Category: Public Health

Measles Cases Skyrocket Because of Bad, Ignorant Parents

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Yep, it’s those vaccination flat Earthers again, with measles cases to date this year being three times more than all of last year.

I will note that a significant number of the cases are infants who are too young to get the vaccine, so the loss of herd immunity because of these harms the helpless whose bear no blame.

There is no correlation between thimerosal in particular, or vaccines in general, and autism.

While correlation does not prove causation, lack of correlation does prove causation.

What’s more the (hopefully soon to be stripped of his license) doctor who came up with the theory has a history of making up his own facts, and has a financial interest in alternatives to vaccines.

My earlier posts on the subject here.

I will note that my son is on the autism spectrum, he has Aspergers, and my wife, a special education professional trained to look for such things, spotted the first indicators in his first weeks of life. No vaccine problems there.

Clinton’s Healthcare Expert Hired by Obama Campaign

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It appears that Neera Tanden has been hired by Obama to work on his campaign as director of domestic policy.

This is some very friendly signaling from the Obama campaign to hillary supporters:

She was a key architect of, among other things, Clinton’s health care plan, whose more aggressive push for universal coverage through mandates was probably the key domestic policy difference between the Democrats.

My guess is that all these imagines slights that we have heard about over the past are more figments of the imaginations of the Beltway Boyz than anything else.

Republithugs Put HMOs Above Medical Care

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So now, the Republicans are blocking paying doctors through Medicare in order to protect their HMO friends:

But Senate Republicans (and President Bush) don’t like the way the bill finds money for docs by cutting subsidies to Medicare Advantage, the privately administered Medicare plans.

If they needs subsidies, then, “Medicare Advantage, the privately administered Medicare plans”, are less efficient than big government, and hence are government waste, which should be abolished.

The cloture vote failed 58:40, and it needs 60 votes. Kennedy was not there because he has cancer, and McCain was not there because he doesn’t give a damn about doing his job as Senator.

When Republicans complain about earmarks, they are looking at amounts that are in total less than 1/10 of this.

I hope that the Democrats pound them mercilessly on this until election day.

Iran Is an Odd Place

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They still enforce a death penalty for homosexuality, but they are one of the most transsexual friendly governments in the world, and now I find that Iran’s policy towards drugs and addiction is geared to a remarkable degree towards treatment, rather than punishment:

In a country where the discussion of some social and cultural issues, like homosexuality, can be all but taboo, drug addiction has been widely acknowledged as a serious problem. It is talked about openly in schools and on television. Posters have encouraged people to think of addiction as a disease and to seek treatment.

Iran’s theocratic government has encouraged and financed a vast expansion in the number of drug treatment centers to help users confront their addictions and to combat the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, through shared needles.

…..

Iran’s government, trying to curb addiction’s huge social costs, has been more supportive of drug treatment than any other government in the Islamic world, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

…..

But two decades later, it recognized that this approach had failed. A sharp increase in the crime rate and the number of people infected with HIV, both directly linked to a surge in narcotics use, persuaded the government to shift strategies.

….

…. After a 25 percent surge in HIV cases, the government began distributing free needles in prisons in 2000.

….

“There are so many options that no addict can claim that there is nowhere to go for help,” said Dr. Mohammad-Reza Haddadi, a physician and researcher at the National Center for Addiction Studies. “It is much cheaper and healthier for them to go to these centers for methadone than to drug dealers.”

They realized that a war on drugs wasn’t working, and they changed.

The fact that the Iranians are more sane on drug policy than either mainstream party should be an embarrassment to Americans.

Vaccine Junk Science: the NY Times Almost Gets It Right

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When they have the following paragraph in a story on an Autism-Thimerosal law suit:

Every major study and scientific organization to examine the issue has found no link between vaccination and autism, but the parents and their advocates have persisted.

The get close to being right…Except that it’s paragraph 3, and it should be in paragraph 1.

A core fact on the vaccine stupidity is that there is no correlation between vaccines or Thimerosal and conditions on the Autism spectrum. Period, full stop, check my earlier posts.

It is a fraud put forward by an unethical doctor.

Me Bad. Hillary Wanking on Autism Too

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You can read it here:

I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines. I have long been a supporter of increased research to determine the links between environmental factors and diseases, and I believe we should increase the NIH’s ability to engage in this type of research. My administration will be committed to improving research to support fact-based solutions, and I will ensure that the NIH has the staff and funding to fully explore all possible causes of autism.

Just to be clear: the vaccine-autism link is a hoax.

The doctor who came up with it was in cahoots with the lawyers, and he had a patent on a junk science alternative.

He is now in the process of having his license to practice medicine stripped.

Obama Just Pissed Me Off

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I have been an involuntary student of conditions on the Autism spectrum by virtue of my son having Aspergers (see here, here, and here), so I have looked at the evidence (see here and here) and it is clear that there is no link.

I’ve also lambasted people who are putting their community and children at risk, because they are stupid and unthinking, which would, of course, include McCain’s claim that there is an explicit link.

Well, now we have Obama saying that the science is not yet settled on Autism and vaccines. While he does so in the context of promising additional funding for early interventions (BTW, Hillary was first on suggesting funding for this), by promoting this junk science, junk science that has sickenes thousands of children in the US every year, he pisses me off.

There are (very small) risks to vaccines, which is why the US government has a vaccine fund, but Autism is not one of them.

The anti-vaccine folks should be treated with nothing but disdain, much like the nut-job Mullahs in Northern Nigeria who sabotaged the polio eradication project because they thought it a secret plan to sterilize them.

Parents Putting Children, and the Community at Risk

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The facts are quite clear, there is no tie between vaccines and Autism*, and this has been conclusively proven.

The doctor who came up with this cockamamie theory had his ticket yanked. The removal of Thimerisol (which was an independent good regardless of the non link to Autism) made no difference in the trajectory of the disease.

Vaccines represent the greatest success in public health in the history of…well..history.

When we see reports like this one the Neanderthal† anti-vaccination movement, the basic points which need to be made are as follows:

  • There is no evidence that vaccines are listed are linked to any disease.
  • The idea that there is a link to Autism is false and has been completely disproven.
  • This puts the entire community at risk, because unvaccinated children spread the disease.
  • It puts holes in herd immunity.

These basic points were not made in this article, though it was hinted at when the writer quoted Sybil “I’m a Moron” Carlson saying that vaccines caused “immunology”.

Let’s be clear. Vaccines do have risks, I know someone who is in a wheelchair because of a vaccine induced case of polio, and my mother had an allergic reaction to the horse serum used in the tetanus vaccine, but they are less than that of not being vaccinated, and they are acute, not chronic.

The anti-vaccine movement is based on two things, stupidity and ignorance involving the science, and a blithe disregard for for the effects of society.

That’s why we are getting outbreaks of measles, mumps, whooping cough. Because these people are creating reservoirs of disease out of their children, and it affects the vaccinated too, because no vaccine is 100%, and some vaccinated children are put at risk.

*Full disclosure, my son is on the spectrum, diagnosed with Aspergers.
†In deference to the GEICO cavemen, I wish to apoliogize for any offense to true Neanderthals.

Monsanto Wants to Ban “rBST Free” Labels

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Monsanto has created an astroturf group that is lobbying to prohibit rBST and BGH free labels. They argue that it is “too confusing to consumers”.

I understand that Monsanto wants to market its industrial waste as widely as possible, but I object to their attempt to keep me, and the rest of the general public in the dark about it.

This is not confusing at all. I don’t their crap in my kid’s milk. Period, full stop.

Yeah, Like This Will Be a Winner for Republicans

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As the late, great Steve Gilliard says, never stop a your enemy from stepping on his own dick, and George W. Bush’s proposal to raise Medicare premiums is such an example.

It turns out that the Medicare costs projected by the lying sacks of excrement in the Bush admin are wrong, so the lying chimpy usurper boy is proposing an increase in premiums, along with the proposed cuts he put forward earlier.

FWIW, I think that this is an excellent time to reintroduce legislation granting authority to the government to negotiate with drug makers.

The Republicans are going to have to vote for higher premiums, which is a political loser, and for Medicare cuts, which is a political loser, and against the power to negotiate with drug manufacturers, which is a political loser.

Heck of a job Georgie.

Prison study to investigate link between junk food and violence

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Nope, this is not a punchline. It’s an actual study that they are conducting in the UK.

The university will lead the £1.4m study in which 1,000 males aged 16 to 21 from three young offenders’ institutions in England and Scotland will be randomly allocated either the vitamin-and-mineral supplements or a placebo, and followed over 12 months.

In a pilot study of 231 prisoners by the same researchers, published in 2002, violent incidents while in custody were cut by a more than a third among those given the supplements. Overall, offences recorded by the prison authorities fell by a quarter.

It certainly would explain the relatively high crime in the US.

We have effectively been giving borderline nutrition to the poor, and it shows up in crime statistics, just like Nixon’s removal of lead paint from the market correlates to the crime drop of the 1990s.

Taking Tips in Africa

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Well, after many years, two studies have shown that circumcision reduces AIDS transmission by about 60%. There has been anecdotal data for years.

This answers a question I’ve always had, why is the US AIDS rate relatively low when the US public health infrastructure sucks, and you have Talibaptists everywhere campaigning against condoms?

The answer is dumb luck. Through historical accident, the US probably has the highest circumcision rate this side of Israel (Moslems do it too).

Unfortunately, studying wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until last March, when the National Institutes of Health stopped the African circumcision trials—it was no longer ethical to continue them, because circumcision was clearly beneficial—that the World Health Organization and other agencies did an about-face.