pm_me_firearms

I'm all for vaccines. But they need to make sure they are safe. It seems that some vaccines get pushed out without being tested fully. FDA needs to do it's job.

samtrovaum

Durrrrrrrp. Wipe that drool, useful idiot.

jafbm

Isn't activistpost one of James Corbett's blogs?

RockAndNoWater

I tend to think the bane of humankind is diseases like polio , which vaccines help us control.

FisherOfMen

Check your givens.

At the exact same time as the vaccine push, polio diagnosis was broken into three diseases: Polio, meningitis, and flaccid paralysis. Even without vaccination, that split of diagnosis would have cut the "polio" rate considerably.

With the diagnostic criteria changed, there is no way to tell if they had an effect or not. It's all null data, meaningless. We simply don't know now, because of this factor, if the vaccine helped at all.

RockAndNoWater

So you think polio in the U.S. disappeared by itself? Do you think smallpox died out by itself?

FisherOfMen

So you think polio in the U.S. disappeared by itself?

You said that, not me.

I said from the numerical data given, and the circumstances of the changed diagnostics, there is no "cause/effect" to be determined by those numbers.

tothetop

It wasn't broken into three dimensions. Polio is still the same polio that it was before. Polio takes root in your gastrointestinal tract and can spread from there. Meningitis is just the meninges being inflammed and has a ton of possible causes. I guess it could theoretically happen with polio if the virus managed to get there, but it would still be diagnosed as polio if that were the case. Same thing applies to flaccid paralysis - it's anything that causes muscle weakness or paralysis. Polio could cause it, but it would still be diagnosed as polio.

The diagnostic criteria didn't change. Those are just ways polio can affect the body and if polio caused them, it would be diagnosed as such. So yes we can say that the vaccine definitively 100% helped control polio and eliminate it in many parts of the world.

FisherOfMen

Symptoms that would have been diagnosed as polio pre-vaccine could be diagnosed as any number of things post vaccine.

This reduced the number of polio diagnoses without any indication of whether the vaccine helped or not. The numbers given literally provide nothing to help determine if the polio vaccine was effective.

Pre-vaccine diagnostic of polio: Paralysis for 24 hours
Post-vaccine diagnostic of polio: Paralysis for 3 months

Every one of those enterovirus D68 infections last year would have been diagnosed as polio in 1950.

tothetop

Why is the exact time of the vaccine release the cutoff for this?

Also, I can't find anything that says they couldn't test for the virus based on a lab test. Those would be definitive of polio numbers at the time, no?

Even if you accept as fact that what is diagnosed as polio has changed, how can you argue against the fact that the United States hasn't had a polio case since 1979? No matter how inflated numbers may have been before, there are none now.

FisherOfMen

They do test for virus in lab tests now. They didn't used to. If you exhibited cold symptoms and then had paralysis, it was 'polio' in 1950.

Nowadays, it's polio, flaccid paralysis, enterovirus d68, meningitis, undeterminate cause, coxsackie virus, etc.

It means that everything diagnosed as polio beforehand wasn't necessarily "polio" either, but again, the point here is that the numbers showing that polio dropped after vaccination/reclassification is simply useless for determining whether the vaccine actually reduced the polio virus in the wild, because the diagnostic criteria changed.

See, this: http://www.cdc.gov/non-polio-enterovirus/

...wasn't even classified in 1950. It would have been called "polio."

tothetop

Do you have a source that there were no lab tests for polio? I find it very hard to believe that they didn't know how to perform a lab test on it yet were able to successfully develop a vaccine that targeted it. Also, there were tests available immediately immediately afterward because there is data for whether anyone that got polio got it from the vaccine or from the "wild".

You are still mixing symptoms (like flaccid paralysis and meningitis) with actual diagnoses (like polio). It makes it impossible to take your claim any credibility.

I understand that there may have been some misdiagnoses, but that doesn't change the fact that there were at least some number x of polio cases prior to the vaccine and there are none now. Or are you saying that there never was polio and the whole disease is made up to convince the public that they needed a vaccine?

Yes, that is called science developing. It happens. You still have shown no evidence in support of your claim, just your suspicions on the accuracy of the diagnoses in the 1950s, your confusion between symptoms and a diagnosis, and that science has evolved. Nothing contradicts the fact that there were plenty of polio cases at the time and after the vaccine they have vanished from the United States completely.

FisherOfMen

You are still mixing symptoms (like flaccid paralysis and meningitis) with actual diagnoses (like polio). It makes it impossible to take your claim any credibility.

This is absurd. There was no infrastructure back then to do polio cultures on 50,000 kids stricken with the disease.

Here's the World Health Organization's criteria for diagnosing polio in the early 1950s, before the vaccine:

"Spinal paralytic poliomyelitis: signs and symptoms of nonparalytic poliomyelitis with the addition of partial or complete paralysis of one or more muscle groups, detected on two examinations at least 24 hours apart."

So now you can clearly see how changing that diagnostic to require paralysis months later will sharply reduce the number of "polio" cases. Many polio paralysis cases are transient. Something like Enterovirus D68 would have been classified as polio in 1950. So would Guillain-Barre or any secondary infection affecting the nervous system after any cold or flu.

The reduction in official numbers after a diagnostic change offers no data at all on whether real caseload rose or fell.

tothetop

Thank you for the quote, but it is from a conspiracy site so I'm going to take it with a grain of salt.

You are still failing to address the fact that there are no cases in the United States now.

FisherOfMen

I think we have a communication gap.

There are cases of "polio" in the united states right now by a 1950 definition. The Enterovirus D68 paralysis cases are "polio" by the 1950 definition. We just went through a "polio epidemic" if we used the 1950 diagnostic criteria. The only reason it wasn't called a polio epidemic is because the diagnostic criteria changed.

Which is my point. Because the diagnostic criteria changed immediately following mass vaccination, the official numbers can in no way indicate that the vaccine had an effect on polio. It's a null set.

tothetop

I understand that portion. What I don't understand is how you can say there were zero polio cases in 1950 even by the current definition? Because there are clearly zero cases of it currently in the United States.