I’m not getting a troll vibe from AnthonyElite. He seemed perfectly reasonable until he was attacked.
curlcoat, check out my previous post in this thread - I quoted some pretty grim statistics on how many deaths measles are responsible for each year.
That’s why I asked. Of course I was a kid at the time, but I don’t remember anyone being concerned about death when their kid got the measles. Unless it was the German measles.
It’s a similar situation with the flu. While there are flu deaths in the US, it’s naturally disproportionally more of a problem in poorer countries where health care and sound medical information are less available as is clean water, food, housing, etc. Apparently (according to wiki anyway), in some of those countries, a fatality rate for measles approaching 30+% is not unheard of.
If you get proper diagnosis and treatment sooner rather than later you can get better results. That’s not to say people in the US don’t die from the flu or the measles (they absolutely do) but it’s not the same problem it is in other countries. Even in the US, the modern fatality rate for measles (at least up to 2000, it may be higher now with fewer vaccinations) is 3 out of 1000 or 0.3%. While not particularly high, that’s atrocious for an otherwise avoidable disease.
But these diseases making a comeback due to some douchetwit jackhole is infuriating as is anybody (not you, by the way) snidely questioning their efficacy when a vast metric whale-assload of evidence shows they absolutely are.
ETA: I’ve also been patiently awaiting the end of polio. I promised all my friends I’d throw a massive party the day it was declared eradicated. It pisses me off to no end that more children have to suffer needlessly due to sick, ignorant fucks and to a lesser extent because I can’t throw my big bash.
Really? The whole “I’ve read a bunch, but I don’t get it?!?!?!?!?” plus a bunch of typical anti-vax stuff (‘natural’ immunity is better, etc, etc, etc) wasn’t a clue? It’s the new approach, 1. Pretend you don’t understand. 2. Ask questions.
Step 1 makes the opponent explain the situation as they see it. This explanation can then be attacked by using Step 2. Basically it forces your opponent to soft-lob back to you.
Step 2 asks questions about the explanation*.
Step 3 is to go round and round and round until the explainer gets tired.
Step 4 is to declare victory**.
Note that the audience is NOT the person he/she is [del]arguing[/del]discussing reasonably with (that person has done the research). It’s the “undecided”. Some may be convinced and that counts as a win.
*These questions are probably based on either completely disproved science or pure unadulterated bullshit.
** Often by going away “unconvinced” by the explainer’s argument. This can then be later used as evidence that the other side lacks conviction/truthiness. “See in this thread I asked Poster A bunch of questions and never got answers! Obviously the pro-____ side can’t make their case!”
This is one of those times when living in a third world country has its advantages. Vaccination here is universal, free and mandatory for all children able to withstand it. Non-vaccinated children have a hard time getting into school. Another plus is that we still getting vaccines that other countries stopped using a long time ago (like Polio).
My daughter got her full round of vaccines, one that was not in the schedule and will get the HPV one and a tetanus shot at 12 in time for puberty.
I know somebody who suffered from Polio. This people are crazy and dangerous. I am glad you get to keep them.
A couple of days surprises me - you may be misrembering.
Measles is far worse for very young children, so the ones who got the worst effects, like blindness, would not even have been in your school.
I would have thought that there’d have been some measles vaccinations when you were a kid, though? The vaccine’s been around since 1963. Maybe the uptake wasn’t immediately universal, but it would have still made a difference.
Death’s not the only thing to worry about with measles - it can also cause severe brain damage and mental retardation. Most kids recovered fully, but everyone knew that a few unlucky ones did not.
Parents didn’t worry about it much because there wasn’t anything they could do. Catching the disease was essentially unavoidable, and then it was just a matter of waiting to see what happened.
I think Curlcoat might be mixing up measles and rubella. It’s rubella that isn’t all that big a deal, usually, for children. Kids who missed a couple days of school most likely had rubella. Measles is a respiratory disease, with fever and rash, which can lead to pneumonia, and rarer cases, encephalitis. It can lead to blindness. Something like 450 children a day, worldwide, still die of it. It’s a week or more of fairly serious illness, even if you come out of it well.
Polio is still on the schedule, because it hasn’t been eradicated, which means it’s just a plane ride away.
Three more countries and we can rethink that.
If they started vaccinating babies (15 months) when the vaccine came out, Curlcoat’s birth cohort would have missed it by a bit.
Boy, you guys are paranoid!
Could easily be, but I don’t remember it as being that big of a deal.
And they also weren’t siblings of the kids I knew. I’ve just never had the impression that measles was that big of a deal for anyone with a decent immune system.
Vaccine for the “soft” measles has been around since 1963? Anyway, I was born in 1957 so the vaccine probably wasn’t available to poor people when I was young.
Parents seemed to be far more concerned with the mumps than the measles. OTOH, we are talking me trying to remember what was going on over 40 years ago… 
So, rubella wasn’t the hard measles? * Googles * Ah, no it wasn’t but the word is almost the same. I guess I had the seriousness of rubella in pregnant women mixed up with what measles were a problem for kids.
My friend S grew up in rural Connecticut back in the '40s, and he remembers that in the summer, his relatives from NYC would come to stay on the family farm. They were fleeing the periodic polio outbreaks in the city. All these decades later, he still remembers the terror people had at the mention of the word “polio”. It was every parent’s nightmare.
Come sit by me and we shall discuss my plan to haul him up on murder charges when I take over the world.
You have an “interesting” definition of dehumanizing. Saying a child with autism is one that has lost his soul seems to me to be pretty dehumanizing.
Read some autism advocates’ descriptions of their children. They talk incessantly of “recovering” their children, re-finding the child they know they should have, freeing their child of the “possession” of autism.
You’re far too kind. I think he’s a psychopath who latched onto the issue to dupe grieving parents, a gullible public, and corrupt lawyers into a life of ease.
She’d wipe the floor with him. And she’s better at not using foul language than I am (most of the time) 
Of course, his latest calls for a “televised public debate” have been scaled back to refer specifically to one particular doctor who’s a critic of his.
Both Lavenderblue and I are part of the group that works on those memes. Thank you for the support.
Right on time.
Yes, LavenderBlue and I co-authored a book about this issue.
Eh, if I don’t understand something, I ask questions, too - I didn’t see him taking it to the nth degree to be a jerk.
Yes, and I live in the county with the highest number of unvaccinated children (Buncombe) so it’s probably going to be huge here. (Wow, I just had to add unvaccinated to Firefox’s dictionary. I hate ruining something’s innocence.) This is also the county with one of the highest concentrations of crunchy granola nimrods who believe vaccines are “unnatural” and cause autism, bleeding from the ears, and voting Republican.
Ah, yes. Asheville. Or as I like to call it, “Boulder in the South.”
People need to turn the ol’ brain on and realize that “natural” does not equal “good.” There are lots of 100% natural things that will kill you quite dead without trying hard.
Oh yes. Cyanide is my favorite example. It comes in apple seeds!
Kolga, I love being in Asheville. I can be considered conservative without changing my beliefs at all.
One of my friends was upset because someone in her family received the chickenpox vaccine, and it turns out that they ended up needing a booster shot ten years later. This was their argument for passing chickenpox naturally instead.
A booster shot!? Oh, the horror! :rolleyes:
Depends on what you mean by a “big deal”. I am a little older than you, and I got measles before the vaccine was available. As a result I have partial hearing loss in one ear.
And when the measles vaccine became available, my parents were lined up outside the doctor’s office with their noses pressed against the glass to get my sister immunized so it wouldn’t happen to her.
ETA: Wakefield shouldn’t be in prison. He should be used for medical experiments.
Regards,
Shodan