Off Topic: H1n1

I work in a hospital pharmacy, so I have strong feelings about this subject.  I'm wary of products that our wonderful pharmaceutical companies (can you smell the sarcasm?) rush into production -- they don't see the forest for the money they can make from the trees, so to speak.  The US was in panic mode when the outbreaks occurred last year (typical idiocy), so the hype to get the vaccine was very high.  Not being one to follow such hype, I dragged my butt about getting vaccinated, though -- as a hospital employee -- we were more or less compelled to get both the "regular seasonal" flu and H1N1 vaccines (I opted to take the nasal form for both).

(And, to be honest, I think that I had the "piggy" virus back in October -- I was out of work for 2 weeks with all sorts of lovely symptoms which eventually abated.  Upside:  I had plenty of time to play with Pianoteq, even if I did feel like the living dead at the time!  I never had any official tests done [better to stay away from people -- doctors' offices don't need you to bring the enemy to their door ;^], but the consensus at Employee Health was H1N1, not seasonal flu.  Ironically, I still had to get both vaccines, and the H1N1 wasn't available to us for about another month afterward -- so it wouldn't have done me a darn bit of good to try to get it earlier, anyway!!!)

The whole scenario played out in a fairly sloppy fashion here, thankfully with no pandemic flare-ups.  (You would've thought that the plague was in town, with the way the media constantly harped on the subject.)

Would I have refused to take the vaccine if it hadn't been virtually required by my job?  Probably, or I would have just been too lazy to get it anyway.  "First times" with drug companies tend to be the scariest;  one just loves hearing about this-or-that fault being found with a med after it's been released and consumed.

As for mercury poisoning and/or autism -- who knows?  So many variables come into play that you almost have a hard time singling out a vaccine as the root cause of such ills.  Damned if you do, damned if you don't...

To be honest, my situation is way different from that of most people; I have CLL so a virus like H1N1 is too big a risk for me to take, and my age is WAY past the point of autism being a problem (even if it is caused by an element in vaccines).  Besides I've been getting flu shots for going on twenty years and I'm still here.

G

Strange topic to be reading on the Pianoteq forum!

I live in the UK and am not in a 'high risk group' (very old, very young, or a front-line health care worker), so I didn't get the vaccine. I didn't get swine flu either
My other half is a nurse and so he got it, and experienced no ill effects apart from a stiff arm for a couple of afternoons...

As a chemist, I'll have to pick you up on the whole "mercury" thing.

They don't put mercury metal in vaccines - that would be unsane, as mercury metal is well known for making people mad as a hatter. Saying that there is "mercury" in vaccines makes people think of environmental disasters like the Minamata tragedy in Japan
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minamata_disease

In actual fact, an organo-mercury compound called thiomersal was used in some vaccines as a preservative (to stop them going mouldy, basically). Concerns were raised about this but the scientific consensus has repeatedly been that they could find no toxicity problems with it at all (nonetheless, to please people, they still decided to phase it out)
You can read a fair summary of it here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiomersal_controversy

Regarding the "rise" of autism:
autism is a "spectrum" of behaviours and personalities which society has decided are "abnormal". It is not a "disease" with a diagnosable physical cause.
If you take a historical perspective, you will see that over the centuries, "society" has had many fashions for varies types of "madness" that it decides it does not like.  A century ago, women were regularly getting diagnosed with "hysteria", a few centuries before that, they were getting diagnosed as "witches"... 
...there have always been people who are "autistic", and whom "normal" people have declared as "abnormal" in some way (Dalton, Dirac, Gary Numan...   ...  without a great many of them   a lot of these bloody "norms" would still be living in caves.

My advice would be:
- don't use silly YouTube videos with scary music as a reliable source of information.
- be highly skeptical when "society" tells you that increasing amounts of people are mentally "abnormal"

Feline1

I'm usually skeptical. Don't use to believe in conspiracy theories. But I searched a lot, and heard onpions of scientists on TV, not just youtubers video creator".
Also, most french doctors did not trusted the vacin, and you have to remamber that French medicine it's  really very good and care a lot about people, much more than for example USA medical system. I don't think they are ignorant !

I'm not saying the vacine will kill bilions to reduce human population, like some sick lunatic youtube videos stated. I just spot that maybe it's not safe enough to justify a large scale imunization against a type of flu that do not kill enough.

I'm just rising a discussion. Some researches really noticed a very high increase in authism after the 80's.  Change in diagnostic aproachs is the reason  ???   I don't know...   Maybe yes, maybe not.

I agre and sympathize with your commentary about "normal" people always classifying "abnormal " people.  I'm sure many "abnormals" can be great person, more sane than ordinary people.  While many idiots, from a given "usual brand fashion actual generation", are see as normal.
If a kid is too playful he is hiperactive. If he do not play enough he is slight authist.  A century ago if you was not a racist or had no religion you would be see as a sick or crazy.
But hey, If I had told about the possibility of over prescription of drugs to active kids, you would say I was silly conspiracy believer.  And there is a record increase in drugs prescription for kids. From drugs for hiperactive to anti depressing drugs.

About medicine, I also see a lot of news everywhere, suposed great discoveries, a lot of research and new drugs.  But in practice I see the doctors doing the same old things, same therapies, with minor modifications, but general the same things a decade or two ago, and people still always compalin.  The new discoveries looks like SCI_Fi and do not get much in practice, or took 3 times more time than the estimated to became available.
  So I take the practical facts to say that medicine sesms stop.

   Diagnoses with 3D ressoance seems great. But only tell where a person is  &*%¨#$@(#/]=   .  It did not solve someone's problem.

I caught h1n1 before the vaccine was available so I didn't need to get the shot

it's very hard to tell if the vaccine helped prevent something serious or if it was all money wasted; sometimes it's hard to tell victory from defeat

I think most people agree that the swine flu was "hyped" in the media, governments felt obliged to "respond" and provide access to a vaccine, and it's certainly something to be wary of - any new drug will have side effect risks, and these may outweigh the risk of the disease.

Bear in mind, though, that at least with a vaccine, you only get it once, rather than having to take a course of it which may take weeks or months...

When I see middle-class parents on television complaining that their children aren't normal enough, I do get very skeptical.
DIAGNOSIS of children as autistic has certainly increased, yes.
Diagnosis and concern about other things has decreased - for example, for many decades in the western world, from victorian times until the 1950s, there was great medical concern about child masturbating. We can all snigger about it now, but this was considered a serious social and medical problem which was damaging children and society.
You will not find many medics concerned about this now, diagnosing an excess of it, or proscribing ways to reduce it. But I very much doubt children are doing less of it.

A historical analysis of these types of things can provide great insight to societies' neuroses and how they are expressed regarding what is "abnormal". Michael Foucault wrote a lot about such things, for example "The Birth of the Clinic" and "Madness and Civilization" being classic texts...

I have "aspergers syndrome" myself.

It is quite handy for beta-testing the minutiae of software lol

Conversely I often dispair at what I consider to be the irrational, slap-dash, non-systematic behaviour of many of the "normal" musicians I work with

ahine!