“Pox packages,” child abuse, and the violation of federal law

From the Washington Post:

Prosecutor warns parents wary of vaccines: Mailing chickenpox so kids develop immunity illegal

*No opinion here on public health, just a fact.*

Seriously, I got measles the old-fashioned way….

And while we’re on the topic of child abuse and public endangerment it appears that the Geiers and their pr engine ( CoMeD) have a new surrogate making the rounds of woo-news outlets ( NaturalNews; ProgressiveRadioNetwork; RS Bell): he is Brian Hooker,PhD, and I’m sure that his articles about mercury will be circulating around FaceBook, blogs, websites, yoga studios, and vitamin shops like the pox they truly are.

I can’t think of a better way of loosing a custody battle than infecting my kids from a “pox package”. Irrational doesn’t even come close to cover this.

“I have to wonder whether this is a matter of saying “my folks did it this way, and I’m all right” (although the speaker is not necessarily so “all right”)”

Of course that is the case…you don’t get to hear from the ones who are “not alright”.

Surely this is a well worn theme in this blog, but that mild chicken pox (I still remember the itching and have scars) gave me shingles 50 years later.

I don’t understand why everypony is so surprised by this. I mean, these parents are already criminally negligent in addition to being morally bankrupt; why not take that next step and do something outright illegal?

On the way home from work a couple days ago, I saw a sign outside a Walgreens; it said, “Shingles Vaccine Available Here”. Given the stories I’ve read on the posts about this, I want to go get it just to be sure, since I had a rather memorable CP infection. Am I wrong?

It’s my understanding that pre-vaccine pox parties were an attempt to expose a kid while he or she was young, as the older you were when you got it, the more likely you were to have complications. So for most parents, it was wholly an attempt to mitigate the effects of the disease and cause their kid to go through as little suffering as possible.

So, uh, it seems these parents have lost sight of the whole POINT of pox parties, and would prefer their kids suffer needlessly.

I feel that I ever so *slightly* understand them:

they are frightened by vaccines’ “dangerous” toxic ingredients and “ability” to “cause” chronic illness
but aren’t afraid of complications of childhood illnesses;
they mistrust “establishment” information, institutions, and medical personnel
however they believe any over-the-top fear mongering and wish fulfilling fantasy that con artists throw at them;
they believe that they somehow have the “one-up” on the bulk of humdrum consensus following drones
while despising know-it-all, too snarky or too wonky (choose one) over-educated elitists;
they do not comprehend the irrationality of this intricately intertwined set of beliefs.

It’s as wrong to exterminate a virus as it is to exterminate all your Ox.

One day, one of these viruses will mutate and will actually upgrade our bodies in a really cool way that only evolution can pull off.

We wouldn’t be where we are today (male and female) without the threat of viruses to spur us on, and we won’t get to where we’re going without the help of viruses either.

We will never achieve in a lab what can be achieved sooner or later with a larger or smaller ‘playing field’ with the viruses.

Forward-looking people realise this. Why cling to the past? Scream if you wanna go faster!

Looking at the positives. If you can’t get a guy with hair or a job, get a guy with scabs. At least you’ll know he’s survived something dangerous at least once in his life. Maybe half your relatives died of varicella and you want to have kids with a bit more immunity? How else can a girl know for sure? x

When my daughter got a case of mild “breakthrough” chickenpox despite having been vaccinated, I took my pediatrician’s advice and did everything I could to avoid exposing her to at risk populations- I didn’t take her anyplace where their could be unvaccinated babies, elderly, or immunocompromised people-which pretty much meant she couldn’t go anywhere or have visitors for a week.
Has anyone seen the latest post on AoA? It’s just as chilling as reading about pox parties. It seems now that the **rabies** vaccine causes autism and is now bad, too. That’s right, parents, if your kid is bitten by a wild/infected animal, better forgo the vaccine and take the risk of your kid suffering and almost certainly dying from a horrible disease, rather than have them possibly regress into autism, which to the anti-vaxxers at AoA is a worse fate!

No comment on the mailing issue but as to chickenpox parties being child abuse, that’s silly. It’s the same as vaccinating: you’re “hurting” or causing a child some discomfort to avoid greater discomfort at a later time. With widespread forced vaccination however it’s probably unnecessary today. In a world without forced vaccination and a realistic possibility of catching chickenpox, it might be better to actively pursue them while young. On the other hand if I came from a long line of immunocompromised individuals – like so many who post here – for whom the chickenpox causes great suffering, the vaccine might be the better choice.

What is wrong with these people? I’ve heard a lot of stupid things this week but this takes the cake. Seriously what is wrong with these people.
Next time someone asks why I have no faith in humanity I’ll just show them this piece of insanity.

People who give pox parties are crazy.

No comment on the mailing issue but as to chickenpox parties being child abuse, that’s silly. It’s the same as vaccinating: you’re “hurting” or causing a child some discomfort to avoid greater discomfort at a later time. With widespread forced vaccination however it’s probably unnecessary today. In a world without forced vaccination and a realistic possibility of catching chickenpox, it might be better to actively pursue them while young. On the other hand if I came from a long line of immunocompromised individuals – like so many who post here – for whom the chickenpox causes great suffering, the vaccine might be the better choice.

Well, kudos for you for at least recognizing that there are circumstances where the vaccine is the better choice. That’s some sense, at least. However, the rest of your points don’t make sense.

* What these parents are doing is not “the same as vaccinating,” anymore than giving your kid a good slug of whiskey, grabbing your workbench drill, and excavating any spots you think you see in their teeth is “the same as” letting a trained dentist clean out the child’s cavities. One is being done according to professional standards that have been developed over decades, standards that have been refined over time to increase the efficacy of the procedure and reduce any risk from it. The other is a dramatic illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect: someone who says “of course I know what I’m doing!” not because they actually know what they’re doing but because they don’t even have the competence to recognize competence. You’d better believe it’s child abuse for these parents to be playing amateur-specialist-in-infectious-diseases.

* Your other point, skipping over the usual blather about “widespread forced vaccination” which you know by now to be false, amounts to your usual refrain “The low incidence of these diseases in the wild means I don’t have to take any individual responsibility for preventing the spread of disease; why, if I choose to, I can even choose to deliberately spread disease through mailing of pox! That’s a freedom afforded to me by the fact that the incidence of these diseases is and will always remain low!” The flaw in your argument, as always, is that the incidence of these diseases will not “always remain low,” especially not if you succeed in convincing others to join you in your carelessness, and especially not if people deliberately go out trying to infect each other with the wild virus! Honestly, Sid, if you were to be consistent in your views, you’d be with us in opposing these pox parties and pox packages: you keep telling us that you can afford to deprive your children of the protection of vaccination because the disease is so rare in the wild. These people are trying to keep the disease circulating in the wild. Why are you supporting them as they try to destroy what you keep claiming is what keeps you safe?

I knew there would come a point where it’d be justifiable to put some of the anti-vax cranks in jail, and put their kids in the hands of social services. This is it. Hopefully the FBI was paying attention, and is working with facebook to track them down.

In fact I would suggest that the next time skeptics reading this site catch idiots like this in action, take screenshots of the page and forward them to the FBI immediately, follow up with a phone call to get their attention, and then give them a few days to investigate before posting to skeptics blogs and thus warning the perps. These people are criminals and child abusers, sociopaths spreading disease, and should be treated as such.

Idiocracy. In time, we will all be mailing herpes to each other because we will be too lazy to fornicate and too stupid to recognize the problem.

I got chickenpox in 1975 when I was 13 and it was awful, by far the worst childhood disease I got, and I got a lot of them. I lived in a summer house without indoor plumbing at the time and was so weak I had to rest several times on the way out to the outhouse each time. High fever for days; I don’t even remember the pox because I was too sick to notice. If I had found out my parents had deliberately exposed me to something that made me that sick, I would never have forgiven them. Getting it by accident is one thing; purposefully giving it to your kid is another. It’s no joke, and now I work closely with someone who has shingles. Get your kids the vaccine, already!

Aha, here’s the source for my previous comment:

Can the vaccine cause herpes zoster (shingles)?

Yes, this is possible. The risk of zoster following vaccination appears to be less than that following infection with the varicella virus. The majority of cases of shingles following vaccine have been mild and have not been associated with serious complications.

Washington Post: Prosecutor warns parents wary of vaccines: Mailing chickenpox so kids develop immunity illegal

Jerry Martin, U.S. attorney for the Middle District of Tennessee…

Sending the lollipops would be illegal under the same law that makes it illegal to mail contagions like anthrax. He said a conviction could lead to a sentence from less than a year to 20 years in prison.

Let’s hope we actually see some of that!

Let’s hope we actually see some of that!

Crunchy warrior mommies, I would suppose, tend to make for low-value prosecution targets. Of course, there’s always the specter of their true bête noire, supervision by child protective services.

There is no difference between sending one type of pathogen via the USPO (like chicken pox) and another (like anthrax) – the USPS takes things like this very seriously, especially after what happened in DC in 2001 (during the anthrax letter attacks). Given that there is always the chance the a package could be opened accidentally or delivered to the wrong address, there is no reason in the world not to crack down on this swiftly, decisively & put some people in prison.

I can’t believe anyone would condone this (even our resident Sid Troll).

^ poisonous

You know, I had chickenpox the old fashioned way when I was about 11. I had no complications whatsoever, but it was still a good two weeks of misery. My younger sister had it at the same time I did (she was about 8). She got better faster than I did, but was sicker than me, at one point having a dangerously high fever. Given that a family friend had suffered severe brain damage following a very high fever in childhood, I remember being pretty terrified the same thing would happen to my sis (who was a brat, but I still didn’t want her to have brain damage).

In retrospect, I doubt her fever was ever high enough for that to be a realistic concern (she was nearly hospitalized, but not quite), but I was 11 years old and not that great at distinguishing a realistic threat from an unrealistic one! Between the physical illness and the worry, those were an awesome few weeks. Oddly enough, my mum claims my brother had chickenpox at that time as well, but I don’t remember it at all. Apparently he was mildly sick for a few days. Either he was the “right” age (he was 5) or he just got lucky. My memories of thinking something horrible would happen to my sister, though, are VIVID. I guess kids remember emotional trauma better than uneventful stuff. On the bright side, though, we all have the possibility of getting shingles one day. What fun!

My childhood came before the chickenpox vaccine was available. If my siblings and I could have had a shot instead, if we had caught wild type chickenpox because my parents had taken us to a pox party or given us infected lollipops some lunatic had mailed to them, I would be VERY UPSET. Even though 3 out of 3 kids got wild-type chickenpox, none had complications, seems like pretty decent odds. But I still would much rather we could’ve just had a shot instead.

My mum, incidentally, even though no vaccine was available at the time, did not deliberately seek to infect us with chickenpox (maybe because she wasn’t bugfuck insane). So parents who are considering pox parties or mail fraud, know one thing before you start: if you give your kids chickenpox on purpose instead of acting like a grown-up and taking them for the damn shot, maybe decades from now, your kids won’t come and visit you in the old folks’ home.

My kids were among the last generation to get chicken pox before the vaccine became widely available. They were at a jungle gym in Poole, England, and while I did not see him, there was supposedly a kid with a prominent rash running around in there too. By the time I heard anyone else commenting on it, it must have been too late, because both my kids came down with chicken pox with days of getting home to the US. It was a royal pain in the ass staying home with first one, and then the other kid as they became ill, but happily both cases were mild. What concerned me most was the people who might have been exposed in that gym, or later on during our holiday, or on the plane on the way home who might become more seriously ill. I don’t know if the parents of the child thought the jungle gym was an “unannounced” pox party, or just figured (too early) that their kid was no longer infectious… Additionally, all too many people think that measles, mumps and chicken pox are a walk in the park and it doesn’t do any harm to get the real thing. Amazingly thoughtless.

Hello,
I’m the 20 year old sister of the 17 year old that wrote the “chirpy captions” which I personally think were cute comments. I did get the vaccine for CP and I still got CP. And yeah my mom did expose me (to my own siblings) and I’m very thankful she did. Now someday when I have my own kids- I will not have to worry about getting CP when pregnant.

Pox parties are about as idiotic a concept as I can think of vaccination[…]

That.

Good news: looks like Facebook killed the pox party pages referred to in the TV story.

Lordy. I really can’t believe how stupid people are. Just when you think that the University of Google moms and dads cannot possibly, possibly get any stupider, they decide to send viruses through the mail in Ziploc bags. And then, on the other end of the transaction, people happily feed contagious material from strangers to their children. These same people probably wouldn’t let their kids play outside for fear of evil child molesters lurking behind every other bush, yet they invite any unknown idiot with a contagious disease right into the mouths of their precious little darlings.

I mean, whatever happened to that old saying, “Don’t take candy from strangers?”

It boggles the mind.

For anyone out there who thinks that getting contagious lollipops from strangers is a good idea, please think about the following. Please. What if the person sending you that infectious lollipop is really a weirdo with hepatitis who wants to spread the love? Or a nut case with mono? Etc. etc. etc. She might sound all nice and mommmy-like, but you can’t really know that about someone you met on the internet, can you?

How long does varicella live outside the human body anyway? It’s clearly more than a couple of minutes, but if you send off some tissue that your chicken pox infected kid sneezed on, would any still be living a week later?

“As much as I am appalled at these “pox parties”, I can think of one thing worse than this: “AIDS parties.””

On the contrary, it would be a fine way for HIV denialists (those who are convinced that HIV does not cause AIDS) to demonstrate their convictions. A bunch of denialists could pass around HIV-infected needles to use, then laugh heartily at all of us later on when none of them develop manifestations of AIDS.

In my childhood and adolescence,I had poliomyelitis, measles, mumps, chickenpox and German measles. I would much rather have had the vaccines, thank you. My children have had vaccines for all of those. Unlike the antivaxers, I know why we have vaccines and I am glad that the vaccines exist. People who mail contaminated articles through the mail should be imprisoned, and those who deliberately expose their children should be imprisoned and lose custody as child abusers. This may sound harsh to some, but it is no less than they deserve.

Yeah–my 3 year old nephew battling leukemia really will appreciate the chirpy captions of people spreading pox in the community, I’m sure. Those are really funny to kids who can’t get immunized and are already in serious health battles.

Thanks, kids, for being so mindful of the most vulnerable in our society!

If a mother were walking down the street with her child, she saw a child ahead of her suck on a lollipop and then discard it in the street, and she then picked it up and stuck it in her own child’s mouth — would that not be child abuse?

Oh I’m sure Chris wouldn’t mind toddlers picking up stuff on the sidewalk and putting it in their mouth, would you Chris?

But then again, that’s just the sidewalk. Toddlers love to eat dirt, no?

Regular readers of this blog and anyone who’s ever followed the anti-vaccine movement more than superficially have probably heard of pox parties. These are, yes, parties where parents who don’t want to vaccinate their children against chickenpox, hoping for “natural immunity,” intentionally expose their children who have never had chickenpox to children with active chickenpox in order to intentionally infect them with the disease.

I know what you mean Orac. You don’t want any competing infection promoters besides vaccination. I see.

Since some people seem so keen on anecdotal evidence, here is a piece of family history some may find interesting.
In the early part of the 20th century,my Great Grandmother’s sister had a child who was suffering from an illness which concerned her so greatly she paid for a doctor to examine him (an extremely rare occurrence for poor working class people of that time). The doctor quickly diagnosed measles and went on to explain that there was no treatment available beyond careful nursing.
He went on to suggest that she sleep her other three children in the same bed with the afflicted
child in the hope they too would become infected,to “get it
all out of the way at once”.
She followed this advice and the other three children did indeed become infected.
All four died.

That’s why there are so many federal regulations about shipping biohazardous substances across state lines. Indeed, when it was pointed out that shipping biohazards like bodily fluids from an individual infected with varicella across state lines is a federal offense

Of course I don’t call anyone who vaccinate as bioterrorist for allowing their children to be injected with known biohazards. At least not yet. I simply call them infection promoters even though vaccines are considered biohazards.

Unreal. You take a lollipop from a kid’s mouth, put it in a sealed moist environment, send it through what are probably pretty warm conditions, pull it out, and put it in the mouth of a different child to see if they catch anything?

Why not just call it “bacteria roulette?” I can go scrape some coughdrops off a sidewalk if that will help…

Not to do a “me too agreement” post, but here’s a me too agreement post. That was my thought too. I can see how some people are brainwashed about vaccines being more harmful than the disease, but how doorknob stupid are you when you want to stick a used lollipop into your kid’s mouth?! Who knows what has grown on it in the meantime, who knows if it actually was in another infected kid’s mouth at all (here Rover, lick this), who knows if there are any other viruses transferred along with it, say, Hep C.

The OCD side of me just whined quietly and curled up into a fetal position for the day.

No stranger to humans, no? He still you. Failure to be also be asking if your hypotheticals can save the target.

There’s also the fact that chicken pox infection in early pregnancy can cause serious birth defects. There’s a good chance that some of the mothers attending these parties would be pregnant and at risk, if they hadn’t already had chicken pox or the vaccine.

I know of a successful lawsuit against a doctor for failing to recognize the risk of chicken pox in a pregnant woman. The child was born with some serious congenital abnormalities. The damages were enormous (for future care etc). Unfortunately, the promoters of the parties would have “shallow pockets”.

I see that boring, stupid, insane troll is still boring, stupid and insane.

I call Poe on the just-a-little-too-vapid, chirpy sisters. There is no vaccine for chirpys by the way.

Bot, you inspire me ( Sing, oh Heavenly Bot?):

How do people conceptualise the risks of vaccines vs the risks of acquiring the illness that the vaccine usually prevents?

I am speculating but I envision the following scenario: a person who uses “data” will directly compare numbers e.g. Todd** might compare numbers that show multiple risks associated with getting a childhood illness- summed, contra the multiple risks of getting the vaccine- summed. He might get a final figure like 1000:1.

Now Dan** makes less use of numbers to anchor his analysis: he uses verbal descriptions that accompany parents’ accounts and speculative writings / research of experts he personally deems reliable: thus he “sums” material that is not numerical but assigns hypothetical numerical value ( and I’m not saying that this is a conscious process) that is based on the emotional content of the accounts and written material as well as their frequency/ intensity/ duration in comparison to previously viewed similar material. Pathos inspiring stories are more heavily weighted as are articles that invoke anger and resentment against institutions and individuals ( see NaturalNews, AoA, NVIC, et al). Similarly the risks associated with a child acquiring the illness are dimissed or reduced through linguistic labelling: ” just a childhood illness”. Similarly emotional material is weighted based on its source with less emphasis on number.

So “significant” has two different meanings based on whether it is used numerically or as an estimate / evaluation based on verbal accounts. Todd’s ratio is incomprehensible or meaningless to Dan.

Yesterday afternoon and evening as I walked around Hipsterville-on-Hudson*** encountering many young mothers and couples with their *bebes* in the shops, galleries, and cafes, I wondered how many see the world of risk as I do.

** random names. Not really.
*** a real town.

This and potent. Read it.
No stranger to humans, no? He still you. Failure to be also be asking if your hypotheticals can save the target..
 
Pure poetry, Th1th2bot. Bravo! Encore!

Found this at Whizz-Bang, a pediatric nephrologist in academic medicine:

http://scientopia.org/blogs/whizbang/2011/11/05/not-a-bad-idea-30-years-ago/

I’m in the most unusual position of having recommended chickenpox exposure in my professional career. Children with chronic kidney disease, heading toward a lifetime of immunosuppression, had risk from chickenpox above and beyond a period of itchy misery. Having them get chickenpox prior to transplant was a wonderful thing that saved these children shots of prophylactic immune globulin after exposure and the danger of active infection.

So hell, yes, I had parents take their kids to visit the little pox-ball next door.

Until 1993 when the varicella vaccine became available. Now we give these kids a couple of shots before transplant. Since most of their peers have been vaccinated, they rarely get exposed. Even if their immune response is sub-par, we deal with a whole lot less morbidity from this virus.

The vaccine works. It has been around at least 17 years, and its safety is confirmed. There is simply no reason to promote active infection today.

Let me repeat that, just in case you didn’t hear it the first time.

The vaccine works. It has been around at least 17 years, and its safety is confirmed. There is simply no reason to promote active infection today.

Well the fact is varicella, either by natural infection or vaccines, is contraindicated in pregnancy but the problem is that you are an infection promoter duh.

You’re barking up the squirrel to find out. You carry out when to your point. Probably went to come again, it’s you consider yourself before.

I didn’t know Poe’s law; as applied to internet stuff, urban dictionary gives it as follows:

Similar to Murphy’s Law, Poe’s Law concerns internet debates, particularly regarding religion or politics.

For example

…”Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humor, it is impossible to create a parody of Fundamentalism that SOMEONE won’t mistake for the real thing.”

@ Th1Th2bot Service Center:

Please handle the bot with kid gloves: it is unfortunate how frequently prodigiously talented artists flame out early in their careers – their fragile presences disappearing like meteors do as they penetrate into the increasingly denser levels of the atmosphere- gone all too soon! We wouldn’t want that now, would we?

Well, whatever happens to these kids (or their parents whilst they handle the packages) is natural selection at work.

No, it’s not. Moreover, you may find that cheap social Darwinism is viewed rather dimly in some quarters.

This concerns vaccines, but it is slightly off topic so I apologize in advance.

Can someone more knowledgeable than I (trolls f*%^ off) tell us if this “super flu shot” is actually something to get excited over, or is it just baseless hype?

http://dfw.cbslocal.com/2011/11/04/north-texas-researchers-creating-ultimate-flu-shot/

Thank you Antaeus. I’ll add my fingers to the list of those that will be crossed that this turns into a real breakthrough.

When I stand in line for my super-flu shot, I’ll be sure to ask for extra mercury. 😉

I know that a couple of people have reported the pox party page to Facebook.

Aparently that was another Pox Party page. This one does not advocate mailing viruses.

Just a thought, but would anyone be able to use the results of a few years of these pox parties to show how effective vaccines really are? I mean, they’re exposing themselves so i don’t foresee any ethical problems except for keeping the data confidential.

This is just appalling. I can recall (and have the scars to show) chicken pox. I brought it home and infected my older brother and baby sister, much to my mother’s dismay. My sister, under 1 year at the time, seemed to have a good case. Except she caught it again 15 years later and was really miserable.

My kids were born before the vaccine. They caught it from a child in daycare. Younger daughter was mildly ill, older daughter (age 5) was very miserable, with pox all over. It’s SO much fun to give a 5 year old narcotics for chicken pox, because they are in so much agony that they can’t sit, stand, lie down, eat, drink or urinate. I would so happily do that again! /sarcasm

My older girl still remembers chicken pox. When she heard about the vaccine, since she was/is fully vaccinated, she wanted to know WHY she hadn’t gotten it. If it had been available, and she had not received it, I don’t think she would ever forgive me.

Killfile is a blessing, my poor table would not have survived one more ::headdesk::.

Remember when that one guy was trying to help spread natural immunity to anthrax? I wonder what happened to him.

Hi-
Long time lurker here. I just came across a study that had me a bit worried as per the chicken pox vaccine. My son is fully vaccinated and got his CP vac last year. I was reading another (non-science) blog/forum and one of the posters made mention of a recent study of the increase in shingles “due to” the prevalence of the CP vac. http://www.news-medical.net/news/2005/09/01/12896.aspx
Can anyone give me clarification about this? I love science but I am not a scientist so I would prefer someone who is one to help me understand this. Thanks so much.

*sigh* Missie and BRose: Yes, of course you can still get the chicken pox after the vaccine, especially if your parents/friends did something as moronic as having a chicken pox party. The fact that you didn’t come here ranting and raving about how sick you became, given your older age at the time, shows how the vaccine protected you – people who contract the pox after receiving the vaccine have milder cases. If you hadn’t had the vaccine before the pox party you probably would have become much, much more ill from contracting it. But there is no such thing as “double immunity” – you now, however, have a stronger immunity after having been ill. Good for you. It would not have been necessary for you to have been ill at all, though, if you had simply avoided contact with those infected with the chickenpox while they were at their most contagious. I’m not sure how old your siblings were to have “not gotten the vaccine yet” but when my son was vaccinated he was very small. So I have to wonder if your parents were just deliberately avoiding getting them proper immunizations. If so, they suffered an illness for no good reason.

RE: sending lollipops though the mail – I don’t get trusting a stranger on the mail to send an infected anything. How do you know it isn’t some psycho sending their herpes, HIV, whatever? Not a medical professional, clearly, I don’t know what pathogens can survive a several day long trip on a lollipop but – ew. Just ew.

When CP is endemic in a population, as it was before vaccination (and still is in some countries like the UK), people’s immunity is naturally boosted by contact with children with CP from time to time. This helps to prevent the virus from emerging from dormancy to cause shingles in older people whose immunity is declining.

Myth.

There may be a temporary period of several years when people who had CP as children no longer get that natural boost to immunity and so will be more likely to get shingles as they get older. As the children who have been vaccinated against CP grow up and get older (and those of us who had natural CP die off), the incidence of shingles is expected to fall.

Myth.

In the meantime there is a zoster vaccine that will stimulate immunity and is quite effective at preventing shingles in older people.

Crap.

The CP vaccine may lead to shingles,[…]

Fact.

So your son is very unlikely to get either chicken pox or shingles, much less likely than if he had not been vaccinated.

Her son has qualified for shingles thanks for the vaccine dunce.

Time will tell how long immunity to CP latent infection lasts after vaccination,[…]

That and reactivation.

I’m concerned about getting shingles from my teenaged bout of chickenpox,[…]

How about the greater majority of children who were inoculated with the causative agent, no?

@Rebecca — Just so you know, Th1Th2 is the resident know-nothing, biologically-ignorant troll; please do not take anything s/he says as being a reliable guide.

The way that people get shingles is indeed having had a full-blown case of chicken pox, then the virus taking up residence in the central nervous system instead of being cleared entirely. Generally it stays dormant, but shingles occurs when it breaks out of dormancy. Re-exposure to the pox is supposed to help keep our immune systems sensitive enough to it to slap it down, which is why some people were worried that NOT being around poxy children would be enough to trigger an epidemic of shingles in the older generations which have the zoster virus resident in the CNS. However, this epidemic has not materialised anywhere yet, even though the chicken pox vaccine has been in use in the US for years now. Besides, if our immune systems need a reminder, there is now a followup vaccine aimed at the zoster virus specifically to prevent shingles; having seen some truly horrendous cases of shingles, I know what I’m going for.

The chicken pox vaccine is a weakened, attenuated virus, which is in general nowhere near enough strength to take up residence in the central nervous system the way the wild virus does — obviously it is possible on rare occasions, it just doesn’t happen nearly as much as it does with actual chicken pox infections.

http://www.bupa.co.uk/individuals/health-information/directory/s/shingles

The chicken pox vaccine itself doesn’t actually have a 100% efficacy — best figures I can find for it are between 80-90% efficacy — but it seems quite consistent that those who have had it, even if they subsequently catch chicken pox, avoid severe disease. This makes it much less likely that even these will have shingles in the future.

http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vpd-vac/varicella/default.htm

Don’t feed the parasprites.

@ myself (#119)

to distribute infections materials

Er, “to distribute infectous materials”. *sigh*

— Steve

@ g724:

I’d be very interested to hear how telling people they’re child abusing idiots who are breaking the law could possibly give them any kind of defense. Much less entrapment, which at least according to Wikipedia can only be performed by government agents.

Quite the opposite, in fact. It would make it much harder for them to credibly argue ignorance of the consequences, to the extent that could be a viable defense.

Rebecca,

Not to feed or encourage the trolls, but I’ve learned an enormous amount from their “arguments” and the subsequent (and inevitable and educational) smackdowns. Thanks!

You’re welcome. Th1Th2 is now back in my killfile where she belongs.

I say good for them. Both my kids had chicken pox and swam in toxic lakes and my God, they didn’t even develop flesh eating disease, never mind any ‘horrendous’ complications. That’s how far the CDC has pushed people – I remember some old doc telling the American public that it was a good thing for parents to do so they wouldn’t have to take sick days for their child w chicken pox. Next they’ll be adding anthrax and malaria to the schedule. This just goes to show how far parents have been pushed on the issue of vaccines. Many of us remember that chicken pox isn’t a dreaded disease.

I could of guessed that Jen likes to see kids suffer for two weeks with itchy poxes. That is just cruel.

My daughter got chicken pox when she was six months old, it was horrible. It was no picnic for her older brothers, especially the one who was so sick he kept wetting his bed.

Anyone who thinks chicken pox is good for children, especially when it sets them up for shingles in later life, is just sadistic.

Jen–

Even if there were a good malaria vaccine, it probably wouldn’t be on the U.S. schedule, because malaria isn’t endemic in the United States. (At present: it has been in the past.) But it would save huge numbers of lives and large amounts of suffering in much of the world. Do you have a point, beyond your ignorance of the current state of malaria treatment, prevention (bed nets), and research?

Let’s go back a few years when my now 22 year old son went to Disneyland with me, returned for kindergarten, and roughly 10 days later, came down with chicken pox, and infected the entire home-daycare brood.

I was NOT a popular person. The provider was sure that somehow I should have “seen” it, etc. As if. This was the easiest call for “time to switch providers”! Our relationship never did recover. She now does landscaping, to the relief of parents and children in the neighborhood.

The mind boggles at this new turn of events. No, I don’t want it sent in the mail, either!

I’ve been away for a few days and missed this lively discussion about the mailing of poxes and infected lollipops.

I’ve found an excellent article from the American Society of Microbiology (January 12, 2007) about the extended viability of respiratory and enteric viruses on fomites…which have been implicated in the transmission of viral disease outbreaks in day care centers, schools, nursing homes and aboard tourist ships:

Significance Of Fomites In The Spread Of Respiratory and Enteric Viral Diseases

I went to Alaska in July with a land tour first, transferring to a southbound passage aboard a tourist ship. It was all very “hush-hush” while aboard the ship when we were not permitted to “help ourselves” at the buffet stations, two days out. On the third day, the daily newsletter explained that an unknown number of passengers had been diagnosed with norovirus, presumably contracted aboard a scenic train excursion during their land excursion and were quarantined in their staterooms. I’m glad that we didn’t opt for that excursion.

Please don’t feed ignorant, boring disease promoting troll(s).

I have a comment stuck in moderation about the transmission of respiratory and enteric viruses on fomites, verified by actual PCR laboratory testing of fomite surfaces.

After sputtering “What the hell is wrong with these people????” along with everyone else, I’ve been wondering if social media will end up being the undoing of alties/anti-vaxxers in the long run. On the one hand they get an open platform to spout their nonsense, but on the other hand their unfiltered lunacy is on public display for normal people to see. Even a shruggie would have to wonder about people who think it’s OK to mail pathogens to other people so they can infect their children with vaccine-preventable diseases.

Delusional Thing troll is off its meds again, I see. Will not engage.

jen: “Many of us remember that chicken pox isn’t a dreaded disease.” And many of us remember getting it (as well as measles, mumps, rubella etc.) and being miserably sick, even if there were no permanent repercussions. Had vaccines for those diseases been available when I was a child, it would have been hard to comprehend any parent refusing to protect their kids while saying “Piffle, getting sick isn’t so bad”.

Of course, when I was a child there were far fewer people with immunosuppression due to chemotherapy and radiation for cancer, far fewer on steroids for autoimmune and other diseases (with resultant immunosuppression), and no HIV-infected people faced with catching life-threatening infections from unimmunized kids. The at-risk population is much larger now.

I actually remember having measles years ago. I was about fourteen years old, my sister was fifteen and my brother 20 years old…quite unusual for three siblings to reach our mid teens, without contracting measles.

I don’t recall any “pox” parties, but then there were no vaccines available for measles, mumps, rubella and varicella. Parents weren’t overly concerned about exposures…because every kid had “cases”…sooner or later.

I probably messed up a prior posting about fomite transmission of respiratory and enteric diseases in day care, schools, hospitals, nursing homes and aboard tourist cruise ships. An excellent article appeared in the American Society For Micribiology journal (January 12, 2007):

Significance of Fomites In the Spread of Respiratory and Enteric Viral Diseases

Please ignore disease promoting, boring trolls.

a-non @133:

Funny how the anti-vaxers on this thread, by and large, ignore the crux of the case and instead go off on discredited tangents about vaccines in general and varicella immunization in particular. It’s like they can’t bring themselves to disparage their fellow loons.

That struck me too, although to me it’s more like they’ve settled on the medical profession as an outlet for their bigotry and hatred, and any excuse will do to vilify medical professionals, without regard to whether others do the same or worse. The point, after all, is not to condemn actions, but to have an excuse to hate and condemn identifiable people.

Please ignore delusional, disease-promoting, uneducated, health care professional wannabe, boring troll. It needs “terminal disinfection”.

@ ed haslett: What if one of these infected kids whose parents opted for the pox package, infects a woman in the very early stages of pregnancy? You do know, don’t you, that the fetus has a chance of suffering life-long permanent disabilities. Infants born with congenital varicella syndrome have a constellation of disabilities including permanent scarring, limb deformities, microcephaly, delayed development and mental retardation.

How would you feel Mr. Haslett, if that pregnant woman was your wife, your sister or your daughter and was among the five percent of the population who never had the “natural disease”?

I read this post on the weekend and was appalled. Then I reread it today, and was appalled again.
Then denial kicked in, and I decided the whole thing was a sick, sick joke.

This has to be a a joke, right? Orac? is it April Fools?

“intentionally trying to infect someone with a substance from a stranger seems dumb”

Seems dumb? Seems dumb? SEEMS dumb?

If it only seems dumb to you, perhaps you should read the comments here more carefully. Knowingly infecting a child with an unknown disease, of unknown virulence, provided by an unknown person on the Internet doesn’t just seem dumb.

Thanks for the responses. I know my post was long, let me clarify a few things.
1. Mailing desease vectors is a bad idea, however, please see my flu example. I will google the number of people killed by the flu compared to chicken pox and return with more data as time permits.
2. My main point, chicken pox=child abuse. We can’t compare chicken pox to small pox, sorry far different critters. Life is always a risk, and choices that seem right today, often turn out to be questionable with hind sight. At the end of the day, the choice of how to raise one’s kids is still a parental choice.
It is nice to see the passion here on this blog, I will come back as time permits and clarify my position further.

Mr. Haslett, I wasn’t actually comparing chicken pox and small pox. I was comparing the fact that contamination with additional bacteria and/or viruses is a very real threat because of the fact you have a lollipop or other thing that is suspected of harboring infection and you have no idea what other types of bacteria and viruses are being shared as well. Since your biggest worry is mailing it and maybe making a postal carrier sick, I wanted you to realize that it is dangerous even if Mom from two doors down says “hey, my kid has chicken pox, here’s his lollipop.” You cannot know what other things you might be exposing your child to at that time.

However, I DO agree with your reluctance to move those kids into the foster care system. Many parents who are interested in alternative medicine are also parents who feed their kids a healthy diet, make sure they get plenty of exercise and love their children very much. Possibly moving social services in in a supervisory role to ensure adequate and safe vaccination is fine, but unless there are other irregularities I think removing the kids from the home could expose them to worse dangers.

Also I believe I stated earlier on this blog post that my own pediatrician recommended against the chicken pox vaccine when it first came out and told me to get my son exposure the natural way if at all possible. I never found any chicken pox, though and ended up having him vaccinated to start school because of state law.

Small pox is a different and much more dangerous illness than chicken pox and I’m aware of that. However, contamination of the items used to share the disease is much more likely than vaccine contamination or injury.

Mrs. Woo:

Someone who posts here regularly kept sharing from a book called “Pox: An American History.” I ended up doing a Kindle preview and got so engrossed in it I coughed up the $15.00 to finish reading it.

Yes, it has a history on how smallpox vaccine changed, how smallpox spread, how it was sometimes contaminated, how it started off FDA regulations of biologics, and it has the wonderful story of Immanuael Pfeiffer.

I returned it to the library a week ago. Remember another way to read the books is through your local library, or neighboring county library. You can find books in libraries using this cool website: http://www.worldcat.org

Today I am returning Dr. William Foege’s book House on Fire about ridding the world of smallpox.

Beamup @ 124: I’m not going to spell this out in a public forum, but I’ll be glad to tell you more in private email. Write to me at g2g-public01 (at) att (period) net and refer to your postings here. Suffice to say for now, that hunters don’t bang on pots and pans in the forest.

Seriously folks, do not communicate with or engage with the poxers. Leave them alone. This situation is being taken care of. That’s all I can say in public at this point, but there will be news when there’s news, and y’all will be pleased at the outcome.

Chris – I thought it was you but couldn’t remember for sure. I’ll have to go look for that link and/or see if I can find a way to borrow virtually from a library through my Kindle sometimes – the place I live is very small and anything like you’re suggesting could only be obtained via interlibrary loan if at all.

ed haslett, put aside pox parties. Does it not sound like child abuse, to you, to *ask* total strangers to send you infectious material to feed to your child? You have no guarantee that the child advertised as having chickenpox actually has only chickenpox and not something more, or something worse. And you have no guarantee that the sender isn’t outright lying. See above: “here Rover, lick this”. I was thinking more along the lines of LSD. Or botulism toxin.

daedalus2u:

Calli, the definition of a terrorist act is simply politically motivated premeditated violence against non-combatant targets.

But it’s not politically motivated; the motivation is to “help” their children to get chickenpox “safely”. They’re wrong, but their motivation is not political, and their intention is medical. (They’re utterly wrong-headed, but they don’t believe they will be causing the children harm. Now, if a person sending this material is deliberately including other infectious agents for the purpose of causing harm, that’s a different matter altogether, and I could certainly see that happening.)

But that’s irrelevant. I’m saying it’s too much for us to label these parents terrorists. That doesn’t mean you can’t apply anti-terrorism laws to their actions. There is a difference in context between law and common discourse, IMHO. I think labeling them terrorists and child abusers will make it impossible for us to get through to them, because that would make anyone defensive.

Oh look, I’ve reversed my comments and blockquotes.

It must be Opposite Day today!

Crazy stuff, eh? Similar to Orac, I occasionally have to transport or send viruses to distant locales and the paperwork to send even non-pathological, bacterial viruses is amazing. When I wanted to use tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) in my research, I had to get approval from the USDA.

Apart from breaking laws (and, I might add, common sense rules about exposing uninvolved people to pathogens), it seems that the parents didn’t consider that these fomites might have other pathogenic viruses and bacteria on them. I’ve taken a few minutes to list some of the most common ones you might expect to see on a “used” lolly:

[1] Herpes simplex (often reactivated during varicella infections)
[2] Streptococcus pyogenes (AKA “strep throat”)
[3] Influenza virus (I bet none of the “pox-packet” kids got the flu vaccine)
[4] Coxsackievirus A (hand, foot and mouth disease – can look a lot like chickenpox)
[5] Hepatitis B (did these kids get the HepB vaccine?)
[6] Adenoviruses
[7] Rhinoviruses
[8] Neisseria meningitidis (meningococcus – it’s usually a mouth/nose flora that “waits” for an opportunity)
[9] Bordetella pertussis (“whooping cough”)

Of course, I could go on and on (and on and on…), but I think that’s enough to get the point across.

Prometheus

Also mommy warriors can unfailingly diagnose every illness of their children.

Calli is more concerned with prosecuting the “mommy suppliers” of the virus-laden lollipops…rather than the “mommy recipients” who deliberately infect their kids.

Perhaps these “pox packages” are “start-up” kits. The kids who are deliberately infected become the distant biological laboratories. Their mommies then distribute virus-laden lollipops to other mommies in their group who want their kids to have the “natural” chicken pox.

Mommy warriors who “know their children can become infected with one virus at time” and “can unfailingly diagnose every illness of their children” also know how to read the MMWR. They need only peruse “notes from the field” measles outbreak reports to figure out how a virus is spread from the index case and results in secondary and terciary outbreaks.

daedalus2u,

Trying to infect someone with something is violence.

One reason why vaccination should be stopped. It’s hideous.

I don’t think that law enforcement or the Justice Department will make excruciatingly fine distinctions between people who sent chicken pox and those who solicited others to send chicken pox to them.

What will probably happen is that all the parents will be put in jail (at least temporarily) and all their children will go into foster care (at least temporarily), where the first thing that will be done is to catch them all up on their vaccinations. That is the one good thing that will come out of this.

MissWoo:

“However, I DO agree with your reluctance to move those kids into the foster care system. Many parents who are interested in alternative medicine are also parents who feed their kids a healthy diet, make sure they get plenty of exercise and love their children very much…”

I’m not so sure about this. For example, what about parents with what are arguably eating disorders, who force them on their children? I’m thinking in particular of extreme “raw food” vegans with dozens of crank beliefs about nutrition, the sort of person who forces their cat to be vegan.

There are some around in my community, and it has to be said, their kids don’t look that healthy. I really wish social services had the courage to intervene in such cases.

True, but I feel besieged by woo here in Canada’s lotusland, and my tolerance is low. The level of woo “medical” fraud on open display alone is incredible, people are actually dying of it, and the government is too spineless to do anything due to their financial influence on the political parties. Our *MAYOR* made his fortune in woo.

Bruce of Canuckistan @184

Our *MAYOR* made his fortune in woo.

What woo and city would that be?

As to the topic at hand – that is nude motorcycle racing, skydiving without a reserve chute, grizzly bear cub kicking level insane.

@ Eripere: Why after reading Orac’s blog and the excellent posts here, do you believe that parents have a “right” to deliberately infect their child?

Do you not understand that the varicella zoster virus is also a herpes virus, which lies dormant in the human body and manifests itself at a later time in the form of painful herpes shingles disease?

The “state” has the “right” to intervene whenever a parent puts a child at medical risk…indeed the “state” has the duty to intervene to protect children.

You need to re-read the article and the posts for additional information about the risks to the developing fetus and to a newborn whose mothers become infected with chicken pox, due to parents deliberately infecting their children.

Children and adults who are medically frail and are immune suppressed or immune compromised shouldn’t be put at risk by a deliberately infected child.

Obviously, you don’t live in the United States, but I am certain wherever you are posting from, you will find similar provisions under public health law and social services laws to protect the populace and to intervene, whenever a parent deliberately exposes a child to a vaccine-preventable disease.

@Mrs. Woo:
Sorry for slightly deviating from the topic at hand, but while we are on the subject of nutrition…

Being vegan might prove to be detrimental to some extent, but I disagree that meat consumption is the only way to get adequate protein in the diet. A good combination of cereals and pulses/legumes can provide adequate and quality protein in the diet.
I come from a culture that has more than two thousand years history of being lacto-vegetarians (for religious reasons) and it clearly hasn’t proven to be detrimental to growth and development and we definitely are not a small number, either. Our regional cuisines have evolved over time to include a combination of cereals and pulses in every meal (though not because the science behind it was known) and that helps. Of course, milk and milk product consumption also supplements the protein intake but more importantly, is our only good source of Vitamin B12. Though I myself am not very religious, having grown up in the culture, I continue to be a lacto-vegetarian and has not proven to be detrimental to my health.
I’m not condemning the consumption of meat (having been a meat eater myself for two years, at one point in my life). Just pointing out a flaw in your statement.

@Drew:

I contracted chickenpox at age 9 or so. I picked it up by accident (no pox party here) and here is how I remember it: Two weeks of bliss.

I was sick for only one week, but if I’m under severe stress I get mouth ulcers. My mother had chickenpox over 40 years ago and she still gets fever blisters. She and I are both at risk for shingles, as are you.
Just because you had “two weeks of bliss” doesn’t mean evryone else did. If you click through to my blog (shameless plug), there is a post “Harmless Childhood Diseases?! Yeah, right!” One of the linked stories is of a boy who died of chicken pox.

@T-Reg – I actually could be very supportive of the type of vegetarian diet you describe (you add milk products) and I know that very careful balancing of some non-meat products can balance a diet, but strict raw veganism (only vegetables, no dairy, no eggs) frequently can cause long-term issues.

However, it’s been argued that a raw vegetable only diet (many of these even eschew grains and fruits as they push for an “alkaline only” diet) cannot get adequate protein or calories for survival. Since I’ve had various versions of the alkaline raw veggie vegan diet shared with me to “cure” me, I may have jumped to conclusions when she shared so gleefully that her family was going to live on nothing but green veggie smoothies and that they were going raw vegan.

You’re right. Thank you for pointing out that I may have made assumptions.

@ Drew/Rogue Priest Blogger: You may have found your work nirvana by working at home, and you may offer some “spiritual” advice on your website…but you are not an expert on vaccine-preventable diseases.

Why don’t you read this entire blog and the (non-troll) postings about the public health ramifications, the legal ramifications and the social implications of mailing “pox packages” to parents who will be deliberately infecting their child and putting others in the wider community at risk.

What these parents are doing is violated man’s law and God’s law to protect innocent little kids and the most vulnerable people in our society.

Simply stated it is child abuse…these parents are public health menaces.

Drew, I had two weeks of MISERY with the chickenpox when I was 11, as opposed to two weeks of bliss. I also went through extreme stress because my sister had a significantly worse case than I did, and had such a high fever she very nearly had to be hospitalized. I was terrified out of my mind, because a family friend had suffered severe brain damage due to a very high fever in her own childhood. Thinking your little sister may die or end up with severe brain damage is NOT fun. Luckily she didn’t, but I defintiely wouldn’t call the experience “bliss”.

Mrs Woo:

However, I’ve known a few kids who have had very disruptive home lives and I know that it is very traumatic for all involved to have a child removed from a home. If a child is not in immediate danger and it’s a matter of educating parents better about risk vs. benefit of vaccines and the relative risk they will take trusting strangers to mail them viruses, I’d rather have social services supervision and intervention rather than a child removed.

This cannot be stated enough, in my opinion. While I think it is wrong for these parents to leave their children unvaccinated when they do not have any specific medical reason to avoid the vaccine, removing the children would be a pretty draconian response, and it would do more harm than good. You have to think about the end goal. If your main goal is to punish wrongdoers, then perhaps it makes sense. But if your main goal is to make sure the children have a decent chance at a healthy life, it doesn’t make sense. If the only thing their parents have ever done that’s wrong is to deny them vaccination, then you will be putting them through enormous emotional stress at a sensitive developmental period merely to reduce their risk of contracting diseases which are not very common anymore. Granted, these diseases are uncommon precisely because of vaccination — but CPS isn’t supposed to be taking a community-level view. They’re supposed to be taking the children’s view, and for the individual children, removing them from their home would likely be far more damaging than allowing them to remain unvaccinated. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and don’t punish children because their parents have weird beliefs.

Note: it is not actually illegal to refuse routine vaccination for your children (a point Sid Offit seems not to grasp), and as far as I know, it’s not illegal to let your child suck on a sucker that a sick kid has had in their mouth. Not yet, anyway. It’s just incredibly gross and certainly needlessly risky. But it IS illegal to knowingly mail infectious substances without the appropriate packaging and labeling, so while I do not support arresting the parents who buy these suckers, I definitely support arresting the parents who sell them. Yes, it will be harmful for their children to see their parents taken away, but in that case, their parents represent a threat to public safety.

@Calli Arcale:

I agree with your point about CPS, however firstly, having that ultimate consequence in the air may help them focus their attention on what social service workers have to say about where their rights stop and their children’s begin.

And secondly, as I pointed out above, often the parent’s crank views about vaccination or CP are just the tip of the iceberg. I believe that for many who are deeply into radical diet control and conspiracy theories, it’s not so much an ideology as a symptom of mental illness (please note I do not put vegetarians in that box).

Most altie-types are just rebelling against society, and perhaps dragging their kids along for the game. However I suspect that those going as far as pox-parties, mail-order-measles, and online attention-whoring using their children are far more likely to be in the serious mental illness category. It’s a red flag.

My mum teaches public school in British Columbia, Canada. Based on her experiences reporting child abuse and neglect among her students, child protection workers wouldn’t open a file on a family based on the sending or receiving of a “pox package” unless there was an immune-suppressed child in the family. And parents with immunse-suppressed children tend to be in favour of vaccination, because it helps protect their kids.

Child protection workers are overworked and underfunded in most jurisdictions. They’d roll their eyes at the looniness no doubt, but unless the pox package went along with other reportable behaviour, they’d walk on. If you only have X number of hours in a week, you’ll prioritize the child with cigarette burns over the one with crunchy granola parents. And rightly so.

That said, it’s still illegal to send viruses through the mail, and I have no problem with pox packagers breaking out in a cold sweat imagining a visit from law enforcement.

@Mrs Woo – hope I’m not taking us too off topic, but Orac has written about alkaline diet woo before: https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2007/06/your_friday_dose_of_woo_acid_base_or_woo_2.php

https://www.respectfulinsolence.com/2006/09/your_friday_dose_of_woo_acid_base_or_woo_1.php

Might help next time Mr. Woo tries to put you on a diet.

Now back to the discussion about pox-mailing maniacs….

Ed, can you sleep at night knowing you just trivialized the deaths of everyone who died of chickenpox?

@ Gray Falcon & Chris: If you have been personally touched by this my apologies. I guess even if you haven’t I apologize as my intent is not to trivialize anyone. Let me try this; I have a friend/co-worker that recently lost his young daughter. They were at a relative’s house, it was rainy outside, and the kids were playing up stairs in a bed room. The girls were jumping on the bed, the window was open, and his daughter fell out, landed poorly, and lost her life. Both a true and deeply sad story, but, how we react is the key. This could have been prevented by banning and destroying all multi-level dwellings, forbidding kids to play, placing bars on all windows, and a variety of other things (admittedly some more practical than others, but I am trying to make a point). People die every day, lots in various accidents, some from smoking, some from drinking, some from diseases (preventable and unpreventable). I hate quoting statistics to make a point, but, over 3,000 people die every year from drowning, would you prevent you child from swimming? The risk of death is higher than that from chicken pox. Again, sorry if I hurt you in anyway, but my point stands, you can’t protect people from everything, without taking away all of their freedom. And sadly 100 people is more of a statistical anomaly than a point of real concern. Yup, I still remember having chicken pox as a kid, one of my few memories back to that age, so clearly it was unpleasant in the extreme, both my kids had it as well. I am not an insurance sales man, but, hopefully this applies. “Always insure against the worst case scenario, no matter how unlikely, and never insure against annoyances no matter how likely”. At the end of the day, the impact of chicken pox is just not high enough to force people to take action against it.

Oh, I feel so much for your friends! That is terrible!

Once during hot weather I went up to check on my kids and found my thirty month old younger son on the dresser inches from a fully open second story window. I screamed at my husband! That window had a special latch that kept it locked with only three inches open*, and he thought it would be okay for it to be fully open.

The thing is, Mr. Haslett, the hazards from chicken pox are preventable. Then you said:

I hate quoting statistics to make a point, but, over 3,000 people die every year from drowning, would you prevent you child from swimming?

My younger son is a lifeguard (the one who almost went out a window), so this is something I know about. Unfortunately many of the drownings are also preventable. Some are young teens who think they can swim and stray away from areas with lifeguards. Some are very young children (under age four) who wander into bodies of water when they cannot swim, or even tip into buckets of water. Then there are those folks who do not wear life jackets when they go boating, especially on rivers (the early summer when rivers are full of snow melt are especially dangerous).

Then there is the bugaboo of all trained lifeguards: parents thinking their children can “swim” unsupervised with inflatable rings on their arms or special swimming suits with styrofoam inserts. Neither of those will keep a child’s head above water.

Many deaths are preventable, especially if it is just a simple shot in the arm.

*Sad stupid thing about the latch that kept the window open only to three inches: when we ordered new windows for an addition from the same company that feature was no longer available. Apparently someone died in a fire because he could not open the window far enough, so they were no longer allowed. Double sigh.

By the way, I think making kids go through a disease when it can be prevented is also “parent abuse.” The kids may end up fine, but we are the ones who go without sleep, who clean up the messes and deal with the guilt.

Yeah, that’ll work.

By law, my landlord is required to send around forms periodically, asking about window guards. I have three options: A child under a certain age (six?) lives in my apartment, so install window guards; no child under that age lives in my apartment, and I don’t want them; or no child under that age lives here, but I want them anyway.

People still enjoy the air, sunlight, et cetera, and fewer children die or are injured by falls.

Yes, it’s possible to be over-cautious, but I don’t think that’s manifesting as window guards, seat belts, or chicken pox vaccine. It’s in the teenagers who aren’t allowed to ride the bus or subway alone. It’s my friend, in her early 30s, for whom my generation’s stories of casually riding our bikes around urban or suburban neighborhoods, with instructions of “be home by six/seven/dark” or “don’t go beyond $location,” sound like something out of historical fiction.

@ Ed:

Your various arguments that different things are more dangerous than chicken pox are really quite irrelevant. For any individual decision, one must look at the risks vs. benefits of that decision. Sure driving in a car is more dangerous than chicken pox. It is also more beneficial. It tells us absolutely nothing at all about the question at hand.

The vaccine’s benefits outweigh the risks – this is well established. Pox parties have fewer benefits and greater risks, so are an inappropriate alternative to vaccination. Attempting to send virus through the mail like this has effectively no benefit and vastly greater risk, so is completely unsupportable. Ergo, there is only one choice that makes sense. Those who claim they have any equivalence and it’s just personal preference are objectively wrong.

I’m sorry, but that is a really, really bad analogy.

The worst analogy that I have heard so far is the infamous vaccine-seatbelt analogy. It’s embarrassing that provax always use this kind of straw man to keep this thread up. No wonder they can’t argue when it comes to Science because they know it burns. For example who would dare inoculate their children with varicella when they know that the vaccine would “set them up for shingles later in life”? Of course, people who vaccinate are ignorant.

Please don’t feed delusional, uneducated, health care professional wannabe, disease-promoting troll…it needs “terminal disinfection”.

I’m absolutely going to get my daughter vaccinated. But I don’t completely buy the “putting your kid at risk for death” angle of it.

No not yet. Just child abuse on your part (i.e. you’re an infection promoter).

Nutty. My mother took me to play with kids with chickenpox 2 or 3 times, but it never took. I finally had chickenpox for the first time 10 years ago, age 27, and was MISERABLE; I wish I’d known a vaccine was available! Much more reliable and not nearly as painful.

Because there seems to be misinformation about “not getting shingles if you get the chicken pox vaccine” (it might be being implied and not stated – if that is a point of contention let me know).

My niece (14 at the time) developed shingles last year and her pediatrician said it was because she got the chicken pox vaccine. Since it is still infecting you with varicella zoster, you still can have a recurrence in the form of shingles. It was also implied that she wouldn’t have had shingles at such a young age if she had had real chicken pox instead of a vaccine.

I did find this:
http://www.nfid.org/pdf/factsheets/varicellaadult.pdf

It does say that you can still get shingles after getting vaccinated for chicken pox and recommends a shingles vaccination for people over 60.

Please don’t feed delusional, uneducated, health care professional wannabe, disease-promoting troll…it needs “terminal disinfection”.

There’s an article worth reading if you’re interested in varicella and zoster, ‘Prevention of Herpes Zoster: Recommendations of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP)’ here. A couple of relevant quotes:

Collectively these studies suggest that the risk for Oka/Merck strain zoster following varicella vaccination is no higher, and likely considerably lower, than that following wild-type varicella infection, even though the acquisition of the Oka/Merck VZV through vaccination generally occurs at a young age (i.e., varicella vaccination is recommended for children aged >12 months), which might be a risk factor for pediatric zoster. As varicella vaccine recipients age, the risk for and manifestation of Oka/Merck strain zoster in older persons at greater risk for zoster complications can be evaluated.

And:

In a large, placebo-controlled clinical trial, the zoster vaccine reduced BOI [burden of illness] attributed to zoster by 61.1 % and the incidence of PHN [post-herpetic neuralgia] by 66.5 %. The vaccine reduced the overall incidence of zoster by 51.3 % and substantially reduced its associated pain.

I find myself wondering … since chickenpox is a live virus anyway, could pediatricians offer it on a lollipop, or a sugar cube, like the polio virus in the old days? Just for the children of antivaxxers, of course. If they’d tell their children to accept infectious lollipops from strangers, why not (less virulently) infectious lollipos from doctors?

Intent vs. Effect

So I read the article and the comments, found the subject interesting, and added my opinion. I am a believer in modern medicine, I don’t hang with chiropractors or acupuncturist, and I think homeopathic medicine is a way to take advantage of desperate people. But now I am defending people that if I knew them, I would say they are crazy, and I am researching vaccine side effects to prepare this post……….

I believe most of you are saying getting vaccinated against chicken pox is a good idea. No problem, couldn’t agree more. Where I disagree is where I wish everyone would. People that don’t get their kids vaccinated against chicken pox are not (on that fact alone), stupid, abusive, uneducated, or the devil.

If you advocate a position to a ridiculous extreme, you are unlikely to get the outcome you expect.

@TBruce Please have a look at the side effects for DTaP vaccine. http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/vac-gen/side-effects.htm
@Tel Well said.

What I believe about everything I can think of:

No person with a scientific background would find ~100 deaths per year statistically significant. There are few occupations or hobbies that kill less people every year. I’m sorry, but yes Dangerous Bacon, I think a case could be made that the money spent researching a vaccine for chicken pox could have been better spent on fixing bum knees.

Seat belts = good
Compelling people over the age of consent to wear them = bad

Motor cycle helmets = good
Compelling people over the age of consent to wear them = bad

Smoking = bad
Restricting free people from doing something they enjoy, that has little or no effect on others = bad

I’m sure you get it.

Get vaccinated against any disease you would like, don’t smoke, wear your seat belt, and have a happy life. But please, don’t encroach on others freedom to choose for themselves and their charges.

@TBruce: Good grief, yes you are correct in your second description of my comment. Trying to position me as be against DPaT vaccination is a deplorable tactic, you asked me for an example of a rare vaccine side effect from a reliable source and I provided one, from that you can make no inference that I don’t believe in the efficacy of the DPaT vaccine.

Let’s follow your logic: if a serious complication from the DPaT vaccine is one in a million chance, and a possible serious complication from chicken pox is roughly mathematically equivalent (do the math) then I guess (from your perspective) parents of a DPaT vaccinated child, and a parent that allows their child to get chicken pox are equally guilty of causing harm to their child?

Back to my original post (and the reason I don’t comment online);
1. common sense is lacking in at least a portion of our current society.
2. I can’t believe I have devoted this much time to talking about something mildly interesting, but completely inconsequential in the grand scheme of things.
3. Come on!! We are talking about chicken pox……… something everyone over 25 has had!! Sure there are a small percentage of people in the world capable of doing truly stupid things. Mailing a sucker from a child with cp to a person that wants cp is clearly stupid, and interesting enough to cause me to comment. But, it is only stupid, it is no more dangerous than sneezing on an envelope. If it is illegal (which I don’t care to debate) it is based on a law that was designed to protect against far more serious threats than stupidity.
4. If you took the kids from all the people that did something stupid, there would be few families intact. I will admit this is probably a sad commentary on me, but, if there are truly people that have nothing better to worry about than whether someone else’s kid gets cp, they probably don’t have enough problems of their own.

@ken,

Then we’re lucky. To what do you attribute that “luck”?

Not scientific, but I know what my mother would attribute it to, Vaccination!

When I visited her this summer, we spoke about her experience working as a nurse in an Army hospital at the end of World War II. She said that was when she saw the only case of diptheria that she ever treated in her career as a nurse. And she also mentioned that they were vaccinating everyone who came into the hospital against diptheria.

And unlike smallpox, diptheria hasn’t been eradicated.

It didn’t take very much googling to come up with this instance:

http://www.who.int/csr/don/2003_08_29/en/index.html

As of 9 August 2003, WHO reported 50 cases, including 3 deaths ( case fatality rate, 6%), during 12 June and 2 August 2003 in a resettlement camp for internally displaced persons in Kandahar. Preliminary epidemiological data indicate that 74% of the cases were aged 5 to 14. Samples received by the Central Laboratory in Kabul confirm C.diptheriae. Further laboratory investigations are ongoing in Islamabad, Pakistan.

A mass vaccination campaign targeting the entire population of the camp (c. 40,000) was launched on 2 August 2003. As of 7 August 2003, 7,544 individuals had received vaccine.

Having endured chickenpox myself and watched my brothers and sisters suffer through it, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone when the alternative is very effective and has an excellent safety record.

And when people are refusing protective measures like vaccination out of misinformed fears and we are seeing the recurrence of diseases like pertussis and measles, I shudder to think what it would be like if we see the recurrence of a disease that can kill 6% of the people who get it.

@ ed haslett: Before licensing of the varicella vaccine in 1995, there were an estimated 4 million cases each year, 11,000 varicella-related hospitalizations and 100-150 deaths.

Still think that the money to develop the vaccine would be better spent on fixing bum knees?

I suggest you look at the CDC website to find the human “costs” of contracting the disease:

What would happen if we stopped vaccinations?

And, no I don’t agree with you that parents have the right to deliberately infect their child…it is abuse.

Um, Ken, the USA is not the only country on this planet. Perhaps you would like to explain to the parents of this Australian woman that there is no diphtheria in the USA.

@ed haslett:

Seat belts, Motor cycle helmets = good
Compelling people over the age of consent to wear them = bad.

Umm, no. My brother-in-law is an ex-policeman. One day, he went to the scene of an accident. The victim was an ex-teacher of ours (we went to the same high school). He had been going at speed when he hit a hole that had had its cover removed. It was on the freeway and he wasn’t wearing his seatbelt.
He was “ejected from the vehicle at speed” (thrown through the windscreen) and hit the tarmac at such high speed that he was killed almost instantly. My BIL was one of the people who had to clean up the accident site.

Smoking = bad
Restricting free people from doing something they enjoy, that has little or no effect on others = bad.

The dangers of exposure to secondhand smoke are well known. There are reasons why most countries now have severe restrictions on where you can or can’t smoke.

@ed haslett

Mailing a sucker from a child with cp to a person that wants cp is clearly stupid, and interesting enough to cause me to comment. But, it is only stupid, it is no more dangerous than sneezing on an envelope.

Au contraire. Last I checked, people were not in the habit of sucking on an envelope they received. Thus, they are unlikely to pick up much off of it. A lollipop, on the other hand, has one purpose: to be sucked. Now, the people sending these things may think that all they are sending is chicken pox. If that were the case, the likelihood of actually infecting anyone else is relatively small, since the mode of transmission is not conducive to the spread of varicella (which is spread predominantly via inhalation), not is it likely to even remain intact, as it does not survive long in the environment.

The big problem, though, is what these parents may not know about or may know about but still do it anyway. That sucker may have other viruses on it, like HepA or HepB, which are transmitted orally. The damp rags and candy may also breed fungus or other bacteria, which may be hazardous to one’s health.

Pox parties, IMO, are stupid. I don’t think they rise to the level of criminality, but they aren’t good ideas. Mailing suckers and crap like that, on the other hand, are, indeed, criminal. They knowingly send biological hazards via post, even if they know it is illegal, and should suffer the consequences of their actions.

As to your comment about forcing safety measures, you forget some other factors, which some of the other commenters have already pointed out. Your choice not to wear a seatbelt or helmet has indirect negative effects on other people through increases in insurance premiums, drains on the medical system, etc. With the seatbelt example, there is the possibility that there will be direct harm of others, such as when the person not wearing a belt is ejected from the vehicle and collides with another person or damages property. Even if the person is not ejected, they may still hurt other people in the same vehicle, as they in essence become a loose, heavy projectile.

If you are trying to argue that there is no good reason to compel immunization for something like chicken pox, you have yet to make any convincing points. The choice of whether or not to vaccinate affects more than just the individual or family making the decision. There is a measurable effect on the public.

A question for ed haslett: By your logic, shouldn’t people be allowed to drive on whatever side of the road they want to?

Mr. Haslett:

This is certainly my last post, and I hope you get my point.

That you are now a concern troll? Yes, we got that with your first comment.

@Ed haslett: It’s not just about the economic cost of the disease but also the social cost of the disease. A disease which can have debilitating complications makes the life of the suffer a living hell. A secondary effect is that it puts a huge strain on the family too in taking care of the patient.

As medical science advances, the standards of care and the standards of health also rise. When you can avoid unnecessary discomfort and potential complications, why not? What benefit do you believe not vaccinating gives vs the risks?

There is yet another way that ed haslett’s comments are off the mark; he compares the vaccination of children, to the use of seat belts by people over the age of consent.

In the latter case, whether or not you are willing to accept the testimony from medical professionals and first line emergency services as to the lowered fatality and disability rates which result from the enforcement of safety equipment in cars (and oh boy, does it ever exist, in spades!), you are still comparing adults making decisions which can harm themselves
to
adults making decisions which can harm their children.

I note that a more accurate comparison would be with laws compelling parents to use suitable car seats and restraints with their children, not for themselves. Odd how you seem to have bypassed that.

The fact is, there is a low fatality rate for chicken pox in children, but not nonexistant — and a far lower fatality rate (officially and according to all records: 0 ) associated with the use of the vaccine. Therefore, parents are putting children at unnecessary risk by deliberately not using the vaccine. Plus, there IS also real risk years down the line from shingles; parents are making decisions which can potentially (and will likely) have effects on their childrens’ health years after the initial event. Shingles is not trivial. Again, this is an entirely unnecessary endangerment, even though most people survive shingles, too.

But, by using a false analogy, you are once again dodging the actual point — which is that “parents’ rights” are very legitimately curtailed against “children’s health rights.”

From my recollection, whenever there is a second hand smoke article someone smoking advocate shows up. As you can see from the behavior of “Carol” on that link, she has no idea how her actions affects others.

“This is certainly my last post, and I hope you get my point. On any subject, individual rights should be considered at least equal to the rights of society (my opinion obviously). Once you start approaching it from the other way (which we have) there is no realistic place to stop. If that is the society the majority of people want, who am I to argue, but, just to be clear, that is not the way the country started out, and it is not the way I want things to be.”

I think we know where Ed is going with that remark…It is the mantra of the Tea Party/Libertarian folks.

Here is another example of what the “folks” believe in:

“If it was up to Ron Paul, or many of the Tea Party audience members at Monday night’s GOP presidential debate, churches, not the federal government, would help foot the bill for the medical costs of America’s 50 million residents living without health insurance.

CNN moderator Wolf Blitzer’s hypothetical question about whether an uninsured 30-year-old working man in coma should be treated prompted one of the most boisterous moments of audience participation in the CNN/Tea Party Express.

“What he should do is whatever he wants to do and assume responsibility for himself,” Paul responded, adding, “That’s what freedom is all about, taking your own risk. This whole idea that you have to compare and take care of everybody…”

The audience erupted into cheers, cutting off the Congressman’s sentence.

After a pause, Blitzer followed up by asking “Congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?” to which a small number of audience members shouted “Yeah!” (Source ABC.com)

I’ve viewed each and every Republican candidates televised debate…including the one where Ron Paul said let the uninsured died. During another Republican debate, a gay serviceman who was deployed and served in Iraq, asked one of the candidates about supporting the civil rights of gay and lesbian service men and women…and was booed by the audience.

There is another Republican debate scheduled for telecasting tomorrow night on CBS at 8 PM EST…topic will be foreign policy.

I have a lengthier post caught in moderation because I included a link about shingles, but I did want to make one clear point, as well — ed haslett’s comparison of vaccination of children for chicken pox to adults choosing whether or not to use seat belts, is a false analogy.

“People making decisions which affect the health of their children” =/= “Compelling people over the age of consent to wear [seatbelts/helmets]”

The real analogy is
“People making decisions which affect the health of their children” = “People being compelled to use appropriate car seats and restraints for their children.”

I notice he shies away from the crucial point: that it isn’t about people over the age of majority making decisions which affect only themselves. This is about adults making decisions which will have a definite effect on someone else.

Ok, ok, just one more

You guys are great, love the passion and consideration for others. Not so much, the trying to trap me into a political ideology, but I do understand. If anyone understands my point about personal liberty, and how each of the things I site takes a little bite of that, and how I believe this rolls going forward if left unchecked, they are not the vocal part of this audience.

Kids are born to parents, not the state or fed. Parents are responsible for those kids until they are ~18. Now there are a few folks that treat their kids very badly, and there must be laws in a society to deal with that, our point of disagreement is where the line is drawn. Beating a kid to the point of bruising for forgetting to turn off the bathroom light is over the line. How about knocking them around for taking illegal drugs and being a part of a gang of vandals? How ‘bout letting a kid get a childhood disease we all (over 25) have had? How ‘bout not having plastic plugs in all the empty light sockets? I hope most would agree that at least one of those things is not child abuse, I don’t think we will ever agree on anything deeper.

As far as sick kids, my daughter had a childhood illness (thank God nothing as serious as chicken pox sorry just a joke) that required several nights in the hospital, I did my time sleeping in a hospital crib with her so she could sleep. I don’t know if that shows I know what having a sick child is like, but, it is the best I have.

Mr. Haslett:

As far as sick kids, my daughter had a childhood illness (thank God nothing as serious as chicken pox sorry just a joke) that required several nights in the hospital, I did my time sleeping in a hospital crib with her so she could sleep. I don’t know if that shows I know what having a sick child is like, but, it is the best I have.

Oh, you poor deer! Give yourself a gold star. So you really have no idea what chicken pox is like, and definitely not for a full month of very sick kids in itchy pain.

Oh, and today I took my kid in for another echocardiogram and a holter. There have been continuing issues since he was taken to the hospital by ambulance due to tachycardia a couple of months ago. It was even less fun than when he had taken to the hospital by ambulance because of seizures due to a now vaccine preventable disease.

I really have no need of concern trolls who don’t understand the concept of “public health.”

Ed, are your children the only children on planet Earth? That’s the only way you would have a valid point.

I was wrong:

Chicken pox is the worst thing ever. Any parent not getting thier child/children vaccinated should on that fact alone be punished to the fullest extent of the law. To make up for my sins, I will find out the vaccination status of any child I meet, and inform CPS of anyone that is not vaccinated.

@Luna_the_cat: Short of letting you write my reply I have no idea how to get out of this. Parents are responsible for their children; how to raise them, punish them, reward them, feed them, and vaccinate them. Except in the most extreme cases those things are none of anyone else’s business. In my opinion which I hope by now, I have made clear, whether or not a child gets a cp shot matters so little in the grand scheme of life that to consider it as child abuse is one of the strangest things I have ever heard. I honestly have nothing else to say on the subject.

@ed haslett —

So what you’re saying is that, in your view, except for the “most extreme” cases (so, obviously, you see that a line gets drawn somewhere) the parents’ rights to treat their child how they please trumps the child’s right to safety, healthcare and protection.

In other words, the most important thing wrt protection from disease is that child is considered as property of the parent? The less important thing is to protect the interests of the child?

LOL, ok I have quit my job, so now I have unlimited time to respond to this article.
In order:
I don’t know who Laura is.
Yes. I believe I was the best person to raise my kids. On a macro level certainly my household was ran better than any government agency that I am aware of. On a micro level, I cared more, and made more rational decisions than any 50k a year social worker with 100 cases to manage could.

If you don’t like my position, or my analogies that is ok, and well within your rights, but please, take a dispassionate look at the kids and young adults that come out of foster care. If you call this child abuse, that is a possible remedy and from my understanding, it is nearly worst case for the kids you so desperately want to protect from a week of itching, and a far less than 1% chance of serious complication.

@Mrs. Woo: You are correct that anything you can do to avoid adult CP is probably a good idea. And thank you for the clarification on troll, clearly my idea of common sense is not globally held, but I didn’t intend to create this conversation.

Life is full of risk, we were not built to live forever, and it doesn’t appear that we were intended to live with no suffering. I didn’t design the world, but I am smart enough to know I don’t have the only valid opinion. I am also smart enough (or dumb enough depending on your perspective) to know I am responsible for myself and my family.

Life is full of risk, we were not built to live forever, and it doesn’t appear that we were intended to live with no suffering.

Intended? And, then, as efficient master of the household, it’s yours to distribute?

@ Ed: Perhaps you were unaware when you came to post here, that vaccine-preventable-diseases and anti-vaccination groups are a hot button issue here. Perhaps you were also unaware that some of the “regulars” here are doctors, nurses and “civilians” who are extremely-well educated in the science of immunology and medical epidemiology.

I think you were interested in Orac’s blog because you have an open mind and I believe that you are on a journey toward educating yourself about health care issues. That being said, we do have a difference of opinion about intentionally infecting your child, which does constitute child abuse.

Ed, I worked as a public health nurse in a County Health Department-Division of Communicable Disease Control. I know only too well the grief that parents felt, when they lost their child to a communicable vaccine-preventable-disease. I still weep about the loss of those children.

I also have some experience with Child Protective Services…under State law I am a “mandatory reporter” of suspect incidences of child abuse or child neglect. The mailer of infectious material, or the recipient of infectious material, who share the intention of deliberately infecting a child, does constitutes abuse of child.

Ed, I am also a bit (or more) older than you and have experienced personal loss as well. My childhood friend died 58 years ago from polio and my cousin was left with lifelong disabilities due to measles encephalopathy.

“I don’t know who Laura is.” She’s a real anti-vax troll who leaves this blog “in a huff” (or “high dudgeon”)…whenever she is called out about her pseudoscience inane posts.

@ Chris: Well, her two favorite fascist posters are online waiting for her…

ArtK:

I want you to wear that seat belt because I don’t want to pay for your stupidity. It is not possible to live your life exactly as you wish, and not impact (negatively) other people.

Which to me is secondary to the absolute human suffering those irresponsible actions cause.

While it does cost the rest of us real money when those feel entitled to do their own thing end up as grease spots on the roadway or their kids become disease statistics… most of us are truly saddened by the consequences of those bad decisions.

Every story on http://whatstheharm.net/index.html breaks my heart. Trying to mask bad choices with entitled libertarian rhetoric does not make it better.

Ed,
We were not intended to live without suffering, but we made some technological advancements, like vaccins, antibiotics and a whole lot more to reduce some suffering. So why not wanting a kid to have a vaccin, to reduce the chance of a disease, which might result in terrible side-effects, but use all the medical advancements to get the child better when it has gotten the disease. The later has a lot more costs, but perhaps you pay all those costs yourself, without the help of a health insurance. (I can’t imagine how it is, because I live in a country with a good public health system and I’m very glad I do.)

Parents are responsible for a child, but as the old saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child.

I would be interested in a reading list too. I read Trick or Treatment a while back(and now enjoy annoying my friends who are into lifestyle woo by pointing out they are wasting their money.) I have Pox: An American History on hold at the library, but I’d appreciate recommendations for other reading. It’s been a long time since I’ve taken a biology class.

If you are looking for a fast, straightforward, but reasonably technical intro to immunology, I would recommend the BIOS Instant Notes in Immunology book — they have a new edition out this year, by Lydyard, Whelan and Fanger. (I’m not linking because I don’t want this hung up in moderation, but you can find it quite easily on Amazon.)

What Luna recommendeds is a good start. You might also want to read online, the first two chapters of the CDC Pink Book. Just hit the “ready to print PDF version”.

@ Luna: We have already discussed Thingy’s “condition” extensively online.

All of us believe it has some sort of serious mental disorder, may cycle in and out of the mental health system, probably refuses treatment and gets money from the government for its disability.

It is also delusional about its education in medical science and has an “imaginary” job in a hospital.

I’m quite comfortable talking ABOUT Thingy and its delusions, but otherwise ignore it…because it craves engagement. It usually goes away for a short period of time, when you ignore it.

@lilady —

Sorry, I was largely offline for much of the year, so obviously missed a lot of those discussions. I’m going to agree with your assessment, though.

@luna_the_cat: Hey! I thought you hadn’t been around much, but wondered if I was just missing your posts. Hope you are doing OK, and welcome back to the wonderful world of RI. The regulars are still around, lilady is “teh awesome” (and way better than me with links..) and the trolls are still trollish.

Thingy, IIRC time wise, was only infesting SBM when last you posted on RI, and meandered over here several months ago. Since Orac is in Michigan, I’m going to snark that Thingy lives under the Ambassador Bridge. Little Augie (aka augustine) has been mostly gone, thankfully. Silly Sid Offal is still around.

As far as Thingy goes, lilady is pretty right on about the lunacy, as is Chris. Thingy lives in its own world and, like Humpty Dumpty, words only mean what it wants them to mean (and they come around for their pay weekly).

Yeah you better keep reading.

Try this whole of lies: you don’t know that would be passing a different tune. You should only one coming soon, intravenous wrong tree. Fact is the fact is did not take on barking up for convenience.

Haha, referring to answer.

@MI Dawn — thank you, very much. 🙂 I don’t know how much I’ll be able to be around overall, but hopefully more than I have been.

Also, long version answer: it has been a very high-stress year, and just to keep things interesting my left descending artery decided that it would develop a habit of coronary spasm, which prompted a number of investigations. (Let me just say that I am actually very grateful for the NHS.) Life is still very high stress, and I still have about a million more things to do than I have time for (so, no change there, then) — so I do plead extenuating circumstances for prolonged absence. But, I do feel better than I did.

The unvaccinated are not always to blame for outbreaks-

Just by the by, ken, who’s the reservoir for pertussis?

“ken” (#304):

“The unvaccinated are not always to blame for outbreaks-“

From his “drive-by” commenting technique, I’m pretty sure that “ken” isn’t interested in either debate or information, but I’ll give it a try.

The 1994 (!?!) paper “ken” cites was about a 1993 pertussis outbreak in Cincinnati, Ohio in which the majority of the victims had been immunised according to the the-current recommendations (using the whole-cell vaccine). This was but one of several studies revealing that the pertussis vaccine was not as effective as previously thought and needed to be re-administered in the teen and adult years, just as was (much) earlier found with the tetanus vaccine.

So, to correct “ken’s” interpretation of the study:

“The unvaccinated are not always to blame for outbreaks – sometimes they are due to inadequate vaccination.”

Fixed it for ya’, “ken”.

Prometheus

This is how more vaccinated persons get the disease than unvaccinated. Even if the infection rate was at 100%, there would still be more of the vaccinated getting the diseases because there are more of them!

Chris is simply pointing out that vaccine failure is a common outcome of continued vaccination. Whereas this lack of vaccine efficacy and failure to protect the herd will only lead to the creation of the so called herd immunity (i.e. the vaccinated will get re-infected anyway, naturally), right Chris? But then again, Chris is not a smart and intelligent person to be able to understand real science. She still believes in myth like herd immunity.

@ ken: You already interjected diphtheria in your hit-and-run posting at # 239 above. I, in turn, replied to your diphtheria comment and provided some information to you. Why haven’t you replied to my questions that I posed at #243 above?:

@ ken: The article you provided under “incidence” describes an epidemic of diphtheria in the former Soviet Union during the early 1990s. During this time of political upheaval, when vaccination rates plummeted, there were 150,000 cases. What do you think would happen in the USA, if the vaccination rates plummeted?

The diphtheria vaccine first became available in 1923 in the USA. In 1921 there were 206,000 cases of diphtheria and 15,520 deaths from diphtheria. Diphtheria has a fatality rate of 5-10 % and up to 20 % fatality rate for the very young or elderly population that contracts the disease. ***So, Ken, what would be the number of cases and the number of deaths from diphtheria if the vaccination rate plummeted in 2011?

***1920 USA census total population 106 million and 2010 census total population 308 million (Wikipedia)

Please don’t feed delusional, uneducated, disease-promoting, health care career wannabe troll. It needs “terminal disinfection”.

That’s laughable.

The inject not; needed right now that song before posting. Do you know your fallacious mama’s use therefore found in? The best time.

From so is your self-recognition of equal importance at what you see. There. You.

@ Thingy bot: I find your “translations” very enlightening and make sense when compared to the gibberish of the troll. Please keep the bot generator operative.

Chris, if you have time, listen to Offal’s radio debut on BBC Radio 5…it’s a hoot.

Thank you very much, Heliantus for your expanded more concise definition. I still really believe (though I usually look on most of the world rather kindly) that Mr. Haslett was not deliberately trolling. Rather, he believed his point had valid consideration and was attempting to defend himself from what he felt were rather unwarranted attacks. Like I said, though, I often think the best of most people.

Yup. Have to be very careful what I say here. Even not being concise enough about “troll” can get me in trouble?

Thank you, Alison, for the other suggestion. I’ve wish-listed it on Amazon to track down later. I’m not sure how far the local library reaches to try to get inter-library loans. The last small town I lived in they shared with other libraries in the county and that was it, so I might have to spend ten bucks on a used copy. It looks like a fascinating read!

Ed Haslett (#264):

“Kids are born to parents, not the state or fed. Parents are responsible for those kids until they are ~18. Now there are a few folks that treat their kids very badly, and there must be laws in a society to deal with that, our point of disagreement is where the line is drawn.”

I’m not a lawyer or a Child Protective Services worker, but I think that where the line gets drawn is pretty clear. Parents in the US are given control of their children and are allowed to raise them without “interference” unless and until the parents are no longer looking out for the best interests of the child.

In my day, that “line” was drawn at physical abuse that left scars, broke bones or caused internal damage. Today, the line is somewhere else. Parents are (currently) allowed to give their children whatever medical care they feel is best (up to and including not vaccinating them) unless that medical care is [a] not up to the “reasonable person” standard (i.e. what a “reasonable person” would do in similar circumstances) AND [b] the child is harmed (or is in clear danger of being harmed in the near future).

That means you can refuse to vaccinate your child, can treat their asthma with chiropractic and their appendicitis with prayer and – as long as they don’t come to any harm – “the state” can’t do anything about it (note: refusing to let your unvaccinated child attend public school without a signed “exemption” from the parents is not “compulsory vaccination”).

Let your “unreasonable” care lead to injury or death, however, and “the state” will have plenty to do with your parental rights (not to mention where you will be living for the next five to ten years).

And, though it may not seem “fair”, if you do the “reasonable” thing and take your asthmatic child to a doctor who makes a mistake that kills your child, you have not committed child abuse (although the doctor may well have).

I “get” the whole libertarian agenda – people don’t like being forced to do what’s “good for them” and it sucks to have to wear a helmet to ride a motorcycle (although I certainly would – I wear one to ride a bicycle). Some states have repealed their helmet laws in response to such complaints. However, with more and more people realising that they’re “on the hook” (via Medicaid, Medicare and private insurance premiums) for treating a motorcycle rider in a persistent vegetative state after an accident, I suspect that argument will garner less support.

The fact of the matter is that society has become too interconnected for someone to legitimately claim that their poor choices only affect themselves, even if you limit that to financial impacts. It may well come to people being fined for obesity or skydiving – I hope not. But the “I am only hurting myself” argument doesn’t hold water anymore.

As for the “harmless childhood disease” that “we all (over 25) have had” (i.e. chickenpox), not only do children die from that disease, but anyone who has had chickenpox can potentially develop “shingles” if they live long enough. When there was no vaccine for chickenpox (when I had it, for instance), there wasn’t any alternative – you got chickenpox, preferrably when you were a child, and you took your chances.

Now, with the vaccine, children have the chance to not only miss out on a “harmless childhood ilness” that still kills a hundred or more children a year, but also miss out on chickenpox’s nasty sequel: “Shingles”. At this point in time, it’s starting to look a bit like cruelty to let a child get infected with wild-type chickenpox and have that threat hanging over them the rest of their life.

Is it child abuse? Not yet, perhaps, but the “reasonable person” standard is always in flux, responding to what “reasonable people” think is the best thing to do. It may move that far some day; it may not. Having seen “shingles”, however, and loving my children, I would get them vaccinated (youngest was, oldest got chickenpox before the vaccine was available).

Prometheus

“It may well come to people being fined for obesity or skydiving”

Obesity, perhaps, but skydiving? Are there very many *non-fatal* accidents in skydiving?

That is a whole bunch of lie.

Here’s the one is done. I don’t to humans, no.

And those are you only if you played it was only happens when most people were exposed to the matter: me. This thread is something not given have or that myth, no those vaccine. You have heard any antigen specific antibodies? Most people were inoculated with a point.

I started no loitering allowed; differentials. It’s easy to lose. You consider yourself a different.

LW:

Are there very many *non-fatal* accidents in skydiving?

Slightly OT, but yes. It’s not that unusual to sprain or fracture an ankle in a bad landing, and certainly bruises and muscle strains are commonplace. (I am not a skydiver, and never will be — I can barely tolerate climbing a ladder — but I paid attention to the safety briefing my brother attended on his one skydiving experience.) And there have been some pretty freakish accidents as well — the story of a group of parasailers who got sucked up into a thunderstorm’s rising air current in Australia is pretty harrowing. Some of them died, mainly of hypothermia and oxygen deprivation at extreme altitude. At least one of them did survive to tell the tale.

@ WMDKitty: The herpes zoster (shingles) vaccine was first licensed in 2006 and recommended for persons age 60 years and older. At the time of licensing, there was a provision in the ACIP recommendations to expand the age downward (ages 50-59), in 2011.

There has been a shortage of the vaccine due to manufacturing difficulties according to the MMWR (November 11, 2001 issue); the “expansion” downward in age eligibility will not be implemented until there is more availability of the vaccine.

See the entire article “Update on Herpes Zoster Vaccine Licensure For Persons age 50 Through 59 Years” at the MMWR website.

@Prometheus: I am unclear, the reading I have done indicates that shingles is still a possiblity if you have been vaccinated against cp. Do you/anyone know the final answer?

Any volunteers for taking the adult equivalent of 26 vaccine doses for an infant under
one year of age?

@ lurker: Make mine doubles and four times on Sundays.

lurker,

Your response in #333 is already an irrefutable fact against these infection promoters however your follow up question in #334 is loose and open to straw man fanatics. Just look at them.

@ ed haslett: You do realize, don’t you, that the full impact of decreasing incidence, severity and post herpetic nerve pain associated with shingles, from early childhood immunization with the varicella vaccine, is being studied? And, that studies will not be completed until these children get older…when they would be at risk for shingles…from either the actual disease or the preventive varicella immunization. The varicella vaccine was first licensed by the FDA in 2005 for use in healthy children ages 12 month-12 years.

The herpes zoster (shingles) vaccine when administered to older people has been studied and according to this abstract (Pubmed 20104941):

“Individuals who have been infected with varicella zoster virus (VZV) are at risk for developing herpes zoster and this risk appears to be related to a decline in VZV-specific cell-mediated immunity (CMI). Zostavax (zoster vaccine) is a one-dose, high-potency, live, attenuated VZV vaccine that boosts VZV-specific CMI and this is its presumed mechanism of action. Zoster vaccine is registered in the EU for use in adults aged >or=50 years for the prevention of herpes zoster and herpes zoster-related postherpetic neuralgia. In the Shingles Prevention Study, a placebo-controlled trial in adults aged >or=60 years (n = 38 546), zoster vaccine led to a sustained boost of VZV-specific CMI. Over a mean herpes zoster surveillance period of 3.1 years, zoster vaccine reduced the herpes zoster-related burden of illness by 61%, reduced the incidence of herpes zoster by 51% and reduced the incidence of postherpetic neuralgia by 67%. Zoster vaccine recipients who developed herpes zoster had a shorter illness duration and severity than placebo recipients who developed herpes zoster. Zoster vaccine had continuing efficacy in a Shingles Prevention Study subpopulation followed for 7 years post-vaccination. Zoster vaccine was generally well tolerated in older adults. While cost-effectiveness estimates in pharmacoeconomic analyses varied widely according to vaccine and herpes zoster parameter cost/benefit estimates, an analysis from a UK perspective found a zoster vaccine immunization programme in adults aged 65 years to be cost effective. In older adults, the zoster vaccine has the potential to significantly reduce the herpes zoster burden of illness by decreasing the incidence of herpes zoster or reducing its severity.”

Of course lilady as usual has no idea what she’s talking about (being completely inept in immunology). She’s merely stating a fact that those who were not inoculated with the etiologic agent VZV will never suffer chicken pox and shingles later in life. So where’s the risk of shingles among the unvaccinated? Only in lilady’s wildest imagination.

How fortunate are the unvaccinated and uninfected.

@ Thingy bot: Thank you for that explanation…it makes much more sense than anything the delusional, disease-promoting, uneducated, health care professional wannabe troll has posted.

It needs “terminal disinfection”.

One thing that is significantly different about the vaccine-strain virus – according to animal studies – is that it doesn’t cause the destruction of dorsal root ganglion neurons that is seen with the wild-type virus. It is this neuron damage that causes the chronic pain seen after wild-type herpes zoster (shingles) reactivations.

[Citation needed]

Interestingly, vaccinating older adults who had wild-type varicella (chickenpox) infections in their youth has been shown to significantly reduce the incidence of shingles.

How?