Tuesday 4 November 2008

I'm all right Jack

This is a prime example of the "me me me" attitude of the JABS posters. Aquamarine smugly posts:

Think I'll stick to the good old-fashioned things that have got humanity through the last hundred thousand years or so... good wholesome organic food, sunlight, clean water, exercise, hygiene. Somehow we survived that long without vaccines and without the toxic potions we smear all over ourselves every day, so I think I'll just fall back on our collective experience and take my chances.

While wholesome food, clean water, hygiene etc are all extremely good ideas, and presumably things that Aquamarine has easy access to, there are plenty people in the world who don't have these advantages, for whom measles is far more likely to be fatal. In addition, if everyone healthy with these advantages eschews vaccination, we're going to see more outbreaks of potentially fatal diseases - and for those of the population who for whatever reason can't be vaccinated, with suppressed immune systems - that could be disastrous.

Perhaps there's no malice here, unlike some JABS posters, but there's just a serious lack of rational thought.

As an afterthought, is Aquamarine thinking of relying on wholesome food for protection if he/she ever travels to a country where malaria is endemic?

3 comments:

John The Geophysicist said...

errrrrr does it take a non medico like me to point out the bleeding obvious.

I will repeat a previous post. Look at the table at:

http://dcscience.net/?p=260#comment-4054

Over 11 million deaths per annum prior to the introduction of the relevant vaccination.

Less than 9000 in 2001 and 2002 and most of them from whooping cough. (the rest probably within the jabbophobe community).

What part of ""somehow we survived that long without vaccines"" applies to the 11 million annual American corpses.

And that is just in the US. God knows what the deaths from things like measles were like in Africa and the rest of the developing world.

Has she heard about the global eradication of smallpox or the deaths from various pandemic plagues.

And half the world's population do not have wholesome organic food (in Haiti they eat mud pies - which are pies made out of river mud).

Half the world do not have clean water.

Still, at least all those dying Africans will be getting plenty of sunlight (so that takes care of their Vitamin D requirement).

Becky - why do you ask such silly rhetorical questions. You know as well as I do that Aquamarine (and presumably her indigo children) will take homeopathic malarial remedies if they ever step outside of their idyllic organic science-free walled garden.

Bring on the sedatives nurse.

Sanity said...

Still no table there John...

Aquamarine fails to realise that while the human species survives, that's little comfort to the millions of individuals dying from "incurable" and painfull disease.

Also, this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy#Timeline_for_humans

John The Geophysicist said...

Alcari

I have no idea what is going on with that URL. It works on my laptop (although it takes me to post 57 when the actual table is in post 37 and scrolling up a bit is not too painful).

Are you sure the woo merchants have not surreptitiously replaced your PC with one of their non-evidence based culturally relative quantum based bio-energetic tachyon PCs.

Good table that one you pointed to (if only as an exercise in how meaningless the statistical mean is with respect to this sort of data although the text does point out that this is skewed by class etc. Plus a lot of the deaths would be in childhood which drags down the average).

I wonder what raised the average life expectancy from about 20-30 up to the 20th century to about 66 currently.

Errr let me think. Scratches head.

Vaccination and science based medicne - thats what I was looking for.