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In Australia, Immunize Or Lose Benefits
An anonymous reader writes with news of a plan from the Australian government to cut down on the number of kids who aren't vaccinated. The new scheme will deny family tax benefits to parents whose children don't pass immunization checks. Quoting:
"The FTB supplement, worth $726 per child each year, will now only be paid once a child is fully immunized at these checks. Families are already required to have their child fully immunized to receive Child Care Benefit and the Child Care Rebate. Children will also be required for the first time to be vaccinated against meningococcal C, pneumococcal and chicken pox. Children will also be immunized against measles, mumps and rubella earlier, at 18 months instead of the current four years of age."
Rational social interest trumps irrational "self" interest, for once. The USA could learn a thing or two from Australia.
...considering that they have socialized medicine. To libertarians this probably looks like a communist nightmare, I'll admit that to me it only seems OK because I don't believe in the Right to Put Everyone In Danger By Being a Total Moron.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
I don't think you understand how immunization is supposed to work.
Things aren't looking good for you sir... their > there
Do you realize intersection between the 'hygiene hypothesis' (exposure to many different infectious vectors helps prime the immune system in useful ways) and immunizations (attempting to decrease the incidence of a few, serious infections) is very, very, very small?
Basically it's a non sequitor.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
What "government"? Are you even Australian?
At least here in Scandinavia, the government is not the enemy, it represents us and our shared interests. Many Americans seem to think their negative view is the "universal" truth. It is most certainly not.
On the other hand we allow individuals to choose what immunizations they want their children to get. It just happens that most people actually trust our government, universal health care system and science; the majority of people choose to get all immunizations offered.
We are actively changing the fitness function for diseases to include "must be resistant to antibiotics, must be resistant to antivirals, must be able to infect even immunised people, etc", this will inevitably lead to bugs that fulfil these criteria... eventually.
By this logic, we should be expecting bullet-proof cattle and thresher-proof wheat any day now, not to mention hook-resistant fish and armored potatoes...
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
which doesn't necessarily make them all that important. A virus/bacteria/etc that is resistant to all of those things but only gives you a runny nose for 2 days isn't really a big problem.
And of course we know that doing nothing killed people. A lot of them. For centuries. Or have we all forgotten that infant mortality rates used to be over 10%, and deaths by what are now preventable diseases killed millions at a young age?
Ok, so maybe we create diseases that are immune to whatever we're doing, that's why we keep doing drug research. It might be a cat and mouse game, but I prefer being on the side of people who have very fortunately lived through all of these things. And I'm sure so do you, even if you don't realize it.
that which puts me and my children in danger- not getting vaccinated, is not a natural freedom.
The problem with the definition of freedom, as defined by teenagers (not chronological teenagers, but psychological teenagers) is that it does not take into account how some "freedoms" naturally and automatically impinge on the freedoms of others.
For example: your freedom to play your music as loud as you want, my freedom to get a good night's sleep. Your freedom to consume nicotine, my freedom to breathe clean air when I walk down the sidewalk. You freedom to talk on your cellphone, my freedom to enjoy a movie. Etc.
If you claim as a right or freedom that which impinges on someone else's rights or freedoms, without even considering the possibility, you aren't selfish. You're just stupid: you don't know what freedom really is. To you, it is "let me do whatever I want without consideration of effects or consequences." That is "freedom" as defined by an ignorant teenager (again, not a chronological teenager, a psychological one, who could be of any age), and has absolutely nothing to do with the real fight for freedom in this world by real freedom fighters, who are often quoted by people who don't even know what freedom really is.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
1. No vaccine is 100% effective. You can be immunized and still get sick. Less likely, and it's likely to be milder, but it could still be fatal.
2. Not being immunized raises the chance you will get sick, and expose those around you to the disease.
For many of these major diseases, if less than a certain percentage of the population gets immunized, the disease still runs fairly rampant through the population - including the immunized population. You need basically everybody to be immunized so that when the disease strikes one person, it doesn't have any convenient vectors to other people, and stays contained.
Besides, we have a certain hesitancy to allow survival of the fittest to take it's course where humans are concerned. Partly out of fellow-feeling, and partly because we've found that 'fittest' can have multiple meanings, and that someone who can barely talk and can't get out of their wheelchair can still give humanity as a whole great value in understanding the how the universe works. (Through their own work.)
'Sensible' is a curse word.
The studies done so far don't show any correlation between vaccination and the hygiene effect.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/03/030304072832.htm
Immunization doesn't take for everyone. Immunizations can't be used on everyone due to things like allergies. Immunization can wear off and become ineffective over time, or in between booster shots. When everyone is vaccinated according to schedule, you only have a small percentage of the population that is at risk to those diseases. Since there are only a couple percent that will become infected when exposed, the likelihood of the virus being passed between two of these people is very low. It is a condition called "herd immunity" that makes unchecked spread of the virus unlikely.
When people are willingly forgoing vaccinations, you aren't just putting yourself at risk, you are dropping the total percent of the population that is at risk. As that number drops further and further, the easier it is for the virus to spread into an outbreak. The more a virus spreads, the higher likelihood it will have a chance to mutate into a form the existing vaccine does not protect against. In other words, when they chose not to get vaccinated, they are putting all the rest of us at risk out of their own stupidity.
Fish are being influenced by selective pressure from fishing... it's pushing them to spawn younger, grow faster and die sooner. Not much can be done evolutionwise to become net-resistant, so they are evolving to breed faster.
Except it doesn't. The only viruses that successfully 'get around' immunization are the ones that do it naturally(See Influenza), because that's the way they are, not as some defense mechanism.
We are seeing anti-biotic resistant bacteria because anti-biotics dont kill all the bacteria, some survive the treatment, and very occasionally then take hold elsewhere to become resistant strains.
We don't see this problem in our immunological response, because our white cells don't exactly leave bacteria and viruses half dead, or survivors for that matter. Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back. That white cell there is going to annihilate you.
Not necessarily. For example smallpox was completely eradicated through vaccination, and polio is well on it's way out.
First: You are mixing up bacteria and viruses. Bacteria evolve resistance to antibiotics. Viruses do not, because they do not react to antibiotics in the first place.
Second: Evolution in biology does not work like in poorly researched science fiction. While you can throw any factor you want into a fitness function, there are limits on what can be replicated in a cell. The viral capsid has to consist of protein and be of a certain shape, and the immune system can be trained to recognize it.
Third: Even if it worked, you're running the small risk of the spontaneous appearance of a disease that could overcome vaccinations and infect everyone, as opposed to not vaccinating and definitely allowing ordinary diseases to infect everyone. Unlike the antibiotic, the vaccine is preventive, long-term and specific to a disease. The danger of antibiotic abuse (ie. irregular or uncompleted treatments, or regular small doses) is that it exposes bacteria just enough to allow resistance to evolve, rather than killing off the infection completely. Vaccination doesn't do that because the immune system will kill the infection before it can take hold.
No such thing as vaccine resistant. The vaccine actually attacks the body stimulating it to produce anti-bodies, you might argue that this produces anti-body resistant bacteria but that has always been the case, if a bacteria could attack faster than the body reacted it survived, also if the body could not produce effective anti-bodies the bacteria lived. This has been going on since bacteria attacked other living things, not just since humans were around. If the anti-body to bacteria battle could produce a super-germ we would have seen one by now.
What happens here is antiviral, antibiotic, or vaccination doesn't kill off 100% of the virus. Some cells tend to survive. If some of the cells are resistant to the 'cure', then the survivors tend to be those particular cells that live to continue manufacturing virions that are less susceptible to the vaccine.
You may not have a vaccine-resistant virus today, but vaccination creates selective pressures that tend to make ones that are vaccine-resistant survive and reproduce more.... resulting that in the future newer viruses that occur are more likely to resemble the more vaccine-resistant ones, and eventually, as the trend repeats with enough iterations, the resistance becomes stronger and stronger......
That is not how vaccines work. Vaccines don't kill anything. They train your body to recognize and respond effectively to the infection.
Some very basic info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaccine
"You want to know how to help your kids? Leave them the fuck alone." -George Carlin
I live in France, where you can't get kids into kindergarten or school without vaccination certificates. And they cut child benefit too. The result is a very high vaccination rate, and that protects those who cannot be vaccinated such as very young children.
Virtually serving coffee
You do realize that first the taxes are taken from the family, the only question is how much of THIER OWN MONEY the government decides to hand back...
I'm not sure what your point is?
Those same taxes are also taken from families with no children, and with grown up children, and whose children have died due to not being immunized too....
Everyone pays taxes, that's how government is paid for. Deal with it. Your point is at most a distraction from any rational discussion.
anti-bacterial hand gel. That is one of the worst ideas (at a consumer level) ever. Anything it doesnt kill is now immune to the damn gel and has no competition in its enviornment
I'm presuming you are referring to triclosan containing soaps, not hand sanitizer gels. The latter typically contain 60-70% alcohol, and you're not going to be developing resistance to that.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
The rich will immunize because its a smart move. The poor will immunize because its a smart move.
Interestingly, here in Canada, the 'poor' actually have a higher immunization rate for their children than the rich, because the poor trust their doctors and don't have the time/energy/wherewithall to spend their time with 'herbalists' and other rubbish. A note comes from school saying 'we're immunizing against rubella tomorrow' and the poor sign the permission slip because to them it sounds like a good idea. And they're right.
You don't get it. Society believes, based on evidence, that the few dipshits that don't immunize are putting others at risk. They incentivise the smart choice, in a way of saying "those who will take measures to keep us all safer get a tax break". This is to drive all people to make the smart choice....
I bet you would be even more upset if the incentive was percentage of income based, which *would* equally motivate the rich to immunize... and because they would have breaks in the hundreds of thousands while the poor only get hundreds.
So should the break be percentage based? It would be proportional, and equally incentivising....
Too many people don't understand how antibiotic resistance works: there's no problem with using antibiotics if you use them as a full-course and thoroughly eradicate an infection. However, since you can't always do this, every time we use them (and in the idiotic ways they've been used previously) what we've done is not wipe-out whole infections, but only kill off say, 99% of them, leaving a harbor of 1%.
The 1% that survive, then end up restarting the infection - but now, it's the 1% that were, for whatever reason ever so slightly more resistant to the antibiotic used then the entire population. They don't have to be completely resistant - just a little. But now, the next time you use the antibiotics it's just that little bit slower to kill off the population - and if you again leave a harbor, well, now you've just selected for even more resistance.
Vaccines are very different, because the immune system itself is designed to be able to vary it's response to target mutants. The immune system has a built in evolutionary system to permute through antibody combinations, so it's very good at wiping out not just the things it's seen, but any subtle variants it hasn't. Only a very few organisms can elude the immune system, and they do so by expressing a similar behavior - having a library of proteins they can rapidly shuffle.
The whole point of a vaccine is that since the immune system is initially primed to the disease, it wipes out most of it before an infection can be established, and natural immunity then quickly destroys variants. No resistance can be formed, because the organism never gets a chance to create off-spring with mutations before the immune system has annihilated it from the body.
Not a failure of vaccines, but a failure due to ignorance and superstition.
Once those antibodies attach, your done. No passing go, no collecting 200$, no passing on your genes so that the next generation can evolve to fight back.
Once they attach – the next generation evolves from the few that survive because the antibodies didn't attach ;)
No they don't.
Look, your immune system is keyed to murder every non-self thing in your body. It's why implants and organ transplants are so hard to do.
Infections depend on overwhelming the immune system - infecting enough cells that by the time the immune response is mounted (i.e. by the time an antibody which can attach to the pathogen is generated via our natural mechanism for permutating them) that there is an enormous number of virus or bacteria to deal with (i.e. you're sick). Usually, the immune system wins under these conditions (if it doesn't you die and game over).
Vaccination shortcuts the process - exposes the immune system to the pathogen so that the antibody type needed is already known and remembered (i.e. some base amount of it is always in your blood). When the first pathogen hits, an antibody finds it, binds to it, and the immune system almost immediately produces a huge amount of the exact right antibody - the infection never takes hold.
But that isn't all that happens: because the infection can't take hold, the infection never gets a chance to mutate from reproducing. And any mutations present are unlikely to be dramatic - that is to say, while surviving 1% longer might be the start of an evolutionary path way to resisting the antibodies (say, taking slightly longer to bind, or producing a weaker binding) - if that mutation never gets a chance to become an established infection then it simply doesn't matter - it's just as dead. And because the immune system is also permutating around the core motif, any minor variation is incredibly likely to be just as easily destroyed.
Most viruses and bacteria simply can't rapidly change their structure - there's a big energy cost to it, or it's too great an evolutionary gap to jump (i.e. there's no pathway which lets them have 100% resistance immediately - which means that, without becoming established infections, they might as well be completely non-resistant).