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First, the Bad News:
http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/parents-vaccine-fears-causing-measles-revival/2010-04-07?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Measles are making a comeback. This isn't exactly brand new, there has been quite a few pockets of measles outbreaks over the last few years since that fucking moron baby-killer Jenny McCarthy (there are not harsh enough words to describe her) started her imbecilic anti-vaccine campaign. Thanks to our shitty educational system, the anti-intellectual/anti-science movement that thinks people with specialized education are "elitist", and the utterly naive Libertarian position of "just throw out all the information and let people access what they want", entire communities have absolutely no comprehension of how the immune system works and how vaccines function. They seem to think that exposing their bodies to the full virus makes their bodies STRONGER and that exposure to a dead, neutralized, inactive, or partial virus is somehow WORSE.
I'll repeat that.
People actually believe that exposing themselves to something that can't possibly hurt them but will turn their immune system on to create blueprints for the real thing before it comes along is WORSE than exposing themselves to a full, activated, deadly virus running rampant.
Do you people not understand that these vaccines basically FUCKING ELIMINATED measles in First World countries until your stupidity brought it back? It is still a deadly threat in other parts of the world, which means that we are not yet safe from it! In this article, Canada is suffering from an influx of measles because they hosted the Olympics, which brought in the disease from those parts of the world that have not eradicated it, and the completely misguided belief that vaccines cause autism is killing children.
16 people contracted measles ... 8 OF THEM IN A SINGLE HOUSEHOLD.
Can you imagine wiping out your entire family with a virus that we have the ability to prevent you from catching? Can you imagine refusing a vaccine on the grounds that it *might* cause autism only to have all of your children get brain damage from the virus itself? Can you imagine being responsible for ending your family line by killing your children because you refused to listen to the experts?
In one case, a 7-year-old boy picked up a case of measles on a family trip to Switzerland and infected "839 people. Of those, 73 were unvaccinated children — 25 whose parents chose not to get them vaccinated, and 48 children under 12 months who were too young to be vaccinated." (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125570056&ps=cprs). If that 7-year-old boy had only been vaccinated, those 48 children who were too young could have relied on the herd immunity that the vaccine schedule is supposed to create and would not have fallen ill to a disease that could kill them or cause brain damage in their oh-so-young and developing brains.
And if you want to be particularly pragmatic and callous about it, this incident cost the taxpayers $10,000 per case to contain and treat.
The second article there goes on to emphasize that the anti-vaccine parents are not the bad guys, they're just misinformed and guided by a sense of concern for their children. I agree, although my vitriol at these senseless deaths and illnesses might suggest otherwise. I do understand that these parents are concerned for the wellbeing of their children, and it is due to the completely irresponsible Jenny McCarthy and her ilk that we have these misguided parents who are trying to do the right thing by their children and end up doing exactly the opposite and endangering their children's lives.
I have spoken to parents with autistic children who were told it was caused by vaccines, and I have actually managed to convince them that they were mistaken by being informed and having the correct information readily available. These parents are concerned, and how are they supposed to be able to distinguish between good information and bad information when people in lab coats are telling them two different stories?
Oh, maybe by instilling in them a good science and critical thinking background in school, we can give people the tools they need to tell the difference between actual medical advice and pseudoscientific rubbish.
And now for the Good News:
http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/cancer-vaccines/2010-04-07?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Researchers see cancer vaccine revolution on the horizon
There are "several cancer vaccine drugs nearing FDA approval. Dendreon's prostate cancer vaccine Provenge is awaiting the agency's OK, and Merck KGaA's Stimuvax is in trials for multiple myleoma, lung cancer, and breast cancer. ... UPMC researcher Olivera Finn is developing a vaccine to treat patients with advanced pancreatic cancer." This is fantastic news.
Most of these types of vaccines get started by treating people who already have cancer, so that helps people to beat it and recover. "Part of the challenge of testing preventative vaccines in people with early-stage cancer is time; patients would have to be followed for years for researchers to determine if early treatment was effective. And that's enormously expensive. "...[I]t's much easier to do that after you've got a revenue-generating product," says Robert Kirkman, president of Oncothyreon, which originally developed Stimuvax. That's why developers choose to treat late-stage diseases first."
So we will first see vaccines being used to treat people who already have advanced stages of cancer - which in a way is a good thing since those people need the treatments right away. Remember, that they won't be getting them until after they've shown efficacy and safety in the lab first, but once the vaccine starts bringing in money, the drug companies can start testing the efficacy and safety for early stages and preventative uses.
Just think, we are on the cusp of an era that could eliminate cancer as a primary cause of death in the human species!
http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/parents-vaccine-fears-causing-measles-revival/2010-04-07?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Measles are making a comeback. This isn't exactly brand new, there has been quite a few pockets of measles outbreaks over the last few years since that fucking moron baby-killer Jenny McCarthy (there are not harsh enough words to describe her) started her imbecilic anti-vaccine campaign. Thanks to our shitty educational system, the anti-intellectual/anti-science movement that thinks people with specialized education are "elitist", and the utterly naive Libertarian position of "just throw out all the information and let people access what they want", entire communities have absolutely no comprehension of how the immune system works and how vaccines function. They seem to think that exposing their bodies to the full virus makes their bodies STRONGER and that exposure to a dead, neutralized, inactive, or partial virus is somehow WORSE.
I'll repeat that.
People actually believe that exposing themselves to something that can't possibly hurt them but will turn their immune system on to create blueprints for the real thing before it comes along is WORSE than exposing themselves to a full, activated, deadly virus running rampant.
"In spite of years of research proving otherwise, some parents still misguidedly believe vaccines ... can cause autism. ... Measles once affected about 4 million children a year, causing hundreds of deaths and leaving thousands more with brain damage."
Do you people not understand that these vaccines basically FUCKING ELIMINATED measles in First World countries until your stupidity brought it back? It is still a deadly threat in other parts of the world, which means that we are not yet safe from it! In this article, Canada is suffering from an influx of measles because they hosted the Olympics, which brought in the disease from those parts of the world that have not eradicated it, and the completely misguided belief that vaccines cause autism is killing children.
16 people contracted measles ... 8 OF THEM IN A SINGLE HOUSEHOLD.
Can you imagine wiping out your entire family with a virus that we have the ability to prevent you from catching? Can you imagine refusing a vaccine on the grounds that it *might* cause autism only to have all of your children get brain damage from the virus itself? Can you imagine being responsible for ending your family line by killing your children because you refused to listen to the experts?
"'If a measles-infected person walks into a room with 10 uninfected people," says Dr. David Sugerman of the CDC, "nine of them will get infected.' Moreover, anyone who goes into that room within the next two hours after the infected person has left is likely to get measles, too."
In one case, a 7-year-old boy picked up a case of measles on a family trip to Switzerland and infected "839 people. Of those, 73 were unvaccinated children — 25 whose parents chose not to get them vaccinated, and 48 children under 12 months who were too young to be vaccinated." (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=125570056&ps=cprs). If that 7-year-old boy had only been vaccinated, those 48 children who were too young could have relied on the herd immunity that the vaccine schedule is supposed to create and would not have fallen ill to a disease that could kill them or cause brain damage in their oh-so-young and developing brains.
And if you want to be particularly pragmatic and callous about it, this incident cost the taxpayers $10,000 per case to contain and treat.
The second article there goes on to emphasize that the anti-vaccine parents are not the bad guys, they're just misinformed and guided by a sense of concern for their children. I agree, although my vitriol at these senseless deaths and illnesses might suggest otherwise. I do understand that these parents are concerned for the wellbeing of their children, and it is due to the completely irresponsible Jenny McCarthy and her ilk that we have these misguided parents who are trying to do the right thing by their children and end up doing exactly the opposite and endangering their children's lives.
I have spoken to parents with autistic children who were told it was caused by vaccines, and I have actually managed to convince them that they were mistaken by being informed and having the correct information readily available. These parents are concerned, and how are they supposed to be able to distinguish between good information and bad information when people in lab coats are telling them two different stories?
Oh, maybe by instilling in them a good science and critical thinking background in school, we can give people the tools they need to tell the difference between actual medical advice and pseudoscientific rubbish.
And now for the Good News:
http://www.fiercevaccines.com/story/cancer-vaccines/2010-04-07?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal
Researchers see cancer vaccine revolution on the horizon
There are "several cancer vaccine drugs nearing FDA approval. Dendreon's prostate cancer vaccine Provenge is awaiting the agency's OK, and Merck KGaA's Stimuvax is in trials for multiple myleoma, lung cancer, and breast cancer. ... UPMC researcher Olivera Finn is developing a vaccine to treat patients with advanced pancreatic cancer." This is fantastic news.
Most of these types of vaccines get started by treating people who already have cancer, so that helps people to beat it and recover. "Part of the challenge of testing preventative vaccines in people with early-stage cancer is time; patients would have to be followed for years for researchers to determine if early treatment was effective. And that's enormously expensive. "...[I]t's much easier to do that after you've got a revenue-generating product," says Robert Kirkman, president of Oncothyreon, which originally developed Stimuvax. That's why developers choose to treat late-stage diseases first."
So we will first see vaccines being used to treat people who already have advanced stages of cancer - which in a way is a good thing since those people need the treatments right away. Remember, that they won't be getting them until after they've shown efficacy and safety in the lab first, but once the vaccine starts bringing in money, the drug companies can start testing the efficacy and safety for early stages and preventative uses.
Just think, we are on the cusp of an era that could eliminate cancer as a primary cause of death in the human species!
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no subject
Date: 4/8/10 10:44 pm (UTC)From:But part of the problem for people who didn't live before the vaccine is that a lot of people do pull through just fine. And people who can't figure out that autism isn't linked to vaccinations despite the massive data we have are also unlikely to understand the statistics of something that is usually not so bad, but is still statistically a huge killer. And you don't know if you or your child is going to be one of the ones that gets killed or severely disabled in advance.
If we didn't have a vaccination for it, I'd be telling people to remember that they probably will be okay. But we do have a vaccination, and so there is no reason to take the much larger chance of damage by measles than the much smaller risk of an MMR (and yes, MMRs do contain a risk, just not of autism, but that risk is extremely small for severe side effects, much smaller than one's risk of both catching and having severe effects from measles or mumps (rubella is more complicated and the main risk is not to you but to the child of a pregnant woman, but severe harm to the next generation is also considered to be bad)).
I hope the cancer research works out well. I am so sick of cancer affecting people and animals. And I will be so frustrated if I live long enough to hear people talking about how cancer isn't really that dangerous so they shouldn't get their kids vaccinated. But at least with cancer it is more likely to affect you when you're older, so maybe those kids will have a chance to grow up and get themselves vaccinated.
no subject
Date: 4/8/10 10:59 pm (UTC)From:Statistics was an elective math class in college for me. I think that's a huge mistake. A basic understanding of the scientific method, how research works, how the immune system works, and risk/reward ratios and statistics ought to be mandatory high school courses.
Of course, I also think logic and critical thinking (along with a focus on logical fallacies) and a study of the Constitution ought to be mandatory high school courses too. But I'm kinda crazy like that, wanting our citizens to be informed and responsible citizens is, apparently, a revolutionary idea.
no subject
Date: 4/8/10 11:22 pm (UTC)From:Plus, if the child grows into an adult with those views, it bothers me only for the herd immunity issues. It's their lives they are destroying. What I really hate is the way parents are allowed to endanger their children who are too young to accept the risk for themselves. And the way people endanger others.
no subject
Date: 4/8/10 11:30 pm (UTC)From:Unfortunately, dangerous ideas spread, often faster than the disease, so even an adult who isn't harming any children directly, spreads their ideas to other adults who do (i.e. Jenny McCarthy). Then there's the whole taxpayer issue that their personal choices cost me money to clean up. I'm not willing to give up the idea of government assistance for health issues, so that means these individual's personal choices do affect me - my health and my wallet. If people who refused vaccination also willingly interred themselves in communities that did not expose me to their viruses, foist their dangerous beliefs onto their children, or take my tax money to fix what their beliefs directly cause, then I'd be happy to say live and let die, uh, I mean "live".