On deaths, and not dying

[pecunium]

One of these things is not like the others:

Polio
Mumps
Rubella
Smallpox
Human Papilloma Virus
Measles
Whooping Cough
Diptheria
Chicken Pox
Scarlet Fever

The one which is unlike the others: Smallpox. Smallpox, alone among diseases is, so far as we can tell, extinct. No one in the world has caught smallpox in 30 years. It's gone.

Why? Because we killed it. The gov'ts of the world united and vaccinated everyone against it. I have a scar. I was in the tail end of the United States campaign. My sister is 14 months my junior, she has no scar. My younger siblings don't have the scar. No one I have ever met has had it.

The first disease to be wiped out is the one from which we get the word vaccine

It's part of why we vaccinate

Vaccinations save lives. We say, "children bury their parents, parent's shouldn't bury their children." Well burying children used to be part and parcel of having them.

Ben Jonson wrote a poem about the death of his son Benjamin. I've seen the tombstones.

Children died so regularly that in some places they didn't get real names until they'd attained some age at which it was assumed they were likely to live. That might be as high as eight.

There's been a big brouhaha about vaccines in the past ten years or so. Claims that it leads to autism. It doesn't. The data were faked and the author had conflicts of interest.

And, even if it did increase the risk of autism, so what? The world isn't safe. Maybe the vaccination schedule raises the odds of autism. I don't know. What I do know is polio... kills; when it doesn't maim.

Measles kills, when it doesn't blind, or deafen.

Scarlett Fever doesn't kill, unless it leads to Rheumatic Fever, which weakens the heart and leads to early demise, when it doesn't kill.

Chicken pox can disfigure, blind and (yes, you got it) kill.

Whooping cough, can kill.

The list of preventable diseases is longer than the one I provided. Many of them are fatal. They are, in the developed world, rare. Why?

Because we vaccinate. Right now England is having a rash of measles cases? Why? Because people were afraid of autism. Autism is bad. Burying your kids (even if they make it past eight) is worse.

My grandmother buried her second child. He got TB, and he died. He was three. She lived almost seventy more years, and it Johnny's death never left her. Not getting kids vaccinated will inflict that on more people, mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. We don't have to go back to that.

One other of those is not like the others: HPV. HPV is sexually transmitted. This wigs a lot of people out. They think (as with making condoms available to teens) that vaccinating against HPV will tell girls they can have sex anytime they want and they won't be suceptible to strains of genital warts, which reduces the odds of cervical cancer.

HPV is usually silent. Most males don't know they have it, and condoms can't protect against it. Once a woman is exposed, the vaccine is useless.

Twenty years ago I went to a Tuesday evening class (logic and argment). I picked up a copy of the campus paper. The Roundup was a weekly, and I was no longer on the staff. From Managing Editor to just another consumer of the news. Which was as it should be, because working on the paper was a full-time job, and I was actually trying to get a degree.

It came out on Weds, but Tues. afternoon was when it came back from the printer, and it was put in the stands, so the early classes on Weds. would have it ready to hand.

On the front page was a photo of one of the former staffers. She was sitting with a lamb. Something about the photo bothered me. I couldn't quite place it, but something seemed out of place.

I started to read it, and the tense seemed wrong. That's when it hit me. The photo was bordered in a style I'd designed the year before. It had become the obituary edging.

Stacey was dead. The woman who had gone to Canada for the summer two years before and come back engaged. The woman who made the random quotations list because she was overheard saying, "I love you Terry. My thighs hate you, but I love you," after I'd brought some sweets to her and Joy in the newsroom.

Stacy, the lovable, sweet-natured, peacemaking, wonderful woman. A decent writer, a pretty good photograper. A friend (I admit it, I'd had a crush on her, and been to chicken to act on it. It didn't help that there were problems of position, she was a staff photographer, and I was an editor; not quite a sexual harrassment issue, but it colored my thinking, but I digress). A daughter, and a wife.

She was 27 years old, and she was dead. I don't remember much of the evening. I recall telling my instructor something like, "I won't be in class tonight. I just found out a friend of mine died," and dropping the paper on his desk as I walked out.

I think I called my girlfriend Stacey (it was a strange time, I was dating a Stacey, had a class with a different Stacy, and this Stacy died), and got drunk. The next day I went to the city room and sat with friends and we mourned some. There never was a wake. Her husband, and family, were too devastated to have one, and the rest of us weren't really old enough to have a handle on hosting one. Drinks at The Scotland Yard and stories and not quite crying in the pitchers was how we did it.

She had cervical cancer.

Add that to the list of things we don't have to put up with. We have the means to stop it. All we need is the will.

Comments

[calimac.livejournal.com]

Absolutely. And I see you've read what Jim M. had to say.

On top of everything else, mass vaccination predates the rise of autism diagnoses.

All the same, it would be comforting to have a reason for the autism bit. All the more because it's the absence of an explanation that's giving fueling the perception of a vaccination connection. Is it just an increase in diagnosis, not the condition itself? That seems not to be the case.

We think we know what's causing the rise in childhood allergies, and ironically it's parental fear of them that's doing it.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

I think it is an increase of diagnosis. Kids like my son, who has Asperger's, were just considered weird, a lot of them. Kids like my OTHER son, who is 'low functioning', were simply considered retarded. Both of them are statistics.

By the way, there's been no mercury in shots (except flu, I believe) in years. And no DROP in the number of cases. A reason, some think, for the shot connection, is that the first noticeable signs are around the same time as the MMR shot. In retrospect, though, my son had signs since birth, I think. (And he didn't have shots, because of insurance. He's all caught up, now.)

Fear of allergies causes allergies?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I read the ML post. Then I read matociquala's.

In the latter was a comment which reminded me of something.

That was the genesis of this.

I think the issue is both one of better diagnosis, and a widening of the spectrum.

When I first encounted autism (back in the late seventies) it was a dread thing. Now we include, Asperger's and high functioning, and lots of people confuse that with the idea of it we got as kids and it seems a huge swath of violent people have been released on us.

[aesmael.livejournal.com]

Probably just or mainly an increase in diagnosis. I've seen analyses showing rises in diagnosis of autism directly matching decreases in retardation, and some used to get other diagnoses like schizophrenia but have since been reclassified. That, and it seems a significant part of the increase in diagnosis is from older people - teenagers and adults. Anecdotally, it seems to be heritable; the two major approaches under investigation by scientists seem to be genetic and hormonal exposure in the womb.

[youraugustine.livejournal.com]

As an individual on the autism spectrum, and with an autistic sister, I get very cranky at the way that the anti-vax movement likes to imply that autism is equal to death. That it is the worst thing in the world. That it is A CATASTROPHE.

Even if it weren't an ex-hypothesis (http://scienceblogs.com/insolence/2009/01/the_first_of_i_hope_many_very_bad_days_f.php?utm_source=networkbanner&utm_medium=link), which it is, still: pisses me off.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Well, I'd consider it a catastrophe, for some. For my son, at least. Not as bad as death, but it's pretty fucking horrible. I'm not sure if it is saying it is as equal as death, but parents are shredded for daring to say, hey, I wish my kid didn't have this -- as if it somehow implied we loved them less.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Yeah...all we need is the will. Thank you, Terry. And it might be twenty years too late, but I'm sorry about Stacey. I have friends I still mourn for and will never forget.

More links and information on HPV for you, and anyone else interested, can be found here.

http://stillnotbored.livejournal.com/571632.html

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's not too late. I've had half a bottle of port tonight, and will be cuddling my canadian girfriend, and your comments about your daughter remined me of Joy and Stacy in the cafeteria when I shared ding-dongs, and time at the restaurant she worked at and hoping her husband recovered and the soft pain of survivor's guilt that I didn't have the courage to ask her out, and how contingent fate meant I got to go out with my Stacey, which led to all the rest of my life.

We die. It sucks for the survivors, and we go on. Thank you for the sympathy. Glasses to turn over aren't terrible, it means we've lived, loved and lost.

Joy where we find it, tears when we need them, and hope throughout.

[vicious-wench.livejournal.com]

Amen.

I have the scar too; my husband (slightly younger than me) doesn't. I'm on the young side for having one, but overseas travel as a youngun spurred it. Now, of course, you've caused me to decide to go do a little research on why the smallpox vaccine caused a reactive blister/scar and other pox-virus vaccines don't...

The supposed link between vaccinations and autism has been exposed for the myth that it is.

And immunizations generally aren't actually about the health of the individual -- a vaccination program is a public health issue.

The development of the HPV vaccine is a huge step forward -- at least when it's available. Thanks for shedding attention on it; it gets frequently overlooked.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Because cowpox is different to the weakened/dead strains of the others.

I am glad the autism/MMR idea has been exposed, but even if it weren't, the odds of autism from it were less (by fucking far) than the odds of death without it (small fractions of hundteds of thousands vs. one in four?: no doubts at all).

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Got my daughter the HPV shots. She was less than thrilled, I told her too damn bad. Put it in the way, too, that gets tweens (now a teen) kinda squirmy. "You don't REALLY want to come to me at the age of 16 or whatever and ASK for it, do you?" I got the MOOOOMMMMMM and the eyerolls, but I feel she's a little bit safer.

She's had scarlet fever, btw -- that's strep related. No shots for it, yet. I got so scared when she had it, because I remembered Little Women. I thought my little girl was a goner, but the doctor VERY quickly reassured me.

[elf]

"The venereal diseases are ones we stand a chance of stamping out, the way we did smallpox, because .... A venereal disease is one that is so terribly difficult to catch that only intercourse or deep kissing is likely to pass it on. That's why we stand a chance of stamping them out... if only the idiots would co-operate!"To Sail Beyond the Sunset

I have issues with the mass vaccination drives. I am worried & occasionally annoyed that the same dose is given to children three weeks old, or two years old.

I was concerned enough to avoid Pertussis vaccine for my kids as infants--they were not in daycare and had very little exposure to/from other children, and I wasn't against it entirely, just worried about inflicting it on very young bodies. So I asked the doctor, how about getting her vaccinated just before she starts school? And the doctor said, oh, if they're not vaccinated by the age of five, we don't bother.

My kids may-or-may-not be vaccinated against whooping cough. (I forget. There are limits to my compliance with gov't-mandated health measures that assume I'm too ignorant to make a coherent decision... I've been persuaded that it's a Good Idea to do this, so I do, but am not wasting brain cells trying to memorize the contents of the card.) They are vaccinated against everything else that's recommended, although sometimes considerably later than the recommended schedule. (They were homeschooled for a long stretch.)

As a child, I was vaccinated against everything recommended. This includes rubella. During my first pregnancy, they tested me for rubella antibodies (because rubella is a relatively mild childhood disease that causes nasty birth defects if contracted during pregnancy). I didn't have any, leading them to think I either wasn't vaccinated or it had "worn off." They told me to stay away from people with rubella, should any exist in Oakland, and gave me a vaccine shot just after I gave birth. (Told me not to get pregnant for at least 90 days.)

During my second pregnancy, 3 years later, they tested me for rubella antibodies. I didn't have any, leading them to think I hadn't been vaccinated. >.< This time, I declined the shot.

I would like more info, more open discussion, on when/why vaccines are ineffective--because "ineffective" means "wasted money," and our health care system can't afford that. Would like more studies on long-term effects, or long-term lack of effects... are there other ones that "wear off?" I'd like to know which vaccines are supposed to help for life, and which are supposed to help until age 16 or so, after which people have (1) stronger immune systems and (2) less forced contact with hundreds of near-strangers every day, even during times of illness. (Y'know, all my employers have had a policy of "if you're sick, don't come in; contagion is bad for business." Public schools don't have this policy--or at least, they don't encourage it.)

I do understand that any public claims of "some vaccines are perhaps a waste of resources" will be jumped on as "I shouldn't vaccinate!!!" Which, um. Is not the same at all.

I'm still fuzzy on the "herd immunity" concept. I admit to falling for the "can cause autism" theory... and I still got my kids vaccinated. Because I may not understand herd immunity, but I do know how statistics work in general--and that a "one in twelve thousand is allergic" is indeed a risk I'm willing to take.

I ride on public buses with them. We have a house with live electricity and fire in the stove and hot water on demand. I have some idea of the numbers of children injured or killed each year from those things, vs. those damaged by vaccinations.

I consider some of the claimed benefits of vaccines to be vaporware. But as I'm not an anti-vaporware person--I support promotion of hypothetical, may-never-manifest benefits--I'm not anti-vaccine.

However, some of the attitudes used to promote them, esp. by medical personnel, rub me the wrong way, and I actively struggle against those.

(You left off tetanus. The tetanus vaccine alone is possibly worth the promotion of the rest of them.)

I've read this topic before...

[urox.livejournal.com]

I and a friend just had our children vaccinated last month against many things at their 2 month appointment. Looking back, both of us wish we'd waited until 3 months. There were definite behavior difference for the past week as well as fevers and illness like symptoms. More vomiting, less alertness, and lots of crying upon waking. Both of us noted it immediately after the vaccine round.

The only reason why I caved into getting the hep B for mine was that there is a 10% incident rate in the Asian community here. While I would think that she wouldn't get it unless she's having sex or sharing needles, my friends and family "scared" me into it. I'm still glad I didn't give it to her at birth.

Recent research has said that the chickenpox vaccine is near useless and so they've recommended a booster. Sure, it can kill, but I know several people who had no problems from it. It isn't worth getting vaccines for.

And I am extremely pissed that they're giving girls the HPV vaccine but not guys. A carrier is a carrier and while it may protect girls, it doesn't get rid of the disease which should be the goal.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I could have listed lots. Tetanus is one which, can be given after exposure (which, I confess, is true of Smallpox).

I've had a a mild case of whooping cough. God forbid I should have had anything more (an hour spent in a sodden lump on the floor, because all breathing did was give me the energy to cough myself into a semi-concious state). It was a trivial one (in that I only had the one bout of incapacitating cough, and codeine dealt with the rest, a cure; in its way almost as bad as the problem. That, however, is just my body and codeine).

Rubella gives me pangs. It's one of the diseases which needs a booster, because the vaccine is only good for about 15 years.

The issue is herd immunity. If enough people get the vaccine, then those for whom it didn't take, has worn off, or didn't get it at all, will be so unlikely to encounter it as to be as safe as if they were immune.

But rubella needs to be repeated between 10-12 years after initial. Kids need it so they won't expose adults who have lost immunity (which is the idea behind herd immunity; so few are infectable that the disease can't get a foothold. Keep that up long enough and [as with smallpox] the disease dies off).

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

The amusing thing about the HPV vaccine (I have a very sick sense of humor sometimes) is that people on the left who would normally be very suspicious of big pharma, were in a big hurry to accept when the company that made the vaccine said they would only offer it at a moderate price if the shots were made mandatory.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

Y'know, all my employers have had a policy of "if you're sick, don't come in; contagion is bad for business." Public schools don't have this policy--or at least, they don't encourage it.

Do you mean among the teachers or among the students? I have friends who teach, and every single one of them has griped about having to go in when they were contagious -- because there was no substitute available. That's called being between a rock and a hard place. If they don't go in, there's no one to take care of the students; if they do, they're putting the students at risk.

WRT the students, that gets trickier. Between having a mandated number of attendance days, and the number of students for whom being home sick means being totally unsupervised (not everyone has the luxury of being able to homeschool, or even to take a day off work to take care of a sick child), there are going to be times when children will be in school even though they're contagious. Fixing that is going to be a matter of changing some deep-running societal attitudes.

[pazi-ashfeather.livejournal.com]

Herd immunity is fairly easy to understand -- it's like a firebreak, in essence. Diseases spread from Patient 0 to the first wave of people infected, who then spread it to others, and so on -- it can grow like wildfire if it's transmitted often enough.

If you have, say, a thousand people, none of whom are immune to the disease, then giving it to one of them means all one thousand will soon be afflicted. If 1 percent are immune (10 people), just as swiftly all but those ten immune folks will have the disease.

But if you have 50% immune and 50% not, the rate of infection will be much slower. Why? Because every time an infected person is exposed to someone, there's only a 50/50 chance that the new person will get infected (obviously this is oversimplified). When something like 90 percent of the population is immune to the disease, the challenge is finding a way to spread the disease among the 100 people who can get it. After all, most of them are just isolated islands of vulnerability in a vast sea of immunity.

In short, get the rate of general immunity high enough, and the disease you're treating for won't be able to get a foothold --at worst, you'll encounter very rare, isolated outbreaks in individuals from your target population, that almost never transmit to another patient. For some diseases, this means they become vanishingly rare. For others, it simply means extinction.

[hammercock.livejournal.com]

They'd stopped vaccinating for smallpox by the time I was born, but I'd gladly get vaccinated if it were actually available to me. I'm a big fan of receiving any vaccine I can get, because I'm a fan of, you know, not dying of preventable diseases. Elizabeth Moon's essay about polio was terrifying enough; I've met people who had it as children, and that's the closest I ever want to get. I had the oral vaccine as a child, and had a booster in late 2007 (along with MMR, DTP, and influenza shots, plus oral typhoid vaccine) prior to a trip to Indonesia. It's outrageous that there are still children contracting polio when we got so close to eradicating it in the wild.

I had a mild case of chicken pox around age 9. There was no vaccine then. But if I hadn't gotten it as a child, I would have made sure to get the shot as an adult, because I've seen up close and personal what it looks like for an adult to contract it. *shudder* I also once knew a man, a client of the human services program where I worked, who'd had congenital rubella, and he was profoundly deaf and mildly developmentally disabled. He was pretty high-functioning and had a part-time job, but still it was enough to make me glad to have been vaccinated.

Any children I ever have will be receiving all their shots.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Smallpox isn't needed. It's dead, apart from stocks kept by Russia and the United States.

I confess to a strange pride in my scar; doing my small part in helping the human race, but all in all, it's a trivial thing; given my being at the feathered edge of the death of smallpox.

[soldiergrrrl.livejournal.com]

I have the scar. It's a tiny asterisk of deformed freckles on my left upper arm.

I live with two other folx who have it. It's weird.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I thought the "one of these things" would turn out to be that you had had one of those diseases. I've had two: chicken pox and mumps. I only know one person who has had polio. And I have never seen my small pox scar because it is in the middle of my back. My brother is the only other person I know who had this placement.

K.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I've had two, for certain, and two which are possible. Immunized against, had weak symptoms, consonant with the disease.

[sunfell.livejournal.com]

I have two smallpox scars. I got the second vaccination because they could not find evidence of the first, nor records. They've almost faded away. Being an Air Force brat, I had lots of shots when I was young.

I have chickenpox scars on my forehead. I worry about getting shingles.

Aspergers did not exist when I was a kid- so I was labeled 'brilliant and eccentric'. I am still undiagnosed, and choose to remain so, because I really don't want to deal with the stigma connected to the condition. I'd rather be considered 'eccentric' than somehow damaged, which is how people tend to treat any cognitive variance. Since my own 'cognitive variance' goes well with my job, I am well respected and valued.

[aostara.livejournal.com]

Amen! I wish the HPV vaccine had been around when I was younger and I could have gotten it, because I *have* been exposed and now need to get a colposcopy as well as a pap every year and hope like hell that nothing worse than "abnormal but not malignant" ever shows up. I'm grateful I was in the correct age range to get vaccines for all that other stuff. And, yeah, I have a little smallpox vaccine scar... although now it has a tribal tattoo wrapped around it. ;->

[axejudge.livejournal.com]

My mother was vigilant about having her children vaccinated with whatever they had available at the time. Why? Because she had had EVERY CHILDHOOD DISEASE out there - in the 1920's.

measles
mumps
whooping cough
scarletina
polio
SMALLPOX

She survived them all, without lasting effects. She knew she was lucky. She didn't want her kids to go through all that. Admittedly, it was too late for some of them - my siblings got measles and mumps. But I got away clean, until I finally got chickenpox as a 17th birthday present. I asked Mom if I was likely to give this to her. She said no; she hadn't had chickenpox, but she had had smallpox, so she had nothing to worry about. Yikes.

[slave2tehtink.livejournal.com]

I've got a smallpox scar. I've also got a scar on my cervix from where a precancerous lesion was removed after I picked up HPV. Estimates of how many people have it run to 75% of those who are sexually active.

Fun stuff. I want to choke the shit out of all the people complaining that the vaccine will make girls into sluts. I went through a couple weeks of hell waiting for the biopsy to come back, and let's not even talk about the part where my cervix got skinned with a hot wire.

[gracemcfee.livejournal.com]

Well I'm not up for a vax debate, but I am part of the anti-vax crowd. Not because of the autism issue, though, that one actually annoys me and had almost nothing to do with my decision. No vaxes for me or the kids, and I think the HPV one is a total crock.