'Nother Solent

Polio and the tragedy of the commons.

Anthony Cox writes:

Thanks for the links, I would respond if I was still blogging. But why bother when someone else has already nailed it....

I would draw your attention to this very good discussion about the tragedy of the commons in relation to vaccines at USS Clueless:

When it comes to serious diseases for which vaccines are available, if you're properly immunized you can't get the disease. But even if you aren't, you can't get the disease if you're never exposed to it. There's what is known as "herd immunity", and what it means is that if everyone around me is immunized, I am also protected even if I was not immunized. Since no one I come into contact with can have the disease, I can never be exposed to it and thus cannot get it.

The chance of a disease spreading is a function of how likely it is that an infectious person comes into contact with and infects someone else (at least for most of the diseases for which vaccination is now controversial, with the notable exception of tetanus). If most of the population is immunized, people who are infected will not have many encounters with people who could be infected, and thus the disease will have a very hard time spreading.

However, most of those vaccines carry a small risk, such that one or two children per million who are vaccinated suffer a terrible reaction which can cripple them or kill them. (There are also urban legends regarding things like an increased risk of autism, even though every attempt to look for a link has found there isn't one.) So some parents refuse to vaccinate their kids in order to avoid that perceived risk. From their point of view, there's no important chance that their kids will get those diseases whether vaccinated or not, so they're better off not being vaccinated in order to also avoid the risk inherent in the vaccines.

That makes this is a classic example of the tragedy, because if enough parents come to that conclusion, than the vaccination rate drops far enough for herd immunity to cease operating, and the diseases reappear. (Which has actually happened in some case.)

Our solution to this one is law enforcement. In most of the US, you are not permitted to enroll your children in public school unless you can prove that they've had all their vaccinations. While that hasn't resulted in a 100% vaccination rate, it has guaranteed that the rate stays high enough for herd immunity to operate.

Link to the debate in USS Clueless

--
Anthony Cox

Den Beste's link has some good arguments against libertarian ideas. I have a feeling that there are some good responses out there, but I don't know them. I hope this doesn't give the impression that all I'm interested in is defending my little ideological group. Perhaps a slightly more accurate statement would be that I can see the dim shapes of good responses to Den Beste but right now I cannot answer him. I don't despise my own ability to see dim shapes of arguments: usually I do manage to reach clear arguments in the end. It takes and should take quite a lot to make a person renounce their axioms. But for now, he has an awfully good point, doesn't he?

LATER: The phrase "Right to exclude" is going to be a large part of any answer I might come up with. But not tonight, I'm turning in.

"This is pompea last day sort of place."

Awesome. A twenty-five year old Ukrainian biker girl has produced this unforgettable photo-essay about her distinctly unusual hobby.

"I travel a lot and one of my favorite destination lead through poisoned with radiation, so called Chernobyl "dead zone" It is 130kms from my home. Why favourite? because one can ride there for hours and not meet any single car and not to see any single soul. People left and nature is blooming, there are beautiful places, woods, lakes. "

Not to mention ghost towns across which looters, scientists and tourists of the macabre each make their own trajectories through the empty land - and through which this free spirit rides with a dosimeter at her hip and the wind in her hair.

Thanks to Damian Penny and a long chain of equally awed bloggers which I traced as far back as Jessica's Well.

It's been a while

since I had a good old-fashioned anti-socialist rant. I owe a debt of gratitude to the Guardian's David Walker for this good old-fashioned socialist rant that reminded me of forgotten pleasures.

Walker has been reading a report by the Treasury's Derek Wanless (who pops up everywhere these days) that says the poor are more unhealthy than the rich. Here's Walker's solution:

But wouldn't it be even cheaper to address the causes of the income disparity that in turn correlates so strongly with ill health? It would be, but where is the physician to recommend the progressive taxation that would underpin such a health-giving redistribution of income?

Where indeed? On a Saturday night at about this hour I reckon he's just about reached the petits fours and will be calling for coffee and the bill any minute now. Good thing too, he's been moving left all night and one more drink would have had him recommending the massacre of the bourgeoisie. (The taramind sauce was a little bitter, I thought. )

Getting back to Mr Walker, we'll start with his sloppy language. Nothing that Walker quotes from Wanless's report suggests that income disparity causes the ill-health. If you literally believed inequality caused ill-health the best policy would be to make all the rich, healthy people poor. Oh, I forgot, that is the policy.

Come to think of it, though, Walker missed a trick. Inequality does cause ill health, among baboons anyway. I read somewhere - oh, you Google - that baboons are more unhappy on a given ration of bananas when they are at the bottom of the social hierarchy than when they have the same banana allowance but are nearer being Top Baboons. That's another reason for not having socialism, say I. Ain't nothing more hierarchical than a socialist society! Without the entropic flow of money they stratify; and one of the ways they stratify is by access to health care. The elite have the skills to make sure their problems are first on the consultant's list; the lumpenproletariat do not.

But I digress. It is not inequality that should outrage but poverty. We have to get rid of poverty. So let's have more of the method of poverty-zapping that's worked for hundreds of millions of people worlwide.

Oddly, Mr Walker says quite a lot about the way poor people smoke more than rich people without explaining why giving the poor more of other people's money to buy ciggies would help. Free fruit and veg? I don't see it working, mate. Carrots, for instance are damn near free already. In the developed countries most of the health problems of the permanently poor class are behavioural.

(Most, but not all. For some reason the Guardian column doesn't mention some non-behavioural health-influencing factors that would make their case a lot more effectively, such as damp, cold and pollution. Perhaps the actual death and sickness rates from these causes are lower than I thought.)

But there's avoidable ill-health behind every chip buttie. Orwell once ran through a poor man's weeky income (he knew from his own experience what that was) to test the claim that the poor couldn't buy books. He concluded they could buy them if they wanted to but they didn't. They had other pleasures. If that was true for books then, how much more true it is for vegetables now.

When we were poor the thing that bugged me most was anxiety. We could get by so long as nothing went wrong. (The car stalls and your lips move in silent prayer. A paycheque is a day late and your chest starts to hurt.) Healthy food simply wasn't an issue. In fact someone praised us for the way we always seemed to have good, plain wholesome English food on the hob. So we did. If you buy Scrag End of Animal and cook it for hours you can eat as peasants did for centuries. It seemed like that stew lasted for centuries, actually. Every fibre of my soul yearned for a Waitrose Ready Meal but I didn't starve.

The middle class poor do make some decisions that are as bad in their own way as the decisions of the working class and sub-working class poor. Since I've cited Orwell once against the working class I'll do so again against the middle class-but-slipping: he also said somewhere that thousands of people yearly cast themselves into real destitution by their efforts to keep up the pretence that they are not poor. This is spot-on. Think what agonies people will go through to keep 'the house'. When you also add in the effects of modern vices unknown to Orwell such as thinking one has to have a computer, the end result shouldn't leave the snobby salad-eaters looking so smug. But it does leave them looking healthy.

A hypothesis Walker doesn't suggest but I do is that welfare makes you unhealthy. Welfare people spend a lot of time sitting around doing nothing, and that is bad for your health. (The fun thing about that last sentence is it presses all the outrage buttons while remaining perfectly defensible.) Inactivity, low morale and passivity are the hallmarks of welfare and are also the hallmarks of ill health. Getting folk off welfare would save lives.

I had a sort of preparatory proto-rant to this one over in the comments to this post at Freedom and Whisky. Some BBC report said that poorer people couldn't afford healthy food and couldn't afford exercise. Can't the BBC conceive of exercise outside a gym?

ADDED LATER: A thing I didn't bring out in this rant was that when I talk about health problems being behavioural problems nine times out of ten I think that harmful behaviours are made a lot more likely by bad incentives in society. In that respect I haven't changed much since my pinko days - although my views as to what constitutes a bad state of society have changed.

Yeah. I'm still a wimp.

Sulli

has up two funny stories about politically correct editing. Here's my contribution to the genre, which I actually heard in a sermon: worried that he might hesitate or stumble over the deceased's name while reading the words of a funeral service, a Catholic priest got into the habit of using the the "Replace All" function of his word processor to print out the text with the correct name inserted every time. All went well until he had to conduct the funeral of a lady called Mary, closely followed by another funeral for a man called Joe. "Hail Joe, full of grace..."

More on polio vaccination in Nigeria.

I'm putting this follow up to my Biased BBC post here rather than there because it's more about the story itself rather than the BBC presentation of it. There's plenty to say.

Anthony Cox of the late lamented Black Triangle blog writes:

You are making me all nostalgic about my blog, I've been covering this for
some time...

Anti-vaccine and anti-American nexus

Anti-American and anti-vaccine nexus re-confirmed

The Nigerian Vaccine Scandal

Mission Impossible

And here's a link plus discussion from Gene Expressions: link

One of the commenters ("bbartlog") to the Gene Expressions post brings up some reasonable arguments against vaccination. I concede that when liberty meets public health, sparks fly. Here are some of the issues:

• The "prisoner's dilemma" mentioned by bbartlog: it might lower the risk of harm to the general population if your child were vaccinated but raise the risk for your child, if he were particularly susceptible to an adverse reaction, for instance.
  
• What does a libertarian do with Typhoid Mary? Don't think we haven't thought about it. Options discussed have included all possible combinations of the right of communities to exclude, insurance, quarantine plus compensation, and a well-placed bullet through the head.
  
• The idea that the [Jews/ Catholics/ CIA / KGB / alien lizards] are contaminating something or other to make our women infertile is a staple of loony conspiracy theorists. That should not blind us to the fact that accidental contamination of vaccines does occur. One of the commenters to the final Black Triangle post mentions a case.
  
• Nor is it inconceivable that the the authorities might take measures that infringe human rights under the guise of public health, and might lie about doing it. (Though I cannot resist a digression to say that the belief that back in World War II the British Army secretly put bromide in the soldiers' tea to reduce their sex drive is a myth according to this Q&A from New Scientist and this urban folklore page. The latter says the Army did use bromide but only to purify water. Snopes mentions and denies a parallel US myth about saltpetre. )
  
• The health lobby are very arrogant. Their belief that health trumps self-ownership is a danger to freedom, the more so because it is sincere and well meaning. This is actually one of the major issues of our time.

OK, so I've raised all these questions and shown what a reasonable person I am. I've told the BMA to get their noses out of my life on this blog before now and no doubt I will again. Now let's get back to the immediate case before us.

None of these points, thought-provoking though they are, seriously challenge the point I made on Biased BBC. The myth that "the Americans are lacing polio vaccine to make Nigerian women infertile" is baseless. While it lasts, it kills. If the BBC talk about "public service" means anything at all, it means educating people not to believe such rubbish.

UPDATE: Gadaffi believes similar conspiracy theories. This account comes via Noah of Africapundit.

If you are at peace with the world,

read Laban Tall and the reinvigorated Peter Briffa and they'll soon set you right.

On Biased BBC

I have up an angry post about BBC reporting of the conspiracy theory that is stopping many Nigerians from being vaccinated against polio.

Simple evil.

Cass Brown

saw my piece on sick jokes, and now writes:

Dear Natalie

I am terminally ill, happy and have produced a web site which is an idiot's guide to accepting, living with, laughing at and even dying from cancer or other serious illness. The very, very last bit I can't be absolutely sure of but then who can? I could have put together some beautifully crafted, grammatically correct essays but I hope you will understand, that when I say "I don't have a lot of time" I mean it far more literally than you do. I wanted to publish some thoughts which may just light a spark in some people and help them or their families to deal with their situation. I am receiving overwhelming support from the general public MPs, doctors nurses etc. This may be of interest to you or maybe to other employees as this can touch anyone and does touch most families at some stage.

I am not selling anything and I am not supporting a cause, religion or other group. As you will see from the site, it seems that some people's lives have been changed for the better merely by looking at this different approach.

No handkerchief needed.

Kind Regards

Cass Brown

The website is here. Now, as it happens, Blog City is being upgraded so I haven't actually seen it. But the email struck me as straightforward and up-front so I'm taking it on trust. That sort of humour that I expect to see there isn't going to appeal to everybody, but there is a big difference between grim humour about your own position and mockery of someone else's, as members of the Guinea Pig Club could tell you.

UPDATE: I'm afraid I still haven't been able to get the first link (http://cancergiggles.blog-city.com/read/472766.htm) to work. I can't figure out what I'm doing wrong

Important Environmental News

. Bjorn Lomborg looks like Harrison Ford.

Bet that explains some of his success - and some of the fury against him.

Sorry, too busy to blog today.

I'll just mention that while desperately trying to hack down a few of the hydra-heads of email I found one offering me effort-free academic qualifications which came from a netscape email address starting with the characters "nataliesolent" and which had in the text the phrase "real name: natalie solent."

Gosh, what an amazing coincidence, I don't think. I am definitely not offering fake MBAs for money, and so far as I know there is no other Natalie Solent on the net. May all spammers die a lingering death in the depths of space.