Interesting Threads of Thought
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Some things to think about that I learned on the net
This page is just various bits of information that I have gathered from various sources. I have lumped them together in essay form according to subject. This page is an example of "one thing leads to another". I seem to find "snippets" of information that can be connected by a thin thread. I read something in a book, see something on the Internet, or I hear something on television or radio. When I have seen several things, my mind churns and I go, "Ah!". I connect the "snippets" together and come to a conclusion. These "snippets" are "straws that show which way the current is set". I have put these "straws" together here. Some of the "straws" are of course "anecdotal". I try to give my sources, but sometimes I can't remember where I "heard" or read something. You can make of my "conclusions" what you will. (By the way, I am not a feminist. You will notice as you read this web site, that I use "old fashioned" grammar sometimes. I still believe in the grammatical rule of using the pronoun "he" for when the gender of the person is not known. I like showing my politically-incorrectness and so I use old-fashioned gender specific nouns. Here is an example of a "pet peeve" of mine. A woman, whose profession is acting, can never be called an "actor". The only way a woman can be called an "actor" is if she gets a sex change operation. Otherwise she is an "actress". I cannot understand why a woman would want to be thought of like a man anyway!) I hope all the links on this page work when you try and access them. Hopefully, I have included enough other information about the linked pages, in case the links don't work and you want to look the page up on "Google". (www.google.com)
  Part One: The Human Immune System and Sanitation

One of the greatest "health" controversies on the Internet is about vaccines. There is tons of mainstream information on the health benefits of giving children their "routine" immunizations. There are (possibly) even more web sites giving information on the dangers of vaccines. If you read what I have read, giving a child his "shots" should never be thought of as "routine". It is difficult to sort out all the information and know who is telling the truth. I personally tend to believe the "alternative press" a little more than the "mainstream press". I know that the "mainstream health bodies" usually have a connection to the makers of the vaccines. The connection is a lot of the time financial. The "mainstream press" just parrots back what the "mainstream health bodies" say anyway. The journalists rarely check out their stories to see who is telling the truth. It is very difficult to know which "alternative" source to believe. You can read various opinions from tons of doctors and "lay people". In this section, are some things I have learned. I have NOT sorted out all the facts and come up with a solution to the vaccine controversy. I am not telling anyone what to believe. This is just some "food for thought". I originally meant this first section to be a couple of paragraphs or so. But, as I told Vladimir, "I can't write so few words". I was hoping to put more subjects on here as I thought about things. We will have to see what happens. I know it looks as if I am giving you a lot of information here. Yet, I am leaving out a lot of details to the "straws" which make up my "paper on sanitation". This is just the "gist" so you can get started.

Sanitation and the Immune System

I have a collection of "old" books. Some of my favorite subjects are, cooking, health and "keeping house". I have quite a few books that have, "household hints" and ways to "keep house" in them. (Not that I follow their dictates as often as I should.) Most of these books were printed before 1960. The ones printed before the 1950's, really stress cleaning and sanitation.

One book I managed to pick up is, "Bacteriology and Sanitation" prepared by Glenn M. Hobbs, Ph.D. It is from the "American School of Correspondence". The last copyright in it is, 1917. This book talks about proper sanitation of the "Canal Zone" (Panama) amongst other things. There is an interesting table on page 37, showing "The ten leading causes of death in Massachusetts in order of frequency" for 1856 and 1904. In 1856 most of the diseases were infectious diseases. The leading killer was "consumption" (tuberculosis). In 1904 "consumption" was the second leading killer and "heart disease" was first. It would seem that as people cleaned up and became sanitary, rates of infectious disease decreased. As to the "heart disease", look at the "healthy eating links page", to find out more. The epidemic of heart disease is due in part to "our" going from eating a traditional diet of animal fats to eating things like partially hydrogenated vegetable oils.

I remember reading "The American Way of Birth" by Jessica Mitford. I think I am confusing two sources here…..but Jessica Mitford writes about how "they" discovered that hand washing could eradicate "childbed fever". I once saw a documentary via PBS on the history of nursing in the U.S. Was it there, that I learned that women dreaded having their babies in hospitals? I don't remember, it was either by that documentary, or in "The American Way of Birth". It was only the poorest women who would have their babies in a hospital. Women with any means at all, had their babies at home. Women in the hospitals usually died from "childbed fever". Well, the doctor would go in and do a postmortem examination on the dead woman. Then he would go directly in and deliver another baby. That woman would die from the fever too. It was an ongoing cycle. There was no hand washing between patients. I think I read or saw (although I am not sure now) that women, who were forced to go to a hospital for delivery, would sit outside on the steps waiting until the last minute before entering. They knew they would surely die inside. It was when doctors like Oliver Wendell Holmes started advocating the washing of hands, that this fever was eradicated. Oliver Wendell Holmes lived from 1809 to 1894.

It was during the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the Western World started pushing cleanliness and sanitation. They discovered "germs" as an agent of disease. As with any age, there were competing theories about all sorts of things. In the field of "infectious diseases", two rivals were Louis Pasteur and Antoine Bechamp. Pasteur and his "theories" are well known. One seldom hears about Bechamp anymore. You can read about both men and their rivalry at the Sumaria.net website. http://www.sumeria.net/bechamp/bechamp.html

"Bechamp, [Pierre Jacques] Antoine (born 1816, died 1908). French chemist and implacable opponent of Pasteur and the germ theory. Born at Bassing (Lorraine). Spent some years in Rumania. Returned to France and studied in Strassburg, where he met Pasteur. Bechamp became Prof. of Medical Chemistry and Pharmacy in Montpellier, and in 1874 Dean of the Free Faculty of Medicine in Lille. Resigned after eleven years and settled first in Havre and then in Paris, where he died in a room in the Quarter Latin aged 92. For some years B. attained great notoriety with his theory of microzymas but this is now forgotten. (Biog. and portrait in Hume, E.D., Bechamp or Pasteur? A lost chapter in the history of biology, Chicago 1923)"

Another neat book I found was, "A Tale of Soap & Water" by Grace T. Hallock. "The Historical Progress of Cleanliness". Published by "Cleanliness Institute" 1928. "A Tale of Soap & Water" is a very nicely illustrated children's book. It is basically the history of soap and water. When I looked up the "Cleanliness Institute" on the Internet, I discovered that it was a consortium of the soap and glycerin manufacturers. This book is a piece of propaganda from the soap manufacturers. Evidently, a great deal of the 20th century's push to "come clean", was fueled by soap companies. I am always a little skeptical about large companies. My distrust of large companies probably started from the "socialist" teaching I had as a teenager. There are times when my skepticism is justified. Other times it is something I have to control my thinking on. Like when I see that a, food "product" was produced by a large soap company. I tend to jokingly wonder if any soap accidentally made its way into the food package. (As if the food and the soap were manufactured in the same factory, AND some of the soap would spill into the food.)

If you want to learn about the "Cleanliness Institute" from a "business" point of view check out, http://www.worldtrademag.com/CDA/ArticleInformation/features/BNP__Features__Item/0,3483,66537,00.html

If you want to learn about the "Cleanliness Institute" from an academic point of view, check out,http://www.faculty.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/mokyr/warwick.pdf This page requires that you have a "PDF" reader on your computer. A good one, which is free via the Internet, is "Adobe Acrobat". There is a little section on this page about the "Cleanliness Institute". I think there is another PDF document with something about the "Cleanliness Institute" on the same site. Just go to "google" and type in "Cleanliness Institute" to find it.

If you want a feminist point of view to being clean, please view the article, (There is something about the "Cleanliness Institute" on here.) "Downright Dangerous and Dirty: Tainted Trademarks of the Monstrous Feminine" by Cynthia Lee Henthorn. http://www.nomadnet.org/massage5/dangerous/index.htmlhttp://www.nomadnet.org/massage5/dangerous/two.htmlhttp://www.nomadnet.org/massage5/dangerous/three.html

This is supposed to be a drawing of a doctor's office. It has lost some of it in translation.
  Part Two There is something I have heard of lately called the "dirt theory". (I do not know if that is the proper name for it.) From what I understand it says that a little dirt won't kill you. Which means, that you need some infections in order to build up a healthy immune system. Here are some things I know in regards to this "dirt theory". This goes back to the vaccine controversy.

The smallpox vaccine is used as an example by the anti-vaccine people on the net. It is generally believed, by a lot of people apparently, that it was not the vaccine that caused "us" to eradicate smallpox. It was proper sanitation. There was an address given by William Howard Hay M.D. on June 25, 1937 before the Medical Freedom Society. It is copied from the Congressional Record. It was read in support of the Lemke bill to abolish compulsory vaccination. (It would seem that this bill did not pass as I was subjected to many mandatory vaccines in my day.) There are web sites, which quote from this address. But only one I found seemed to have the "whole of", or a maybe a "better part" of, the address. The longer version was at what should have been a really good anti-vaccine website. All sorts of sites have links to this site. That website WAS VaccineWebsite.com at www.whale.to/. It is not there now. You can try and access the page with William Howard Hay's address, via google's cache of it at, http://216.239.51.100/search?q=cache:u6da1jkAwpQC:www.whale.to/vaccines/hay.html+Medical+Freedom+Society+"William+Howard+Hay"&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

A shorter version of Dr. Hay's address can be found at http://goodlight.net/nyvic/health/disease/dr_hay.htm

The address by Dr. William Howard Hay deals with, among other examples, the Philippine sanitation and vaccination campaign at the time of the American occupation there. If you want to know the official Army medical account of that time, please look here, http://www.armymedicine.army.mil/history/booksdocs/spanam/gillett3/ch11.htm

Here is another anti-vaccination article http://newtimes.rway.com/2000/wellness00/immune.shtml It is interesting in that it talks about the connection of exposure to infection and the strength of the immune system.

The "dirt theory" is, that as we cleaned up and became "sanitary" we weakened our immune systems. We were not exposed to common infections, which strengthened our immune systems. As a side note, it is well known that for healthy digestion we need friendly bacteria in our "gut". But with the high amounts of antibiotics in the food chain and the over-prescribing of antibiotics in past years, we have less and less of these bacteria in our bodies. The sales of various stomach remedies are astronomical. I should know, I used to work as a cashier in a discount drug store. (discount chemists shop)

I was watching a documentary on the History Channel recently. It was about the development of the polio vaccine and the famous March of Dimes campaign. At one point the researchers were puzzled as to how polio became an epidemic so fast. The scientists discovered that it was our sanitation, which caused this to happen. Polio was evidently a common virus in the past. But because of the great push for sanitation, "we" did not develop a natural immunity to polio like "we" had in the past.

Someone we know from our Bible Fellowship, was talking about "our" immune systems. He brought up the well known saying they tell tourists visiting Mexico, "Don't drink the water". He reminded us that "our" immune systems are "weaker" than that of the Mexicans. "We" get sick from a sort of dysentery if "we" drink their water. But the Mexicans can drink the water. They do not get sick from it.

In Canada, not all the water systems of the country are chlorinated. In recent years, they had some serious e-colli outbreaks due to contaminated water. I heard a debate on CBC Radio One about the issue of adding chlorine to the water. One person phoned in and talked about the disease agents similar to the one in the Mexican water. This person had lived overseas for a time. They wondered if it would not be better for Canadians to develop immunities to some of the minor water born pathogens. The question is, do we add a potentially harmful chemical to our drinking water that will kill all the disease agents? Or do we develop a strong immune system like they have in other countries? There are better ways of cleaning the water than by using chlorination by the way.

Now for the last thought in this thread. (At least as far as I can remember it now. This is the last thing on my note.) The chickenpox vaccine--- is it really something that should be given to children? When the drug company came out with a vaccine for chickenpox, the CBC television news program "The National" had a doctor on who was warning about the dangers of giving such a vaccine. He said that no one knew how long the effects of the vaccine would last. It is well known, that chickenpox in adults is much more of a problem than it is in children. The death rate in adults with chickenpox is much higher that it is for children. Adults get much more "sick" from chickenpox than children do. What if the effects of the vaccine lasted only a few years and then we saw an epidemic of adult chickenpox? Then I read a BBC News article about how some adults who once had chickenpox as children, develop shingles later in life.http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1961565.stm If you have ever had, or know anyone who has had shingles, then you know it is something you would not wish upon your worst enemy. The article said that adults who are repeatedly exposed to children who have chickenpox, strengthen their immune systems against shingles. So, if you immunize children against chickenpox it could hurt adults in the long run.

Wait! There's more.

Somewhere along my reading and listening, I may have heard "something" suggesting another point of interest. It seems like I heard, that "they" have come up with "evidence?" suggesting that getting a disease and fighting it off does something different to the body than just getting the resistance by immunization for that disease. I think the comment was that building the resistance by getting the disease was better than building resistance via vaccine. Of course I could be dreaming that I heard or read this.

Then there is the part to this thread suggested by my local veterinarian. She was telling us that our cat had a different immune system than humans. The resistance to the diseases that the vaccine was for, can only last a year or two (maybe three?) in cats. In humans they were claiming that the resistance lasted a life time. (Now they are saying that the resistance to some diseases won't last a life time in humans. I think this new idea is just the government's way of making sure "we" get inoculated with these new anti-terrorist vaccines.) This all made me wonder why a cats immune system would be so different from ours. I just brushed it off as "cats are cats, and we are humans" and left it at that. I was reminded of what the Canadian doctor that the CBC interviewed about the then "new" chicken pox vaccine. (see above) Then eventually the U.S. government said that anyone vaccinated against "small pox" would have to get the new vaccine for it. AND they were going to pass a law, which would MANDATE that we all get the new small pox vaccine. They said that the resistance we had to smallpox would not last a lifetime. So I kept thinking of what the Vet. said about my cat's immune system. Then I thought of how we humans were originally formed out of the dust of the earth. Some parts of us were not "created". This is because when God creates something he does not have to "create" it again. Does this mean, that when God created the animals, and he created their immune systems, that we got a similar immune system to the animals? I know I am speculating and that is not a good thing to do. This would be an interesting thing to study from The Bible. But the real question is, does all this mean that we have been inoculating ourselves with vaccines and that only now are scientists beginning to learn anything about the long-term effects of doing that to ourselves? I think the answer to the last question is "Yes!".

Back to the comment by the veterinarian I know there is a controversy about vaccines in pets. People are concerned that their pets are getting too much of the vaccine at one time. There is a debate as to how long the effects of the vaccines last in animals. So, some people are buying their animal vaccines themselves and giving smaller doses than what a Vet. gives.

Relevant Smallpox articles:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/1973070.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2014513.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2114890.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2222225.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/2160731.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/hottopics/smallpox/index.shtml

In England, the MMR (Measles, Mumps and Rubella) vaccine, is seen by some as a leading candidate for causing autism. I have been following the debate about this vaccine for months now. One study will say there is a link between this vaccine and autism. The next study says there is no link. The British government says that the vaccine is safe. Parents don't know what to believe. This means, they either won't vaccinate their children, or they opt for the "single jab". The "single jab" is the single virus vaccine as opposed to the three in one. Now one of the only manufacturers of the single measles vaccine has stopped making it. They can't get single jabs in the U.K. anymore.

To learn more about the U.K. MMR debate, check out http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/health/2002/mmr_debate/

Then there are those who say that the vaccines have mercury in them. There are others who say there is a link to mercury and autism. What I wonder, is if something in the vaccine could cause children to be unable to absorb nutrients. I heard on the short-wave radio that they found some of the disease agent in the vaccine in the intestines of a child. Could this be the reason for the bowel disease? Do the vaccines cause the intestines to be coated with something? If the child has severe diarrhea, then no nutrients will be absorbed. Without proper nutrients, there can be severe neurological problems. Could this be why, the medicine that causes the intestines to absorb dye, seems to help some children? Could the medicine allow the child to absorb nutrients, when they aren't able to normally? The more I look at vaccines, the more puzzled I get.