Tag Archives: anti-vaxxers

When facts don’t matter: Arizona cancels vaccine program after backlash from parents who don’t vaccinate

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When will post-truth thinking extend to buildings and bridges, which will remain intact because of faith rather than physics?

Australia gets a few totalitarian things right, such as mandatory voting and mandatory vaccination if parents want their kids to attend school.

Stephanie Innes of Arizona Central writes the state of Arizona has canceled a vaccine education program after receiving complaints from parents who don’t immunize their school-age children.

The pilot online course, modeled after programs in Oregon and Michigan, was created in response to the rising number of Arizona schoolchildren skipping school-required immunizations against diseases like measles, mumps and whooping cough because of their parents’ beliefs.

But some parents, who were worried the optional course was going to become mandatory, complained to the Governor’s Regulatory Review Council, which reviews regulations to ensure they are necessary and do not adversely affect the public. The six-member council is appointed by Gov. Doug Ducey, with an ex-officio general counsel.

Members of the council questioned the state health department about the course after receiving the public feedback about it, emails show. The state responded by canceling it.

The complaints that ended the pilot program came from about 120 individuals and families, including 20 parents who said that they don’t vaccinate their children, records show.

“We’re so sorry we couldn’t make a go of this — strong forces against us,” Brenda Jones, immunization services manager at the Arizona Department of Health Services, wrote in an Aug. 6 email to a Glendale school official, along with a notification about the course’s cancellation.

In an email to two Health Department staff members on Aug. 14, Jones wrote that there had been “a lot of political and anti-vaxx” feedback.

“I’m not sure why providing ‘information’ is seen as a negative thing,” said state Rep. Heather Carter, R-Cave Creek, who spent the last three legislative sessions as chairwoman of the House Health Committee and helped create the pilot program.

“Providing information doesn’t take away a parent’s choice to seek an exemption. … This is a major concern. Vaccines have saved lives for generations. We all want to live in safe and healthy communities.”

Kindergartners in Maricopa County as a whole are now below herd immunity for measles, said Dr. Rebecca Sunenshine, medical director for disease control for the Maricopa County Department of Public Health.

Maricopa County reflects national trends that show people who choose not to vaccinate their children tend to be higher income and white, sh

The American Academy of Pediatrics views non-medical vaccine exemptions to school-required immunizations “as inappropriate for individual, public health, and ethical reasons and advocates for their elimination,” a September 2016 policy statement says.

A California law that took effect in 2016  —  a little more than a year after a measles outbreak erupted at Disneyland and spread to include seven Arizona cases — prohibits personal belief exemptions. Children in California may still get exemptions for medical reasons, as long as their exemption is signed by a licensed physician. Otherwise, they aren’t allowed to enroll in school. 

Empathy is lost on some: Australian mum forced to explain how her baby dies after anti-vaxxers attack her heartbreaking post

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Freedom of speech is fundamental to western values.

Freedom of speech does not include idiocracy, and must be protected.

Nina Young writes that just a few days ago, Jordan DeRosier and her husband Justin found themselves in a living nightmare when their seven-month-old baby boy, Sloan, died suddenly in his cot.

Jordan announced Sloan’s death on her Facebook in a heartbreaking post, writing: “Our sweet rainbow warrior, your short time on this earth blessed so many. You were a gift to all who knew you, and an inspiration to all who didn’t. Your death has impacted this world, it has left an emptiness felt by so many.”

“Proof that you held with you so much light and grace. You were not able to live out our dreams for you, yet our dreams are where we will find you forever. We will forever be caught in this space between worlds, the space you now exist for us. Our longing for you is eternal, if only your life had been.”

Incredibly, although Jordan did not initially share the circumstances of her young son’s death, a number of anti-vaxxers were quick to comment online suggesting that vaccines had played a part in the tragedy. Some even went so far as to message Jordan directly to make the unfounded accusations.

The grieving mother was forced to go online and defend herself and her son’s memory writing on Facebook about the day the tragedy occurred.

“To those who keep commenting and messaging trying to blame vaccines for our sons death — stop,” she begged.

“Initially I had not wanted to explain the detailed circumstances of his death because of my guilt and the fear of condemnation from others. But I will not allow anyone to try and place blame where it does not belong.”

Jordan went on to explain that she had put her baby down to sleep with a blanket.

“He had pulled it through the crib rails somehow and gotten himself stuck in it,” she explained.

“You never think it will happen to you. You never think it will be your baby. Please do not put your babies to bed with a blanket. Please. He was seven months old, I thought because he was crawling, standing on his own, and climbing, that he would be fine with a blanket.

“This is the face of immense, unfathomable grief, the face of longing, of heartbreak, of self-inflicted GUILT. I will NEVER stop feeling responsible.”

Jordan hopes that people will learn from her experience rather than try to use it to push their own agendas.

I know all about grief and guilt.

And assholes with agendas.

I take great pride in my Friday sessions, where we share stories, struggles, and successes.

It’s making me a better person (maybe).

It’s a much better use of my time rather than sitting in yet another fucking faculty meeting, with the nerds from grade school who made it through to prof-land and feel entitled to inflict their previous abuse on grad students.

And have no intention of admitting weaknesses or self-examination.

Just part of the system

It’s a big old goofy world.

 

Science is hard, being a celebrity isn’t: Salmonella reductions in the US

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With six cases of measles linked to the University of Queensland and paleo-diet-for-babies moron Pete Evans being eviscerated by viewers, it seems like a bright time for science.

paleo.pete.evansThe boring, repetitive, peer-reviewed stuff that science is made of.

I want the bridges designed to cross the Brisbane river to function safely based on mathematics and engineering, not scientology.

Following on Chapman’s deserved put-down of state-sponsored jazz and food porn – sometimes referred to as NPR – I offer this paper about Salmonella, and the efforts required to reduce the number of sick people.

Salmonella enterica causes an estimated 1 million domestically acquired foodborne illnesses annually in the U.S. Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis (SE) is among the top three serovars of reported cases of Salmonella.

We examined trends in SE foodborne outbreaks from 1973 to 2009 using Joinpoint and Poisson regression. The annual number of SE outbreaks increased sharply in the 1970s and 1980s but declined significantly after 1990. Over the study period, SE outbreaks were most frequently attributed to foods containing eggs.

The average rate of SE outbreaks attributed to egg-containing foods reported by states began to decline significantly after 1990, and the proportion of SE outbreaks attributed to egg-containing foods began declining after 1997. Our results suggest that interventions initiated in the 1990s to decrease SE contamination of shell eggs may have been integral to preventing SE outbreaks.

The rise and decline in Salmonella enterica serovar Enteritidis outbreaks attributed to egg-containing foods in the United States, 1973–2009

Epidemiology & Infection

P. Wright, L. Richardson, B. E. Mahon, R. Rothenberg and D. J. Cole

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=9916508&fileId=S0950268815001867y

 

 

Are Australian raw milk pushers the same as U.S. anti-vaxxers?

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Adults can choose to do many things, like drink unpasteurized milk or not get vaccinated, but those choices should not be inflicted on children.

milk.dirty.toronto.1913A growing number of parents in recent years, especially in the U.S., have skipped their children’s vaccines because of a discredited belief that vaccines are linked to autism.

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 84 people in 14 states were diagnosed with measles from Jan. 1 through Jan. 28. Most were infected either at Disneyland or by someone who went there.

Controlling a measles outbreak is expensive and time-consuming. Each case in a 2008 measles outbreak cost taxpayers more than $10,000 as public health staff traced each patient’s contacts, quarantined patients and administered vaccines.

Now apply the same language to those in Victoria who plan to fight for their right to drink unpasteurized milk today (it’s Saturday in Australia) despite one death and four serious illnesses in children under five-years-old, announced in Dec. and linked to consumption of raw milk.

Three of the four children – all under five — developed hemolytic uremic syndrome, usually associated with shiga-toxin producing E. coli, such as E. coli O157, and the other developed cryptosporidiosis.

The death was attributed to HUS. How many others developed milder forms of illness is unknown.

Rebecca Freer, who is planning the drink-in outside a state Minister’s office in Melbourne, said exactly what anti-vaxxers would say: “I think they’re in denial that there’s a large subculture of raw milk drinkers, who are well-informed, educated people.”

In May 1943, Edsel Bryant Ford, the son of auto magnate Henry Ford, died at the age of 49 in Detroit, of what some claimed was a broken heart.

1418367700411Biology, however, decreed that Ford died of undulant fever, apparently brought on by drinking unpasteurized milk from the Ford dairy herd, at the behest of his father’s mistaken belief that all things natural must be good.

Shortly thereafter, my mother – then a child — developed undulate fever, which my grandfather, with no knowledge of microbiology, attributed to the dairy cows on his farm in Ontario, Canada.

He got rid of the cows and went into potatoes, and then asparagus.

In addition to the personal tragedies, every outbreak raises questions about risk and personal choice.

It’s true that choice is a good thing. People make risk-benefit decisions daily by smoking, drinking, driving, and especially in Brisbane, cycling.

But the 19th-century English utilitarian philosopher, John Stuart Mill, noted that absolute choice has limits, stating, “if it (in this case the consumption of raw unpasteurized milk) only directly affects the person undertaking the action, then society has no right to intervene, even if it feels the actor is harming himself.”

Excused from Mill’s libertarian principle are those people who are incapable of self-government — children.

Society generally regulates what is allowed for children – most parents aren’t having a scotch and a smoke with their 3-year-olds.

Celebrity chefs, would-be farmers and the wannabe fashionable can devoutly selectively spin scientific data. Does the Internet inform or merely solidify pre-existing beliefs?

Ten years ago, Ontario’s former chief medical health officer (that’s in Canada), said, “Some people feel that unpasteurized milk is either not bad for their health (they don’t believe the health risks) or they actually believe that it has healing properties because it’s all natural and untainted by government interference.”

Except poop happens, especially in a barn, and when it does people, usually kids, will get sick. That’s why drinking water is chlorinated and milk is pasteurized — one more example of how science can be used to enhance what nature provided.

Yes, lots of other foods make people sick, but in the case of milk, there is a solution to limit harm – pasteurization.

Society has a responsibility to the many — philosopher Mill also articulated how the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the one — to use knowledge to minimize harm.

The only thing lacking in pasteurized milk is the bacteria that make people, especially kids, seriously ill.

Adults, do whatever you think works to ensure a natural and healthy lifestyle, but please don’t impose your dietary regimes on those incapable of protecting themselves: your kids.