Archives for 2009

Oh, I know. You’ll say these things are rare, that cervical cancer is a bad thing and that immunization programs are worth the risks. Certainly that’s what the experts always seem to say. But this 14-year-old girl was alive and now she’s dead.

Dr Caron Grainger, Joint Director of Public Health for NHS Coventry and the city’s council, said: “A 14-year-old girl took ill at a school in Coventry and was taken to University Hospital in the city where she later sadly died. Our sympathies are with the girl’s family and friends at this difficult time.”

She added that the incident happened shortly after the girl received the vaccine, but “no link can be made between the death and the vaccine until all the facts are known and a post-mortem takes place.”

[…]

Earlier this month, the drug safety watchdog MHRA said that thousands of schoolgirls were suffering suspected adverse reactions to the vaccine. Doctors’ reports found that girls of 12 and 13 were experiencing convulsions, fever and paralysis. The analysis drawn up by MHRA found that 2,107 patients reported suspected adverse reactions, with several reporting multiple reactions.

At the risk of sounding like a worse quack than I am (I’m not opposed to all vaccines; just the flu shot and this one, really): Why the rush to vaccinate girls given those kinds of side effects?

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UPDATE: Health officials say it’s “most unlikely” the vaccine caused her death.

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SECOND UPDATE, THURSDAY MORNING: “A girl who was vaccinated against cervical cancer died from a malignant tumour of the chest and not from a reaction to the jab, it was revealed.”

Oh boy, the knives are about to come out:

In a study which will cause renewed debate over who have to divide their time between caring for their offspring and going out to work, the researchers found children whose mothers worked were more likely to be driven to school, to watch more than two hours of TV a day, and have sweetened drinks between meals.

Children of mothers who worked full time also ate less fruit and vegetables, the study suggests.

Middle class families suffer the same problems as the findings remained similar even when household income was taken into account, the paper said.

It’s funny. We are surrounded by people who seem to think that moms actually don’t matter. I’m sure there are plenty of examples of families that work well even if Mom is out working, and sure, some women really don’t have much of a choice in the matter. But that doesn’t change the main point, which is that, all else being equal, growing up with Mom is better than the alternative. So why this?

Research author, Professor Catherine Law, paediatric epidemiologist at the Institute of Child Health, said: “Our results do not imply that mothers should not work.

“Rather, they highlight the need for policies and programmes to help support parents to create a healthy environment for their children.”

If this were a study showing that, say, breast-fed babies tended to be healthier than formula-fed ones, you think the researchers would insist that what was needed was a good set of policies to help support parents?

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Andrea adds: The fantastic lengths we will go to to avoid stating the obvious are amazing. That said, I believe most women have more sense about them, and they get the results of said study, furthermore, as Margaret Wente pointed out in her recent column, know what they prefer to do too. The main thing may be in this and so many other cases–the women reporting the findings are themselves working with kids. And very few will advise themselves against their current course of action.

A man is accused of killing both his girlfriend and her unborn child – he apparently wanted her to have an abortion and she’d refused. He will be charged with double murder. If the mother had decided to abort the baby (even at 8 months), the child’s life would not count.

What a sorry mess.

I try to be a reasonably reasonable kind of person. I like to know the why, not just the what. I rarely take anything for granted. And then, sometimes, I’m just a quack with a persistent bee in my bonnet (if you’ll forgive the mangled metaphor). For years I have scoffed at those who get the flu shot. And I’ve raved and ranted against them, too. The flu vaccine is useless at best, I’ve always said. And probably worse than that. (I’m also not a fan of Gardasil, which in my mind is way worse than useless at best.)

Now it turns out doctors are starting to catch up with my anti-flu-shot quackery:

A “perplexing” Canadian study linking H1N1 to seasonal flu shots is throwing national influenza plans into disarray and testing public faith in the government agencies responsible for protecting the nation’s health.

Distributed for peer review last week, the study confounded infectious-disease experts in suggesting that people vaccinated against seasonal flu are twice as likely to catch swine flu.

The paper is under peer review, and lead researchers Danuta Skowronski of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Gaston De Serres of Laval University must stay mum until it’s published.

Met with intense early skepticism both in Canada and abroad, the paper has since convinced several provincial health agencies to announce hasty suspensions of seasonal flu vaccinations, long-held fixtures of public-health planning.

“It has confused things very badly,” said Dr. Ethan Rubinstein, head of adult infectious diseases at the University of Manitoba. “And it has certainly cost us credibility from the public because of conflicting recommendations. Until last week, there had always been much encouragement to get the seasonal flu vaccine.”

Not only that: I was at a social gathering lately and was chastised by more than one guest (including one who is a nurse) not to shake hands and kiss friends (I’m French; the kiss-on-both-cheeks thing is something I do without thinking). There are messages on the radio reminding me to sneeze in my arm, etc. And I just want to scream. I’m healthy and not completely stupid. I know how to deal with the flu (stay home and sip chicken-noodle soup). It’s actually quite simple, and the more “experts” try to meddle with how normal people deal with normal health questions, the more they mess things up.

I am talking to a class at St. Paul University here in Ottawa tomorrow about the injustice of abortion for women. I see it’s posted here as a public lecture, so feel free to come if you are in the area. (Starts at 5:00 pm in the Saint Paul University Amphitheatre.)

Love this column. All of it. Mythbusting stereotypes on the gender front is important. I like the last line, too:

I don’t know how many women “should” be in top jobs, but it’s possible that there are about as many there as want to be there. Maybe our granddaughters will make different choices. In the meantime, maybe we should be congratulating ourselves for our success.

Why old school feminists won’t celebrate still baffles me–but perhaps that’s because they’d lose their Status of Women jobs. Some women have made a career out of complaining. Too bad.

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Rebecca adds: Ah, but “old-school feminists” are wedded to belief that gender is a social construct. If you deny the possibility that, at the level of large populations, men and women have different aptitudes, goals, interests and predispositions, then there can be no reason BUT sexism for them to have different career paths; even if we could prove to the Gloria Steinems and Andrea Dworkins that women are represented at the CEO level at about the same proportion that they want to be at that level, why that would simply prove that women are brainwashed by a patriarchal society to want different things. I’m afraid a lot of ideologues have made the small but important hop across falsifiability; there is nothing we could show them that would shake their confidence in their assumptions. Which, per Karl Popper, puts them squarely into dogma and superstition, rather than rationality, but that’s another post …

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Brigitte doesn’t know a lot about gender theory, but would like to say that as an incorrigible heteronormative kinda gal, I like it when men and women do different things just because they are, you know, different. I wouldn’t want men and women to be just the same. That would be boring and horrible.

This blog on women’s issues isn’t one I agree with a whole lot, but by asking if women are less happy when they wear less clothes, I think they’re on to something. I’m not sure that anorexia, bulimia and low self-esteem exist because models are thinner than a generation ago, though. Sure, there are women thinner and more beautiful than any of us out there (unless, apparently, you’re Megan Fox – but there are people out there who are smarter, richer, healthier, or better at karate than all of us, too, and the fact of their existence doesn’t drive us to despair, let alone mental illness.

The Jewish conception of modesty is, like all things Jewish, complicated, occasionally hard to understand and sometimes downright weird. (Gefilte fish, I’m looking at you.) But the basic concept of physical modesty, which applies to men too, is that we cover our bodies because they are sacred and not for public enjoyment, and is often expressed by the phrase “The glory of the king’s daughter is within.” What this means is that the things that matter – virtue, kindness, honesty, integrity, courage, humility – aren’t what show on the outside; inner beauty, in other words, however trite that phrase has become.

I think what’s really pernicious about our culture’s obsession with mostly naked women, however beautiful or thin they are, is the message that it sends about worth. “You’re worthless unless you’re thin” is the lesson some people take from it, sure, but it’s also a message that we publicly talk about and deconstruct. “Your value and your identity resides in your physical body” is the less obvious but no less pervasive message they convey. And when desirability as a friend or wife is also bound up in prettiness, it reinforces that message. If I had a daughter, I wouldn’t worry so much about magazine covers that say “you should look like Angelina/Kate Moss/Lindsay Lohan” as about the broader message that “all that matters is how you look.”

Certainly, you can dress scrupulously modestly and still be shallow. And you can insist on modest clothing for your chidlren without valuing their character and moral code. But as Wendy Shalit points out, by striving for a certain modesty in our dress and behaviour, we have the opportunity not only to say “I’m not on public display” but also “I will not be judged by your criteria.” Which is actually the sort of subversive, iconoclastic sentiment feminists celebrate. Right?

The average British man or woman has slept with 2.8 million people — albeit indirectly, according to figures released Wednesday to promote awareness of sexual health.

Read the story, here. (Does anyone ever wonder how it is that culturally we make fun of people who promote abstinence?)

I like thoughtful critiques that make me think about the way I think.

This isn’t one of them.

I caught this article as I was reviewing my notes for an upcoming talk on Why Abortion is an Injustice for Women. (I was typing away from behind my hijab, pondering how to please my male masters when someone sent me the link.)

You can disagree–absolutely–but there should at least be some substance to that disagreement.

Anyway, I’ll be speaking about abortion as injustice for women at the deVeber Institute conference on Friday, October 2 in Toronto. The conference title is Reproductive Decisions and Women’s Well-Being: Current Research and Practical Solutions.