Tessa Masters the Art of Portraiturating...

Tess and I had made a connection this morning--probably over some game on the Kindle--but I don't remember exactly what it was about. In our excitement over the connection, we had this conversation:


Me: "It's like our minds are one."
Tess: "It's like we are the same person."
Me: "It's like we finish each others'..."
Tess: "...Mommies."

Perhaps we aren't quite as in sync as I thought. Nevertheless, she is my girl! So, I made the decision 5 minutes ago not to let this blog die...even though I would gladly do so. And I decided that to get things started again here in the New Year, I would do some posts on things I should have posted about last year. Starting with Thanksgiving and Tessa's family portraits.

In Jaime's family, after the meal is done and cleaned up, everyone gathers for the "Family Sing." There's also a family walk thrown in there too, which is a nice tradition too.

Tess was having a little trouble staying content during the singing part, so I asked her if she wanted to take pictures of everyone. She did. And then she walked around getting some really nice close-up shots of everyone. I took some pictures like the one above, but feel a little awkward getting right in front of people's faces to take a picture of them in this situation. Not Tess! So, here are some highlights to showcase her distinct portrait style. Courtney:

It's important to cut off the top of the person's head. One of Great Grandma snuggling George's stuffed cat:

Lindsey:

Grandma and Poppa (and George):

A nice shot of William...and Lauren:

Tess has a history of subtly sending Lauren hints about what she thinks of her relationship with William (like the picture Tess took of them on their wedding day):

And just because, here's a great picture of George from Thanksgiving Day (not taken by Tess since his head is all there):

George reading Where's Spot?

It's been a tearful morning for me, thinking about Newtown and grieving with some of our best friends who are enduring a tragic family loss. The weight of it all makes me want to try harder each day to add some joy to the world. Here's a little something for today:

Looking Closer at an Anti-Vax Website

A few months ago, I saw couple different friends on Facebook share the following link from an anti-vax website called GreenMedInfo. (With the tagline "Education Equals Empowerment"...ah irony.)

I've had this rebuttal rolling around my head ever since. (Yes...I am slow at doing things.) As the title makes clear, the jist of the article is that the measles vaccine is scarier than the actual measles. The friends who shared this are well-meaning people who are all loving mothers, and I would of course never want to see their children contract measles. I hate that any children suffer from preventable diseases, so I am writing to hopefully expose what a shoddy, reprehensible, misleading piece of garbage this article is, and I am concerned that people I know and love may have been convinced by it.

If you already lean towards distrusting the medical establishment, you might easily be swayed by this author if you just gave the article a quick skim without checking his data. Not everyone has time for the tedious work of examining footnotes, I know, so I've tried to perform a service here by digging a little deeper, and....well. The discrepancy I found between what the author, Sayer Ji, claims his sources say, and what they *actually* say, is pretty jaw-dropping.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a scientist - I went to college back in the halcyon pre-recession years and majored blithely in American history, one of those fluffy liberal arts degrees that arms you with nothing but critical thinking skills with which to feed yourself (I loved it and have never gone hungry, so...no regrets!). I have your average college-educated-person's understanding of vaccine science and the concept of herd immunity. So I have no special expertise, but honestly, you don't need scientific expertise to spot the red flags here - they will smack you in the face as soon as you do a little digging. Let's look closer, shall we?)

BIOGRAPHY

First, let's take a look at author's credentials. His bio at the bottom of the website sounds very authoritative, doesn't it? "Founder" of GreenMedInfo.com - ooh, he's a "founder" of something, that sure sounds impressive. Let's follow the link to his Google Plus page: oh....the highest degree he earned is a BA from Rutgers...in Philosophy. Hmm...he has about as much scientific expertise as I do. Why should I trust his judgment?? On his website bio he claims to have been published by the New York Times (the only reputable one of the list he mentions), but on his Google Plus page that outlet is missing. Hmmmmm. Then in the very last sentence, what is his job? He's a "consultant for the natural products industry". Hmmmmmmmmm. So he is making money when people choose "natural" remedies instead of traditional medicine like vaccines, but he is writing all these articles as a supposedly neutral observer. HELLO conflict of interest! There are red flags all over this bio. But let's ignore his credentials for now and just look at his arguments.

FOOTNOTE 1:

Sayer Ji writes:

"First, we should acknowledge one underreported fact of immunology: vaccine-induced antibody elevations do not guarantee real world protection against the pathogen the vaccine is intended to immunize us against, which is the only true measure of their value.

This is not a new observation. It goes back decades, with a 1990 study published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases finding that even though 95% of a population of urban African children had measles antibodies after vaccination, vaccine efficacy was not more than 68%.[1]"

Is that really the finding of that study? Let's look at the footnote a little closer. From the abstract:

"Measles incidence, vaccine efficacy, and mortality were examined prospectively in two districts in Bissau where vaccine coverage for children aged 12-23 months was 81% (Bandim 1) and 61% (Bandim 2). There was little difference in cumulative measles incidence before 9 months of age (6.1% and 7.6%, respectively). Between 9 months and 2 years of age, however, 6.1% contracted measles in Bandim 1 and 13.7% in Bandim 2. Even adjusting for vaccination status, incidence was significantly higher in Bandim 2 (relative risk 1.6, P = .04). Even though 95% of the children had measles antibodies after vaccination, vaccine efficacy was not more than 68% (95% confidence interval [CI] 39%-84%) and was unrelated to age at vaccination. Unvaccinated children had a mortality hazard ratio of 3.0 compared with vaccinated children (P = .002), indicating a protective efficacy against death of 66% (CI 32%-83%) of measles vaccination. These data suggest that it will be necessary to vaccinate before age 9 months to control measles in hyperendemic urban African areas." (bolding = mine)

Did you follow that? Ji either completely misunderstood or flat out lied about the results of this study. He completely mischaracterized the study's findings! COMPLETELY!!! When he gave the statistic that "95% of a population of urban African children had measles antibodies after vaccination", he implied that 95% of the entire population was vaccinated - when that is ABSOLUTELY NOT what the abstract says. It states that vaccine coverage in the two districts studied was 81% at best (61% in the second district) - and both of those coverage rates are significantly lower than the level needed to achieve herd immunity. The 95% is a measure of the group of children who received the vaccine - 95% of them were found to have measles antibodies after vaccination.

Look at the first chart in the Wikipedia entry on herd immunity (from the CDC and World Health Organization, so reputable sources, don't be a Wikipedia snob): the vaccination rate necessary to achieve herd immunity for measles is 92-94%. OF COURSE the vaccine in this study had only a 68% efficacy rate - because so many people remained unvaccinated! The findings of this study say the exact opposite of what Sayer Ji is (ab)using it in order to argue - it says that more people need to be vaccinated, not less! Here is a great graphic to get a visual sense of the importance of herd immunity:

If you couldn't tell by the amount of bolding and all-caps so far in the previous paragraphs, the level of incompetency shown by Sayer Ji in using this study as evidence in his favor is making my head spin. When 19-39% of a population is unvaccinated, then sure, it's true that "vaccine-induced antibody elevations do not guarantee real world protection against the pathogen the vaccine is intended to immunize us against". But if you understand the concept of herd immunity, you know that vaccine efficacy is greatly reduced when substantial portions of a population do not vaccinate.

And who has ever claimed that vaccines "guarantee" immunity against the real world pathogens? "Guarantee" is a word used by salesmen, not scientists. Scientists know that the protection provided by vaccines is imperfect (it's highly effective, but not perfectly effective), and is absolutely dependent on herd immunity. That is the very reason why doctors and scientists talk about herd immunity so much! If there is no herd immunity, then everyone is at greater risk, even people who have been vaccinated.

(I skipped footnotes 2 and 3 because they were heavier on the medical jargon - I didn't understand all the technical details. I am willing to bet, however, that if they were too technical for ME, than Mr. Ji and his Philosophy BA didn't fare much better. Footnote 4 was just a cite of another GreenMedInfo article.)

FOOTNOTES 5, 6 and 7:

Ji writes:

"...it has been known for several decades that the administration of measles vaccine in underdeveloped countries may actually be resulting in higher infant mortality rates.[5] [6] "

Let's check the abstracts of footnote 5 and footnote 6. They tell the story of a high-titre measles vaccine (I had to google titres) approved in 1989 for use in infants younger than 9 months, but then rescinded in 1992 because of safety concerns after higher levels of female mortality were detected in some trials. Footnote 5 merely describes the situation, speculating that "It is suspected that high-titre vaccines cause long-term disruption of immune function, including an imbalance in the type of helper T cell response" with the caveat that "Aaby et al. also suggest that standard-titre vaccines reduce overall mortality by general immunostimulation." Science is trial and error. They found that high-titre vaccines seemed to not be working but they didn't know why so they stopped administering them in order to find out.

Following up in footnote 6, "Investigators have hypothesized that HT vaccine had caused immune suppression similar to that of measles infection. The present review suggests first that the HT vaccine itself is unlikely to be the cause because the effect was not found in all studies. Second, the increased mortality started only after 9 to 10 months of age when controls received ST measles vaccine, and HT groups received the "control vaccine." It was not found in the studies that provided another measles vaccine instead of control vaccine. Third, because the HT studies with excess mortality rates showed increased female mortality rates, we need to find environmental or contextual conditions associated with increased female mortality rates in some studies to explain the problem associated with HT measles vaccination." Correlation is not causation, people.

Let's look back at Sayer Ji's original sentence: "...it has been known for several decades that the administration of measles vaccine in underdeveloped countries may actually be resulting in higher infant mortality rates.[5] [6] " Or, you know, they MAY not, since that's not what the results of those studies found at all. There was no clear link shown between the HT vaccines and higher female mortality (Ji neglects to mention it was only female, not both female and male, infant mortality, that rose in the documented cases.) On the other hand, I did find in my Googling this article published in the journal Pediatrics in 1999 ostensibly defending the safety of the original HT vaccine in the first place. (I say ostensibly b/c I'm not going to pay to read the whole thing, but there's the cite if you want to).

Ji's next sentence reads: "This has, in fact, been a persistent criticism levied against UNICEF's vaccine-heavy strategy in certain regions of Africa, which appear to have increased mortality rates.[7]" Footnote 7 leads not to a scientific study but to this BBC News article vaguely describing a study with no direct cite. It describes a UN program that promoted a combination of vaccines (no indication they were measles vaccines, notably), Vitamin A pills, and mosquito nets in an effort to decrease child mortality, but fell short of its goal of reducing mortality by 25%. The article is barely two paragraphs (that actually describe mixed results - failure in some areas, but success in others), not a scientific study and certainly not enough evidence to draw a bright line to the conclusion that vaccines increased mortality rates.

FOOTNOTE 8:

• 1985, Texas, USA: According to an article published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987, "An outbreak of measles occurred among adolescents in Corpus Christi, Texas, in the spring of 1985, even though vaccination requirements for school attendance had been thoroughly enforced." They concluded: "We conclude that outbreaks of measles can occur in secondary schools, even when more than 99 percent of the students have been vaccinated and more than 95 percent are immune."[8]

Yes, that is the final sentence of the abstract. Let's look at the few preceding sentences though:

"Stratified analysis showed that the number of doses of vaccine received was the most important predictor of antibody response. Ninety-five percent confidence intervals of seronegative rates were 0 to 3.3 percent for students who had received two prior doses of vaccine, as compared with 3.6 to 6.8 percent for students who had received only a single dose. After the survey, none of the 1732 seropositive students contracted measles. Fourteen of 74 seronegative students, all of whom had been vaccinated, contracted measles. In addition, three seronegative students seroconverted without experiencing any symptoms. 

So, the students who received *two* doses of the vaccine were much less likely to test negative for the antibodies that fight measles (which they should hopefully test positive for after receiving the vaccine, but remember? There are very high success rates with vaccines, but no "100% guarantees") What does this tell us? That your kid should get both doses, not no doses.

****************

Okay people, I am going to wrap things up here, because this post is crazy long already - I've been working on it for days and I just want to hit publish. If there is interest I will follow up with a Part 2 examining the rest of his footnotes. But I think there is enough evidence here to show you this man and his website, GreenMedInfo, are not to be trusted, right?

Do you see the pattern here? Sayer Ji has consistently misinterpreted and misconstrued the results of the studies he is citing. NONE OF THEM SAY WHAT HE SAYS THEY DO. Please, please, don't buy what this snake-oil salesman with a degree in PHILOSOPHY, of all things, is selling as medical advice. Your kids' health is at risk if you choose not to vaccinate. And not just yours, but MINE.

Thanks for reading if you made it to the end! (What's wrong with you?) :)

Oops

I made to the very end of NaBloPoMo and finally messed up and forgot to blog one day! I've just been busy doing lots of post-Thanksgiving relaxing. We went to see Catching Fire - it was good! Seeing movies in the theater is a rare treat, thanks Mom for babysitting! We bought a headrest-mountable DVD player for the car on Black Friday (at the reasonable hour of 4 PM, not 4 AM) - an investment in our sanity on the way home.  I went to the thrift store with my mom and sisters - always good fun. We played some Catan, some Bananagrams, some pretending to be Wild Kratts (Tessa's idea), and ate lots and lots more food.

This may be a boring post to close out NaBloPoMo, but it does contain some possibly exciting news - I enjoyed this month so much I think I'm going to keep it up. Maybe not every day, but with some regularity. It's been fun to flex the old writing brain-muscles. Don't tell me brain muscles aren't a thing...just cause I never took anatomy in college...you're not better than me...ok maybe you are, at anatomy at least. :)

Still in a food coma...

I know I am getting older because I could only eat four small slivers of delicious pies before my body said YUCK, NO MORE SUGAR PLEASE. YOU ARE DONE GROWING. YOU DIDN'T STOP FOR A LONG TIME BUT NOW YOU ARE DONE. THERE ARE NO MORE GROWTH SPURTS TO FUEL.

This Thanksgiving, I am thankful (among other things) for a responsive body, and also for many previous years of gluttony. :)

South of the Border

We made it to Virginia! Praise be! On our way from Atlanta to Richmond, we crossed paths in Greensboro, NC with Josh's parents who were on their way from Franklin to Raleigh. Fortuitous timing! We had a joyous reunion at the Taco Bell. We are eating Thanksgiving with my family this year so it was a fun surprise to get to see them too. Now to sleep and dream of turkey and pumpkin pie...

Belief, Revisited

(The title is a reference to my facetious post from NaBloPoMo, Day 2)

I had choir practice last night, which gets me nostalgic for all my past choir days. Do you ever get the sense when you're in the middle of something that "This is amazing. This is going to change me and stay with me forever but it's not going to last long so I need to savor it!" I feel that way now about lots of moments of motherhood, but I also felt it frequently in choir at BYU. I knew it was a singular experience at the time, but the years since I've been out of school have thrown that truth even more into relief. So much of that music made an impression on me - the harmonies and the lyrics - at a formative time in my life, and those impressions constitute much of what I consider my limited knowledge of God. In other areas of my life God has felt somewhat distant or abstract at times, but music has always been one of my primary means of intuiting God's existence. I've had in mind the past couple nights a song I sung back at BYU, a choral setting of a Robert Frost poem, "Choose Something Like a Star". Here is the poem for your devouring: 

Robert Frost (1874-1963)

Choose Something Like a Star 
O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud --
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says "I burn."
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

And here is a good clip of the choral setting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWnKkMd8zY8 

(And now I will awkwardly attempt to wax eloquent and philosophical, with probably too many rhetorical flourishes and not enough clarity or editing. Please forgive the attempt.) 

In this poem, I see man and his longing to understand the universe. It's funny, because from one perspective I can see this poem having great appeal to an atheist. In the absence of God, choose something like a star. But as a believer, I also see a parallel to man and his longing to understand God. Here is my rambling vision, prompted in part by this poem: There is so much in the physical world and in the spiritual calculus of the universe that we want to know, but we don't. How things work, why bad things happen to innocent people, etc. We can't even know how much we don't know. And yet we sense that things have explanations, have meanings even when it's impossible for us to comprehend them. We are meaning-making creatures - we try so hard to explain everything - but our reach exceeds our grasp. We grow frustrated - we overcompensate - we embellish what little we know - we talk up our certainty of what little we do. We see the stars burning silent and distant and we can't leave them alone to burn - we sense, we insist that they have something to say. We are part of the universe and we feel entitled to comprehend it all, to know it's deepest corners, to resonate with it and hear it speak to us.

But we forget that we are children. We demand to know, we demand because demanding is the bulk of our skill set, and I imagine God as empathetic towards our flailings and lashing out. I also imagine His attempts to speak to us as not dissimilar to my attempts to speak to my pre-verbal children. Each one, I have spoken to from birth in a daily ritual, watching their eyes as I touch my face and say "Mama", then put my hand on their bellies and repeat their own name. Over and over. I want them to know me and to know themselves in relation to me. There is a cloudiness in their eyes, but also such concentration! So much attentiveness as they study my face and see my lips move and hear my words. As months and more months pass the cloudiness recedes, but even as their recognition grows they have no language to articulate what they recognize - only noise.

When I try to conceive of God, I imagine Him in my place and myself as the neonate. When I imagine my soul in communication with God I see my infant whining and wailing, and I see those times in my life when I believe He was communicating back to me His existence - always simply - no angelic voices, no bright lights or specific instructions for me - but like Frost's star, "I burn" - "I am here" - "I exist". Nothing more, but nothing less either. A sense of warmth from a faraway burning. "It gives us strangely little aid, but does tell us something in the end." I could dismiss that sensation of warmth, of mercy, as emotionalism, as a mere cocktail of hormones gifted to me by evolutionary biology, and that picture's not wrong, but incomplete, I think. Just as a star is a giant ball of gas millions of miles away, and yet something more than that, the science behind my emotional responses to music (and literature and art and scripture) is insufficient to me in explaining their significance.

As I've mulled over this poem the past couple nights, I've also been reminded of an essay I read a few months back by one of my favorite Mormon writers, Rosalynde Welch, titled Disenchanted Mormonism: Practicing a Rooted Religion, that offers an alternative narrative to the common one of "faith, faith crisis, then faith resolution or abandonment":

"My experience has not been one of conventional religious doubt, an agonizing knife-edge demanding resolution through insight or decision, but rather one of puzzlement. Puzzlement is a gentler and more sustainable state of mind. It entails patience, an internal stillness, and an acknowledgement of my own failure to wring answers from an inscrutable world. Puzzlement implies humility. If provisional doubt must be mastered by individual judgment and choice, then puzzlement marks the limits of our intellectual and moral mastery. 

Moreover, the notion of puzzlement allows us to uncouple belief from faith, and faith from choice, in the troubling but inescapable logic of doubt. Puzzlement allows us to think of faith not as a moral victory over uncertainty but rather as an encounter with uncertainty itself, which is to say an encounter with the limits of our own capacity to comprehend or control the world. When we encounter church doctrines or practices that we fail to understand or can’t justify, or when we taste suffering in our own lives or the lives of those we love, we find ourselves puzzled by God’s will. These moments of hesitation become the personal occasions of faith. They originate not in our capacity to choose, in our strength of will, but on the contrary in our own limitations of mind, in our insufficiency to comprehend or our present inability to decide. Faith begins at the moment we say “I don’t understand.” Faith here is not a choice to believe but choice’s opposite, born in a moment of spiritual hesitation or aporia; not first a triumph of the moral mind, but its fortunate failure."

I find myself in a state of puzzlement all the time. Similar to the author, my natural bent is not to see God in every little lucky coincidence or mishap. Elsewhere in the article she talks about a spiritual otherworld visible to some believers, where every boon and bane confirms His existence - I don't know that world. What I do have is puzzlement about why things are the way they are, why I am the way that I am, and in the face of that confusion, a quiet "I burn" communicated through others by kindness, by music, by compassion, by art. It stays my mind, and asks of me a certain height, and I'm certain that I am not reaching it, but I am reaching.

(I am not sure if or how to end now, but)

THE END