On deaths, and not dying
Feb. 25th, 2009 08:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pecuniumOne 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.
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.
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no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 07:46 am (UTC)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).
no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 03:06 pm (UTC)But rubella needs to be repeated between 10-12 years after initial.
Then why isn't it recommended for adults? Why isn't it part of an adult's regular health schedule, especially for men (who don't run the risk of getting pregnant accidentally during the first couple of months after getting the shot)?
I know (vaguely) how herd immunity's supposed to work. The propaganda around it bothers me--"you have an obligation to immunize your child so other people don't get sick!" has a certain logic to it, but this logic often isn't extended to other fields. (Like, "you have an obligation to conserve water/gas/energy & recycle, so other people will have better lives." Or "you have an obligation to communicate effectively & well so the people around you also will.") And while I might posit that obligation exists, I don't agree that it's stronger than my obligation to tend my child's specific health--for example, to immunize in the face of known family allergies or other expected problems.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 03:47 pm (UTC)Herd immunity is how diseases die off. It only works with viruses. With rare exceptions exposure to a disease confers absolute immunity for the rest of your life. Viruses need to move to never-infected hosts, or they die.
If there aren't enough uninfected hosts (or enough of the rare people who don't get symptoms, and don't become immune), then the virus has no place to go before. Everyone it tries to infect will kill it off.
With great enough density the group, as a whole, will e immune. This is why there were waves of things like diptheria. Everyone who survived it, as a child, was immune. When they had kids someone would contract it, and all the people who weren't immune, would get it. Lots of them died.
If there are allergies, vaccines can be skipped. This is safe, only if, there are enough people immune (about 90 percent) to keep the odds of contact from the rare case, from being great enough for casual transmission.
The obligation to conserve is treated the same way (with a lot of vocal opposition). It's why the speed limit in the states was reduced to 55. It's why water is rationed in drier parts of the country (and don't get me started on the stupidities of water policy).
But heres the real difference. If people don't recycle aluminum, aluminum will cost more. We might run out. If people don't vaccinate their kids, the odds of my kids dying go up. Maybe my child is allergic to the culture base for the vaccine. Maybe there is a family history of problems with a vaccine. Any number of things might make it impossible for some people to safely administer a vaccine (it really rare for someone to be unable to recieve any).
So long as everyone who can be immunized is being immunized, that's ok.
We don't immunize against smallpox anymore. People don't die, or go blind, or get massive scarring from it.
Because they were required to do it.
no subject
Date: 2009-02-26 05:08 pm (UTC)