This is mostly a quickie entry, since my attention is pretty much tied up with other things... But, while wandering from one online thing to the next, I managed to check the recent activity of my friends at Digg and saw that InvisibleK had pointed out a worthwhile one: I've Got Measles! Thanks Mom!
As the page says:
"Please digg so more parents will read that the link to autism has been debunked. Measles is highly contagious and can cause brain swelling, pneumonia, and even death."
I already know at least one person that has gotten another one of the Dread Diseases (whooping cough)... Sad to say, many people don't seem to realize how vaccines actually function in a community, that it's not just a matter of one person being protected or not. Ideally, it works like horses or wagons circling together during an attack: the large majority of individuals that are healthy get vaccinated in order to form a protective ring around the babies, elderly, or immune-disabled that can't safely use the shots to defend themselves. If there aren't enough healthy inoculated people to form that crucial barrier, the diseases can start attacking those vulnerable people, getting the chance to mutate into a form the vaccine can't handle -- potentially causing a real epidemic.
The other problem, of course, is that most people don't have the medical experience to have a clue what they're risking. As Elizabeth of Screw Bronze put it, speaking about her own past as a non-disabled citizen, "getting the flu or cold was the worst" the typical person fears. They don't think in terms of not being able to get out of bed for weeks, crying secretly out of the fear that perhaps they won't be alive 24 or 12 hours from now, being in the hell that many hospital wards can be. They see things like autism as the pinnacle of horror expressly because they haven't seen what real nightmares -- like the one Elizabeth described in "Fragile" yesterday -- are like.
Relatedly, I read Meet The Austins by Madeline L'Engle this past week, and was surprised to see how casually she treated the subject of all the children coming down with measles. There was no sense of the disease being dangerous or even particularly horrible; she portrayed it as essentially being on par with an average case of the flu. Odd for a disease that killed so many, even though it was in a young-adult novel; then again, it might say a lot. Many older adults were told as kids that a deceased child had moved away or stayed asleep forever -- combine that with sterilized depictions of major illnesses in media, and the lack of terror at the big diseases makes a lot more sense.
(First post with the newer version of Windows Live Writer! If nothing bad happens in my life in the near future, then hopefully having WLW will get me blogging again; like it a lot more than the web client or Semagic.)
