Public Enemy Number One

I do my best to live and let live. I understand that not everyone is going to agree about everything, and not everyone is going to agree with me. I’m passionate about the things I hold true, but I try not to beat people over the held with it. Each to their own, right?
However, there are times when things can harm others. One of my hot-button issues is marriage equality. I do not take kindly to those who would deny people I love and value the same rights that are afforded to the rest of us. Are people physically harmed by laws that prohibit same-sex marriage? Perhaps not, but they are emotionally and psychologically harmed, and they are being treated as “less than” the rest of us. I simply cannot abide that, and I will do whatever I can to ensure that these laws go by the wayside. It’s only a matter of time.

My other hot-button issue—probably my main one—is vaccines, which will come as no surprise to many of you. I’ve gotten riled up about this before. Well, I’m even more riled up now. In fact, I’m loaded and ready for bear.

I’m downright pissed.

We are starting to see more and more reports of preventable diseases in our country and in the world. Let me reiterate that. Preventable diseases. Outbreaks of measles in New York and British Columbia; outbreaks of pertussis in California and the Midwest; outbreaks of polio in Africa and Pakistan; twenty years after measles was considered to be all but eradicated, it is once again endemic—meaning that it exists there, rather than is a rarity—in the United Kingdom.

This is insane. This has to stop. These are life-threatening infections that can be prevented by vaccines. The worst case scenario is that people will die from these infections, and that happens all the time. Other consequences of infection are deafness, blindness, sterility, and brain damage. There have been over two dozen studies consisting of hundreds of thousands of children that show that there is absolutely no connection between vaccines and autism, but there are still those who cling to their irrational and unscientific beliefs that vaccines are harmful. The initial study that posited a connection, by Andrew Wakefield in the UK, consisted of twelve children. TWELVE. His study was shown to be fraudulent and unethical, it was retracted by the Lancet, and he was stripped of his medical license. He was working for a rival vaccine company, and he completely fabricated a bowel disease caused by the MMR vaccine.

THAT is the guy that these people are still following. An unethical shill for a company that wanted to market an alternative vaccine.

I’m all for letting people live their lives as they see fit, but that doesn’t apply here. Because these decisions aren’t just impacting your child. They are impacting the newborn next door who is too young to be vaccinated. They are impacting your elderly mother who can’t fight off infections as easily. They are impacting the guy you see at the grocery store who is battling cancer. They are impacting the person with AIDS, the person who had a lung transplant, the person with rheumatoid arthritis, the person who had a bone marrow transplant to fight breast cancer or testicular cancer or leukemia. YOUR selfish and uninformed decisions have the potential to literally kill people, including people that I love.

So I am done with this “I understand your viewpoint” bullshit. Because I do NOT understand your viewpoint. You are basing your decisions on a discredited study, you know nothing about legitimate science or how the immune system works, and you have decided that your thousands of hours of Google research of fringe websites and alleged scientific papers that are not peer-reviewed is somehow the equivalent of people who have spent years in school learning about how these things actually work and who have spent their lives trying to find a way to prevent others from dealing with these diseases and their consequences.

I am past the point where I am willing to say that your concerns about vaccinations have merit. They don’t. You don’t understand the first thing about medicine or vaccines or the immune system, and you suck. You are willing to put your own child at risk because of your delusions. Even if your child caught one of these preventable diseases and survived, why would you subject them to the fever and potential trauma that can come with these diseases? Why would you take that risk? Why would you knowingly subject others to such a risk? This is monstrous. You are a threat to public health and you are a threat to a healthy society.

If you want to continue on this ridiculous pathway, go live in a commune in the woods or on an island and take your chances there. Stay the fuck out of our public spaces and deal with your infections on your own. I pity your kids, and I wish I could charge you with criminal negligence. But we’re not at that point yet, so just go away and stop infecting people because you’re too rock stupid to understand how serious these infections are and how safe the vaccines are.

Dr. Paul Offit has said that things probably won’t change until we start seeing a comeback of these preventable diseases, and people once again understand how serious they can be. I’m sorry to say that it seems that he is right. We are now seeing a resurgence of these infections, and it is up to the rest of us to push back against the ignorance and say that we value the societal contract. If we are to be a part of society, we need to understand that our actions have consequences. When you make that misinformed decision for your own child, you are making it not just for them, but for many others.

I am to the point of shunning and public shaming. I don’t want to be around you if you choose to ignore vaccines, and I will not hesitate to point out that you are ignorant about medicine, immunology, and microbiology. The tide is turning against you, anti-vaxxers. As more people come down with preventable diseases, we will blame YOU.

Count on it.

Bits and Pieces

Good grief, Billie Joe, what an adorable little punk you are! More on that in a moment.

Got the estimate on Blacky today, and good news! It came in at much less than anticipated, and he is totally NOT totaled! The appraiser knows and has dealt with my cousin and his body shop, and I emailed my cousin to start to figure out what we need to do and when to bring it down. They’re going to start looking for parts now, and we’ll probably take it down on Saturday. The insurance company called after they got the estimate, and the agent was super helpful. She’s going to send out the rental voucher as well as medical forms so that Ken can get reimbursed for new lenses on his glasses. (Got a chip on them from the broken glass...if it had been on the edge, no big deal, but it’s right in his line of site.) I told her that I’ve been really impressed with how quickly they are moving on this. Thank you, Farm Bureau! You guys rock!

What a relief, because we would have dealt with it if we’d needed to, but we weren’t quite ready for a new car yet. Very happy that Blacky can be fixed!

It was a warm day today, so after I did my workout, I did a couple of things and then sat outside and read for a while. There was a nice breeze, and it’s not too bad in here. Tomorrow could be another story, because we’re supposed to get hot and humid again, possibly breaking a record. Urgh!

Late this afternoon, I picked up with my Coursera courses, watching the latest video for the Vaccines course. One of the topics was the polio vaccine. It’s amazing to me how many kids have been saved from this virus, and I hope to see it completely eradicated in my lifetime. We’re getting very close! I watched a couple more lectures from this week’s History of Rock lectures, and enjoyed them very much. I’ll try to spread it out a little more this week, instead of watching them all in one day.

I was listening to “Nimrod” while working out today, and I love the song “All the Time.” I LOVE that opening riff! I like these lines, too:

Wasting time down a bumfuck road
And I don't know where the hell it'll go

Man, if that’s not small town life, I don’t know what is. And really, where DID all the time go?

Salud! TURN IT UP!

The other class

No, not socioeconomic classes! Remember, Rick Santorum says we don’t have those here. That’s Marxism talk!

Today I started the second class I’m taking through Coursera. This one, Vaccines, is actually relative to what I did for many years (Microbiology), and it is taught by Dr. Paul Offit, who is an outspoken critic of the anti-vaxxer movement. He touched briefly on that in the introduction video, in which he talked about the three vaccination exemptions in the United States.

Medical: You have an allergy to one of the components of the vaccine, like eggs in influenza vaccines.

Religious: Obvious, but he questioned why any religion would specifically ban vaccinations, because religious books like the Bible and the Koran were written long before vaccinations were invented. He said this seemed to originate more with the Christian Science movement, which says that infections like smallpox are a “state of mind” and should be prayed away. No comment, but you can probably guess what I think about that!

Philosophical: This is the exemption that anti-vaxxers use. They choose not to vaccinate based on their personal belief system. Dr. Offit had a great point in that it doesn’t matter whether or not you believe vaccines work. They have been shown over and over in thousands of studies to effectively prevent infectious diseases. The supposed autism connection has been thoroughly disproven, the original paper from Andrew Wakefield completely discredited, and his medical license in England was stripped.

Then Dr. Offit talked about the earliest forms of vaccines, which involved whole animals for production. These included smallpox, polio, and rabies. The rabies vaccine developed by Louis Pasteur is still in use.

I enjoyed it very much, and I took the quiz. I found myself wishing there were a couple more lectures this week, but that’s it for the week. This isn’t anything new for me, but it’s something that I’m still interested in and it’s fun for me to do this course. I don’t get college credit for it, but I don’t really need that, do I? This is just learning for learning’s sake, and that can be the best kind.

Callie Grace

We met up tonight with several family members at one of our favorite places, Maxi’s. Me and Ken, my sister Diana and her husband Tom, Shane and Matt, and Tom’s daughters Heather and Jennifer, and Heather’s husband Rey and their son Liam. Still with me? It was ten of us for food and drinks and conversation and laughter. Liam turned five years old this week, and he is such a super cute and smart kid who lifts everyone’s spirits. He totally conked out early on, but came to life later and we had a lot of fun rawring like dinosaurs and just being silly!

It was not exactly happy circumstances that brought us all together this time. Tom’s father, Heather and Jennifer’s grandfather, left us this week. Heather and Jen and family were able to come out from California to be with their Indiana family for a sad occasion which turned into a family get-together...and I know Ben would approve! Tonight was a lot of fun, a chance for some of us to meet up and celebrate our connections with each other. I hate to get too smarmy or sentimental, but damn...I love each and every person who was there tonight, and I can honestly say that I would take a bullet for any one of them. No lie.

To top it all off, we were discussing various political things and science things...and Heather pushed my buttons about vaccinations. She knows that is my hot-button issue, and she knows that just the mention of it gets me going! (Her and Rey are smart parents who follow the science, and Liam has all of his immunizations. Yay!) I mentioned that I recently got my booster shot for Tdap, and that no one there was going to be getting diphtheria or pertussis from me! Heather is at risk for infections, Liam is at risk as a young person, and we all, even as adults, can pass infectious diseases like pertussis on to those who are at risk.

Well, our server (who was awesome, by the way) came up to us and said, “Did I hear you all talking about pertussis?” We said yes, we were talking about vaccinations. It is making me cry to think about this, but she said that her daughter died from whooping cough (pertussis), and she is now an advocate for immunization and awareness of the dangers of not vaccinating. I went over to her and gave her a hug and said that I support her 100%, and she brought us all bracelets that have her daughter’s name on them: Callie Grace.

This is the very real face of non-vaccination. This woman lost her baby daughter because her daughter was too young to be immunized and she caught it from someone else.

I’ve written here about the importance of vaccinations, but it’s one thing to just write about it. It’s a whole other thing to encounter a person who lost a child to an infectious disease that is very preventable. It was astounding to me, and a very moving moment, to be discussing this with family and to have someone overhear us and say, “Yes...I know. And I lost my daughter to this infection.”  

Here’s to my family, here’s to those who we are missing, and here’s to Callie Grace.

Double poke

I had to have blood drawn this morning for the wellness program through Ken’s work. It was fasting, and although I don’t have any problem going all day without eating, I sure missed my Trop-A-Rocka Snapple this morning! I went to the grocery store afterwards, and managed to not buy the store out, but I scarfed down a bowl of cottage cheese when I got home. I was getting pretty hungry!

While I was at the doctor’s office, I decided to put my money where my shoulder is...or something like that. I can’t recall the last time I had a tetanus shot, and with living out in the country, I thought it wasn’t a bad idea to get a booster. Also, I’ve been reading about outbreaks of pertussis (whooping cough) in various parts of the country, and figured I’d go for the trifecta and get the Tdap, which includes diphtheria in a lower dose for adults. As a strong vaccine advocate, I did my part to help with herd immunity.

As an adult, I wasn’t worried about getting pertussis myself; it’s mild and self-limiting in adults. But with a couple of young great-nephews, as well as an elderly mom and mother-in-law, I thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to get it. I had the vaccine when I was a kid, of course, but the whole-cell vaccine used at that time is one of the least effective vaccines and immunity wanes over time. I’ve been reading that the acellular vaccine used now might not protect as long as anticipated, so I suspect there will be more studies to find out what is going on.

The current outbreaks I’m reading about, though, are due to unvaccinated populations. And if you’ve been paying attention, I think you know how I feel about THAT! I’m to the point where I don’t think there should be any religious exemptions—you’re not just endangering your own child, you’re endangering others around your kids—but I don’t see that happening anytime soon. To take it a step further, I think anyone who doesn’t obtain medical treatment for their kid based on religious/personal beliefs should be prosecuted for negligence and endangerment. I am just appalled by such behavior. Those kids aren’t making their own decisions.

Anyway, I’ve got a slightly sore arm, but nothing major. However, if I suddenly develop mental retardation, you’ll know what happened. You’ll be able to see the signs, I’m sure. I’ll start talking about voting for Mittens, and about how Planned Parenthood should be defunded, and demanding to see NOBAMA’S birth certificate. [snicker]

Another fruit fly moment

Anderson Cooper recently discussed the endless parade of Michele Bachmann gaffes and errors, culminating in her assertion the day after the latest debate that the HPV vaccine has serious side effects, including “mental retardation.”

Setting aside the fact that she seems to be confusing “mental retardation” with brain damage, there is no case for either consequence from this vaccine. I was reminded of the infamous Sarah Palin fruit fly moment (and no, I will NEVER let it go!), in which she ridiculed “fruit fly research in Paris, France.”

It might sound like a strange thing to trigger that last straw, but that was it for me. After that, I stopped being nice about Palin, because I saw that she had no intelligence when it came to science, and even worse, she had no desire to learn. Anything that was beyond her scope of knowledge was deemed foolish and a waste of money. (Never mind that research using fruit flies has numerous applications, including upon autism research.)

I’ve never given Bachmann a break; I recognized from the very beginning that she was a homophobic moron who wants to institute a theocracy in my country. Her remarks about the HPV vaccine, however, put her on a whole other plane of ignorance and irresponsibility. Her initial point in the debate about Governor Perry possibly involved in pushing the vaccine in order to benefit the manufacturer, Merck, was a legitimate one. Her assertions that it was a “dangerous injection” were not legitimate, and the following day, she took it up a notch and mentioned a woman who came up to her and tearfully told her that her daughter became “mentally retarded” after being vaccinated for HPV.

Bachmann tried to portray the vaccine mandate as government overreach, and I have no doubt that she preyed on typical conservative Christian fears that a vaccine for a sexually transmitted infection will lead to promiscuity. Just like free condoms lead to sexual promiscuity. Never mind the fact that it can keep a young woman (and with the new guidelines for vaccinating young boys, it protects them as well) from getting not only genital warts, but it can keep her from getting cervical cancer down the road.

Think about that for a moment. I still remember how exciting it was when we first started checking for HPV in my lab, because of the numerous studies that showed a correlation between HPV infection and subsequent cervical cancer. Showing the presence of the virus (and certain strains, which are stronger predictors of cancer risk) allowed for earlier detection and more aggressive treatment, resulting in greater survival rates. When the vaccine came out, it was even more of a breakthrough, because we were essentially vaccinating against cancer. This is astounding to me, and I honestly cannot understand anyone who would place the nebulous possibility of their children having premarital sex earlier than usual (or who thinks that their kids wouldn’t have premarital sex if it weren’t for those pesky free condoms and protection against a sexually transmitted cancer-causing virus) above the childrens’ long-term health and protection against cancer.

There has been no proof that vaccines cause autism. I’ve written about this extensively. For Bachmann to suggest that the HPV vaccine causes “mental retardation” is not just ignorant, it could possibly cause many parents to forgo the vaccine for their children and leave them open to this very common sexually transmitted infection and later cervical cancer. As someone who lost a very dear relative, my Aunt Bert, to cervical cancer, I take it seriously. So should Bachmann, if she can manage to think of the greater good when it comes to public health rather than pandering to the anti-government teabagger loons.

Bachmann made her pronouncement after speaking to one tearful mother who was certain that a vaccine caused her daughter to suddenly develop “mental retardation.” There are very real, genetic causes for such impairment, and vaccines aren’t one of them. Bachmann’s bizarre insistence on giving full credence to one parent and ignoring numerous studies, extensive research, and thorough vaccine trials should rightfully doom her candidacy. She is obviously someone who just does not want to learn and who does not trust scientists...or even science.

Hear no evil

Wow, you guys are the best. You know what really helped me, other than a good night’s sleep? It was hearing that several others are also on a short fuse. Somehow knowing that I wasn’t alone in my frustration and irritation eased the distress. I don’t want anyone else to feel the way I did yesterday, but I appreciate those of you who sympathized and said you were kind of feeling the same thing. Like I always say, I get by with a little help from my friends. I think someone might have said that before me, but I’m not sure who. As far as homilies go, though, you can’t beat it with a drumstick! [wink]

I was in a much better frame of mind today, and even when something did grate on my nerves, it wasn’t quite on the last one. I was able to just laugh about it and shake it off. In my previous entry, I mentioned something about giving valid advice to people and having them ignore it. That’s always bugged me. If you’re going to ask me a question, and I give you the answer you didn’t want and you choose to ignore it, why did you waste my time by asking me the question? If that’s what you’re going to do, don’t bother asking me and wasting both your time and mine, okay?

I get very frustrated when people don’t listen to me, and especially frustrated when it’s something that I happen to know quite a bit about. It happens to all of us, I know, but it doesn’t make it any more tolerable for me.

Today I was talking to someone on the phone, and the subject of autism came up. This person has a relative in another state who happens to have a kid diagnosed with autism. This person said, “And the mother thinks—and I agree with her—that those inoculations had something to do with it.” *ding ding ding ding* Many of you know that that is one of my hot-button issues, if not THE hot-button issue for me. I said, “I completely disagree. They have shown over and over that there is no link between vaccines and autism.” This person said, “But they didn’t see any signs of it until after the shots.” I said, “That’s often because the signs of autism show up and can be diagnosed around that time. There isn’t a connection between vaccines and autism. This is kind of my thing.” The response?

“Whatever.”

That’s right. When talking with someone who actually knows a bit about the subject and has read extensively about it, they ignored my comments by saying, “Whatever.” I am not an epidemiologist, and I don’t pretend to know all the details of vaccines; I don’t know the schedule of vaccines, and I don’t really know what all is recommended; my expertise was in trying to grow or identify the infectious diseases that were present. But most of us in the lab followed trends in diseases, and tracked the statistics released in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, and I also checked Indiana’s numbers. Not to mention reading up on trends around the world and tracking where outbreaks occurred, and why. So when I talk about vaccines, I’m not talking out of my ass.

I guess I can chalk it up to people not wanting to have their ideas challenged. I guess it’s easier to listen to a young mother say that she firmly believes that her child’s autism is due to vaccinations than have a microbiologist explain that it is faulty science and has no basis in reality and came about because an unethical physician conducted bad research on a whopping TWELVE kids. No matter that the physician’s paper was yanked from the journal in which it was published, the research was denounced, and the doctor’s medical license was stripped. No matter that over twenty subsequent studies, involving thousands of children, showed absolutely no correlation. It’s easier to listen to junk science and accept it than to try to have someone who actually understands the issue and has read plenty about it explain it in detail. It’s easier to dismiss what I say than to make an effort to listen to me and maybe learn something about it.

Is it any wonder that I don’t get closer to such people? Is it any wonder that I’m feeling more than a little misanthropic lately? Is it any wonder I’m sane at all? I think someone said that before me, but I’m not sure who. Maybe when Charon ferries me across to Hades, I’ll think of it. [wink]