny McCarty, and frankly, objectively showing her tits is the only thing she didn't manage to fuck-up. Presumably because it doesn't involve much using that crazy and stupid brain of hers. If they ever make a bra that requires any thinking to operate, yeah, she'll probably botch getting out of that too, but in the meantime it's a safe enough thing for her to do.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How vaccines are made:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvQvz5uPPZk
Can you show me a website that clearly documents how vaccines are made? I wonder why not...
Here is a list of doctors that Merck wanted to silence:
http://dida.library.ucsf.edu/pdf/oxx02y10
Does that scare you? It should.
Because for about two per thousand cases, it causes meningitis which kills about half of the affected patients, leaving many of the survivors brain damaged for life. For quite a few who don't get meningitis, it causes blindness and deafness (measles was the #1 cause of both in the 50s.)
This suggests a few questions to me:
1) What is the rate of complications from the MMR immunization?
This link:
http://pediatrics.about.com/cs/immunizations/a/mmr_vis_2.htm
Suggests mild complications in 1 of 6 and death in 1 of 1,000,000.
2) If the odds of getting measles is less than 1 in 1000, and the most negative affects (death) are at 1 in 1000, then NOT getting the shot puts you at 1 in 1,000,000 chance of death. Just like getting the effing shot in the first place.
3) Why not let the measles run a little wild and see if "the market" or whoever can find some solutions to that. Make this a win-win-win.
To be sure, I am pro vaccination. But unlike Rick Perry, I am opposed to FORCED vaccination by the government.
Then there are diseases like chicken pox, a disease in which parents would go out of their way to ensure that their children got it at a young age. So to me it's no surprise that people are forgetting how bad some of these diseases can be when schools are requiring vaccination against freaking chicken pox before letting kids attend class.
Now it could be that chicken pox can be worse than what I know of it. I'm simply basing this on the fact that everyone I know went out of their way to ensure that their kids got chicken pox.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
What articles like these always fail to note is that kids are getting huge numbers of vaccines compared to their counterparts a generation ago. You don't take a baby in to get "a shot". Your baby is more likely to get six shots in one visit (3 in each thigh), and some of those shots might have multiple vaccines in them. Note that the combination vaccines aren't for the child's convenience, they're for the doctor's convenience (don't bring up the trauma of being poked; I'll poke my kid 20 times instead of two if it means protecting their cerebral development).
By the time a child is 2, they've had between 25 and 30 vaccinations, and they keep adding more to the list every year. Is it REALLY necessary to be vaccinated that many times at such a critical developmental stage? You can't postpone just a few of those vaccinations and boosters until the kid's brain has matured a little? Instead, all we get are breathless headlines about Measles and Whooping Cough "epidemics" (always with a careful avoidance of any sort of demographics associated with said epidemics) and then pundits calling parents "idiots" for wondering out loud whether it's all just gotten a little out of hand.
When they tell you that your infant needs a Hep B vaccine and 2 boosters (Hep B is contracted from "infected blood, sex, and needles", hepb.org), and no one in the family engages in any of that sort of behavior, that's not science talking, that's the maker of the Hep B vaccine talking. There needs to be an honest discussion about what is actually necessary, and what is bullying by Big Pharma.
Take your daughter in for her 18-month checkup and vaccinations, then watch her freak out and regress 6 months developmentally, and then find out that they RECALLED THE FUCKING EXPERIMENTAL VACCINE THEY INJECTED HER WITH (of course failing to mention it was experimental), and then tell me about why I shouldn't be a little paranoid.
If they are stupid enough to listen to a celebrity rather than a scientist they do not deserve their stupid genes to be passed on. Think of it as opt in eugenics.
Now it could be that chicken pox can be worse than what I know of it.
Yes, it can be. I know personally of cases where a child got pox blisters in the airway, for instance. The mortality rate isn't the same as measles (about 2/100K for healthy children), but on the other hand chicken pox (like all herpes infections) is forever. It's just that when it comes back at my age it's called "shingles."
Considering that, unlike measles, herpes zoster specifically infects the nervous system, it's hardly surprising that encephalitis is a common complication. That, plus pneumonia, are responsible for hospitalizing about one in fifty paediatric patients.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
It can be even worse.
Not exactly the same thing, but related, I have recently done the research to tell my Work's mailing list that a hoax someone had forwarded was a hoax. I was called "prepotent", because the person who spread the hoax was obviously a well meaning person, who sent the message because "he cares for us", and "it is not totally implausible, even if not true".
So people not only don't care about doing the research. They resent those who do.
Governments need to ban their stupid kids from schools and any public building unless they have the shot. If Jenny McCarthy doesn't like it she can get bent.
Companies would much rather you get sick and need treatment because a one-time shot doesn't make a lot of money.
Unless the one-time shot helps a patient live long enough to want the other drugs that the drug company sells, such as blood pressure medications, erectile dysfunction medications, and the like.
I don't see why there's such a big screaming panic about a disease that gives you spots and a bit of a temperature, and a couple of days off school...
Because for about two per thousand cases, it causes meningitis which kills about half of the affected patients, leaving many of the survivors brain damaged for life. For quite a few who don't get meningitis, it causes blindness and deafness (measles was the #1 cause of both in the 50s.) Because it causes pneumonia of the "hospitalized for days" variety in up to 30% of cases (and before oxygen therapy, IV fluids, and antibiotics killed about 10% of patients.)
Forgot to mention that catching this and other childhood diseases as an adult can also mean sterilization.
Personally...having seen too many of today's parents and their kids and what brats they are...that may not be such a bad conclusion. At least the gene pool will get some cleaning...some college girls will make some extra money from donating eggs and may have a better educated population. That is unless the most stupid ones are the ones to survive and have the kids.
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
"n. A lot of people are more concerned about lower-level negative immune system responses, such as increased allergy rates."
No it isn't. Please, link a good study.
"hay fever was virtually unknown before the mid-1800s"
as was cancer, but that doesn't mean it wasn't happening.
"were not very worried about it."
ah, NO. they where deeply concerned about it. measle parties where the best way to try to control and monitor it's effects. Parent were very worried, because most of them know at least 1 person that died, or ended up brain damaged in the hospital. They did the best thing they could; which is barbaric by today's standards.
"(between killing all but the healthiest or luckiest and weakened immune or damaged systems"
I don't think you know how the immune system or vaccines work. If not, please STFU until you study up.
" I'm not anti-vaccination per-se."
You are spreading bad information, fear, and ignorance,so like it or not, you are adding the the anti-vaccine crap.
" I am against the knee-jerk vaccinate against everything policy that governments and pharma push. "You don't like public health? Do you even know pharma makes almost no money from vaccines? Dr. office often loose money on vaccinations?
Of course not, that would require actual research into the issue.
You post is like saying :I am not a flat earther per-se, but ships should never leave the line of sight of the ocean because they will get attacked by giant squid.
Yes, you literally sound that ignorant to people who know this issue.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
would put your comment in the comment section...
There's a lot of misunderstanding about this whole vaccination process. People started refusing vaccines not because they vaccines themselves affected their children but because the mercury based preservatives in those vaccines did. The preservatives are added to multi-doze vaccines, which most of the vaccines manufacturer's have shifted their production, ending most of single doze lines because of much higher profit on multi-doze orders. There was a Rolling Stones article on this a while ago. http://www.autismcoach.com/Rolling%20Stone%20Autism%20Article.htm Contrary to USA, most European countries ended mercury based vaccines back in the 1970's. Now because of the massive outcry against mercury based preservatives, a lot of vaccines manufacturers have switched to aluminum based ones. But distrust is still there and the lack of single doze is only feeding that mistrust. Now before you go and say that I don't know what I'm talking about, I have 2 nephews and a niece that became autistic after being given vaccines with thimerisol based preservatives. Each was give multiple vaccines at once, as is often done nowadays and is actually recommended by FDA. Each shot contained enough mercury, that if that amount of mercury was spilled on the floor, it would require a hazmat to clean up. All the children were perfectly fine before that and were really smart and outgoing. This was about 18 years ago. Another thing to consider is that mercury does not leave the body, it accumulates over lifetime. The only way to remove it, is through some rather aggressive chemo-therapy, so can't be done to young kids. One of my nephews had the process performed on him when he was about 12 and he became much better but the family didn't have the money or the will to put him though several more that were needed to remove the remaining mercury. Now, not every child is going to have that reaction but you don't know until you try. So before you go a label these people as complete idiots, try to put yourself in their place...
" I am arguing that there is no moral imperative to get vaccinated"
And you are wrong.
Not getting vaccinnated harms OTHER PEOPLE. It reduces the herd immunity effect, and they are a vector for mutation. It hurt people who can't be vaccinated(allergies to the medicine) or whose vaccines didn't take.(combined its about 5% overall)
" the fool is not responsible for your actions. "
It is when the fool is presented as an expert, lies about the topic, and is given more air time then actual experts. Specifically, they share some of the responsibility.
" or held you at gunpoint and you were obligated to follow."
What a marvelously simple and stupid world you must live in to think people spreading bad information bear no responsibility for those lies.
Sure, I told him I packed his parachute, but I didn't hold a gun to his head to make him jump.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
health sentinel? HEALTH SENTINEL? are you fucking kidding me?
Here is proof we are visited by aliens:
http://atlantisbook.com/
I mean, it's a nice graph, too bad it measure per 100K and not per 1000. Nice manipulation to drowned out inconvient facts.
"... and logical deduction. "
I have yet to see any of that in any of your posts.
Here are the three top reason people are helthier:
Hand washing, flush toilets, and vaccines.
3 of every 1000 people with measles die. 1 in a hundred in third world countries.
If only there was a site known for it's rigor ,, oh wait:
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/whatifstop.htm#measles
"..*may* have reached the point where the costs of "improved health" outweigh the benefits."
We haven't, all the evidences point to you being wrong.
You are experiencing the GIGO effect.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
If building a natural immunity is more effective than a vaccine, then what's wrong with choosing the former over the latter for you and your family? There seems to be a lot of rhetoric here about 'natural selection', but that only proves the point that the healthier population will survive without vaccines, right? The philosophy that I have to vaccinate my child in order to protect another "weaker" child is the Disney-fication of medicine, ie playing to the lowest common denominator. If we want to survive as a species, then we need set higher standards for ourselves. People survive all manner of diseases without vaccines, and (more often than not) are the better for it.
Then someone claims vaccines cause bad, scary things which plants doubt in their minds so they do a risk evaluation in their head. They know autism is bad. They probably have seen someone with autism. They have probably never seen someone with measles or whooping cough, though. Their brain tries to come up with a "bad disease" and they think of the flu. So would a lifetime of autism be worse than a week of fever and coughing? Sure. So skip the vaccines.
Having had a sister pass away from pneumonia from either mumps or measles (doesn't matter since both can now be vaccinated against)...have also worked extensively with autistic children. Have seen both ends of the this discussion.
The point is that many of these autistic children have their infirmity because not of an imagined threat which can be pointed to...but because either/both of the parents have bad genetics. It's too tough for many people to even consider that something outside of their control (other than not having children or having an abortion once you find out) is the cause of their children's disability. Parents don't want to hear or understand that if they didn't want to have an autistic child...they should have never had sex and gotten pregnant in the first place. By not controlling your urges to have children...the parents are the ones who caused their child to develop autism...NOT a vaccine.
Don't worry about the world coming to an end today. It's already tomorrow in Australia. - Charles M. Schulz
Between the Obesity epidemic and the beyond-foolish growth of vaccine refusal, Who the HELL would have thought that our population in the 2010's would be LESS healthy than the population of the 1970's and 80's?
This is the twenty first century. Polio should be gone. Measles should be gone. Thank god we got rid of Small Pox in the 70's, or that nightmare would be on the rise again, I have no doubt.
I personally think even now folks who are involved in the breakouts should be charged with reckless endangerment, negligence, and whatever else would be justified in ANY OTHER CASE where someone's bad choices lead to harm to someone else.
This future sucks.
PS: I have a partial solution for vaccine refusal, too, a not-so-modest proposal. If your unvaccinated child is linked to an outbreak of a vaccine preventable disease, you're responsible for paying for the care of those other cases. No predetermined fine, nothing the rich folks can decide "Oh, I'll just pay the penalty." It doesn't matter if your child was the "origin" or not, by not being vaccinated, they were unable to contribute to herd immunity and instead contributed to the spread of the disease. You want to "exercise your right to choose for your child?" Fine. But you get to deal with the consequences of that choice, all of them. That includes rehabilitation and supportive costs for the damage wreaked by measles encephalitis, and god help you if someone dies.
Given how limited and variable the efficacy of the Flu vaccine is, I'd not include that in this situation, but otherwise, all childhood vaccines.
I wonder how much that would change the opinions of those folks that are "just uncomfortable with the idea, I mean, everyone's talking about it, so there has to be SOMETHING to it, right? I mean, it's *not natural* to vaccinate anyways, the body just needs to learn anyways, right?" instead of actually thinking.
2) If the odds of getting measles is less than 1 in 1000, and the most negative affects (death) are at 1 in 1000, then NOT getting the shot puts you at 1 in 1,000,000 chance of death. Just like getting the effing shot in the first place.
Conveniently ignoring all of the other stuff he mentioned, which has higher occurring rates when you get the measles. Not to mention ignoring the fact that as immunization goes down, rates of infection go up, meaning that the rates of negative effects go up.
3) Why not let the measles run a little wild and see if "the market" or whoever can find some solutions to that. Make this a win-win-win.
There is ABSOLUTELY NO WIN in any of that. Except maybe for a pharma company executive. It is completely lose for everybody else. Of course, anyone who describes the "free market" as win-win typically only care about that scenario.
But unlike Rick Perry, I am opposed to FORCED vaccination by the government.
Not your choice. You don't have the right to put other people's children in danger. You want to participate in society? You get the goddamned shot.
Wow, I've rarely seen such uniformity of opinion on /. It scares me. So allow me to be perverse for a sec: Paul Offit, mentioned in another post here as an author of an authoritative dismissal of vaccination fears, says in TFA that he is '"uncomfortable as a scientist" with the committee's methodology'. That got me thinking. Are we (vaccination supporters) guilty of some of the same types of non-scientific conclusions? For instance, many people have stated that the outbreaks of measles and whooping cough were caused by people refusing the vaccination. Is there evidence of that? Could there be other factors, like new resistant strains of the diseases, or reduced effectiveness of the vaccine? Maybe there is evidence and I haven't seen it, but I'd hate to see some health-related development missed because it's so easy to blame non-vaccinators for the issue.
Your logic and numbers are flawed. As fewer people are vaccinated, the chance of getting it will increase dramatically.
Just another eugenicist. They were the Libertarians of yesteryear, selfish and wicked.
The eugenicists of the late 19th and early 20th century were proud socialists. This is a matter of historical fact that can't be revised to suit your personal political agenda.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Here goes my Karma.
Some parents are a little concerned about the number of immunizations that children receive in a very short time. There seem to be concerns that
27 separate immunizations over the first 18 months of a child's life may be stressing the immune system a little too much. If you start forcing people to do things they don't not understand they will resist, I hope society would stop calling them stupid, treat the parents like rational people and give them an educated choice.
And guess who is losing?
Evolution doesn't make things better in the sense that we know. You might be best adapted to your current environment, but this doesn't necessarily make you better than your predecessor, only more likely to pass on your genes in the current situation.
Check out Irish Elk. There's a lot of different thoughts as to why they died-out, most involving their massive antlers. These were thought to be for mating display, where the most "evolved" had the biggest antlers and got all the girls. Along comes humans and a climate change which makes the antler advantage less appealing, and they're now extinct.
-Matt
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is that the people whom orginally advocated against vaccination were the people that never came in contact with such sickly individuals because their society didn't invite any migrants, and foremost their protest stems from the fact that the vaccines are injected directly into the blood-stream to infect the entire body at once where would cause a possible cytokine rush whereas proper exposure to pathogens is localised through either of the glands of the body.
Inherintly, the anti-vaccine "movement" is just like the patriot "movement" in that the few at the top of that food chain all have PHD's. So is the reason they start such income-flow of alternate lifestyle because they failed in the normal commerce resulting in their degrees, or is there a moral if not strategic purpose to avoid vaccination? I think it's a little bit of both, and you all should realize that.
The problems is that important vaccines are bundled with unimportant vaccines. For example, the only way to get measles (rubeola) vaccine, is to get MMVR vaccine, which also includes mumps, varicella and rubella. Measles is serious, but rubella, mumps and varicella (chicken pox) generally have very good prognosis with healthy and nourished children (I had them all as a child and all my friends did, and no one had any complications). Parents should have a choice to do individual vaccines. Measles is always a good idea to vaccinate against. Rubella, mumps and varicella - only necessary for malnourished and/or children with health issues, or when the parents do not want to deal with the nuisance of a sick child.
> The reappearance of the potentially deadly virus
Hang on, any virus, including the common cold, is potentially deadly. The treatment for uncomplicated Measles is roughly the same as a case of the flu. Isolation, bed rest, and ibuprofin. You don't think the case is overstated just a little?
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
> I had measles before there were vaccines for it.
Yep, so did I, back in the sixties, and there was nothing to it. I'm sorry, there just wasn't. With most people it's just not a big deal. Getting upset doesn't make it so.
However, in my twenties I caught a common cold and it developed into double pneumonia. Took me two and a half months to shake it and I was fairly ill all through that time. Was even coughing up a little blood at one time. I'm a little afraid of catching colds now. We are all products of our experiences. You see people at work overuse Purell and chances are, they had a bad experience with a common ailment. It happens.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
My daughter got the chicken pox vaccine, and promptly caught chicken pox. I always wondered if that was the intention of the vaccine.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I hate the knee jerk reaction that somehow Big Pharma is pushing vaccinations on the unwashed masses with help from the government. Most vaccinations are unprofitable especially with the risk of adverse events factored in. Companies would much rather you get sick and need treatment because a one-time shot doesn't make a lot of money. In fact, the government has to specifically create a liability fund to get companies to make vaccines for public use.
Oh, yea, it's a ludicrous reaction. We all know about Big Pharma's lobbying efforts for patents, and extended patents, protections from lawsuits, donations to Rick Perry who then mandated Gardacil to all school girls in Texas. But in this one instance, they are being just purely altruistic. How can anyone doubt it?
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
For what it's worth, autism isn't the only negative outcome anti-vax folks attribute to vaccination. There may not be much evidence to support most of the claims, but some of them have some meat. For instance, this study found a weak but significant risk of childhood asthma stemming from the Hep B vaccination.
Does it therefore follow that they're not worth preventing?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
2) If the odds of getting measles is less than 1 in 1000
They aren't. In a society like the one I grew up in (70's UK) without measles immunisation, more or less everybody got measles.
But unlike Rick Perry, I am opposed to FORCED vaccination by the government.
The measles vaccine is not 100% effective on individuals. It relies, to an extent on herd immunity, which is to say, it works by lowering the probability that the virus will transfer from one person to the next to the point where it will die out before it can spread.
It is your duty to society to be vaccinated and to get your children vaccinated.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
If you refuse to vaccinate your kids because of some imagined fear (not because of egg allergy or something rational), you are guilty of child abuse and at the very least, you should be fined heavily.
And you should be investigated for other signs of abuse.
--
BMO
They need to be told, clearly and unequivocally, what's the recommended thing to do in issues involving science/medicine/etc.
Well, they have been. They've been told that vaccines are harmful, and they shouldn't give them to their kids. If we had an educated population used to questioning things and doing research themselves, then ignorant demagogues wouldn't be able to get such traction.
And those demagogues are one part of the problem. The fact that they are not held responsible for the damage they can be proven to cause is another part of it. And that's why I also said (but you inexplicably cut out):
Any imbecile who publicly tells them to do demonstrably harmful things should be taken to task, and held culpable to the extent which can be justified.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
So people not only don't care about doing the research. They resent those who do.
"No good deed goes unpunished". Sad, but true.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Bad timing, most likely. It takes a week or two from the time of injection to build up full immunity, and if you get infected during that gap (or shortly before), it'll look like you got chickenpox from the vaccine.
They went out of their way because chicken pox as an adult is really bad. Giving children chicken pox is effectively a vaccine against adult chicken pox. If there's now an actual vaccine that can prevent the childhood disease, then that's even better.
Even presuming the cases of vacination causing autism were not bullshit, it'd still be worse to not vaccinate all our kids - more would end up dead than would end up autistic.
The problem is that statistics doesn't work at the small scale, and people's understanding of risk doesn't either. It would be nice to say X% of children in our society will wind up autistic and society will be ready to handle the situation (hopefully for very small X); in the real world if it's YOUR kid then you have a 100% screwed up future to deal with and it's all your own problem, and that is the risk that people calculate against.
I'm even more concerned about more subtle effects. I believe that we're raising an entire generation of kids many of whom have a small degradation from where they would have been without high fevers as babies. What if we have been knocking 3 or 4 percent off the IQ of, say, 3/4 of the kids who got these shots so early? Maybe the constant dumbing-down of academic testing and school results is because we've been dumbing-down the people.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
2/10, far too obvious. Go back to Digg and practice your trolling some more. You're not ready for Slashdot.
I literally can not believe that people actually still refer to something so discredited.
Better start believing -- people in fact DO still refer to this, even as discredited as it is.
(Did you mean 'figuratively'? That would make more sense in context...)
Measles isn't terrible. Almost everyone over 65 has had the measles. Just like all of us in our 30s had Chicken Pox, but our kids won't because of vaccination.
Another part of the problem is a general loss of trust for the medical profession. Thanks to HMOs, the doctor is just some person in a white coat. Not the trusted practitioner who has taken care of your family for years and years and will likely continue doing so (whose advice would tend to actually carry some weight).
Meanwhile, in addition to the truly dangerous diseases, they want you to get annual vaccines against their best (and often wrong) guess as to what flu will be going around, even if you're not in the risk group. They want to vaccinate for chicken pox. We routinely see both news stories about how drugs that big pharma swore were safe are killing people or leaving them severely disabled. We see commercials where they encourage us to take prescription drugs for minor problems and then the list of side effects reads like an episode of 1000 ways to die.
Restore the doctor-patient relationship and start doing actual risk-benefit analysis for new drugs (and require new drugs to be either more effective or less dangerous than the current treatment rather than simply more effective than placebo), and there will be less problems like this.
You are correct about measles. But why do I need to get vaccinated for rubella and chicken pox in order to get the measles vaccine? Rubella and chicken pox are generally harmless and with good nutrition and modern medicine to mitigate possible secondary infections, they are a little more than a nuisance (I had varicella and rubella as a child and so did everyone else). The problems is that children today receive too many vaccine injections - about 30 shots till age 6. Can you proof that quantitative accumulations go not lead to qualitative changes?
1. Measles scarcely belongs in the same category as whooping cough and polio. It's a fairly harmless childhood disease that we all used to get before there was a vaccine.
2. 150 cases in the entire U.S. in one year is not so much an epidemic as a vanishingly rare issue.
3. Err... no, it's entirely only those who refuse vaccination who end up at risk. Extremely minor risk.
4. Just to make it interesting-- how many serious cases do we have per year, of people injured due to bad reactions to vaccinations? I'd have to guess it's well over 150.
Problem is that their risk assessment is highly flawed.
And it's intentionally skewed to be flawed. Every time I hear the autism scare tale, it's that "the vaccine causes autism". Not "increases your risk of", not "might have a connection to". It's phrased to imply that if you get the vaccine and *don't* get autism, you have somehow beaten the odds.
When you stack that on today's environment of "OMG YOU MUST PROTECT YOUR CHILDREN FROM EVERYTHING" that is inflicted on parents (disclaimer: I have a four-year-old, and people freak out about *everything* these days), it's not surprising that the issue continues to get traction.
People need to learn that being wrong isn't something bad - and that you sure as hell do not have a right to never be wrong. I get it, these parents want to look after their kids - and who can blame them for that? What I can blame them for is not actually caring enough to check what is actually good for them.
You would put modern philosophy, femnism, and most of the social sciences out of business. Just attempting to process this information at a very surface level would cause their beating hearts to almost explode, so they would have to stop, and then project their arrogance onto you.
Sad fact that there are real ethical consequences for holding onto your ingnorance, esp. if you are in the academy.
Why don't doctors just advertise their "non autism causing vaccination"?
They are not lying, it really does not cause autism and the I assume most people that fall for the "vaccination causes autism" will be very excited and willing to get a vaccination that really does not cause it.
Measles can have terrible long term consequences. I know, I had measles as a child. It's caused me skin disfigurement and abnormal behaviour. (When I was I'll in bed, aged about 7, my Mom gave me her copy of LoTR to read and I now have an Elvish tattoo and LARP.)
And post on /.
Red to red, black to black. Switch it on, but stand well back.
Anybody who's retarded enough to not vaccinate their children for non-medical reasons (whether religious or due to unqualified 'celebrities' telling them it's not safe) is unfit to raise kids and should have them taken away. Plus, we should sterilize the parents for good measure, to make sure their stupid beliefs don't put any potential future children at risk. (This is not a troll; I'm deadly serious. Stupid parents shouldn't be allowed to put children - not to mention the rest of us - at risk due to unfounded superstition.)
boomers seem to be doing a pretty good job of refusing to accept responsibility for the damage they've caused, or to actually fix any of it. I take it you are one of them.
Why do left-winger Hollywood types hate science?
Of course, this completely ignores a few key issues.
First, vaccination is VERY polarized. What this means for someone like me, who hates the idea of using mercury for injections, as well as the idea of my kid suffering from a potentially risky disease, is that there is nowhere to go that actually tells you the truth about vaccines. They either say your kids going to die or be autistic if you give it to them, or they say nothing bad has ever been linked to vaccinations (not even sudden onset of fever and death within hours of getting the vaccination). So how do I determine who's lying to me more?
Second, there ARE reasons you shouldn't get a vaccination. The only place besides the internet where I've heard such things is in the media when they talk about egg-based vaccinations, such as when the H1N1 vaccination was first released. So, when I check out a vaccination my doctor was going to give my kid, and see that he has not one, not two, but three of the contraindications for that vaccinations, I'm somewhat less inclined to trust the experts.
Third, which I can't back up (and the data doubtless came from a rabidly anti-vaccination site, since measured and reasonable anti-vaccination sites don't exist), death rates from most infectious diseases have been trending downwards for the last century, primarily due to better hygiene and nutrition. So saying that vaccination has caused all these improvements without comparing trends prior to the inception and general use of vaccinations is disingenuous at best.
Fourth, some vaccinations are just stupid for some, if not all, people. I remember a few years back (about 10?) how there was a discussion to give all kids a hepatitis C (I think) vaccination at about the 10 to 12 year old range. The big issue was, you had a 1% chance to get hep C in the next 10 to 15 years while you had a 2% chance to get it from the actual vaccination. Now this is foggy, but even if the percentages were reversed, I'd rather take my 2% over 10 years and being careful than roll the dice and see if I get it right away (you know those averages include all the stupid people, not just the normal and unlucky people). Then there's the chickenpox vaccine. When it first came out and was being promoted (5 to 8 years ago, I think), they were talking about how 315 children died of chickenpox in the US in the previous year. Sure, that's a Big Scary Number, but 100 times more die from the flu every year, mostly children and the elderly. And exactly how many people get chickenpox every year anyway, reported or estimated? Do 10% die, 1%, 0.01%? The advertisers certainly weren't bothering to tell me, and if the number had been compelling, I'm sure they would have used that Big Scary Number, too...
Now, as far as the thimerisol is concerned, I don't know if studies were done to see how this behaved in your body, so I don't know how well bound the mercury is. I think the prudent choice would be to limit your exposure in any case (and now I look over to the CFL in my lamp...light bulbs never break, do they?). Having just reviewed the FDA site, it seems they agreed with me in 2004. Since I'm not American, and since my kids were born before then, that wouldn't have benefited me anyway.
My final analysis will be to get my kids current with the vaccinations they can take, after verification that they don't meet the contraindications. What I expect this will mean is that one won't get any vaccinations and the others won't get all of them. One of the reasons will be so we can travel abroad with fewer hassles, and more safety - not everywhere I want to go has the health and hygiene standards we enjoy at home. And those hassles won't entirely go away simply because of those vaccinations that my child shouldn't have in the first place.
P.S. It's worth noting that my opinions aren't due to me not having to go through these childhood diseases. I've had chickenpox, measles, and german measles. I didn't have mumps or whooping cough (although I had a schoolmate who who had whooping cough, and it wasn't terribly pretty) - I was vaccinated for those. The success of vaccines didn't have much of a bearing on my personal experience, or my feelings about them. What I'd like is balanced, reasonable information.
Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
Perhaps if they stopped putting mercury and other things in them that kill people in there people wouldn't have problems taking them.
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How dare you assume that know what my body can or cannot do. Secondly, do tell how you know so matter of factly that your body has been supernaturally gifted with ability to fend off those diseases. Better yet, don't, you've already spouted far to much psycho babble as it is.
Good day sir.
Don't make measles sound worse than it is. 103 F fever for 3 or four days, rash, sensitivity to light.
I had it, as did my brother, and we are both fine. My friends had it, there were fine. None of us went to the hospital either. Granted we were all descended from Northern Europe and pretty resistant to it.
Now polio is whole different matter. Although most people who got it did make a full recovery, including my uncle, the fraction who didn't were anywhere from partially paralyzed to living an iron lung.
IQ has been rising over the past several decades, not falling. Look up the Flynn Effect.
you know how a vaccination works? you inject the actual living, but weakened disease into the mark. the antibodies are made by the marks immune system. please explain where mercury comes into play. not only where it comes in, by why it was increased 5 fold when people started to complain that it was there in the late 90's. and it isnt 100% effective...yes, some people even get chicken pox 2 times. but i don't think that should be included in the cocktail of vaccinations either. many diseases are bad, but the vaccinations themselves are not good. i think perhaps you yourself needs to do some research and find out exactly how not good. that penn and teller episode mentioned in this thread was a good shot, but did not fully explain the results, would take more than an hour. dr tenpenny has a good docu about whats in the needle also. so, toxic amounts of mercury, that might cause autism, and more likely determines how the brain develops (have you ever seen mercury touch brain matter? i think there's a YouTube vid on it), or run the chance of getting sick. if the vaccination worked, then no one else would have to worry. if the vaccinations were that important, you would not be given the choice. i keep wondering how much smarter i might be if i wasn't injected with near lethal doses of mercury 3 times when i was a kid....but then again, if i was the ruler of a people, i would not want but a few smarter than me, a few that could be controlled. but when the entire society is smarter than the ruler, there's a something going to happen
What you have there is a fallacy of composition, just because, by themselves, the things that make up the vaccine are bad, the vaccine itself is bad.
I'll make an example. I am not a fan of drinking rum neat - I'm also not someone who enjoys cola much, and yet make me a rum and cola and I can enjoy it. You can not take an item and presume it is simply the sum of it's parts directly.
I understand how vaccinations work. Why is mercury there? Well, a quick bit of research shows it actually isn't - since 2001 it's been slowly taken out of vaccines and replaced with alternatives. The answer as to why it was there - it was there in very small amounts as a preservative. It's commonplace to see preservatives (that in larger amounts, alone, would be harmful) in your food, so why is it surprising in a vaccine? They have to be stored, and it was tested and showed no adverse effects.
The answer here is perspective - mercury is in things like tuna that people eat - as long as you don't eat only tuna, it's not a problem. Getting a few vaccines that contain micrograms of a mercury-containing substance is not an issue. To be sensationalist and say things like 'near lethal' is just flat out wrong.
What you need to do is go and look beyond the sources you have done - look at the studies, the facts, and the figures - and don't get caught up in the sensationalist stuff - yes, vaccines don't sound very good when you hear about them, but when you understand why they have these things in, and how they work, it's not something to be scared about. The diseases they protect you from, on the other hand, those are.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
Your immune system doesn't know how it got the blueprint for immunity. A vaccine and being exposed to it are no different to what is basically a molecule catcher and matcher.
"We live as though the world were as it should be, to show it what it can be." - Joss Whedon via Angel
i have to agree, but still question the underlining objectives of the vaccinations. the rum n coke analogy makes some kinda sense, but all in all, the vaccinations are not good. what they protect from are not good either.
whats in a vaccination isn't explained anywhere, it shows what it protects against, but not whats in it.
if mercury was taken out, no reason to disbelieve you, it was after i turned off the tv 10 years ago.
from what i remember, what i was told in school, the measles were so bad because they killed about 1 in 10000 and disfigured a buncha people. chicken pox is being vaccinated for because it causes you to itch, and kills 1 in 100 000 that do not seek medical attention.
i don't think i should have to have take that risk because someone doesn't want to seek medical attention when their deathly ill.
and also because medical science hasn't found a link does not mean one doesn't exists. it simply means that one hasn't been found with enough evidence to convince the people at the head to say its true. sorta like rocks falling from the sky was scientifically unfounded till the 19th century.
well, enough is enough. i think there's more to it and it needs to be questions and scrutinized. even if there isnt anything more to it, if it isn't looked at and watched carefully, something will be added to it.
that and i have to leave for work.
you - vaccination is fine
me - its acceptable, maybe...but has to be watched
I would never suggest that we should just accept something without monitoring it. Things can change, we can learn new things.
This said - the only sane way to go through life is acting based on the most likely thing to happen. Sure, in 5 seconds, gravity could dissapear completely - but you don't live as though that's the case - you live with the most likely case in mind.
You say the vaccinations are not good? Why? They are tested, and lots of people have been given them. With the number of people that have been given them, if there was some link, then it would have shown itself by now, and would be testable and repeatable. Just because medical science hasn't found a link doesn't mean one doesn't exist - you are completely right. However, to act as though there is one when there hasn't been one proven is insane. The reality is that vaccines are tested and provable to protect you from a number of bad diseases - even something like chicken pox can do serious damage in the right circumstance, and it's better to never have it. This is shown in repeatable experiments. The supposed negative effects of those vaccines has never been shown in any repeatable experiment, in fact, quite the opposite. They have good effects, and no shown bad effects, the choice is simple.
To argue you should not take a vaccine because of a potential risk is just flat out illogical. If makes no more sense than working on the assumption there is an elephant in your bathtub - it's technically possible, but you'd never do things on the basis it was true without reason to do so. The only difference is there hasn't been some media hysteria about the elephant in your bathtub that doesn't exist - instead it's about the risks of vaccines - risks that do not exist.
This is a constant issue and reinforces my opinion that children should be taught basic logic in schools - people make so many fallacies while discussing an issue, and don't think rationally about issues.
-- Lattyware (www.lattyware.co.uk)
You were lucky then. There are complications from measles that are a lot worse than fever, rash and sensitivity to light. About 1 in 1,000 people with measles develop encephalitis "an inflammation of the brain that may cause vomiting, convulsions and, rarely, coma or even death. Encephalitis can closely follow measles, or it can occur months late." (Source: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/measles/DS00331/DSECTION=complications )
Personally, I'd rather give my kids a measles shot than take a 1 in 1,000 risk of encephalitis.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
(Using http://antiantivax.flurf.net/ as my source for all of the following.)
1. Thimerisol is only really present in the flu vaccines nowadays (though there are non-thimerisol versions). Most other vaccines remove any mercury used before the vaccine gets shipped. At most, there are trace amounts of mercury in the dose of vaccine you get. Even that mercury won't build up to toxic levels as some anti-vax folks claim, though. It's ethylmercury, not methylmercury and has a half life of a few days to a week. Even if you get three injections at once of vaccines with trace amounts of mercury, it'll be flushed from your system by the time you get your next shots.
There are side effects to vaccines. In most cases (something like 99.999%), any side effects that manifest will be limited to a sore arm (or leg if the child gets the injection there), minor injection-site swelling and possibly a short-lived fever. I don't know of any cases of someone suddenly dying from vaccinations. Even if there were, though, they would be so rare that the risk of sudden death by vaccine would be much less than the risk of death by measles, whooping cough or the other vaccinated diseases.
2. There are valid reasons to not get a vaccine. For example, allergies or an immune system problem. In this case, I don't think anybody is claiming you should get the vaccine anyway. If you worry that you or your child would have an allergic reaction, a doctor can perform an allergy test. If your doctor is ignoring valid reasons to not give your child a vaccine, then the solution isn't skipping all vaccines and declaring them evil, but to find a better doctor. (NOTE: This doesn't mean doctor-shopping because your doctor insists that the MMR doesn't cause autism and you were convinced by a website that it does.)
3. Many of the vaccine-prevented diseases are airborne. These wouldn't be helped by greater hygiene. In addition, in regions where vaccine rates plummet, the diseases have seen a resurgence. If the drop was hygiene-related then shouldn't vaccination rates rising or lowering have no effect on disease rates? In addition, from the flurf site linked to above: "Before the approval of the vaccine, paralytic polio struck 13,000-20,000 individuals every year in the U.S. The number of cases peaked at 21,000 in 1952, only three years before approval of the vaccine. By 1960, there were only 2,525 cases, and only 61 cases in 1965." When the vaccine was introduced, disease rates plummeted. I know that correlation doesn't equal causation, but in times like this is strongly points to a link. If you turn a variable up and down (introduce polio vaccines vs. dropping vaccine rates) and the observed phenomenon has a repeatable, consistent reaction, then the rational conclusion is that they are linked.
4. Part of the reason is herd immunity. Even if you don't come down with the disease, you could still carry it from one person to another. If you are vaccinated, though, you aren't a conduit. Also, isn't it better for a child to get a shot in the arm and be protected against a disease like Chicken Pox then be out of school for a week, itching at sores all over their body, and possibly suffering complications? As far as getting Hep C from the vaccine, I'd ask for some sources for that. Getting a disease from the vaccine would require the use of a live vaccine without any modifications to keep it from multiplying. I don't think those are used anymore (for obvious reasons).
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Having gone through a couple of different strains of measles, mumps just before puberty, and was missed by the polio epidemic before the vaccine was available while kids I knew were crippled... I appreciate the danger that they present a little differently than younger folks might...
The minor danger involved in vaccinations for all of the above doesn't begin to approach the real world effects of the disease...
The local school district (with just one campus k-12) doesn't let kids without vaccinations enroll... the cold and flue effects on attendance are quite bad enough...
My kids got their vaccinations on time with my complete blessing, with the exception of hepatitis vaccine that the clinic gave my youngest before asking...
Unlike most other vaccinations today, that on has potential side effects that scared the pants off me...
I had just spent several weeks deciding whether or not the risk TO MY KIDS from MY taking it was worth the potential benefits... and the technician at the clinic just poked the three month old little guy without a second's concern...
None of us has turned into a "Typhoid Mary" with a permanent case of infectious hepatitis so me missed that potential side effect....
It is a Very Good Thing that the creator of the pseudoscience putting so many kids at risk is being prosecuted to the full extent of the law...
I removed a former co-worker from my friends list because some of the (Christian offshoot) religious groups he was part of were ending up in my feed regularly as he "liked" them etc.
The straw that broke the camel's back was a call to ban/boycott immunization because they believed vaccines were made from (or made from testing with) aborted baby fetuses.
Greedy jackass.
Wanna know what evil looks like? Andrew Wakefield.
Measles is bad, and Whooping cough is a nightmare. 5 years ago, I contracted a case of whooping cough. The febrile stage went away in a week, but the cough took a couple months. Good Gawd, the coughing spasms could come on at any time. Usually at the beginning of an intake of breath. Several times I almost passed out. That is one deadly little affliction.
I think that darling Jenny should be arrested for manslaughter at the least. She's wrong about the vaccine-autism link, and promoting a deadly practice.
Th anti-vaccine crowd shows all the signs of zealotry. First the cause is the mercury based preservative, then after it was removed, with no change in the rate of cases of autism, the "problem became the vaccines themselves. Next it will be the composition of the hypodermic syringes. When you are proven wrong, move the goalposts (my favorite mixed metaphor)
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Measles isn't terrible.
Right... like the way playing Russian Roulette "isn't terrible" because 5/6 people who play survive unharmed.
For a healthy individual with modern medical care the fatality rate is 3 in a thousand. It is insanely contagous, 90% of unprotected people sharing a living space will become infected and it can easily be passed with casual or indirect contact. The fatality rate is around 30% if an immunocompromised person becomes infected, and the fatality rate can be nearly that high for a malnourished individual with poor health care. Even in healthy individuals Measles has particularly high rates of serious complications including pneumonia, brain damage, and permanent damage to vision or hearing upto and including blindness or deafness.
Measles and Mumps "merely" elevates the risk of miscarriage for pregnant women, whereas Rubella causes high rates of miscarriages and severe birth defects.
But yeah, most people who get Measles survive with no permanent damage. It's not like it's the Plague. Oh wait, I think maybe I'd rather get the Plague than Measles. Nowadays we have antibiotics that can easily cure the Plague with little risk of death or complications. We have no cure or even treatment for Measles. All doctors can do is attempt to manage the symptoms.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
As the grandparent said, and as you partially agreed, part of the "probleM' is that vaccines have been so successful that people are oblivious to just how nasty these diseases can be and why we were so desperate to develop vaccines for them.
You're right that Rubella is little more than a nuisance... in terms of the person directly infected. The part you are missing is that Rubella is a horrific disease in terms of pregnant women. Rubella scoots right across the placenta and disrupts the developing fetus. This results in either miscarriage or seriously nasty birth defects.
When the Rubella vaccine was first developed they first tried just vaccinating girls, but it was ineffective. Even a vaccinated pregnant woman would still pass the virus on to the fetus when she was exposed to it via the father (or other male) who was infected.
The problems is that children today receive too many vaccine injections
The problem today is that children aren't getting enough vaccine injections. We still don't have vaccines for AIDS, the common cold, and countess other diseases.
If I could get a vaccine for the common cold, I'd take it. And I'd give it to my kids. Sure the common cold isn't life threatening, but the misery of infection and the secondary eye-ear-throat infections and the disruption to school and work... they far outweigh the trivial nuisance of one more vaccination.
A crackpot&fraud doctor started the whole thing with bogus claims of a vaccine-autism link, then a gutter-level-tabloid papers hyped up that doctor's claims, then autism parents desperate for an explanation latched on to the story, and then the idiot mainstream press ran with it bringing the "controversy" to the general public. And now there's all this baseless woo that maybe there's something mysteriously dangerous about vaccines. This woo that there's some controversy and you can't trust anyone or anything (not even your doctor) because no one's really sure. And when parents feel unsure that there might some sort of danger, they of course base their decisions on "better safe than sorry". Except there was never anything to the story in the first place, and scientists have confirmed that vaccines are about the safest thing you'll ever face in life (and far safer than most of the foods you feed your kids), and the "better safe than sorry" worry over vaccines is putting their kids in danger.
I really wish the news would quite hyping "controversies" by grabbing a typical random scientist on one side and a crackpot on the other side and presenting a "debate" as if the two sides were equal... presenting the lone crackpot as if he were equally as credible as the other person representing the entire medical or scientific community.
Whatever happened to investigative journalism where a reporter pent the time and effort checking someone's credentials and checking claims and investigated the evidence and informing people which side is lying or not-credible? Hell, I'd be satisfied if they'd just start off by pointing out that one side represents mainstream scientists/doctors and mentioning that the other side is a small minority / fringe position generally rejected by mainstream professionals in the field. It takes no deep investigation or judgment to accurately identify majority view vs minority view.
Sorry if I got carried away ranting. I really just intended to explain the Rubella thing and my frustration at the whole anti-vaxxer movement just sorta spewed out :D
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Don't make measles sound harmless either. Just because you and four of your friends happened to play russian roulette and came out fine doesn't mean russian roulette isn't seriously dangerous.
In healthy people with modern medical care the death rate is 3 per 1000. It is insanely infectious, 90% of unprotected people sharing a living space will be infected, with high risk of infection from casual or indirect contact. If an immunocompromized person is infected the fatality rate is about 30%. Measles also has a a significant risk of serious complications including brain damage, and permanent damage to vision or hearing upto and including deafness or blindness.
Rubella is a minor nuisance infection, at least as far as the direct infection itself. However it's a horrific disease when a pregnant woman is exposed (even if the woman herself is immunized!). If a pregnant woman is exposed to an infected person the virus will scoot right across the placenta and disrupt the developing fetus. When it doesn't outright kill the fetus (causing miscarriage), it results in horrific birth defects.
Mumps is mostly "merely" painful, except for the 30% chance it will infect the testicles of post-pubescent males. At which point it often results in sterility.
Vaccines have been so successful that most people have forgotten why we were so desperate to develop these vaccines in the first place.
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