That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘parents’

It’s no big deal, it’s natures way.

Some twat in Scotland has proposed that a tax should be levied on chocolate; the BBC HYS forum is currently red hot. It’s not a bad idea to do something about obesity but we are attacking it from the wrong angle, the current thinking is to tax everyone in order to waste money telling fatties that they should eat less and exercise more, all the while the fatty food companies are spending more money getting the fatties through the door and plying them with lard. We are now considering taxing everyone for eating crap in the same way that we tax smokers and drinkers, something which the tobacco industry fought by making smokes a luxury and desirable product and something the booze industry fought by lowering production costs, lowering margins and increasing volume.

So if we know that these things don’t work why are we doing them? We tax booze and fags not to lower demand but to line the coffers of the treasury so that they can offset the cost of booze and smoke related illnesses. So why not attack the costs head on rather than trying to scrabble around for the cash to pay for it? Why not just withdraw free NHS treatment for smokers, drinkers and fatties. Not only does it provide a real incentive for people to stop smoking, drinking or cramming junk down the gullets, it means that those who don’t can continue to make that choice without impacting on the rest of society. Sure a few fatties will die but they are going to die anyway and prolonging their lives is a pointles waste of time. Parents who allow their kids to become fatties can of course be prosecuted for child abuse and the kids rehomed with parents who are actually going to take care of them.

The BBC is currently running articles about the stillbirth rate in the UK and how as many as 6500 children die each year before they are 4 weeks old. I understand that losing a child in this way must be truely horrific but with child mortality rates dropping, life expectancy increasing and a global population of around seven billion I have to ask: do we need another 6500 kids every year?

Guest post from ‘Sensibly Ginger’
The Independent, on Thursday 26th Feb said:

“Health officials have been forced to withdraw 21,000 doses of the meningitis C vaccine from GP clinics around the UK after it emerged that some doses may have been contaminated with a blood-poisoning bacterium.
“More than 60,000 doses of the vaccine, which is offered to all four-month-old babies, could be contaminated with the hospital-acquired infection – the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium – and a third of these had already been sent to vaccination clinics before officials became aware of the problem.
“Officials within the Department of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturers are believed to have known of the problem since Tuesday but only issued an emergency recall last night after being contacted about the potential contamination by The Independent. “

Maybe that’s because ALL of the vaccines in the UK were safe, as the Independent evidently knew:

“In a statement, the Department of Health denied that any contaminated samples had entered the UK market. Two batches have been identified and are being recalled as a purely precautionary measure. These two batches passed all routine quality testing, including a sterility test.”

What has happened, as the BBC reported, is:

“The recalled batches of the Menjugate Kit, which were manufactured in Italy, had passed safety checks before leaving the factory to be transported by road to the UK.
“But a small number of samples were sent overseas by aeroplane to test whether the sample would remain secure under different air pressures.
“At the destination, these were found to be contaminated with staphylococcus aureus bacteria, but never entered the supply chain.”

So really, what it should have said is:

Novartis bend over backwards to make sure your kids are safe, and don’t die from meningitis. 

But that wouldn’t sell adverts, if all they did was inform you of the important news you need to know.

The media have fueled the fire, yet again, and are helping the public misunderstanding of science. Vaccines are safe, they really, really are. Children are now dying because parents aren’t getting their children vaccinated.

Raising worries over safe vaccines is not only a fucking stupid thing to do, it is a public health risk.

Continuing the current theme of expanding on the misconceptions of the ignorant I thought I would share this wonderful comment which was made on another site related to the MMR debate:

Why are we made to give this artificial drug to our kids? Drugs like this are known to create superbugs that kill more people.

I totally love that shit. Mutant superbugs are at your door waiting to rape your daughters and kill your sons! Clearly it’s all because of the drugs that these superbugs exist and kill our grannies when they go into hospital for some completely unrelated reason.

Hysteria aside there does appear to be a common misconception that antibiotics cause germs to mutate into strains that are either more virulent or are resistant to those antibiotics. This is a variation of the classic correlation/causality fallacy where it is assumed (by idiots) that if two things are related then it follows that one thing causes the other (which is *sometimes* the case but not *always* the case and even when it is the case it’s hard to prove which one causes the other). Viruses mutate, that’s a given, but it’s not assumed by rational thinking people that the mutation is caused directly by the antibiotics because mutations have been observed in controlled environments where no antibiotics are present. What *has* been observed is that when antibiotics are used to remove the population of a particular bug, what remains is likely to be resistant to the antibiotics; otherwise it too would have been wiped out.

This is a crass analogy but if I were to engineer a method of killing everyone who has brown, black or blonde hair (but not ginger) and leave it on earth for a great many years while observing from a secret space station I would return to earth to find a lot of ginger folk. I would not have *turned them all ginger*, I would have merely selectively removed the dark haired and blonde haired people and allowed the gingers to thrive and pass on their ginger genes. It follows that if I wipe out the population of a virus that is not resistant to my antibiotics, whatever is left (if there is anything left) will be resistant to the antibiotics.

So how did they get resistant in the first place? Pretty much the same way we have ginger people, albino people, white people, black people, hairy people, bald people or any of the other myriad of variations in our own population; pure chance. When the genetic information is passed from one generation to another there is often a little bit of scrambling along the way, this is what introduces variations in organisms that reproduce asexually. It’s actually a little more complex in organisms like us that reproduce sexually, our genetic information is a milkshake of our parents’ genetic information along with the odd random mutation, but essentially there is randomness in all living things.

For those with a few cells of grey matter, you might be thinking:

“Oh, shit, that sounds an awful lot like that theory of evolution thingumy!”

Yes. Yes it does, doesn’t it. It’s another observable example of the theory in action. If you can find a better explanation using the scientifically observed information (and can prove it to a point where peers in the scientific community can’t fault your theory) then you should let everyone know by sending your answers to:

I.want.one.of.those@nobelprize.org