A change in the weather, it's cooler, rained hard today and last night. So, today, we find out that Canada has put itself into a big old medical experiment. Some unpublished Canadian research strongly suggests that being inoculated against regular 'flu, makes it more likely that you will contract the swine 'flu, or H1N1 as we are now more technically and accurately calling it. So six - I believe - Provinces have decided to not issue the regular 'flu vaccination except to people in certain specific categories.
The States is going ahead with Plan A, that is, to offer both.
I'm not sure which of us is the control group, but doesn't it make you tingle?
No?
Oh.
We live and love in interesting times.
There is something disgusting about some of the reactions to the arrest of Roman Polanski in Switzerland. He anally raped a 13-year-old girl, having first drugged her, and when he was charged, and pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor, he ran away to join the foreign legion - well, not exactly, more, to live in France.
And the world said...?
'He's done his time,' Really?
'It wasn't really rape, she agreed to it,' so far as a drugged, frightened thirteen-year-old can agree to sex, she...no, she still didn't agree, but she didn't struggle enough,
'But he makse GREAT films,' uhuh, and this means he can commit a violent act against a young woman...or any woman...or any human being...or even an animal, it just won't wash.
Apparently Egypt has had all its pigs killed earlier this year, to avoid swine 'flu. So far so good?
No, I know, it sounds ridiculous by anyone's standards, but now even Egyptian Muslims are regretting it.
The country's Christians have the contract to collect organic waste, which they used to do and feed to the pigs. Nice bit of recycling.
You see where this is going?
No pigs, no waste collection, no waste collection - even more of a health threat than H1N1.
Oops!
4 comments:
Glad to hear your thoughts on this. I'm so suspect of all these shots right now, as well as the media frenzy H1N1 has caused. Maybe I'm not a scientist but I do wonder if all of these innoculations is what got us in this trouble in the first place...
I too wonder about the flu shot.
The one that really got my goat recently though, was when someone was saying that people shouldn't get the polio jab because only 15% of people who contract the disease die of it.
Excuse me? And others survived with excruciating pain, crippled or unable to breath alone. My generation were lucky enough to be vaccinated against polio, but people just a few years older than me weren't.
If you have ever taken a stroll through an old graveyard, you may have winced at the surprising number of tombstones bearing witness to the young age of their occupants. In the past, around 1 in 3 children died before their fifth birthday. It was common for children to perish from diphtheria, measles or whooping cough, to be paralysed by polio or to be born deaf and blind from congenital rubella.
Now fewer than 1 in 150 children die before age 5 in developed countries. Much of this is down to better sanitation and nutrition, but a large part of the credit must also go to vaccines. Despite this, some parents are refusing to allow their children to be vaccinated out of fear that certain vaccines cause autism, or that combined vaccines against several diseases overload the immune system.
Vaccines can cause side effects, and a few have had such serious effects they have had to be withdrawn. However, any side effects are usually minor, such as a fever, and have to be set against the risks of the real disease. What's more, study after study has shown that autism is not more common in children who are vaccinated. And children can respond to an estimated 10,000 immune challenges at one time - a good job when you consider the maelstrom of microbes they encounter in every speck of dirt.
I much prefer that I have a much higher chance of having a child making it to adulthood and I agree that it appears shots are a big part of that. Also, modern science also allowed me to wait til my mid-30s to have a child and ensured I didn't die in childbirth. However, on a purely philosophical level, I just think that with all the breakthroughs, there are costs we aren't examining - more virulent diseases, an exponentially growing population, the much sooner end to mankind. Also, noticed we're becoming more and more dependant on the flu shot year after year?
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