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You are here: Home / Open Threads / Go get your flu shot

Go get your flu shot

by David Anderson|  September 27, 20187:17 am| 59 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Ground breaking new study that shows an unexpected outcome from regular vaccinations. The visual abstract is below:

I love our pediatrician’s shirt today https://t.co/uchPBJhIdy pic.twitter.com/LIyFapwd98

— CoolPics (@CoolPics) September 25, 2018

Open thread as I’m off for a couple of days taking my kids to a magical land where the youth had to stand up against a reactionary revolt and a blinkered establishment willing to get played instead of disturbing the arrangements of power that had worked well enough.

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Reader Interactions

59Comments

  1. 1.

    Cheryl Rofer

    September 27, 2018 at 7:22 am

    Got my flu shot last week.

  2. 2.

    Elizabelle

    September 27, 2018 at 7:26 am

    Good reminder. I will do it tomorrow. If not today.

    So where are David and family headed for? Too early for riddles. No coffee yet. Downstairs to fix that.

  3. 3.

    different-church-lady

    September 27, 2018 at 7:36 am

    Yesterday I was told here that I was anti-science, so I guess I’ll just have to get sick and die.

    Which, after yesterday, might just be something of a relief…

  4. 4.

    Mary G

    September 27, 2018 at 7:36 am

    @Elizabelle: I am guessing Harry Potter at Universal Studios in Florida.

  5. 5.

    Wag

    September 27, 2018 at 7:41 am

    @Mary G:
    That’s my guess as well. It is awesome.

  6. 6.

    Cermet

    September 27, 2018 at 7:46 am

    @different-church-lady: Maybe some context for those of us that didn’t read every single post yesterday – some post entries are getting a bit long.

  7. 7.

    HeartlandLiberal

    September 27, 2018 at 7:47 am

    I was a child when the first polio vaccine came out in the fifties. I remember us all going to line up and take our sugar cubes with the vaccine at the storefront set up for our small town for every child to go to. As a result, I was protected from polio, which then involved an iron lung, and most often death. Seemed like a good deal to me and my parents. And here I am 72 years old. Although some still question my adult status. But that is another story.

    What amazes me most about the antivaxers is that the original study that triggered the hysterical belief that vaccines cause autism was totally refuted, the publication that published it recalled and repudiated it, and no medical scientist who is honest can now be found to continue to support is findings.

    But then, I look around every day and find myself in a post-truth, alternate facts, science denying society that appears to have let the ignorant and evil seize all the reigns of power.

  8. 8.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    September 27, 2018 at 7:53 am

    @Mary G: @Wag: That sounds more fun than my guess of going to DC to watch the hearings.

    Speaking of which, I can’t decide whether to listen to the hearings because possibly historic, or not because I might scream and throw things.

  9. 9.

    Elizabelle

    September 27, 2018 at 7:55 am

    Have been watching 1960s movies on a big screen at the local art house.

    Noticing how many times I see vaccination scars on the women. Especially in B&W movies. It was a thing. It needs to stay “a thing.”

    Hearing that upscale California communities are welcoming whooping cough back into the fold. If I find that article, will share it.

    #vaccinationsrock!

  10. 10.

    Nancy

    September 27, 2018 at 7:58 am

    @HeartlandLiberal: My mom got polio shortly after giving birth to my brother in 1954. Vaccine became available for her children. We had shots and sugar cubes. Poor baby brother was three weeks old when he had his first shot.
    Mom survived, only to deal with post-polio syndrome in later life. I believe in science still get lots of shots.

  11. 11.

    David Anderson

    September 27, 2018 at 7:58 am

    @Mary G: yep

  12. 12.

    Kraux Pas

    September 27, 2018 at 8:08 am

    @HeartlandLiberal:

    What amazes me most about the antivaxers is that the original study that triggered the hysterical belief that vaccines cause autism was totally refuted, the publication that published it recalled and repudiated it, and no medical scientist who is honest can now be found to continue to support is findings.

    Don’t you know that’s just the scientific community imposing conformity, maaaaaan?

    Apparently, to some, a scientist who loses his credentials is more trustworthy than the peer review process because he speaks Hard Truths (TM)

  13. 13.

    Baud

    September 27, 2018 at 8:08 am

    Clicked on the link hoping the side effect was super powers. Was disappointed.

  14. 14.

    Gin & Tonic

    September 27, 2018 at 8:09 am

    @Baud: I thought you already had super powers. You want even more?

  15. 15.

    Just One More Canuck

    September 27, 2018 at 8:11 am

    @Elizabelle: Whooping cough? Jeebus, take me now. My mother had whooping cough and suffered her whole life because of it. I cant believe how many people are so wilfully blind and stupid

  16. 16.

    Just One More Canuck

    September 27, 2018 at 8:12 am

    @Gin & Tonic: Baud is a supervillain?

  17. 17.

    raven

    September 27, 2018 at 8:12 am

    I got shingle shot #1 last week. I think I’m going to hold off until Monday for the flu vac.

  18. 18.

    Baud

    September 27, 2018 at 8:14 am

    @Gin & Tonic: I have a preternatural ability to predict the past. But I’d like a more useful power.

  19. 19.

    raven

    September 27, 2018 at 8:16 am

    @Elizabelle: In the Army in the 60’s they hit us with a “Jet Gun”. If you stayed still they were ok but, if you moved, they ripped a gsh in your arm! There were always guys who passed out just at the sight of a needle or gun so it was tricky.

  20. 20.

    Dorothy A. Winsor

    September 27, 2018 at 8:18 am

    When I run into an anti-vaxxer on line, I look up Roald Dahl’s account of his seven-year-old daughter dying of complications from measles and post that.

  21. 21.

    O. Felix Culpa

    September 27, 2018 at 8:24 am

    @Cheryl Rofer: Me too.

  22. 22.

    Elizabelle

    September 27, 2018 at 8:30 am

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: Did not know that.

    Here is the full letter text, from Roald Dahl’s (posthumous!) website.

  23. 23.

    Cheryl Rofer

    September 27, 2018 at 8:41 am

    @Elizabelle: That vaccination scar was from smallpox vaccinations. Mine are pretty much invisible now. Smallpox vaccinations were so effective that we’ve eliminated the disease in the wild. So nobody needs those scars any more. We’re working on polio, too, and are not far from its extinction. Those are a couple of extinctions that are a good thing.

  24. 24.

    bjacques

    September 27, 2018 at 8:50 am

    @raven: We had something like that in the early 70s in grade school, for rubeola (or rubella) and something else.

    I remember when the anti-vax movement took off in the UK (2003? 2004?, over the MMR (measles, mumps & rubeola) shot, and then PM Tony Blair was asked whether his children had been vaccinated. That was his chance to throw some moral weight behind science, when it might have mattered, but instead he refused to answer, saying it was a private matter. Thanks again, Tony.

  25. 25.

    J R in WV

    September 27, 2018 at 8:53 am

    I too am old enough to remember the Salk polio shots first. At the family business they set up with a doctor and an RN to give every employee and every family member of every employee shots, and anyone who walked in and wanted one. Everybody! It was really serious business and I could tell because the grownups were all really serious — no one was really sure it would work as it was a new thing. And the other option was… really bad.

    My little brother was a babe in arms, and it took four grown adults to hold his still enough for the TN to hit him with the big needle. Then a few years later we all did the Sabin oral vaccine on the sugar cubes, again, the whole family, the whole neighborhood standing line at the local school.

    People who don’t get vaccinated for everything every chance they get are Darwinian fools! I’ll never forget the shot lines in Boot Camp, you would walk down a set of corpsmen on both sides and get hit in your arms, both of them, repeatedly. By the end we all had blood running both arms to our elbows. Ouch!

    I’ll be getting a new flu shot my next regularly scheduled Dr appointment in early October, and talking about the new Shingles shots. My dad had that shit, and I don’t want any, No, No, No!

  26. 26.

    --bd

    September 27, 2018 at 8:56 am

    I have some doubts about that picture. The pediatrician is wearing a Fitbit Surge and the wrist band hasn’t fallen apart yet. Obviously ‘shopped.

  27. 27.

    gene108

    September 27, 2018 at 9:00 am

    @HeartlandLiberal:

    1. Anti-vaxxers are young enough to have children, so by and large they are under 40.
    2. Part of me realizes our older generations have not been good stewards of the public trust.
    3. Therefore, I sort of get how a younger generation is cynical and distrusts authority.

    Global warming, the most pressing environmental issue of the last 30 years is being fought against by a wealthy entrenched minority, and they have largely succeeded in stalling progress.

    There are probably other issues out there that bad government has cast doubts on as being something where we should trust authority figures.

    I can bet you one thing, an anti-vaxxer probably has a whole of distrust of everything, from pasteurized milk to standard over the counter medicines, and would look to treat ailments, with questionable herbal remedies* they found on the internet.

    * Nothing against herbal remedies, but when you are really sick, you need modern medicine.

  28. 28.

    Elizabelle

    September 27, 2018 at 9:00 am

    @Cheryl Rofer: Thank you. I remember having a vaccination scar too. Smallpox. Indeed.

    WRT flu shots: at one job, there was a whole group of people who scoffed at flu shots. They were all out, for several days, with flu when it hit. Never followed up on whether they went for the vaccine the next year. But it was a silent reminder of flu shots’ efficacy. Seeing all those empty desks. (And a LOT of extra work for the rest of us that week.)

  29. 29.

    Percysowner

    September 27, 2018 at 9:05 am

    Got my flu shot a couple of weeks ago. I got the original shingles vaccine a couple of years ago and I’ll be getting the new and improved version on my next visit. They held off giving it because I wasn’t 65 on my last visit. When my daughter got married a few years ago, she was having kids at her wedding, so I boosted my DPT vaccine, just to be safe and keep them safe. Now I need to bother my daughter and SIL into getting the flu vaccine, because they have a baby and they (and I) don’t want to bring home the flu to a bitty baby. I believe in vaccines.

    I am another person who got both the Salk vaccine and then the Sabin version for polio. SOS Sabin Oral Sunday, we all went to some public facility (school, church, community center?) and stood in line to take our sugar cubes. The place was packed. The anti-vaxxers have no idea how bad things can get when you get an outbreak of these diseases, even the supposedly minor ones.

  30. 30.

    joel hanes

    September 27, 2018 at 9:24 am

    My company offers free flu shots, and I signed up for the day they’ll be set up in my building, Oct. 3.
    Then I flew on a plane on Sept 6 and apparently got exposed, because I’m in day 14 of the flu, and still having the fever at night, headaches, and deep chest congestion that mark its end stages in me.

    I’ll still get the shot on the 3d.

    And I too had both Salk and Sabin polio vaccines; I remember all the children in our school lined up.
    And I remember that some of the older teachers were weeping.

  31. 31.

    Juice Box

    September 27, 2018 at 9:27 am

    I had some time on my hands once and I looked up some of the early reports of polio vaccination programs which weren’t available on line then (and because they weren’t online yet, anti-vaxxers claimed they didn’t exist. Fake news.). Dry medical journals had page after page of successful reports from a vast number of countries. You could feel the excitement and the relief. It was touching.

    Andre Wakefield’s lies live on because it’s just impossible to get people to stop believing a lie when it supports their existing beliefs. The bell can’t be unrung.

  32. 32.

    Gelfling 545

    September 27, 2018 at 9:35 am

    My 2 brothers and I had whooping cough as children. I still remember it. My mother had rubella when pregnant with brother 2. He was mostly deaf, had heart defects and developmental disabilities along with life long health issues. My nephew is not quite completely blind in one eye due to chicken pox as a toddler. When I was young, nearly every family had someone who’d been affected by polio. I get my vaccinations. Got the flu shot last week.

  33. 33.

    Tazj

    September 27, 2018 at 9:36 am

    @Elizabelle: Welcoming Pertussis is pure madness and child abuse. I worked nights as a pediatric nurse for a number of years. When you had to take care of a little one with Pertussis it was sure to be a very busy and scary night. You spent your time running in their room every time they coughed, holding them upright, suctioning them and holding the oxygen right to their face hoping they could catch their breath and you wouldn’t have to send them to the ICU or call a code.
    My maternal grandmother’s nine month old little brother died of whooping cough and she often talked about how hard that loss was on her and her whole family.

  34. 34.

    geg6

    September 27, 2018 at 9:39 am

    @joel hanes:

    I feel your pain. About 3 weeks ago, I caught this virus, with the horrible sinus issues that eventually work into a sinus infection for me. Had the headache and fever and all. Still dealing with sinus issues and a nasty but productive cough. It’s just exhausting.

    However, I signed right up for the free vaccines we get through work. Mine is on Oct. 10. Made my John go get one the other day at CVS and he didn’t argue after seeing me go through this. As he keeps saying, I almost never get sick and has been amazed at how bad I got over this one. He went and got it and no back talk. ;-)

  35. 35.

    geg6

    September 27, 2018 at 9:44 am

    @geg6:

    Oh and I, too, remember the sugar cube vaccines, both the Sabin and the rubella ones. They gave us the polio one in kindergarten, lining up all the kindergarten kids in our elementary school one day and handing out the tiny paper cups with the sugar cubes. A few years later, they had every kid on our entire school district lined up at the high school auditorium lobby to get the tiny paper cups with the sugar cubes, but this time battling rubella. Funny how you remember these things, but I put that down to the deep seriousness with which the adults treated the entire thing.

  36. 36.

    Yutsano

    September 27, 2018 at 9:45 am

    Got mine on Monday. Doc wouldn’t let me leave without it.

  37. 37.

    trollhattan

    September 27, 2018 at 9:52 am

    @Elizabelle: @Tazj:
    Lady at work had two kids and her husband come down with whooping cough–she and one kid were spared. Took months to run its course and husband even cracked ribs from all the coughing. Not much sleep for anybody throughout.

    They had all had their jabs (the Brit term) but the Peoples Republic of Davis, CA at the time had a pretty high non-compliance rate so the whole herd protection value went out the window.

    State has since tightened the pathway to exemptions for public school kids but there are still plenty of ways to go forth unvaccinated. I wonder about people some days.

  38. 38.

    Anotherlurker

    September 27, 2018 at 9:55 am

    My Shingles was diagnosed on June 3. It progressed to the point that all I could do was sleep and wish for death, the pain was that bad. The outbreak was on the left side of my face. I looked like a bad make-up test for a 1950’s Science Fiction Film. I didn’t start to feel better until August. I’m still dealing with Posttherpetic Neuralgia . Most nights my left eye and left nostril simultaneously burns, itches and weeps. I have a drooping left eyelid.
    I will get the new Shingles Vaccine as soon as I’m settled in California.
    It is a condition that I wouldn’t wish on anyone, except all rednecks and republicans.

  39. 39.

    PIGL

    September 27, 2018 at 10:01 am

    @Cheryl Rofer: it seemed to me that mostly women had these scars. Do you know, Cheryl, if that’s the case, and why)

  40. 40.

    Uncle Cosmo

    September 27, 2018 at 10:07 am

    @HeartlandLiberal:

    I was a child when the first polio vaccine came out in the fifties. I remember us all going to line up and take our sugar cubes…

    Then you didn’t have “the first polio vaccine”. The later Sabin vaccine was oral, delivered on sugar cubes; the Salk vaccine was injected. I remember lining up at elementary school in first or second grade for my shot. My parents would have shoved everyone else out of the way to put me in line for that shot – I was the miracle, the kid they weren’t supposed to have in their late 30s, & like all the other parents in the USA they were terrified of “infantile paralysis”. (Another truth that’s gotten lost with the passing of the GI Gneration.)

    FTR, one of my closest friends is one of the last polio victims in the First World (although he caught it as a child in the Third). By the time we met at university he’d learned to get along reasonably well with a withered leg…until the onset of post-polio syndrome, the Trickster God’s last cruel jest on polio victims. Pushing 70 now, he is utterly dependent on motorized chairs for mobility & his physical resources diminish day by day.

    I have yet to meet a militant anti-vaxxer but it&when I do & I’m feeling excessively polite, I shall whip out my cell phone & say, There’s someone you need to talk to – someone for whom the vaccines came just too late.

  41. 41.

    trollhattan

    September 27, 2018 at 10:08 am

    @Anotherlurker:
    You have my heartfelt sympathies. My beloved granny used to get shingles intermittently and while she’d try and describe how it felt it was impossible to comprehend.

    I got the old (original) vaccine last year and will ask the doc about the new one at this year’s physical. I want nothing to do with the malady, even though the vaccine feels like battery acid for an extended period. (I honestly don’t know if I had chicken pox and mom isn’t around to provide that detail. We kids got most of the kid diseases–both types of measles included–as a matter of course. Rights of passage and all that. “It’s not so bad.” Except when it is.

  42. 42.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    September 27, 2018 at 10:10 am

    It’s not just people being anti-vax, some people think if their kids do get sick that it’s better not to take them to the doctor to at least help shorten the amount of time their child has to suffer from the disease:
    http://deadstate.org/naturopath-mom-lets-her-children-contract-whooping-cough-because-its-an-immune-building-process/

    It’s so great they got to suffer through almost 6 months of hell so she could prove her warrior mamma cred…/snark

    “We made it through using only natural remedies,” Dexter said. “My children developed REAL and TRUE immunity from being exposed to this bacteria and fighting it off naturally. It has been my biggest challenge to date as a mother. This mother conquered.”

    She is right up there with the Canadian parents that let their toddler die of meningitis rather than go to the damn doctor

  43. 43.

    Mart

    September 27, 2018 at 10:12 am

    I also too remember the whole neighborhood lining up at the Church to get shots and cubes. My kids all got their shots even though Thimerosal was all the rage at the time. I am a flu shot skeptic. For years seemed like every time my wife or I got one we got very ill. So we have skipped them for at least a decade with no flu. I know not science, and thinking of trying a shot again. Though my wife’s doctor weirdly agreed with us when we explained we did not want shots last year.

  44. 44.

    trollhattan

    September 27, 2018 at 10:20 am

    @Mart:
    My admittedly sketchy understanding of the flu vaccine is the virus choice is made the better part of a year ahead of time and is a “best guess” as to which strain will be prevalent during flu season. Takes that long to manufacture. Last year’s did not match well and was given a fairly low probability of fending off that season’s flu. But regardless it’s said to give the body an immune system boost of some benefit.

    I demurred most of my life but one especially bad bout of flu got me on schedule, and in the last decade or so since I’ve not had a full-on infection.

  45. 45.

    EmbraceYourInnerCrone

    September 27, 2018 at 10:22 am

    For the record I mostly DON’T trust “natural” remedies. If you don’t call it medication you can sell pretty much anything with very little oversight. One scary example is Hylands homeopathic teething tablets. Their main active ingredient is the perfectly natural Belladonna…in apparently dangerous amounts. It caused seizures, uncontrollable muscle twitching and stopped breathing in some cases:

    https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hundreds-of-babies-harmed-by-homeopathic-remedies-families-say/

    “laboratory analysis of Hyland’s teething tablets found levels of belladonna “sometimes far exceeding the amount claimed on the label.”

    Another name for belladonna is Deadly nightshade.

  46. 46.

    NotMax

    September 27, 2018 at 10:27 am

    @trollhattan

    I honestly don’t know if I had chicken pox

    First, I am not a medico.

    You can be tested to check if you have immunity to chickenpox. If yes, then you had it and the shingles vaccine is in order. If no, then opt for the chickenpox vaccine instead.

  47. 47.

    Cheryl Rofer

    September 27, 2018 at 10:28 am

    @PIGL: Purely subjective, but I think men had them too. Just that women wear more revealing clothing. The smallpox vaccination scars were typically on the upper arm or thigh. Women’s clothes often leave the upper arm bare, men’s not so much.

  48. 48.

    Uncle Cosmo

    September 27, 2018 at 10:32 am

    @Cheryl Rofer: My mom had one of those scars, big as a 50-cent piece (anyone remember them?). IIRC smallpox vaccinations c. 1920 were performed by breaking a glass ampule of cowpox virus in suspension & then scratching the skin with the jagged edges of the ampule as the liquid dripped out. Primitive, but it (mostly) worked.

    And hardly anyone complained. Smallpox killed a third of its victims & left most of the rest permanently disfigured; almost anything that would spare you from that fate was embraced with relish. Like polio in the 1950s, only more so.

  49. 49.

    NotMax

    September 27, 2018 at 10:33 am

    Fingers crossed that extended, horrendous coughing disease of last winter doesn’t decide to revisit.

    Think I must be part lizard, with regenerative abilities, as would swear the hacking was so deep that I coughed up some toes last winter.

  50. 50.

    NotMax

    September 27, 2018 at 10:49 am

    @Uncle Cosmo

    Sobering to recall that effective treatment for tuberculosis is still a part of living memory for many. It’s estimated that, historically, TB was responsible for 25% of all deaths.

  51. 51.

    Uncle Cosmo

    September 27, 2018 at 11:38 am

    @NotMax: Also sobering to note that Yersinia pestis, the causative agent of bubonic (& pneumonic) plague, remains widely distributed around the world – among other things, it’s endemic in rodents in the US Southwest – yet it’s barely a blip on the public-health radar in the First World. Part of that is improved public sanitation (even in the most hardscrabble urban environments of the First World, human exposure to rats [reservoirs for Y. pestis] & their fleas [vectors for transmission to humans] is far below what it was in the teeming cities of >200 years ago) More stunningly, in nature the bugs are exquisitely vulnerable to – wait for it – common antibiotics like streptomycin; antibiotic resistance has developed rather slowly, & medicine seems still to be ahead of the curve. (When the USSR weaponized the plague organism its main achievement [one US scientists never managed] was to store it in warheads & deliver it with its potency intact. I’m not sure if they also managed to create antibiotic-resistant strains, but it strikes me that would be easier than the weaponization – Y pestis in nature is a remarkably fragile organism outside a host or vector.)

  52. 52.

    wkwv

    September 27, 2018 at 11:40 am

    @NotMax: Yup My grandfarher’s mother and two youngest sisters died of TB while he was a child. When chest X-rays became available the rest of his family was x-rayed annually including the next generation that never met her.

  53. 53.

    gvg

    September 27, 2018 at 12:12 pm

    i am not old enough to remember the polio vaccines but my parents had a friend in a wheelchair for life from polio. She got married and had 4 daughters from that wheelchair and it was a big deal to her when she made enough to get a house with a pool and had a custom ramp put in so she could roll into the water, brake it, float away and swim, then come back to the chair, and wheel it back out, without help.
    I was also a book worm and read a lot about the colonial and pioneer eras (as well as everything else). It struck me then how many stories there were about both whites and Indian communities being wiped out by some disease. smallpox, yellow fever and others. My grandmother was an orphan adopted into the family. We wern’t sure, but one of the possibilities was the influenza at the end of WWI. Basically any historical fiction older than about 100 years has lots of death from contagious diseases.

  54. 54.

    phein59

    September 27, 2018 at 12:30 pm

    @raven: They were still using that gun in 1976 at Leonard Wood. The specialist doing my lane got a little distracted, so I would up with a gash and the shot, and a tongue lashing from a drill sergeant. Good times.

  55. 55.

    different-church-lady

    September 27, 2018 at 12:45 pm

    @Cermet: Just a silly misunderstanding between me and MajorX4 that I’m having a bit of fun with. Everyone’s still friends.

  56. 56.

    Shantanu Saha

    September 27, 2018 at 12:50 pm

    You know what I call countries that don’t vaccinate all of their citizens for infectious diseases where vaccines have been produced? Shithole countries.

  57. 57.

    brettvk

    September 27, 2018 at 1:24 pm

    Both of my parents had polio as children in the 1930s-40s. My mother was temporarily paralyzed but recovered; my father walked with a leg brace for the rest of his life. His sister had a lifelong limp.

    The antivaxxers are perpetrators/victims of the abysmal way our species ignores its history. How many people know that more soldiers died of disease than combat in almost every war until WWII? The rich idiots of Silicon Valley are riding on the herd immunity we’ve built up over the last half of the 20th century, but if they stress our public health system to the breaking point, they’ll get re-acquainted with the merciless math of biology real quick.

  58. 58.

    Procopius

    September 27, 2018 at 7:52 pm

    @Uncle Cosmo: One of Tony Hillerman’s novels, A Thief of Time, is about the public health service people who track Y. Pestis in the American Southwest. In this case specifically on the Navaho Reservation in Arizona. It seems prairie dogs are another vector for the organism. In the novel the murderer is a university researcher who discovers a prairie dog “colony” with a new, more virulent strain of the disease who wants to preserve the colony to discover what is different about these animals that allows them to live while carrying the disease while it kills other prairie dogs.

  59. 59.

    Procopius

    September 27, 2018 at 8:13 pm

    @Uncle Cosmo: It wasn’t just parents who were terrified of “infantile paralysis.” I remember in grade school, every year they passed out these cards with slots for coins for the March of Dimes, a charity to help people who got polio and couldn’t pay for an iron lung. I forget how many dimes there was room for. It was not so long after the Great Depression, and $1.00 or $2.00 was a lot of money. Every kid somehow managed to fill their card with dimes. Thank goodness I never had whooping cough, but I had measles and chicken pox and a couple of other “childhood diseases” and all of them had the possibility of death or lifelong disability.

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