Gurgle, Hack, Wheeze, Sniffle

My lungs are currently full of fluid.  I slosh gently as I walk and rolling over in bed puts me in danger of drowning.  For a bit and active person this would be a crippling inconvenience.  For me it just means some aches in the joints and getting tired rather easily.

Incidentally note the flamboyant and overly dramatic way I announce that I have what is, in essence, a cold.  Like most males I'm an irresponsible hypochondriac.  That is I firmly believe that a minor headache is a symptom of an undiagnosed brain tumour while at the same time neglecting to go for the tests that might save my life if it turned out I was right.

Naturally since I acquired my cold (it was on special, everybody had one) my thoughts have been moving along the lines of pneumonia and pleurisy.  This is slightly more plausible as I have had both of these in the past so obviously I have history.  Naturally I haven't gone to the doctor about this either.  In fact the only thing I have done is bought some cold and flu tablets which I'm viewing with suspicion as they no longer have pseudoephedrine in them.  Hopefully whatever their molecule meddlers have come up with in replacement is equally good (and slightly less addictive).

One of the problems with being a hypochondriac nowadays is that suddenly there's a hell of a lot more sick to get.  My brother recently came down with whooping cough for God's sake.  That's something I thought went out with the middle ages.  The problem is that my brother lives next door to a teacher, that teacher educates children, some of those children have parents who are moronic deadbeats and refuse to immunise their offspring.

In theory there is nothing wrong with people refusing to immunise their children.  In fact I would go so far as to say its a very handy way of removing some inferior product from the human gene pool.  The problem is, it isn't only their children who die.  If it was, there wouldn't be a problem.  However a lot of the immunisation we have built up over the years and that I for one took for granted relies on herd immunity rather than specific immunity.  That is nobody is completely proof from the disease but rather we rely on the fact that the entire of society is relatively immune to prevent diseases taking hold.  The only problem with this is it doesn't actually take too many halfwits refusing to vaccinate their children before that ceases to be true.

Some have claimed that herd immunity is a myth in which case the remarkable absence of scarlet fever, whooping cough, diphtheria and various others from our society over the past fifty years or so is just a wild coincidence.  Even if vaccination is pointless obviously whatever it is we're doing now is working so let's not stop. 

For those people who are violently opposed to vaccinating their children I do have some sympathy.  It is never good when officious people start turning up on your doorstep and telling you what to do and forcing vaccination on the unwilling is pretty intrusive.  To those people I ask simply for a little consideration.  If you really hate your children that much kill them in a way that doesn't endanger others.  May I suggest drowning them in the bath.