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Antivaxers do it again

JEROME DA GNOME said:
I live in a very happy world. It is one in which my neighbors and I provide for our selfs without the need for a Father figure in the form of government taking from other people to provide us with things. Do you understand that which is provided for you by government was taken from another person? I find those that rely on the government for their needs are nothing more than parasitic and ungrateful.
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I suspect that Rolfe, like me, is a net contributor to the state. I am certainly grateful for the NHS and I think Rolfe is too.
One can certainly criticise the government for the way it spends some of our money but vaccination programmes are definitely worth it.
Call it enlightened self-interest.
 
Did any of the UK sceptics on the board catch this little bit of news on Sunday?:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3909515.ece

Children will be banned from starting school until they receive the MMR jab, under new Labour party proposals.

Parents will have to provide proof their offspring have had a full range of vaccinations when they put in applications for primary schools.

The plan, designed to increase the take-up of the measles, mumps and rubella triple jab, has been drawn up by Mary Creagh, the Labour MP in charge of the party’s health manifesto for the next general election.

“Parents need to protect their children and science gives them a way to do that,” said Creagh. “We need to get that message across.”
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Where could the government possibly of got this idea from?:)

If the chairman of the BMA's comment is representative of what doctors in the UK think about this proposal, doctors appear to be opposed to the idea.

ETA: More here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/7392510.stm
 
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Not sure if the BBC is accurately expressing this particular doctor's views or not given the inaccuracy of the news media to get this sort of thing right, but regardless, this point of view espouses letting freedom to chose to vaccinate put not only the kids at risk of bad parental decisions, but also other people at risk if they happen to not have a good immune response to a vaccine.

We don't let parents beat their kids to death, why should we let them kill them by making ignorant medical decisions?

The bottom line is there is science here. There is evidence here. People ignorant of the science who believe they are not are still ignorant of the evidence and the science.

You can argue your cost effectiveness all you want, Ivor. The bottom line about the medicine however, is the vaccines are much safer than the infections they prevent and parental decisions to not vaccinate their kids are not based on arguing cost effectiveness, the decisions are based on believing false information about risk and benefit.
 
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Some of us in the UK (and probably elsewhere) are old enough to have grown up before most of the vaccines were routinely used.

I was born in 1953 and so was only immunized against diphtheria and polio (I had both injections and sugar lumps - I remember loads of 10 year olds pretending to be out of there heads on LSD, so must have been early '60s:D). This means that I actually contracted measles, rubella, mumps and chicken-pox. I also managed to contract whooping-cough (pertussis) as a baby, presumably before they managed to innoculate me. :(

According to what I can find on the net, there were 500 deaths (approx) per year from measles in the '50s. However, I remember times when I had the assorted diseases (barring WC) that other kids who hadn't would be brought around specifically to catch them and get them out of the way.

I don't know why no-one around our area seemed to have dangerous reactions to the diseases, I never felt that bad with most of them. A possible reason might be (total speculation alert!) that we were all pretty healthy; it was a working class, but not deprived, area and it was soon after rationing was finally finished and, apparently, that was one of the most healthy periods in recent history.

Having re-read this post, I'm not totally sure what my point is. Oh well.
 
Aitch said:
...I don't know why no-one around our area seemed to have dangerous reactions to the diseases, I never felt that bad with most of them. A possible reason might be (total speculation alert!) that we were all pretty healthy; it was a working class, but not deprived, area and it was soon after rationing was finally finished and, apparently, that was one of the most healthy periods in recent history.

Having re-read this post, I'm not totally sure what my point is. Oh well.
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Actually, if you were in a school of 300 kids, then perhaps a child in the neighboring school was a victim... or perhaps you did not know everyone in your school. Also, as a kid we were often shielded from bad stories. I do remember after recovering from chicken pox coming across my mother talking with a neighbor. They changed the subject when I came near, but I caught something about someone else's kid having had a bad time with measles and going to another school.

If you read Roald Dahl's autobiographies... You'll see in his first one called "Boy" that he placed bits of the letters he wrote his mother throughout the book. Since starting boarding school and until she died, Dahl wrote his mother every week (or month... well, quite often!, and she saved the letters). One of the letter bits described measles going through the school and one child dying.

In his second autobiography (Going Solo or Flying Solo) he mentioned that his oldest child died from measles. Here is an essay he wrote about it:
http://www.blacktriangle.org/blog/?p=715

Anyway, my point... is that it happened. It is just hard to remember everything that happened as a kid.
 
MinorityView said:
Okay, I'm wicked scum. No problem. I agree that my behavior was dishonest, inappropriate and sneaky. You are right to call me on it. Now, how about dealing with the problem of serotype replacement?
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Only just spotted this thread...

The really serious thing that DeeTee pointed out that is that this piece of self-proclaimed "wicked scum" deliberately used selective quotation to distort the significance of the cited paper. "Wicked scum" seems to have gone away rather than justify that piece of deception.

It is this inevitable descent into deception that DeeTee was highlighting. The faux naive attempt then to get DeeTee or someone to contribute to their site as if its creators were impartial and disinterested seekers after truth is pretty nauseating.

So, in response to Ivor, antivaxers are singled out not because of what they believe but because of the despicable way in which they act.

It's the same with SCAMmers everywhere. I really don't care if you are so stupid as to think that sugar pills cured your cold, but don't encourage other people to believe the same by deliberately lying and distorting the evidence.

I see a new acronym emerging: Supplementary Complementary Unconventional Medicine. Use it at all times and in all places.
 
I note that our pal Minority view is bragging on the Jabs forum that their science is so good over at Inside Vaccines that nobody can refute them.

The right response is to drown folks like that with science based arguments, complete with citations. It won't shut them up, but it will make them look stupid. This is the whole concept behind this web-site:

Inside Vaccines and it has worked, in that so far no one has been able to prove our science wrong. All we've gotten is a few people nit-picking about minor side-shows.
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The minor nitpicking she is referring to must be the rather blatant cherry picking that DeeTee pointed out. She wasn't confident enough in her science to actually debate it here.
 
Ivor the Engineer said:
Did any of the UK sceptics on the board catch this little bit of news on Sunday?:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/article3909515.ece



Where could the government possibly of got this idea from?:)...
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I forgot to also mention that the idea was likely coming from the current worldwide measles epidemic which began in Switzerland and has spread to Europe and the USA due in a large part to a growing % of unvaccinated children.

Related recent articles:
EUvacNet
Eurosurveillance
 
Aitch said:
Some of us in the UK (and probably elsewhere) are old enough to have grown up before most of the vaccines were routinely used.

I was born in 1953 and so was only immunized against diphtheria and polio (I had both injections and sugar lumps - I remember loads of 10 year olds pretending to be out of there heads on LSD, so must have been early '60s:D). This means that I actually contracted measles, rubella, mumps and chicken-pox. I also managed to contract whooping-cough (pertussis) as a baby, presumably before they managed to innoculate me. :(

According to what I can find on the net, there were 500 deaths (approx) per year from measles in the '50s. However, I remember times when I had the assorted diseases (barring WC) that other kids who hadn't would be brought around specifically to catch them and get them out of the way.

I don't know why no-one around our area seemed to have dangerous reactions to the diseases, I never felt that bad with most of them. A possible reason might be (total speculation alert!) that we were all pretty healthy; it was a working class, but not deprived, area and it was soon after rationing was finally finished and, apparently, that was one of the most healthy periods in recent history.

Having re-read this post, I'm not totally sure what my point is. Oh well.
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Your data source claiming 500 measles deaths a year (in the UK alone, I presume) fails to take into account that such records were not accurate at the time. Surveillance, case reporting, and accuracy of the listed cause of death in various record archives affect the reliability of such data.

To conclude measles is not a dangerous disease because one doesn't recall any neighbor's children becoming seriously ill is naive. All it takes is a 1% fatality rate from measles for the death rate to be astounding. Measles is so contagious that before the vaccine, virtually 99%+ of all humans on the planet would have gotten infected by the time they were 30 years old. No other single organism has that high of an infection rate. Just a 1% fatality rate of the 60 billion people on the planet would mean that approximately every year, 2 million people would be dying of measles. And that is about the annual worldwide fatality rate from measles before the vaccine.

But my point is it only takes a 1% fatality rate to kill a hugely significant number of people if everyone gets the infection. In the 1918 flu pandemic the overall death rate was only a little over 2%. Flu infects about 30% of the population in pandemic years.

Measles - Key facts
Vaccination has had a major impact on measles deaths. Overall, global measles mortality decreased by 68% between 2000 and 2006. The largest gains occurred in Africa where measles cases and deaths fell by 91%....

Children usually do not die directly of measles, but from its complications. Complications are more common in children under the age of five or adults over the age of 20.

The most serious complications include blindness, encephalitis (a dangerous infection of the brain causing inflammation), severe diarrhoea (possibly leading to dehydration), ear infections and severe respiratory infections such as pneumonia, which is the most common cause of death associated with measles. Encephalitis is estimated to occur in one out of 1000 cases, while otitis media (middle ear infection) is reported in 5-15% of cases and pneumonia in 5-10% of cases. The case fatality rate in developing countries is generally in the range of 1 to 5%, but may be as high as 25% in populations with high levels of malnutrition and poor access to health care.
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To translate those %s into total numbers...
Measles deaths worldwide drop by nearly 40% over five years
Global measles deaths have plummeted by 39%, from 873 000 in 1999 to an estimated 530 000 in 2003....
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The vaccine has saved millions and millions of lives.
 
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