Vaccine eradication of disease - Page 3

[stik]

Quarantine is very difficult to implement effectively.  Being quarantined interferes with people's ability to work and to care for family members even if they are not sick themselves.  Knowledge of a quarantine tends to keep people from seeking medical care for themselves and family members, which allows diseases more time to spread through a community and tends to increase morbidity and mortality.  Also, for many contagious diseases, once a case is identified, it's already been spread.  The swine flu outbreak a couple years back offered a great example of this.  Nervous elected officials called for closing borders to limit disease transmission, but the disease had already crossed borders and was spreading through populations without help from tourists and immigrants.  There would have been no point.  

Obviously, it would be great for public health if people stayed home when they were sick.  Quarantines impose limits on more people than that, because you have to if you're going to keep the disease from being transmitted while it's pre-symptomatic, which is when a lot of diseases are contagious.  

[PlayaMama]

Originally Posted by Calm 

I certainly hope you don't hold all MDC members up to this kind of scrutiny and judgment and only read posts that are accurate to the nth degree.  Who is going to learn under those conditions?  I've had debates online with scholars (religious debates mostly) and scientists and now and again, they make mistakes.  In fact, there are one or two who are so accurate, if you can pick a mistake in their information, you get an "I corrected Blair" icon - so even the most pedantic do such things and to disregard their information based on what is rather an inconsequential piece of the point is only shooting yourself in the foot.  I personally don't like language mistakes... grammar, spelling, etc... but the thing is, most people aren't good at language so I have to deal with that.  I don't skip over posts that don't satisfy my personal grievances.  

Because I write with a pedantic style, I do tend to draw "corrections", I've had to learn to live with that.  As some have said to me:  consider yourself with a strong case if all the other side can do is correct your spelling or inconsequential mistakes to discredit all your info based on that.  I've actually seen people discredit others based on spelling mistakes... I know, that's funny, but it happens in attempts to discredit the writer.  It is basically an ad hominem logical fallacy.  

ETA don't confuse what I've said here with an objection to corrections.  I appreciate corrections, I give them myself.  It was skipping the rest of my post based on that that I am addressing.  And as an aside, are you aware how common it is to mix theory and law, let alone law and fact?  It is taught in science class for a reason, and then refreshed in university for a reason.  

i apologize if you thought that i was deliberately picking apart your post.

i am currently finishing a master's degree program and so i only have time to briefly scan most threads and only engage in some. as i hadn't read this entire thread deeply, and honestly don't have much knowledge on smallpox, i thought it best to avoid the major discussion.

i do accept that the use of language is very important to me (perhaps more than other people ), and i think that it's important to keep scientific language accurate for the reasons i mentioned above. i would also suggest that the difference between the idea that scientific theory becoming law is different than a spelling or grammar error.

i promise that i wasn't intending to discredit your argument based on the confusion of those terms. i think i even mentioned that they are frequently confused?

[miriam]

I think people's perceptions of the effectiveness of the vaccines plays a role - but even educated people can be misled.  It happens all the time.) 

I have an education, a good memory, and life experience, so that must be my problem.  Most of the parents who now refuse vaccines for their children or selectively vax are well-educated, so it must be the problem. 

Since I can remember measles, mumps, rubella, and chicken pox being considered mild childhood diseases, I guess that is why I do not trust the medical profession when I am now informed that chicken pox is a dangerous disease. Even the CDC said that measles was a mild childhood disease in 1967 - 

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1919891/pdf/pubhealthreporig00027-0069.pdf

[QUOTE]For centuries the measles virus has maintained a remarkably stable ecological relationship with man. The clinical disease is a characteristic syndrome of notable constancy and only moderate severity. Complications are infrequent, and, with adequate medical care, fatality is rare.[/UNQUOTE]

Time magazine boldly stated that the government intended to wipe measles out in one year, 1967.  http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,836830-1,00.html  How has that worked out for us?

[QUOTE]Though rubella early in pregnancy has gained an evil reputation as a killer and crippler of the unborn, it is otherwise a mild and almost harmless infection.[/UNQUOTE]

The same article says that measles is dangerous, so who am I to believe?

There is concern in some government healthcare circles in forty years as to women of childbearing age not having continuous natural immunity to rubella.  I cannot find that now. I will post it when I find it. 

Edited by miriam - 4/19/11 at 7:57pm

[miriam]

"...I don't think that resistance has anything to do with the effectiveness of the vaccines..."

Really?  

Some one needs to tell these people that information.  

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/08/14/health/main5242168.shtml  

"So when WHO officials discovered a polio outbreak in Nigeria was sparked by the polio vaccine itself, they assumed it would be easier to stop than a natural "wild" virus.

They were wrong."

[JMJ]

Miriam, I'm not sure that your article has much to do with resistance, mutation yes, resistance no.  It does, however, highlight an issue that has been on my mind.  We seem to have outlined two conflicting theories for stopping serious diseases (in addition to elements that may fit into both theories such as cleanliness and nutrition):

Theory 1: We allow the disease to run its course to allow people to develop natural immunity.  This creates a sort of a herd immunity where immune factors passed from mother to child causes a slow decrease in severity of the disease over many generations of exposure.  Combine this method with better medical care for treating less common severe cases, and a killer disease has been turned into a mild illness.

Theory 2: Use vaccines to reduce the number of non-immune people without actually getting the disease.  Quarantine anyone who gets the disease or is believed to be a possible carrier of the disease.

I think that either theory is plausible. though both have some issues.  Theory 2 is generally seen as more humane, and Theory 1 is more natural.  For Theory 1 to work, a lot of lives have to be affected by the disease, and for theory 2 to work, the vaccine has to create immunity in a very high percentage of individuals.  This requires that the vaccine is both effective and almost universally used.

The problem is that in most cases, the OPV most of all, having different people working toward both of the goals in the theories above prevents us from reaching either goal.  We have had theory 2 drilled into our heads by the government and the media, and there is no shortage of blame for unvaxed people who get sick and pass on the disease.  Vaxed people who get sick are accounted for in vaccine error, but unvaxed people who do not submit themselves to the statistical probabilities are lowering the effectiveness of a vaccination campaign by being not immune.  Close to 100% of unvaxed people are not immune without getting the disease while a smaller percentage of vaxed individuals fail to achieve immunity.  To some extent, people working for theory 1 will help those working for theory 2 because after they have been sick, they are immune with a more effective immunity than those who have been vaccinated, but since the goal in theory 2 is to keep people from getting sick, getting and passing on a disease works against theory 2.

What is not often noted is that working towards the goal in theory 2 works directly against theory 1.  With widespread vaccines, natural immunity tends not to be passed from mother to child.  The severity of a disease is not reduced.  It is increased.  There is no way to find equilibrium through theory 1 if most people are vaxed.

The OPV is the best example of these theories working against each other.  The OPV works by giving those who use it a mild form of the disease that is contageous so that others who are not vaccinated can "catch" the vaccine from those who are.  This can theoretically be passed on indefinitely so that the vaccine becomes the source of a new outbreak, and at any point, that outbreak can mutate to become a more severe paralytic form of polio, which is does not so rarely.  The vaccine tends to protect those who are vaccinated against catching both the wild polio and this vaccine derived polio from other people (but doesn't protect them from the vaccine itself).  Therefore, vaccinating pretty much everybody will theoretically contain both the wild and the vaccine derived polio, but if the vaccine is used partially, you have introduced another disease into a vulnerable population.

I don't know whether or not polio is worth wiping out with a vaccine, but what we have done with the OPV is a mess.  Would polio still be as serious today if we hadn't vaccinated against it and instead spent the money improving nutrition?  Would polio still exist if a better vaccine had been developed and used without creating all the distrust associated with the OPV?

[JMJ]

I think my own answers to my original question are coalescing.  I'm actually basing this on the "Just War" theory, that certain circumstances should exist to justify the use of vaccines in a war against a disease.

-The disease should be severe and widespread with few treatment options.

-The vaccine should be highly effective, well researched, with few side effects.

-The general public should see of their own accord (not counting propaganda campaigns) the disastrous effects of the disease.

-Statistics on the side effects of the vaccine should be researched thoroughly and presented honestly so that the public can clearly see the risks of both the disease and the risks of the vaccine to see that the risks of the vaccine are much lower than the risks of the disease, not somebody trying to convince them of that and questioning the truth of it.

-There should be a clear plan of attack intended to eradicate this disease.  It should take into account the nature of the disease, the contageous period, and the cultural elements of the affected cultures.

-There should be good reason to believe that this plan will be successful.

-The majority of the public should be in favor of the plan before a propaganda campaign is begun, calling for an effective vaccine.

-The plan should be carried out quickly to eradicate the disease, and the vaccine should be discontinued.

What do you all think?  Anything to add or subtract?

[miriam]

You seem to be defining the discussion to suit your own convenience. 

You left out the fact that if number two is to work, as you define number two, then society will need to sacrifice some susceptible individuals as Hannah Poling, Hannah Bruesewitz, or Baby Ian  since vaccines are not 100% effective nor are vaccines 100% safe and never will be. 

That is why the government set up VAERS. 

Why eradicate a disease through vaccines at all?  Why not just improve nutrition and sanitation for all?  

How do you or the pharmaceutical houses define well-researched, highly-effective, or few side effects?  When your child has one side effect, that is one too many. 

What is your risk/benefit standard?  If your child is vaccine damaged, remember, your chances were 100%.

-The general public should see of their own accord (not counting propaganda campaigns) the disastrous effects of the disease.

Who is directing the propaganda campaign?  The CDC?  HHS? WHO? UNICEF?  Wyeth? QuackWatch?  Who is printing the textbooks to educate people? The drug companies? Dealing with vaccine damaged children makes the diseases look less threatening. 

-Statistics on the side effects of the vaccine should be researched thoroughly and presented honestly so that the public can clearly see the risks of both the disease and the risks of the vaccine to see that the risks of the vaccine are much lower than the risks of the disease, not somebody trying to convince them of that and questioning the truth of it.

Don't hold your breath...

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/07/25/cbsnews_investigates/main4296175.shtml?tag=mncol%3Blst%3B2

...because vaccine manufacturers are not the most honest of people...

http://www.cnbc.com/id/42592600

and  do you really believe that doctors and pharmaceutical companies think it is worth their time to convince wary parents to vaccinate their children?

http://www.upi.com/Health_News/2011/04/19/Parents-worry-about-kid-vaccines-grows/UPI-13781303192109/

In my opinion, that HIV and AIDS have become such a challenge to the medical community because medicine is relying on a 18th century view of disease.  It does not and will not work. When researchers decide that they are not god and do not know everything then maybe we as a society will move ahead in ""conquering" disease. A better term should be to co-exist with germs since we will never eradicate them unless we are fool ourselves. War never solved anything.

And, where is scarlet fever and the scarlet fever vaccine?

[SilverMoon010]

Originally Posted by JMJ 

I think my own answers to my original question are coalescing.  I'm actually basing this on the "Just War" theory, that certain circumstances should exist to justify the use of vaccines in a war against a disease.

-The disease should be severe and widespread with few treatment options.

-The vaccine should be highly effective, well researched, with few side effects.

-The general public should see of their own accord (not counting propaganda campaigns) the disastrous effects of the disease.

-Statistics on the side effects of the vaccine should be researched thoroughly and presented honestly so that the public can clearly see the risks of both the disease and the risks of the vaccine to see that the risks of the vaccine are much lower than the risks of the disease, not somebody trying to convince them of that and questioning the truth of it.

-There should be a clear plan of attack intended to eradicate this disease.  It should take into account the nature of the disease, the contageous period, and the cultural elements of the affected cultures.

-There should be good reason to believe that this plan will be successful.

-The majority of the public should be in favor of the plan before a propaganda campaign is begun, calling for an effective vaccine.

-The plan should be carried out quickly to eradicate the disease, and the vaccine should be discontinued.

What do you all think?  Anything to add or subtract?

I'm just jumping in here out of nowhere   (You guys are so advanced on this subject, I can't keep up!)

The above is completely hypothetical, right? Because this would never happen. In a perfect world maybe, but we are too, too far from a perfect world,and this country is too quick to deem every virus/illness as deadly.

Is the thought process behind this referring to a mandatory vaccine program for a specific disease?  Also, I'm curious how the public would see in their own accord the disastrous effects of the disease? Does this mean visiting hospital wards of those infected with the disease? Also, a very important factor is who is spearheading all of this, which is not mentioned.

How is the vaccine going to eradicate the disease, and quickly?  In most cases, the vaccines have done quite the opposite.  For one, vaccines don't confer lifelong immunity.  So, you would need boosters for this disease, right, in case it was to reemerge as some diseases do naturally?

You mention OPV above.  Yes, that was a disaster.   The thing with vaccines such as OPV, or any for that matter, is that you don't know how disastrous the vaccines are until it has been submitted to millions and it is much too late.  You can say the lesson was learned with OPV, but was it really?  There are still recalls being made of vaccines time and time again. Who knows what the devastating effects are having on these people who have been vaccinated with a recalled vaccine, and who knows when another SV-40 type of incident will occur.  It can occur at any time but the public wouldn't know about it until too late.  The lesson is never fully learned and will never be.  Nature is still too smart for science.

Edited by SilverMoon010 - 4/20/11 at 12:15pm

[stik]

Option number one also involves significant sacrifice, since the diseases are not 100% safe either.
 

Originally Posted by miriam 

You seem to be defining the discussion to suit your own convenience. 

You left out the fact that if number two is to work, as you define number two, then society will need to sacrifice some susceptible individuals as Hannah Poling, Hannah Bruesewitz, or Baby Ian  since vaccines are not 100% effective nor are vaccines 100% safe and never will be. 

[miriam]

First, Do No Harm.

Autism now involves more children than childhood cancer, juvenile diabetes combined, and another chronic condition I cannot recall according to PBS's MacNeil - something measles never could claim. If this is preventative disease, then I will take my chances with disease.

[stik]

I don't want to underestimate the difficulties faced by children living with autism.  I don't want to over-estimate them either - autism isn't fatal.  Measles can be.  

If vaccines caused autism, that would be a major problem even though autism isn't fatal.  But vaccines don't cause autism.  

We don't know what causes autism.  Right now, the available evidence suggests that vaccines are not at fault.  There is NO link between autism and vaccination.  

[SilverMoon010]

1. Quote:

Originally Posted by stik 

I don't want to underestimate the difficulties faced by children living with autism.  I don't want to over-estimate them either - autism isn't fatal.  Measles can be.  

If vaccines caused autism, that would be a major problem even though autism isn't fatal.  But vaccines don't cause autism.  

We don't know what causes autism.  Right now, the available evidence suggests that vaccines are not at fault.  There is NO link between autism and vaccination.

I don't want to get off topic, but this is a huge thing.  Autism is only a tiny factor in my decision, a tiny, tiny factor.  I think there are tons of other dangers with vaccines in addition to the autism factor.

However, with that said, I was reading a magazine (mainstream) the other day and it was about autism and environmental factors and how vaccines don't cause autism but other environmental factors do.  It went on to talk about how pregnant women should avoid living near major highways, limit the use of burning incense and scented candles, don't eat foods with pesticides on it, BUT, vaccines are okay.  Wait a sec....Did I just read that right? We are to avoid foods with pesticides on them and scented candles, but we are to continue to vaccinate with major toxins in our systems????? Talk about hypocritical.  I couldn't help but get irritated by reading that article.  Everyone should realize there are dangers of vaccinations. I'm sorry, I'm going to avoid vaccines before I avoid burning candles!

What available evidence are you referring to? You may have to read between the lines as to who is conducting these studies/research as well.  I guarantee there is a conflict of interest somewhere along the lines.  They smear doctors like Wakefield because they don't want people to wake up to the fact that vaccines can cause damage.  They want us all to continue to be in the dark.

[stik]

IMO, no one needed to smear Wakefield.  He did a great job smearing himself.  

All the other studies on the link between autism and vaccination come up with a big fat NO.  Wakefield stands alone.  And he's a fraud, who's been stripped of his license to practice medicine.  If you find Wakefield compelling anyway, we are not going to be able to come to any sort of agreement on that, because personally, I don't believe in a shadowy nebulous "they" who are out to give kids autism, and apparently you do.  

There are a lot more toxins in air pollution and pesticides in food than there are in vaccines, and we ingest air pollution and food on a daily basis, and vaccines only on a few occasions, so it at least makes sense that toxins in the environment would be a much more serious concern than toxins in vaccines.  Although, to be honest, I'm not knocking myself out to eat only pesticide-free food because the cause of autism is currently unknown, but seems likely to me to be a combination of complex genetic and epigenetic factors.  

[Chamomile Girl]

Originally Posted by stik 

IMO, no one needed to smear Wakefield.  He did a great job smearing himself.  

All the other studies on the link between autism and vaccination come up with a big fat NO.  Wakefield stands alone.  And he's a fraud, who's been stripped of his license to practice medicine.  If you find Wakefield compelling anyway, we are not going to be able to come to any sort of agreement on that, because personally, I don't believe in a shadowy nebulous "they" who are out to give kids autism, and apparently you do.  

There are a lot more toxins in air pollution and pesticides in food than there are in vaccines, and we ingest air pollution and food on a daily basis, and vaccines only on a few occasions, so it at least makes sense that toxins in the environment would be a much more serious concern than toxins in vaccines.  Although, to be honest, I'm not knocking myself out to eat only pesticide-free food because the cause of autism is currently unknown, but seems likely to me to be a combination of complex genetic and epigenetic factors.  

There may be more toxins in air pollution and pesticides, but I am not injecting these things directly into my baby's bloodstream, so that is a spurious argument at best.

[stik]

You're not injecting vaccines directly into your baby's bloodstream either.  Vaccine injections are intramuscular.  

Most cases of morbidity and mortality related to toxic substances are caused by ingestion or inhalation of large quantities of toxins.  The respiratory and digestive systems provide perfectly accessible routes for heavy metal poisoning, and indeed, for most kinds of poisoning.  Those are the typical routes for acquired toxicity.    

[SilverMoon010]

Originally Posted by stik 

IMO, no one needed to smear Wakefield.  He did a great job smearing himself.  

All the other studies on the link between autism and vaccination come up with a big fat NO.  Wakefield stands alone.  And he's a fraud, who's been stripped of his license to practice medicine.  If you find Wakefield compelling anyway, we are not going to be able to come to any sort of agreement on that, because personally, I don't believe in a shadowy nebulous "they" who are out to give kids autism, and apparently you do.  

There are a lot more toxins in air pollution and pesticides in food than there are in vaccines, and we ingest air pollution and food on a daily basis, and vaccines only on a few occasions, so it at least makes sense that toxins in the environment would be a much more serious concern than toxins in vaccines.  Although, to be honest, I'm not knocking myself out to eat only pesticide-free food because the cause of autism is currently unknown, but seems likely to me to be a combination of complex genetic and epigenetic factors.  

Pesticides were not my reasoning....It was the reasoning of the mainstream magazine article I read, although I certainly try to limit the intake of pesticides on my food whenever I can.  The thing with that article is is that I just can't believe for one minute how we have stooped to contributing autism to pesticides and candles, and disregarding formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury, etc.  You may think vaccines are only on a few occasions, but this is not true. The introduction of toxin over toxin from vaccine after vaccine accumulates over time, where the body reaches a point where it's unable to dispose of them, leaving the toxins no where to go but remain in the body.

If your theory is genetic, then why has autism increased so dramatically over the past years?

My brother 30 some years ago, when he was a baby, had a severe reaction to the DPT vaccine, where he almost died.  Shortly after, he developed dyslexia when there was nothing that indicated he was genetically-predisposed to it.  I don't call that a coincidence.  

My theory is that it's everything combined in the vaccines, not just the mercury, causing the neurological damage.

(Oh boy, how did we get on this topic? I think we may be getting way off topic with this direction.  Let's veer back to the original topic because this topic can go on forever)

Edited by SilverMoon010 - 4/20/11 at 1:27pm

[pers]

     Quote:

Originally Posted by Calm 

In studying disease eradication, we need to look at other aspects.  Diseases naturally eradicate themselves.  Belief in this idea is crucial to even have a chance of being open to ideas apart from vax for health advances.  We can look back at how ridiculous it was to suffer scurvy when the cure was so simple... but science simply could not figure it out.  In fact, we always look back and scoff at how infantile science was "back then", and to think in future our children won't look back on us as total idiots is arrogant and not learning from history.  Right now, there are tons of things, perhaps all things, we do medically that will seem completely ridiculous, and bluntly: incompetent and dangerous.  Chemotherapy, for starters.  That's akin to blood letting but if you even mention that, even with its sorry 5% "success" rate, people invariably get their panties in a wad about how brilliant it is and how modernity has saved us.  Um. Yeah.  Whatever.  Chemo is the best we have right now.  To put it on a higher pedestal than that is at the very least pessimistic.  

Sure, it is possible for natural selection to lead to humans who are resistant to a disease or for a disease to mutate away from virulence over time.  But smallpox has been around for millennia.  Should we have patiently have waited through a few thousand more years of death and suffering for it maybe to have gone away?

I certainly do hope and expect that future generations have much better medicine than we do.  But yes, as brutal as it can be some times, chemo is the best we have in many cases at this time, and it can be very effective.   What sort of chemo has a 5% success rate for treating what sort of cancer? Is that only for chemo used by itself, or also used in combination with other treatments such as surgery and/or radiation? And what is success?  Is it a good five year survival rate?  Is it preventing a cancer likely to recur many years after surgery or radiation from doing so?  Is it giving a person with terminal cancer a few more months or a year extra to spend with their family?  Chemo is used for all sorts of different things and with all sorts of different goals.  For some cancers, such as acute leukemia in children, it can be quite effective in saving their lives.  For others, it is so ineffective that it is not even part of the recommended treatment.  

Unlike blooodletting, chemo is backed up by studies and actual evidence to show just how effective it is at achieving various goals in various situations, and to even try to assign a blanket number to the effectiveness of chemo in general is absurd.  It's like picking up a big paint roller and asking how effective a tool it is and getting a an answer that tries to average it out over every possible use of paint and represent it with a single percentage.  To be at all useful the answer would at least have to take into consideration whether you want to use it to paint a finely detailed portrait or to paint a large wall. 

I want to address the small number of people vaccinated point too, but it is kind of a big deal toward the topic of this thread, and something that comes up a lot, so I'll post it later by itself so it isn't lost amidst this post which may very well be tl;dr.
 

Originally Posted by miriam 

Why wasn't smallpox eradicated by the Chinese thousands of years ago when they used the "dried pus sniffed into the nose" method?  That method was used all over China and the Middle East for a very long time by very many people. It is described in the Mothering Book, Vaccines: Issue For Our Times, the first issue. That method was used for thousands of years and smallpox was NOT eradicated in all of that time anywhere. 

I think how smallpox kills has been addressed by others already, but to answer your other question...

The "sniffed into the nose" method was called variolation, and it was used in lots of places over a very long time, though sniffing into the nose may have been particular to the Chinese, inserting a bit of dried scab into a small cut was more common.  There were two main strains of smallpox, variola major and variola minor.  The former killed around 30% of its victims while the latter only 1 or 2%.  For variolation, they generally used material from a person who had had a mild case of smallpox, and thus was more likely to have had variola minor, though they didn't know the specifics of how that worked then.  Also, by using a very small amount of material, the initial dose of virus may have been less than typically aquired by breathing in right very close to someone who coughs or sneezes out smallpox virus, and thus give the immune system a slight headstart in responding to the infection as the virus takes slightly longer to multiply enough to cause illness.  

But as for why this didn't eradicate smallpox is primarily because it was deliberate infection with live smallpox mattter.  Just as vaccination with vaccinia virus can actually spread vaccinia, variolation can and did spread smallpox, and this happened much, much more often than with the much milder and much more likely to remain localized to vaccination site vaccinia.  There were actual smallpox outbreaks that were started by variolation.  Also, just because someone had a mild case of smallpox did not absolutely guarantee that they had variola minor rather than major, so variola major could be spread by variolation as well, and variola minor was deadly in itself even if less so than major.  And finally, the smallpox vaccination campaigns worked because they chased down every outbreak of smallpox and brought the vaccine wherever smallpox was to minimize the number of cases and stop the spread (this was succesful due to a lot of effort and the characteristics of smallpox, there are many disease for which these methods would not be effective).  But while variolation was widespread, it was not used universally in all places where smallpox was spreading.  And even if one local variolated all of it's population and they all suffered from relatively mild cases (though 1-2% died from the variolation) and thus were mostly immune to smallpox (just as vaccination, variolation could sometimes not take, for instance if the material used did not actually contain any live virus), as long as smallpox existed elsewhere it could return to infect a less protected future generation. 

Originally Posted by Calm 

Can scurvy be eradicated?  In my opinion, the answer to that question is the same as the answer to the question of communicable diseases.  

[...]

What does it take to eradicate a disease?  I personally think it takes high immune function which is stimulated by a biologically appropriate lifestyle.    When we look at a time line though, what it shows is that it takes time.  But that is usually time to spread the information to the people.  And even then, what we had last century was an accidental decrease in mortality... all we have are guesses as to why the death rates plummeted to virtually all diseases, communicable or not, before vaccines and antibiotics.  

Imagine what would happen if our nutrition wasn't just "better" than medieval, but was "optimal"?  Look what happened with the subtle changes in our environments and access to foods.  I know we're talking about eradication which is cases, not mortality, but what mortality rates show us is our strength against diseases.  Our defenses against acute disease such as viral and bacterial in the west had gained magnificent strength last century in the west.  When we follow the pattern of diseases, we see that those that are proven directly related to diet had the exact same decrease in mortality as the communicable ones, as this chart shows, comparing measles and scurvy.  Yet oh how strongly science had refused to acknowledge this connection when it comes to communicable disease!  In fact, all the clinical trials on vitamin A for measles is dated 1989 or later.  Time.  It seems to take a lot of frustrating time.

Scurvy is not caused by a virus or bacteria that the immune system could fight off, it is the direct result of a deficiency of vitamin C.  Of course preventing the deficiency will prevent scurvy. It is not a infectious disease, you can't catch it form someone who has it or be infected by it lurking in the environment.  While it may serve as an example of scientific progress and how we now have answers to things that were once mysteries, and thus can hope to someday have answers to current mysteries, it does not in the least answer any questions about communicable diseases since it is not an example of one. 

Malnutrition does for sure weaken the immune system and leave us more susceptible to catching communicable diseases and less able to fight them off.  So does stress, lack of sleep, lack of exercise, or too much exercise - plain old physical exhaustion from overdoing it. .  These things all get in the way of the immune system acting as it should. Doctors know this, though I agree that they are often too quick to brush off getting people to eat better as something that they aren't going to convince people to change any way so why bother trying.  

But there is no such thing as a perfect immune system.  Doing the right things can help keep the immune system functioning properly, but even when it is functioning properly, while that gives it a much better chance of fighting the disease, sometimes the disease still wins.   There is no evidence that any particular diet or lifestyle (besides living as an absolute hermit, I suppose, can't catch a disease from a person if you have no contact) will make the immune system able to fight off all disease.  There is no evidence that an optimal diet and lifestyle would have made any difference in whether or not people got smallpox, for instance, though it likely would have prevented some cases from ending in death.  

And just what is an optimal diet?  I think you weigh in on the raw vegan side, right? But if you just look around the forum a little, you will find plenty of people who would swear that that is a horribly unhealthy diet and the paleo diet is what everyone should be doing and bring forth a bunch of links to scientific sounding stuff and a large reading list to support this.  I myself am not really down with the raw, but do lean toward the Micheal Pollan "Eat food. Not too much.  Mostly plants" way of thinking, but really, nutrition is a very complicated science, and while there are certainly thing we know are very unhealthy, there is not a lot to back up any single mode of diet as the one true way of eating for perfect health. 

[JMJ]

Quote:

Originally Posted by SilverMoon010 

The above is completely hypothetical, right? Because this would never happen. In a perfect world maybe, but we are too, too far from a perfect world,and this country is too quick to deem every virus/illness as deadly.

Is the thought process behind this referring to a mandatory vaccine program for a specific disease?  Also, I'm curious how the public would see in their own accord the disastrous effects of the disease? Does this mean visiting hospital wards of those infected with the disease? Also, a very important factor is who is spearheading all of this, which is not mentioned.

How is the vaccine going to eradicate the disease, and quickly?  In most cases, the vaccines have done quite the opposite.  For one, vaccines don't confer lifelong immunity.  So, you would need boosters for this disease, right, in case it was to reemerge as some diseases do naturally?

Yes, I am thinking completely hypothetically and almost definitely impossibly.  Just as there has never been a just war, there has never been a just vaccine war.  Smallpox may have come closer than anything else just based on the fact that it was successful, that achievable goals were met in a reasonable amount of time, but a lot of my other points weren't met.

In my hypothetical situation, the disease would be common enough that most people would know somebody who suffered or died from the disease.  When smallpox was rampant, large portions of the population died.  I was reading the other day that some places, babies were not named until they got smallpox and proved that they could survive.  Everybody knew that smallpox was serious.  Similarly, when polio was rampant, everybody knew somebody who was crippled by polio.  Can we say the same for measles and chicken pox?  When's the last time you knew somebody who died from the chicken pox?  Sure, it happens, but it's so rare that it would be hard to get people behind a massive vaccination campaign by telling them that the chicken pox is deadly when everyone they know had it as a kid and was fine.

I'm saying I wouldn't wage a war using vaccines unless I had a pretty good idea that it could be done quickly.  Raise the standard of living for people.  Give them clean water and better medical care.  Teach them better nutrition, but don't recommend that everybody get vaccinated until you've got an open and shut plan to eradicate the disease.
 

Originally Posted by miriam 

You seem to be defining the discussion to suit your own convenience. 

You left out the fact that if number two is to work, as you define number two, then society will need to sacrifice some susceptible individuals as Hannah Poling, Hannah Bruesewitz, or Baby Ian  since vaccines are not 100% effective nor are vaccines 100% safe and never will be. 

That is why the government set up VAERS. 

Why eradicate a disease through vaccines at all?  Why not just improve nutrition and sanitation for all? 

Originally Posted by stik 

Option number one also involves significant sacrifice, since the diseases are not 100% safe either.
 

Originally Posted by miriam 

First, Do No Harm.

All of these points are very important to consider.  I tend to lean in favor of the idea of vaccination and against pretty much all the vaccines.  I'm not trying to define the discussion to suit my convenience, but to ask all of you wise women to gently keep me balanced.  I do not want to have a debate on the causes of autism.  If you want to do that, you'll need to start another thread.  We can leave it at the fact that there are people who have been hurt and killed by vaccines, and there have been people hurt and killed by diseases that are vaccinated against.  Miriam, I tend to agree with you that we should err on the side of caution when it comes to making interventions that could have nasty side effects, but at the same time, I believe in the moral principle of double-effect, that it is moral to do something to protect somebody, a greater good, even if there is an unintended, unwanted consequence.  It is moral to prescribe a medication that may have unintended side effects if the physician believes that the medication is more likely to have a positive effect on the patient.

I admit that much of our medical care is unneeded and in many cases detrimental to us, and I don't trust physicians to make my medical decisions for me.  In our litigious society, physicians are pressured into making more interventions than necessary just in case, and we suffer from those interventions more than we would from our original health issues.  Because of the principle of first doing no harm, they should be making fewer interventions.

Still, I think it should be the right of individuals (parents in the case of children) to make a decision about vaccines for themselves.  If you think your child would be at a high risk of death with the measles, by all means, take the risk and get the vaccine.  If you think your child is at a high risk of autism, feel free to minimize your child's exposure to chemicals including the ones in vaccines.  I think that vaccines should be offered because they have the potential to cause more good than harm for some people, but I don't think they should be required because they can do more harm than good for other people.

I would say that for public health officials to recommend the use of a vaccine, it should meet my previous criteria above.  I understand that it's an unreasonable request.  Most public health officials have heard a lot of propaganda and/or are in the back pocket of the vaccine companies.  I'm trying to figure out if there is a proper way to use a vaccine to assist in eradicating a disease, and if so, then how?

[stik]

Even an aggressive vaccine schedule is infrequent exposure compared the the number of times you eat or inhale.  

IMO, autism hasn't increased dramatically over the last 20-30 years.  What has increased is the frequency of diagnosis.  In the past, some of the children now diagnosed as autistic would have been diagnosed with other conditions like mental retardation, and other children wouldn't have been diagnosed at all.  

Pollution and pesticides also combine a lot of toxins.  Vaccines aren't alone there.  

This is the first time I have ever seen dyslexia described as a consequence of vaccination.  From your description of your brother having a reaction "when he was a baby," I'm not sure how he could then show signs of dyslexia "shortly after" - babies aren't expected to interpret a lot of symbols or identify rhyming words, and dyslexia isn't diagnosable until children reach school age and begin reading instruction.  Near-fatal vaccine reactions are terrifying, and I can easily see how your brother's experience might lead you to rationally conclude that vaccines could be unsafe for your family.  But I think your conclusion about the vaccine causing dyslexia is highly refutable.  For example, the last shot in the DPT series is usually administered around 5 years of age, which is also the age at which reading instruction begins for schoolchildren in the US.  So a child might appear to develop dyslexia right around the time of the last shot in the series (usually given shortly before the school year so mom can give the school an updated shot record) because that's when reading difficulties would first become apparent, but they would have been dyslexic all along and just been asymptomatic because no one expected them to read.  And, your brother could be dyslexic without a family history of dyslexia because genes are weird, and the law of large numbers points out that in a large enough population, things that are uncommon will still happen sometimes.  

Originally Posted by SilverMoon010 

Pesticides were not my reasoning....It was the reasoning of the mainstream magazine article I read, although I certainly try to limit the intake of pesticides on my food whenever I can.  The thing with that article is is that I just can't believe for one minute how we have stooped to contributing autism to pesticides and candles, and disregarding formaldehyde, aluminum, mercury, etc.  You may think vaccines are only on a few occasions, but this is not true. The introduction of toxin over toxin from vaccine after vaccine accumulates over time, where the body reaches a point where it's unable to dispose of them, leaving the toxins no where to go but remain in the body.

If your theory is genetic, then why has autism increased so dramatically over the past years?

My brother 30 some years ago, when he was a baby, had a severe reaction to the DPT vaccine, where he almost died.  Shortly after, he developed dyslexia when there was nothing that indicated he was genetically-predisposed to it.  I don't call that a coincidence.  

My theory is that it's everything combined in the vaccines, not just the mercury, causing the neurological damage.

(Oh boy, how did we get on this topic? I think we may be getting way off topic with this direction.  Let's veer back to the original topic because this topic can go on forever)

[JMJ]

Pers, you make a good point about chasing down outbreaks.  I'd also say I'm not in favor of attempting to vax the entire population or the claim that if only 95% of the people in the world were vaxed, there wouldn't be a problem.  Here, 98% are vaxed, and we're in the middle of a measles outbreak that involves vaxed as well as unvaxed children, but the public health officials are doing a lot to try to contain it, and soon, the town will be measles-free again.  If you're going to vax, vax the people who are at risk for getting the disease, not the entire population.

Also, if you're going to run an eradication campaign, it's got to be a pretty serious disease.  As long as the chicken pox vaccine is more dangerous than pox parties that allow parents to choose a time that would be a good time for their kid to get the chicken pox, we're not going to eradicate it.  We've got measles in town, and we're dining on beef liver pate and copious amounts of vegetables, not running out to get vaxed.  If I was informed that I had just been exposed to smallpox, and there was a 30% chance that I'd be dead within the month if I didn't get vaxed, you bet I'd take my chances with vaccine side effects and let somebody give me scars all up and down my arm to get the smallpox vaccine.