I Am Officially Pissed
Okay, what can possibly justified this??? I am rather infuriated right now, given how many times I heard the argument on online forums based on this study alone, linking the MMR vaccine to autism? Well, guess what? Turns out the study was cooked, the data is misrepresented, and who know what consequences loom?
This alone is more than alarming:
Me, I had no intentions of delaying or skipping vaccinations to our daughter. I got vaccinated back in Hungary on almost the same aggressive schedule as they do in the US, and turned out just fine. In fact, I need to get a pertussis booster in the hospital as I was exposed via a coworker's children who got it this winter.Despite involving just a dozen children, the 1998 paper’s impact was extraordinary. After its publication, rates of inoculation fell from 92% to below 80%. Populations acquire “herd immunity” from measles when more than 95% of people have been vaccinated.
Last week official figures showed that 1,348 confirmed cases of measles in England and Wales were reported last year, compared with 56 in 1998. Two children have died of the disease.
::sigh::
posted by Annamaria @ 1:53 PM
12 Comments:
Oh, kill kill kill kill kill
The anecdotal "evidence" is rampant all over the web, many from well-meaning, scared-out-of-their minds parents. But the scientific evidence is clear: no connection.
Speaking of giving into irrational fears, have you heard of "chicken pox parties"? I nearly fell out of my chair when I heard about it on ABC News the other day.
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Story?id=6772216&page=1
SHEESH.
I heard about those just last week. SICK.
Jim-Yeah, you shoulda heard your brother...
The whole MMR thing has been bothering me for years. It's like nobody noticed just the coincidental timing of it. About the time babies has very definable social milestones they get this vaccine. So people blamed the vaccine for the autism, not the fact that until babies get to this age its hard to analyze and assess their social and verbal abilities. It would be near impossible for this to have been diagnosed before this age. Imagine a new parent; they may not notice a lack of eye contact, but they will notice a lack of verbalization.
Sorry. Need to say more. I also have heard that it is in fact TV viewing by the young (under 2) that may be behind the increased rate of Autism. As the brain is being formed the 2-D images affect its development. The statistics help support this theory. As cable (and with it shows geared to younger audiences) subscriptions increased so did the autism rate. Baby Einstein may be worse for your kids than sitting in a blank room.
http://www.slate.com/id/2151538/
Heather--thank you. That was always a pet peeve of mine--yet another reason why we don't have cable, or watch TV other than the occasional rented DVD..
I've heard the same thing about TV and a link to autistm. Children are getting far less physical interaction with real people now than ever before in our history as a species. It definitely seems logical that there would be a connection.
And on a personal note, I think the doctor who falsified this data should be put on an island with a small pox colony...
Personally I am thinking honey and fire ants, but I take the smallpox if there's nothing around. Just. Sick.
I can do you both one better and it has a nice classic touch to it. Let's send the doctor to either Tribal Agency Pakistan or Northern Nigeria with a deal. He has to vaccinate 500 children for Polio while wearing a "Born in the USA" T Shirt. He gets no police or military protection and he can't leave until the job is done, or he dies from either Polio or gunfire from the Muslims who are convinced that Polio vaccine is a western trick to sterilize Muslim women.
I read the article too. It is absolutely sick that people jumped on this bandwagon. I think this falls under "a little information can cause a lot of harm". I read an article earlier this year about a woman who continually argued with her doctor about the various vaccines. She said she was the kind of parent that doctors hate because she did research and knew enough to argue with him over what medicines actually did. She gained her knowledge through reading several books and some articles. She couldn't understand why that didn't equal 10 years of med school when the interviewer brought it up.
I hate stuff like this. If you want to be a moron go ahead, but damn leave me and my family out of it.
Yeah. I am currently trying to explain on a discussion board why it's a bad idea to refuse antibiotics treatment if you're diagnosed with the Group B Strep infection in the last 4 weeks of your pregnancy. Sepsis, menengitis and/or pneumonia in the newborn is just a few of the effects. And then comes some moron on the board and says 'well, I researched this, and it doesn NOT necessarily mean you infect your baby, the risk is like 1 in 4,000 or something. They prescribe antibiotics too easily these days.'
Um...hello? It's a bacterial infection, and it can kill your baby. Like you said, Mike, doctors studied to prevent this just a bit longer than taking a few looks on websites.
Sheesh.
This is like people who stop their cars to take pictures of cows in their "natural environment". WE have too many people who are way to far removed from the rubber meeting road aspect of a lot of stuff everyone takes for granted. Polio, measles, mumps, whooping cough, good hygene, clean water, safe food, no mosquitoes, fertilizers and pesticides, no locust swarms that eat everything to include your clothes, controlled rivers so you don't flood out every damn spring, drained swamps, rubbish pickup. The list goes on and on. I have been places where these things DON'T exist and everyone there is VERY aware of it. But in the US we have two coasts full of people who simply think this is the way its always been and now are questioning things that are not just stupid to question, but are DANGEROUS to question. Public Health is not something that you should leave to a freaken class action lawyer and some semi-literate boobs who have enough time to read just enough to be dangerous and to go and protest. We should lock them all up in their own little world and let them run it however they think right. And in 4 years when the plagues and starvation have wiped them out, we can build a DDT factory on the site.
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