Measles is Awesome!

"MY CHILDREN DON'T NEED THE HPV VACCINE BECAUSE THEY WON'T BE HAVING SEX UNTIL MARRIAGE AND VIRGINS CAN'T GIVE HPV TO EACH OTHER WARRRRRGARBL"

Boys should get the HPV vaccine. It was utterly ridiculous that they targeted it young women rather than young adults to begin with.

Agreed. The reasoning was likely that HPV is basically a non-issue for men as there are no known effects for men.

Men can get warts from it, I think. Pretty innocuous, relative to cervical cancer though.

The effects for men are spreading a fucking infectious disease. One of the biggest selling points for a vaccine is herd immunity, and by only giving it to half the population you're fucking ruining any chance of that happening.

It seemed like a political move. As it is a sexually transmitted disease, tying it to actual sex was probably difficult, politically. So, they pushed for discussing it as a cancer thing.
This is all conjecture, of course. I have no idea why they didn't give it to everyone.

It's an easier sell to women because guys will go, "Cervical cancer? I don't even HAVE a cervix!".

But you make it more normal among the key target group and it makes it easier to draw in your secondary group.

Also, the HPV vaccine looks to have had very good initial results - 38 per cent decrease in the rates of pre-cancerous cervical lesions in the two years after the vaccine was introduced.

In case we're feeling left out, there's been recent research showing that men carrying HPV are at a small risk of anal and penile cancers. Here's a nice CDC sheet on HPV and men, but as much as I'm for giving people all the information, pointing out that the high risk groups are gay men and those who are immunocompromised might not help when trying to push herd immunity, basically because straight men are often stupid. "Hey bro, I'm not a fag or a wimp, so my wang is invincible!"

edit: I love how this thread has become a catch-all for all things communicable.

We're just biding our time until the inevitable grammar discussion about the correctness of the thread title.

Talk about over-estimating education.

Isn't it the case that when a verb ends in S but isn't actually plural, you stick with "is?"

There's no disease called "measle," so I would assume that just like "AIDS is awesome," is correct, "Measles is awesome" would also be correct.

Yes.

Well, I'm glad we had that talk. ;)

Hey, I was answering your question! And you were correct!

...except that "measles" isn't a verb, but we're willing to overlook the slip-up just this once.

That's one hell of a slippery slope, SuperJay.

Did you guys hear about the swine flu narcoleptic issue in Europe. I ran across it somewhere..
There is a rise in narcolepsy amongst children who got the flu shot in 2009. Supposedly they had a chemical in it that did this. I am in no position to say it is or is not factual. I throw this out there as a .. hey someone with more braincells look into it please.

Yep, Kerzain posted about it on the previous page.

Alright I didn't see it I admit my stupidtude.

That was just an FYI, not an allegation or judgement.

I wasn't blaming you, it's all UnSub 's fault for invoking potential grammar issues.

And yeah, I meant to say "word" instead of "verb." Not sure which wires got crossed, but whatevs.

Wakefield's legacy lives on:

Measles in UK at highest rate in 18 years

That was in February by the way.

And now we have a proper 765 case outbreak that's only going to get worse.

Yep, we've reached the point where the word "epidemic" is being used. Fucking brilliant. Good work people who care too much for their children to perform even the slightest bit of research.

I was pondering this morning if we needed some kind of new criminal offence to catch people like Wakefield. I mean he maliciously fabricated evidence to create a panic and boost his own ego, and continues to do so, this is not a case of an honest mistake leading to tragedy.

He has an enormous amount of blood on his hands by now, some of it the blood of children, and that's before we even take into account the additional harm caused to people who don't die from measles. The difficulty, of course, is how diffused the crime is between the Wakefield ground zero and his mixture of collaborators in the media and hollywood (who may at least plead ignorance) which makes it difficult to assign the full weight of blame accurately.

I feel like he should get at least five years in prison and some kind of free speech gagging order for abusing the privilege.

Second plan; ban kids and adults who refuse to be vaccinated from public places unless they are wearing full protective suits at all times.

Stop allowing people without medical knowledge to make medical decisions.

So, looking to topple the entire American political establishment, eh? We've got words for people like you. Elitest.

What you're not taking into account is that many of those people have given birth to indigo children who will save us from the measles epidemic with their psychic powers.

Possibly the first death from the current epidemic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-south-west-wales-22221704

My sister, who is into the paleo diet, raw milk, chiropractic, and other alternative woo had sent me a link that vaccines are pointless and actually didn't help wipe out the childhood diseases because they claim those diseases were already in a naturally decline and vaccines don't help the natural immunity. *sigh*. My sister is smart and has a bio-chem degree and I'm saddened that she has fallen into the alternative woo bullshit.

Sounds like sufficient grounds to revoke her degree if you ask me.

Here's a neat comic about the downfall of Dr. Wakefield. Feel free to link it to people who don't read text without pictures.

http://tallguywrites.livejournal.com/148012.html

You need to realign your views with the evidence.

I just wrote a complaint to the ombudsman at the paper, I sometimes review for, because they ran a series about how doctors advicing the government on vaccines was also part time employees of the medicinal companies selling the vaccines - right now it was the HPV vaccine.

Those articles wasn't bad and shone a light on an important issue, but for human interest (I guess) they had a case story about parents whose daughter got seriously ill after recieving the vaccine. As a parent, who just this week had my 12-year old vaccinated with both MMR and the HPV-vaccine, this was of interest.

NOWHERE in the article are we given a doctor's opinion on the girl's symptoms. Just the parents claiming that it was the vaccine and that they regretted having her vaccinated. At one point the article states with no questions added "The girl has now started on accupuncture and is feeling better, but the parents still regret having the vaccine"

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!

We need to go back to the good old days when we had half the life-span we have now and people died every day to agonising diseases. Because nature. And ancient wisdom.

I'd say that the evidence goes to show that "smart" and "believes in wacky pseudoscience" are in no way contradictory. One of the thing that drives me bug fucking nuts about a lot of skepticism communities is their insistence that being skeptical and being smart are intensely correlated. They're not! People of middling and low intelligence can be dubious of bad science, and brilliant people can buy into it completely.

Perhaps you need to define "smart" then. Cause believing random, baseless non-sense isn't terribly "smart".

I'm interested in seeing this evidence, and also in what you mean by "smart."

The way I have heard this put before is "not stupid, just an idiot."

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
-- George Orwell

well he was a filthy socialist, so there you go.