I'm not sure about the rat poison connection? Squalene is a naturally occurring substance produced by the liver of, I believe, anything that has a liver including humans. Commercial squalene is extracted from shark livers because they have a lot of it. It is used to boost the immune response to a vaccine, meaning less vaccine needs to be used for each individual and a low vaccine supply can be stretched farther. The US purchased a supply of squalene around the time of H1N1 in case things got really bad and they needed to speed up vaccination, but they never used it, and no vaccines used in the US have had squalene. The H1N1 vaccines in Canada and the Europe* did use squalene, and I am not aware of any problems associated with it. It seems to be very safe for use in vaccines, and the most troubling aspect of it to me is the potential devastating effect it could have on shark populations if used in the future.
Unfortunately, some of the antivac sites contain very misleading graphs, which is a little disturbing to me because it is hard to believe that they are presenting the graphs the way they do by accident. Some diseases really did cease to be problems due to improved sanitary practices - diseases such as typhoid and cholera which are spread contaminated water or food. Not so much with diseases that are spread directly from human to human such as the flu, common cold, chicken pox, measles, mumps, german measles, etc.
What did go down, and what is often shown as evidence that diseases themselves were going away before vaccines, is the death rates for diseases due in a large part to antibiotics to treat bacterial infections (scarlet fever, which is caused by the same bacteria as strep throat and for which there is still no vaccine, used to be a pretty serious illness but is now cleared up easily with a simple course of antibiotics), and to treat opportunistic secondary infections in the wake of a virus, as well as many other drugs, the iron lung to save many polio victims who would have died before its invention, the ability to intubate people can't breath on their own, etc. Measles, for instance, only kills 1 or 2 per thousand people who get it in the first world today, but in places with high poverty and malnutrition levels and low or no access to modern health care, it can still kill as many as 5 to 10% of those are unfortunate enough to be stricken with it.
But while the death rates plummeted for many of these diseases, they diseases themselves continued to spread in rising and falling epidemics until intruduction of vaccine at which point the rates of disease themselves did indeed drop dramatically.
*edited, much later, because just back rereading the thread and noticed I'd written Canada and US use squalene when I meant Canada and Europe. Ouch - bad mistake.
Edited by pers - 2/5/11 at 4:00pm
