I don't give a shit if this is power leveling. This kind of shit pisses me off, big time.
My paternal grandmother had two brothers who died as children. One, Johnny, was only three when he died of
pertussis, aka whooping cough.. For the uniformed, if you get whooping cough, you can literally cough yourself to death. People have been known to break ribs from coughing so hard. Today it can be prevented with a vaccine. But back when my great-grandmother was raising her children, there was no way to prevent it. (I don't know what year my Uncle Johnny died, or when he was born, but I do believe it would have been sometime in the 1920s-30s)
Another uncle, Karl, died of
tetanus when he was seven. In this case, he was about a year older than my grandmother, and he stepped on a nail while playing in the barn at their grandparents' farm. Tetanus is an extremely painful way to die. Again, deaths from tetanus are extremely rare nowadays, because we have a vaccine for it, but back in the 1930s, there wasn't one available.
I also went to college with a guy from Rwanda (this would have been in the late 90s, early 2000s, and the dude would've been in his late teens, early twenties) who had polio as a child. He had to use a walking stick because his leg was all twisted up. At that the time that just amazed me, because like, who the fuck do you know in your generation who's ever had fucking polio? And even though it's pretty much gone in the U.S., if parents don't vaccinate their own kids, what happens if someone goes to a third world country where it IS still present, and brings it back here? Do we really want to see another generation of kids in iron lungs? (They don't even make the goddamned things anymore!)
Now whooping cough is making a comeback. Yesterday, we went to the cemetary to plant flowers on my maternal grandparents's grave. A good number of the graves there are those of children. I'm guessing many of them died of diseases that we now can prevent with vaccines (measles, pertussis, tetanus, diptheria, smallpox, etc). Imagine how their parents would feel, knowing that now those ailments can be prevented, but people are fighting AGAINST the methods of preventing them. It fucking pisses me off. This kind of thing is fucking child abuse if you ask me.
We wiped out fucking SMALLPOX. The deadliest disease known to mankind, and it's gone, all thanks to vaccination.
(I don't care if this makes me a sperg. Anti-vaxxers piss me off big time. It's not different than assholes who refuse lifesaving medical care to their children because of some hokey religious reason or only use "alternative" medicine. Only this is much much worse because they're putting other people in danger. Fuck every last one of them.)
