Sometimes I get lost in thinking about diseases. Since the early 2000s I’ve read the monthly issue of Emerging Infectious Disease. This is a journal put out by the CDC on disease outbreaks. At the time I first learned about this journal I was teaching both genetics and evolution and influenza was a hot topic. EID was a good resource on the history and current strains of influenza, but also so much more.
Emerging Infectious Disease can be found online and can be accessed by anybody, with no subscription necessary.
Then when I started teaching human anatomy and physiology in 2008 the topic of hearing and hearing loss was always a topic that students were interested in. When I was young there were many schools for the deaf, why were there so few now? The simple answer was vaccinations. So many preventable childhood diseases resulted on only is death but also neurological damage, both mental and physically – the main outcome was the loss of hearing.
This brings me to our current regime and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. His skepticism of vaccines and their relationship is outright criminal. This connection was proven to be a complete lie many years ago when the physician who published the work had fabricated his data to meet his agenda as anti-vaccination. Not only did he lose his medical license we also went to prison for the damage it caused.
It was in 2017 when I did a TED talk entitled The Time Of Epidemics, When Children Died. But now we have returned to that time, who is not only unfortunate, but criminal.
While this editorial cartoon turns the topic into fantasy, it quite real.
That’s all for now, back to nature tomorrow.
Michael's Place 