Mine too, only on that page. After checking it in a mobile browser, I’m pretty sure it’s a mangled PDF link in one of those posts.
Aaaaand back on the vaccination theme:
I was talking with two women today who were in town on a conference on childhood genetic diseases. This is one of those conferences where Ric Flair should be a special guest so he could walk around and go “WOO!” all the time.* These deluded females actually believe that a genetic disease could be **cured **by diet.
They also claimed my nephews’ nut allergies were caused by vaccinations.
They also believe that gluten was te ebil and a vicious poison out to kill us all.
:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
Bless their li’l hearts.
*Someone around here linked a .gif of Ric Flair with the caption saying he declared something to be “WOO!” Whoever that was, can you repost the link? I need to use it wantonly on Facebook.
I just found the pic of Flair, downloaded it, pulled it into paint, added the caption and uploaded it to my photobucket account for just this sort of thing.
If needed, feel free to use the entire link.
That’s what our first house was like - it was rundown and had holes in the walls and stuff, and didn’t look like much and sat on the market for months before we looked at it, but when we went to see it, we just walked around in the house going, “Okay, this isn’t so bad - this is okay - this is great! Why isn’t this selling?” It really can be a simple case of other people not being able to see past the superficial look of a house to see its potential. If you watch the real estate porn shows, you’ll see that there are plenty of people who won’t buy a house because of something like paint colour (easiest fix in the world!) 
My A/C crapped out this week, the same day we replaced the dishwasher (finally - it’s been broken since October). Of course this happens when it’s more than 100 degrees outside for over a week.
Fortunately, we were able to replace it quickly (and able to afford it without financing), but shit. What timing. And the guys who are installing it got here at 8 a.m. and they’re now wrapping up (only with no signs of actually getting the hell out - don’t get me wrong, I appreciate them being thorough, but dammit; when will they go away?) and it’s 4:15. Dammit. I have to leave in an hour after the kids get home and was hoping to luxuriate in a quiet, cool house for a few minutes before all hell breaks loose and everyone descends upon the house. Dammit. And I haven’t eaten yet today, which is adding to my severe annoyance.
Oh, and I still have another full week of JAR sessions to go. Fucking requirements gathering sessions. 10 hours a day for the full fucking week. Thank goodness I have a fairly understanding husband.
For what it’s worth, I get that these are relatively minor issues and my ire is probably out of line with actual events, but I’ve had a shitty week otherwise and would like some fucking time alone before next week starts and I’m required to be on all goddamn, mother-fucking week. Fuck.
Oh Google Maps…
When I search for “Walgreens”, why would I want a Walgreens two hours away? The entire point is to find one close to HERE.
I’ve noticed that. Mom watches a lot of reno shows, and on Love it or List it there is inevitably someone who will complain about the paint colour (usually the woman) and then someone will look at the realtor and bitch that they wanted it move in ready and no work to do (usually the man). Painting is easy. I’ve helped paint my friend’s house! It’s not that hard to do. It’s annoying and hot and takes time but it’s not HARD.
That makes me feel better. I keep looking at the place, and running numbers, and getting ballpark quotes from google on things (which I know could be nowhere close, but it’s hard to get a ‘this is what the average job costs to do’ I am finding because everyone wants to come in and quote and I don’t own diddly yet.. I just want to play with numbers ahead of time!). Most people keep throwing roadblocks along the lines of it’s a foreclosure it will take time, this and that and blah and then the odd this repair will need to be done and this could go either way but for the most part it’s gelling. Even the numbers.
I’d rather buy a little fixer upper than a condo, if I’m paying that much extra in fees let me direct where it can go.
Corrected link for anti-vax nut:
I just want to scream that she dares accuse me sacrificing children. She’s the one lobbying against protective health measures that really will kill kids too young to get the MMR or hurt the immune compromised who may not be able to fight off a nasty bout of pertussis.
She had the nerve to take that ridiculous rant to the Minnesota Department of Health to argue in favor of stupid vaccine exemptions.
My answer to the anti-vax nut:
Condemned to Repeat It or Why Anti-Vaxxers Don’t Really Remember History
Everything has a history to it. You, the salt you sprinkled on your French fries the other day, the street you crossed a few minutes ago.
So do vaccines. The anti-vax brigade would have you believe that vaccines were made up for pharm company profits and little else. Nothing could be further from the truth. For much of human history to be a mother was to be the mother of at least one dead baby. Or more likely three or four or five dead babies. Babies were born and then they died. They died sometimes from the reasons babies die today: from congenital diseases or from negligence or from parental abuse.
But mostly they died from vaccine-preventable diseases.
Smallpox alone took the lives of over four hundred million people before it was finally erased from contemporary memory. Pertussis took the lives of one in two hundred and fifty babies who caught it. Diphtheria shook the life from over a hundred thousand people in America alone as recently as the 1920’s. Polio, measles, rubella, mumps – they all killed babies by the hundreds and thousands each year. Measles still kills over a hundred thousand children today in the world where the numbers have finally been falling due to massive vaccine efforts.
When those diseases didn’t kill, they maimed. Vaccine-preventable diseases made people deaf or blind or paralyzed or brain dead. Measles can take bits of your hearing. Smallpox got into people’s eyes and made them blind. Polio was a notorious thief of people’s freedom of movement. Someone could wake up one day and find them couldn’t move their legs or couldn’t breathe or couldn’t use their hands from polio an hour later. Pertussis carries a one in a hundred risk of brain damage in little babies. Congenital rubella syndrome led to an epidemic of children made blind, deaf and mentally retarded even before they had been born.
Today we hear there’s an epidemic of vaccine damaged children. Any rational person can find no evidence for this assertion. Vaccines do not cause autism or type I diabetes or ADHD or asthma as I pointed out in the book. They haven’t been linked to psychiatric problems or mental illness or brain damage.
You know what they really have been linked to? A decrease in the number of dead children. A decrease in the number of children blind, deaf or paralyzed. A decrease in the number of children who have had their mental promise stolen by vaccine-preventable diseases.
That’s exactly what history tells us happens without vaccines: dead babies. Maimed babies. Deafblind babies. A generation of needless suffering imposed on our most vulnerable societal members. That’s what we’ll have back if we stop vaccinating. Even if we tear down the safety net of herd immunity just a little and partially stop vaccinating that is what we’ll have: vaccine-preventable diseases in the immune-compromised, those who do not seroconvert and babies who cannot be vaccinated against many vaccine preventable diseases.
I asked those who are against vaccines what vaccines do you want to do away with and what vaccine-preventable diseases do you want back? I ask it again. I ask it in name of history. Because that’s where the real answer to these questions lies: in the historical memory that is our common heritage. It is bad enough to refuse to remember it. It’s unforgivable to ask us to repeat it.
For various reasons, we were a few weeks late getting Widget her MMR. We were still well within the recommended period; we just didn’t do it the second she was old enough.
My mother could not *believe *that we didn’t have her down at the GP’s office the morning of her first birthday. She couldn’t relax till all the shots were done.
You know why? Because my mother grew up in a country that didn’t have widespread vaccination. For her, what happens without vaccination isn’t history; it’s a reality that she’s seen with her own eyes. And it terrified the bejasus out of her.
For anyone who actually knows what life is like without vaccinations, they’re one of the most wonderful things science has ever come up with.
My husband is “helping” me change out a blind. Can someone just shoot me now? :mad:
LavenderBlue, it’s sad that you have to write so eloquently on such a mind-bogglingly stupid topic as vaccines causing autism and diabetes and whatever, but those are some very powerful words.
Yup, my mom too - she remembers almost losing a little brother to pertussis.
Very good reply, Lavender. My fear is that the anti-vaxxers will win any victories, like how Calgary recently lost fluoride in our municipal water. I thought that the majority of people understood how valuable fluoride was in preventing cavities, but somehow we lost it anyway. I’m afraid of a similar thing happening with vaccinations - that somehow people who don’t understand anything will influence policy to the detriment of everyone.
*Thank *you.
Thank you. It was meant as a companion piece to my co-author Kolga’s eloquent words on some of the science they don’t understand either.
**
The One Study or Why the Anti-Vaccine Movement Doesn’t Really Understand Science**
Multiple studies in multiple countries using multiple research models and multiple research groups, with multiple funding sources, have found no link between vaccines and autism. This is also true for a link between vaccines and ADHD, asthma, diabetes, auto-immune disorders, and the various other conditions that anti-vaccine propagandists attempt to link to vaccinations.
Every one of these studies has been dismissed by those anti-vaccine propagandists as having the wrong funding source, the wrong research design, the wrong focus, not separating out antigens from other vaccine ingredients, separating antigens from other vaccine ingredients inappropriately, not testing this, or that or something else.
The anti-vaccine movement wants ONE study. The One Study To Rule Them All. The One Study that tests every possible aspect of every vaccine.
This is basically what the AVers are asking us to do.
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Eliminate the use of all vaccines immediately in every country on the planet. Immediately. Regardless of any public health issues currently in existence.
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Randomly sample an acceptable number of children for each experimental and control group for each group discussed below.
The numbers in each group would need to be in the hundreds or thousands to satisfy statistical requirements for validity and significance, and would have to include children from every country, every ethnicity, every socio-economic status, with every possible genetic combination from parents, and of every possible health history based on parental family health. Anti-vaccine propagandists have rejected studies with 3000 or more subjects, so each group below would need to contain huge numbers in order to satisfy them. But then again, many of them accept 12 subjects (the number in Andrew Wakefield’s fraudulent study) as valid, so who knows?
Anti-vaccine propagandists are fond of saying “there are plenty of unvaccinated kids already, just use them!” You cannot use pre-existing groups who selectively vaccinate or do not vaccinate at all, because research has shown that these parents have certain differences from other parents, and those pre-existing differences would be a confounding variable in the study. To do a credible study of the kind that the anti-vaccine propagandists are demanding, you MUST randomly sample children, and then you MUST randomly assign them to the groups below. Parents would have no choice about this.
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Obtain permission from parents of children in each group to administer an injection into their child. The parents and children will not know what injection the child is receiving. The parents would not be allowed to have their children receive any injection from any other source, to avoid contamination of the data. Some children in the study would be completely unprotected from any disease outbreak, and their parents would be unaware of whether or not the children were unprotected.
-
The injection received may contain any of the following configurations:
a. Just the antigen, in saline.
b. Just saline. This comparison (or control, in scientific terms) group would be necessary for every single group involved in the study. No one in this group would receive any aspect of any vaccine ever, just injections of saline.
c. Just one ingredient of the vaccine (i.e., formaldehyde), in saline.
d. Two or more of the ingredients, in various combinations (i.e., formaldehyde and the antigen, formaldehyde and the aluminum salts, the antigen and the aluminum salts, etc.). For example, according to the CDC pink book, the MMR-II vaccine contains these ingredients:
i. Vitamins
ii. amino acids
iii. fetal bovine serum
iv. sucrose
v. sodium phosphate,
vi. glutamate
vii. recombinant human albumin
viii. neomycin
ix. sorbitol,
x. hydrolyzed gelatin,
xi. chick embryo cell culture
xii. WI-38 human diploid lung fibroblasts
So, starting with the first ingredient on the list, we’d have to have a group that received every single vitamin injected, every single vitamin in combination with every single other vitamin, in combination with multiple of the other vitamins, etc. Let’s say there are four different vitamins (A, B, C, D). We’d have to have an A only group, a B only group, a C only group a D only group, an A/B group, an A/C group, an A/D group, a B/C group, a B/D group, a C/D group, an ABC group, an ABD group, an ACD group, a BDC group, and an ABCD . That’s 15 comparison groups for four ingredients. Then, we’d have to have a group for each vitamin in combination with each other ingredient – vitamin A combined with sucrose, B with sucrose, D with sucrose, etc. Then we would have to test each other ingredient in various combinations with other ingredients. Again, thousands of groups, each having hundreds or thousands of children to cover all combinations mentioned above.
The above breakdown of possible combinations would have to be repeated for every vaccine, for every booster, and for every possible combination of boosters.
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Follow every single child in every single group throughout the course of their entire lifetime (which, with current life expectancy, can be 70-80 years in developed countries), monitoring every medical/health condition that develops, and comparing those rates for each and every group above. If a single of the thousands of study groups lost a single participant (through moving, withdrawal, death, etc.), the Avers would declare the entire study null and void, even though such attrition is to be expected, and is controlled for in the study design.
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Compare each group above for every possible illness or medical/health condition.
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For each and every group mentioned above, we’d have to create a control group in which the children received no injection at all, of anything. No saline, no antigen, nothing.
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Remember that the anti-vaccine movement wants each vaccine tested individually, THEN in combination. So, we’d have to have one generation of children receiving the above breakdown of ONE vaccine over an entire lifetime, then another generation of children receiving the above breakdown of ANOTHER vaccine over an entire lifetime, etc., until all vaccines have been tested individually. Then and only then do we start testing vaccines with boosters. Then after that, vaccines in combination, but only two at a time. Then three at a time. This requirement would mean that the study that would fit the criteria demanded, the One True Study, would last until approximately the heat death of the sun.
This doesn’t even get into the ethics of the various groups, the sampling difficulties, or the enormous amounts of money that would be required (money that could not come from any government, any governmental agency, any institution of higher education, or any scientist who’s ever done vaccination research in their career).
At this point, it should be apparently that such a study is not possible.
It’s also not necessary.
Various studies have addressed various aspects of each of the embedded questions in the above scenarios, and in combination, those answers address the concern of the anti-vaccine movement. For example, one ingredient used in vaccines are aluminum salts (not elemental aluminum, as is claimed). These are used as an adjuvant, to create a stronger immune response so that less antigenic material is required. The safety of these adjuvants has been well established (Adverse events after immunisation with aluminium-containing DTP vaccines: systematic review of the evidence - PubMed). That’s just one meta-analysis of the studies of the safety of one ingredient. It’s not part of The One Study that anti-vaccine propagandists want, though, so they reject it.
Think of the studies as a jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle isn’t one piece. It’s many pieces that fit together, making a total picture. The total picture on vaccinations is that they are safe and save lives.
Science isn’t about The One Study. It’s about ALL the studies.
Stupid trying to be a good neighbor. Plan for today was to mow the seriously overgrown lawn, trim some shrubs, clean the gutters.
My nice next door neighbor is having a huge get together right now, everyone is outside.
So I’ll wait.
When we had TheKid’s grad party, another neighbor did a bunch of loud yardwork and it annoyed us as we had to shout to hear each other. I decided then that I wouldn’t do that to others.
Tomorrow it’s supposed to rain, I’m in office Monday… so Tuesday it is. Feh.
I have bookmarked this and I’m sending the link to my friends to use if that’s okay with you.
Oh god. I went out for dinner yesterday with a very dear friend and her new guy. He’s been around for a few months now but all socialization during that time has been event driven and we really haven’t had time to talk. Last night I found out he considers the anti fluoride decision a victory, believes that americans are now being taxed on both their state of birth and their state of residence AND that their children will be taxed on their state of birth, their parents state of birth and their state of residence and probably a few more that I’ve blanked out by the pain of biting my tongue.
She’s had a rough time since her divorce and he’s a sweet guy who is obviously crazy but he’s also crazy about her. I think I’m going to just continue to bite my tongue and ignore the stupid but its hard 
I pit Unnecessary And Annoying Capitalization Of Words That Don’t Need It.
For instance, bowing before a few protectionist French winemakers and only using Champagne in a news story instead of champagne. Hey Jacques, champagne has entered the language as a generic term for overpriced fizzy wine drunk at celebrations. Deal with it.
Then we have snooty real estate agents who insist they be called Realtors. We don’t do this for Doctors, Lawyers or Theoretical Physicists, so why prop up the egos of overdressed lamebodies who sell houses on commission?
Unbelievably, I saw the word Windbreaker in a New York Times story on Friday (this is the same paper that insists on Champagne). So we’re supposed to capitalize the word to avoid offending the inventor of Windbreakers?
I break wind at the thought. And I’m not alone.
The post is on my Facebook page if anyone would like to share it from there.
