One of my facebook friends posted a link to an article provocatively titled: CDC researchers say mothers should stop breastfeeding to boost ‘efficacy’ of vaccines.

About the only good thing I can say about that site is that they linked to the original paper so that I could read it. As it turns out, the article completely misrepresents the study and it’s conclusions.

As background, you should know that vaccinations work by taking dead or attenuated (weakling) viruses and getting them into the body, which trains the child’s immune system to recognize them. Breast milk also contains antibodies against many viruses, which can help defuse threats before they manage to cause serious infections in the kid.

This study focused on rotavirus vaccines that are given orally. What they found was that when breast milk and the vaccine are given at nearly the same time, the antibodies in the milk hit the dead viruses and neutralize them before the child’s immune system has a chance to see them. As a result, the kid’s immune system doesn’t learn to recognize the threat, and the vaccine doesn’t work.

Their recommendation is that the mother delay breast-feeding for a little while beforehand and a little while afterwards, to give the vaccine time to get into the kid before the breastmilk neutralizes it all: “A short delay of breast-feeding at the time of immunization might be the least complicated intervention to improve the efficacy of these vaccines”

So no, they’re emphatically not recommending that people stop breastfeeding altogether. They’re just saying that by telling mothers to stagger their feeding a little bit, we can make the vaccine more effective and save thousands of lives! How cool is that?!

Another important point is that the study re-emphasizes how breastmilk helps defend kids against real viruses. One commenter, who has clearly been drinking the kool-aid, interpreted that to mean that breastmilk should be enough, and that maybe we should be getting rid of vaccines all together. That’s a dangerous idea, because while breast milk is great, it just isn’t enough.

Right now, about a half-million kids die every year from rotavirus, and 2 million more get severely ill. This happens even though lots of these kids are being breastfed. It’s also important to note that once a child’s immune system recognizes the threat, it’ll remember that even after the kid is done breastfeeding. This means the vaccine helps keep toddlers safe too.

Nothing drives me crazier that people distorting science to try to push an agenda based on fear and wishful thinking. Vaccines save lives, and we need to keep spreading that message loud enough that it drowns out the dangerous and false information being spread by anti-vaccination proponents.

Citation:

It is not possible to be a scientist unless you believe that knowledge of the world, and the power which this gives, is a thing which is of intrinsic value to humanity, and that you are using it to help in the spread of knowledge, and are willing to take the consequences.

–Robert Oppenheimer

This is the field where the battle did not happen,
where the unknown soldier did not die.
This is the field where grass joined hands,
where no monument stands,
and the only heroic thing is the sky.

Birds fly here without any sound,
unfolding their wings across the open.
No people killed — or were killed — on this ground
hallowed by neglect and an air so tame
that people celebrate it by forgetting its name.

With some help from Ask Metafilter, I tracked down this NYT infographic, which is based on information from the 2008 American Time Use Survey. It turns out that at 6:30 am, which is roughly when the sun rose today, 53% of employed people are sleeping. What a waste of sunlight. At 5:00 pm, which is roughly when the sun set today, only 3% of people are sleeping.

With this in mind, I propose that we eliminate standard time and move permanently to Daylight Savings time. There are arguments to be made based on energy savings or mitigating the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder here, but dammit, it should be enough that it would make a whole lot of people’s evenings suck less.

There are some oddities in the perspective with which we see the world. The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be

–Douglas Adams

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.

The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.

This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.

– President Dwight D. Eisenhower

I’ve posted the first sentence of this quotation before, but hadn’t read the subsequent lines until today.

The playoffs start tonight, and while most columnists have picked the Phillies, Rany Jazayerli had this to say:

The Phillies have the best starting rotation anyone has seen in years. Which will just make their first-round exit at the hands of a team that no one thought would even be here that much more galling. In a season in which a pair of titans have already suffered shocking late-season collapses, the Phillies will be the biggest to fall. I fully expect that by the end of this series, at least one Phillies pitcher will suffer from PTSD thanks to Albert Pujols. Philadelphia fans already hate me, so I might as well earn their scorn: St. Louis Cardinals in four games.

There’s nothing quite like October baseball.

“Now, Bill,” Jody tells me, “you got to remember something when you go to grab that frog tonight.” … “You’re not petting that frog,” he says. “You’re not slapping that frog. You got to…” He presses his lips together, searching for something that will illustrate his point. His eye comes to rest on an empty coffee cup in the truck’s holder. “You got to grab that frog.” As he speaks, a large right fist shoots out, seizing and crushing the Styrofoam cup so quickly and completely that it basically explodes inside the cab. The noise alone is extraordinary.

Grabbing Dinner