The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center has created a really neat flash app that allows you to zoom through the relative size of things. You start out with a coffee bean, sesame seed, and rice grain. Using the slider on the bottom, you can zoom in to see bacteria, viruses, and eventually, a carbon atom. It's a super neat app.
I had a co-worker inform me today that they are opting-out of our building's vaccination program, after watching a video on YouTube. The video, which I was aware of (but won't link here), shows an interview with a woman who says she was neurologically damaged by a flu vaccine. She suffers spasms and is only able to walk backwards.
Thus, my co-worker told me that even if there is only a one in a million chance that something may go wrong with their vaccination, it's a risk that they're unwilling to take.
Current statistics show that if you contract swine flu, there is a 1 in 6 chance that you will develop serious complications which require you to be hospitalized. Further, there is roughly a 1 in 100 chance that if you contract H1N1, you will die as a result.
It baffles my mind how someone could avoid a vaccination for a disease which, contracted, has a 1 in 100 chance of killing you because the vaccination carries a one in a million chance of non-fatal complications.
This disease is not discriminating. This week a healthy, physically active Toronto teenager was killed by H1N1. It took 48 hours from the onset of symptoms to death. He was a minor-league hockey player in peak health.
Even if you insist on not vaccinating yourself, and do not develop complications, you are still more than capable of delivering the disease to a person, or persons, who do not share your relative resistance. Will you still be willing to gamble the numbers when other people's lives are on the table?
If that is still not enough incentive, consider also that every human this virus successfully resides in results in many generations of evolution for the virus. With each successive case, a virus could mutate into something even more deadly. This is not supposition, this is scientific fact.
I don't know what more I can do or say. Sometimes it seems like ignorance is more powerful than knowledge.
I pride myself on keeping the company of intelligent friends who base their opinions on sound facts. Which is why I've been very disappointed lately to learn that a number of people I know have been indoctrinated by "antivax" propaganda.
By "antivax", I refer to persons and dogma which perpetuate the beliefs that vaccines are inherently dangerous. Such persons often cite a number of "facts" to prove their case, many if not all of which have been disproved by science or are based on faulty premises, or are occasionally based on truthy work by non-sciency thinktanks. The antivax movement has been around as long as vaccines themselves; it demonstrates an inherent lack of understanding in how vaccines and the Human immune system in general function.
Sadly, the antivax dogma has found great traction among the hippie crowd, who feel that putting anything "unnatural" in our bodies is bad for us. I would argue from a socialist perspective: that maintaining the good health of the general population necessitates that the masses educate themselves about the benefits of vaccines and get out to take them. In the U.S., the originator of much antivax dogma, thousands of children die each year from preventable diseases because their parents refused to vaccinate them. In the past, mass vaccination helped eradicate smallpox, and has all but wiped out polio, both deadly and debilitating diseases likely to strike during childhood.
I'd recommend starting with an article recently linked on boingboing, titled, "How safe is the HPV Vaccine?" which shows that statistically, you're more likely to be killed by a lightning strike (which people can survive) than suffer life-threatening complications from Gardasil.
Then I'd move on to Anti-Antivax, which is a terse but wonderful site which debunks the most frequently-spread myths about vaccines. It's easy reading.
If you're feeling really adventurous, there's morereading available for the curious. (credit to Bad Astronomy)
This isn't about enforcing conformance, or trusting the establishment, or making money for big-pharma; this is about trusting the majority of medical doctors and scientists over the vocal minority of crackpots. (see also: global warming denial, creationism, moon-landing conspiracy theorists, etc...)
Truthiness is infectious. Vaccinate yourself against ignorance.
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion...
The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms
In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river
Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death’s twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men...
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.
Posted at 08:44 AM
10-12-09
Monday, October 12, 2009
Where the fuck is my happily ever after?
Posted at 09:21 PM
10-10-09
Saturday, October 10, 2009
I've decided that I need to just post something every day, even if it is completely random.
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