Day 124, Thursday, May 30th, 2013

Time is just flying by. No really, someone is throwing clocks off of the roof. Digital, mechanical, novelty, off they go, to clatter on the ground and separate into their component pieces. Note: clocks not actually being lobbed from rooftop by irresponsible cancer patients.

The void between posts is reflective, not so much of my mental state, but rather of the severe lack of happenstance. We're sitting around, reading, watching movies, and generally hiding out. This is a good thing, medically speaking. Boring means that nothing untoward is taking place in my body, and it's important to respect that. To that end, I've been operating under a sort of self-imposed quarantine, leaving only to walk to the SCCA, walk for exercise, or, occasionally, if they're not busy, get a Vivace espresso that I drink at one of the outside tables so that no one accidentally plagues on me.

Plague avoidance is a big part of my life right now. I've got my anti-fungal meds, and my anti-viral meds, and antibiotics are a sometimes food (like warfarin), but I'm also on a bunch of immunosuppressants, and so I'm largely dependent on herd immunity, which, to be effective, requires that people get vaccinated as children. Vaccines don't make you invulnerable to infection, but they do drastically increase your resistance to infection, sort of like a water-resistant wristwatch VS a waterproof one. The resistant wristwatch can handle a splash of water, even the occasional dip, but not forever. With enough water, the resistance of the watch is overcome, just as with enough viral exposure, even a vaccinated person is overcome.

The concept of herd immunity flows from this knowledge. If you have enough members of a given population that have been vaccinated, then a single sick person cannot spread enough infectious material to get the people around them sick, because all they encounter are resistant individuals. In this way, we eradicated polio from the western world. Or we had, until the rise of the anti-vaccination movement.

I'm getting extremely tired of the anti-vaccination movement, largely because of the hideous ignorance it perpetuates, particularly in light of a number of simple facts:

 - Vaccines have saved more lives than any other invention in human history.

 - Not vaccinating your children quite literally kills people, by enabling the spread of entirely preventable disease. The USA has polio again, but India doesn't.

 - The risks of vaccination consist of well-known but exceedingly rare allergic reactions to the ingredients, mostly egg-related, and of well-known but exceedingly rare cases of symptoms triggered by attenuated-live vaccines. Ask yourself what is worse, 1/5000 or 1/10000 people having an adverse reaction to a vaccine? Or 5000-10000 people getting the disease that the vaccine prevents, particularly if that disease has a mortality rate of even three percent?

If the concept of herd immunity is confusing, here is an excellent (and short) series of videos that demonstrate the concept visually. I urge you to watch it.

Stochastic monte carlo Herd Immunity demonstration.

Sadly, this simple statistical model ignores mortality and assumes that everyone recovers from illness, which is most definitely not the case, and is why vaccination is so massively important.

I'd also, at this time, like to remind everyone that the study that linked autism in children with the MMR (measles-mumps-rubella) vaccine has not only been conclusively debunked by many other scientists (seventeen other studies, in fact), the entire published paper was a scientific forgery, full of 'massaged' data, rank with omission, and was eventually retracted by the Lancet, the journal in which it was published.

Scientific papers are retracted so rarely that the word never springs to mind. It was a lie, perpetrated on the world by a group of people who hired the scientist in question, one Andrew Wakefield, to produce a paper that would support their ideas about vaccines, regardless of what the evidence actually showed. It was a lie eagerly seized upon as ultimate truth by confused, worried, and ultimately, ignorant parents, and it has led us to this strange place, where people choose to leave their children unvaccinated in the hopes that it will make them healthier, and where homeopaths are selling "nosomes" - homeopathic vaccines, and promising that they are as effective as actual vaccines, when they are nothing more than water, alcohol, or sugar pills.

It's enough to make a biochemist cry.

A man in a movie theatre notices what looks like a whale sitting next to him. "Are you a whale?" Asked the man, surprised.

 "Yes." Replied the whale.

 "What are you doing at the movies?" Asked the man.

 And the whale said, "Well, I liked the book."