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I don’t have children, and the jury is out on if that will happen.  But i have read a little about having babies and raising children.  I have a few ideas about how i want to do things.  In the course of my reading, i stumbled onto the idea that vaccinations are not something you should blindly succumb to.  “Vaccinations are risky…the big medical companies are just out to make a profit…” etc, etc.

These are easy things to believe because there’s a big bad guy out there that you can point a finger at, and you can save yourself by taking action, or in this case, not taking action (not getting vaccinated, or not having your children vaccinated).  My mind was open to this line of thinking.

Not anymore.  An article from Wired Magazine called An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All really got through and changed my mind.  (It’s not a short article, so be prepared for a lengthy read.)  Their most convincing argument was simply to make me realize that i have no idea what i am talking about.  I am not a doctor, nor are the parents who want to end mandatory vaccinations.  The second most powerful argument comes from a psychology perspective - the idea that we are or should be or can be in control of our own safety, and how that idea affects us.

Ah, risk. It is the idea that fuels the anti-vaccine movement — that parents should be allowed to opt out, because it is their right to evaluate risk for their own children. It is also the idea that underlies the CDC’s vaccination schedule — that the risk to public health is too great to allow individuals, one by one, to make decisions that will impact their communities. (The concept of herd immunity is key here: It holds that, in diseases passed from person to person, it is more difficult to maintain a chain of infection when large numbers of a population are immune.)

That actually makes sense to me.  I’m all for individual power, but the idea that individual persons may end up jeopardizing the community at-large is a little bit scary.  To be a part of a community, i think we have to allow certain decisions to be made for us that are in the best interests of all.

In 2005, a 17-year-old Indiana girl got infected on a trip to Bucharest, Romania. On the return flight home, she was congested, coughing, and feverish but had no rash. The next day, without realizing she was contagious, she went to a church gathering of 500 people. She was there just a few hours. Of the 500 people present, about 450 had either been vaccinated or had developed a natural immunity. Two people in that group had vaccination failure and got measles. Thirty-two people who had not been vaccinated and therefore had no resistance to measles also got sick. Did the girl encounter each of these people face-to-face in her brief visit to the picnic? No. All you have to do to get the measles is to inhabit the airspace of a contagious person within two hours of them being there.

OK - that’s a lot scary.  Who wants to volunteer to forgo the measles vaccine after reading that?

The article anchors itself around Paul Offit, a pediatrician and a proponent for vaccinations who has even developed a vaccine himself.  He’s taking a very public stand in what has become a controversial debate about whether vaccines can cause autism.  He adamantly says no.

And he <Paul Offit> wants Americans to be fully educated about risk and not hoodwinked into thinking that dropping vaccines keeps their children safe. “The choice not to get a vaccine is not a choice to take no risk,” he says. “It’s just a choice to take a different risk, and we need to be better about saying, ‘Here’s what that different risk looks like.’ Dying of Hib meningitis is a horrible, ugly way to die.”

That’s an important point.  Is it possible that we are forgetting how awful these diseases are?

…by a 2002 study published in The Journal of Infectious Diseases. Looking at 3,292 cases of measles in the Netherlands, the study found that the risk of contracting the disease was lower if you were completely unvaccinated and living in a highly vaccinated community than if you were completely vaccinated and living in a relatively unvaccinated community. Why? Because vaccines don’t always take. What does that mean? You can’t minimize your individual risk unless your herd, your friends and neighbors, also buy in.

Perceived risk — our changing relationship to it and our increasing intolerance of it — is at the crux of vaccine safety concerns, not to mention related fears of pesticides, genetically modified food, and cloning. Sharon Kaufman, a medical anthropologist at UC San Francisco, observes that our concept of risk has evolved from an external threat that’s out of our control (think: statistical probability of a plane crash) to something that can be managed and controlled if we just make the right decisions (eat less fat and you’ll live longer). Improved diagnostic tests, a change in consumer awareness, an aging society determined to stay youthful — all have contributed to the growing perception that risk (of death, illness, accident) is our responsibility to reduce or eliminate. In the old order, risk management was in the hands of your doctor — or God. Under the new dispensation, it’s all up to you.

That last paragraph is something that really hit home for me.  I am a bit of a control freak (Lance is nodding his head at that!), and i do tend to think that i can become informed about the choices i have to make and thus make better ones.  To a degree, this is true.  But at some point i have to stop and admit that i can’t out-think people who have made a life’s work out of something i’m trying to google in 15 minutes.

It’s a very interesting article, and i would encourage reading it if you have the time.  Share with me what you think.

Welcome!

If you’re here, you probably saw the link on my Myspace blog. I probably won’t be using Myspace much anymore. I never use it much anyway - i only remember to check it whenever i have a blog i wanted to post.

Anyway, this site is much prettier, and will give me some more leeway to do other types of things besides the blog:

Recipes - My recipes section is mostly complete at this point. I took all the good recipes i have and put them out here. I believe i’ve tried all of these recipes, and all are good. I’ve always wanted an electronic location like this for my recipes. Now i can take a peek from work to see what ingredients i need to get from the store on the way home.

Bridge - This section is in development. There will be a section for bridge articles - they don’t belong in the normal blog. I will try to write more of these types of articles now i have a place to put them. I’ve always enjoyed reading bridge columns and bridge books. This will be my way to contribute in an amateur fashion. And who knows, maybe eventually i’ll make it into the Bridge Bulletin.

Photos - This section is also in development. It should be a smattering of select photos from various events. It will be the next section of the site that gets released, if i can ever find software that does what i want and integrates well with wordpress. Frankly i’m not having a lot of luck so far.

Who knows what else may eventually reside here? Right now I’m just having lots of fun learning about how to do all this stuff.

There have been a few posts in the past week that i didn’t put on Myspace. Check them out, and let me know what you think.

This film was extremely eye-opening.

The main point of the movie is that we, as a country, are being controlled by the media. Radio and television and music and Hollywood are all controlled by a handful of huge mega-corporations. This is not good.

There were a lot of good examples in the film of how we are being controlled. Yes, similar to how it is described in Orwell’s 1984. And similar to how Hitler’s propaganda strategist, Joseph Goebbels, manipulated the German public. Specifically, both scenarios begin with taking control of all sources of information. And that is what is happening in this country.

The internet is the sole remaining unobstructed source of information for us. And there are already proposals and debates about how and if to regulate or place controls on its use. The next decade will see attempts to control it, and us.

I found a new hatred for Bush while watching this movie, as well. 5.6 more months…

This is a must-see film. We’ve checked out a bunch of books from the library on similar topics, too, and i plan to review them here eventually.

Let us suppose for a moment that someone has created synthetic oil. It’s the same thing, molecularly, as the oil that is drilled from the earth. It can be used for all things we use oil for now. It looks the same and smells the same. It is basically indecipherable unless you send it to a specialized lab. And it’s significantly cheaper, too.

Now suppose that OPEC launched a campaign to convince people that drilled oil was better than the synthetic kind. That drilled oil ran your cars better. That you were a better person because you used “real” oil instead of the manufactured kind. Do you think you would fall for such a campaign, or would you pocket the savings and never give it another thought?

It’s meant to be a rhetorical question, yet i have an example that is precisely the SAME THING, yet we want the drilled oil anyway: diamonds.

The reason we are so emotionally invested in our diamonds is primarily due to a superbly-run ad campaign launched by De Beers in the 1940s. “Diamonds are Forever” is something we still spout today. Somewhere along the line, De Beers convinced people to pass their diamonds on as family heirlooms, which reduced the market for used diamonds. They even created new traditions among us; John Stossel writes, “Russia increased the mining of small diamonds. Since De Beers had to fulfill a purchase contract with Russia, it suddenly had more small diamonds than it could sell. So De Beers started promoting the idea that, after years of marriage, if a man really loved his wife, he would show his devotion by giving her an ‘eternity ring’ - a ring with lots of small diamonds on it. It worked. Today thousands of American women wear eternity rings because of a South African company’s need to accommodate Russia.”

It’s just propaganda. Diamonds are special because De Beers tells us they are - there isn’t anything inherent about them that makes them so.

When diamonds were first grown in labs, De Beers created the “Gem Defensive Program” to raise awareness and convince people that they really want the real thing. To convince people they really want to pay more for drilled oil rather than purchasing the synthetic oil which is basically indistinguishable. And it worked! John Stossel again - “Women told us, even if they had preferred the look of the imitation, they’d still rather be given the diamond. ‘It just makes you feel like you’re special’, said one woman. ‘I know what I want on my finger, and it has to be the real thing.’ We’ll spend more for a rock because a South African cartel has run a great ad campaign? Apparently we will.”

It’s a hell of an ad campaign, that’s all i can say.

Now, if your loved one gave you a diamond, i’m not trying to minimize the significance of the promise that the diamond represents. That is meaningful, priceless even, and your ring may always symbolize that for you. But it is the promise and the commitment that makes it special, not the diamond itself.