Two things sustain me. Love of literature and hatred of the bourgeois.
Thimerosal is a mercury-containing preservative that has been used in vaccines and some immune globulin products since the 1930s. Some people believe that infants exposed to thimerosal are at risk for neurodevelopmental problems, most notably autism, during childhood.
. . . higher prenatal mercury exposure was associated with better performance on one measure of language and poorer performance on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasingly levels of mercury exposure from birth to 7 months were associated with better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination and on one measure of attention and executive functioning. Increasing mercury exposure from birth to 28 days was associated with poor performance on one measure of speech articulation and better performance on one measure of fine motor coordination.[Thus]:
The results do not support a casual association between early exposure to mercury from thimerosal-containing vaccines and immune globulins and deficits in neuropyschological functionaing at 7 to 10 years of age.[All in all]:
there were a total of 19 significant effects associated with thimerosal expsoure - 12 improved outcomes, 7 poorer outcomes. Altogether, the study employed 378 statistical tests. Therefore, the statistically significant outcomes represented approximately 5% of total outcomes, suggesting that the "significant" outcomes were significant by chance alone, not by true casuality.
Science usually doesn't sway "true believers," and in this case we seem tobe dealing with a belief in a serach of validation--the hypothesis has been rejected. The most convincing evidence will come when the removal of thimerosal from vaccines does not lead to a fall in the rates of autism; this has already been demonstrated in other countries.
We will soon hear claims that if it is not thimerosal in vaccines that has harmed our children, it must be something else. Are you ready for the aluminum controversy?
‘I think there are a lot of people who don’t really see these things (like riding the subway or walking to school) as risks but they aren’t letting their kids have more freedom because they get flak from their neighbours.
‘It can be the simplest, stupidest thing. One lady wrote to me about how she had to go to work early so she let her 11-year-old daughter walk across the street alone to wait at the bus stop. The other mothers waiting with their kids were outraged and this mom ended up feeling horribly guilty. But when she came across the website she thought: “This is crazy. I’ve been torturing myself because I let my daughter walk across the street on her own!” Another woman told me how a stranger walked by and admonished her because she wasn’t paying enough attention to her children playing in the yard in front of her. She was just reading her book.’
When New York banned smoking in the workplace, I quit working. When it was banned in restaurants, I stopped eating out and when the price of cigarettes hit seven dollars a pack I gathered all my stuff together and went to France.
Mom #1: So, yeah, I could send him to Brentwood next year, but then with my two others in private schools, I wouldn't be able to buy a new Lexus this year.
Mom #2: Yeah, I know.
many of these parents are influenced by misinformation obtained from Web sites that oppose vaccination.
Children who are not vaccinated are unnecessarily susceptible to serious illnesses, they say, but also present a danger to children who have had their shots — the measles vaccine, for instance, is only 95 percent effective — and to those children too young to receive certain vaccines.
Measles, almost wholly eradicated in the United States through vaccines, can cause pneumonia and brain swelling, which in rare cases can lead to death. The measles outbreak here alarmed public health officials, sickened babies and sent one child to the hospital.
“I refuse to sacrifice my children for the greater good,” said Sybil Carlson, whose 6-year-old son goes to school with several of the children hit by the measles outbreak here. The boy is immunized against some diseases but not measles, Ms. Carlson said, while his 3-year-old brother has had just one shot, protecting him against meningitis.
While nationwide over 90 percent of children old enough to receive vaccines get them, the number of exemptions worries many health officials and experts. They say that vaccines have saved countless lives, and that personal-belief exemptions are potentially dangerous and bad public policy because they are not based on sound science.
Some parents of unvaccinated children go to great lengths to expose their children to childhood diseases to help them build natural immunities.
In the wake of last month’s outbreak, Linda Palmer considered sending her son to a measles party to contract the virus. Several years ago, the boy, now 12, contracted chicken pox when Ms. Palmer had him attend a gathering of children with that virus.
“It is a very common thing in the natural-health oriented world,” Ms. Palmer said of the parties.
She ultimately decided against the measles party for fear of having her son ostracized if he became ill.
When I was in high school in the 1970s, we had a name for teenagers like Chloe: losers. If an otherwise normal girl thought that the best way to spend a Saturday night was home with her parents — not just co-existing with them, but actually hanging out with them — we would have been looking for a bucket of pig’s blood.
In my day, we did whatever was necessary to get out on a Saturday night: we climbed out of windows; we jumped on the back of motorcycles; God help us, we hitchhiked. We needed, on the most basic and physical level, to be out in the dangerous night, with one another, away from our parents and the safety of home. It was no way to live, and some of us didn’t. But it was a drive so elemental and essential that there seemed no way to deny it.
LINK to NYT Article.
"I Hate Baby-Boomers. After WWII, they were handed the entire planet on a silver platter. They've pissed the entire thing away. Now younger people must pay while the boomers continue to wallow in their own fucking self-absorption. Assholes."
Rox Populi.
Daniel: It was sinking in to a great portion of the population of young people that they were the first generation that were not better off than their parents. These young people didn't have the opportunities their parents did, so they were doubling up and sleeping on couches. Not voluntarily, like with the Beat generation; this was more of a pragmatic thing.
Linklater: The generation ahead of me, the boomers, they've got it locked up to the grave. We'll forever be in their shadow, because there are so fucking many of them. They've geared everything toward their own needs. It's a little disgusting. They're the Worst Generation! [Laughs]
Rote learning. Rote learning used to mean asking an entire class to recite in unison answers to set questions, whether or not they understood the meaning of the question or the answer. Today, educators define rote learning variously as 'spouting words,' 'memorization without understanding,' and isolated facts. The teachers feel that these things prevent students from becoming independent thinkers. Hirsch admits that all of these concerns are valid. However, "it is better to encourage the integrated understanding of knowledge over the merely verbal repetition of separate facts. It is better for students to think for themselves than merely to repeat what they have been told. For all of these reasons, rote learning is inferior to learning that is internalized and can be expressed in the student's own words. These valid objections to purely verbal, fragmented, and passive education have, however, been used as a blunt instrument to attack all emphasis on factual knowledge and vocabulary ... In the progressive tradition, the attack on rote learning (timely in 1918) has been used to attack factual knowledge and memorization, to the great disadvantage of our children's academic competencies." - E. D. Hirsch
A generation ago when you sent your kids to private school [it] was because you didn’t like black people. And now when you send your kids to private school it’s cause you don’t like poor people. It’s all about class, it’s all about, “I want my kid to go to school with the right kinds of people so that he can get in to Harvard, or, God forbid, if he’s not that smart, which is usually the case, he’ll get into one of those schools with one of those names like Sarah something or William something or one of those schools. We’ll get you in, we’ll get him in, give us some money we’ll get him in. But, um, it’s all about class.
-Joe Queenan
Vaccine by Arthur Allen, a former foreign correspondent for Associated Press, provided a successful blend of scientific fact, history, controversy, and entertainment….
This brings us to Allen’s third theme, which he explores in some detail: the development of a misguided but powerful and influential anti-vaccination lobby, particularly in the United States. Many of the anti-vaccination zealots whose concepts would have been well accommodated in the seventeenth century, had their convictions shaped by personal pain secondary to a child of their own developing a severe medical problem which they became convinced was a complication following a vaccination. That such scaremongering can have tragic results is all too obvious when, in 1978 in the United Kingdom, rumours that pertussis vaccine could cause permanent brain damage to infants saw immunization rates fall drastically to 31 per cent. As a result, infectious rates, and many children suffered unnecessarily or even died. Similar scenarios were played out in Japan and Sweden. However, exhaustive investigations in a number of countries resulted in epidemiologists concluding that if pertussis vaccine ever caused permanent brain damage the incidence was so low that it was impossible to prove this to be the case. Allen, while sympathetic to the pain of such parents, does eventually expose the flaws in the arguments of opponents to vaccination; he also points out the urgent need for new communication strategies if public health authorities are to restore confidence in safety and efficacy of vaccines.
A long chapter on autism covers similar ground; the author explores the way in which a suspicion of trace amounts of mercury used as a preservative in a number of vaccines, could cause autism became a certainty in the minds of many affected families. Mercury (in large does over a long period of time) has been known since the eighteenth century to cause neurological damage. It was used in the manufacture of hats and resulted in the development of “Mad Hatter’s” disease. Courts in the US actually awarded damages based on this claim, as legal avarice outpaced science. Scientific studies ended up showing that, if anything, children who had received vaccines containing mercury had a lower incidence of autism. Allen’s interview with a mother of a child with autism as she force-feeds him (potentially dangerous) megadoses of vitamins, convinced that this must benefit her son, is profoundly saddening.
