I should probably unsubscribe from fanfictionrants ...

In breaking news, someone said something silly on the internet. Full story at nine.

I just had to physically restrain myself from replying to a very nice person who had written a well-worded rant complaining that people writing Star Wars fics continually give the characters stupid dialogue and idiotic reasoning skills.

My response: 'Surely that's canon?' would not have contributed meaningfully to the conversation.

Bedtime, life is chaos, deadline filled with madness. Back to the world shortly with news about fire recovery and HP10K and more ...

I should probably unsubscribe from fanfictionrants ...

In breaking news, someone said something silly on the internet. Full story at nine.

I just had to physically restrain myself from replying to a very nice person who had written a well-worded rant complaining that people writing Star Wars fics continually give the characters stupid dialogue and idiotic reasoning skills.

My response: 'Surely that's canon?' would not have contributed meaningfully to the conversation.

Bedtime, life is chaos, deadline filled with madness. Back to the world shortly with news about fire recovery and HP10K and more ...

ARGH! Vaccine rant, and I do mean rant.

It's my own fault for watching the news on the trashy commercial TV channel.

The story began reasonably enough. It told the tragic tale of a very young baby who has just died of whooping cough up in Lismore, near the idiot hippie capital of Australia. The child was too young to be immunised, and because the level of immunisation in the area is so low, she was infected by an older child whose parents had not kept his or her shots up. Not only was that original child made very ill, just like the other 3300 Australian whooping cough cases in the first two months of this year, it has killed four-week-old Dana.

Dana's parents wanted her vaccinated, but she was too young.

Up to this point the news story was quite scientifically accurate. But after clearly outlining the facts, it went on to say 'Tell that to parents like Wayne Bennet whose son suffered an adverse reaction to the diptheria vaccine, which caused brain damage.'

To which I say ... hold on a minute, sunshine.

Now you will find lots of pages on the internet telling you that the diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, (DPT) vaccine causes brain damage, just as you will find many telling you the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Diphtheria is a highly contagious disease that kills 4-10% of people who contract it and causes severe chronic illness in many others. Tetanus and whooping cough you probably know about. In the 1970s, a UK study suggested that one in 310,000 children would have a serious reaction to the DPT vaccine, and as one of the children who would have contributed to those statistics, I have to say that it's what I consider an acceptable risk. However, subsequent studies and reinterpretation of the original data all came to the same conclusion. There was in fact NO PROVEN SERIOUS RISK. Mild rashes, nausea and the very rare cases of anaphylaxis which can occur with ANY substance and which are best off occurring in a doctor's surgery or with a trained nurse armed with adrenalin standing beside you were the only reactions shown by the data.

Wayne Bennett is a famous football coach. His son suffered seizures after his DPT vaccination. He believes that it was causal. It is possible that it was. People have all sorts of strange and unique allergic reactions. It's also possible that it was a coincidence and another factor caused the seizures at a close time to the vaccine, the boy's sister has serious genetic issues and it may just have been that his were under the radar until that day, or even that the baby had been suffering smaller seizures previously that had gone un-noticed until his system was challenged by the vaccine, which led to a larger physiological response. It is a very sad event, and the family have been great, but it is a specific and individual case.

To give this single case the same weight as the entire DPT vaccination programme, which has not only delivered no proven risk of serious reaction caused by vaccine, but also demonstrably prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of diseases that have definite death rates -- quite high ones in the case of diphtheria ... it goes beyond bad journalism to being overtly unethical.

( Cut for further ranting on other vaccines )

For journalists to pretend that they are providing a 'balanced' report by slipping notes such as the Wayne Bennett comment into stories on vaccination infuriates me. But my fury is nothing.

That sort of thinking killed Dana. She was only four weeks old.

ARGH! Vaccine rant, and I do mean rant.

It's my own fault for watching the news on the trashy commercial TV channel.

The story began reasonably enough. It told the tragic tale of a very young baby who has just died of whooping cough up in Lismore, near the idiot hippie capital of Australia. The child was too young to be immunised, and because the level of immunisation in the area is so low, she was infected by an older child whose parents had not kept his or her shots up. Not only was that original child made very ill, just like the other 3300 Australian whooping cough cases in the first two months of this year, it has killed four-week-old Dana.

Dana's parents wanted her vaccinated, but she was too young.

Up to this point the news story was quite scientifically accurate. But after clearly outlining the facts, it went on to say 'Tell that to parents like Wayne Bennet whose son suffered an adverse reaction to the diptheria vaccine, which caused brain damage.'

To which I say ... hold on a minute, sunshine.

Now you will find lots of pages on the internet telling you that the diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, (DPT) vaccine causes brain damage, just as you will find many telling you the MMR vaccine causes autism.

Diphtheria is a highly contagious disease that kills 4-10% of people who contract it and causes severe chronic illness in many others. Tetanus and whooping cough you probably know about. In the 1970s, a UK study suggested that one in 310,000 children would have a serious reaction to the DPT vaccine, and as one of the children who would have contributed to those statistics, I have to say that it's what I consider an acceptable risk. However, subsequent studies and reinterpretation of the original data all came to the same conclusion. There was in fact NO PROVEN SERIOUS RISK. Mild rashes, nausea and the very rare cases of anaphylaxis which can occur with ANY substance and which are best off occurring in a doctor's surgery or with a trained nurse armed with adrenalin standing beside you were the only reactions shown by the data.

Wayne Bennett is a famous football coach. His son suffered seizures after his DPT vaccination. He believes that it was causal. It is possible that it was. People have all sorts of strange and unique allergic reactions. It's also possible that it was a coincidence and another factor caused the seizures at a close time to the vaccine, the boy's sister has serious genetic issues and it may just have been that his were under the radar until that day, or even that the baby had been suffering smaller seizures previously that had gone un-noticed until his system was challenged by the vaccine, which led to a larger physiological response. It is a very sad event, and the family have been great, but it is a specific and individual case.

To give this single case the same weight as the entire DPT vaccination programme, which has not only delivered no proven risk of serious reaction caused by vaccine, but also demonstrably prevented hundreds of thousands of cases of diseases that have definite death rates -- quite high ones in the case of diphtheria ... it goes beyond bad journalism to being overtly unethical.

( Cut for further ranting on other vaccines )

For journalists to pretend that they are providing a 'balanced' report by slipping notes such as the Wayne Bennett comment into stories on vaccination infuriates me. But my fury is nothing.

That sort of thinking killed Dana. She was only four weeks old.