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from the even-smart-people-can-perpetuate-stupid dept.
False beliefs and wishful thinking about the human experience are common. They are hurting people — and holding back science.
[...] These myths often blossom from a seed of a fact — early detection does save lives for some cancers — and thrive on human desires or anxieties, such as a fear of death. But they can do harm by, for instance, driving people to pursue unnecessary treatment or spend money on unproven products. They can also derail or forestall promising research by distracting scientists or monopolizing funding. And dispelling them is tricky.
Scientists should work to discredit myths, but they also have a responsibility to try to prevent new ones from arising, says Paul Howard-Jones, who studies neuroscience and education at the University of Bristol, UK. "We need to look deeper to understand how they come about in the first place and why they're so prevalent and persistent."
Some dangerous myths get plenty of air time: vaccines cause autism, HIV doesn't cause AIDS. But many others swirl about, too, harming people, sucking up money, muddying the scientific enterprise — or simply getting on scientists' nerves. Here, Nature looks at the origins and repercussions of five myths that refuse to die.
These are some of the science myths that will not die.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Francis on Sunday December 20 2015, @09:08AM
And what about the risks associated with contracting the illness?
For example, the Measles has between a 1/10 000 and 1/300 000 chance of causing panencephalitis, which is usually fatal. And that doesn't include the other risks such as hearing loss. Vaccines are approved and required because the risks associated with not being vaccinated are sufficiently greater than the risks of the vaccination over the population that there's a benefit to society.
My brother could only get 2 of the 3 shots in the MMR series because of a reaction. I couldn't have gotten the small pox vaccination thanks to a skin problem. Thankfully I was born after small pox was eradicated, but I would have been depending upon other people to suck it up and get their shots because the risk to me of getting the shots would have been unreasonable.
1/10 000 000 sounds like a small number because it is. You'd get better results worrying about suicide and murder than having that kind of reaction from a vaccination.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 21 2015, @07:26AM
The other thing to remember with many vaccines is they will be applied to billions of people, many of whom are well and do not have the disease. In contrast many elective treatments are only applied to those who are already sick and in need of treatment so the benefit/harm is clearer. So a cancer treatment that only causes problems with one in 10,000 is damn good to near miraculous but if a vaccine was about that safe and applied to all children it could harm 12000 kids per year. So what's the actual safety ratio like? With the vaccine promoters ignoring all complaints how can they really get the true facts? It's not like Big Pharma or the Gov hasn't lied about such stuff. ;)
Billions can eat peanuts/etc and not die, but that does not mean peanuts are safe for all. There's even a person who is allergic to eating apples while near a birch tree (birch tree pollen is allergenic), she's fine with eating apples elsewhere, and fine with birch tree pollen on its own, but together it's a big problem for her.
Of course all sorts of things can go wrong with people too, and problems developing just after a vaccination could just be a coincidence.