19th April 2009, 12:14 AM
Well actually antibacterial soap, aside from being tested to not be any more effective than just plain regular soap, also runs the risk of producing resistant strains.
Handling disease is a good health concern, but throwing antibacterial stuff at everything is excessive and ineffectual at best and downright dangerous in the long term at worst. The better ways are to simply prevent the spread of disease, and that's as simple as regularly washing your funky bad self down now and again combined with doing your part to prevent the spread of things like flu by, say, staying home when you have it or if you MUST leave, try to wear a mask and not touch everything everywhere you go. Also, keep your food away from your garbage. Yoiu know, stuff we know as obvious but the dark ages were totally unaware of.
As to autism, the chance is 0 from all available evidence. Even trying a concillatory "next to 0" isn't accurate enough. Firstly, autism is a genetic disorder. Secondly, all testing has shown no effect. That's all there is to it.
Recently the anti-vax movement have changed their argument in the face of the rising tide of outbreaks of measles and the like. Now they're saying they are "in favor of vaccinations when they are made safe". Who gets to decide when it's "safe"? You've yet to give good reason to believe it's unsafe to begin with. What, will the next change in how vaccinations are distributed come under fire the moment some kid starts showing signs of autism? News flash, there's such a thing as culture, the vast majority of kids get vaccination shots. Soime kids suffer from autism. There's a good chance of overlap, so a single anecdotal case of "my kid had a shot and then later got diagnosed with autism" proves nothing.
But such a change assumes that the medical industry would actually be willing or capable of finding new ways to distribute it, and they'd have no good reason to. Heck, the new solution would itself be totally untested and would have to undergo years of clinical trials! Would the parents suddenly think they've won the second it's announced and start demanding it be applied even without testing? Considering how all these parents are using completely unproven and untested "natural" remedies of all stripes out there in the wild with complete abandon and no questioning whether THOSE either help or harm, I have to wonder.
It also suggests that the scientists would be put in a position of potentially being forced to lie just to get people to take their medicine, treating the public like a dog and having to sneak the medicine into their food. It's a rather horrible moral scenario that would make for an episode of Star Trek.
And what of the more unsrupulous companies? Well consider the fact that many food companies will put labels like "fat free" and "sugar free" on products that never contained either to begin with (Fat free candy? You don't say!). I can see doctor's offices everywhere putting big labels on their advertisements saying "Our vaccines now safe!", which aside from just delaying the conflict also furthers the real issue of general public ignorance of the scientific method and when it's exposed as how silly it is will just raise public distrust of modern medicine even further.
The other scenario is simply that parents NEVER accept ANY changes made to vaccines, ALWAYS thinking that no matter what they make it's just unsafe, which is very well possible as some vaccines HAVE had improvements and changes over the years since this ridiculous fear was brought up. I remember back then the argument was that vaccines were no different than antibiotics and just created "immune strains", even though vaccines are an entirely different thing which are not just a substance to kill bacteria but rather are a trigger to get one's own immune system primed to fight disease it hasn't encountered in the "wild" before by using a heavily damaged version.
Parents are afraid, and this is not in itself a bad thing. It's when they don't decide to do the research that the fear ends up hurting them. They just react, they don't check their premises, and in their desperate attempt to protect their children from a fantasy threat, they expose them to a very real one, and worse expose many more indirectly to that same threat. Parents do not "own" their children. Their kids have a right to have the latest medicine and a right to be protected from bad choices made by their parents. Before one assumes I'm talking about the state removing rights of the parents to raise their children and care for them any way they please, let me say that YES I'm suggesting that to a limited extent, and YES our society ALREADY agrees to that on a number of things. One can already get arrested for depriving a child of food and shelter, abandoning them, or abusing them. Depriving a child of immediate emergency care is also a criminal act. I suggest that depriving them of long term medical care such as vaccinations should also be criminal, and in this case the extra charge of public endangerment should be added to that.
At a certain point, the beliefs of the parents have to be ignored. The parent can fervently believe that relying on a hospital to fix a broken bone is wrong and will make the child worse, but in the end they should never have held such a belief to begin with and are responsible for what happens. The same in this case. A parent may very well fervently believe that they are making their child sick by giving them a vaccination, but if it is not based in sound evidence, their belief is again irrelevent and harmful to the child.
Handling disease is a good health concern, but throwing antibacterial stuff at everything is excessive and ineffectual at best and downright dangerous in the long term at worst. The better ways are to simply prevent the spread of disease, and that's as simple as regularly washing your funky bad self down now and again combined with doing your part to prevent the spread of things like flu by, say, staying home when you have it or if you MUST leave, try to wear a mask and not touch everything everywhere you go. Also, keep your food away from your garbage. Yoiu know, stuff we know as obvious but the dark ages were totally unaware of.
As to autism, the chance is 0 from all available evidence. Even trying a concillatory "next to 0" isn't accurate enough. Firstly, autism is a genetic disorder. Secondly, all testing has shown no effect. That's all there is to it.
Recently the anti-vax movement have changed their argument in the face of the rising tide of outbreaks of measles and the like. Now they're saying they are "in favor of vaccinations when they are made safe". Who gets to decide when it's "safe"? You've yet to give good reason to believe it's unsafe to begin with. What, will the next change in how vaccinations are distributed come under fire the moment some kid starts showing signs of autism? News flash, there's such a thing as culture, the vast majority of kids get vaccination shots. Soime kids suffer from autism. There's a good chance of overlap, so a single anecdotal case of "my kid had a shot and then later got diagnosed with autism" proves nothing.
But such a change assumes that the medical industry would actually be willing or capable of finding new ways to distribute it, and they'd have no good reason to. Heck, the new solution would itself be totally untested and would have to undergo years of clinical trials! Would the parents suddenly think they've won the second it's announced and start demanding it be applied even without testing? Considering how all these parents are using completely unproven and untested "natural" remedies of all stripes out there in the wild with complete abandon and no questioning whether THOSE either help or harm, I have to wonder.
It also suggests that the scientists would be put in a position of potentially being forced to lie just to get people to take their medicine, treating the public like a dog and having to sneak the medicine into their food. It's a rather horrible moral scenario that would make for an episode of Star Trek.
And what of the more unsrupulous companies? Well consider the fact that many food companies will put labels like "fat free" and "sugar free" on products that never contained either to begin with (Fat free candy? You don't say!). I can see doctor's offices everywhere putting big labels on their advertisements saying "Our vaccines now safe!", which aside from just delaying the conflict also furthers the real issue of general public ignorance of the scientific method and when it's exposed as how silly it is will just raise public distrust of modern medicine even further.
The other scenario is simply that parents NEVER accept ANY changes made to vaccines, ALWAYS thinking that no matter what they make it's just unsafe, which is very well possible as some vaccines HAVE had improvements and changes over the years since this ridiculous fear was brought up. I remember back then the argument was that vaccines were no different than antibiotics and just created "immune strains", even though vaccines are an entirely different thing which are not just a substance to kill bacteria but rather are a trigger to get one's own immune system primed to fight disease it hasn't encountered in the "wild" before by using a heavily damaged version.
Parents are afraid, and this is not in itself a bad thing. It's when they don't decide to do the research that the fear ends up hurting them. They just react, they don't check their premises, and in their desperate attempt to protect their children from a fantasy threat, they expose them to a very real one, and worse expose many more indirectly to that same threat. Parents do not "own" their children. Their kids have a right to have the latest medicine and a right to be protected from bad choices made by their parents. Before one assumes I'm talking about the state removing rights of the parents to raise their children and care for them any way they please, let me say that YES I'm suggesting that to a limited extent, and YES our society ALREADY agrees to that on a number of things. One can already get arrested for depriving a child of food and shelter, abandoning them, or abusing them. Depriving a child of immediate emergency care is also a criminal act. I suggest that depriving them of long term medical care such as vaccinations should also be criminal, and in this case the extra charge of public endangerment should be added to that.
At a certain point, the beliefs of the parents have to be ignored. The parent can fervently believe that relying on a hospital to fix a broken bone is wrong and will make the child worse, but in the end they should never have held such a belief to begin with and are responsible for what happens. The same in this case. A parent may very well fervently believe that they are making their child sick by giving them a vaccination, but if it is not based in sound evidence, their belief is again irrelevent and harmful to the child.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)