Barbara Loe Fisher, the president of the National Vaccine (dis-)Information Center, said: “Fifty-seven cases of measles … in a country with a population of 317 million people is not a lot of cases.”
Bullshit. 57 cases of a disease that was declared eliminated as recently as 2000 is a lot. And the outbreak is spreading: Not all of the victims were even at Disneyland. Consider this:
Transmitted via a sneeze or a cough, the virus can live in air droplets for two hours after an infected person has left the room, exposing everyone who enters during that time frame. It’s particularly contagious during the four days before a rash appears, when most people are unaware they are infected.
Measles is far more infectious than Ebola. This is the outbreak we should be worried about.
And it’s entirely the result of the anti-vaxxers.
A Pun Involving Travel 
But a celebrity told me not to.
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Eventually Darwinism will catch up to them… then again… there was that cup of coffee once…
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JP Lizotte you might want to take a minute or two to look up the details of that coffee case. Long story short: They kept the coffee dangerously hot so they had to brew it less often; The woman got 2nd and 3rd degree burns on her legs and genitals; The jury awarded her one day of McDonald’s coffee profits, they had no idea it would be so much.
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And if you would ask me if I’ve ever had coffee near my genitals. Ever. What do you suppose I would say? Do I drink hot coffee in the car? And finally if I did spill it, whom would I blame.
Now I’ll add a bit of science to this. Best coffee is arguably served between 69° and 85°C (155ºF and 175ºF).
According to http://www.burnfoundation.org/programs/resource.cfm?c=1&a=3 you can get a 3rd degree burn in 5 seconds @140°F. The Consumer Product Safety Commission and the plumbing industry have published a voluntary standard which states that the maximum allowable temperature at the water outlet to the bathing area should be 120°F (source: http://www.antiscald.com/) Accroding to a table at this same ressource, a few degrees more reduces the time for 3rd degree burns almost exponentially.
So spilling an ideally temperatured coffee on herself would have yielded a similar result in just a few seconds. There was no malice or intent to maim on McDonald’s behalf. Yet this is the state of things.
So, when I make a hot beverage, I happen to know that the water in it has boiled, moments before, so I must assume the water was close to boiling when being served “a hot beverage” seconds after prepared. But then that’s just me… and my genitals.
[rant]
Issue I have is, that it has come to a point that our convenience is an unalienable right despite any imputability and responsibility of our own: I “should” be able to walk out of a restaurant with a coffee suitably temperatured for me to spill it on my lap without consequences, while in my car? I am sorry, I am possibly an old fool but I don’t buy it.
The same I don’t buy it that kids shouldn’t have toys in cereal boxes and so on.
Because of one incident an entire industry was forced to penalize every following generation. We are creating all kind of incentives to achieve a state of total personal irresponsibility. Or as I would normally call ’em: Pansies.
We are “breeding” ourselves out of the ability to deal with adversity. And a vaccine is just that, a proper dose of adversity so our immune system can compose with the real disease.
So I can’t hold any other discourse than: adversity, especially the accidental kind, is good for our species. Sure some of it is tragic. But without it, we are no better than amoebas and surely would have not evolved much past that.
This over sterile, over protective mentality is exactly the kind that is spun into the paranoia that says that we must live ever so sheltered lives and that vaccines are the boogeyman of medicine.
All this while the corporations that we hold accountable for our own mishaps, get away with planetary murder on an industrial scale. A society that considers banks’ self regulation is just fine, while making sure you can’t supersize your soda or don’t burn yourself with coffee. Just wow. Let me get in line for that. There’s a social contract I can really sink my teeth into.
[/rant]
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