You can email me at ken@autismnewsbeat.com

Speaking of news, have you seen this:
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=14

Also, for a collection of blogs of autitistic adults, parents of autistic children and those who work with autistic people go here;
http://www.autism-hub.co.uk/

http://www.cdc.gov/flu/weekly/index.htm

In these reports, they list pediatric deaths from laboratory-proven influenza, as well as nation-wide deaths attributed to pneumonia and “influenza”. The reported pediatric deaths are definitely caused by influenza.

Last influenza season (which runs from October to May), there were 68 deaths of children under 18 years of age that were from laboratory-proven influenza.

Since there were a little over 74 million children under the age of 18 in Jan 2007 (rough middle of the “flu” season), that works out to a shade under one in a million. Not bad odds, I suppose, unless it’s your child.

Of course, the hospitalization rate was higher than the death toll. In the same influenza season, a little over 7,000 children aged 0 – 4 years were hospitalized with laboratory-proven influenza.

And last season was a mild one. In the 2003 – 2004 influenza season, there were 152 deaths of children younger than 18 and almost 24,000 children 0 – 4 were hospitalized.

I suppose it all depends on whether you’re willing to take the risk.

It’s also worth considering the impact of vaccination on the deaths and hospitalizations. If there is a reasonable “herd immunity”, the people with poor immunity and those who aren’t vaccinated are safer.

Prometheus

Prometheus

In children and adults the consequences of influenza are mainly absences from school and work, however the risk of complications is greatest in children and people over 65 years old.

Another consequence is a worldwide pandemic similar to the 1919 Spanish flu outbreak that killed tens of millions.

http://www.cochrane.org/reviews/en/ab004876.html

This quote from the first article is interesting:

“The large gap between policy and what the data tell us (when rigorously assembled and evaluated) is surprising. The reasons for this situation are not clear and may be complex. The starting point is the potential confusion between influenza and influenza-like illness, when any case of illness resembling influenza is seen as real influenza, especially during peak periods of activity. Some surveillance systems report cases of influenza-like illness as influenza without further explanation. This confusion leads to a gross overestimation of the impact of influenza, unrealistic expectations of the performance of vaccines, and spurious certainty of our ability to predict viral circulation and impact. The consequences are seen in the impractical advice given by public bodies on thresholds of the incidence of influenza-like illness at which influenza specific interventions (antivirals) should be used.”

Please note that you won’t find any evidence to confirm the CDC’s death rates from Flu that they publish every year. Those numbers are used to justify the vaccine, but are almost certainly overestimated due to the inability to seperate flu vs flu-like illness. (let alone the lack of evidence of efficacy in many of the populations the flu vaccine is given to).

I love you.

- pD

I’m not sure why you posted that, but it contains no data at all on the flu vaccine. The influenza vaccine in this paper is referring to HeB which is a childhood vaccine. They don’t even discuss it in the body of the paper.

I also note that a lot of the references here come from industry funded studies which the Cochrane report (a semi-independent group) has clearly stated are filled with bias and design flaws.

This paper was specifically written to promote widespread usage of the HPV vaccine.

So far that’s 7 recent references to show lack of efficacy of the flu vaccine. That represents a huge cost benefit problem.