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jazzmasterson for this:
Guy with poor webdesign skills seeks 2-6 women to have 2-15 children with him. "The preferred situation tends towards the higher numbers." (Although later on the site: "I would like to have 17 children. Why 17? I don't know. It just seems like a good number to have. I didn't say this earlier in the web-site because I didn't want to scare you away right off the bat.")
Good job of THAT.
# When the children reach 18 years of age, I would like for each of them to have 2 children with a mate selected by me.
And here's the page that REALLY pissed me off:
First. I insist that corrective lens for nearsightedness not be put on any of my children (before adulthood). I believe that there is some research evidence showing that if corrective lens are never used for this condition, that the degree to which the condition will develop will be minimized and that the vision may improve over the long-term.
So, the guy's willing to make decisions that significantly impact the lives of his kids in the basis of stuff he thinks he's heard, without even looking it up? I'll come back to the nearsightedness stuff later, but worse lies just ahead:
I don't want my children vaccinated against the standard childhood diseases. Against serious diseases, yes, but not against things like measles, mumps, chickenpox, etc.
Soapbox mode:
I would like to personally sterilise (preferably with red-hot irons) each and every asshole who refuses to have their children vaccinated against measles because it's "not a serious disease". Before immunisation was introduced, measles killed around 450 children a year in the USA alone.
National immunisation campaigns stomped on measles to the point where it was no longer endemic in the US, with most cases imported from outside the USA. In recent years, immunisation rates have been slipping (thanks largely to a scare campaign about possible risk of autism from MMR vaccination - a risk which, even if it's all people say, is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than the risk from measles itself). Result: outbreaks of measles are on the rise again. Non-immunised kids aren't just a danger to themselves - because they provide a vector for the disease, they also present a danger to those who genuinely can't be vaccinated for whatever reason, and to those for who the vaccine didn't take.
So people like this guy aren't just taking chances with their own kids' lives, they're taking chances with ours too. And all because they can't be bothered to ask why doctors take immunisation so seriously. Gaah.
First up - what this guy's saying has some truth to it (although he STILL needs to be smacked for basing a major decision on it without making sure of his facts). Visual stimuli in childhood do seem to affect the development of myopia.
However, there's a great deal of argument over how this actually works, and what's needed to avoid it (studies performed on chickens wearing lenses 24/7 don't easily translate to humans wearing lenses some of the time - it may be that leaving the glasses off a couple of hours a day is all that's needed to avoid this effect, we don't know).
And, even if wearing glasses is going to make your child more short-sighted... that's not the end of the world, y'know? It's a nuisance, but what about the social and developmental consequences of leaving your children visually impaired throughout their formative years? Getting perfect eyesight at age 18 isn't much use if you never developed the ability to make use of that information.
jazzmasterson for this:Guy with poor webdesign skills seeks 2-6 women to have 2-15 children with him. "The preferred situation tends towards the higher numbers." (Although later on the site: "I would like to have 17 children. Why 17? I don't know. It just seems like a good number to have. I didn't say this earlier in the web-site because I didn't want to scare you away right off the bat.")
Good job of THAT.
# When the children reach 18 years of age, I would like for each of them to have 2 children with a mate selected by me.
And here's the page that REALLY pissed me off:
First. I insist that corrective lens for nearsightedness not be put on any of my children (before adulthood). I believe that there is some research evidence showing that if corrective lens are never used for this condition, that the degree to which the condition will develop will be minimized and that the vision may improve over the long-term.
So, the guy's willing to make decisions that significantly impact the lives of his kids in the basis of stuff he thinks he's heard, without even looking it up? I'll come back to the nearsightedness stuff later, but worse lies just ahead:
I don't want my children vaccinated against the standard childhood diseases. Against serious diseases, yes, but not against things like measles, mumps, chickenpox, etc.
Soapbox mode:
I would like to personally sterilise (preferably with red-hot irons) each and every asshole who refuses to have their children vaccinated against measles because it's "not a serious disease". Before immunisation was introduced, measles killed around 450 children a year in the USA alone.
National immunisation campaigns stomped on measles to the point where it was no longer endemic in the US, with most cases imported from outside the USA. In recent years, immunisation rates have been slipping (thanks largely to a scare campaign about possible risk of autism from MMR vaccination - a risk which, even if it's all people say, is a couple of orders of magnitude lower than the risk from measles itself). Result: outbreaks of measles are on the rise again. Non-immunised kids aren't just a danger to themselves - because they provide a vector for the disease, they also present a danger to those who genuinely can't be vaccinated for whatever reason, and to those for who the vaccine didn't take.
So people like this guy aren't just taking chances with their own kids' lives, they're taking chances with ours too. And all because they can't be bothered to ask why doctors take immunisation so seriously. Gaah.
First up - what this guy's saying has some truth to it (although he STILL needs to be smacked for basing a major decision on it without making sure of his facts). Visual stimuli in childhood do seem to affect the development of myopia.
However, there's a great deal of argument over how this actually works, and what's needed to avoid it (studies performed on chickens wearing lenses 24/7 don't easily translate to humans wearing lenses some of the time - it may be that leaving the glasses off a couple of hours a day is all that's needed to avoid this effect, we don't know).
And, even if wearing glasses is going to make your child more short-sighted... that's not the end of the world, y'know? It's a nuisance, but what about the social and developmental consequences of leaving your children visually impaired throughout their formative years? Getting perfect eyesight at age 18 isn't much use if you never developed the ability to make use of that information.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 02:41 pm (UTC)sol.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-16 02:44 pm (UTC)It's worse---it's not that they can't be bothered; it's that they won't be bothered because the doctors obviously don't know anything anyway; "traditional" medicine (or "modern" medicine, what they call it depends) doesn't work, and science is one huge crock.
Sigh.
autism and the MMR vaccine
Date: 2004-02-17 09:34 am (UTC)2) Autism seems to be on the rise.
3) MMR vaccinations have become more common (until the autism scare)
4) The symptoms of autism tend to appear about the time kids recieve their first MMR shots.
When a child who had seemed to be normal suddenly starts losing language skills and avoiding human contact, some parents assume that the vaccine CAUSED these changes. There is NO real evidence that the vaccine has any causal relationship to autism, but the timing makes it seem related.
Re: autism and the MMR vaccine
Date: 2004-02-17 02:10 pm (UTC)Interestingly, this site reports that while autism is usually diagnosed in the second or third year of life, around the same time MMR vaccination takes place, analysis of home movies shows that most kids diagnosed with autism at that age actually had symptoms during the first year or even at birth.
In the end, even if most of the things the anti-vaccination lobby claim about MMR are true, it still doesn't justify not vaccinating - simply because measles is much nastier than they acknowledge, with a rate of death comparable to the rates of autism they claim for the vaccination.
Re: autism and the MMR vaccine
Date: 2004-02-17 02:41 pm (UTC)There are several reputable studies that go a long way towards refuting links between the MMR vaccine per se and autism. However, of course, most vaccines aren't just live vaccine - they also contain preservatives to prolong the shelf life of the vaccine.
One of the most common preservatives used to be Thimerosal. Which contains significant amounts of mercury. The symptoms of mercury poisoning and autism are frighteningly similar.
Also, AFAIK, the MMR is often the last in a series of vaccines recieved by children, and the studies do little to track cumulative effects.
Saying "We don't know what causes autism" is, AFAIK, not quite accurate, or at least, requires further explanation. The DSM IV definition of autism, as with many such disorders, is basically a list of symptoms, including those you mention above and culminating with "Where the disturbance is not better explained by Rett's disorder or CDD". In other words, anything (other than Rett's or CDD) that causes those symptoms is called autism - there's no phsyical/physiological requirement. So it's worth clarifying that what we call autism may have many disparate causes that happen to result in the same symptoms. Almost by definition, we don't know what causes autism - if a causal relationship can be shown between, for example, the exposure to Thimerosal and the onset of the symptoms of autism in a number of children, then presumably the diagnosis for those children becomes severe mercury poisoning, rather than autism - especially if there are still children exhibiting the symptoms of autism without such exposure. Which makes the debate far thornier - we can, for example, discover that Substance X causes symptoms of autism in 99% of people exposed to it, but studies of those with the symptoms of autism may show that only 10% of them ever came into contact with Substance X. So that adds whole layers of complexity to the debate.
I'm keeping an eye on Baron-Cohen's theory about testosterone poisoning, for example.
sol.
.
Yoink!
Date: 2004-02-17 02:51 pm (UTC)sol.
.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-18 04:18 am (UTC)I was almost 18 when a flatmate realised that I couldn't see and put his glasses on my face - what a revelation! I hated school and dropped out at the end of year 11 (partly due to leaving home - it's a bit hard to keep studying when you have to support yourself on 16 y.o. wages). I wonder how different it would have been if I had glasses.
So yeah, better to wear glasses. My vision only got worse in any case.