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xchrom

(108,903 posts)
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 01:27 PM Apr 2013

MMR and me

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/life-and-physics/2013/apr/19/mmr


A young boy with a measles rash. Photograph: mediacolor's/Alamy


***SNIP

I have a doctorate in physics. My wife has one in chemistry. We have an 11-year-old son, who should have got his MMR jab in 2003. We're probably better informed scientifically than most. (You would hope so, anyway, if Oxford and Durham take care when awarding doctorates.) We're generally sceptical, with no particular trust in governments (especially when the prime minister at the time wouldn't say whether his own son had had the treatment he was recommending for everyone else). We read Private Eye, which was back then still saying the now-struck-off and discredited Andrew Wakefield was a victim of a conspiracy. Private Eye is often correct, so who was to know that this time it had its head up its arse?

Back in 2003, we were in an agony of indecision. In the end it took several days' research to decide what to do. This involved downloading academic papers from outside my own field and desperately trying to understand them. It meant doing it at work, because anyone without academic library access would have had to pay huge amounts for the privilege of reading that publicly funded research. It meant forming a judgement, and there was no escape, no easy way out, because there were risks in all decisions.

This was very frightening.

In the end, even to a physicist and a chemist, the medical evidence was overwhelming. He got his MMR. But it was hard.
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hlthe2b

(101,711 posts)
1. "who should have got" (?!) Somehow, I'd expect better grammar from this PhD physicist (editor?)
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 01:31 PM
Apr 2013

I hate to be sidetracked by this and I'm not normally a "grammar cop", but this was jarring, coming, as it does, in the very first few sentences of the piece.

Warpy

(110,900 posts)
3. That's a colloquialism, you can hear it on BBC stuff all the time.
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 03:50 PM
Apr 2013

However, since we're not British, we need to say "gotten."

I have my own problems with the MMR. I get sick as hell and don't develop a positive antibody titer to measles, a disease that nearly killed me when I was six. That disqualified me from working on pediatrics floors and I was fine with that.

However, an unvaccinated kid with the measles out in public is a loaded gun pointed at me.

I'm thrilled Wakefield has been exposed, discredited and humiliated. I just wish more of that would follow him to the US.

hlthe2b

(101,711 posts)
4. like "in-hospital" (as opposed to "in THE hospital").... LOL.. drives me nuts.
Sat Apr 20, 2013, 04:10 PM
Apr 2013

Though if someone wanted to sponsor me to live/work in London for a year or few, I'm sure I'd get over it.

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