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Texas lawmaker says he's not worried about measles outbreak because of ‘antibiotics'
Texas state representative Bill Zedler says a resurgence of measles across the U.S. isn't worrying him.
Zedler, R-Arlington, is promoting legislation that would allow Texans to opt out of childhood vaccinations.
“They want to say people are dying of measles. Yeah, in Third World countries they’re dying of measles,” Zedler said, the Texas Observer reports. “Today, with antibiotics and that kind of stuff, they’re not dying in America.”
There is no treatment for measles, a highly contagious virus that can be fatal. Antibiotics treat bacterial infections and can't kill viruses.
It could be funny if it weren't so tragic.
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Texas Lawmaker not Worried about Measles because of ‘Antibiotics'
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Dying is one of the few things that can be done as easily lying down.
-- Woody Allen
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Barenflimski on Thursday February 28 2019, @05:56AM (7 children)
Things have gotten so good for so many folks, they don't even remember what bad really was. Bad today is a cold. Bad today is a few rotten politicians. Bad today is someone stubbing their toe getting on and off an airplane. Ironically, all this progress has given people the room to disagree simply because they can disagree without the world ending for them. Not too long ago in the U.S., and currently in lands not so far away people still believe in witchcraft, because warding off the spirits is as good as anything else they've got. Like any good hive mind you have to have your detractrors to keep the rest of the mind pointed in the right direction and relatively healthy. People doing this are simply a symptom of success. If you really took away vaccines, it wouldn't be very many generations before that type of thinking succumbed to Darwin's "survival of the fittest" theory.
If the anti-vaxer movement proves anything its that reading things on the internet doesn't make them true. Interestingly, one could argue that these same folks would be better off not reading things on the internet because it confuses them.
(Score: 2) by loonycyborg on Thursday February 28 2019, @08:54AM (1 child)
To catch up with all knowledge accumulated by our ancestors each person needs a lot of time and work. Most are too lazy or too busy.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by HiThere on Thursday February 28 2019, @05:27PM
There's "not knowing" and there's "publicly expressing a strong opinion about matters in which you are ignorant". And if you're enacting laws based on that it's even worse.
FWIW, I don't believe that the neurological damage that some people received from measles could be prevented by anti-biotics, but it seems quite reasonable that fewer people would die if the symptoms (and secondary infections) were properly treated. So it could well be that the arguments on both sides, as explicitly stated in the above thread, are generally accurate. And this wouldn't change my opinion that children should not be allowed into public school without being vaccinated. It *MIGHT* change my opinion that failure to vaccinate should be counted as child abuse.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:09PM (4 children)
I've been thinking that as life gets easier for an organism, the organism becomes less fit. No doubt someone has discovered and named this principle.
Saw a report on a scientific experiment in which flies were coddled so they didn't have to fly. In only a few generations, the flies degenerated to the point many of them were born with defective wings and could not fly.
This cuts more than one way. The anti-vaxxers have had life made so easy they can indulge this thinking, and not pay for it with the lives of their children. Or, inadvertently or purposefully, they're restoring their own fitness to survive measles by putting their kids through the disease. Don't need the brains to discern that the vaccine is the much better bet, if the consequences of choosing not to use it aren't that severe. And you can still win a poker too, by folding when you have a winning hand. Lot harder to win when you play like that, but not impossible.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @01:33PM (3 children)
This is a misunderstanding of the concept of fitness. The animal is only fit relative to their current environment. If flying around is not required for flies to reproduce then the flies that don't waste energy on this are fitter than those who do.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday February 28 2019, @02:35PM (2 children)
The key phrase is "current environment". What are the odds that a "current" environment will last a long enough time to make such quick genetic changes a good bet? Millions of years of flying, and then, just a few months of no flying required, and the flies responded that quickly?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2019, @03:00PM
A few months (~90 days) to a fly is like 270 years for humans with 30 year generation time:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drosophila_melanogaster#Lifecycle_and_reproduction [wikipedia.org]
And who said the population can't gain back the ability to fly as fast as they lost it?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday February 28 2019, @05:31PM
Yes. An example of this kind of evolutionary preference is the dodo, which started out at a kind of pigeon, but it got to an island where flying away was likely to get you drowned...or at least removed from the gene pool resident on the island. (Maybe you successfully made it back to the mainland, but you still were no longer ancestral to the remaining pigeons.) So the dodo lost the power of flight, as that made them more successful. Evolution has no foresight.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.