warri0r45

This is true, but since the disease is stronger, it is more likely to kill the father if he does get infected. Sure, it lowers infection rate(if the vaccination is effective) but it raises the mortaility rate of people who haven't been vaccinated. Of course I'm not referring to human influenza, because we have somewhat formed a natural immunity to it already. But without vaccinations, the disease has nothing to evolve against, except a natural immunity that we may form from it. You've not justified why the disease is stronger if you vaccinate against it. I don't even see what you're trying to argue with that second point... Let me try and break it down this way: if you don't vaccinate, people will gain natural immunity but the pathogen will evolve immunity against the antibodies we produce. If you do vaccinate, we gain "artificial" immunity but the pathogen will evolve immunity against the antibodies we produce. The only point of a vaccine is to gain immunity before copping the brunt of the disease, and I don't see how that makes the pathogen stronger. My argument was that vaccinations, due to lowering the amount of time a pathogen divides and mutates in vivo, can't possibly make the pathogen stronger. Quite the opposite, I would have thought.

It seems the flu vaccine works best in healthy patients (70%-90% effectiveness) and so should be encouraged, especially during pregnancy. Warrior, I know you mentioned that you thought the vaccine should be mandatory for at-risk groups but it seems from the aforementioned study at-risk groups have as little as 30% effectiveness, therefore nowhere near as effective as healthy persons. I like your idea about children though, I think from memory there was a study in the list I provided you with about how health professionals should be targeting children foremost instead of seniors. Ok, let me do his one more time. No vaccinations for people who may have a severe reaction to it (e.g. people with egg allergies). Vaccinations primarily for those in whom it will be most effective at stopping the spread of the flu (schools kids and healthy adults working in nursing homes, hospitals, etc). I'd go so far as to make it mandatory in these people. I can't understand why some people in this thread are getting hung up on a principle that "only I can choose to do what I want with my body" when this kind of thing is a little [puncture] (or nasal spray) and a couple of symptoms that can save peoples lives. I'm not usually driven by authoritarian principles but there's a clear advantage in cases like this. As for the elderly and others with an immune system less likely to get a good response from the vaccine, why not make it mandatory for them as well? The only issue I can see is running out of the vaccine each season, and as I said above we should vaccinate other groups first. Only one disease has been completely eradicated by human vaccinations(smallpox). And the only reason we could do that is because it could only be spread directly from person to person, it was not airbourne and not sitting on any touched surface. Vaccinations only keep those who get vaccinated safe. They actually hurt those who don't, because the disease gets stronger trying to outdo the vaccination. It's not quite that simple. You'd also have to consider that if more people get vaccinated, there are less carriers and therefore less spread of the diseased to the unvaccinated. Consider a family where everyone but the father has been vaccinated. The good thing for dad is that the rest of the family won't come home with the disease and spread it to him. I'd also argue against your second point as well. An infectious disease that makes it's way through a human host usually only divides within the host (can you think of an example where it doesn't?), and it's that division which allows the possibility of mutations--and therefore the evolution of resistance--to seep in. If more people are vaccinated, the pathogen population has less chances to pass on beneficial mutations, hence in theory the disease shouldn't get stronger because of vaccinations.

I would have said it shows how stupid and fundamentally fear-driven people are. It's interesting how quick people are to blame the media for things like this. In Australia I've heard nothing but factual reporting on the issue.

Check Your Head by The Beastie Boys (album).

That doesn't sound counter-intuitive to me. In fact, it sounds perfectly reasonable and it's the way I approach music too.

Hopeless Hopes by Martyr (album). Incredible. Fans of Cynic and Death would love this. :thumbup:

Sounds like a great idea. It was interesting to see Hitchens go through it.

Thanks for the links, Goddess. Firstly, which of those sources that you listed are poor-quality? I know which ones I think are, but I want to hear what you say. Secondly, I'm willing to agree that some estimates of vaccine efficacy in seniors are biased and that there are possible conflicts of interest due to funding arrangements, but that doesn't mean the flu vaccine is useless. One of the sources that argues that data on senior vaccine efficacy is biased [1] also states the following: This definitely seems like a more reliable way of determining vaccine efficacy in the elderly because it's based on proven cases of flu in the hospital and compares them to vaccine status. I'm not saying that this now proves efficacy in seniors, though; I'd need to do more research into studies of this methodology before I do that. Also, another of your sources [2] makes a point not to throw the baby out with the bathwater because of bias: In fact, most sources that I've seen always acknowledge that the vaccine works fairly well, it's just that not all studies have good methodology. I don't know how much of an effect the conflict of interest has in this case, so perhaps that's something to look into further. Perhaps I can revise my earlier comments and say that flu vaccines should only be mandatory in at-risk groups and also during outbreaks. I like the idea of vaccine programs in schools, for example.

The discussion was about the effectiveness of flu vaccines, not antivirals like Tamiflu.

Scattered in what sense? In that the effectiveness varies depending on the immune system of the individual and by the match of vaccine to flu strain? In that case I agree. Here's some info from the CDC: [1] Seems pretty good to me. I'm looking into a few reviews at the moment. I'd like to see an example of a biased article if you wouldn't mind. Conflict of interest bias is a well known problem in medical science. Pharmaceutical companies are an important source of funds and scientists are tempted to for example not publish studies that would "bite the hand that feeds them". You can find many articles of this problem by searching PubMed for "conflict of interest" or Google for something similar. (Watch out for alternative medicine money-grabber texts on Google though.) A good example of a suspected published biased flu vaccine study would be Shumpei Yokota's study on behaviour differences caused by oseltamivir (his university received a donation from the company that makes Tamiflu and later studies have shown different results): http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUST151430 If you have access to The Lancet, Volume 369, Issue 9567, Pages 1056-1056 will have an article where Yokota's possible bias is acknowledged. http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve ... 3607605029 (link to the Lancet article) Here is a news report of a later study done with a larger group of test subjects contradicting Yokota's study: http://www.smh.com.au/world/science/tam ... -ac3y.html I'd like to point out that I wouldn't think twice about taking Tamiflu if I had the swine flu. As is usually the case with vaccines, the benefits would far outweight the risks. I'm aware of conflicts of interest, but your example is regarding Tamiflu, not an influenza vaccine. I'm not doubting that there could be a similar case for a flu vaccine, but I just want to see what Goddess says. If you have any examples of bias in flu vaccine research I'd be willing to hear you out.

Scattered in what sense? In that the effectiveness varies depending on the immune system of the individual and by the match of vaccine to flu strain? In that case I agree. Here's some info from the CDC: [1] Seems pretty good to me. I'm looking into a few reviews at the moment. I'd like to see an example of a biased article if you wouldn't mind.

Seriously? I wasn't aware of that, and I'll admit I've not read into the specifics of efficacy in all types of vaccines. As far as I was aware they update the vaccine according to the emerging strains and it's most effective for at risk groups like kids and the elderly. Where did you get that info from? I'll have to look into it some more.

Yes, they should, and they should be mandatory for other contagious diseases as well. Links to autism and the like have been disproved and any further risk is worth the benefit of keeping entire communities of people safe. If you don't get vaccinated, you're putting other people's lives in jeopardy. Comparing vaccines to hyper-cleanliness is wrong. In fact, vaccines stimulate the immune system, they don't deny it the ability to develop. I don't think you understand what a vaccine is. Your objection hurts other people, not just you. If people in society didn't get vaccinated, there would be more sickness and deaths. Just because you've never been sick doesn't mean you're a representative sample of society.

I don't see what the problem is, and I've never heard this "basic rule" before. Sure, it's risky and we're not in the right place to go around doing it at the moment, but I can see the day where it's safe enough (and even common place) to use gene therapy to cure things like cystic fibrosis, or even reactivate a pseudogene. It's the kind of thing that obviously requires strict oversight, but there are scientists who have done DNA work like gene therapy in humans. http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/H ... tml#recent

Yeah, that's rediculous. Maybe if it was meth and they had a better reason to do the search than some other student making an accusation, but this is just too far.

Spot-activation is impossible? I know several genes act as activators for the transcription of others, but did the paper say that any protein but retrocyclin will be produced? What's spot activation? I haven't read the entire paper (just abstracts and introduction), but as far as I'm aware aminoglycosides have no way of discriminating between transcripts. In other words, other pseudogenes that produce a transcript may become active by virtue of their reactivated stop codons. I don't see the link with transcription factors... unless you're saying some transcription factor pseudogene could become active through this technique and screw up the transcription of other genes?

It's certainly some ingenuitive molecular biology. Here's another source: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=2672611 The last paragraph is where my concern lies - safety. I wonder what other latent pseudogenes aminoglycosides will activate. What effects will all of those proteins have on the cell? Plenty of more research is required before this becomes a cure, that's for sure. Edit: Here's the actual paper: http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articl ... id=2672613

Saying they sued their fans is a bit of a stretch. They sued a peer-to-peer service. I don't really blame Metallica for doing what they did. You might take it as an attempt at profiteering by minimising losses as much as possible, but there is the principle of the matter to consider. I know if someone was freely distributing my copyrighted work I wouldn't be happy about it. They have a right to their material, and they were justified in suing. Mind you, I do download music occasionally. If all those artists sued peer-to-peer services and stopped me from freely acessing their material I wouldn't be so arrogant as to complain about it. I've been getting their material for free, so I don't feel I have a right to compain should that happen.

I'm not proud of it, but I've downloaded a bit lately. Most of the music I own is still in my CD collection, though. I wouldn't be surprised. It's only when I started listening to music that I didn't own that I started to build a CD collection. I'd put it down to people having no faith in whether a CD will be good or not; you can't tell until you sample the music, and you're bound to find something you want to buy when you start listening to copyrighted material. It's an interesting moral predicament...

I agree that tool use was the initial step, but I would think intelligence comes before writing. Language is too much of an intricate system for anything lacking intelligence to master. I probably wasn't specific enough. By "in the context of the human experience" I meant the intelligence to build cities and cure diseases, etc. The kind of "super intelligence" the OP talked about. On some level it takes intelligence to use tools, too.

It's getting pretty crazy. There are now multiple suspected cases in Australia. Nothing confirmed yet, though.

I' don't know much in the area, but im sure not everything becomes fossilised right, for example, we dont conclusively know every species that ever existed, maybe an offshoot of the raptors (most intelligent dinosaur i know of but thats only from films) grew hands with thumb-like parts somehow. That's a massive stretch, and it's not founded on anything. As far as intelligent dinosaurs goes, I agree with Stilev. They didn't have the morphology to be able to manipulate the environment like we can, and I'd say that's a necessary precursor to intelligence. Tool use first, writing second, then comes intelligence (in the context of the human experience).

I agree, Evil Empire is great. I really have to listen to it again though; I haven't for a while.

Under A Stone With No Inscription by Anata (album). Goddamn, Entropy Within is such a catchy song.

I recently got into The Conductor's Departutre by Anata, so I'll have to check out The Infernal Depths of Hatred (you got the name wrong - http://www.metal-archives.com/release.php?id=7355). They're definitely up there with the best in tech-death.