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Comment by tmcw | Hacker News Reader

Sigh. Whooping cough back because everyone's afraid of the non-threat of vaccines. Bed bugs back because everyone's afraid of DDT.

Uninformed wusses are killing us all.

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Comparing vaccines to DDT seems backwards to me.

Perhaps we're more afraid of DDT than we should be, but DDT is moderately toxic and has a soil half-life of up to 15 years. (Compare this to a few weeks for Malathion or a few months for Glyphosate.) Bed bugs suck, but they never killed anybody.

Compare this to measles or whooping cough where the vaccine is very safe and the diseases can permanently scar or kill victims.

Bed bugs never killed anybody, but malaria sure does. There are definitely areas of the world where the net positive action for human well-being is a liberal application of DDT.

And they never stopped doing surface application of DDT.

I avidly read this as another antivax story, but it doesn't seem to be one; rather, the issue here is that adults need to get DTAP boosters. Who knew? Not me.

Apparently that's new: in the US at least, Tdap was only approved in 2005, and replaced Td (the previous standard bundled tetanus/diptheria every-10-years booster) in most recommendations/clinics around 2006-2007. So adults who haven't had a tetanus booster in the past 3-4 years didn't get the one that includes whooping cough, and probably don't even know about the change (I got my last booster in 2003, and didn't know that it was different now).

... And now I understand why my doctor gave me a tetanus booster last month without even asking if I had had one in the last ten years. (I think I have, but I'm not sure, and I never turn down free tetanus boosters if the doctor offers one.)

It's both. There's a cluster of "crazy hippy" people in and around Marin who are convinced vaccinations are responsible for every modern ailment. I've met, and tried unsuccessfully to reason with a few of them.

The DTAP booster may be our best shot (haha) at routing around them though. Even if they won't vaccinate their children, if enough adults get regular DTAPs we might be able to get enough herd immunity that whooping cough dies out again.

I know it's not as simple as "the tea party, pro-ignorance, anti-science, pro-middle-ages movement is responsible for this." But there is no doubt in my mind that the rise of anti-vaccine ignorance played a good part.

I understand where you're coming from, but the anti-vaccine people I've met tend not to be tea-party types. They're hippies. Very liberal, and often convinced that the "medical establishment" is out to get them.

The tea-party I've met are not anti-vacine. In fact, most of them have a very ill opinion of those "hippies ignoring their doctors".

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