Absolutely. But statistically over a decent sample of stega vs non-stega docs, you see a difference. And if they can get ahold of a copy of the source document or image that compresses significantly differently, they then have an argument that steganography is present.
Steganography can be detected because the documents that contain such hidden data do not compress as well as documents not containing such data. That doesn't help you get the contents, but it can tell you that something is lurking within.
In the (early?) 90's I saw a Dec Alpha laptop running NT at Comdex. Absolutely awesome laptop. Sadly it never made it to production.
I do know of an Alpha in production: my wife's observatory has two Alpha's running VMS and Lisp to control the telescope motors. They're 100% reliable, but they're also now looking in to replacing them as it's not exactly a maintainable system.
I found a copy of an old BBC Comedy called 'Allo 'Allo. I'm in the U.S., said DVD was Region 2 and subtitled in Dutch. So yes, I'm ripping it and re-burning it sans DVD. And it don't break my heart one little bit.
Good point, but everything depends on preventing the loss of brain function, and the brain is not specifically addressed in TFA. If they add another 50% to our lives (they're not going to double it right off the bat), but the last 30% of it you're still going to have a significant loss of brain function? I suppose it's a net gain, but it's also probably a longer period of senility of which you may or may not be aware of.
How many people have long term care policies that would actually keep them comfortable in a nice rest home for the last decade or two of their lives? How much are such policies going to cost in a world where the average lifespan is over 130 years? I have a friend dying of ALS, in a theoretical world where we had a doubled life span, it would take him twice as long to die and he turned 51 this summer.
Wow, you're just a regular ray of sunshine, ain'tcha?
I am being pragmatic. IANA Medical Professional or Genetics Researcher, but how many diseases have we actually cured in the last 50 years? We've improved detection and diagnosis, we've improved treatment, we've improved vaccines as preventatives, but we still have polio, cancer, halitosis, herpes, and the common cold. Infections usually can be cured, but at the genetic level, things become a lot more difficult. I also won't overestimate the hype and marketing that pervades every new "advancement" announcement. The human body is like Windows PC's: infinite permutations. I believe they'll have better treatments 50/100 years in the future, but I don't know that they'll have a cure, and I'm not going to base my future happiness on such a promise, I'll live day-to-day and wait to see what tomorrow brings. To quote myself, "I don't want to think about doing that for a hundred years." I don't read that as wanting to die, just that at some later stage in my life that I might say screw it.
If I were suicidally predisposed, I wouldn't bother posting to/., following the haters on it would probably be enough to send me over the edge.
There's a book by Christopher Buckley called Boomsday kind of based on that premise. He is perhaps my favorite non-SF/F author, though I would consider this one of his weaker books.
I'm stating an opinion based on current conditions, which is the only basis in fact that I have available. The one thing that the article doesn't address is mental degradation, and we currently have no way of actually repairing damaged brain cells. They're seeing hope with physical effects, but they don't have proof of slowing down mental decay, so they still have quite a ways to go. To misquote a Slashdot sig, we see the universe as it is because if it were different, we wouldn't be here to see it. You're right, I can't appreciate what it would be like to conceivably live to be 150, I can only project based on my current experience. You'd have to be born in to a society that was already living that long to fully identify with that framework, so by your standard no one could make a statement that they would or would not want to live to 150. I have long-lived genes in my family, my maternal grandmother lived to 96 and my mom's brother to 92 or 93, but at the same time two of my dad's five sisters died of Alzheimer's or complications from it and a third has severe dementia. So I have sort of a Sword of Damocles hanging over me, which also affects my decision behind my original statement.
Companies that have been around for a hundred years? Government. Federal, State, County, Municipal. Lots of major manufacturing: steel, aluminum, glass, ship builders, the big three automakers are approaching a century. The Japanese combines: Subaru, Matsushita, etc. Drug manufacturers. All of them have gone through evolutions/mergers/buyouts/etc., but lots can trace their roots back 100 years.
I agree with about five years being more the norm these days. My record is 9 years at one place, I'm currently at 4+. And I totally agree about companies no longer looking out for employees.
The one thing that we cannot predict (as if we can predict what the future will hold) is how our technology field will change. 35 years ago we had punch cards, KSR-33 teletypes, DECwriters, the beginning of VDT's, 110 baud dial-up. My mom asked me over a decade ago what I thought computers would be like in the future, I said "smaller, faster, and aside from that I have no idea." So who knows how IT-types will be working in 50 years, or even 20. All we know is that it'll be different.
Treatment methodology has progressed. My condition was first identified about 60 years ago, and the treatment is to inject immuneglobin. Initially treatment was an intramuscular shot, extremely painful and not very effective. It evolved to intravenous, which is a great improvement over IM, but requires going to a cancer treatment center (really cheery place!) or having a home nurse come out. I do the latest, which has only been around for about a decade in the U.S., and that's subcutaneous. So treatment has evolved even though the drug is fundamentally the same. Blood parts is blood parts.
I participated in a survey about a new treatment paradigm which involves a small device about the size of a deck of playing cards. You alcohol swab the site that you're going to infuse at, peel off a backing to reveal the sticky surface, slap it on your infusion site, and pull a string. Then go to bed, in the morning it's done and you throw away the device. I don't know the exact methodology of how it works, it has to be some form of subcutaneous infusion, but it sounds a heck of a lot more comfortable than what I'm doing now.
As to how long I'm willing to tolerate it, I guess it depends on quality of life. Stopping treatment doesn't mean instant death, it means steadily declining immuneglobin levels and increasing infection risk. My diagnostic event was having pneumonia four times in five months. So if I were to stop treatment, I would probably enter a similar cycle, but it would take 3-6 months before something like that started.
I have it easy and I should suck it up. I know people with immune disorders who have to infuse on a daily basis. I know people with this disorder who in addition to infusing subcutaneously, has to get IV whole blood because of other disorders in addition to an immunodeficiency. I'm lucky in that now all I have is hypogammaglobulinemia (common variable immune deficiency), but it can get worse and other conditions may arise as I get older.
Oh, and without insurance my meds would cost approx $5,000 a month.
It would totally change the basic paradigms of work. I know my (previous) boss resented having to pay for his employees to stay up-to-date on new tech, I can't imagine what corps will think when people potentially are working for them for a century. And I cannot imagine what it would do for promotion stagnancy.
Me, personally, I do not want to live to 150. I turn 50 in a couple of months, and it turns out that I have an immune disorder that kicked in to high gear two years ago. In those two years, I've had over 200 infusions (twice a week) involving 4 needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I don't want to think about doing that for a hundred years. Yes, they might develop a cure (they will certainly improve treatment models), but I'm not expecting a cure in my (current) lifetime. They've been able to jump-start immune systems with gene therapy, but they've also had a tremendous increase in tumors in such patients. It's possible that an immune system could shut down to prevent the start/spread of tumors as a defensive mechanism.
Compared to Arizona, where it's 8 freaking months of very hot Summer? I left there for the mountains of New Mexico after growing up there. We did hit 18 below zero in February, but normally winters don't get below 20 and don't last more than 4-5 months.
Put your phone on silent, or turned off, into the glove compartment. You could also give it to your companion if one is with you if you don't think they're going to get arrested. If the officer asks "You don't mind if I search your car, do you?", to which there is no answer that means no, state "I do not give you permission to search my car." They then have to get a formal warrant.
Unless you have deniable encryption at rest, it doesn't matter. They don't take your phone and poke around on it, they hook it up to a machine that sucks the contents out of it into an image in about 10 seconds. Passwords do nothing to block this, so it doesn't matter if you give it to them or not.
I'm a filer at work because (a) helps to keep long-term project notes better organized, and (b) our damn Outlook retention policy purges email older than a month or so. The only way that I can keep old notes is to put them in folders. I'm a filer on my main home account because Yahoo searches a bit too broadly and, again, I have some long-term projects that need better quick reference for certain types of notes. Searching makes no difference whether it's inbox or folders as far as I can see in Outlook. I'm not going to bother reading TFA, but I wonder if they're painting with too broad a brush since IBM is stuck on Notes.
If you get pulled over, silence your phone and put it in the glove box. If they can't see it in plain sight, and you don't give the explicit permission to search your car, they can't look for it or suck it dry. If they ask in any form if they can search your car, such as "You don't mind if I search your car?" (damned if you do and damned if you don't), clearly state "I do not give permission for my car to be searched."
Sounds like a nice way to work and one that gives you a lot of respect and self-worth, definitely valuable intangibles. I've spent most of my working life in the government sector. We're also underpaid compared to peers, but there's usually a better amount of job security. I have worked in small companies before, the smallest shop I worked in was my first: a realtor, me, and his secretary. It was no where near my best job, but definitely wasn't my worst.
Funny thing is that the best jobs for me totally depend on the people, and as people change or move on, the job can change from best to "I gotta get out of this place!" I was really frustrated when I quit working at one job after 9 years and my friends said "Good, you haven't been happy there for a long time." Yet they never told me what they had noticed, and it took a crisis for me to finally decide that I'd had enough.
I have stayed friends with many people in companies that I have left. The 7,000 pounds is a heck of a raise, but personally I would value regaining an hour and a half of my day as an equally big advantage.
Loyalty to an employer is no longer an admirable trait (usually) as has been demonstrated time and again over the last couple of decades. If you don't have a financial interest or investment in the company, i.e. stock options/shares/whatever, you're not tied to its success or failure. Loyalty is your feelings to a company, a company does not have feelings and doesn't care much about you one way or another. The smaller the company is, that may change, but fundamentally we all are cogs.
My wife operates a 3.5 meter telescope, fortunately a ridge blocks most of the town below, but not the air force base next door, for some reason they like to keep the lights on for their runways. She has some strong opinions about city light and Las Vegas. The funny thing is: she was invited as a guest to a convention in Vegas and we went! It was kind of amusing watching her cringe and bitch.
If my interpretation of the bible is correct, Jesus may well appear at Landover Ministries, and utterly lay waste to it with a sword when he returns. At least that's my fervent desire. Speaking as a fellow heathen.
The answer that I got was that 10,000 plasma donations are pooled for one batch to get a good mix of antibodies. Each donation is less than a liter, though I didn't get an exact number, and one donation is 4 grams of IgG, so I personally need 10 donation equivalents per month (I receive 4 weeks of meds per shipment, so we call that a month). I don't think you can easily say that the average treatment is X grams per month as it varies wildly depending on the person's problems, treatment and body weight.
I remember the first FSZ that I ever saw. I was attending San Diego Comic Con and the next event to be held at the convention center was the Republican National Convention. The FSZ was a chain link pen probably 30x10' and about a quarter mile from the convention center, so the important people wouldn't need to be sullied.
I don't remember the year, but it was before 9/11. I thought then that it was a terrible turn for our country to take.
Unfortunately I didn't attend the panel on how the product is made when I attended a conference earlier this year. It is my understanding that if you give a plasma donation or sell plasma, the immuneglobin (Ig) constitutes a fairly small amount as the plasma is filtered from your whole blood. The Ig has to be further processed through filtration, purification, inspection, concentration, etc., until it ends up in the bottle that I just finished infusing. I infuse 10 grams a week (50 ml), I have no idea how many grams of Ig are in a liter of plasma (typical amount of a donation/sale). The plasma is not used exclusively for treatments for conditions like mine, a lot of other treatments are derived from it.
The variety is important. Since I don't produce antibodies, I get them from donors through this donation/concentration process. I still get tetanus shots every decade or whatever and flu vaccines annually, but I can't do live vaccines like FluMist where they spray it up your nose, I'm also not supposed to be exposed to people who do live vaccines, which is a little tricky. There's a definite down-side to it: you can't run antibody tests on me because the results are unreliable since I'm receiving 10,000 people's antibodies. Earlier this year I was mildly sick for a few months and we thought it could be mono, but the conventional test for it is an Epstein-Barr test and the EBV is an antibody-based test, so the results were inconclusive and we shouldn't have wasted the money and resources on it.
I'll ask about the scale on an immunology board that I frequent, I might be able to get an answer there.
as I'm a person with such a disorder. Specifically, my body does not produce immuneglobin, which can make me very susceptible to disease. My triggering event was in 2009 when I had pneumonia four times in five months, fortunately I had no permanent lung damage as a result. I have to infuse immuneglobin into my abdomen weekly to stay reasonably healthy (four needles/90 minutes/twice a week, I recently did my 200th infusion).
For the most part, it's a life-long genetic condition, and we had indicators that I did get sick more often than most people, but it took this mini-crisis for me to get diagnosed and treated. There is no cure as of yet. My specific disorder is that my body's B cells do not produce immuneglobin in response to the presence of infection. They have successfully forced/tricked B cells to produce IG in a petri dish, but have not yet succeeded at that rat level.
Which brings us to the interesting part. I've heard a theory that immune system shut-down could actually be a form of defensive mechanism. For certain types of immunodeficiency they have successfully turned the immune system back on, but they've had a very high incidence of tumors later. So it's possible that an immune system clamps down and stops producing certain types of immuneglobin so that the body doesn't start producing cancer.
Interesting concept. They've also seen a reduction in certain cancer rates for people on immuneglobin therapy, and since I'll be doing this for the rest of my life, that's small compensation.
Treatment is expensive, it takes portions of 10,000 plasma donations to produce one treatment. That's a pretty scary scale to me.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. But statistically over a decent sample of stega vs non-stega docs, you see a difference. And if they can get ahold of a copy of the source document or image that compresses significantly differently, they then have an argument that steganography is present.
Steganography can be detected because the documents that contain such hidden data do not compress as well as documents not containing such data. That doesn't help you get the contents, but it can tell you that something is lurking within.
In the (early?) 90's I saw a Dec Alpha laptop running NT at Comdex. Absolutely awesome laptop. Sadly it never made it to production.
I do know of an Alpha in production: my wife's observatory has two Alpha's running VMS and Lisp to control the telescope motors. They're 100% reliable, but they're also now looking in to replacing them as it's not exactly a maintainable system.
I found a copy of an old BBC Comedy called 'Allo 'Allo. I'm in the U.S., said DVD was Region 2 and subtitled in Dutch. So yes, I'm ripping it and re-burning it sans DVD. And it don't break my heart one little bit.
Good point, but everything depends on preventing the loss of brain function, and the brain is not specifically addressed in TFA. If they add another 50% to our lives (they're not going to double it right off the bat), but the last 30% of it you're still going to have a significant loss of brain function? I suppose it's a net gain, but it's also probably a longer period of senility of which you may or may not be aware of.
How many people have long term care policies that would actually keep them comfortable in a nice rest home for the last decade or two of their lives? How much are such policies going to cost in a world where the average lifespan is over 130 years? I have a friend dying of ALS, in a theoretical world where we had a doubled life span, it would take him twice as long to die and he turned 51 this summer.
Wow, you're just a regular ray of sunshine, ain'tcha?
/., following the haters on it would probably be enough to send me over the edge.
I am being pragmatic. IANA Medical Professional or Genetics Researcher, but how many diseases have we actually cured in the last 50 years? We've improved detection and diagnosis, we've improved treatment, we've improved vaccines as preventatives, but we still have polio, cancer, halitosis, herpes, and the common cold. Infections usually can be cured, but at the genetic level, things become a lot more difficult. I also won't overestimate the hype and marketing that pervades every new "advancement" announcement. The human body is like Windows PC's: infinite permutations. I believe they'll have better treatments 50/100 years in the future, but I don't know that they'll have a cure, and I'm not going to base my future happiness on such a promise, I'll live day-to-day and wait to see what tomorrow brings. To quote myself, "I don't want to think about doing that for a hundred years." I don't read that as wanting to die, just that at some later stage in my life that I might say screw it.
If I were suicidally predisposed, I wouldn't bother posting to
There's a book by Christopher Buckley called Boomsday kind of based on that premise. He is perhaps my favorite non-SF/F author, though I would consider this one of his weaker books.
Absolutely on both points. jfac++.
I'm stating an opinion based on current conditions, which is the only basis in fact that I have available. The one thing that the article doesn't address is mental degradation, and we currently have no way of actually repairing damaged brain cells. They're seeing hope with physical effects, but they don't have proof of slowing down mental decay, so they still have quite a ways to go. To misquote a Slashdot sig, we see the universe as it is because if it were different, we wouldn't be here to see it. You're right, I can't appreciate what it would be like to conceivably live to be 150, I can only project based on my current experience. You'd have to be born in to a society that was already living that long to fully identify with that framework, so by your standard no one could make a statement that they would or would not want to live to 150. I have long-lived genes in my family, my maternal grandmother lived to 96 and my mom's brother to 92 or 93, but at the same time two of my dad's five sisters died of Alzheimer's or complications from it and a third has severe dementia. So I have sort of a Sword of Damocles hanging over me, which also affects my decision behind my original statement.
Companies that have been around for a hundred years? Government. Federal, State, County, Municipal. Lots of major manufacturing: steel, aluminum, glass, ship builders, the big three automakers are approaching a century. The Japanese combines: Subaru, Matsushita, etc. Drug manufacturers. All of them have gone through evolutions/mergers/buyouts/etc., but lots can trace their roots back 100 years.
I agree with about five years being more the norm these days. My record is 9 years at one place, I'm currently at 4+. And I totally agree about companies no longer looking out for employees.
The one thing that we cannot predict (as if we can predict what the future will hold) is how our technology field will change. 35 years ago we had punch cards, KSR-33 teletypes, DECwriters, the beginning of VDT's, 110 baud dial-up. My mom asked me over a decade ago what I thought computers would be like in the future, I said "smaller, faster, and aside from that I have no idea." So who knows how IT-types will be working in 50 years, or even 20. All we know is that it'll be different.
Treatment methodology has progressed. My condition was first identified about 60 years ago, and the treatment is to inject immuneglobin. Initially treatment was an intramuscular shot, extremely painful and not very effective. It evolved to intravenous, which is a great improvement over IM, but requires going to a cancer treatment center (really cheery place!) or having a home nurse come out. I do the latest, which has only been around for about a decade in the U.S., and that's subcutaneous. So treatment has evolved even though the drug is fundamentally the same. Blood parts is blood parts.
I participated in a survey about a new treatment paradigm which involves a small device about the size of a deck of playing cards. You alcohol swab the site that you're going to infuse at, peel off a backing to reveal the sticky surface, slap it on your infusion site, and pull a string. Then go to bed, in the morning it's done and you throw away the device. I don't know the exact methodology of how it works, it has to be some form of subcutaneous infusion, but it sounds a heck of a lot more comfortable than what I'm doing now.
As to how long I'm willing to tolerate it, I guess it depends on quality of life. Stopping treatment doesn't mean instant death, it means steadily declining immuneglobin levels and increasing infection risk. My diagnostic event was having pneumonia four times in five months. So if I were to stop treatment, I would probably enter a similar cycle, but it would take 3-6 months before something like that started.
I have it easy and I should suck it up. I know people with immune disorders who have to infuse on a daily basis. I know people with this disorder who in addition to infusing subcutaneously, has to get IV whole blood because of other disorders in addition to an immunodeficiency. I'm lucky in that now all I have is hypogammaglobulinemia (common variable immune deficiency), but it can get worse and other conditions may arise as I get older.
Oh, and without insurance my meds would cost approx $5,000 a month.
Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.
;-)
Yeah, I'm always depressed whenever I'm around.
It would totally change the basic paradigms of work. I know my (previous) boss resented having to pay for his employees to stay up-to-date on new tech, I can't imagine what corps will think when people potentially are working for them for a century. And I cannot imagine what it would do for promotion stagnancy.
Me, personally, I do not want to live to 150. I turn 50 in a couple of months, and it turns out that I have an immune disorder that kicked in to high gear two years ago. In those two years, I've had over 200 infusions (twice a week) involving 4 needles in my abdomen for 90 minutes or so twice a week. I don't want to think about doing that for a hundred years. Yes, they might develop a cure (they will certainly improve treatment models), but I'm not expecting a cure in my (current) lifetime. They've been able to jump-start immune systems with gene therapy, but they've also had a tremendous increase in tumors in such patients. It's possible that an immune system could shut down to prevent the start/spread of tumors as a defensive mechanism.
Compared to Arizona, where it's 8 freaking months of very hot Summer? I left there for the mountains of New Mexico after growing up there. We did hit 18 below zero in February, but normally winters don't get below 20 and don't last more than 4-5 months.
Put your phone on silent, or turned off, into the glove compartment. You could also give it to your companion if one is with you if you don't think they're going to get arrested. If the officer asks "You don't mind if I search your car, do you?", to which there is no answer that means no, state "I do not give you permission to search my car." They then have to get a formal warrant.
Unless you have deniable encryption at rest, it doesn't matter. They don't take your phone and poke around on it, they hook it up to a machine that sucks the contents out of it into an image in about 10 seconds. Passwords do nothing to block this, so it doesn't matter if you give it to them or not.
I'm a filer at work because (a) helps to keep long-term project notes better organized, and (b) our damn Outlook retention policy purges email older than a month or so. The only way that I can keep old notes is to put them in folders. I'm a filer on my main home account because Yahoo searches a bit too broadly and, again, I have some long-term projects that need better quick reference for certain types of notes. Searching makes no difference whether it's inbox or folders as far as I can see in Outlook. I'm not going to bother reading TFA, but I wonder if they're painting with too broad a brush since IBM is stuck on Notes.
If you get pulled over, silence your phone and put it in the glove box. If they can't see it in plain sight, and you don't give the explicit permission to search your car, they can't look for it or suck it dry. If they ask in any form if they can search your car, such as "You don't mind if I search your car?" (damned if you do and damned if you don't), clearly state "I do not give permission for my car to be searched."
The Nomad Law site is excellent, such as this video on Do Not Talk To The Police. http://nomadlaw.com/2010/09/dont-talk-police-videotaped-lesson/
Sounds like a nice way to work and one that gives you a lot of respect and self-worth, definitely valuable intangibles. I've spent most of my working life in the government sector. We're also underpaid compared to peers, but there's usually a better amount of job security. I have worked in small companies before, the smallest shop I worked in was my first: a realtor, me, and his secretary. It was no where near my best job, but definitely wasn't my worst.
Funny thing is that the best jobs for me totally depend on the people, and as people change or move on, the job can change from best to "I gotta get out of this place!" I was really frustrated when I quit working at one job after 9 years and my friends said "Good, you haven't been happy there for a long time." Yet they never told me what they had noticed, and it took a crisis for me to finally decide that I'd had enough.
I have stayed friends with many people in companies that I have left. The 7,000 pounds is a heck of a raise, but personally I would value regaining an hour and a half of my day as an equally big advantage.
Loyalty to an employer is no longer an admirable trait (usually) as has been demonstrated time and again over the last couple of decades. If you don't have a financial interest or investment in the company, i.e. stock options/shares/whatever, you're not tied to its success or failure. Loyalty is your feelings to a company, a company does not have feelings and doesn't care much about you one way or another. The smaller the company is, that may change, but fundamentally we all are cogs.
My wife operates a 3.5 meter telescope, fortunately a ridge blocks most of the town below, but not the air force base next door, for some reason they like to keep the lights on for their runways. She has some strong opinions about city light and Las Vegas. The funny thing is: she was invited as a guest to a convention in Vegas and we went! It was kind of amusing watching her cringe and bitch.
If my interpretation of the bible is correct, Jesus may well appear at Landover Ministries, and utterly lay waste to it with a sword when he returns. At least that's my fervent desire. Speaking as a fellow heathen.
The answer that I got was that 10,000 plasma donations are pooled for one batch to get a good mix of antibodies. Each donation is less than a liter, though I didn't get an exact number, and one donation is 4 grams of IgG, so I personally need 10 donation equivalents per month (I receive 4 weeks of meds per shipment, so we call that a month). I don't think you can easily say that the average treatment is X grams per month as it varies wildly depending on the person's problems, treatment and body weight.
I remember the first FSZ that I ever saw. I was attending San Diego Comic Con and the next event to be held at the convention center was the Republican National Convention. The FSZ was a chain link pen probably 30x10' and about a quarter mile from the convention center, so the important people wouldn't need to be sullied.
I don't remember the year, but it was before 9/11. I thought then that it was a terrible turn for our country to take.
Unfortunately I didn't attend the panel on how the product is made when I attended a conference earlier this year. It is my understanding that if you give a plasma donation or sell plasma, the immuneglobin (Ig) constitutes a fairly small amount as the plasma is filtered from your whole blood. The Ig has to be further processed through filtration, purification, inspection, concentration, etc., until it ends up in the bottle that I just finished infusing. I infuse 10 grams a week (50 ml), I have no idea how many grams of Ig are in a liter of plasma (typical amount of a donation/sale). The plasma is not used exclusively for treatments for conditions like mine, a lot of other treatments are derived from it.
The variety is important. Since I don't produce antibodies, I get them from donors through this donation/concentration process. I still get tetanus shots every decade or whatever and flu vaccines annually, but I can't do live vaccines like FluMist where they spray it up your nose, I'm also not supposed to be exposed to people who do live vaccines, which is a little tricky. There's a definite down-side to it: you can't run antibody tests on me because the results are unreliable since I'm receiving 10,000 people's antibodies. Earlier this year I was mildly sick for a few months and we thought it could be mono, but the conventional test for it is an Epstein-Barr test and the EBV is an antibody-based test, so the results were inconclusive and we shouldn't have wasted the money and resources on it.
I'll ask about the scale on an immunology board that I frequent, I might be able to get an answer there.
as I'm a person with such a disorder. Specifically, my body does not produce immuneglobin, which can make me very susceptible to disease. My triggering event was in 2009 when I had pneumonia four times in five months, fortunately I had no permanent lung damage as a result. I have to infuse immuneglobin into my abdomen weekly to stay reasonably healthy (four needles/90 minutes/twice a week, I recently did my 200th infusion).
For the most part, it's a life-long genetic condition, and we had indicators that I did get sick more often than most people, but it took this mini-crisis for me to get diagnosed and treated. There is no cure as of yet. My specific disorder is that my body's B cells do not produce immuneglobin in response to the presence of infection. They have successfully forced/tricked B cells to produce IG in a petri dish, but have not yet succeeded at that rat level.
Which brings us to the interesting part. I've heard a theory that immune system shut-down could actually be a form of defensive mechanism. For certain types of immunodeficiency they have successfully turned the immune system back on, but they've had a very high incidence of tumors later. So it's possible that an immune system clamps down and stops producing certain types of immuneglobin so that the body doesn't start producing cancer.
Interesting concept. They've also seen a reduction in certain cancer rates for people on immuneglobin therapy, and since I'll be doing this for the rest of my life, that's small compensation.
Treatment is expensive, it takes portions of 10,000 plasma donations to produce one treatment. That's a pretty scary scale to me.