Japan develops vaccine for West Nile virus

[The Sushi Bandit]

http://mdn.mainichi.co.jp/news/20040827p2a00m0dm006000c.html

[liontamer]

1. yay

now the city can stop spraying poison on us

[phantom power]

2. I wonder if all this spraying was even worth it.

By all estimates I've heard, many thousands of people have been infected with WNV, and are either completely asymptomatic, or just think they've got a case of flu, and get better.

The number of people hospitalized is a pretty small fraction of those infected, and the number of people who've died is a small fraction of that.

It's scary to see people die from a new virus, butg if you look at the numbers dispassionately, it's not clear to me that the risk/reward tradeoff for massive pesticide spraying is so great.

[liontamer]

3. I don't think it's worth it at all

I think it just makes politicians look as though they care about the welfare of the people. I'm just glad that now they'll stop.

[NNadir]

4. Watch for lots of lawsuits and the banning of the vaccine in the US.

We talk quite a bit about scientific illiteracy here and the failure of the public to understand risk analysis. Aside from energy, the use of vaccines is one of the more egregrious instances of anti-scientific mythology intruding on public policy.

The much needed Lyme vaccine was pulled from the market on the grounds that the cost of defending lawsuits related to the vaccine exceeded the likely profit.

If you actually know science and want to get your dander up, read some of those articles in our scientifically illiterate "press" about autism and Mercury poisoning from vaccines. The same press that largely ignores the issue of Mercury in the atmosphere from energy production (since it wouldn't show the media hero George Bush in a particularly favorable light) will swear up and down that the one-time exposure to the vaccine preservative Thimerosal (a Mercury thiosalicylate) causes autism. Incredible, but true.