Get your kids vaccinated but not the “homeopathic” way
April 7th, 2009
|
| Share |
Some people like to pretend that vaccines arte akin to homeopathy. Of course, they’re not. A vaccine is a legitimate medical preperation of modified, atenuated or partial viruses or bacteria extracts. Homeopathy is a crock of bull based on the idea of diluting substances into non-existance.
It seems that the anti-vaccine movement has made an unholy union with the equally fradulent “homeopathic” movement and now is selling “homeopathic vaccines” to any idiot dumb enough to think vaccines are harmful or “natural homeopathic whole-body spiritial” crap works better.
Health service warns against homeopathic whooping cough remedy
The North Coast Area Health Service is warning people not to rely on homeopathic preparations against whooping cough.
The health service recently began offering free whooping cough vaccinations for all carers of young babies, after a four-week-old girl from Lennox Head became the first child to die from the respiratory disease since the 1990s.
The area health service director of public health, Paul Corben, says a local newspaper has now run an article about the benefits of a homeopathic vaccination against whooping cough.
But he says there is no scientific evidence to support the effectiveness of homeopathic vaccinations.
“Even the professional bodies that oversee the work of homeopathy practices advise that use of those preparations is not an alternative to conventional vaccination,” he said.
I have to say it really burns me up every time I hear of a whooping cough outbreak. Since the antivaccine movement of the past few years, whooping cough has cropped up in a number of places in the US, Europe, Canada and Australia. These are areas where the disease had been all but unheard of for years. In some cases, doctors were perplexed at first, because they had never seen whooping cough in their carreers and it never occured to them that such a disease would return to the industrial world.
In the US, for example, the rate of whooping cough deaths has increased in the past few years to more than a dozen each year since 2001. Hospitalization has gone up even more. This compared to the mid 1990’s when yearly deaths from the disease were around three or four.
Whooping cough, or pertussis, is always misserable and occasionally deadly. The disease is a bacterial respiratory infection that can be quite agressive, when treated with antibiotics within the first few days it is usually successfully cured, but it is not uncommon for the symptoms to be severe enough to require hospitalization. Of course, additional and unnecessaryb patients receiving in-patient hospital treatment is something the system absolutely does not need.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 12:57 am and is filed under Bad Science, Culture, Quackery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
View blog reactions
April 7th, 2009 at 2:05 am
Canada has the dubious title of being the only major industrial nation to have not eradicated whooping cough or even come close to it. Of course, there are efforts to do so and the numbers have been brough down signifficantly with the vaccine, but this bull**** about vaccine safety is really going to hurt the efforts to get it under control.
Mark my words: the way this is going it’s only a matter of time before some rich yuppity community ends up with a minor outbreak of polio. There are enough unvaccinated kids these days to actually see that happen. Just one infected passenger from India or somewhere like that, or even contamination on something from abroad could introduce it. Maybe even a serviceman coming home from Afghanistan. The only reason we don’t see it anymore is that it was wiped out to the point that even if you have an unvaccinated population there’s no place to acquire it… yet… but it only will take one spark to set the tinder.
If this antivaccine thing continues it will have to happen, in the world we live in, with travel and imports. At least then it might be the wakeup call.
One thing I remember was when I was just a kid, the vaccine was just coming out and it was a huge relief because parents considered polio their worst nightmare.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 7:16 am
It’s always good to discover another voice of reason on the web. The anti-vaxers are a menace; thanks to them and their guru, Andrew Wakefield, we are seeing measles epidemics in the UK even though the MMR jabs have been available since 1988.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 7:37 am
I recall an outbreak of pertussis about fifteen years ago in my area. While the infection itself was treated rapidly with antibiotics, the typical cough would persist in the victims for weeks.
To control this the attending physicians were handing out prescriptions for a methadone-based antitussive. Months later stories began to come out about people strung-out on the stuff, going through withdrawal and fighting with family members over the stuff. This in a very white-bread middle-class neighborhood.
Why Canada still has an issue with whooping cough is beyond me, the vaccine is both readily available and free. This is not just since the anti- vaccination nonsense – we never really had full control of the disease up here.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
DV82XL said:
You’re right about that, but they still have made progress and really there’s no reason we can’t get a handle on this. To be honest it’s a little embarrassing becasue just about every other industrial country has licked the problem for a while.
I’m sure it can be accomplished and if we stick to the vaccine programs then it will be accomplished. The antivaccine nonsense assures it won’t happen, though. If this continues then it undermines the efforts to finally get this under control and we can’t stand for that. Maybe we should turn it into an issue of national pride or something, because it is really a public health fight and one that’s important.
I’ve seen whooping cough a couple of times and it looks like a really nasty condition to live with for any period of time so I can see how there would be prescriptions for the symptoms. It seems like you’d cough your throat raw without it.
It makes me wonder also about what it might do so far as further infections that might not be tied to the condition because if you get your airway inflamed and cough your way to a bad sore throat then you have a pathway that any kind of bacteria or virus can get into the tissues and take hold. I don’t know if people always apprecite that even non-fatal infections need to be vaccinated against when possible because of the fact that the impact on health can cause other issues either right away or even down the road.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Any severe infection can, even if it doesn’t do that much damage on its own, create an opportunity for other infections. I read somewhere (and sorry I don’t have the source for this) that many of the deaths from the 1919 flu epidemic are believed to have been bacterial infections that were opportunistic to the flu infection or the health crisis it created.
These infections weaken the immune system and even after them it can take some time to recover and if the infection leads to inflammation or to coughing or soreness that causes a compromise of the membranes in the throat, mouth, nose or lungs, then this is where bacteria or viruses have a chance to take hold.
Also, gastric infections can badly unbalance gut flora and this can take some time to recover. During this time there is increased chance of infection.
Of course I’m not trying to be alarmist, but lets not forget that every infectious disease has the potential to cause greater problems and therefore should be avoided when possible. Anything like a vaccine that can cut down on something like whooping cough is going to have a much larger net beneficial effect on public health than just what is directly attributable to the infection.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Consider the following:
A random sample of chiropractors showed that one third agreed with the statement claiming that there is no scientific proof that immunization prevents disease, that it causes more disease than it prevents, and that contracting an infectious disease is safer than immunization (Ernst E. The attitude against immunization within some branches of complementary medicine. Eur J Pediatr. 1997;156:513-515.)
Naturopaths were reportedly opposed to routine human immunization because they believed it was “unnatural, unnecessary, and elitist”(Ibid)
Did you know that homeopathic “vaccines” (or nosodes, to use their technical term) are made from serially agitated dilutions of made from urine, excreta, vomitus, nasal discharges, and diseased tissues from patients suffering from infectious diseases? I am stunned by this level of stupidity, because in this case it is posible that a pathogen will survive dilution and “succussing” and if it does it will not be properly attenuated as in a real vaccines.
Quote Comment
April 7th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
DV82XL said:
Yeah, it’s scray really. In theory, if an item were actually diluted to one part per 10^20 or something more then it shouldn’t be dangerous, but just the fact that the original agent is handled in the same general area, using the same vials and in the same enviornment is dangerous enough.
It really makes my skin crawl when I hear talk from homeopaths saying it’s just like a vaccine. If it were that easy to make vaccines we could have a vaccine for everything – Need an Aids vaccine? Take a drop of infected blood and dilute repeatedly. Of course, it doesn’t work like that.
Vaccines are not simply diluted agents and the term “attenuated” is over simplistic. They’re the result of a lot of hard work and testing to render viruses and bacteria that have been specially modified or have had proteins taken from them or have had their genes transplanted into other organisms etc to make the vaccine. Even comparatively simple vaccine production methods require a great deal of R&D, for example, the “killed vaccine” method like in polio vaccine requires methods of assuring the virus is dead but not destroying the protein structure of it.
Of course, some dieases are tougher nuts to crack than others, but they all require a lot of research, testing and evaluation. It’s damn insulting to the whole field of medical research to equate that process to homeopaths who blindly dilute substances down to nothing and then claim they do magical things.
Quote Comment
April 8th, 2009 at 4:01 pm
“Jenny McCarthy has a body count attached to her name. This website will publish the total number of vaccine preventable illnesses and vaccine preventable deaths that have happened since June 2007 when she began publicly speaking out against vaccines.”
Jenny McCarthy Body Count page
Via: Phil Plait’s Skepticblog
Quote Comment
April 8th, 2009 at 4:50 pm
DV82XL said:
Yes, but she also has a body and a nice one which she is willing to show without leaving anything to the imagination. Or at least she was in the 1990’s and it still looks pretty good, if not as perfect as it once was.
In our society this kind of thing seems to get you more attention than your actual understanding of something or for that matter the validity of your facts and information. Sad though it is.
I don’t have a problem with giving her attention for the right reasons, but it needs to have it’s limits: hot stupid girls are for looking at, not listening to and certainly not for taking advice from.
Quote Comment
April 8th, 2009 at 5:59 pm
Q said:
Actually there are any number of pleasant things you can do with hot stupid girls other than just looking at them….
Quote Comment