1 hour ago, Nigel Garvie said:

The point about vaccination programs is to achieve herd immunity

I don't care about 'the herd', the weak should be allowed to die, the strong should survive and reproduce. This is the natural order of life.

On 10/17/2018 at 9:43 PM, Arjen said:

 

There are also Christians who refuse vaccinations, (and insurances) for religious reasons. And there is growing group peoople who think vaccinations are unhealthy and should be avoided....

 

Arjen.

True. Also true that these people are considered Idiots. Science and modern medicine deniers, living in a fantasy world. Child abusers and murderers when they reject simple known treatments and vaccinations that could easily save their children. 

On the topic of BSE, the reason why the GOVERNMENT said beef was safe (before people started dying) was purely economic - the cost to the beef trade would have been astronomical (as it eventually did when people started dying).  If you have ever heard of Kuru (a disease of cannibals in New Guinea) you would have soon realised that this wasn't completely new. I gave up beef for 20 years, starting in about 1989 and encouraged my children to not eat it as well. i would now judge UK beef to have only minimal risk, so do eat occasionally.  As for likelihood of getting BSE (or new variant CJD if you want to be pedantic) during that period, well the sister of one of my staff died of it.

Obviously at the time little was known about the dangers of BSE to humans, you couldn't PROVE it was dangerous, just it was a possibility. There is a similar disease called Scrapie in sheep - but this has never been transmitted (as far as we know) to Humans or other animals. But when the first zoo animals died of BSE my alarm bells began ringing.

 

As for vaccinations - as  said herd immunity. If you do not get vaccinated, you provide a pool of susceptible hosts and this prevents the disease from dying out and risks further epidemics. If people had not been vaccinated against Small Pox it would still be with us today - Small Pox still killed between 300-500 MILLION people in the 20th century. 

 

So measles is not dangerous? this is from Wikipedia: -

Quote

Measles affects about 20 million people a year,[3] primarily in the developing areas of Africa and Asia.[6] No other vaccine-preventable disease causes as many deaths.[12] In 1980, 2.6 million people died of it,[6] and in 1990, 545,000 died; by 2014, global vaccination programs had reduced the number of deaths from measles to 73,000

Anti-vaxers are not just stupid, they are accessories to murder.

 

14 hours ago, Arjen said:

BSE. But still, people, humans, homo sapiens can not get sick with BSE.

BSE causes a spongiform degeneration of the brain and spinal cord.

On 10/19/2018 at 9:02 AM, BritManToo said:

My kids are all alive and undamaged.

 

Survivorship bias.  Imagine being one person who survived out of three hundred in a plane crash and using your privileged position as a soap box upon which to proclaim the crash was no big deal since you made it out alive.

 

On 10/19/2018 at 5:58 PM, BritManToo said:

I don't care about 'the herd', the weak should be allowed to die, the strong should survive and reproduce. This is the natural order of life.

 

This is sickening.  Infants coughing their lungs up from whooping cough should not be "allowed to die".  Senior citizens in a nursing home should not be "allowed to die" from the flu.  If your kids pick up this attitude from you, then they are most certainly not "undamaged".