/sci/ - Science & Math

>The first thing to say about this tragic chart is that both Los Altos city and Santa Clara county have extremely low immunization rates. The right level of immunization is 100%, and rates of 90% or 94% are very dangerous indeed.

>This is a very dangerous level of immunization–the level where herd immunity gets lost, disease reservoirs are established, and children emerge from their school to infect infants, immunocompromised adults, and people whose vaccinations didn’t take or have waned, with potentially fatal diseases.

>By far the best book on this phenomenon is The Panic Virus, by Seth Mnookin; I can highly recommend it. He tells of how when public-health officials try to work out which areas are at highest risk of fatal outbreaks, one thing they do is look at a map of Whole Food stores — it’s the crunchy-granola college-educated liberals who are by far the worst offenders when it comes to putting their own children and everybody else’s at risk. And they love to eat up pseudoscientific claptrap about “immature thymus glands” when it’s published by outlets like the Huffington Post.

http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2011/11/01/the-most-dangerous-school-in-los-altos/

I fucking hate hippies, do you?