smallpox

by dwight heet

Mon, Oct 22, 2001 4:09PM

US orders 300 million doses of smallpox vaccine doses from Cambridege-based biotech firm Acambis

Smallpox is an unlikely 'terrorist' weapon. It is too indiscriminate in who is attacked. Seeing as the only people who would like to see large scale die-offs in the US would prefer targeted populations, other chemical/biological formats would seem preferable. The main danger is from an enforced program of vaccination - resist this. Brain damage,chronic disease, auto-immune syndromes and death for large numbers of people would be a logical outcome. In May 1796, Edward Jenner, acting upon

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§Ignoring history

by hippy boy

Tue, Oct 23, 2001 9:14AM

Many diseases our grand parents had to worry about are no longer an
issue due to vaccination. Perhaps there are sometimes bad reactions to
vaccination, but this is nothing compared to the toll these largely forgotten
diseases used to take.

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§I hate making up titles

by Mulberry Sellers

Tue, Oct 23, 2001 9:33AM

"As an added bonus: ‘there was not one leper in the whole of the Hawaiian Islands before the noble work of Jenner reached them. By the nineties, 10 percent of the natives were lepers.’ "

Ah, reasoning under that great natural law, "post hoc ergo propter hoc", I see.

Never mind that the organism causing Hansen's Disease (commonly known as leprosy) has been known for decades to be a soil-dwelling bacterium.

Never mind that the incidence of diseases like measles, polio, mumps, rubella etc. nosedived suddenly immediately after vaccines for each disease were licensed. (for more info, check out http://www.quackwatch.com).

Never mind that in a couple of hundred years smallpox in the wild vanished from the Earth.

Never mind that in less than 50 years polio has become almost nonexistent.

Never mind that the current generation of schoolkids don't have classmates who drag polio-crippled legs in braces, as I did and as my parents did in spades.

Let's go back to the 17th century and take our chances. Pathogens are all-natural and organic; we shouldn't oppress and discriminate against them with widespread immunity.

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