some people are just crazy
While running some errands today, I caught part of an NPR report about ‘Chicken Pox Parties’. It seems that some parents have little faith in the chicken pox vaccine. These parents take their kids to ‘parties’ where infected kids are present, in an effort to INTENTIONALLY infect their own kids with the potentially FATAL disease. OK, not such a big deal…here’s how they do it. They pass bubble gum from child to child. I am not kidding! The sick kid chews a bunch of gum and passes the chewed lump to a healthy kid, hoping to transmit the bumps. Another method is to swab the nose of an infected child and then take that cotton ball and swab the healthy child.
WTF? This has no scientific backing whatsoever. The quoted biologists said that while true that the disease is much more serious if it is contracted as an adult than as a child, the vaccine eliminates nearly ALL risk of fatality. They said that of those inoculated, something like 75% will not become infected if exposed while the remaining 25% will suffer a very mild case of the chicken pox. NPR ran through a list of 3 or 4 doctors who couldn’t offer a single benefit of the ‘parties’.
Maybe to help reduce std’s we should…wait that’s ridiculous. Oh yeah, so’s the chicken pox thing. If, as a parent, I ever do something remotely close to this, using the ‘ridiculous scale’ of course, I am hereby giving the entire internet community permission to kick my ass.
Still a skeptic? Check it out. I believe you can even listen for free.
Also of note is that during this post, I realized that I really, really need to implement a spell checker for my blog.