Science denialism

This is a subject that really irks me. Some of my otherwise rational, intelligent friends and coworkers deny science in a variety of ways. One won't vaccinate his four kids (he and his wife are planning on having more, too), because he's "not in the mood for autism and mercury poisoning". His wife, a lovely woman, relies mainly on "herbal cures" to take care of herself and her family. You feel a cold coming on? Here, drink this repulsive, smelly tea. Two are on diets that, long-term, may harm them. At least one tells me he's not going to be on it for long; the other thinks that, after eating fried foods, sweets and McDonald's all his life, he's going to be happy and be able to sustain a diet that cuts out almost all carbohydrates, does not include bread or grains, and only includes, basically, water to drink. Sorry, my friend, but I don't think so. But good luck to you. That particular friend is a fellow skeptic, but is apparently sometimes easily swayed by "authority" (unless it's religious authority, but that's a different story). It really makes me angry.

But Bunny, you may say, they have a right to do or think or believe or feel any way they want. Yeah, you're right. But I don't want to see my friend's kids getting measles or whooping cough, simply because their parents took them to another home school event, where none of the other kids are vaccinated, and one picked up measles somewhere and spread it to their friends, or the parent has a "bad cough that won't go away", and it ends up really being pertussis, and now all the kids have it, and some are hospitalized, and one dies. No, it really is that bad. Have you ever seen a kid with pertussis (whooping cough)? I have. It's horrible. My father was a general practice physician, and he saw whooping cough all the time. And, occasionally, smallpox. He was happy when it was eradicated in the wild in 1979, due to the efforts of the World Health Organization and their vaccination campaign. My mother's sister suffered from polio, which she contracted as a very small girl during an epidemic. Her legs were paralyzed by it, and later in life my mother suffered from post-polio syndrome, because it's likely she had a low-level infection during the epidemic. Polio still exists in the world, and people are paralyzed or killed by it all the time. Even chickenpox can be fatal to some, and hospitalizes many more. The cost of these diseases in dollars is immense; the cost in human lives is much, much worse.

That was a child with whooping cough. Imagine hearing that for hours, days, weeks on end. Imagine a child dying because he was too young to be immunized, or had a medical reason why he couldn't be immunized (like HIV/AIDS, or cancer treatments, because yes, kids get cancer, too). Just horrible. There has been no identifiable link between ANY vaccine and autism. So protect your kids and get them immunized, already! And update your own immunizations. If you're an adult, you should get an update on your diphtheria/tetanus shot, and make sure you ask for the pertussis vaccine (the combined vaccine is called Tdap) with that. It's just one little shot, for crying out loud! I did it, after I finally realized I could. And because I'm around my friend's kids.

People spend millions of dollars every year denying science. They use remedies that won't cure them, then go to the hospital when they're much sicker and aren't getting better. That ends up costing much, much more than  the doctor's office visit would have. They buy homeopathic "remedies", which are basically just water dropped onto a sugar pill. No, really. Oscillococcinum, the "flu remedy" sold at drugstores and Walmart and other such places, at least, is essentially just a piece of duck liver and/or duck heart waved over a glass of water, then the water is placed onto sugar pills and sold for considerably more than it's worth. Ok, maybe that's oversimplified, but the result is the same. It's insane. Here's James Randi explaining how homeopathy works (watch it, it's terrific):

I love James Randi.

The world could prevent people from starving if so many well-meaning people weren't afraid of "genetically modified organisms (GMOs)". People, we've been modifying crops for centuries! Take the banana, for instance, one of the world's most popular fruits. It used to look like this:

http://bwindiresearchers.wildlifedirect.org/files/2009/07/pict0268.jpg

Would you really want to eat that? You know what they look like now:

http://www.fatburningfurnace.com/images/Banana%20nutrition%20facts.jpg

That's because humans crossed different types of bananas and finally got something good. It happens with everything. We cross different types of fruits to get new fruits (nectarine and tangelo, anyone?), we breed animals to come up with cattle that are better at either meat or milk production (sorry, vegans, I know, but let me finish), we even cross animals that we live with to get the best traits of each of the parents (think Labradoodle or Maltipoo). With GMOs, we're manipulating genes. We can put vitamin A in rice, and save the sight of millions for whom rice is a staple food. Sure, there are drawbacks. Nothing we do in life is totally without risk. But because we've done science on all this, and we are allowed to experiment, we know pretty much what we're doing. Well, scientists do. The rest of the population, not so much. Because the United States, as a whole, is a pretty science-illiterate population, I'm sad to say. And that needs to change.

One more video for you. It's a TED talk by science writer Michael Specter. It pretty much sums it up.

I have to go start cooking stuff for tomorrow. Have a great turkey day!