Anti-vaccination campaigns: a real threat
These campaigns (especially in the US but also here) against vaccination are increasingly prevalent and dangerous. They operate on the spurious grounds that vaccination causes harm: Andrew Wakefield, who was responsible for the paper in The Lancet claiming that the MMR vaccine caused autism and who was struck off, now lives in the US and continues to plug his discredited line.It's shocking how many people are prepared to ignore the evidence and prevent their children from being vaccinated. Measles is a particularly unpleasant disease: the CDC in the US reports that "some people may suffer from severe complications, such as pneumonia (infection of the lungs) and encephalitis (swelling of the brain). They may need to be hospitalised and could die. As many as one out of every 20 children with measles gets pneumonia, the most common cause of death from measles in young children." And yet we get idiots like one Hilary Bilkis, a massage therapist and “intuitive healer” in New Jersey, who has said that “My grandparents fled Europe to avoid being harassed, persecuted and murdered because they were of the Jewish faith,” complaining about the infringement of individual liberties, as if the Holocaust were remotely similar to the purported effects of vaccination.But don't imagine the threat is confined to the wilder reaches of the US: a BMJ editorial, writing about Wakefield's work, described it as an "elaborate fraud" that led to lower vaccination rates, putting hundreds of thousands of children at risk and diverting energy and money away from research into the true cause of autism.
Richard Carter ● 2814d9 Comments ● 2813d