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posted by janrinok on Monday November 27 2017, @08:27PM   Printer-friendly

England's National Health Service is urging parents to get their children vaccinated for the flu ahead of the holiday season to protect grandparents and other vulnerable relatives:

Flu vaccines administered through a nasal spray rather than an injection have been rolled out this autumn for two and three-year-olds, and children in reception class and years one to four in primary school. Children are super-spreaders because of the greater likelihood of them contracting flu at nursery or school, where germs are passed on at a rapid rate. But only 18% of school-age children have had the nasal spray immunisation, according to the latest figures.

Prof Keith Willett, NHS England's medical director for acute care, said: "Flu can be spread more easily by children, especially to vulnerable relatives such as older grandparents, those with heart or lung conditions and pregnant family members. Last year, millions of people missed out on their free vaccination and yet it's one simple, common sense step to help us all stay healthy this winter."

With less than a month until Christmas, the NHS is urging parents to book their children in for the free vaccination to help curb infection over the festive season, when family get-togethers can spread the infection.

Meanwhile, the Daily Mirror (a tabloid) claims that Russian agents are spreading anti-vaccination propaganda in the UK in an effort to destabilize the country:

Russian cyber units are spreading false information about flu and measles jabs in the UK, experts warn. [Ed's Note: The current flu immunisation is applied via a nasal spray - there are no 'jabs' involved.] Vladimir Putin is believed to want to erode trust in US and European governments. The state-sponsored units are spreading the lies on social media to destabilise Britain, it is claimed. The Kremlin has previously been accused of attempting to influence Brexit and Scottish independence. Now, it is feared it is trying to create distrust over flu jabs and the MMR measles vaccine.

[...] Security services are so concerned over the threat to public health and security that Government departments have been ordered to monitor social media and flag up risky articles. Health chiefs have had emerg­ency meetings over the spread "fake news" over vaccination campaigns. [...] We can reveal public health officials are investigating whether an outbreak of measles last week in Liverpool and Leeds was fuelled by parents not vaccinating children due to "false information read on the internet".

Also at BBC. BBC's collection of newspaper covers.


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  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 30 2017, @06:15PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday November 30 2017, @06:15PM (#603554) Journal
    Marriage exists in polygamous societies as well. I can't get a concrete measure of how prevalent marriage is in human cultures, but consensus appears to be that it is widely prevalent and present even in hunter-gatherer systems. Monogamous marriage is less frequent, but still appears. What is interesting is that when I was browsing about marriage [google.com] there's indications that modern societies have unusually low marriage rates. In other words, marriage seems quite the ancient and prevalent institution (even to the extent of appearing in the New World for which culture exchange prior to 1492 would have happened before agriculture). I suppose marriage could have spontaneously popped up independently in the half dozen or so cradles of agriculture, but that seems a poor bet.

    OTOH, if marriage was present in some form from at least the human population bottleneck of 75k years ago (Toba eruption), that would easily explain its prevalence now.

    Moving on, even when pure monogamous marriage is not the only form of marriage, it often remains the most common sort, perhaps due to economics, lack of availability of mates, or desires of the couple. For example, almost 40% of listed cultures [uci.edu] (data comes from the Ethnographic Atlas [wikipedia.org]) are "occasionally polygamous", that is, have the potential to marry multiple times, but don't on average.

    Jealously and cuckoldry are clearly ancient emotions which are exhibited in similar fashion among other mammals and aren't particular to monogamous situations.

    They're particular to situations where there's a shortage of one of the sexes (usually females). Eliminate that problem (and the sexual frustration that comes with it), along with the notion of parents being completely responsible for raising their offspring, and these emotions (which are simply a by-product of fear) go away.

    Emotions don't work that way. They're biological and hence, inherited from a time when they were preferentially propagated, perhaps because they were an evolutionary advantage.