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

[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?

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

"Fear of allergies causes allergies?"

Kinda sorta, I gather. Current thinking seems to be that children reared in a hyper-clean environment tend to develop an immune system that's hyper-intolerant. And/or that repeated exposure (on a small scale) to things that produce an allergic reaction tend to de-sensitize the individual.

Unfortunately, these "tend to" things are statistical in nature, and don't necessarily apply to any given individual's reaction to any given allergy causative factor.

My own feeling is that arthritis and AIDS have spurred great advances in the study of the human immune system, but science still has a long way to go in that field.

[kibbles.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, I heard that/have had it discussed in a few different classes (I'm in nursing school; it comes up in various classes). I thought you meant that parents were reporting every little sneeze as an allergy, but that wouldn't REALLY be an allergy.

Arthritis is SCARY. Rheumatoid in particular. Immune system problems frustrate the HELL out of me, because on the most basic level, my head is screaming "surely we can fix that with drugs"! But often, we can't. It's just this stupid gut reaction I get every time something about the immune system is studied. (Neurology, meanwhile, has me scratching my head going "how on earth did they ever figure THAT drug out?")

I'm a huge fan of dirty kids, and I'm really old fashioned in that I think children need to be outdoors every day. Even in horrible weather, for a little walk. Anything. I like to collect old textbooks and other, similar books, and I have a child care book from the 40s that has a whole routine for 'airing out' babies. And I laughed, because that's pretty much what I used to do!

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Yup, arthritis is scary. It's also weird. Ten or fifteen years ago I couldn't use my favorite (cast-iron) soup kettle because it was too heavy, even empty, for my wrists to cope with. A few minutes ago I moved it (filled with stew -- a pound of beef, two large onions, carmelized, two bottles of ale & one of stout, three potatoes, & a package of frozen mixed vegetables) from the stove-top to the counter without a second thought. "Remission" is a marvelous word. (Okay, the ankles are still sometimes twingey after three or four days of roaming around at a Convention, but it's not serious pain.)

It's purely Theory, of course -- I'm single & childless -- but I think it does kids good to get out, maybe get dirty, and roam around observing and interacting with The Real World. Somewhat dangerous, maybe, but I have to wonder about the benefits (if any) of the highly-protective, zero-tolerance upbringing of so many middle-class kids today.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Thank God for remission.

Every day, each morning. Because arthritis is scary.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

When the commonly throw around statistic was that the average kid had six colds a year, we'd sometimes have NO colds among our four kids, and never, ever, did any of them have six. We attributed this to three things: (1) they were never exposed to smoke; (2) we had a water cooler with nice cold water that they could get their own drinks from (Minneapolis water is yucky at times of the year!), so they drank a lot of water; (3) they didn't have to have a bath very often. Seriously!

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What Don said. "Fear of infections causes allergies" would have been a more precise statement from me. Of course I didn't mean that every allergy is caused by this hypo-allergenic fad; but the rise in them - to the point where peanuts, once a childhood staple, are now considered a toxin of anthrax-like intensity - definitely yes.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

There are a lot things going on. Some may be over-reactive immiune systems.

For those who have the allergy commodorified will have convulsions if someone has eaten peanuts less than hours before kissing her, as I was told by an ex of hers, because I was thinking of eating a sauce dressed with them).

I have a friend who lost her driving privileges for three years because she was accidentally exposed to peanuts at a chinese restaurant, and the paramedics called it a seizure. Her father and I tease her (because I carry J-Tubes) about peanuts.

So it's not considered. In it's own right it's worse than anthrax.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

I don't need testimonies about peanut allergies. I know they're real.

But anything is a deadly toxin to someone who's deadly allergic to it. The question is, are those allergies weird and rare, or are they so common that the substance has to be held under strict control?

Peanuts were once the one, now they're the other. That's what "considered a toxin" means. It's how they're treated by society, not how deadly they are to the subset of those whom they're deadly to. As I said, anything's a toxin to those to whom it's toxic.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I don't see the "peanuts must be held under strict control" thing at all. Warning labels are for the protection of those for whom they are toxic, but I can still walk into any convenience store in the country and buy a pack of peanuts, or peanut-butter crackers, with no hassle whatsoever.

Of course, the same can be said for some pretty damn toxic things, like weed-killers. So I really don't see where you're coming from with this.

[ailsaek.livejournal.com]

The "under strict control" thing is something you see if you have children in grade school.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

They are practically banned in some schools. They are no longer to be found on airplanes. They aren't banned, but there are a lot of places you won't find them served.

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I think the airplane thing is fairly recent. The reason I say this is that I have a good friend who has both asthma and severe peanut allergies, and ISTR her mentioning a plane trip on which peanut dust in the air caused her some problems, sometime within the past year.

But honestly, if they're now banned on airplanes, that doesn't bother me. Anaphylactic shock isn't anything you want to fool around with, and I'd rather err on the side of caution.

Somewhat-amusing downside of being aware of allergies and just how bad they can be: it's now enough to throw me out of a story if someone is killed by being dosed with peanuts and they didn't have an epi-pen, unless some plausible reason for its not being present is provided. (Plausible reasons can include "person is in denial about the severity of their allergy".) I've seen a couple of people live because of them, who would have been dead otherwise.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I've not been served anything wih peanuts on a plane in about 5 years. Are they legally banned? No, but I don't know of any airline which has them.

I do know lots of people whoo have peanut allergies; severe ones, and no epi-pen. Same as I know people with anaphylactic reactions to bee-sting who don't carry one.

They aren't free, and they expire. In lots of places they require a prescription to obtain, which raises the price.

[calimac.livejournal.com]

What the others said. Strict restrictions on their presence and consumption now hedge about wherever the allergic may be found, and they're in lots of places. Not only are they not served on most airlines, but I've taken flights from airlines that encouraged passengers to bring their own food, but explicitly forbade them to eat any peanut-touching product.

And it's worse in schools. Five items can now get a student sent home with extreme prejudice and no appeal:
1) Butter knives
2) Asthma inhalers
3) Tobacco products
4) Nude photos of themselves on cell phone cameras
5) Peanuts