Because broadcasting anyone’s medical records like that would be a massive Federal offense. Even if that person is a child.
Besides, it wouldn’t work, and it might make it worse. These things thrive on the in-group/out-group mentality, the Us Against The World Syndrome. Printing the names would reinforce in-group bonds by giving the anti-vaxxers proof that they’re really and truly part of the group (and help to weed out the waverers, who talk the talk but don’t actually put their kids’ health in danger, assuming such people exist) and by making them feel persecuted, just like Galileo and Jesus and Andrew Wakefield.
For them, it’s more important to be self-righteous than to be right.
Yeah, I am asking my doctor about what vaccinations would be good for me when I do my annual physical in November. Shingles is definitely on the list. I should be covered for pertussis, since I had it in 2007, but it’s been 40+ years since I had measles and mumps. I don’t want to get them again. At least I don’t have to worry about scarlet fever any more.
“To our community, Andrew Wakefield is Nelson Mandela and Jesus Christ rolled up into one” - J.B. Handley, co-founder of the antivax group Generation Rescue .
Yep, my right-winger niece denies climate change, says overpopulation is a lie, believes wives should be submissive and obedient to the hubbies, and so on.
She used to be pro-vax until she took an Immunology course, started reading the label inserts about vaccines and decided that the data is faulty.
You can get Scarlet Fever more than once. Scarlet fever is strep throat with a rash in reaction to the waste products of the strep bacteria. They are toxic to people.
My son had scarlet fever last winter.
The reason it isn’t very common anymore is that usually people go to the doctor for strep right when the get the sore throat and fever, and get an antibiotic before there is much build-up of toxins. My son, for some reason, was asymtomatic, except for a runny nose, until he broke out in a terrible rash. He didn’t have a sore throat until he’d already started on the antibiotics, and never had a fever. It was a very unusual presentation, but not unheard of, and actually, what frequently happens now in regard to actually getting the rash. Back before antibiotics, when you just had to wait for your body to fight off the infection, it was more common to get the rash.
At this point, that might be the only option. She could talk to her grandma, my mom, who suffered through whooping cough as a kid in the 1930s.
Niece’s only source of “info” appears to be another FB page called People for Informed Consent (irony, anyone?), which seems to be just a collection of anecdotes. I clicked “About” and found nothing but a blurb about Gov. Brown in CA making vaccines mandatory for school kids.
These people are literally insane. Jim Carrey , who used to be a decent comedic actor, is violently anti-vaxxer.
Conspiracy freaks are everywhere these days.
I think I’m about to be unfriended on Facebook. One of my former co-workers went all in for the pagan/hippie lifestyle and recently refused a good job because it was at a hospital and they wanted her to get a flu vaccine.
She recently posted an article about how the Amish don’t get autism. Two seconds of Google proved that crap wrong, and I couldn’t help myself…I posted an article disputing that (apparently the Amish are at high risk for getting Maple Syrup Urine Disease :eek:)
We’ll see. I just blocked someone who sent me an article that chemo is poison. As a breast cancer survivor, I take great umbrage at that.
I don’t have time for such ill-informed medical woo. Keeping an open mind when it comes to politics is one thing. Turning one’s nose up at settled medical fact is another.
The late author Carla Emery, who wrote “The Encyclopedia of Country Living” in its various incarnations, was anti-vax until one of her kids (she had 7) got pertussis, and he was sick for about two months. :eek: After that, all her kids were fully vaxed. This would have been in the late 1960s or early 1970s.
*"Auckland parents Ian and Linda Williams thought they had made an informed choice not to vaccinate their children, but after their son ended up in intensive care with a tetanus infection they realised they had made a terrible mistake.
“The mistake that we made was that we underestimated the diseases and we totally over-estimated the adverse reactions”, says father Ian Williams, who is speaking publicly of his family’s ordeal in an effort to warn other parents about the dangers of not immunising their children."*
As it was explained to me, chemo is poison, but the hope is that it kills the cancer without killing the patient. Do I have this wrong, or is someone trying to actually dissuade people from undergoing chemotherapy just because it has some toxic effects?
Kind of. “Chemotherapy” just means “drug treatment,” although it’s customarily understood to mean “Drug treatment for cancer.” There are 100s of chemotherapy drugs, and they don’t all work the same way. Generally speaking, the largest and oldest group of chemotherapy drugs attack cells at a certain point in the cell growth cycle, by various means. Since cancer cells grow faster and divide more often than healthy cells, the chemotherapy tends to do more damage to the cancer cells, but the drug really can’t tell the difference between a cancer cell and a healthy cell. If a healthy cell happens to be at the correct stage in its growth cycle, it will be killed by the chemo as well as the cancer cells. (Hair cells also grow quickly and divide rapidly, which is why so many - but not all - chemotherapy agents cause hair loss.)
But there are lots of other chemotherapy agents, some of which are more targeted to kill just cancer cells, or disrupt hormones to slow the growth of cancers that are triggered by those hormones, or activate a person’s immune system to get it to recognize and attack the cancer directly. So not all chemo is “poison” to healthy cells. We’ve gotten a lot better at choosing chemotherapy regimens that don’t come close to killing the patient, and sometimes don’t even make them feel ill after the treatment. I’ve got patients who actually feel *better *for a few days after chemo, and then slowly start to feel worse again until their next treatment.
But yes, there are still lots of people whose imagination of what chemotherapy is and does has very little to do with reality, and yeah, they try to talk people out of chemo because they think it’s like it’s portrayed in movies.
(That being said, there are times and circumstances when I’d probably refuse chemo. Every situation and every patient deserves to be treated as an individual.)
I recently asked an old acquaintance about a mutual pal from way back.
Dead.
Testicular cancer.
The chemo destroyed his liver. He didn’t get a replacement.
He died in a big city home of a Medical Center run by UC system.
He died in 2013. Not exactly in Dark Ages or “Out in the Sticks”.
And I get noise about not wanting prostate screening unless I have symptoms.
I’ll be dead in 10 years - I’m not going to waste any time with bullshit medical stuff -I have real medical stuff to fill in the time remaining.
Prostate cancer (which is not the same as testicular cancer) comes in many different forms. For some of them, frankly I agree with you. I probably wouldn’t choose to treat it at all, or I’d choose radiation without chemo, or palliative treatment to keep me as comfortable as possible without trying to “beat” the cancer. Other forms, it just makes sense to me to go in aggressively with both barrels blazing. But that’s not a decision I can make for anyone else. I can’t even make it for myself in 5 years; I can only make it for me today.
My mother, who is a hospital chaplain, has some really great questions she asks people with dire diagnoses, to help them to figure out exactly what their goals are, so that their doctor can help them choose the best plan. Say you have a daughter’s wedding in 6 months - some people would choose an aggressive treatment to increase their chances of making it to that wedding, even if they know it won’t prolong their life for years. Or maybe a person just wants to get strong enough to take a walk with their spouse one more time, in which case massive doses of steroids and some Physical Therapy might be their best bet, even though it won’t help them live any longer. I’m humbled by her wisdom in this matter, and think that these are the “end of life discussions,” we really need to be having more of. Doctor’s goals are not always the same as patient goals, but sometimes we all need help figuring out what our actual goals are.
Dunno why you people are blaming antivaxers for the reappearance of vaccine-preventable diseases, when it obviously is the CIA’s fault.
*"When last week the (Venezuelan) Ministry of Health finally made the announcement acknowledging the resurgence of diphtheria, Diosdado Cabello, a prominent Chavista, said Venezuela is the target of a “germ warfare orchestrated by the CIA labs.”
A few days earlier, Marisol Escalona, Coordinator of the government’s Expanded Program on Immunization, came out with an odd warning to the medical community: ”You cannot report anything (about diphtheria) because it goes against the [Bolivarian] revolution.“
”Venezuela is not prepared to deal with a diphtheria outbreak because we don’t meet the immunization standard recommended by the World Health Organization, because we cannot provide medication in a timely manner and because of flaws in the information flow to the community,“ said Huniades Urbina, president of the Venezuelan Society of Pediatrics, in a video conference at the Central University of Venezuela.
In addition, the Epidemiological Bulletin has not been published since of November 2014.
Dr. Julio Castro, from the Institute of Tropical Medicine, agrees with Urbina in that containing the outbreak requires a wide vaccination effort. ”For over 20 years we had not witnessed cases of diphtheria disease in Venezuela for a simple reason: it can be prevented with the DPT vaccine (diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus),” he said. “It is possible that the government did not vaccinate the number of people necessary to create the epidemiological barrier.”"*