I read this morning how Thabo Mbeki has caused the deaths of 330,000 South Africans by ignoring the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS and making the decision in 1999 not to provide drugs that would somewhat stymie the rise in incidence of the disease.
Rolling forward, allowing HIV/AIDS to flourish to this extent, will result in more and more deaths in the future.
I am reluctant to say that science has answers for everything, but on the whole, it does a good job.
When I talk about vaccination to people, you have some that come back and say things like “Wasn’t science responsible for Thalidomide?” Indeed Thalidomide was a terrible situation and one that wasn’t predictable, but this is not to say that science does no good.
People live with HIV now, instead of Dying of AIDS. This is a massive improvment in the quality and duration of people’s lives.
We have excellent 3-in-1vaccines for small children, but because of a few scaremongers, the vaccination programme is not as successful as it should be. The overwhelming evidence is that this vaccine has no effect whatsoever on the onset of Autism, and yet the troglodytes are still out there saying that it does.
What I think is that we should publish the statistics on the numbers of people tht have died in Ireland as a direct result of the scaremongers here that result in parents not bringing their children to be vaccinated.
Because in my opinion, these scaremongers are doing the same job in Ireland that Thabo Mbeki did in South Africa.
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Follow-up comment rss or Leave a Trackback[…] I read this morning how Thabo Mbeki has caused the deaths of 330000 South Africans by ignoring the scientific evidence that HIV causes AIDS and making the decision in 1999 not to provide drugs that would somewhat stymie the rise in … Excerpt from […]
I’m not disagreeing with you Docky, but I’d like to see the figures related to the suppose rise in Autism. Plus I too would be a bit wary of a triple vaccine-should I have a small baby. I would be far more comfortable with a staggered vaccination process which I think is what some parents are hoping to get.
Nobody wants their children to get horrific childhood illnesses but by the same token fear of harm is a very powerful root.
What Mbeki did and continues to do is monstrous and I believe down to money rather than any real belief in the healing powers of garlic or whatever other claptrap he and his ministers spout.
The main figure that people quote is the 500%+ rise in the diagnosis of autism in the 1990s. This is for the most part due to the correct diagnosis of autism, which is a spectrum disorder - a lot of cases were being diagnosed as other things, but now they are being diagnosed as autism.
The 3-in-1 vaccine has nothing to do with autism. The vaccine is administered at about 14 months, which is the mean age of onset of autism. This is where people cannot tell the difference between cause and correlation. Washington DC has the highest murder rate in the US and also the highest level of policing, however, only a poor statistician would say that the elevated murder rate was caused by the police.
In a study of 500,000 kids in Denmark, 400,000 of whom received the 3-in-1 and 100,000 who didn’t, the incidence of autism was the same in both groups, the average age of onset of autism was the same in both groups.
It is dangerous to promulgate the untruth about the vaccine - dangerous because it keeps parents away from the clinics and dangerous because resources are put in the wrong place. There is no correlation between the 3-in-1 vaccine and autism apart from the fact that one is administered at about the average age when autism is diagnosed. It is bad science to say that one causes the other and this bad science needs to be stamped out.
As I said in the title, ignoring scientific evidence means that people can die.
I wonder why autism is so much more prevalent now. Do you think it’s really down to better diagnoses or is there a real spike in cases?
Hard to say FMC. Apparently, diagnosis was really poor in the past and Autism is a spectrum disorder that shows a lot of variability. Sometimes a person only really shows a kind of reticence to be involved with others - a ‘loner’ if you will - but when analysed in detail, is now being dignosed with autism.
I think we will really only know in 10 years time whether it is on the increase.
Unfortunately, sometimes we have no other way of knowing.