>chicken pox and hepatitis B
Let’s see. Tossing parents in jail for not getting their kids a vaccine for, respectively:
>1) A disease that’s virtually harmless when you get it, for which the vaccine doesn’t work, long-term.
Except when you’re an adult it’s not harmful. Children aren’t the only people at schools.
>2) A disease that you can’t get unless you take recreational drugs intravenously or get sodomized on a regular basis. A vaccination against Hep B wouldn’t be a necessary precaution for most kids.
You’re thinking of Hep C, not Hep B. Hep B is caught from either blood or stool and is passed along really easily because kids don’t always wash their hands and they’re always getting cuts and scrapes.
>But the important thing is that numerous local contractors depend for their income on giving vaccines and boosters against trivial or obscure diseases, and public school children represent a key market segment. So their contacts and friends on the school board and the local family court bar have no choice but to stand in solidarity with them.
So, for your new hat, should the foil be made out of aluminum, tin or steel?
You're wrong. This is from the Mayo Clinic website on risk factors for Hep B:
Risk factors Anyone of any age, race, nationality, sex or sexual orientation can be infected with HBV. But you're at greatest risk if you:
- Have unprotected sex with more than one partner. You're at risk whether you're heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual. Unprotected sex means having sex without using a new latex or polyurethane condom every time.
- Have unprotected sex with someone who's infected with HBV. - Have a sexually transmitted disease such as gonorrhea or chlamydia.
- Share needles during intravenous (IV) drug use.
- Share a household with someone who has a chronic HBV infection.
- Have a job that exposes you to human blood.
- Received a blood transfusion or blood products before 1972.
- Receive hemodialysis for end-stage kidney (renal) disease.
- Travel to regions with high infection rates of HBV, such as sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, the Amazon Basin, the Pacific Islands and the Middle East.
- Are an adolescent or young adult residing in a U.S. correctional facility.
In other words, the risk factors for Hepatitis B are exactly the sam as for HIV, which would exclude most school-age children. It is not passed through casual contact. The only reason for mandating all students to be vaccinated is to make it economically viable for the vaccine maker.
How about a Triclad Tricorn? That aught to do it!
HepC is usually from contaminated food. HepB needs fluid contact for the virus to survive, as I recall, so in the playground scenario, you'd need an open cut or scrape meeting another open cut or scrape for transmission to occur. Pretty unlikely.
HepB is the homosexual-and-drug-related one, and no kidding, early on, that was in the sales pitch for it—because after all (the argument went), who are you to say what "lifestyles" your kid may choose?
I don't care for that reasoning, any more than I think my daughters should be given the HPV vaccine, with its various risks, known and unknown—on the pretext that they might become tarts when they grow up.
HepB vaccination is a particularly touchy issue because the vaccine carries some risk of causing the disease itself, which in turn heavily increases the risk of liver cancer.
for your new hat, should the foil be made out of aluminum, tin or steel?
As for metallic hat fashions, I'm hoping for a golden crown one day. But in the meantime, maybe you're blessed with a particularly honest school board and local government, but let's just say I'm not. Besides living here, I've done some trustee work, and I'm not exaggerating about the affinity groups that exist among professionals and officials—understandable and normal human behavior, by the way. But these folks are pack animals, and their judgments on scientific issues are often skewed as a result.
Then the adults at the school who fear getting chicken pox should get the vaccine.