heywood on 18/3/2015 at 23:49
The question of who brought Measles into Disneyland is irrelevant. If a community has sufficient immunity, it is highly unlikely that a Measles outbreak will occur when the community is exposed to an infected person. That is why Measles cases had nearly disappeared from the US even though the US is continually being visited by infectious travelers. The outbreaks are mainly happening in communities with low vaccination rates.
Anyway, here's what the CDC says about the US Measles outbreaks:
(
http://www.cdc.gov/measles/cases-outbreaks.html)
Of course, you can't trust them since they're in the pocket of big pharma, right :p
EDIT: And one other thing, if you're going to defend people who skip vaccinations, why aren't you extending that to immigrants or visitors? It seems like you're saying residents should have the right to decide for themselves but not immigrants. At least be consistent in who you defend and blame.
Tony_Tarantula on 18/3/2015 at 23:56
Not the point.
I'm questioning if a small number of US "anti vaxxers" (estimated at 2-3%) of the US population are effectively bioterrorists, then why is it perfectly acceptable to import massive numbers of un-vaccinated immigrants and the few people who suggested that they should be screened before being released were pilloried.
Or maybe which medically dubious actions become a big deal has more to do with politics and self interest than science.
heywood on 19/3/2015 at 00:46
Who says it is perfectly acceptable to import massive numbers of un-vaccinated immigrant? Nobody is saying that.
I can't prevent illegal border crossers and screening is not a 100% reliable process anyway. Unless a disease is completely eradicated worldwide, there is going to be some possibility of it entering the US.
If there is adequate immunity within US communities, then outbreaks aren't likely to occur when an infectious person enters the community. If there is inadequate immunity, then the community is vulnerable. It's not complicated.
You're taking this wierd "blame the illegal immigrants" angle, but illegal immigrants have been arriving in steady numbers for decades and yet Measles cases had been declining. The sudden increase is not due to a change in immigration.
bjack on 19/3/2015 at 00:58
I choose to believe from the evidence and my own experience that immunizations are valid. Yes, big pharma wants to rape your pocket book, mainly due to FDA rules that make it nearly impossible to approve something simple as aspirin without spending billions. But, they are not always money grubbing creeps. Sometimes the products they produce actually work as they say. The anti vaccine crowd is simply delusional. There is long standing imperial proof immunizations work. The proof is not just some computer models and falsified data. Yes, I wrote that for dramatic effect. I was freely thinking it would be funny, but I bet some will find it either just crude, sad, or lame. So be it. I still like it.
So is free thinking dead? It seems so in some cases, yet alive in others. I hope the control freaks do not get enough control to remove our right to think for ourselves. If they do, that is the end of all progress. We will stop at dogmatic thought. All is known and all is what the anointed say it is. To disagree is death. Or as RUSH said in 2112 - "We have assumed control!" Note: that actually was when the when the good forces took back control over the Red Star rulers, but that is not that important here. And yes, I do agree with some of Ayn Rand, but I tend toward "Lighten up Francis". For those too young to know, this is a reference from the movie Stripes.
Individual control freaks out there do not scare me, but a clan of them do. I fear the tyranny of the right and its control over self expression. I fear the left and their hive mentality. I take the cognitive approach and take those bits and pieces of both that fit reality and logic. This is how I was indoctrinated back in the 70s and it still rings true today. "Think for yourself", as George said.
faetal on 19/3/2015 at 06:07
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
Exactly where the fuck am I going to get a peer reviewed study about a one-time news event?
Well, since you are touting it as some kind of incontrovertible explanation, I assumed that someone had cut and dried it. Or is everything in the news completely rigorous now?
Quote:
And if they're so concerned about what's best for people(it's clearly ENTIRELY altruistic and not at all about money), from what I've been told it would be easily possible but considerably more expensive to replace those additives that have a high metal content with ones that don't.
None of them have a high metal content. If they did, there would be toxicity. The metal concentration used is enough to goad the immune system into scouting the site of inoculation for antigens to present to the adaptive immune system. If you knew anything about toxicology, you'd know that dose is
everything. The doses used are not harmful. They're not harmful if you multiply their concentration by 100 fold. If they were, they would not pass the animal trials stage. Also, I'm not sure you've understood who I'm talking about. The medics I meet don't charge for vaccines, so aren't motivated by money. The worst the pharma industry can be accused of wrt vaccines is over-stating their efficacy and making vast amounts through government stock-piling (Roche / Tamiflu), though it's difficult to know the exact nature as Roche have yet to pony up the full studies (we already have the toxicology data, before you start rambling on about them hiding a conspiracy to give everyone autism for some reason related to profit or whatever).
Quote:
I don't think anyone is "anti vaxxine", but there's a lot of people who distrust big pharma. There's a strong parallel in agriculture where people no longer believe the studies that say that pesticides are completely safe, but still accept the idea of eating vegetables. ....creating a huge market for organic foods.
There are lots of people who are anti-vaxxine. There are people who think it is part of a mind-control ploy to create a docile populace. There are people who know nothing about immunity who "worry about giving my child so many viruses at once" (can't even begin to start picking that apart). There are people who take the "I had measles when I was a kid, a week of school won't do them any harm and it's more natural" approach, which is basically like saying "I don't give a fuck about those with weakened immune systems or the elderly, I want my kid to have some disease nostalgia".
Quote:
Anyway, let's go with an appeal to authority and "peer review". There's a wealth of literature indicating that some of the additives are questionable. An obvious solution is to replace them with better studied alternatives, so why is it heresy to suggest that as the solution?
Peer review isn't "appeal to authority". If you're going to use such weak arguments, is there any point in my engaging with you? It's getting to the pigeon playing chess stage. I've clearly explained the benefits of peer-review over individuals googling things which back up their preferred viewpoints (which seems to be your forté). If you're now framing that as some kind of logical fallacy, well...there's no reasoning with you. You can't understand the nuance of 'not perfect != not useful", yet expect me to accept the most tenuous reasoning from you? Sorry, but it's a 2 way street. If I'm going to expend the effort to actually learn about stuff, I don't see why I have to bring myself down to the pointless drudgery of having to explain every little tenuous link you can come up with after ignoring the vast amounts of work which point to the contrary. You're ignoring mountains to hunt for tiny molehills which prop up your ill-informed points? Bravo, have a cookie - but it's not my responsibility to fill in the gaps for you if you're just going to (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance#Belief_disconfirmation_paradigm) ignore them because they don't prop up your views.
Yes, I've seen this before. The studies it links are indeed peer-reviewed, but they are also weak studies. Most of them aren't properly blinded or have samples sizes which are too small to properly see an effect. It's called cherry-picking - it doesn't stop being so just because it's presented in a nice document by a well funded and notorious anti-vaccination organisation. This is why I feel like I should not bother with you - you don't understand research. You think a peer-reviewed paper has a default value and that this doesn't vary between studies. Instead of hunting down documents which agree with you, how about a decent meta-analysis instead? These look as ALL of the studies available, not just ones which already agree with the agenda of the researchers. The only bar to entry is study quality. Fair enough that you don't know this - you aren't trained in research - but you are assuming a higher level of confidence in your assumptions than your skill set allows. Again, and with risk of making it look like my favourite thing ever, I refer you to the research of Dunning and Kruger. Your lack of knowledge about the complexity of the subject is making you over-confident in the quality of your findings.
One thing the anti-vaxxers seem to miss about vaccines is that you
need a noxious stimulus, or the immune response won't be strong enough to guarantee a decent expansion of memory cells. If you use a noxious stimulus, you're going to get small reactions. These may involve a skin rash or feverishness as the fever we get from illness is not caused by the virus, parasite, fungus or bacteria itself, but by the body's response. Sometimes these responses can be adverse. The vast majority of these used to be for things like allergy to hen egg lysozyme, or strong responses to bee venom (another adjuvant) or LPS (a bacterial cell wall component which triggers the innate immune response). There is literally no way to get vaccines working without an adjuvant. Every time adjuvants are improved, we effectively need to reset the record for how we decide how reactions to vaccines factor in to their safety and efficacy. So hand-wringng about thiomersal/thimerosal, which is no longer used is kind of pointless and essentially just used as ammo by anti-vax people, despite, hilariously, very little evidence of widespread adverse effects - most of the studies which found them, tend to be old, poorly designed or since refuted, as per most in the article you linked. You haven't even provided any examples of the "better studied alternatives" you mention. No doubt if they were replaced, the anti-vaxxers would anyway just tack on a new set of fallacious arguments backed up with furious googling and feeble research for why they were also evil and giving children ADHD or whatever.
I'm probably not going to expend a lot of extra time on this. I do so because I genuinely love debate, I like how ideas compete and how over the course of discussion, informational entropy gets dragged gradually closer to something which can be called reasonable. In this case though, and many like it where you have "google experts" tryign to debate something they don't understand, it's like trying to debate with a (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_room) Chinese room, using ideologically chosen summaries as the anchor for their talking points, rather than anything resembling knowledge, experience or even a good point.
faetal on 19/3/2015 at 08:58
Also Bjack, don't feel sad for me. One of the great benefits of knowing I don't know very much (relatively speaking) and being surrounded by experts in my field which I respect is that I have endless opportunities to learn, to improve to maybe one day be one of those people with a weight of experience who can teach others. It's a life goal. If I already felt like all of my own thoughts and opinions were the apex and just as valid as those of people who've spent far longer studying a very complex topic, then I'd be committing myself to spending the remainder of my existence treading water in the stagnant echo chamber of my own self-assurance. I guess that's working ok for you - 'grats. I have slightly higher aspirations. I'd rather see my future as being involved in developing ideas which benefit medical science than using quasi-intellectual adolescent prose to tell everyone how free-spirited I am on an internet forum. Sure I love to bandy ideas about on here, it's fun up to a point. Then it gets to the diminishing returns point, which is fast approaching. New ideas aren't being born from the debate, we're just tap-dancing around semantics and having to explain how research works. It's getting to feel like a training session where the attendees have no interest in the subject*.
Sure there are definitely benefits to being young and having that extra flexibility and effervescence of thought - I came up with something great during my PhD which I did against the advice of my supervisors and which they praised me for after I showed them the evidence. They're not inflexible, they just have the experience to know that I happened to be lucky enough to have stumbled on an actual thing which was waiting to be discovered. Way more often than not, I'd have just been wasting time. Luckily, science is populated by newcomers and those with experience. Some newcomers and pointlessly brash and unproductive, some senior figures are uselessly calcified and stale, but on balance, the mix of experience and enthusiasm given by mixing it all together provides useful output. However, the knowledge side of things definitely favours the seniority. If you take objection to that, be detailed and concise, or don't bother.
* - this is more regarding the ongoing vaccine debate with Tony rather than your thread, which is kind of bleeding into the dilettante one...
bjack on 19/3/2015 at 17:25
Research is definitely even more conservative in its approach to new ideas, than a field like IT. I get that. There is a finite amount of funding and the loud mouth new guy spewing nonsense ideas is going to get shot down, and should be. That was not what I was talking about, but I failed to convey that apparently. I am saying that is is healthy to question because a different approach may have better results. The trick, as you point out, is to be sure you are right before wasting everyone else's time. I think I alluded to that in a previous post.
Chats are dangerous things. Because they are trite, the full meaning may not be gleaned, but instead interpreted by the reader's own bias. I admit I am guilty of that from time to time, but I really try to be careful. I think that some have misunderstood what I am trying to say and this is partly due to my choice of prose. I thought much of the sarcasm would come through, but I guess it did not.
Anyway, I appreciate the responses - all of them. It is good entertainment. Thanks. :cheeky:
DaBeast on 19/3/2015 at 17:38
Quote Posted by Tony_Tarantula
I'm curious why "anti vaxxers" bother you so much? You've been ranting about them in almost every thread on here. Not only is that a very broad brush painted(most that I've talked to are only concerned about the safety of additives used and would be eager to vaccinate if they were replaced with safer ones), but they're at most 3% of the American population. They make a lot of noise but they're trivial.
Oh, by the way, if it makes you feel better it turned out that the recent Measles outbreaks were NOT spread by "anti-vaxxers". It came from hispanic immigrants who, thanks to Obama and the big-business faction of the Republican party, were ushered into the USA without being given any medical screening prior to being released into the country's general population.
Ignorant people massing the ignorant together under a banner of refusing potentially life saving medicine, to the more cold hearted, might seem like Darwin in action. In practise, stupidity can often spread, especially when they believe their cause is just and noble.
Maybe it'll peter out into irrelevance, but in the US, where some 60% believe Noah's Ark was a real thing and that Moses literally parted the red sea, science and logic isn't a primary factor.
I would liken this to the AIDS deniers. If you convince people who have AIDS that AIDS doesn't exist and that your AIDS suffering children don't need that medication to survive, then AIDS is going to AIDS AIDS AIDS AIDS!
But they're free to think that way aren't they?
bjack on 19/3/2015 at 17:58
Quote Posted by DaBeast
But they're free to think that way aren't they?
Yes they are, but they must accept the consequences. One has the right to be stupid, but one does not have the right to inflict stupidity upon others. Wow, that opens up a can of worms!
faetal on 19/3/2015 at 19:02
Quote Posted by bjack
Research is definitely even more conservative in its approach to new ideas, than a field like IT. I get that. There is a finite amount of funding and the loud mouth new guy spewing nonsense ideas is going to get shot down, and should be. That was not what I was talking about, but I failed to convey that apparently. I am saying that is is healthy to question because a different approach may have better results. The trick, as you point out, is to be sure you are right before wasting everyone else's time. I think I alluded to that in a previous post.
You've clearly not worked in research. I have however worked in IT. Of course it is healthy to question - that's exactly what research is!
