Indeed. Vaccinations have been very effective at reducing mortality, globally. But it is a matter of fact that in the UK, measles death rates were reduced by better than 99% *before* vaccination was introduced. Anyway, my point was that the OP's jibe at anti-vaxers would likely not apply to this vaccination.

Some modern humans are afraid that vaccines can trigger autism in infants who are not ill, and are unlikely to be permanently affected by the disease being vaccinated against. The vaccines here are being used on adults who are already seriously ill.

The Microsoft Network. 'nuff said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... It references the relevent act. Good enough?

You are not American. Therefore you do not count.

Years ago (mid 80s or something) there was a "video nasty" frenzy in the UK based on figures that purported to show what percentage of kids and watched "video nasties". The data was gathered by asking kids which of a list of films they had seen. Turned out to be totally bogus, a later study got the same results when the list had a mix of real and invented titles. Not suprising really. Are these figures any better?

I don't know the situation in the US, but in the UK, the figures show that unvaccinated kids visit the doctor a *lot* less than vaccinated kids (there is even research that uses this fact to explain vaccination/allergy correlation in the raw data), so maybe the non-vacinnating parents should demand a rebate from you.

One could also take the reverse position, you are forcing something on them that they might not choose later in life. It's not morally justifiable, but the laws that are in place make coercion necessary from a financial point of view. If the government is going to force me to pay for something, I'd like to pay as little as possible and that means vaccinating the population to the greatest extend possible.

If a measles infection 'wipes out' memory cells to a significant degree, then why is it that it was never the case that people contracted, say, mumps more than once? If the wipe-out was true, then you'd expect mumps to be contracted once *or* twice, depending on the order you got them in.

No, because as the parent post points out, the death rate was about 500 in 500,000 *before* the vaccine was introduced. In the UK it was even lower, the death rate averaged about 75/year over the decade before the single measles vaccine was introduced (1958-68) with a similar birth rate (and hence incidence rate). So, unless you can make an argument that measles has become much more serious over the last 50 years, or there has been some significant societal change, thise figures are upper bounds on what we might expect today.

There is a real problem with studies related to things like this. A few people claim to have some problem - electrosensitivity in this case - which they may or may not have. Then a whole load of other people hear about it, and all claim to have it as well, most simply because they have had some minor random problem, and latch onto it as a reason. In effect the whole thing snowballs. Now, there may actually be a very few people who do genuinely have the problem, but when you come to do the studies, you sample a large number of people. You do the statistics. You do not conclude that there is no link - studies like these cannot show that there is *no* link. You conclude - correctly - that there is no statistically significant link. But there still might (or might not) be a real problem for a very few people.

Since you linked the WikiPedia article, you could have reported it correctly: The discovery of penicillin is attributed to Scottish scientist and Nobel laureate Alexander Fleming in 1928.

FWIW, I'm British and I support the monarchy for two special reasons (whether in practice they'd be any use can of course be debated): First, pretty well all the Bristish armed forces swear allegiance to the monarch (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oath_of_Allegiance_(United_Kingdom)#Armed_forces), so in theory if the government tried to use them against the population then the monarch could order them back to barracks, and the generals and whatnot would have a cast iron reason to tell the government where to go. Second, the monarch can dissolve parliament which triggers a general election. I'd guess this means that, in the event of a knife edge like the one that got Bush in as president, so none of the parties can form a government, rather then wrangling in court, the monarch can effectively force another vote.

"Back in 2002, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome or SARS killed about 10 per cent of the 8,000 people it infected in southern China and Hong Kong" I asked the following question about H5N1, it seems to be just as relevent to SARS: When H5N1 was doing the rounds in the UK, I, and my wife, and a lot of other people I knew, had long running and/or recurrent chest infections over a couple of months or so. None of us was ill enough to bother to go to the doctor, and there were enough people about with the same symptoms that we were still working, so we didn't need a medical report to miss work. So, we never got on any statistics for having something. My feeling (and my wife's, who is a biologist) is that its quite likely that a lot of people got H5N1 but were never diagnosed nor counted. This makes the claimed "H5N1 killed n% of people it infected" (whatever n% was) totally specious. And I'd bet that the same is true of SARS. Unless there is random testing then nobody knows what the death rate is, and all these death rates are scare mongering by governments and the drugs industry,

There can be a lot going for this. I work on a quite large web application written in Python, used by medium-to-large companies. It uses a custom MVC framework which I started 4-5 years ago. Like AC, we understand it, there are no hidden corners, and when we need to modify it to do something we need, we do so. Downsides are documentation (you can't rely on others to do it), and maybe recruitment.

No, they are not. The WSJ figures are quoted for the whole of the outbreak (by July it was essentially over); likely there were cases elsewhere in Wales, but there was no significant other outbreak so (unless we think there will be another outbreak) we can assume that the 1219 figure is broadly correct. They are not figures for the early stages (do you mean disease or outbreak?). Now, I don't have the over-diagnosis figures to hand for last year, but unless you can show me that they were around 50%, then you order-of-magnitude increase claim is pure speculation. If you check out http://www.wales.nhs.uk/sites3/page.cfm?orgId=457&pid=25444 (NHS site for Wales) you can find "Reported notifications of measles usually far exceed the actual numbers of confirmed cases. Other rashes are often mistaken for measles". Unfortunately, they don't say by how much, which is a shame because there are some claims of 3000% overdiagnosis, which seems pretty wacky.