quick update

[brigid]

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

I haven’t posted anything recently because I’m baby wrangling pretty much 24/7 which makes it hard to get things done (I took a shower at 3am this morning because he woke up and then I couldn’t get back to sleep and hey, why not). I also am still overwhelmed and stressed out by this whole “moving” thing. We’re STILL painting and unpacking and there’s roaches (although less, way less) and mice (we are poisoning the hell out of them) and the washing machine gets machine oil on everything and the dryer isn’t vented right and the heat crapped out and and and… and I don’t want to just put up whiny complaint after whiny complaint so I’ve been quiet over here.

I was also working up a post about vaccines and why they are important but I just got so pissed off doing the research for it. I might post “best of” comments from anti-vax folks online.

Here’s what it boils down to. There are diseases that used to be endemic in the USA that killed or crippled kids and adults. It was not uncommon for a disease like, say, diphtheria to sweep through and kill 6 kids and a parent in one fell swoop. Over the years scientists have been developing vaccines that prevent this sort of thing from happening.

Once upon a time, most deadly childhood diseases in the USA and England were really rare, as a result of the vaccines. But now some people who don’t really understand “science” or “cause and effect” or “correlation” or “hypothesis” or… a whole lot of stuff… are convinced that vaccines are evil. And they’re using fear and over statements and lies to get other people afraid of them (note that a lot of the folks doing this who aren’t parents have products to sell… expensive dietary supplements made mainly of water, or chelation therapies that can be deadly, whatever) so they won’t vaccinate their kids. And now measles is once again endemic in the UK and certain parts of the USA.

Which means that kids are getting sick and dying from child hood diseases that they shouldn’t have gotten in the first place.

And that’s sad and that’s wrong. I had a rough few months at my second to last job because someone didn’t vaccinate their kids, their kids got whooping cough, the parents got whooping cough and passed it on to people in THEIR office, and THEY passed it on to THEIR loved ones, including people in MY office. Did you know that you can literally break your ribs while coughing with whooping cough? You can. And it can lost for months. Literally, months. Polio doesn’t always kill, nor does it always land the afflicted in an iron lung. Which leads some people to argue that Polio is a “mild” disease which shouldn’t be inoculated against. But Polio CAN cripple people, leaving them unable to walk or use their arms. And decades down the road, whether they’ve regained the use of their limbs/back again after years of excruciating physical therapy or not, they can then expect post-Polio syndrome which is constant terrible pain. Fun, huh?

If you doubt the efficacy of vaccines, go to an old graveyard and look at the number of tiny headstones for babies and children whose lives were cut tragically short. They didn’t all die from neglect and drowning. They died of measles, they died of diphtheria, they died of polio, they died of rotavirus, they died of smallpox, they died of childhood illnesses many people now deny the lethality of. They died in vast numbers. When a kid dies, people speak about the dramatic perversion of nature, about how awful it is when a child dies before its parent, when a parent has to put a child into the ground. But until relatively recently that was an all too common occurrence.

Vaccines save lives. They save the lives of those who have been vaccinated, and they save the lives of those who cannot be vaccinated for legitimate medical reasons (age, allergy, immune system issues).

Autism, a genetic disorder, has been proven to be not linked with vaccines. This is a fact. This is a true thing. And even if vaccines did cause Autism, I’d rather have a living child with Autism than a dead child.

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