anyone read the latest time magazine?

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http://www.time.com/time/health/article ... 38,00.html

I read a little of it, and it's largely refuting the whole supposed causation between vaccination and autism.

I believe that it's one thing to opt out of the flu shot, the MMR, the rotavirus shot, and the chickenpox shot (chickenpox was the only one I skipped. I have chickenpox right now, actually! It's unpleasant). These diseases, while unpleasant, are not usually life-threatening. However, not inoculating your children against polio, whooping cough, hepatitis, tetanus, diphtheria, viral pneumonia, and viral meningitis is, well, kind of dumb. The child does not get a choice in the matter, so "libertarian" arguments are useless. Plus, if enough people jump on this bandwagon, a serious public health crisis could result. Right now, these folks are able to depend on the fact that everyone else's kids don't get diphtheria for the welfare of their children. If diphtheria abounded, they would be completely screwed. Maybe it makes me a Big Fat Liberal to say this, but public health must be valued over the private choices of paranoiacs.

If we assume that the question of vaccines and autism is still open, it is a matter of the lesser of two evils. A proven connection between The Polio and spending the rest of your life in a goddamn iron lung trumps a circumstantial connection between vaccines and The Autism. Sometimes we have to make choices like that, unfortunately.

I guess until there are clear guild lines we will all have to make up our own minds - but one thing I do know is that I was born different - thats who I am.

There was a wire story today about the death of the last iron lung patient in the USA. She was 60. Since the age of 3, she had been imprisoned inside one of those things after her spine was paralyzed by polio. What killed her? A power outage. She lived her life in rural Tennessee, where thunderstorms can play havoc with the power. Her parents had a diesel generator that was as old as the lung. It wouldn't start. Her parents were too feeble to hand crank the machine, so she died. In her life, she had graduated from high school, taken college classes, and written a children's book to encourage children with disabilities to never give up. As much as parents of autistic kids suffer, there is worse.

It's great that large media influences like Time of print this story, and I also implore the schools that refuse to take in students that have not been vaccinated.... it is for saftey reasons. Everyone knows that public buildings that house a large number of people, especially children are going to have a lot of germs and bacteria, being vaccinated can prevent some of the illness that these can cause.

Health care officals have a right to be frustrated because children can get sick and even lose out on certain opportunities just because their parents are paranoid over a unproven myth.

What about those of us who don't vaccinate but also don't buy the 'vaccines-cause-autism' myth? There's a lot of us out there and it annoys me when they get distracted by trying to prove myths like that, because it distracts from the real issue here, i.e. what they put in them and how toxic the ingredients are, autism aside. MSG, formeldehyde, aluminium, mercury etc are very, very bad for you and cause things besides autism - let's start getting rid of the myths, shift the focus, make them safer, and maybe we'll start to utilise them.

Unless you live more than 100 miles from the nearest major city, you're probably going to get more **** into your system by the time you're 2 just from pollution and certain food products than you will from shots...