I would hope that at some point we can make at least basic vaccinations mandatory, since it’s the kids and not the gullible parents or the crazy hucksters who are going to suffer from it, but then that would infringe upon your right to have chattel for 18 years, er, “raise your kids” wouldn’t it?

If the anti-vaccination people had their way, and we got rid of vaccines and childhood diseases started to run rampant again, we would only be able to control it through quarantine.  And that would mean a whole lot of women would lose their jobs because they couldn’t handle both quarantines and holding down a job. Once again, my suspicions about the crunchy mothering trend are aroused.  A lot of the crunchy parenting trends seem directly aimed at eating away at women’s time for themselves.  I doubt that’s the intention, but there’s sometimes “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” air about crunchy parenting trends.

I don’t know.  I could easily see this burden coming down as hard on the father as the mother.  I’ve got a number of people in my office with wives that out-earn them.  If it came down to a quarantine situation, I could certainly see a marked rise in stay-at-home dads.

That said, at a certain point who are you supposed to believe?  The CDC and the FDA just don’t get the same exposure as Ellen and Oprah.  If Jim Carry and Jenny McCarthy go on another whirlwind anti-vaccination tour, can you honestly blame parents for listening to the line of quacks and luddites that loudly follow?

I’d feel better about vaccinations generally if there was more regulation and oversight of drug companies by the government.  I also get really nervous about how freaking many vaccinations there are nowadays, and how they’re bundled into these huge megadoses for very small babies.

We responded to this by making up our own vaccination schedule:  no more than one shot per month, spread out over our baby’s first three years rather than two.  It made every doctor who dealt with us crazy.  They wanted to get the shots over with as expediently as possible, while we wanted to make sure we weren’t doing anything that would overload our child’s system.  Now, who was acting in the best interest of our individual child in that instance?

I think you’re right, by the way, about the homebound subtext in a lot of the very crunchy mothering trends.  The upshot of it is that if you haven’t given your life entirely over to child-rearing ur doing it wrong.  And the mass of the pressure is put on the mother, starting before the child is born.  Not much change there.  Use painkiller during childbirth?  Bad mother.  Don’t hold your baby 24/7?  Bad mother.  Don’t make all the food yourself?  Bad mother.  Don’t breastfeed for three years?  Bad mother.  In my experience, it is a trend that lends itself to judgmental types very easily.  Because they’re so certain they’re right and have discovered The Only Way.

The other thing going on here is a horrible classism.  They are assuming that if their kids get measles or whatnot, they will recognize the symptoms immediately and get treatment.  I assume that they all have health insurance.  I don’t like the attitude of not insuring people, but if there were ever anything insurance companies should charge more for, it’s an vaccinated child.

Schools should also keep records of who is not vaccinated, and make them available to parents for their children’s class, so they can choose not to invite unvaccinated children to their homes.

Hasn’t Jenny McCarthy claimed she “cured” her child’s autism?  If it was cured, it wasn’t autism.

The luddites are just as “off” as the people who insist that breast implants cause just about every disorder known to man and that HIV has nothing to do with AIDS despite a huge body of evidence to the contrary of their statements.  In the cases of both breast implants (something I don’t understand for anyone who has not undergone a mastectomy) and vaccines, research was planned with a known (and admitted) bias towards proving that they did do all the bad things they were alleged to do and yet the data still has not supported the claims of these people led by the great scientific minds of certain celebrities (heck, not even the ones who at least played a doctor on TV).  Anecdotal evidence and idiosyncratic reactions do not make their claims true.

Most people brush these folks off with a “they’re hurting their own only” but, with the ability of the herd effect being diminished, it’s quite possible that we will be aiding the next pandemic brought about by something that is now more able to infect and mutate to beat current vaccines.  It’s one thing to spread the vaccinations out across time instead of clustering them all together, another completely different thing to refuse vaccination completely.  Worse yet, blaming all these illnesses on vaccination (first it was thimerisol, now that vaccines don’t contain it, it’s the vaccination itself) undermines a chance at real understanding of these illnesses and their true etiologies.

Hasn’t Jenny McCarthy claimed she “cured” her child’s autism?  If it was cured, it wasn’t autism.

Jenny McCarthy seems to think she’s some sort of medical superhero: she has also claimed to ring her son back from the brinks of respiratory failure in a story that makes no clinical sense (she claims he was visibly cyanotic and was told they would put him on a ventilator in an hour if his respiratory status didn’t improve in that time; she off course begged him to breath better and voila he was back to normal - the whole story is beyond suspect).  When I heard she said she cured her son using diet she undermined a claim that his autism diagnosis was accurate - if she cured it with diet, it’s more likely a metabolic disorder or sprue.

We have a 2.5mo daughter, who has had her first round of shots, who has gone to some of the less salubrious restaurants in Atlanta with us, and has yet to get sick beyond a sneeze attack here and there. We also have two friends/acquaintances with young children who have refused to vaccinate their kids. One of them keeps wanting to set up a playdate, and really, I rather like this couple except for their criminal negligence and felony stupidity with regard to vaccinating their children. We’re running out of excuses, but we fear alienating them because we’ve critiqued their “values,” and they’re from the follow your bliss demographic.

“In the cases of both breast implants (something I don’t understand for anyone who has not undergone a mastectomy)”

There are other valid medical reasons. The US actually limits the size of the implants that can be put in.

Though I do have to wonder why the same people who refuse to trust the FDA, the CDC, the AMA, their own doctors, a multitude of scientists, and the entire medical community when it comes to vaccines happily trust a cardboard box at Whole Foods

LOL.

No wonder we’re falling behind the rest of the world.  In today’s climate, being anti-science is a recipe for failure.

“The US actually limits the size of the implants that can be put in. “

BOOOO!  just kidding.

Eileen, I think vaccination paranoia is something that people resort to because they don’t have control over the REAL problems their kids face.  Economy collapsing, pollution in the air, global warming, an increasingly competitive but less rewarding rat race, a growing fundamentalist movement, a shitty school system---no wonder yuppie parents buy into two fallacies: 1) That they can take super-secret special selfish moves to give their kids a leg up and 2) That these moves are as simple as being “skeptical” of science, which requires you to be gullible to hucksters. 

Unfortunately, life just isn’t that simple.  And for all the obsession with the right foods and herbal this and homeopathic that, the ingredients for giving your kid a leg up haven’t changed: proper nutrition, good sleep, and most importantly, good schools, being read to, being pushed to plan a solid professional career from an early age, and saving for college.  Anti-vaccination paranoia is, I believe, a manifestation of the middle class anxiety that Barbara Ehrenreich described in Fear of Falling.  It feels right, because we’re inclined to zero-sum thinking.  Because avoiding vaccination screws other kids, parents think, it must be good for their kids, right?

But nope.  Vaccination is a classic win-win situation.  You don’t spread disease, but you also don’t get disease.  Because not vaccinating screws other kids, it doesn’t automatically confer an advantage on yours.  The kids who got measles were some babies that hadn’t gotten the MMR yet, sure, but there were kids who got it because their parents thought they were getting away with something.

I recommend listening to that podcast. I know it’s not going to make much difference, since you’re getting the schedule anyway, but it’s still relevant if you can share the information with friends who are avoiding vaccinations altogether.  I had a 106 fever when I was 5 or 6 for only about a day.  My memory of it was absolute hell---and that was just one day.  Many days can cause permanent damage.  In fact, even one day caused damage in me---I have one tooth that was coming in at the time that is now softer than the rest, and guess which tooth is the only one I got a cavity in.  I wish they’d had the chicken pox vaccine when I was a kid.  I got the chicken pox when I was 11 and I still struggle with the aftereffects.  I’m extremely worried about getting shingles in middle age because of it---I know a woman who got shingles and it screwed her nervous system up so bad she couldn’t close one of her eyes for months.  We like to think these diseases are no big deal, but they really are.

“Skepticism” of vaccinations isn’t proper skepticism.  Proper skepticism is rigorous and spread to all claims equally.  It requires that you measure the claims of the cranks who have an anti-vaccination vendetta and weigh them against the claims of scientists.  To be suspicious of vaccinations is to be credulous with anti- claims (ignoring that they shift the burden of proof, ignore evidence, make baseless claims, demand that anecdote beats data), but refuse to accept good evidence from the medical community.

The anti-vaccination folks trade known risks from infectious diseases (brain damage, paralysis, birth defects, etc.) for some unknown risks (brain damage and immune system damage) based on distrust of the medical industrial system.  But you do not have to trust the CDC or FDA to get a sense of the risks of diseases.  FDR was in a wheel chair because he had Polio.  Helen Keller was blind and deaf because of scarlet fever.  Smallpox decimated indigenous populations all over the globe.

Most of these people are well educated and probably have been exposed to the history and/or literature the covers this.  In much of the literature I remember from earlier than the 1920s, someone was either dead or dying of TB, pneumonia, etc.

Maybe I should get a copy of the Velveteen Rabbit for my anti-vaccination friends with two young kids.  (All the toys have to be burned to kill off the infection.) We are good friends, but we cannot talk about this issue.  Spouse is a nurse and therefore has bought into the pharmaceutical propaganda.  Which make me want to start yelling at my friends.

There are valid medical excuses not to vaccinate.  A (very small) percentage of kids will have a serious adverse reaction to vaccination or be allergic to one of the ingredients.  It’s probably a pretty unpleasant way to find out your child is allergic to eggs, for example.

However, there’s a big difference between “My child had a major reaction to vaccination and had to be taken to the emergency room” and “My child is such a special snowflake that I just know she’ll have an adverse reaction, so I’m just not going to do it.”

If the FDA won’t or can’t control vaccine safety, then why on earth would they be able to ensure that organic food really is organic?

I hate to nitpick (wait, no I don’t), but it’s the USDA, not the FDA, that oversees “organic” labeling. Even more surprisingly, the USDA doesn’t actually send out its own inspectors; it trusts private (sometimes for-profit), third-party certification organizations to conduct the process. Take that, yuppies! Your food was certified organic by dirty capitalists!

I have the privilege of being friends with several working epidemiologists, which means that sometimes all I have to do is raise the question of whether raw milk is healthier or vaccines are bad for you and then sit back and watch the fur fly.

One thing I will say about the vaccine argument:

1) My epidemiologist friends think the anti-vaccine people are dangerous cranks.
2) They also tried to vaccinate their children on a more spread-out schedule than is standard, because they didn’t feel there was a good reason for the megadoses and they were sick of their kids being miserable for the next week.

The same thing happens when the topic of drinking in pregnancy is brought up. Of course people shouldn’t go on benders. At the same time, people who have done the studies seem to come down on the side of a half-glass of red wine every couple of weeks, and these are the people who don’t drink green tea or eat chocolate all pregnancy because of concerns about caffeine as a tetragen.

I hate to nitpick (wait, no I don’t), but it’s the USDA, not the FDA, that oversees “organic” labeling. Even more surprisingly, the USDA doesn’t actually send out its own inspectors; it trusts private (sometimes for-profit), third-party certification organizations to conduct the process.

Apropos of that, we have this, in which a company sold spiked fertilizer as organic for a few years, and California ag officials knew about it for at least part of that time and didn’t say anything.

I’ve always thought that the anti-vaccination folks were the ultimate in selfishness. They’re basically relying on the fact that there is a national safety net that prevents us from having these diseases because everyone gets vaccinated. It’s a social contract. Vaccinations do cause minor effects in some tiny percentage of people, but the reward is we don’t have thousands of children dying from preventable disease.

But to the anti-vaccine nuts because their special little snowflake is such a special little snowflake they are exempt from this social contract. “Let the other kids get vaccinated and my little special one gets double protected!” Until, of course, like the measels outbreak there are enough idiots refusing inoculations that we are all at risk.

wonder why the same people who refuse to trust the FDA, the CDC, the AMA, their own doctors, a multitude of scientists, and the entire medical community

This is a consequence of several trends over the past 30 years.  First, there is the ongoing Republican war on science.  This is primarily targeted at environmental and climate science, as well as any other science which threatens corporate profits, but it spills over into a more generalized distrust of science.  Second, there is the gutting or handing over to industry shills of the FDA and other regulatory agencies by Republican Presidents over the past 30 years.  The consequence is that these agencies have frequently failed to do due diligence in their oversight, with rather disastrous consequences in some cases.  Third is the rise of the “alternative medicine” movement, which makes numerous, largely false, claims against scientific medicine in promoting their wholly unscientific and until recently totally untested approaches.  This is aided and abetted by the medical profession’s pathological reluctance to explain what and why they are doing things the way they do.  The shift to HMOs and similar factory-style medical delivery systems has also contributed.  Finally, there is the absolutely miserable state of science and medical reporting in the media, which routinely exagerates dangers to create headlines and reports on research findings of individual studies without providing adequate background on the prevailing science.

Regarding the spread-out dosing schedule, that’s what we did and it was no problem for our pediatricians.  They are pretty flexible about it.  Also a few doses get delayed because the kid has a bad cold or an ear infection and you want to wait until they are better.  Thankfully we haven’t had to change doctors, so our sample size is 1 practice.

They’re selfish, but they’re also not thinking straight.  Objectively speaking, the selfish thing to do is get your kids vaccinated, if you define “selfish” as “looking out for your best interests regardless of the effect on others”.  Many selfish choices are win-win for others.  It’s selfish, for instance, to vote Democratic, but it’s also better for the country. 

I really do think a lot of people refuse to believe in the win-win solution.  That they aren’t winning unless someone else is losing.  Therefore they don’t get their kids vaccinated, figuring it must be advantageous because it’s fucking others over.  They’re wrong. The kids who get sick are the ones not vaccinated.

Amanda:

It’s possible to be selfish and misinformed at the same time, so that what you think is to your selfish advantage actually screws you over. Look at the GOP base…

And although I’m beating a dead horse around here, another thing that’s going on here (expanding on your comment about anti-vaccination as a displacement mechanism for other worries) is the crappy US healthcare system. If your kid gets a seriously bad vaccine reaction, your life is ruined not only emotionally and practically, but financially as well. So for those who are misinformed about the odds and about the consequences of some of the standard diseases (which no one is familiar with because they’re so rare), the incentives in the US are particularly perverse.

My opinion is that people - some people, at least - cannot handle randomness.  If their child has autism, there MUST be a reason, a cause, some factor which someone else knows about.  Many individuals cannot handle the realization that sometimes things happen for no reason at all, a factor of the chaos of the Universe.  The other alternative - besides some mysterious external causation - is to blame themselves, to search through their lives for something they did or did not do which caused such misfortune.

In the end these two impulses combine to form a tangle of conspiratorial thinking.  THEY have been lying/concealing/downplaying something, and because I was naive/believed them my child is injured.  The combination of guilt - I trusted THEM - and the perfect explanation - THEY did it, THAT caused my child’s disability - gives people a simple and clear path.  Don’t vaccinate your child and everything will be fine.  Everyone who disagrees with you is on THEIR side.

The same sort of misappropriation of thinking about risk is prevalent throughout our lives.  Obviously, the risks of catching a disease vaccination prevents are obvious and historically proven.  Take, for example, a parallel situation - people will obsess about air travel, buy supplemental insurance, panic over plane crashes, refuse to fly - and yet these same people will drive while impaired, not wear seatbelts, and basically ignore the statistics which say that automobile travel is far more dangerous PER ACCDIENT PER PERSON than air travel.  It’s the illusion of control - you are driving your car, therefore you have the feeling of being the master of your own destiny.  Likewise with vaccinations; trusting the doctor/FDA/CDC is putting your child’s fate in someone else’s hands, while if you buy pallatives from Whole Foods YOU are the one in charge, you have the phantasm of being in control.

In essence these beliefs are a return to superstition.  If you throw salt over your shoulder the pixies won’t curse you with bad luck - after all, last time you didn’t throw salt you lost your wallet.  Not throwing salt = lost wallet, a simple cause-and-effect which highlights our capacity to jump to the wrong causal conclusions about events.  Child vaccinated = autism.  It must be the vaccines, even though as I understand it autism is a condition which is congenital, i.e. the root causes are found in brain formation in the womb, and therefore completely unconnected to any post-birth factor.

The shift to HMOs and similar factory-style medical delivery systems has also contributed.

I’m convinced that a big reason combination vaccines became so popular was that people’s health insurance coverage is constantly changing, so you needed to get your kids’ vaccinations in while they were still covered.

If we had that evil, satanic socialized healthcare, it would probably be just as easy to do the vaccines on a spread-out schedule since you wouldn’t have to worry that the vaccines would be covered this year but wouldn’t be covered next year when your company switches to a new plan.

Tannenburg, you are spot on. I am a scientifically-oriented person and an atheist, and I’m inclined to search for the empirical causes for every effect, so I can’t accept that things happen as a consequence of chaos in the universe (except for those things that are truly random, like genetic mutations and winning the lottery). To that end I do believe that autism is probably genuinely linked to environmental and non-random genetic factors. They sure as shit aren’t linked to vaccines, though. Your suggestion that vaccines are so threatening because they represent The Man Controlling Our Lives is exactly correct, though.

Mnemosyne, I’m intrigued with your theory, but I also think combo vaccines got popular because it’s not a bad idea in general (at least from a public health perspective) to reduce the number of health care visits necessary in order to get full vaccination.  Part of the reason parents might not bring children in for multiple visits might be due to coverage issues, but even in the absence of coverage issues you’re always going to have some percentage of parents who, for whatever reasons, are going to miss some of the recommended pediatric visits.  Bundling the vaccines helps to ameliorate the public health effect; coverage issues, on the other hand, exacerbate it.

Autism research is increasingly pointing to a genetic cause.

Funny with the age of the girl in the picture, and the headline about being “anti-feminism” I thought this would be about Gardasil, the vaccine against HPV. 

In any case, I agree with the points in this article, although I don’t see how a quarantine situation would be just a motherhood issue, unless it’s through social attitudes.  In reality it could be the father that is pushed out of a job.

So if my stereotypes are correct, there’s anti-science from the right, alt-med on the left, where do we get a foothold for critical thinking?

When it came time for my daughter to get vaccines, I mentioned to my wife that I’d heard some things about them being dangerous. So she asked our midwife about it, and she said they were perfectly safe (barring the remote chance of adverse reaction), and I figured she knew a lot more about it than I do.

But then, I considered (as I always do) reading something on the internet a pretty poor substitute for getting an actual informed opinion. Over the past few years I’ve started to have less and less patience with the opinions of others (or my own, for that matter) when the person holding said opinion doesn’t really have the necessary background to form one. I don’t form any opinions on healthcare because I really don’t know enough, for example. I’ll find somebody who is qualified to have an opinion that I can trust, and get theirs.

I’m planning on selectively vaccinating my kid on a far more spread out schedule, and honestly the diseases that I won’t vaccinate for I have very little problem with my child getting. Keep in mind “full vaccination” these days means flu shots every year and the chicken pox shot at something like 3 months. I have very little problem with my child getting the flu, and hope my child gets the chicken pox (if they don’t by 10, we’ll probably vaccinate). Moreover, they push the polio vaccine rather early (first 6 months) despite the fact that polio is utterly eliminated in the west and the only reason to continue vaxing against it here is in the event you come across someone from Africa who carries it, and of course eventually eliminating the disease worldwide.

Overall, I think vaccines are a very good thing, but it’s way too many and way too soon, so I won’t follow the CDC recommendations on vaccines because they aren’t written in the best interest of the individual child but because people are far more likely to see a doctor when a baby is very young, and thus it’s more likely that they can get the vaccines in if they push them really early.

I just listened to that show this weekend and it struck me that one of the things that’s going on with the anti-vaccination crowd is that they’re falling victim to our (human) natural inability to accurately perceive/judge risk. Vaccines were developed and propagated b/c disease—particularly virulent childhood diseases—used to be far more common and fatal than they are now. Only a couple of generations ago (prior to WW2 really) childhood diseases like measles were rampant and childhood mortality was at a level that is unthinkable in modern industrialized societies. And that’s the problem—vaccines were so effective in wiping out those diseases and reducing childhood mortality that modern parents no longer understand the risk that they represent, and equate it with the risk of their child developing side effects from the cure. If I wanted to be flippant about it I’d say it’s another side effect of the Rethuglican war on science & education, but I actually think it’s a combination of many of the points made in this thread.

tannenburg:

My opinion is that people - some people, at least - cannot handle randomness. If their child has autism, there MUST be a reason, a cause, some factor which someone else knows about. Many individuals cannot handle the realization that sometimes things happen for no reason at all, a factor of the chaos of the Universe.

It’s worse than that. The problem isn’t that we can’t handle randomness, it’s that neurologically, we can’t even process it properly. We’re just not set up with a good grasp of the ways chance and randomness actually work in practical terms. Take a look at The Drunkard’s Walk by Leonard Mlodinow for the more detailed hows and whys, but there’s a fairly straightforward reason why this is so.

Human beings — along with all primates and, probably, the overwhelming majority of other mammal species — are pattern-matching experts. We evolved that way for a reason: the evolutionary punishment for seeing a tiger that isn’t there is precisely zero; however, the evolutionary punishment for not seeing a tiger that is there is that it’s rather difficult to breed and pass on your non-pattern-seeking DNA when you’ve been turned into tiger poo. The downside to this is that we’ve evolved to see patterns where there aren’t any as a “better safe than sorry” survival mechanism, and in fact, we’ve come to rely on it so much that we long ago started to actively seek out patterns as a matter of course, so we get benign things like seeing a cloud shaped like a puppy as well as the more dangerous insistences of the anti-vaccination zealots and global conspiracy theorists.

A funny (and wholly off-topic) consequence of this pattern-seeking behaviour is that if you get a bunch of people and ask them to stand randomly around a room, they will tend to space themselves more-or-less evenly across the space. That ain’t random, folks. That’s a pattern. Randomness, on the other hand, clumps. In a truly random spacing, you’re going to have little groups of two or three people (or more, depending on how many you started with) close together here and there, along with the ones that are isolated.

While I’m much happier to see people selectively or delay vaccination than not vaccinate at all, it’s worth noting that the boogeyman that these strategies are designed to work against, “vaccine overload”, is a complete creation of the anti-vaccine movement and has no basis in empirical reality.  It would take thousands of vaccines to equal the number of antigens a baby receives daily just by living in the world.

About the only vaccine risks that have been documented to exist are allergic reactions namely due to what the vaccine was cultured such as chicken eggs, or it uses a weakened form of the virus. The flu vaccine has both risks and kills a small number of people each year. Of course far more die each year in the US from the flu.

being pushed to plan a solid professional career from an early age

Oh God no.  Just no.  That might be a recipe for the kid making a lot of money in the future, but it’s also a recipe for turning him or her into a neurotic mess who never had a chance to enjoy life.  No one should start planning a professional career until they’re a senior in high school.

On a tangent, I’ve noticed for years that there appear (broadly) to be two kinds of people--the germ phobes and the chemical phobes.  Each has their own excesses:  the chemical phobes have such a pathological fear of chemicals, vaccines, and modern pharmacology that they will eschew immunizations and swear up and down that marijuana is an effective treatment for asthma, but steroidal inhalers are not.  OTOH, the germ phobes tend to use anti-bacterial soaps and antibiotics so freely that they are breeding resistant strains of bacteria at an alarming rate.  Each camp’s behavior is based more on neuroses than evidence.  I wonder if it’s genetic.

My opinion is that people - some people, at least - cannot handle randomness.  If their child has autism, there MUST be a reason, a cause, some factor which someone else knows about.

There is a reason; genetics. If your child has autism, you almost certainly have a ‘funny’ or ‘eccentric’ relative somewhere. An awful lot of people with high-functioning autism or ASDs were not diagnosed until adulthood, when their own kids were diagnosed.

By the way, there’s a feminist issue here as well; it wasn’t until very recently that girls were diagnosed properly with ASDs (like Aspergers), because they didn’t fit the stereotype of the gawky antisocial computer nerdboi. Finally some researchers started to look at the gender ratios and ask “why are they different for ASDs than for autism?” Turns out they’re not, but a lot of girls with ASDs get diagnosed as bipolar, “borderline personality” or something else because they don’t present with classic, i.e. MALE, symptoms.

I remember having a long argument with one of my aunts about vaccination, because she believed that vaccines should only be necessary if it is likely your child will be exposed to the disease.  So this particular set of cousins only got the MMR vaccine, because those 3 diseases were the ones my aunt was the most worried about.  She now has a completely different take on it, because one of my cousins came down with whooping cough when he was 7, and not only was he extremely sick for a very long time, but he also experienced some adverse neurological consequences that we think are from having had whooping cough.  He is now freelancing part-time because these neurological consequences make it extremely difficult to hold down any kind of fulltime gainful employment.

I agree that many of the anti-vaccination parents are overprotective as a reaction against other things over which they have no control and are trying to assert control, but I think a lot of them are like my aunt, in that they don’t think their kids will ever get any of these diseases, because they are unlikely to have known anyone who had them.  I find it very scary that they are willing to risk their children getting rubella, for example, and with the prevalence of homeschooling, the likelihood that these children will be potential carriers of rubella as adults in the workplace gives me the heebies.

Re: egg allergies.  IIRC, the vaccines that use eggs are given at around 18 months, by which time you should know whether or not your child is allergic to chicken eggs, unless you’re a very strict vegetarian or allergic to eggs yourself.

Re: adverse consequences from vaccines.  My daughter actually came down with measles from her MMR vaccine, which occurs in approximately 1 out of every 3,000 immunizations given.  She was a pretty sick cookie for a week, especially since it took a lot of work to keep her fever in the 103-104 range.  However, when a few of her classmates came down with chicken pox last year, the ones who had had the vaccine weren’t very sick at all, and the rest of the vaccinated ones didn’t miss any school; the two kids who hadn’t been vaccinated both had medical reasons for not being vaccinated, and they missed something like 2 or 3 weeks of school and were very sick into the bargain.

I also spread out the vaccination schedule for our kids, and our GP was totally OK with this.  I think the clustering is really because the doctors and nurses want to make sure the kids get the vaccinations, since many insurance companies only pay for well-baby visits until 6 months, so that’s when many parents start cutting back on visits and may miss scheduled doses.

Yeesh.  I’ve met many anti-vaccination folks at my undergrad and you’re right....they are anti-science mainly from complete ignorance of what science is and its methods.

This is, unfortunately, not too surprising when I found that many college classmates, even those who graduated from “superior” private boarding schools were able to graduate with as little as 2 years of “rocks for jocks” type science courses without lab. 

“being pushed to plan a solid professional career from an early age”

Oh God no.  Just no.  That might be a recipe for the kid making a lot of money in the future, but it’s also a recipe for turning him or her into a neurotic mess who never had a chance to enjoy life.  No one should start planning a professional career until they’re a senior in high school.

It also does not guarantee success as the professions you may be planning for may become obsolete or experience a glut by the time you graduate.

Knew several dozen older folks who graduated college in the extreme late ‘70s and early ‘80s with Chemical Engineering majors who found after graduation that there were few jobs to be had in that field due to a glut.  Moreover, the few among them who found Chemical Engineering jobs found the career wasn’t for them and had to switch to something totally unrelated such as computer programming, corporate management, etc. 

More recently, several high school classmates who maintained straight-A range grades in high school, got in and maintained similar level grades at topflight colleges such as Cornell, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon, and then joined the technology sector in the wake of the tech boom of the late 1990s-2000s found their hopes of a long career were dashed as a result of the tech bust and a complete lack of “people’s skills”.  During my last high school reunion, many of them were quite bitter at being fed what they felt to be lies/incomplete information that all they needed to succeed professionally was to maintain excellent grades, get into topflight schools, and work extremely hard as they were laid off/fired despite having excellent grades, Ivy/Ivy-level pedigree, and working hard.

Ashley -

Please please please reconsider giving your kid the “lesser shots”.  My neice was just diagnosed with ALL and is “immune compromised” There is an 80% survival rate today, but besides the wonderful job science has done to bring the survival rate up through chemotherapy, I feel that children with diseases that compromise their immune systems have also benefited from more and better vaccinations among all children.  I never considered getting the flu shot until she was diagnosed, and I came down with the flu before I was able to get the shot.  Needless to say, it was a pretty scary couple of days in the hospital for her.  The point of this post is no proof that vaccines are dangerous, so when you do stuff “avoid the lesser shots”, you are giving the middle finger to kids like my neice.

Few things get my blood boiling like the anti-vax crowd, because vaccination is so clearly win-win.  I must acknowledge that there are a very small percentage of severe reactions to vaccines, they are real and can have devestating effects on people, but the only reason people would worry about this very small percent of adverse reactions is because they haven’t seen the adverse effects of getting the diseases the vaccines protect us against.  (Damn, that’s a long sentence.)

That ep. of This American Life had me nearly yelling back at my ipod, my coworkers must have thought I was crazy.  The worst was the quote from the otherwise seemingly reasonable woman (forgot her name) who said she would vaccinate when they could be shown to be absolutely safe.  That was infuriating, because she must do things with her kids that aren’t absolutely safe all the time, like riding in a car.  You couldn’t function otherwise.

Yeah, there are some people I just can’t talk to about this issue, because I would just get too angry.

On a tangent, I’ve noticed for years that there appear (broadly) to be two kinds of people--the germ phobes and the chemical phobes.  Each has their own excesses:  the chemical phobes have such a pathological fear of chemicals, vaccines, and modern pharmacology that they will eschew immunizations and swear up and down that marijuana is an effective treatment for asthma, but steroidal inhalers are not.

I take it the chemical phobes who prefer marijuana are so ignorant/oblivious that they don’t realize that its active ingredient is a chemical....commonly known as delta THC or Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol.  I’d also be shocked if they chose to abstain from drinking water or breathing in oxygen....both chemical compounds.......

They may also want to consider abstaining from many biological functions because *shudder* our bodies also produce and secrete a variety of chemicals.  THE HORROR!!!

“it’s worth noting that the boogeyman that these strategies are designed to work against, “vaccine overload””

Except in the cases where it’s designed to isolate adverse reactions to single shots and narrow down the list of suspect ingredients, or where it’s designed to make the child less cranky and miserable, or where it’s not “delayed vaccination” so much as going from the current accelerated schedule back to an older, more graduated pace. 

It’s understandable that the people in charge of policy that’s population-oriented on a national level would, if they could, encourage the mother of all vaccines to be administered at birth.  Obviously it’s not going to be the best in all circumstances, for all children, but they’re weighing that against a compliance rate that peters out the older the child gets for the population.  Acceding to that as best for your individual child(ren) without scrutinizing it at all is not necessarily a good thing.

“I have very little problem with my child getting the flu, and hope my child gets the chicken pox (if they don’t by 10, we’ll probably vaccinate).”

I’d advise against letting your child get chicken pox if it’s avoidable.  I had a pretty pedestrian case almost two decades ago, and the pockmarks are still routinely mistaken for biopsy scars by doctors.  It also means I have to worry about developing shingles (the antithesis of fun) in the event of old age or an immuno-compromising illness. Oh, and I was out of school for two weeks, which would have been hell on the family budget if my grandmother had not been available to babysit.

Ashley, please get your kids a chicken pox shot.  I have ongoing health problems due to contracting chicken pox in my youth.  It’s not the harmless disease it’s made out to be---it’s very dangerous.  My problems have resulted in embarrassment, self-esteem issues, and you know, plain old pain.

“ I have ongoing health problems due to contracting chicken pox in my youth.  It’s not the harmless disease it’s made out to be---it’s very dangerous. “

Of course a lot of people don’t realize that the chicken pox virus still remains in you after you get infected as a child. Years later when you are an adult it’s back as shingles.

Keep in mind “full vaccination” these days means flu shots every year and the chicken pox shot at something like 3 months.

Ashley, I’m not sure where you are getting the information in your post. Varicella (chicken pox) is not recommended until 12-15 months. All the vaccines have a range of ages, as you can see from this CDC chart. You can spread them out and still be within the CDC recommendations.

By the way, it’s also not true that diseases like polio, measles and whooping cough are artifacts that only poor people in Africa have to worry about these days.

exholt:

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about marijuana for asthma; I don’t actually know anyone who advocates smoking pot to stop the wheezing.  Still, it’s funny how some people will embrace one chemical because it’s “natural” but utterly reject another because its supposedly not.  As you point out, all chemicals are natural, if not all naturally occurring.  I don’t have a problem with marijuana as medicine, for example, as long as it’s been shown to be effective at treating what it’s supposed to treat.

Urgh.

My sister, who has a ten-month-old and is expecting her second, is going down this anti-vaccination path.

She asked me for my opinion, and all I could come up with on-the-spot was to assert my opinion that it was a bad idea to skip vaccinations, because (1) there’s no real evidence they are more harmful than what they are intended to prevent (not by a longshot), and (2) living in a civilized society imposes on us some requirements that might be personally distasteful in some ways, but we should tolerate for everyone’s benefit (in this case, collective immunity).  If (2) makes me sound like a DFH, so be it.

I think she asked me because I have a scientific/medical background, and ultimately I think she wants to do the right thing.  I hope it’s also because she trusts my judgment.  There’s an opening here I want to take advantage of.  She lives among a bunch of other relatively affluent suburbanites in Orange County, California, where this anti-vaccination attitude is particularly prevalent, and I think there’s some peer pressure involved.

This San Diego story is a good start.  But I want to collect some additional material that might be helpful to turn her back to what I consider to be the responsible position.  Does anyone have any good links?

Don’t Google it for me; I can do that myself.  Just if you already have some good and credible resources aimed at non-scientists, I’d love to know what they are.

Much gratitude.

I’d advise against letting your child get chicken pox if it’s avoidable.  I had a pretty pedestrian case almost two decades ago, and the pockmarks are still routinely mistaken for biopsy scars by doctors.  It also means I have to worry about developing shingles (the antithesis of fun) in the event of old age or an immuno-compromising illness. Oh, and I was out of school for two weeks, which would have been hell on the family budget if my grandmother had not been available to babysit.

Have an older friend who contracted Chicken Pox while working.  Not only was he subjected to two weeks of misery from the disease itself, he also had to wash his clothing/bedsheets every day to avoid the risk of reinfection, go through multiple checkups with the doctors after he recovered so he was cleared to return to his workplace and what he felt was embarrassment from contracting what is commonly considered a childhood disease in his thirties.

At what point did “science” become a justification to accept anything the FDA may claim? Science is constantly evolving - yet based upon the viewpoint of Amanda and those espousing the same line, science has reached a level of truth that it now invalidates all concern over the claims made by Gov’t. It’s as if some magical plateau has been reached in the field of science that turns all the evidence of FDA malfeasance and corruption into pure history, never to be seen from them again.

Sorry, the FDA has never been and continues to fail to be any type of grand arbiter of health.

And further, it is only “dark humor” for someone to believe that there is defacto trust in the FDA stamp of Organic approval. If you knew the history of organic labeling you would know that the FDA was fought when they were debating the use of FDA approved organic labeling. Indeed, the FDA originally intended to allow irradiated foods to receive the organic label, and this was only barely overturned by the so-called anti-science community’s opposition.

Science will never be definitive. As long as you argue from the position that it is, you will always fail.

I was being a bit tongue-in-cheek about marijuana for asthma; I don’t actually know anyone who advocates smoking pot to stop the wheezing.  Still, it’s funny how some people will embrace one chemical because it’s “natural” but utterly reject another because its supposedly not.  As you point out, all chemicals are natural, if not all naturally occurring.  I don’t have a problem with marijuana as medicine, for example, as long as it’s been shown to be effective at treating what it’s supposed to treat.

Captain Bathrobe,

Sad thing is I actually met many college classmates who actually believed marijuana is a cure-all for many diseases/illnesses while denouncing use of conventional medicines without being able to provide any reasonable explanations, much less scientific studies proving their assertions.  Many of them happened to be in an environmental history class I took one semester and are part of what my friends and I dubbed the “village idiot” of various campus environmental groups. 

Upon knowing them better, one commonality among all of them was that they all received inadequate and non-rigorous science education from their high/boarding schools and that they weren’t interested in considering any perspective/viewpoints which conflicted with their own complacently unexamined assumptions.

Oops...meant to say “village idiot wing”

Born in 1950, between myself and my brother and sister we ran the gamut of those illnesses for weeks on end, measles, chicken pox, possibly mumps and being quaranteened for Scarlet Fever (with a notice posted to our front door to warn away others!)

My mother was a housewife, housebound, which didn’t improve her mental health any.

I’ve since had shingles twice as an adult: practically incapcitated, and horribly in pain—a very nasty reaction decades later.

(And I believe some men from my generation were made sterile by German measles.)

On the other hand, recently a friend’s toddler grandson dealt out all his innoculations in one day—the immediate reaction was so severe he was hospitalized, and a year later they’re still dealing with frightening problems with his immune system.

I’ve forgotten all the symptoms she related, but remember being horrified in the telling, and he’s been hospitalized since a number of times, their medical bills are mounting, etc.

And yes, it’s medically agreed that it relates directly to the super overload of vaccines.

So, yes to vaccines, but yes also to spreading them out (one day, all vacicnes: is apparently, another sin to be laid on the health insurance companies—cheaper in the short run for them, more dangerous for the children.)

Admittedly, this is wikipedia, but it does provide links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

The development of two polio vaccines led to the first modern mass inoculations. The last cases of paralytic poliomyelitis caused by endemic transmission of wild virus in the United States occurred in 1979, with an outbreak among the Amish in several Midwest states.[13] A global effort to eradicate polio, led by the World Health Organization, UNICEF, and The Rotary Foundation, began in 1988 and has relied largely on the oral polio vaccine developed by Albert Sabin.[14] The disease was entirely eradicated in the Americas by 1994.[15] Polio was officially eradicated in 36 Western Pacific countries, including China and Australia in 2000.[16][17] Europe was declared polio-free in 2002.[18] As of 2008, polio remains endemic in only four countries: Nigeria, India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.[5] Although poliovirus transmission has been interrupted in the much of the world, transmission of wild poliovirus does continue and creates an ongoing risk for the importation of wild poliovirus into previously polio-free regions. If importations of poliovirus occurs, outbreaks of poliomyelitis may develop, especially in areas with low vaccination coverage and poor sanitation. As a result, high levels of vaccination coverage must be maintained.[15]

In short, polio is eradicated from the west. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t come back, but it does mean that it’s safe to delay the vaccine until the child is larger.

You will note that I have thus far not said one single word about measles, pertussis, HPV, hepatitis, etc. For the record, I intend to get my kid the MMR, DTaP, Hib shots at early ages, though certainly not 2 months. I have no reason whatsoever to think my child will be immune-compromised, though of course should that happen my vaccine plans will change. And I have specific reasons to fear the polio vaccine, especially for my young children, as there is a very high likelihood that my child will be allergic to some antibiotics, which are contained in the polio vaccine. To keep my child out of the hospital I plan to avoid unnecessary antibiotics, and hopefully get my infant allergy tested as soon as I can.

My husband and his family were all fully vaccinated, and STILL managed to come down with things like measles (his sister at least) and pertussis (him, when he was 12). I was fully vaccinated (pre-chicken pox and flu shots) and have barely even caught the flu. Vaccines are, shockingly, no guarantee that you won’t get that disease.

Unlike a lot of people, I’ve researched this stuff pretty thoroughly, and have based my decisions off of family history, current family situation (the fact that I’m staying home with the baby means that they’re less likely to catch something at a young age), the nature of the disease, means of transmission, local rates of said disease, and most common ages for catching it.

Like with most things, there is no appropriate one size fits all approach to vaccination.

My problems have resulted in embarrassment, self-esteem issues, and you know, plain old pain.

Oh, bless your heart. And you haven’t even gotten shingles yet! I got them around Labor Day, and as preying mantis says, it’s the antithesis of fun.

I also remember lining up to get the new polio vaccine in school: there had been real polio scares in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, scores of children and adults dying, crippled, or relegated to iron lungs.

(My father contracted a version during the Depression from which he recovered, but he spent 6 months deathly ill at home, in bed. The result of which he missed some very basic math skills, that were a problem when he later became, literally, a rocket scientist.)

The development of the polio vaccine was such a godsend that the government took over the dispensing in schools because, in the days before homeschooling, that was the one way to make sure that all were vaccinated.

In the 1950s the Polio vaccine was given in the upper arm, and then in so strong a dose it left a ring scar almost the size of a quarter, for decades. (In old movies, you’ll sometimes see actors with those polio vaccine scars—jarringly so, in period pieces.)

I’m 58, and only recently realized my polio vaccine had faded at some point.

Stupid DEMONcraps, you don’t need no vaccine, the government is already putting it in the chemtrails!

I’ve since had shingles twice as an adult…

What?! I thought you could only get them once!

Thanks for ruining my frickin’ life!

Regarding chicken pox, I’ve known a few people who had shingles many years post-chicken pox.  They said of it: “I never believed it was as bad as people say it is, but it is.”
In addition to making it more likely that kids will get all their vaccinations, giving lots of vaccines at the same time has another advantage: a kid who’s just had three shots isn’t noticeably more aggravated that a kid who’s just had one.  A kid who has a shot pretty much every time he’s at the doctor’s, and one who was shot-shy to start with, can get pretty damn negative about the doctor.
I should dig out that book again, the one by a doctor from the horse-and-buggy days describing a diphtheria epidemic in his childhood.  There’s a description of death by diphtheria that damn well ought to put the fear of infectious disease into any sensible person, and an account of a family that lost all but one child - nine out of ten, I think it was - in the epidemic; the mother carried the survivor around everywhere, wouldn’t put her down even for a second.  Most of us have been lucky enough not to see an epidemic in our lifetimes.  I’d rather keep it that way.

“and what he felt was embarrassment from contracting what is commonly considered a childhood disease in his thirties. “

Of course most people don’t know that it can be very dangerous to an adult or a pregnant woman especially the fetus which can get some severe birth defects or other health issues from the virus.

Chicken pox can lead to shingles (AFAIK, there’s now a shingles vaccine, separate from chicken pox - I don’t really understand how that works, but if it does, awesome), and you really don’t want that.

That’s the one thing that went through my head when I was listening to This American Life - these parents have the means to stop their lives to take care of a sick child. How would low-income, or even middle class families, handle such a situation? When the loss of one income could mean homelessness for a family. All because of some yuppie families. It also shows great ignorance on the part of such a supposed educated group of people. I, too, am one of those organic-loving, vegan, shopping-at-Trader-Joe’s (because Whole Foods is BEYOND my financial means), but I also have an adult autistic brother I take care off. The fact that people still adhere to the idea that vaccines cause autism absolutely amazes me considering it has been proven TIME AND TIME again - autism starts IN THE WOMB.

I didn’t proofread before posting. Sorry for the crazy overuse of “family”.

Not to belabor the point, Ashley, but polio is most certainly NOT eradicated from the West—there was an outbreak in Ohio in 2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/national/08polio.html

I live in an area with a very high Amish concentration, and my youngest child is immuno-compromised. I have a lot of concerns about unvaxed children, and supposedly eradicated childhood diseases.

Of course, anti-vaccinations folks don’t want their kids to catch the measles or any other disease that vaccination prevents.  They’re counting on herd immunity.

Sure? From my own experience (of being among self-centered teenagers and early-twens who had all been through most of the list of common 70s kid’s illnesses without any worse effects than six weeks off school and less discomfort than a common cold), I got the impression that it’s more “didn’t hurt me any, so why the bother”, or “building the immune system”.

In other words, most anti-vacc.ers I ever talked to personally didn’t mind their kids catching measels, and some wanted them to.

I’ve since had shingles twice as an adult…

What?! I thought you could only get them once!

Thanks for ruining my frickin’ life!

Not only that, but getting shingles once ups your risk of getting it multiple times, iirc.

*Everyone* in my father’s family in three generations dealt with shingles as adults.  My turn was this past summer.  On vacation, four months pregnant, with a one-year-old who hadn’t gotten the vax yet (our ped gives it at 15 months).  So not only was I miserable, but I was panicked as well.  It all turned out okay, but god knows I never want to go through that again.

I actually did a lot of research on the anti-vax subject for a class this past spring.  Some of my sources specifically stated that vaccines are front-loaded because of concerns about parents missing/not being able to pay for/insurance being assholish about well-child visits as their babies get older.

Just so you know, your likelihood of contracting shingles at a later age is probably the same whether you have the vaccine or had the virus. 

http://www.fda.gov/FDAC/features/795_chickpox.html

“Can the chickenpox vaccine, which is a weakened form of the live virus, cause shingles?

“Nobody’s sure what the effect will be,” says Krause. “We really don’t have the data to say what’s going to happen in 20 to 30 years. Based on our knowledge of how the virus works and the data available so far, it doesn’t appear that the rate of shingles cases in vaccinated individuals will be any greater than in the naturally infected population. “

The anti-vax chiropractor daughter of friends of my parents has also taught her child never to wash her hands after going to the bathroom, since exposure to germs builds immunity, you know! FYI, you can’t build an immunity to staph, E coli, or the myriad of other waste-borne illnesses.

Her child, a daughter, is also almost at the very bottom end of the physical development charts, owing to being brought up on a low-fat, heavy on the tofu diet. She’s about 8, and the size of a 4 year old. Low fat vegetarian or vegan diets are simply not appropriate for children (My parents are doctors, I spent many years as a vegetarian, and had to start eating chicken again due to the inability to get enough protein otherwise-I exercise a lot, and simply could not consume the amount of tofu and protein powder necessary. My mum would be happier if I started eating red meat, since I’ve been anemic in the past, but she understands that I just don’t like it. That’s just to let you know that I know what I’m talking about, and am not opposed to vegetarianism).

keshmeshi: No one should start planning a professional career until they’re a senior in high school.

I understood Amanda’s planning a professional career more along the lines of “planning to have one, in whatever field”. Because, yes, planning from early age that the kid has to become a lawyer or a doctor or a civil engineer is a really good way to still have them work McJobs at 35. Being too specific, in this case, is the opposite of “planning”.

Ashley: I’ll join the choir of those saying “get that chicken pox vacc for your kid.” Not only because immune compromised kids have it hard enough and really need as much herd immunity around them as they can get, but also because, yes, shingles = opposite of fun. And sitting with a kid who itches all over and is not allowed to scratch = not much fun either.

Quicksand: I find that a very effective way to get people to re-consider not vaccinating is to have them read up on what the illnesses vaccinated against do. Fortunately we tend to have little first-hand knowledge of that—my mother’s generation got their kids vaccinated against everything possible, because from their own childhood they remembered polio scares having friends die or become crippeled of childhood diseases.

judy brown: AFAIK that ring scar was smallpox vaccination?

Jplum - it is possible to raise a healthy vegetarian/vegan kid with lots of protein and fat in their diet. Doesn’t sound like the people you know are on that, though.

In short, polio is eradicated from the west.

Ashley - “the west” is not a sealed bubble. People travel to and from “the west” all the time. If you read the article linked to in Amanda’s post, the source of the measles outbreak in San Diego was a seven-year-old who traveled overseas and brought it back. Additionally, anyone innoculated with OPV (live polio vaccine) can transmit it.

Also, speaking as a former stay-at-home mother here - that does NOT protect your baby from disease. You will leave the house, with and without baby. And you would not believe the stuff toddlers put in their mouths

I’m genuinely not meaning this in a condescending way, but on the one hand, you say that you’ve done all this research, but on the other, you point to wikipedia in support of information that just is not the case, and you misstate the CDC’s vaccination requirements. You really can follow the vaccination schedule yet ‘space out’ the vaccinations; there is flexibility built into the schedule. What will NOT protect your child is making assumptions about what germs s/he will be exposed to and when.

I… I had no idea what shingles was. I read the Wiki on it and now I’m terrified. But at least shingles isn’t an inevitability for everyone who’s had chickenpox as a kid. Only about half of people who live to be 85 will get it--but it’s still a frightening possibility.

I had chickenpox and appendicitis as a kid. I don’t want any more epic illnesses like that! I thought I was in the clear!

“"judy brown: AFAIK that ring scar was smallpox vaccination? “

Possibly, it was over half-a-century ago, and can’t consult my mother, who has been dead nearly as long.

Perhaps I’m conflating smallpox and polio vaccines.

Didn’t do any research, just went by a faded memory of lining up in the gym for the shot that produced a scar on my upper arm that lasted (at least) for over 20 years.

I thought the reason adults got shingles was because they didn’t get chicken pox as a kid.  That’s why parents would purposely expose their children to chicken pox.  It went around my class in 2nd grade (20 years ago) and all the parents wanted their kid to catch it.

As for not vaccinating, I agree with Amanda in regards to the yuppie crowd.  There are also a lot of communities such as the Amish who don’t vaccinate as well.

Apparently when adults get chickenpox, it’s much worse, and that’s my understanding on why your parents want you to get it as a kid. It’s still better to have it as a kid than an adult, but having had chickenpox is a pre-requisite for getting shingles.

My son is 8 years old. He got every recommended vaccine whenever the hospital (hepatitis B virus vaccine before he left the NICU) or pediatrician (all the other vaccines) said it was time for it; I didn’t alter the schedule or space the shots out. He’s never gotten any of diseases in question, nor did he have any adverse reactions to the immunizations. He’s not autistic.

I wasn’t worried that insurance wouldn’t cover the shots if I dallied—I just didn’t see a reason to deviate from the schedule my pediatrician recommended.

I suspect the vast majority of children who get vaccinated per the CDC’s recommendations have no problems aside from a little pain at the injection site, and no vax-related complications. Really! It’s fine!

@Annabel: Just so you know, your likelihood of contracting shingles at a later age is probably the same whether you have the vaccine or had the virus.

“Nobody’s sure what the effect will be,” says Krause. “We really don’t have the data to say what’s going to happen in 20 to 30 years. Based on our knowledge of how the virus works and the data available so far, it doesn’t appear that the rate of shingles cases in vaccinated individuals will be any greater than in the naturally infected population. “

I don’t interpret Krause as indicating that the likelihood of shingles is the same whether you’ve had the vaccine or chicken pox, but instead a statement that 1)the vaccine hasn’t been around long enough for us to know what the long-term immunity effects will be, and 2) you’re probably not going to end up any worse with the vaccine (ie, the vaccine probably won’t make you more likely to have shingles) than without it.

This is way different than saying the likelihood is probably “the same.”

“Two polio vaccines are used throughout the world to combat poliomyelitis (or polio). The first was developed by Jonas Salk and first tested in 1952. Announced to the world by Salk on April 12, 1955, it consists of an injected dose of inactivated (dead) poliovirus. The second was an oral vaccine developed by Albert Sabin using attenuated poliovirus that he had received from Hilary Koprowski. Human trials of Sabin’s vaccine began in 1957 and it was licensed in 1962.[1]”

My faded memory seems datewise to be more the first than the second (by 1962 I was 12, and I would have been given the vaccine when it was first available in the 1950s, my memory is set further back in gradeschool, in any case). But I could find nothing, in wikipedia ,at least about whether and how the smallpox vaccine was administered back then (another, more faded memory of something on a sugar cube dealt out from a small paper cup ?… Maybe.)

Olivia & Jenny,
Shingles is a re-activation of the virus which has been latent you ones nervous system, thus to have shingles, you would have had to have had chicken pox.  Having chicken pox, the initial infection, is dangerous as an adult, which is why parents would often intentionally get their kids infected.  The affect the vaccine will have on shingles isn’t known.  It isn’t even known if it will actually give life long immunity.

Packman, no one here seems to be getting into the kind of epistemological discussion of understanding that you are coming from.  If pressed I am sure most intellectually honest people can find doubt in the types of knowledge we accept daily.  With vaccinations, the pro-vaccination crowd thinks of themselves as backed by the scientific community because the peer reviewed journals of medicine support vaccinations.  Now, as you seem to be hinting, few to none of the commenters here have read these journals, it is quite likely that few of us could truly understand them, we rely on experts.  These experts are themselves fallible, so we look to multiple sources of information to confirm the validity of the information we receive from them.  Even with government oversight and peer review some bad information gets through, there is no platonic ideal of perfectly clean data sets from which to develop a perfect understanding of the world, and it is a possibility that there are malicious individuals inserting corrupted data into the review process.  However by following scientific methods a predictive model of likely outcomes of a vaccination program can be built.

This does not mean that the pro-vaccination people have a valid claim to the support of a thing called “science” it means that by following scientific methods they have determined that the outcome of listening to experts that follow scientific methods to form conclusions in their fields leads to a more desirable outcome.

Strawman, Pacman.  The straw is flying.  It’s one thing to reject evidence and reality when it comes to yourself, but we’re talking about people who are harming innocent children with their quackery.

I’m not saying buy into everything you hear.  But I am saying that paranoia is not a legitimate substitute for critical thinking, and you should hold all claims to the same standard of proof.  To believe vaccines are bad is to refuse to examine the claims of anti-vaccination cranks at all, while refusing to accept any scientific evidence that contradicts your way of thinking.  That’s not critical thinking.  That’s crankery.

You get shingles a lot if you get chicken pox past a certain age and it’s hard for your body to beat back the disease.

Am I right in this, I think I remember back in the ‘70s being warned that women who’d had “German” measles back in the l1950s, could have fertility problems, or was it, difficulty carrying a child to term?

Those “typical childhood illnesses” were nothing to sneeze at: when at least two of the three of us came down with Scarlet fever, not only were we quarrantined, but the doctor made a housecall (such a rarity even 50 years ago, it had frightening implications.)

I had shingles a number of years ago. We couldn’t go to the doctor as I had no health insurance and my wife and I were destitute she was going to school for Oriental Medicine and working part time, and the only job I could find was in a coffee shop. She ended up giving me acupuncture for it, which worked out well. I still had the rash, but it didn’t hurt much at all.

I realize I may have been obtuse.  In simple straight forward terms, what i meant was it is not some poorly defined scare-quoted “Science” that backs Vaccinations, but rather plain old boring scientific methods.

inge, I believe you.  Obviously, it’s a mix of not thinking your kid could get it and not really believing it’s that bad.  It really is that bad.  And, as I said in the post, our society is not constructed anymore to handle a lot of serious childhood illness.

@Dan,
Dude, can we make points that aren’t based on evo psych, please?

Are you aware that your excellent post is immediately followed on your blog by an anti-vaccine Google scare ad?  Might want to look into that.

“‘70s being warned that women who’d had “German” measles back in the l1950s, could have fertility problems, or was it, difficulty carrying a child to term? “

Rubella is the actual name of it. It can cause the woman to either have a natural abortion or cause serious defects in the fetus. The rubella vaccine is more about preventing those defects then keeping people healthy of the virus. Rubella is a pretty minor illness you could even have it and not even know it.

As for shingles the vaccine is only effective for a few years then you get a booster as recommended. The vaccine may prevent shingles so why get exposed to chicken pox and get shingles later on in life?

“sugar cube dealt out from a small paper cup ?”

You may want to hunt down some old footage of the old newsreels about the Salk vaccine. I seem to recall that was how it was publicily shown when the trials were being discussed.

Huh.  I didn’t even know that they vaccinated against chicken pox nowadays.  Is this a US thing, or do they do this everywhere now?  I remember being a kid and my mom (and my aunt) decided that we (five cousins between seven and ten) were all getting chicken pox at the same time.  It sucked, of course, but it remains an oddly fun memory.

Who needs the chicken pox vaccine most?  Adults and teens who don’t titer for varicella.  Who was forced to get it by health departments strong-armed by the manufacturer?  Kids who are at an age where the disease is typically mild.

The chicken pox vaccine being required was one BIG reason the anti-vax crowd got a toehold in this country, because it didn’t just defy common sense, it defied the epidemiological evidence.  The resulting authoritarian hardball game just pissed people off and generated more radicals.

Reason number one billion why we could really use comprehensive universal health care.

“Is this a US thing, or do they do this everywhere now?”

If memory serves, it was available and being used at least in Europe before it had been approved for use in the US.

“Am I right in this, I think I remember back in the ‘70s being warned that women who’d had “German” measles back in the l1950s, could have fertility problems, or was it, difficulty carrying a child to term?”

Rubella can cause pretty horrible birth defects if you get it while you’re pregnant.  There doesn’t seem to be any risk attendant in just having had it at one point.  I think it’s mumps that can cause sterility in men.

In addition to classism and sexism, there’s a hugely ableist subtext going on as well.

Many of these anti-vaccination people believe it’s better to have these diseases around than the purported effects of vaccination.  If questioned about people who die from these diseases, they say that healthy people are not affected badly. 

To them, it doesn’t matter if a sick person, an elderly person, or a very young baby dies.  It doesn’t matter to them that some people have depressed immune systems from diseases like AIDS, others are on immuno-suppressant drugs like Prednisone either temporarily or permanently.  None of those things matter at all.  Nor does the fact that many people have conditions that don’t suppress their immune system, but that can make getting sick infinitely more risky than it is for the average person.

When someone mentioned homeopathy it reminded me of the same recklessness I’ve seen among people who practice that.  At church, I used to sometimes have to go leave the main service and lie down, because of a chronic condition I have that gives me very crappy stamina.  The same condition makes it a very bad idea indeed for me to get sick.  The only room they had for me to lie down in was the children’s Sunday school room, which had couches in it.  So I’d go in there.  Sometimes, to my great alarm, there would be sick children in there.  At first I thought the parents just hadn’t realized that morning or something.  But inevitably I would hear something from the mother along the lines of “Oh, he’s on homeopathy, so it’s okay to expose people.”

Anyone who thinks this stuff is harmless needs to read the post Thank you, antivaxxers, for taking a month out of my life, which is by a friend of mine who’s permanently on Prednisone, and caught whooping cough from an unvaccinated kid.  She dislocated five ribs coughing (she’s also got Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, which causes very loose and dislocation-prone joints), coughed so much she vomited and became severely dehydrated, was too dehydrated for standard rehydration procedures to work, and had seven seizures in the emergency room as a result.  (And the kind of epilepsy she has can be life-threatening to begin with.)

http://www.immunisation.nhs.uk/Vaccines

Here’s what the UK recommends.  Notice what is considered most important?  They decide that according to the hazards each disease poses in their society, not according to specious presumptions that all parents are too stupid to get well-baby care or manufacturer threats to not produce critical vaccines so insurance companies will have to pay for the non-important ones.

Have an older friend who contracted Chicken Pox while working.

Chicken pox (and several other “childhood” diseases) is much more severe in adults and was in the past often fatal.  Shingles is a potentially recurring condition since the virus (part of the Herpes family), lives in the spinal column forever after you have chicken pox.  It is unclear what causes outbreaks, though a compromised immune system (through fatigue, poor diet, other illness, etc.) is one factor.

Amanda, not to snipe, but why was your friend not vaccinated?

I bet the answer is either “can’t be vaccinated due to medical condition” or “they don’t cover vaccines for adults”.

The latter is part of the entire problem with the way vaccines are required, covered, and administered in the US.  Unvaccinated kids or kids who received improperly stored vaccine (a possibility in your friend’s case) are a serious problem ... MOSTLY because adults can’t get vaccines or cannot get them covered by their insurance.

judy: I tried to find out more but with no success. It seems that the Salk vaccine was given only for a few years before they switched to the Sabin one, and when they changed back it was a “tidier” version. So it is possible that I have never actually seen this ring scar—only the smallpox vacc scars.

I agree with all the points made above about the possible reasons for vax-paranoia, and I also think the vaccine scare has something to do with the modern American family structure. 

People move away from their parents as soon as they are adults, and rear their families miles away from grand-parents.  They have to rear their kids in isolation, and get the help they can from “research”.  They get the facts about what is good for their child and what will damage their child from quacks and books and TV shows.  They agonize about how much vitamin B their baby eats, or how long their kid is taking to walk because they don’t have grandma and grandma’s sisters and cousins to tell them their babies are doing just fine.  And of course, they agonize about the potential consequences of the vaccination because of the same reason.  They think they are going to fuck it up.

I might add that my department head fell ill to pertussis (he and his wife) after traveling abroad.  The man is a medical doctor, but was not vaccinated because of his age.

Fearing an epidemic, he urged everyone in the department to get vaccinated, and paid out of his ownh pocket for those who were not covered by their health plans.

Ms Kate -

That is actually a rather uplifting story.  It is nice to hear of someone with that sense of duty.  It also highlights the reasons why vaccinations against polio and other diseases which are largely extinct in this country are still necessary.  Given the prevalence of international travel and immigration to this country from places where they are not, there remains an ongoing opportunity for a renewed epidemic.

re all this talk of shingles, i recently discovered that there is a shingles vaccine now. not entirely clear on how effective it is if you’ve already had shingles. if anyone knows anything about it, please fill me in.
i had a very bad case of chicken pox when i was about 4 months old, and i had my first case of shingles when i was 12. i’m 25, i’ve had shingles outbreaks 4 times. honestly, 2 of the times haven’t been that bad, but it may be because i’ve learned to recognize the symptoms and *immediately* start treatment. i am so wishing the chicken pox vaccine came around a little sooner.

He’s an awesome person, no doubt about it DrDick.  It does, however, show a huge fault in our health care system that adults can’t get preventative care if they were not children when the vaccines were developed.

My mother had mumps when she was in her 40s, likely from a kid in the doctor’s waiting room when she took me in to update my MMR (the original had been found to be insufficient). 

I was 15 and drove her to the doctor on my learner’s permit.  It stipulated that I had to have a person over age 21 with a valid license riding shotgun.  It did not say that person had to be particularly cognizant of her surroundings!  Awful situation, though.

I agree compleely about the barbarity of our healthcare system.  Mumps is another of those diseases you do not want to get as an adult.  I know it causes male sterility, not sure about in women.

I’ve been to subsaharan Africa, in Mali, where you see people with polio in makeshift wheelchairs all over the place. It’s horrible, especially when one considers just how f**king little it would have cost the rest of us to immunize them, so they could have a hope of living a semi-normal life.

Part of the problem definitely seems to be the lack of experience with these diseases on the part of the anti-vaccine parents.

in defense of the varicella vaccine, my aunt worked for years at the local children’s hospital, and i can’t count the number of times she brought home stories of children coming in with bad cases of the pox, having had the open sores become infected, and the kid subsequently be permenantly brain-damaged(from the incredibly high fever that would have developed), or go septic and die.
my kids got the vaccine.

Okay, I’ve got to threadjack for a moment:

By the way, there’s a feminist issue here as well; it wasn’t until very recently that girls were diagnosed properly with ASDs (like Aspergers), because they didn’t fit the stereotype of the gawky antisocial computer nerdboi.

G. has become convinced that I have undiagnosed Asperger’s, which is a disconcerting thing to be told when you’re almost 40.  I’m still convinced it’s adult ADD, but it was a little weird that I scored a 32 on the online Baron Cohen test when a 35 is the minimum score for Asperger’s.

Baron-Cohen is not exactly the most progressive of researchers. That aside, if you’re concerned, ask around - there are therapists who are experienced and who are educated on the latest developments about autism and ASDs who can help evaluate you.

In my experience, anti-vaxers tend to fall into a couple of groups, which often overlap: 1) ultra-conservative, religious, homeschooling, anti-intellectuals; 2) highly educated, affluent but distrustful of established authority (often for valid reasons); 3) rural or isolated suburbs where transmission risks give the illusion of protection; 4) self-educated, crunchy, reject all established authority in favor of quacks. I’d love to see someone study the demographics of anti-vaxers because it may be the key to figuring out how to effectively counter the propaganda.  It would also illuminate some interesting class dynamics, I suspect.  Anti-vaxers are definitely a group that I am increasingly hostile to because their comprehension of or willful misinterpretation of history/science is infuriating (if I have to hear that improved hygiene, not vaccines, caused these diseases to decline one more time, I may commit violence). 

Ashley:  I understand your impulse to delay vaccines and to opt-out of the flu and chicken pox vaccine because I was there almost three years ago.  After the research I had done to that point, I just could not understand why my son would need all these vaccines so early (still disagree with the Hep B vaccine being administered at birth).  I still do think that for many kids a delayed vaccination schedule makes sense (both in terms of the science and the parental concerns about adverse reactions) and am finding that many pediatricians are amenable to delayed schedules, like the one advocated by Dr. Sears. 

I did, however, end up going with the CDC schedule after consulting the county health department’s statistics on the incidence of reported VPDs in my area. My large metro area has constant population turnover, high tourism, and a low vaccination rate, causing the incidences of VPDs (like pertussis, Hib, measles, and other meningitis-causing illnesses) to rise in infants/toddlers and adults.  I could not have designed a delayed schedule that would have accommodated the minimum length of time required between doses and had my son fully vaccinated during the years he would be most at risk from the effects of the diseases.  In your area these stats may be different and allow you to come up with a delayed schedule that works best for your child. Originally, I too was opposed to administering the varicella vaccine unless my son did not get it naturally by about age 10, but changed my position after more research because, though mild in children between the ages of about 4 and 10, it can be severe in younger children and adults (not to mention that getting chicken pox naturally does not confer lifelong immunity as most anti-vaxers claim).

Being a SAHM provides little protection because, for your sanity, you will probably end up in a playgroup and your child will be exposed to their illnesses regularly. In addition, my son recently caught croup and most likely got the germs from one of our shopping trips (grocery carts are vile). 

This is all to say, when it comes to vaccines it is hard to accurately weigh all the risks when deciding what is the right schedule because there are so many factors at play.  I think realizing how easily diseases spread really pushed me away from being sympathetic to anti-vaxers and becoming much more critical of their claims.

Sorry for the long post-- I have LOTS to say on this subject.

Hmmm...ADD is pretty sex-specific in terms of symptoms sometimes as well…

Back in the thread-topic…

I have been getting more and more upset about topics like this.  Not so much specifically vaccination, but the whole discussions about science thing.  We live in an era where it’s actually pretty critical that people understand, not just how science works, but also of the many formulations that tell us important things about our world.

Relying on experts is one thing, and it’s not so much a bad thing.  However, most people in this society lack even the means to ask the specialist and interpret his or her responses.  It’s not so much that we can’t talk about Greenhouse Gases, for example.  We do, all the time.  Nevertheless, how scientists convey that information to the public at large is all wrapped up in metaphors like Greenhouse.  How many people do you or I know just how a greenhouse works?  I’m pretty sure that if I went out like Jay Leno, I’d be pretty shocked at the responses.  So we talk about one effect that is a scientific metaphor in terms of another effect that is also (if disguised by utility) a scientific metaphor.  Neither of which is fully appreciable by the public at large. 

This means that every time a science issue comes up that requires democratic or otherwise mass participation like global climate change, vaccinations, antibiotic use, etc, etc, etc, we’re not up for the challenge because we’re not really prepared for a debate.  If everything must be discussed in terms of inadequate metaphors to stand in for science that very few halfway understands, then we will always be trying to deal with showing how *really* inappropriate metaphors should be thrown out because it’s not representative of actual scientifically derived information.  Fixing problems becomes impossible to do before they become undeniable problems if there is a group determined to believe other than a probable consensus.  That means we’d have to have a repeat of the 1980’s AIDS epidemic before we can smack around the anti-vax folks via social proscriptions.  It means many cities and islands would have to be drowned, droughts and diseases taking away food from our mouths, etc, before we stand down the global warming deniers.  Problems that did not need to be big ones grow huge. 

On the other hand, we do not want to have some sort of top-down technocratic process for many of our decisions.  Many decisions really do work best if many people are involved in the decision-making process and saying con stuff as well as pro, like what Ms Kate is doing in this thread.  However, in order to appreciate this stuff, we have got to be better at educating people about science.  Not educating science, but science.literacy.  The lack of it is just about as bad as illiteracy or innumeracy, but it doesn’t show up until you have large numbers of science-illiterate people.

It was the small pox vaccine that caused the large blister and subsequent scar on the upper arms of those of us old enough to remember it (routine vaccination ended in the early seventies in the US).

When I had my vaccine, my mother apparently inadvertently touched it and then touched her chin, where she must have had an open scratch (or pimple, perhaps).  She actually managed to vaccinate herself right in the middle of her chin!  Imagine having THAT on your face for three weeks… It’s funny now, but she certainly didn’t think so at the time.

Being born before most of the vaccines for measles, chicken pox, and mumps, I had them all as a child.  My doc says I should get the shingles vaccine when I turn 60.

“still disagree with the Hep B vaccine being administered at birth). “

Because newborns can get it from their mother at birth. It’s fatal to the newborn or will cause the newborn to have a pretty big chance of dying from various liver related ailments since they will be continue to suffer reinfections since they cannot become immune to it. Being giving the vaccine can nullify the viral infection and grant immunity. Only about 5% of newborns have an immune system that will clear the virus.

So there is a very damn good reason to give infants at birth the vaccine.

I am a little sceptical of the movement to diagnose Asperger’s syndrome and adult ADD widely, at least if one considers them “diseases” and not normal variants. Why isn’t frequent use of physical aggression considered a “disease”? I am not a Szasz-ian - I do believe that there are real psychiatric or neurologic/psychosocial diseases. I think that the low-level variations from the modal (most common value) behavior are better regarded as normal variants as long as these variations are acceptable to the people manifesting them.

Mnemosyne: This test? http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/news/page/0,,937443,00.html

It was linked on MakingLight in 2005(?). According to it, I’m a male with Aspergers. But so were more then half of the commenters on that thread.

Very late to the party, but this has sort of been missed:

Vaccines are, shockingly, no guarantee that you won’t get that disease.

This is very true, Ashley, and it’s why EVERYONE should vaccinate.  Some people will be resistant to the vaccine.  Some people will have asthma and need to take steroids in order to breathe--steroids that weaken their immune systems.

Not everyone will be protected, and those who aren’t are the ones who are MEANT to be protected by the herd. 

If you can’t be properly vaccinated, it’s okay if everyone else around has.  You won’t catch the disease b/c the others are not going to be carriers.  Should you catch it, you won’t spread it b/c all the others are protected.

I’m all for combining similar vaccines b/c fewer shots are better for my kids.  Last time, my pediatrician’s office was awesome.  My 4 y/o needed two shots.  They sent in two nurses.  Who nailed both legs at the same time.  By the time the 4 y/o realized something hurt and started to cry, they were done and were asking her “What’s the matter?  It’s all over!  Why are you crying?” and even she had to laugh.

Thanks to shitty insurance and lack of insurance due to layoffs, this child was off schedule for immunizations for a few months.  For being such an incredible crook, Blago sure as hell did right by the kids of Illinois--all children here can be insured, even if your parents work.  If you are self-employed and individual health insurance is too much of a burden, you can still insure your kids (and the wife if pregnant) on a sliding scale that maxes out at ~$80/month.  With that, you can even get into some HMOs and have “real” insurance.

Vaccines are free here, thanks to Blago, no matter what else he’s done.  I’m really sad that he’s such a greedy, crazy ass.

Another one who can attest to the unpleasantness of shingles. I had chickenpox at age 8 or so; shingles showed up in my mid50s. Three weeks of serious pain meds, quarts of calamine lotion, and not being able to go to work—for the first ten days because I was too sick & miserable & itchy & painful & seepy & crusty, and the next two weeks because some of the people at work have compromised immune systems and were afraid of catching chicken pox from me until all the sores dried up.

My doctor gave me the shingles vaccine when I went in to see her with this fabulous rash starting to wrap around me; she said for this outbreak it couldn’t hurt and it might help; maybe there won’t be a second outbreak. (From her lips to God’s ears!)

So get your kids vaccinated against chicken pox. You just might be saving them a *lot* of misery later.

This is aided and abetted by the medical profession’s pathological reluctance to explain what and why they are doing things the way they do.

I do *not* understand this sort of thing. Explanations are *vital* for a good doctor. I spent a year as a teenager being extremely adverse to anti-depressants ‘cause I didn’t know what they did, and I thought they’d change my personality and make me artificially happy and all that, and a few therapists were not able to convince me otherwise. Then I went in for a yearly checkup and my pediatrician explained very simply how SSRI’s just stop seratonin reuptake and don’t actually *make* you happy and BAM: 3 minute explanation and I was totally onboard with getting treatment.

This wouldn’t be a lot harder wrt vaccinations either: “your kids get exposed to all sorts of stuff daily, which teaches their immune systems how to fight off disease. Immunization just exposes them to less dangerous versions of some diseases, to teach their immune system how to protect against them.”

Bam. Wouldn’t be that difficult for the doctors, now would it? (This is assuming a certain level of rational discourse is possible of course; God and Einstein and the Surgeon General together could try to reason with some people and it wouldn’t make a dent.)

I am pleasantly surprised that the anti-vax flying monkeys haven’t arrived yet.  usually they’re as dependable as the Paulbots.  There is usually at least one “my kid has autism and he got it from a vaccine and you can’t tell me otherwise and RFK Jer said so!” poster by now.

And I had shingles in my 40s.  ARGH.  Painful as hell and can do real longterm damage if not treated. (if I remember right)..

My brother, sister and I contracted mumps at the same time, circa 1964. Then my father caught it, and developed orchitis, a common side affect for men. He laid in bed for three days screaming from the pain. I’ll never forget.

Dad is 79 now, and his body has stopped producing testosterone.  The doctors say it’s because he contracted mumps 44 years ago. 

Mumps is not harmless. Neither are measles or chicken pox. Parents who pick and choose which diseases they immunize against are playing Russian Roulette with their kids and yours.

Measles killed 200,000 brown kids last year. It’s just a matter of time before it kills a white American child. That’s when our wonderful news and entertainment media will finally pay attention, and maybe, just maybe call Jenny McCarthy to account for playing doctor with childrens’ lives.

sure, it will kill a poor child.

But it won’t be until a Ryan White is dead that serious media attention that militates against the anti-vaxxers.

Amanda, I had chicken pox at an early age, I think the best thing to do is maintain your immune system, it’s all that’s standing between you and an outbreak of shingles, same as mine has kept shingles at bay for 4 decades

I also wore long-sleeved shirts to cover my pock marks, and I suppose that my wife didn’t always eat her rice.(Chinese children are told each grain of rice they leave on their plate will haunt them later as a pock mark on their future spouse.  That’s why Illocano Avenger never got chicken pox)

Mnemosyne: This test?

No, it was the AQ Test.

I’ve also taken the one you linked to and I scored about 50/50 male/female—my poor spatial skills put me in the female column.

Mnemosyne: Just did the one you linked, got 30, which is in normal range. I love new things and I’m good with stories, but I also love details and patterns and numbers and are bad with people, and that seem to have balanced out. With the test I linked, I feel that the experience of being bad with people and the interest in names and classifications led to a rather extreme result.

I kind of share NancyP’s scepticism about the whole thing. On one side it is useful if “what is wrong with me” has a name and a wikipedia entry to prove that you are not just being “difficult”, and gives people an idea on how to get along with you, but on the other, if one accepts a pathology as descriptive of one’s identity one can waste a lot of energy growing into symptons. Plus, not everything that’s different is pathological.

Thank you, ANB, for mentioning the mumps.  Having never had it as a kid and possibly never being vaccinated for it (how far back were they offering them), I have been quietly terrified of the illness for a while now.  Your charming story has not helped.

I believe the ring shaped scar (seven pins in a hexagon) was a smallpox vaccination.  I recall getting mine well over thirty years ago or longer, as part of the eradication campaign. Mine has faded to a vague white patch, impossible to distinguish from all the other scars of living.

It was the small pox vaccine that caused the large blister and subsequent scar on the upper arms of those of us old enough to remember it (routine vaccination ended in the early seventies in the US).

I’m not sure if they’ve made any changes to how the vaccine is administered since then, but smallpox vaccinations are required for American Army personnel deploying to Korea, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  You get a nasty, weeping scab about the size of a small lentil until it heals.  They’re really not pleasant shots, because you need to induce scarification with a small circular prong of needles.

“ Having never had it as a kid and possibly never being vaccinated for it (how far back were they offering them), “

I think more then twenty years. http://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/14/health/he-mumps14 notes an outbreak in 2006 and mentions the MMR vaccine in 1977.

MMRV also adds chicken pox protection so it’s replacing the use of the MMR vaccine and well should elimanate the occurance of shingles since you have to have the chicken pox virus to get shingles.

And her efforts are starting to head over to Australia too:

Skeptical Inquirers Vs Jenny McCarthy in Australia’s ‘Women’s Day’ - http://podblack.com/?p=1140

If you can — if you have health care that covers it, or if you can afford it — vaccinate your kids against chicken pox.

I had it when I was a kid and yeah, it was a couple weeks of unpleasantness faded into funny memory for me too. But it can be a lot worse.

A lot worse.

My friend Ron Sullivan was a pediatric nurse in Oakland some years back, and this is what she tells people who waver on the chicken pox vaccine, quoted from comments at Orac’s old blog:

When I feel the need to swat with an effective anecdote, I mention the kid I took care of years ago (before the vaccine) who lost his legs at the age of two to complications of chicken pox.

If I want to swat hard, I mention that the facts that he was so young, still had lots of growing to do (including the bone growth in his stumps) and scar tissue is unyielding and doesn’t grow meant that he had to come in periodically for scar revisions—which need was signalled by serious pain. And that this would go on until he reached adulthood… Which he has by now.

That’s a very restrained version of the story. She left out a lot of the detail she’s told me over the years.

Get your kids vaccinated.

If you ever want to watch the fuses blow in the anti-vax brain, you can always point out that congenital rubella used to be one of the most common identified causes of austism-like syndromes.  That’s right, folks: the MMR vaccine PREVENTS autism, by preventing the transmission of rubella (a largely benign disease in kids) to pregnant women, on whom it can have devastating effects in the fetus.  Go ahead and google it - it’s in the peer-reviewed literature going back to the 1970s, long before “autism” was a spit on anyone’s anti-vax tongue.  And watch those crunchy, Whole Foods-shopping, home-schooling, homeopathically-healing neurons implode.

Three children in my family have autism. I don’t know why. It’s not something I can attribute to anything. It is something that concerns me. Two children had the measles vaccine that was used in 197something in Canada, they and thousands like them were hospitalized for a profound reaction. Some had brain damage from high fever that was uncontrollable, and some are deaf. I have since spoken to a couple of late 30, early 40-something women who also remember a horrible experience. That was just one vaccine. If I had to do it over again, I don’t know if I would vaccinate my children.

It doesn’t do any good at all to label people wing-nuts because they don’t want to vaccinate. You’d best look at the science (including that not coming out of the industry) and also consider vaccinations today are very different from what they were when you were a child. They are given in multiple loads, combined, piled on top of each other, with ingredients not back in the days vaccines began. It’s not your good old pertussis and chicken pox vaccine any more.

If you’re a parent, expose your child to chicken pox. Why risk the vaccine when you don’t have to? There are times you may decide you have to. Work harder at finding out which times that will be.

Chris, anecdata is not epidemologic importance.  Notice that the UK doesn’t do varicella vaccines but does have HPV on their list?  That’s because extreme complications are RARE very very RARE with chickenpox, but HPV kills thousands of women and maims many more.

Extreme experiences are not justification for any and all vaccine risks.  Just ask somebody who lost a baby to the rotovirus vaccine and its associated complications.  Those “anecdotes” alone are horrific and they would, by your logic, justify NOT vaccinating kids ever.

So what to do?  Good public health practice based on facts and data, risks of vaccinating or not, identification of high risk groups, and cost coverage for all justified vaccinations in kids AND adults.

Why risk the vaccine when you don’t have to?

Because vaccine risks for many of the standard vaccines, while not zero, are VASTLY LESS THAN THE RISKS OF THE DISEASE.

This is one arena where chickenpox vaccines fall short of importance ...

Fatman: I preferred your obtuse post, where you didn’t essentially claim that the science of immunization is perfect because it uses the scientific method. That is, of course, meaningless circular logic. The fact remains that science is constantly correcting itself. Today’s study may alter the meaning of yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s may contradict both.

Amanda:

It’s one thing to reject evidence and reality when it comes to yourself, but we’re talking about people who are harming innocent children with their quackery.

For any of that to have meaning your presumption would have to be accepted as fact.

To believe vaccines are bad is to refuse to examine the claims of anti-vaccination cranks at all, while refusing to accept any scientific evidence that contradicts your way of thinking.

Nonsense. I do not base my opposition to vaccination on the claims that it is a cause of autism (this seems to be the #1 justification for labeling anyone opposed to vaccinations a quack). I base my opposition on science and the limitations of science. There are numerous studies detailing the side effects of vaccinations. There are numerous studies detailing possible genetic links to the increased likelihood of side effects due to vaccinations. Do each of the enthusiastically pro-vaccination parents obtain genetic profiles of their children to determine the likelihood of severe side effects to the vaccination they are about to subject their child to? I suspect not. Should we ignore that potential harm to the innocent child? What about the as yet undetermined genetic factors that increase the potential of severe side effects?

You have selected only the science that fits your presumption in order to validate your presumption. That’s not how science works. Vaccinations are a gamble and they always will be. Should I gamble with the life of my child for the sake of yours?

Fundamentally it comes down to an evaluation of risk: is my child safest if vaccinated from rare contagions or is my child safest by abstaining from the inherent risks of vaccinations? If I lived in India I would gamble with the former. Since I live in the U.S., at present I would gamble with the latter.

You know…

Some people in the US, maybe not in GB, do not always have access to kids with chicken pox for the traditional method.  That’s how there are many adults who are at risk for adult chicken pox.  Which is what the vaccine is really for.  Sometimes, though, you just want to take care of it early and in your control.

Sis, I don’t know if you would take it from me or not, but get those damn rugrats vaccinated!  The standard vaccinations exists because most of these viruses are completely not a joke.  Pertussis has killed many babies for instance.  Mumps sterilize.  And those are just the weaklings.  Measles are one of the lethal viruses of history and is still a serious disease today.  ect, etc, etc.

What you call science?  The stuff coming not from the industry?  BULLCRAP We can’t get them to really go for vaccine for many other diseases that only poor people will catch.  What makes you think that the vaccine industry is profitable enough to pay for lots of quack doctors?  It ain’t the tobacco industry!

Packman - not all those diseases are so rare. Measles and whooping cough are both making comebacks, precisely due to the increasing numbers of parents failing to vaccinate their kids.

On chicken pox - I had an outbreak of shingles last spring. It was a delightful experience, complete with random shooting pains in my left breast for nearly six months afterwards - and I had a very mild case, caught early and successfully treated. One of the children at my karate school developed cellulitis from his case of chicken pox. He recovered, but was miserable for weeks, and has extensive scarring.

My kids are vaccinated. My eldest actually caught chicken pox the last time it went around the school - he had one (1) pock.

Ok, here’s some “epidemology” for you: Before the vaccine was available, according to the CDC,approximately 10,600 persons were hospitalized and 100 to 150 died as a result of chickenpox in the U.S. every year.

The CDC’s take on who should be vaccinated:

All children and adults without evidence of immunity to varicella need the vaccine.

I had it when I was a kid and yeah, it was a couple weeks of unpleasantness faded into funny memory for me too. But it can be a lot worse.

Heh.

One summer, long long ago, my mum and her defacto decided to go spend the summer at a remote part of NZ, Cape Palliser. Two adults, four kids in one big tent.  Wonderful place - we caught fish straight out of the sea and roasted them in a fire for dinner most days.  It was pretty rugged, but they figured they’d be okay, because the defacto had a a 4WD.

Then it rained.  For two days straight.  It got so bad that even a 4WD couldn’t get out.

And at THAT point, myself and my brother managed to go down with the chicken pox (what, you thought this story was unrelated?).

So we spent a VERY unpleasant couple of nights sleeping in a car until the rivers went down enough to evacuate us back to my grandmothers place, and THEN we had the couple of weeks of unpleasantness.  The rest of the group went back to Cape Palliser to enjoy the rest of the holiday.

Two nights later, the tent blew into the sea.  While they were sleeping underneath it.

That’s why I remember that I’ve had the chicken pox as a kid.

Packman I have read and reread my post and I can find no essentialist claim to the perfection of the current set of methods that we give the name science to.  Those methods do however produce predictive results.  You are correct, those results are almost certainly wrong in one or more respect, as are the methods that produced them.  So we are left to determine which of the outcomes that we can predict, however inaccurately, that we want to occur.  Every step of every decision humans make is fraught with error, so we create systems to try and identify and minimize the errors.  These systems are also, of course erroneous, but over time certain methods tend to produce more accurately predictive results, and by applying those methods still more accurately predictive results can be achieved.  I suppose what I am trying to say is, as far a generating predictive results our current scientific methods have been more effective than previous ones, so while we should be continually seeking to improve on them, we can use them in the interim.  Thus we do not know to a certainty that vaccinations will improve human survivability, but the systems that have in the past been the most predictive predict that they will.

On one side it is useful if “what is wrong with me” has a name and a wikipedia entry to prove that you are not just being “difficult”, and gives people an idea on how to get along with you, but on the other, if one accepts a pathology as descriptive of one’s identity one can waste a lot of energy growing into symptons.

Or, alternatively, one is relieved to find out there may be a reason for a lifetime of social and employment difficulties other than one’s innate stupidity and a possible explanation for why people sometimes look at you like you’re from Mars.  It can go either way.

Since I live in the U.S., at present I would gamble with the latter.

That’s exactly the gamble those parents in San Diego took.  Whoops.  Turns out they weren’t nearly as protected as they thought they were, and the gamble was much more risky than they assumed it would be living in a first world country.

By the way, note that the measles outbreak didn’t begin because the family traveled to India or Africa.  It began because they traveled to the perfectly safe, perfectly clean first world country of Switzerland.  So gambling that nice, clean first world countries will be disease-free is not the safe bet it first appears to be.

Tapetum: A disagreement over the subjective nature of “rare” is not productive. Suffice it to say, I consider them rare in comparison to the necessity of taking on risk associated with vaccination.

Further, I might argue that many infections require re-immunization after a couple of decades or so as their efficacy eventually reaches zero or near zero, yet I do not believe the majority of adults acquire these re-immunizations. If the risks were as high as claimed in this thread, it goes to logic that more adults would suffer from infections related to the failure to maintain immunization. Yet there are not large scale outbreaks of any of these virii/bacteria, save influenza.

If vaccinations are so safe and the pinnacle of rational thought - why are they forever being changed for new and supposedly better versions? The old methods should be just fine - after all they were created through science. Perhaps we should mandate a law requiring the administration of those ancient, discarded vaccination methodologies. Let’s start with smallpox variolation. There’s only a 3% chance you’ll die of smallpox which means there’s a 97% chance you won’t. You say the threat of smallpox is nearly non-existent? Perhaps - but it could make a comeback precisely due to the increasing number of parents failing to use smallpox variolation on their children.

In the mean time, I’ll wait for real risk and/or near-risk free vaccinations.

Mnemosyne: 11 children in a population of, say, 70 million children? That risk level seems rather acceptable to me. Indeed, that would be my very definition of rare.

The nature of the term rare is exactly what is in question here, Packman.  The likelihood that our actions will contribute to the rare occurrences of vaccination complication should we continue vaccinations or future disease outbreak should we terminate vaccinations in the United States are being weighed so one must either have a predictive model for which is less rare or an expert that one can trust.  Few of us have the time or the inclination to become epidemiologists, and even if we all did, a society composed entirely of highly trained and focused specialists could not support itself, therefore it seems that a very few of us will become epidemiologists and the rest of us must undertake the simpler task of determining if the epidemiologists among us can be trusted.  Now, with the complexity of the field even determining what epidemiologist to trust has become a specialized task, one that is handled by government oversight agencies and other epidemiologists in the form of peer review.  Now most peer review tends be of a technical level that most non specialists cannot understand so the general public tend to rely on government oversight agencies.  These agencies, as you pointed out are flawed and often wrong, but by checking one against another a more accurate portrayal of fact can be found.  You state, and rightly so, that the FDA is often incorrect in its assessments, and has been shown to be at times corrupt or swayed by politics rather than science, but when we cross check for vaccination information with the California DPH we can see that they both make the same claims, the same with Nevada DPH.  When I did a cursory search of state health departments that I do not have personal experience with I found the same thing in Illinois DPH, Ohio DH, and Georgia DHR.  On the chance that the problem was with the United States I checked the WHO, Briton’s DH and UNICEF, all claim vaccinations work.  Now science is not consensus, so just because all of these experts agree does not make it so, but as a person who is not an epidemiologist I have already given up on coming to my decision wholly with out expert input, so an expert consensus is the best I can get.

You have come to a different conclusion than I have regarding the importance of the populace of the United States being vaccinated.  I am genuinely interested on how you came to the conclusion that the populace of the United States should not receive vaccinations.

Ms Kate “vastly less than the risks of the disease”. Precisely. Not the disease, but ‘risk’. Risk is not disease.

We’re all at risk for cardiovascular disease because we have hearts.

Those are interesting numbers Chris. What is CDC comparing them to?

Last year the flu vaccine used for everyone in the U.S. was not the flu strain prevalent. Same thing in 2005, I think it was. http://www.medicalconsumers.org/pages/FluVaccineisRarelyEffective.html

Non-industry funded studies are not necessarily quackery, as you seem to imply Shah8. Take a look around here: PLoS.

By the way, are you aware that pharma gets protection on law suits if their CDC *mandated* vaccine maims your grandmother or your child?

Think Gardasil is safe, and should be given to young women? Merck’s principal Gardasil researcher doesn’t. Google Diane Harper M.D.

Have you seen the movie Constant Gardener Shah8?  Not about vaccine, no. But there’s no special “vaccine” pharma. Constant Gardener wasn’t fiction. The jump-off story happened to Dr. Nancy Oliveri in that well know third world country, Canada.

Diane Harper, Merck’s lead Gardasil researcher blasts HPV marketing; not safe for young women:
http://www.kpcnews.com/articles/2007/03/14/online_features/hpv_vaccine/hpv01.prt

Note where she says media (such as CBC News? Boston Globe?) wouldn’t talk to her when she tried to tell them about the dangers.  I know why. I’ve worked in newsrooms where we weren’t allowed to write questioning copy about advertisers who regularly bought double-truck ads and sponsored the publisher’s golf tourney.

Researcher blasts HPV marketing

BY CINDY BEVINGTON

Diane M. Harper, a lead researcher in the development of the humanpapilloma virus vaccine, says giving the drug to 11-year-old girls “is a great big public health experiment.” (Photo contributed)
LEBANON, N.H. — A lead researcher who spent 20 years developing the vaccine for humanpapilloma virus says the HPV vaccine is not for younger girls, and that it is “silly” for states to be mandating it for them.

Not only that, she says it’s not been tested for effectiveness in younger girls, and administering the vaccine to girls as young as 9 may not even protect them at all. And, in the worst-case scenario, instead of serving to reduce the numbers of cervical cancers within 25 years, such a vaccination crusade actually could cause the numbers to go up.

Fatman: Unfortunately, the bulk of your argument is irrelevant due to your incorrect conclusions of my point.

You have come to a different conclusion than I have regarding the importance of the populace of the United States being vaccinated.  I am genuinely interested on how you came to the conclusion that the populace of the United States should not receive vaccinations.

I’m not responsible for the populace of the United States. I am responsible for my child and I take the path of least risk for my child by not immunizing my child.

Statistically the risk of infection does not outweigh the known risks and unknown risks of immunization, here in the U.S. at this present time. As I said previously, were I living in India my position would be different. On the other hand, there is a high probability that if I lived in India I would move.

Would you ingest a vaccine for a disease that you had 0% probability of obtaining (i.e. for the hell of it)? If not, why would you ingest a vaccine for a disease that you have 0.0000001% probability of obtaining?

A quick review of the rates of infection for the diseases covered by vaccination schedules will clearly prove my point.

“A quick review of the rates of infection for the diseases covered by vaccination schedules will clearly prove my point. “

Hehe then explain why there are mini outbreaks among the not immunized among this country? The rates of infection are skewed because of the immunization. Bother to research how the rates of infection are done oh and btw most of the diseases covered by the vaccination scheldules are highly contagious and can kill children as well as adults, cause neurological and physical ailments, cause miscarriages, cause deformities.

The reason these diseases are so low is because of vaccines and having them be mandatory for a while.

Like the people thinking getting chicken pox prevents shingles (when shingles are caused by the chicken pox living in your body decades after the infection) you do not understand why these diseases are not killing hundreds of thousands of people each year in the US.

“If vaccinations are so safe and the pinnacle of rational thought - why are they forever being changed for new and supposedly better versions? The old methods should be just fine - after all they were created through science.”

Because the vaccines get better they get more able to protect and if we can reduce the number of vaccine injections the better. Would you rather have the first version of a rabies treatment or the latest treatment? Science isn’t a religion it’s about finding the best explanation and if a better one is found then we use that one.

You sound like one of those it’s all natural it cannot hurt us when all poisons are found in nature. Even water is toxic to you as is air. Everything is poison. A lot of those herbal medicines aren’t effective at all. The reason they were used is because people used to have nothing better to use.

“Last year the flu vaccine used for everyone in the U.S. was not the flu strain prevalent”

You are obviously why that is so. It takes months to make the vaccine for a flu strain. Months and they have to make a assement as to what strain will be the most likely to be prevalent otherwise they will not have the vaccine ready in time.

They often have been more right then wrong about what strain becomes prevalent and future production will be even more accurate.

As for Gardasil it’s a preventive and best given before sexual activity takes place. Oh btw it’s now recommended for men as well since it can protect them so both straights and gays should be given it.

“she says it’s not been tested for effectiveness in younger girls, and administering the vaccine to girls as young as 9 may not even protect them at all.”

She is lying then since it was tested in girls as young as 9. The studies took place in over 13 countries with tens of thousand of women involved. It was studied for years in clinical trials. It’s why numerous countries approved it. Oh and btw numerous research teams were involved it’s why there is fighting over the patent rights.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/11/041123162300.htm

“If the risks were as high as claimed in this thread, it goes to logic that more adults would suffer from infections related to the failure to maintain immunization. Yet there are not large scale outbreaks of any of these virii/bacteria, save influenza. “

It’s because adults are less likely to be infected anyway. It’s why these diseases affected children and killed far more of them.

If you were to take a million unvaccineted children and a million unvaccineted adults then exposed them to chicken pox you would have hundreds of thousands of infected children with a few thousand dying from it, will only having a few tens of thousands of adults being infected with a few thousand adults dying as well.

There is a reason they called them childhood diseases it’s because the disease has an easier time of infecting them. It’s why when the vaccines first came out it was always children who were innoclated never adults. It was later on that adults in certain cases were recommended to be vaccinated when the disease risk lowered and we weren’t burying two out of every three children.

“Notice that the UK doesn’t do varicella vaccines “

They do actually. There has been enourmous debate about wheter to mandate varicella vaccine for children going to school. An outbreak among school children that made the papers would quickly change their minds and mandate the vaccine like the US does.

UK has never had chicken pox outbreaks like the US has had in recent times.

Chris, did you realize that the CDC issued those statements when the vaccine manufacturers threatened to withdraw their non-profitable vaccine products from the market?

I bet you didn’t.

Oh, and have you ever seen a kid in the hospital due to bad reactions to vaccines?

I be you haven’t.  By your logic, that horror should inform me that I should NOT get my kids vaccinated.  Fortunately, extreme circumstance doesn’t - or shouldn’t - drive public policy. 

That CDC policy you cite was not science-based - and I personally know a number of people who work in that agency (including some of my mentors and associates) who were and are critical of the chicken pox mandate - HIGHLY CRITICAL - of that very policy you cite for VERY MUCH SCIENTIFIC REASONS.  That is because it had diddly shit to do with protecting the public, unlike measels, mumps, polio, etc. vaccines mandates do.  It had far more to do with extortion and corporate profit.

Packman, I was acting under the assumption that with respect to you and your decision Amanda was wrong, and you were not simply opting out of a system that works because of the levels of participation, while counting on the continued participation of others.  If you feel that your child does not need to be vaccinated because the over all number a vaccinated people is high enough to build a heard immunity then you are simply shifting the (perceived) burden of risk to all of the other children.  Your decision weakens the overall heard immunity.  You believe that there are genuine risks associated with vaccination, and while I find the level of fear about vaccinations to be absurd, I might be wrong and you might be right.  Your actions, when coupled with your assumptions appear to be based on an idea that your children need not face a shared danger, only other people’s children do.

Am I incorrect in this understanding?

Wow, really?  For once, I thought I might have encountered an AM post that didn’t take a feminist Truther tack.  I know, someone will inavariably point out her milquetoast ‘I doubt it was intentional’ line, but why even speculate in that case?  Between this and her recent assertion that the Terrell Owens imbroglio had to be about racism-even though AM admits she knows nothing about the situation, she has to have a conspiratorial opinion about it, a habit she would undoubtedly decry when committed by Christianists-she’s really been dropping the ball lately, IMO.

What makes my blood boil about this is a good friend’s adopted 10-year-old is HIV positive. That means someone’s idiotic selfish decision not to vaccinate their child could kill him. Thanks a lot, anti-vaxers.

And as someone who had chicken pox as a child, it is something I would never wish on anyone else. I still vividly remember the nightmare I had when my fever spiked to something like 106. I’m lucky to be alive and not brain damaged.

Packman:

Suffice it to say, I consider them rare in comparison to the necessity of taking on risk associated with vaccination.

And just why do you think those diseases are so “rare” these days, smartguy? Do you think that it’s just some kind of bizarre coincidence that we tend to be the most resistant to the diseases that are most commonly vaccinated against in this country?

Statistically the risk of infection does not outweigh the known risks and unknown risks of immunization, here in the U.S. at this present time.

If you’re going to argue from statistics, you’d better have some actual statistics to back it up. Making shit up as you go along is not a valid substitute for actually knowing what the fuck you’re talking about.

Would you ingest a vaccine for a disease that you had 0% probability of obtaining (i.e. for the hell of it)? If not, why would you ingest a vaccine for a disease that you have 0.0000001% probability of obtaining?

1) Don’t make a statistical argument about real things with statistics you just made right the fuck up. That kind of crap is commonly referred to by people who aren’t self-obsessed choads with egregious entitlement issues as “lying directly out of your asshole.”

2) Continuum fallacy == failure.

And as someone who had chicken pox as a child, it is something I would never wish on anyone else.

So you would wish documented side effects (traced to the OPV strain in the vaccine, not the dominant wild-type) on a predictable percentage of vaccinated persons instead?  That’s the issue with varicella: the vaccine has side effects and problems - like ALL vaccines do.  These complications are very rare, but the extreme consequences of the disease are also very rare.  I wouldn’t wish those consequences (including deaths reported in children with certain types of leukemia who were given the vaccine) on anybody either. 

With varicella, the risk of the disease simply does not justify the risks from mandated vaccination.  With measels, mumps, etc. the risk of the disease is so much higher than the risks and expense of the vaccines as to justify the mandate.

Do you think that it’s just some kind of bizarre coincidence that we tend to be the most resistant to the diseases that are most commonly vaccinated against in this country?

Clearly, he does.  He has no idea what herd immunity is or what it means if that system breaks down.

Here’s a hint:  without herd immunity, your child could still get the measles even if they were vaccinated.  If enough parents make the same decision that you do, the diseases that you think are “eradicated” in the US (even though there are hundreds of cases of measles, mumps, rubella, etc. every year) will become rampant once again, and rushing to get your precious little snowflake immunized after that happens will be like spitting in the wind.

That means someone’s idiotic selfish decision not to vaccinate their child could kill him. Thanks a lot, anti-vaxers.

##

No, that means the child has been raped. That’s where your concern should be focused.

“ I wouldn’t wish those consequences (including deaths reported in children with certain types of leukemia who were given the vaccine) on anybody either.  “

Please provide the studies that show deaths were a result of the vaccine rather then a correlation. Also leukemia is a weakining of the immune system they would have likely died from the chicken pox virus or any other virus. In fact the vaccine is giving to children with leukemia because the chicken pox virus is fatal to them in that state and the vaccine can prevent their death. Hence deaths would be a matter of correlation not causation.

More children die from chickenpox then from the vaccine effects which are just a few a year and more often then not just a matter of correlation not causation as above. Most people that get sick from the vaccine would have suffered far far worse from the actual disease infection and likely would have died from another illness or will die easier then most people from said childhood diseases.

http://www.babycenter.com/0_the-chicken-pox-vaccine_11178.bc

100 to 150 deaths a year isn’t a good reason to get a vaccine shot especially if it can grant immunity to shingles as well as prevent suffering?

“She is lying then since it was tested in girls as young as 9. “

As she says, it has not been tested for effectiveness. Check what they used as end points.

“I’m lucky to be alive and not brain damaged. “

Do you have any other scars from the chicken pox infection besides the emotional ones I mean?

That may be a good reason to get vaccinated those scars can be quite nasty especially on the face. We are talking plastic surgery here.

No, that means the child has been raped. That’s where your concern should be focused. —Sis

Because, of course, the only method of transmission of HIV is the buttsex.  Well done!

No, that means the child has been raped. That’s where your concern should be focused.

Wait, what?  I was unaware that HIV could only be spread via rape.  I guess an HIV-positive mother who transmits AIDS to her baby didn’t do it through her blood or breastmilk.  Nope, the only possible answer is that the mother raped her infant and passed HIV along that way, because there is no other way for it to be transmitted.

I guess we can stop screening blood donations now that Sis has revealed to us that AIDS is only spread through rape.

You’d think that Elisabeth Glaser would have been aware that the reason she and two of her children had AIDS was that they’d been raped, but the foolish woman went to her grave believing that she’d contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion and unknowingly passed it along to her children when she nursed them.  If only Sis had been around to let her know she and both of her children had been rape victims because that’s the only way AIDS is transmitted!

““She is lying then since it was tested in girls as young as 9. “

As she says, it has not been tested for effectiveness. Check what they used as end points.
“

Wrong it’s been tested for years as to the effectiveness. The recent vaccine is effective against more strains as well.

It’s as effective as any other vaccine. You would need booster shots every few years to regain the full potency of the vaccine and considering how wide spreed hpv is that would be a great idea.

Tell me why is it that the other researchers which number a few hundred especially from all the trials haven’t supported this woman? Multiple nations with multiple health agencies all support the hpv vaccine being used in girls as young as 9 with more and more health agencies supporting the use of the hpv vaccine in young men.

As for Dr. Harper please constrast your story with her comments in this one http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/578110

“However, Diane Harper, MD, professor of community and family medicine/obstetrics and gynecology at Dartmouth Medical School, in Hanover, New Hampshire, and director of the Gynecologic Cancer Prevention Research Group at the Norris Cotton Cancer Center, is more circumspect. Dr. Harper, who was involved in clinical trials with both HPV vaccines, commented during an interview, “Serious adverse events reported do happen, but in small numbers of women being vaccinated, and some of these events may be so rare that they will never be directly linked to the vaccine.”

Dr. Harper notes that she has received money from both Merck and GlaxoSmithKline for consultation about and conducting clinical trials on the HPV vaccines. “This is a good vaccine and it is generally safe,” she said. “

She wasn’t the lead researcher what so ever. She was a consultant nimrod. She wasnt’ employed by Merck and she isn’t a researcher on vaccines either.

No, that means the child has been raped. That’s where your concern should be focused.

Thanks, that is BY FAR the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen on Pandagon. And that’s saying something.

Not being a moron: Ur doin it rong.

And if that’s the scintillating scientific awareness you bring to ALL your child-rearing endeavors, it’s miraculous that any of your kids ever survived.

1.) Medscape is funded by Merck.

If you want to follow a good discussion on this, read here. In Dr. Lippman’s article and response she gives the citation for how many tested when and what age, I believe. You’ll have to read through.

http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/search?andorexactfulltext=and&resourcetype=1&disp;_type=&sortspec=date&fulltext=Abby+Lippman&submit;.x=0&submit;.y=0&submit=GO

No, Sis, you don’t get it...once you prove that you’re astoundingly, brain-explodingly ignorant (as you just did, with your HIV/rape bullshit)...nobody gives two shits about your links.

On the topic of shingles, I’ve experienced it twice and while the shingles itself wasn’t as horrific as other people have experienced, the post-herpetic neuralgia has been extremely sucky-- stabbing, burning pain inside my ear that sometimes come on so strong it makes me cry out.  Personally, I’d recommend the varicella vaccine if there’s any chance of preventing shingles down the road.

When it came time to vaccinate my daughter, I had hubby, who has a degree in Biochemistry and works in cancer research, do a review of the studies.  The only published studies that claim any link between MMR and autism come from a single researcher, who has immediate family in a law firm that deals in medical malpractice cases. Quite the conflict of interest.  From what hubby could find out, this is the researcher whose work RFK Jr. used in his anti-immunization book.

It’s quoting her nimrod. Also other newspapers and articles mentioning also back up the medscape report.

She wasn’t a lead researcher whatsoever. She was a consultant to them and she isn’t in the field of vaccine research.

Pubmed backs up Merck as do numerous other scientific organizations that have studied the vaccine as do numerous health agencies around the world.

Oh and medscape btw has peer reviewed backing and is run by WebMD not Merck.

Stop listenting to anti-corporate leaf eaters who smoke the ganja instead of using their brains.

Packman, the only reason why the risk of catching a disease that are routinely vaccinated against is so low is that most people are routinely vaccinated against it. Which is why these days you have mini-outbreaks in places where a bunch of unvaccinated people are close enough to get the disease of the day from each other, instead of the repeated low-key epidemics of my childhood or the citywide emergencies of my parents’.

Yes, the system will protect a few freeloaders. That does not mean that everyone can freeload without consequences—and the consequences, ironically, are that you will really want that vaccination, because for epidemological purposes, you are living in India.

If vaccinations are so safe and the pinnacle of rational thought - why are they forever being changed for new and supposedly better versions?

Should you get a headache thinking about it, willow bark tea should help you answer that question.

Dan The Grand Emperor of Ineptitude: If I believed in god I might pray for you to contract a virus, that’s simply how worthless you are.

Fatman: Yes. Though I would point out that I think Amanda is wrong. The reason she is wrong is that she is either disingenuous or, more likely, misinformed. Opposition to vaccination is not quackery.

Inge: For epidemiological purposes, I am not living in India. Which is the entirety of my point. And that last bit you quoted of me was rhetorical - but the correct answer is: because the old versions are less safe, which means the new versions are less safe than the future versions. Which means vaccinations ARE NOT SAFE. See how that works?

Random other people who fail to grasp anything I have posted: You fail to grasp anything I have posted.

Medscape/WebMed is funded by Merck. PubMed is a ‘“collector", a “library”, having your study *abstract* there is not an agreement of anything.

I hope you’ll read the citations, which have points of view from both sides. I have to work now.

Fatman: I forgot to mention that you needn’t worry too much that my child is not vaccinated. The increased risk to anyone you know is so incredibly small as to be totally meaningless.

Packman: For epidemiological purposes, I am not living in India. Which is the entirety of my point.

Yes, because other people are getting vaccinated, which allows you to profit off their effort.

Which means vaccinations ARE NOT SAFE. See how that works?

Oh yes. 1920’s radiotherapy was less safe than today’s, which is less safe then 2020’s will be. So it’s safest to not treat that cancer.

Packman, I am not worried that your one child is not vaccinated.  You are correct that your one family leaving the responsibility of maintaining herd immunity to others does not in and of its self cause a problem, any more than one person littering makes for a polluted environment. 

What is your response to the assertion that by both believing in the dangers of vaccination and depending on the practice of vaccination by the vast majority of families to provide you with a relatively disease free environment, you are shifting the burden of protecting the group of which you and your family are a part onto others?

Also, what level of safety is acceptable before doing anything, cars in the 70’s were less safe than cars now, so we can assume that cars in the future will be safer, should we forgo transportation now because future transportation will probably be safer?

I do honestly believe Pandagon today is infested with the. Stupidest. Trolls. Ever. Seriously...if you add together James, Packtard, the Mike asshole on the insurance thread...I don’t think they have enough collective brain cells to tie a shoe.

“Medscape/WebMed is funded by Merck. PubMed is a ‘“collector”, a “library”, having your study *abstract* there is not an agreement of anything. “

Backed by dozens of medical organizations doesn’t mean they are funded by Merck.

Pubmed is the National Institute of Health and it’s a datebase referance.

Medscape has peer reviewed stuff and another medical info. They have been judged to be highly accurate and not under corporate control.

Face the facts your Dr. was not accurately quoted on her position on the vaccine nor was the position you claimed her to be. She isn’t a research scientist on vaccines she never worked on the development on it. Guess what the researchers on it agree the vaccine works as well as any other vaccine and is as safe as is any other vaccine using weakened viruses.

I completely agree that the anti-vaccine movement is misguided, in large part to the lack of reliance on actual scientific evidence. 

Unfortunately, I don’t see much actual scientific evidence used to defend our side of the argument either, which makes us just as much of a quack as Jenny McCarthy. 

Pubmed.gov.  18 million citations from medical journals, and it’s free. Please, please, please use it.

A footnote on PubMed:  pubmed is a database of citations that is collected by the National Library of Medicine, one of the institutes and centers of the National Institutes of Health.  PubMed collects and organizes the citations from several thousand medical journals and does NOT back up anything--it is merely a collection of all of the citations from any journals that are accepted--on quality basis only, regardless of position-- into the database.

Packman, are you surrounded by people who share your low opinion of vaccinations?  Or are all the other parents in your child’s community convinced you are an idiot?

B/c your kid is actually safer if you live where everyone knows you’re an idiot.  If you are living with like-minded anti-vax people, you’re moving ever closer to India while remaining stateside.

Speaking of India--my husband has been there.  He hates India.  Do you know how many vaccinations you have to take just to go there?  Plus how many antibiotics they make you take along?

It’s true he was there working, which made India less appealing, but when his coworkers took him out for some local color at Uncle’s Kitchen on Friday, he spent the entire weekend vomiting, having diarhea, high fever and ended up taking every single pill the vaccination place gave him. 

Then he came right back home to Chicago, where he could have introduced any number of bugs to the local populace.

My mom, grandpa, and brother went to Egypt--where said brother got violently ill.  Mom’s best friend since she was 5 went to, and then returned to a very small town in Indiana.

My mother-in-law regularly takes trips to the Middle East with her church.  She’s been to Bethlehem and Turkey.

My point?  We aren’t rich people--my inlaws are blue collar Chicago cops, and they’ve been in the Middle East.

Those far away places where people get sick?  Not really that far away.  Germs don’t care who you are or whether someone gets on an airplane or not.

One more thing--even if the risk is 1 in 50,000, it won’t matter if your kid is the one.  Especially if vaccinating him/her could have prevented it.  I really hope it doesn’t happen, and you’re right, it probably won’t, but the risk you are running with your kid is higher than the risk I ran with mine.

For the record (literally) for anyone wanting to research this matter.  As a mother and a researcher “Not a proponent of mandatory regulation”.

http://www.gpscholar.uthscsa.edu/gpscholar/facultyscholars/CR/bio/Harper.pdf

http://cdc.confex.com/cdc/nic2006/techprogram/P11703.HTM

http://www.publicbroadcasting.net/kuar/.artsmain/article/11/1239/1147560/Radio/Dr..Diane.Harper/

http://dartmed.dartmouth.edu/fall06/html/faculty_focus.php

Dr. Abby Lippman
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/177/5/484

Gosh, yes, it sure sounds like Dr. Harper is opposed to the vaccine:

Yet despite the limitations of the new vaccines, Harper supports their widespread use and believes that insurance companies should cover them. The vaccines—Merck’s requires three shots that cost about $120 each—will be cost-effective, she says, “not necessarily in reducing the numbers of cancers in the U.S., but in reducing the whole abnormal Pap smear” cycle of follow-up tests and treatments. “All of that becomes extraordinarily expensive,” she explains.

You should probably also have noticed that Dr. Lippman is a Ph.D., not an MD.  She’s an epidemiologist, not a medical doctor.  Her opinions are about the utility of the vaccines, not their safety, because the safety of the vaccine is not her purview.

Did you even read your links before you posted them?

Dr. Harper is opposed to:

1.) Mandatory vaccine

2.) Vaccinating very young girls--it’s a “public health experiment”.

There are shades to this argument. I don’t think it’s helpful to characterize anyone as stupid, right-wing, or any of the other insults delivered here in place of real and useful information, which is I hope what I have offered.

Abby, yes. She’s an epidemiologist. That’s valuable in any discussion of drugs. CMAJ and several other peer-reviewed medical journals seem to think so.

Somewhere else, Dr. Harper comments about marketing being what has taken over from information and science on this issue. I agree completely.

I have had cervical cancer, so I am not just a blog poster here trying to score debating points.

Speaking of India--my husband has been there.  He hates India.  Do you know how many vaccinations you have to take just to go there?  Plus how many antibiotics they make you take along?

Had a similar experience when I had to get a whole host of anti-hepatitis and other vaccinations before going to study abroad in China in the late 1990s.  Contracting hepatitis was still a serious danger when I went there, especially if one ate at the outdoor restaurants or was clueless enough to drink water straight from the tap without boiling it thoroughly.  Several unwary classmates ended up having severe abdominal illnesses because of the latter action.  One classmate almost went blind when she used Beijing tapwater to wash her contact lenses.  :(

More recently, I had to submit medical records to prove all my vaccinations were in order so the university would allow me to enroll for grad school as the university wanted to forestall potential epidemics among those in the university community and the potential complications/lawsuits which may ensue as a consequence.

Does your university get funding from pharmaceutical companies? I would submit then, the university would not decline when the pharma made that a stipulation of $$ for grants, X chair, labs, clinics, buildings.

Does your university get funding from pharmaceutical companies? I would submit then, the university would not decline when the pharma made that a stipulation of $$ for grants, X chair, labs, clinics, buildings.

Don’t think that indicates anything as those mandates were based on state public health regulations and mandates for educational institutions. 

Those vaccination mandates also applied at my private liberal arts college where I did my undergrad along with every school I attended from kindergarten to high school.  None of those institutions were centers of big pharma research unless something has changed since I graduated......

It does effect it. Pharmas lobby politicians hard for these mandates. Both Democrats and Republicans.

Merck lobbied the CDC to mandate Gardasil.

Merck is lobbying my provincial government too. Another consumer’s rights advocate I know who has been at that end of it for much longer than I says there’s an open door for pharma VPs to cabinet ministers offices. That’s not good. Would you have it that way for Big Tobacco?

Read Peter Rost’s blog and Pharmalot to keep up on these issues, from a perspective other than marketing. Rost is a former Pfizer/Pharmacia VP-marketing who blew whistle, and Pharmalot is just about the best investigative journalist going on these issues. The penduluum has swung far too far to the advantage of corp pockets. The focus has become stockholders share, not health care.

FYI, I have relatives who grew up in poverty-stricken nations without the healthcare infrastructure to implement any vaccinations. 

From what they’ve told me and what I’ve learned from studying that society during that period, no rational person who grew up taking first-world health care standards for granted would opt to live in those societies over their own.  It was far worse than anything even most average 1950’s working-class Americans can imagine.....

It was one reason why those nations did their best to rapidly implement first-world healthcare standards such as vaccination policies as soon as economic and prevailing geopolitical conditions made it possible.

Tootiredoftheright: You might have had a point about the risk of Hep B to infants if it wasn’t also common practice to test all pregnant women for Hep B.  Unless a newborn is living with someone infected with Hep B and exchanging bodily fluids with them, their risk of contracting it before their 2-month well visit (when they receive the Hep B vaccine again) is extremely low. Certainly, those with PhDs in the related areas that I’ve discussed this with have said there is little scientific evidence to support giving a baby the vaccine within 20 minutes of birth.

One can reasonably disagree with the vaccination schedule (which in most cases is designed to ensure that most children receive the full battery of vaccines rather than determined according to greatest risk/need) without being treated like a nitwit.  I’ve spent the last three years researching this topic and debating anti-vaxers. It does the pro-vaxers no favors to pretend that there aren’t issues with vaccine safety (Ms. Kate pointed out the rotovirus vaccine and I will point out the oral polio vaccine as evidence), with pushing for certain vaccines to become mandatory when the evidence does not support it, or otherwise eliding some of the real concerns that the anti-vax movement exploits to their benefit.

Dr. Harper is opposed to:
1.) Mandatory vaccine
2.) Vaccinating very young girls--it’s a “public health experiment”.

That is different from what you were arguing.  Here’s what you said:

Think Gardasil is safe, and should be given to young women? Merck’s principal Gardasil researcher doesn’t. Google Diane Harper M.D.

Your claim was that Dr. Harper felt the vaccines were dangerous and she was campaigning against them.  Your own evidence shows that that is not true.  Now you’re trying to move the goalposts and pretend that you were only talking about Dr. Harper’s opinion about giving the vaccines to girls under 18 and not about her overall opinion of the vaccines.

If you’re going to argue your points, do it honestly and don’t try to change the subject when your own evidence proves you wrong.

There are issues with antibiotics too. But the cost-benefit analysis is so great a spread that there shouldn’t be any need to even run the numbers. If your loved one gets sick because of the vaccine or the ammoxacilin, if they die, that’s a damn shame. A tragedy, no doubt, and I doubt anyone here would argue. But if your child were to be maimed by a completely preventable disease? You’ve got the only kid in a wheel chair because you couldn’t be bothered to read a real peer-reviewed journal and see where the great bulk of the evidence lies? Seems like that would be worse.

wreckerofplans: I have the impression that it’s the other way around, that the consequences of something you did do hit you harder than the consequences of something you did not do.

Now, I was raised by a physicist, and it doesn’t get much more hard science than that. But I like to think that there would be eventual comfort from knowing that you *really were trying to do the best for your child*. Like my grandmother, whose husband became conscious enough to briefly reassure her that she should pull the plug, should it come to that, which it did shortly thereafter. Right now she’s second guessing herself, but I hope and believe that she will eventually be able to take comfort that she did what he wanted.

I must repeat this quote from Packman, as possibly the least connected to logic of any I’ve seen recently on Pandagon:
“Inge: For epidemiological purposes, I am not living in India. Which is the entirety of my point. And that last bit you quoted of me was rhetorical - but the correct answer is: because the old versions are less safe, which means the new versions are less safe than the future versions. Which means vaccinations ARE NOT SAFE. See how that works?”

Firstly, this defines “safe” as “not having any risk at all”, since otherwise it is possible to conceive of something with less risk (the putative future vaccines in the example above).  If Packman has discovered an activity entirely free of risk, he ought to share that information with the rest of us.
Secondly, nobody actually lives this way.  Cars today are safer than cars used to be.  Cars of the future will likely be safer.  Therefore, you shouldn’t use cars, because they’re not as safe as they possibly, conceivably could be.  See how nonsensical that is?
Thirdly, if one used the formulation “I don’t care about the risks to other people, it’s all about protecting me and mine from the least tiny little risk and to hell with the rest of you” in other contexts, one would be quite rightly labeled an asshole.  “We need to make my kid’s school as good as possible.  If that means other schools aren’t so good, I don’t care, as long as it’s better for my kid” = asshole.  It isn’t different because it’s vaccines.  Note that this doesn’t apply when there’s a disproportionate risk - most reasonable people don’t object to, say, kids with speech problems getting speech services - but, damn it, people don’t live in isolation; not vaccinating one’s child can have serious consequences for other children; in the absence of serious risk, vaccinate the damn child.

“with them, their risk of contracting it before their 2-month well visit (when they receive the Hep B vaccine again) is extremely low.”

It’s very contagious and guess what most people who have it don’t have visible symptoms and also like the AIDs test it takes a while after infection for a positive result to occur meaning you can infect somebody while still testing negative on the test. You can also be in the late stages of the infection and not trigger a positive reaction on the test.

Also transmission in a good portion has no known cause and it can take place with just skin contact.

The hep b vaccine at birth is a very good way of giving life long immunity to the virus a virus which btw infects 2 billion people each year. If you don’t get immunitity due to the vaccine at a young age you won’t ever get it hence the chronic reinfections.

Mandatory vaccinations are often times the most effective way of nearly stamping out a disease.

The world population is estimated to be 6.8 billion, which means that a rate of 2 billion/year, we’d all be infected in less than 4 years.

2 billion is the current estimate for the population of those already infected by Hepatitis B, 350 million of whom are chronically infected.

Packman:

Dan The Grand Emperor of Ineptitude: If I believed in god I might pray for you to contract a virus, that’s simply how worthless you are.

Ah, yes, the old ”I’m right because you’re a stupid doody-head” argument. You sure got me good, what with responding to the things I said by screaming invective at me and wishing me dead, instead of with something that was even remotely relevant. I’ll bet you’re a big hit at the Mensa meetings.

Seriously, dude. Have some fucking self-respect. If the only thing you can come up with in response to someone challenging your claims is insults and cowardice, do yourself and everyone else a favor and just don’t respond at all. Better to be merely thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

And, really? Wishing a disease on me? Could you possibly get any more childish? It’s not like I stole your last cookie, or something. I just asked you why you insist on being a lying, self-obsessed git with absolutely no idea how to make a valid argument. Suck it up or fuck off.

I’m vaccinated, anyway.

Packman, again:

because the old versions are less safe, which means the new versions are less safe than the future versions. Which means vaccinations ARE NOT SAFE. See how that works?

It seems that you didn’t read the wikipedia link I provided about the continuum fallacy, because you just fucking did it again.

PACKMAN: YOU SUCK AT THINKING. PLEASE STOP TRYING.

You need to read what I’ve said, and think about the meaning of it, and what she’s said, and think about the meaning of it.

This isn’t about a game, and goal posts. This blog, isn’t a playing field. Grow up.

“Moving the goalposts.” It’s a common metaphor you should be familiar with. http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/251400.html

All arguments are competitions. You are trying to accomplish a goal, that of convincing some nonzero number of readers that your vax fears should be taken seriously. Your rhetorical opponents’ goal is to demonstrate to those readers that you are willfully misinformed. (And you’re losing so far, Sis. Just a tip. Try accusing everyone here of being on the pharma payroll, and then storm off.)

Sis: “You need to read what I’ve said, and think about the meaning of it, and what she’s said, and think about the meaning of it”

My not agreeing with you doesn’t mean I haven’t considered your arguments.  It may mean that I have considered your arguments and decided they’re silly.

I said infects remember. It’s an infection that can be fought off but you don’t get a lifelong immunity from it. A lot of people get perodic infections in their lifetime of hep B. About the only surefire way to get immunity to it is to be vaccinated at birth. Otherwise it just keeps coming back every few years if you live around the carriers or in a place with poor sanitation. It may not be epidemic in the US but that could change.

Chronicaly infected are carriers of it. It’s real nasty and contagious. Only reason the numbers of infections will drop in a few decades is because the non vaccinated at birth will die off and the numbers of vaccinated at birth will increase.

Fatman:

What is your response to the assertion that by both believing in the dangers of vaccination and depending on the practice of vaccination by the vast majority of families to provide you with a relatively disease free environment, you are shifting the burden of protecting the group of which you and your family are a part onto others?

Every single one of us benefits in various ways from The Group, without necessarily contributing directly to each area where that benefit is derived. Additionally, I am not in control of The Group or the individuals that comprise the group, other than myself. If The Group decides to not vaccinate, perhaps I will vaccinate or perhaps I will move. Each individual has their choice to make. Preferably they make those choices with valid information as opposed to fear tactics and name calling (as is the significantly dominant trait among the vast majority in this thread, Dan The Grand Emperor of Ineptitude being the leader of the pack). I believe most people who get vaccinated do not do it to support The Group but rather their own perception of their self interest. I am doing the exact same thing, only based in reality.

Also, what level of safety is acceptable before doing anything, cars in the 70’s were less safe than cars now, so we can assume that cars in the future will be safer, should we forgo transportation now because future transportation will probably be safer?

I derive great benefit from driving an unsafe car today that I would lose if I decided to wait. I do not derive a great benefit from vaccinating today.

Inge:

Oh yes. 1920’s radiotherapy was less safe than today’s, which is less safe then 2020’s will be. So it’s safest to not treat that cancer

Do you understand the concept of risk? Not getting vaccinated does not mean you will die from the Measles. It means you increase the risk of contracting the Measles from very tiny to slightly less tiny while also taking on a GREATER risk associated with the vaccine.

Caren:
Speaking of India--my husband has been there.  He hates India.

I’ve been to India twice. It took the second trip for me to gain an appreciation. Thanks for sharing your anecdote. I’ll add it to the list of useless anecdotes that comprise nearly the entirety of this threads enthusiastic and senseless pro-vaccination position.

Well, what?: All those with whom you disagree are not trolls, and all those with whom you agree are not smart. This should tell you something.

Apologies Ledasmom. I haven’t read any of your posts.

Packman, please correct me if I am wrong, but your thinking about vaccinations appears to be; a populace with a sufficient population a vaccinated individuals reduces the risk of contracting an infectious disease for all members in that populace, there is a non zero chance of harm coming form receiving a vaccination and I will therefore not vaccinate my children.

As I said earlier, you alone not vaccinating will not end heard immunity.  One human littering will not pollute our wilderness, one human driving a hummer will not use up the oil, one incandescent light bulb will not melt the icecaps.  But we are all in this together, so while you are not compelled to work with all of us, for all of us, to work against the common good while depending on the fact that others are working for it seems douchy.

“. It means you increase the risk of contracting the Measles from very tiny to slightly less tiny while also taking on a GREATER risk associated with the vaccine. “

You are more likely to die from a bug bite or get sick from eating chicken or from potatoes then a vaccine shot.

Sorry but vaccines are incredibly low on the scale of things that will kill or injure you. Salmonella which btw some of the recent outbreaks came from organic farms will do more harm to then the measles vaccine would.

There is a reason why such mini outbreaks freak out anyone who studies viral diseases because it’s just the tip of the iceberg if a real epidemic broke out due to people who didn’t vaccinate. Ever hear of the 1918 flu epidemic? That will likely happen again.

Fatman:

But we are all in this together, so while you are not compelled to work with all of us, for all of us, to work against the common good while depending on the fact that others are working for it seems douchy.

OK. I consider McDonalds to be not only harmful to the individuals that eat there but to the global environment, both due to the obvious impact that corporation has as well as the mental sickness a McDonalds diet produces in the populace. Every time someone purchases McDonalds food it negatively impacts my life.

Perhaps I should start threads about how there is a ridiculously large change of dying by eating just a single McDonalds hamburger. And when anyone tries to point out how false that information is, I will label those people quacks. And lastly, I will point out that everyone who ever eats at McDonalds is a douche for screwing up the entire world and the community that depends on it.

Or maybe the impact of the individual eating at McDonalds isn’t actually significant enough for me to create such hostility towards that person. As I said, everyone in the group benefits in various ways from the group without necessarily contributing directly to each of those areas that are beneficial.

And if the pro-vaccinators stopped lying and solely depended on your Good Will concept of vaccination, I’d bet good money you’d see a massive drop in people getting vaccinated.

Packman:

Preferably they make those choices with valid information as opposed to fear tactics and name calling (as is the significantly dominant trait among the vast majority in this thread, Dan The Grand Emperor of Ineptitude being the leader of the pack).

So the sum total of your response (insofar as it can be considered a “resposne” at all) to what I said was to call me stupid and to literally wish a disease upon me, then when I call you on that, you respond (again, insofar as it can be considered a “response” at all) with the indirect, passive-aggressive version of the exact same load of utterly risible cravenness, and yet you still have the unmitigated gall to call me a fearmonger and name-caller? If that’s seriously the kind of crap you’re going to pull, you might as well just do the word a favor and get the word “hypocrite” tattooed across your forehead.

Like I said before, have some fucking self-respect. Or, failing that, get yourself a show on FOX News. At least there, you can get paid a shit-ton of cash for being intellectually and morally bankrupt in the most obvious way possible.

world*

Pakcman:

You keep trying to use the statistics for the low infection rates of vaccinated people to justify not vaccinating. That makes exactly no sense whatsoever.

You need to show proof that most unvaccinated people don’t contract the diseases they’re not vaccinated for in order for your point to be valid. So far you have not done so. And considering that this post is based on an incident in which several children not vaccinated for measles contracted it (proving that the risk of not vaccinating is not zero) you really need to.

Packman, I have been arguing for vaccination using only logic, not scientifically rigorous data.  I mentioned this up thread.  If you would prefer data, and if you have the technical expertise to understand it (I do not, as I said before, thus the reliance on expert consensus) the links to clinical trial data can be found at pubmed.gov, as was mentioned up thread.  Furthermore, you are correct that the central tenant of the argument form logic is: working together with other members of the community to achieve better living conditions for all members of the community is beneficial. If one summarily rejects the central tenant of an argument, the argument is drastically weakened.  Do you have a reaon that you reject this concept?

I have begun to doubt my ability to convince you.  I could be wrong, but it seems that you accept the benefit of vaccination from an epidemiological perspective, that you understand the concept of heard immunity, but you hold the belief that vaccinations are dangerous, and therefore refuse to vaccinate.  As I said this kind of depending on others to do what you could do but refuse to seems kind of douchy (an important distinction, I referred to the behavior as douchy, not to you as a douche), if you do not feel that depending on heard immunity while steadfastly refusing to stop weakening that heard immunity out of a fear that helping all of us carries perceived risk is douchy please explain why.  Maybe douchy is too imprecise a term, but I am finding difficulty in finding a term to describe this antisocial behavior.

An aside on McDonald’s, if you were to post on your blog that people who eat at McDonald’s each cause an nigh imperceptible amount of damage to our environment that when taken collectively adds up to create conditions that are detrimental to human survivability, and I knew where this blog was, I would comment in support.  As I have said, you alone do not destroy heard immunity, but your actions contribute to the weakening of heard immunity.  No man is an island.

Gardasil is not a vaccine against cancer:

“Letter to the editor re: disinformation about HPV vaccine
Submitted to the Globe and Mail January 31, 2008

What is truly mind-boggling about Christie Blatchford’s column “U of T logic on HPV vaccine boggles the mind” (January 30, 2008), is the misinformation it contains. Contrary to what was written, the HPV vaccine, Gardasil, is not a “vaccine against cancer,” and we do not now know if it will “prevent 70% of cervical cancers.” This vaccine is directed against four strains of human papillomavirus (HPV) – two of which are associated with cervical cancer if they persist and cause cellular changes that go undetected in those infected. While it’s true that about 75% of women will contract an HPV infection at some point in their lifetimes, and that many will first experience this during their sexually-active university years, the students Blatchford seems so concerned about may have already had an infection, most likely with one that’s not “high-risk,” and, more important perhaps, will be among the 90% or so who clear an HPV infection spontaneously within two years (i.e., they have no need for treatment). Most women, even if they remain infected with one of the high-risk HPV strains covered by the vaccine need not develop cervical cancer if there is a robust and efficient Pap testing program available for detecting early cellular changes. An email circulated to U of T students would better serve their overall sexual health if it were to promote safer sex and condom use and remind young women to have regular Pap smears as a proven effective approach to prevent invasive cervical cancer. As for promoting the HPV vaccine for men, this would be to use the vaccine in a way that has not yet been approved by Canadian advisory groups and regulators. While the HPV vaccine may one day become part of the fight against cervical cancer, encouraging mass immunizations of college-age students has neither an evidence nor a public health policy base. Misinformation about the HPV vaccine appears daily in the media across North America. It’s time to look more closely at the details – and to stick to the facts.

Sincerely,

Madeline Boscoe, RN, DU
Advocacy and Special Projects Coordinator
Women’s Health Clinic

Abby Lippman, PhD
Chair, Policy Committee
Canadian Women’s Health Network

Ellen Reynolds
Director of Communications
Canadian Women’s Health Network

Anne Rochon Ford
Central Coordinator
Women and Health Protection

Posted: February 6, 2008