« Money I Owe, Money Ay-Yay | Main | Your Racist Friend »
Move the Needle Telepathically
By Jeff Fecke | August 22, 2008
I hate you. I hate you and your selfish, ignorant, ass-backward narcissism. You’ve decided that a thoroughly debunked vaccine-autism link is more important than your child’s health. That would be bad enough, of course, but you’re putting my child at risk, too, and that’s not something I’m going to take sitting down.
Measles cases in the U.S. are at the highest level in more than a decade, with nearly half of those involving children whose parents rejected vaccination, health officials reported Thursday.
Worried doctors are troubled by the trend fueled by unfounded fears that vaccines may cause autism. The number of cases is still small, just 131, but that’s only for the first seven months of the year. There were only 42 cases for all of last year.
“We’re seeing a lot more spread. That is concerning to us,” said Dr. Jane Seward, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Pediatricians are frustrated, saying they are having to spend more time convincing parents the shot is safe.
By the by, measles is not a minor infection:
Measles, best known for a red skin rash, is a potentially deadly, highly infectious virus that spreads through contact with a sneezing, coughing, infected person.
Fifteen of the kids who contracted measles ended up in the hospital. None of them died, thank God, but if your kid has ever been in the hospital forany reason, you know that it’s not a minor thing.
Look, I know autism is scary. it’s a terrible disease, one that makes life difficult for its victims. Depending on the severity of the disease, it can be a serious hurdle that can be overcome, or it can mean profound, lifetime disability, and the inability to lead anything remotely resembling a normal life. And if my child was autistic — or indeed, became sick or disabled in any way, for any reason — I’d want to know why.
We don’t know for certain what causes autism, but there’s a strong genetic component to it, and every indication that autism is a congential birth defect. Tragically, in most cases, it’s just a bad draw, an unfortunate interaction of genes. In cases where genes aren’t the primary factor, it’s likely that the environmental factors that cause it are introduced within weeks after conception.
And that’s hard to deal with, knowing that you are responsible — even if only through the genes you contributed — for your child’s illness. But it’s the truth. And glomming onto a conspiracy theory isn’t going to change that. And it isn’t going to help your child, or any other children, either.
If you want to help you child avoid autism, you can’t. If they have it, they were born with it, and what you can do is help your child learn to live with it, adjust to it, live the best life they are capable of living despite its affects. But if you want to prevent your child, and others, from getting measles and possibly dying, that’s easy — get them vaccinated. To do otherwise is, to be blunt, parental malpractice. You can’t choose what genes your child gets. You can choose to keep them healthy. Do what you can do.
Topics: Health Care, Science | No Comments »