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Wolfie

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Um, firstly she never said that she was entirely against it and in fact she said it seemed like a good idea and secondly a vaccination against HPV isn't even comparable to a vaccination against the measles or some such thing.

Um, so she can make choices about which vaccines are important enough for her to get, but others who do the same thing are anti-vaxers whom she can't stand.

What she said about Gardisil can be applied to any vaccine out there. And the fact that we approach it as optional compared to others is because it hasn't been mandated for young children yet (but it will be eventually), and enough people are getting it that the public health department hasn't felt the need to publish pictures of toy ducks crying over HPV casualties (but it will eventually).

Many parents in my generation felt the same about the chicken pox vaccine, and others against diseases we'd never heard of.

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It is one of those illnesses that most children do get mildly. But not all. It can be very serious and some children have to be hospitalized and some even die.

As with any illness.

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Supposing the fact that diptheria, polio, tetanus etc, are all but gone, it is not a miracle that I am alive.

Do you even know what tetanus is? If you don't get a tetanus shot, I think you're crazy, but it won't affect me. (Actually it's included in the current Pertussus vaccination) Tetanus is a soil borne illness that is still very alive and well. If you accidentally puncture yourself with something dirty, you can get tetanus. It isn't a communcable disease. Have you heard of lockjaw? Yeah, that's tetanus. Often the shot is given to you if you show up in the ER with a deep wound.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmedhealth/PMH0001640/

Living on an acre, and with hobbies that put my at risk, this is the one vaccine that I really have kept track of besides the flu vaccine until the recent pertussis outbreaks. (And it turns out that I was protected from the pertussis because I kept track of the tetanus.)

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The Spanish flu freaks me out. Luckily, it's not around anymore. If there was a safe, effective Spanish flu vax I might actually get it. Supposing, though, that the flu is still out there making its rounds. ;)

The Spanish Flu was....drumroll...the first of two H1N1 flu pandemics. Guess when the other one was? Oh yeah, in 2009...the swine flu.

A team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine found that the 2009 H1N1 vaccine actually provides some cross-protection against the 1918 flu.

So, there is your vaccine.

You really come across as incredibly uneducated about the impact of diseases around the world currently, and through history, how vaccines actually work, or how even a flu today can be just as deadly as the Spanish Flu - but now we have been methods to treat or prevent secondary symptoms (like pneumonia, or cytokine storms - the latter which happen in people with strong and responsive immune systems) that often killed Spanish Flu victims, as well as different hygiene and lifestyle factors.

And I also doubt that they played such a huge role in modern health as people think they do
.

So polio, pertussis, etc all would have "cured themselves" if we let them? Vaccines do not live in a bubble, better hygiene, better antivirals, research, etc ALL play a role in modern health, but it is just naive to think vaccines did not have a major impact on modern health. Better hygiene does not fix everything. While you may like to believe you have super-genes, you ARE protected by herd immunity from those who have gotten vaccinated. You are therefore exposed far less often to the potentially deadly viruses that DO still exist.

They had never been exposed to anything like smallpox, had they? It was totally foreign. These people would not normally be exposed to smallpox had they gone about their quaint little lives. The immune system isn't as well-equipped to handle things it has never seen anything like before. Like the Native Americans could have seen the ship's sails of the Europeans exploring the Americas and had no idea WTF they were seeing or dealing with.

WTF do you think vaccines DO? They allow the immune system to develop an immunity to things it has "never seen before".

You cannot just hide in a bubble these days and figure you won't get exposed to things, unless you NEVER venture outside and never have anyone ever come over. People travel easily from country to country. There are people everywhere, all the time. A virus can jump aboard a plan in its host in China, and be in Idaho the next day (along with a bunch of other passengers), and spreading around a shopping mall, a daycare, etc within the week.

Also, trade babies and children with weak immune systems who are not well equipped to handle things they have not seen before and rely on herd immunity until they can get vaccinated themselves. Babies and children still die or are severely disabled by pertussis, measles, etc.

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So I should inject myself with 70 vaccines just to protect your daughter, even though vaccination could compromise MY health?

I thought you had an amazingly good immune system!

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Um, so she can make choices about which vaccines are important enough for her to get, but others who do the same thing are anti-vaxers whom she can't stand.

What she said about Gardisil can be applied to any vaccine out there. And the fact that we approach it as optional compared to others is because it hasn't been mandated for young children yet (but it will be eventually), and enough people are getting it that the public health department hasn't felt the need to publish pictures of toy ducks crying over HPV casualties (but it will eventually).

Many parents in my generation felt the same about the chicken pox vaccine, and others against diseases we'd never heard of.

HPV is a sexually transmitted infection. As such, you transmit it to people that you have sex with. Even if you have anonymous sex with a stranger, it is still a very personal connection. You can transmit something like the measles or whooping cough to people within your environment. Unless you live in a fucking bubble, you run the risk of giving it to people that you have only minor interactions with or even people you don't interact with. Thus, not the same thing at all.

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The thing is, a lot of these diseases were becoming so rare that you run the risk of not being properly diagnosed. I had scarlet fever (there is no vaccine for it) when I was 12 and it took over 6 weeks for anyone to diagnose it. They just kept saying "It's just a fever, just take some antibiotics". It was only after one doctor went into his office and got his grandfather's old medical book and looked up random symptoms that he was able to properly diagnose me. By then I had lost over 20 pounds (I am 5'6" and I was under 100 pounds at this point), missed over a month of school, my skin was peeling all over (in thick sheets, not little shavings like when you get a sun burn. Think about the thickness of heavy cardstock), and my hair was falling out. As a result of having it, I am ALWAYS cold. I knew someone else who had it and the same thing happened to her: she is always cold. I will be shivering if it's under 75 degrees. If they would've diagnosed it properly it would have been over with pretty quickly. I heard someone ELSE say that scarlet fever is "just a fever with a rash". Yeah, if you manage to know what it is and treat it immediately. Otherwise it goes on for weeks and it's miserable. Anywho, a lot of anti-vaccine people say "Oh this disease is pretty mild, just do this and that". Mild if you fight it off right away. If you've never seen what diphtheria does (or if you don't even know what it IS), how can you properly treat it?

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The HPV vaccine is the only shot I've had a bad reaction to, and I was disturbed at how lightly my doctor took it and how she tried to convince me it was "all in my head!" or "just anxiety about the shot!" The truth is I have zero anxiety about needles/shots and had never had a bad reaction before. I stopped after the frist two shots because the reaction got worse with the second and my doctor still didn't take it seriously, so I lost some faith in her too.

I only have sons but I don't know what I'll do if I end up having a daughter. I guess I'll have to look into whether the fact that I had a bad reaction gives my kids a bigger chance of having a bad reaction, too.

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The only thing that is weird to me it vaccinating against chicken pox. In the UK it's seen as a minor childhood illness, something to 'get out of the way' and isn't vaccinated against.

I never had chicken pox as a child. I was possibly exposed to it (though no one was sure if the girl was contagious when I was around her), but I never got it. However, when I was headed off to college, my Doctor pretty much insisted that I get it. It was new at the time, but as soon as I heard about it, I wanted it. Chicken pox in normally (but not always) a non life threatening childhood disease, but if you get it as an adult it is far more dangerous. I was thrilled to have something to protect me.

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My mom had measles when she was a kid (about 65 years ago). She missed so much of first grade she had to repeat it and she has had issues with her hearing all her life. You betcha she loved her some vaccines for us kids. She got us vaccinated right on schedule for everything that was available (in those days, mumps and chicken pox were still childhood diseases and I had both).

Just to swing over to another subject, regarding deaths from H1N1, it was noted that during the 1918 influenza pandemic, the age cohort that was hit the hardest was not the babies or the elderly, but young people. That was partially due to the military mobilization going on during World War I, but it's believed the elderly probably had immunity from an earlier, similar flu epidemic and I don't remember why babies had immunity. I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the deaths from H1N1 followed the same trend.

And, for the record, "Spanish influenza" was by all accounts horrible. People who are against vaccinating for the flu ought to read histories of the pandemic and how people died (basically in their own bodily fluids). And then think about, "gee, would I like to see my kid die that way?"

The babies weren't immune - in fact, their weaker immunity systems protected them. The spanish flu provoked an extreme immune response, and the stronger your immune system, the more likely you were to die - your lungs would just fill up with dead cells and fluid. Their bodies were vastly overreacting to the flu and killed itself. That's how a lot of the H1N1 folks died as well, which is scary, because even today, we can't really treat complete lung failure well, and certainly not in epidemic like numbers.

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I recommend the book The Panic Viris by Seth Mnookin. It's about the history of the current vaccine scare. Before the anti-vax crowd targeted the MMR vaccine, they were making claims about the DPT vaccine. There was a chilling account of a baby a few years ago who had whooping cough, but none of the doctors in the emergency room recognized it. The only thing that saved her was when the oldest doctor in the hospital was passing by and heard the characteristic coughing. She was the only doctor who was working during the last period when whooping cough was more common. On the PBS Frontline episode about vaccines, they had a doctor who made it her mission to compile videos of people with vaccine-preventable illnesses and show them to young doctors and EMTs, ones who are too young to remember when those diseases were more common.

This Jezebel article raises another interesting point. If vaccine-preventable illnesses become more common, the only way to prevent them spreading will be through quarantines. This worked back when women with small children were mostly stay-at-home mothers, but today most women work either by choice or by necessity. Are employers going to want to hire mothers if there is a good chance they will be out of commission for several weeks to take care of a quarantined child?

http://jezebel.com/5119830/who-needs-sc ... y-mccarthy

Fantastic book! I heard Mnookin interviewed in NPR and I learned a lot about the ability of a small group of mostly non-scientists to convince large numbers of people of something for which there is no evidence. I like what Dr. Orfit says, too, in that "Anecdata is not the plural of evidence". So sad that we wasted so much time and so many research dollars on the whole hoax.

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So I should inject myself with 70 vaccines just to protect your daughter, even though vaccination could compromise MY health? I'm sorry about your daughters health issues.

I thought you said you had some superhuman immune system? Make your mind up. If you immune system is robust the vaccines will be a doddle for you.

Babies get plenty of vaccinations, if they were "too young to be vaccinated", they wouldn't be jabbed straight out of the womb. But, it's not my job to protect everybody. It's my job to make informed health decisions for myself, the same way you make informed health decisions for yourself and your daughter. My informed health decision is that I will not consent to being injected with foreign chemicals, matter or material in the form of vaccines.

Babies don't receive every single vaccine at birth. Those vaccinations go on throughout childhood. So for a while, they are unprotected and don't have your superhuman immune system.

I get very bothered when people get angry (well, not when they get angry - when they gang up) when they hear that I'm non-vaxed. Most people, however, seem to be on the same side. Once a friend came over when I was younger, and they were complaining about a shot they'd had earlier that day, and upon hearing I never got them, stared quite seriously and asked, "How are you even alive?" I laughed pretty hard. :lol: "Well, I'm moving and don't appear to be dying!"

Supposing the fact that diptheria, polio, tetanus etc, are all but gone, it is not a miracle that I am alive.

The reason they are all but gone in the West is due to vaccination. However the more people who refuse vaccination, the sooner they will be back. We've seen that already when MMR rates dropped.

I should add that I am not "anti-vax". I said that last night because I was tired and annoyed. I'm more pro-choice. I don't wail on people's informed medical decisions, so I'd like that people don't wail on my informed medical decision either.

I'm not saying that vaccines have not been useful. In diseases that cannot be treated successfully, they may be a good thing. I sometimes doubt their effectiveness, however. And I also doubt that they played such a huge role in modern health as people think they do.

They had never been exposed to anything like smallpox, had they? It was totally foreign. These people would not normally be exposed to smallpox had they gone about their quaint little lives. The immune system isn't as well-equipped to handle things it has never seen anything like before. Like the Native Americans could have seen the ship's sails of the Europeans exploring the Americas and had no idea WTF they were seeing or dealing with.

Ought we to force everyone in the world to be injected because of Sola's child?

There area MANY people who have no choice but rely on herd immunity. Even some people who have been vaccinated still have to rely on it because they have weakened immune systems, people with cancer for example.

I don't want to be harsh, as I empathise with having a sick child. When you force everyone to do somethings to benefit a small minority, you take away people's autonomy and right to choose.

OH FFS. I presume you CHOOSE to wear a seat belt in a car? I suppose the law is taking away your freedom to choose to not wear one and go head first through the windscreen in the event of a smash?

Bingo, as I'm actually a libertarian.

The Spanish flu freaks me out. Luckily, it's not around anymore. If there was a safe, effective Spanish flu vax I might actually get it. Supposing, though, that the flu is still out there making its rounds. ;)

And to think I was considering finding a way for me to get exposed to the real thing as opposed to Rubella vaccine :lol: Was thinking about working in a field which requires rubella immunity. I've no interest in getting the MMR.

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The thing is, a lot of these diseases were becoming so rare that you run the risk of not being properly diagnosed. . . If you've never seen what diphtheria does (or if you don't even know what it IS), how can you properly treat it?

Exactly. I've made a point of knowing this stuff even though I'm not a health worker of any kind--someone's got to remember. Someone's got to know. There are now enough unvaccinated children that your story is probably going to get a lot more common.

As for choice? My father chooses not to get the flu shot; a friend of his got Guillain-Barre and he's spooked. I understand. I just stay the hell away from him when he's the tiniest bit ill. My mum gets the shot because she works among populations that can't often afford proper medical care (or daycare for ill children, or time off when they're ill). She knows that if she brings home flu, I'm down for a long time. Thanks, late-stage Lyme.

I respect choices that do not hurt other people. This means that if you insist on remaining unvaccinated when you damn well could be, I expect you to limit your ability to pass illness on to those who rely on herd immunity. So llv? Hope you're ready to don a mask as soon as you start sneezing and coughing. I don't want your crud, whether it's "only" flu or fucking whooping cough. I haven't had Gardasil, and I don't know my HPV status, but since my ideal number of sexual partners is one or two at most, we can make informed choices together. I try to minimise the damage.

Brought to you by the department of "I had an adverse reaction to a couple of jabs and STILL believe in vaccination because the alternative is worse".

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HPV is a sexually transmitted infection. As such, you transmit it to people that you have sex with. Even if you have anonymous sex with a stranger, it is still a very personal connection. You can transmit something like the measles or whooping cough to people within your environment. Unless you live in a fucking bubble, you run the risk of giving it to people that you have only minor interactions with or even people you don't interact with. Thus, not the same thing at all.

Like Hepatitis B. And yet it is a vaccine given to babies moments after birth, whether or not their parents have any risk factors, and it is on the list of required vaccines for school admission... just like Gardisil will be eventually.

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Like Hepatitis B. And yet it is a vaccine given to babies moments after birth, whether or not their parents have any risk factors, and it is on the list of required vaccines for school admission... just like Gardisil will be eventually.

Starting the immunizations at birth is optional in my state. And HepB is not *only* sexually transmitted.

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I recommend the book The Panic Viris by Seth Mnookin. It's about the history of the current vaccine scare. Before the anti-vax crowd targeted the MMR vaccine, they were making claims about the DPT vaccine. There was a chilling account of a baby a few years ago who had whooping cough, but none of the doctors in the emergency room recognized it. The only thing that saved her was when the oldest doctor in the hospital was passing by and heard the characteristic coughing. She was the only doctor who was working during the last period when whooping cough was more common.

The prior incarnation of the DPT was a nightmare of a vaccine that used a live version of the pertussis virus; many kids reacted horribly to it and there were concerns about its effectiveness and endurance.

Interestingly, when I first began investigating my son's reaction to vaccines, I found a blog by an informed-vax RN who insisted pertussis was all over the place, but doctors weren't testing for it because if there was a vaccine for a disease it must be gone. This was back when it was widely reported that pertussis was mostly eradicated. I don't remember the details, but when a particular doctor's office tested all children with upper respiratory infections for pertussis, the numbers were at "outbreak" levels.

She kept insisting that when the pharm companies had a pertussis booster in the works, they would instruct doctors to test again for pertussis, thus showing a "sudden" need for a booster. It took a few years but she called it dead on.

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We had a pertussis outbreak in my community and all of the nonvaxed kids were so sick they were in the hospital. It's pretty serious, not something that kids just run around with.

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Everyone else has addressed llv's idiocy very well but I'd also like to point out that if improved sanitary practices were so great at preventing illnesses (they are, but llv's overestimating their impact in this case), then we wouldn't have to get yearly flu vaccines. Sanitary practices are probably the best they've ever been in history and we still have huge issues with transmitting illnesses like the flu and the common cold.

Llv, you do not have a super immune system, you've just been lucky enough to live in places where enough people vaccinate that herd immunity is still effective. Unfortunately, because of people like you, there are some places where diseases that were all but eradicated are coming back.

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Starting the immunizations at birth is optional in my state. And HepB is not *only* sexually transmitted.

Sexual contact, intravenous drug use, and I believe bodily fluid contact with someone who has Hep B. Babies whose parents do not have Hep B are not at risk for it, so it is quite comparable to the Gardisil vaccine.

In fact, when the Hep B originally came out, it was recommended (therefore paid for) only for those in high-risk groups. I worked in special ed at the time with mildly violent juvenile offenders, and yet since my students were not at the most violent level, my insurance and the school district would not pay for the series. And if they don't want to pay, they assure you the illness is no big deal and you are not at risk. ; )

So Hep B was originally intended for an even smaller subset than Gardisil, and now a couple of decades later it is (almost always) given at birth and required for school admission.

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Starting the immunizations at birth is optional in my state. And HepB is not *only* sexually transmitted.

Which is why I was told to get the vaccinations since I would be working with kids. Yeah, they sometimes bite and/or drool.

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We had a pertussis outbreak in my community and all of the nonvaxed kids were so sick they were in the hospital. It's pretty serious, not something that kids just run around with.

It CAN be serious, no doubt about it. Again, one of the big concerns years ago was that the vaccine itself by industry standards was crappy as hell; high side effects with low effectiveness. They've improved the side effects with use of the deadened virus, but I've not heard anything about it being more effective.

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In fact, when the Hep B originally came out, it was recommended (therefore paid for) only for those in high-risk groups. I worked in special ed at the time with mildly violent juvenile offenders, and yet since my students were not at the most violent level, my insurance and the school district would not pay for the series. And if they don't want to pay, they assure you the illness is no big deal and you are not at risk. ; )

My insurance paid for it 15 years ago. No questions asked. My doctor knew I was going to go into teaching and suggested that I make sure I had the full series before I started.

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In the past, people also didn't understand how disease was spread - you should sterilise medical instruments, wash your hands, wear gloves when giving a birthing woman a cervical exam, and not cough on the food you're serving people. We've come a long way in the spread of disease too - not just jabs. ;)

We know all this stuff now...yet disease and illness still spreads. Colds, flu, stomach bugs, outbreaks of measles and whooping cough...In other words "being clean" or a 'healthy diet' isn't stopping the spread of germy nastiness.

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Wouldn't that make you at least partly an anti-vaxer?

Well, others have already explained it well, but there are also some, um, lifestyle factors that I'm not sure apply to me (if you don't have sex with men, there's no reason to get it, is there?). If I had young daughters I would want them to have it, but for me personally I'm not totally sure. It's also different from other vaccines in that it's fairly new and has a much greater risk of side effects than other vaccines.

And the comment about anti-vaxers, while true, was mostly just a way to try to get back on topic when I really just wanted to talk about how much I hate anti-malaria drugs. :lol:

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Well, others have already explained it well, but there are also some, um, lifestyle factors that I'm not sure apply to me (if you don't have sex with men, there's no reason to get it, is there?)

If you have sex with a woman that has HPV, you can get it (via genital-to-genital skin contact, sharing sex toys, or touching your partner's genitals and then your own)

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