The Australian Vaccination Network lobby group says more testing of the swine flu vaccine needs to be done before it is given to the public. The Federal Government has ordered 21 million doses of the vaccine developed by CSL.

Unfortunately giving air time to these woomiesters just encourages them and that is not something our nationally-funded broadcaster should be doing.

The Australian Vaccination Network, despite its harmless sounding name, is a full blown Anti-vaxxer organisation.

If you look at their website, all pictures of babies and wildflowers, they just appear to be one of those mushy alternative medicine types, but when you read what they say in detail:

We believe it is a parent’s right to choose what’s best for their child…some would say that this is one of the most basic rules of any civilised society.

Vaccines have never been tested

The gold standard of medical science is the double blind crossover placebo study. This test has never been performed on any vaccine currently licensed in Australia. In an astounding leap of logic, contrary to all rules of science, vaccines are assumed to be safe and effective and therefore, it is considered to be unethical to withhold vaccinations for the purposes of testing them.

Vaccines can cause serious long-term side effects

According to medical reports, children are now less healthy than they have ever been before. More than 40% of all children now suffer from chronic conditions, something that was unheard of prior to mass vaccination.

Vaccines do not necessarily protect against infectious diseases

For the very real risk of both short and long-term side effects from vaccines, parents are asked to allow their children to be given vaccines that at best, will provide a temporary sensitisation to illnesses and at worst, can make their children more susceptible to both opportunistic and infectious illness. As evidenced by the recent whooping cough outbreak in SA, the only Australian state which actually records vaccination status in cases of infectious illness, 87% of all those who contracted whooping cough and whose vaccination status was known were fully and appropriately vaccinated.

Pharmaceutical companies have paid for almost all vaccine research to date

Just as the tobacco companies paid for corrupt and incorrect research which purported to show that tobacco and tobacco products were safe for human consumption, so too the pharmaceutical companies have paid for and produced almost all of the research into vaccines.

Some childhood illnesses have beneficial aspects and therefore, prevention may not necessarily be in the best interests of the child

Measles, for example, has been used in Scandinavian countries to successfully treat such autoimmune conditions as eczema and many studies have performed which show that children who do not contract measles naturally as a child are more likely to suffer from certain cancers later in life.

With lists like this it is not even clear where to start:

There is ample evidence vaccines are effective, mass vaccination helped eradicate smallpox, which once killed as many as every seventh child in Europe.

While claiming the need for serious testing of vaccines, AVN can make wild assertions that children are less healthy than every before (tell that to families of the 19th century with their child mortality rates) and that chronic conditions are associated with the rise of vaccinations.

Pretty much all drugs produced by Pharmaceutical companies are tested by those companies, are AVN suggesting that all pharmaceuticals be avoided?

The measles is good for you!

They just link misinformation together in a long line of false assertions. As the Australian Sceptics report they:

…ignores the fact that this is an open debate rather than the back-room conspiracy which it claims vaccine production and distribution to be. It is happy to quote scientists claiming this vaccine is not safe enough, while it usually claims that scientists are silent on the risks of vaccines. It provides publically-available statistics and information on side-effects while at the same time claiming that such information is not available.

This double standard is also shown in the AVN demanding a full scientific investigation of vaccine safety and efficacy while promoting homeopathic treatments that have been scientifically proven to have no efficacy beyond a placebo effect and no effective ingredients whatsoever.

The ABC reporting this rubbish is no different to them reporting the anti-psychiatrist viewpoints of the Scientologists.

It now seems that every single show or movie I watch has macs in it** which makes it appear if makes are the only kinds of computers in the world.

I actually find this a little annoying and am wondering if all the movie and TV studios have tied up some kind of contract with Apple.

Notes:
* Which despite being obviously# set in Melbourne, seems to have signage for a ‘State Police” rather than Victoria Police, in some attempt to make the show cityless and stateless. this is either just petty Australian parochialism or an attempt to sell the show on the world market.
# to me
** Bones, they show that I watched last night also had Macs. the other interesting thing about Bones (another forensic pathologist show) is that it appears that forensic pathologist have little programs for providing nifty animations of almost any process they undertake in the lab.

The toxoplasma parasites live in the gut of cats, producing eggs which are excreted and are picked up by other animals in their surrounds, like rats. But to complete the life cycle the toxoplasma must return to the host, the cat. For this to happen the rat must be eaten by the cat. But generally rats have a fear of cats, which Carl Zimmer reports has been shown by experimentation:

The scientists studied the rats in a six-foot by six-foot outdoor enclosure. They used bricks to turn it into a maze of paths and cells. In each corner of the enclosure they put a nest box along with a bowl of food and water. On each the nests they added a few drops of a particular odor. On one they added the scent of fresh straw bedding, on another the bedding from a rat’s nests, on another the scent of rabbit urine, on another, the urine of a cat. When they set healthy rats loose in the enclosure, the animals rooted around curiously and investigated the nests. But when they came across the cat odor, they shied away and never returned to that corner. This was no surprise: the odor of a cat triggers a sudden shift in the chemistry of rat brains that brings on intense anxiety.

But when the rats were infected with the toxoplasma (which gets into their brains) their behaviour was different:

The scent of a cat in the enclosure didn’t make them anxious, and they went about their business as if nothing was bothering them. They would explore around the odor at least as often as they did anywhere else in the enclosure. In some cases, they even took a special interest in the spot and came back to it over and over again.

The toxoplasma actually infected the rats brain to make them less scared of cats, so that they are more likely to be eaten by cats, allowing the toxoplasma to return to the cat-host and reproduce in its gut.

Now this toxoplasma also infects humans, and half of all people are estimated to be infected. We also know that half of all people are dog people, and half are cat people. How did that half become cat people? I think we know now. They are all infected with toxoplasma gondii.

In related news, there are lots of these parasites that effect animal behaviour, for example, so as to make ants climb high to release their spores:

My favourite picture is of the storms on saturn:

But check them all out!

As an example, here is a clip shot on the Red One.

skate – shot on red #1347 – 120 fps from Opus Magnum Production on Vimeo.

The music is ‘It’s Alright’ by Bang Gang and the site appears to be the Trocadéro in Paris.

It is always difficult to get a sense of an author from a short passage, but this is from a short story, Voices of Time:

The dome was in darkness, all the windows shuttered, but the generator still hummed in the X-ray theatre. Kaldren stepped through the entrance and switched on the lights. In the theatre he touched the grilles of the generator, felt the warm cylinder of the beryllium end-window. The circular target table was revolving slowly, set at 1 r.p.m., a steel restraining chair shackled to it hastily. Grouped in a semi-cicle a few feet away were most of the tanks and cages, piled on top of each other haphazardly. In one of them was the enormous squid-like plant had almost managed to climb from it vivarium. Its long translucent tendrils clung to the end of the tank, but it body had burst into a jellified pool of globular mucilage. In another an enormous spider had trapped itself in its own web, hung helplessly in the centre of a huge three dimensional maze of phosphorescing thread, twitching spasmodically.

All the experimental plants and animals had died. The chimp lay on its back among the remains of the hutch, the helmet forward over its eyes. Kaldren watched it for a moment, then sat down on the desk and picked up the phone.

While he dialed the number he noticed a film reel lying on the blotter. For a moment, he stared at the label, then slid the reel into his pocket beside the tape.

After he had spoken to the police he turned down the lights and went out to the car, drove off slowly down the drive.

When he reached the summer house the early sunlight was breaking across the ribbon-like balconies and terraces. He took the lift to the penthouse, made his way through into the museum. One by one he opened the shutters and let the sunlight play over the exhibits. Then he pulled the a chair over to a side window, sat and stared up at the light pouring through into the room.

Two or three hours later he heard Coma outside, calling up to him. After half an hour she went away, but a little later a second voice appeared and shouted up at Kaldren. He left his chair and closed all the shutters overlooking the front courtyard, and eventually he was left undisturbed.

Kaldren returned to his seat and lay back quietly, his eyes gazing across the line of exhibits. Half asleep, periodically he leaned up and adjusted the flow of light through the shutter, thinking to himself, as he would do in the coming months of Powers and his strange mandala, and of the seven and their journey to the white gardens of the moon, and the blue people who had come from Orion and spoken in poetry to them of the ancient beautiful worlds beneath golden suns in the island of galaxies, vanished for ever now in the myriad deaths of the cosmos.

JG Ballard, The Voices of Time, 1960.

This is of course the same computer that I use:

I have heard that even hardcore geeks are into macs because it is Unix based and thus is essentially a Unix computer with a nice GUI, so all the linux geeks get into them.

Chaiten Volcano

While on the topic I do recommend popping over to the Big Picture every now and then, they have some great news photography at a higher resolution than you will find elsewhere.