The body IS a machine.. and this is a great example of why we should take a pragmatic approach to that and use what we know to protect it..
The grain of truth at the core of the IMHO phony and very contentious "vaccine issue" is a serious threat posed to all of us by exposures to strongly pro-oxidant substances - that threat being especially serious at certain points of the life cycle.
This is a fairly simple scientific fact which would be easy to teach people about..
Something that has been known for at least three decades to me, and explained in at least tens of thousands of scientific papers is the importance of glutathione to health.
Due to our need for
glutathione these pro-oxidant substances can become
additive toxicants - Many are fairly common and many are completely unregulated.. However, the glutathione is there to protect our cells and when a toxic challenge from some substance is encountered, it must be there or the cell may have to kill itself to prevent DNA damage and cancer. So exposure to pro-oxidant toxicants is expensive to or health and should be compensated for.
As multiplication of cells is finite (see "Hayflick Limit") and as we age the built in repair mechanism- apoptosis of damaged cells and cell division of undamaged cells.. becomes less and less available. Also inflammation levels rise using up our precious glutathione even without toxic exposures. (everybody should supplement with NAC as they get older. Not a lot but enough to ensure we're getting enough cysteine to make enough glutathione for our age related needs and take more if we know we're geting toxic exposures. (lead is strongly pro-oxidant and NAC is useful in cases of chronic lead exposure. Another amino acid of use in that context is taurine.)
The big problem as described in the specific paper linked below is that pro-oxidant toxicants have the potential to cause birth defects in pregnancy due to changes in the expression of two genes "Fyn" and "c-Cbl" . Very low level exposures can disrupts precursor cell function. In other words disrupt cell differentiation.
So, a very serious threat to humanity's reproductive process is posed by low level pollutants. So all pollutants and other chemicals that have strong pro-oxidant activity should be considered to be additive, not regulated separately.
Pro oxidant toxicants are toxic to the unborn children of pregnant women, and should be of concern to all others as well - They can dramatically effect the IQs of children and cause life chaging autoimmune disease and inflammation in people of all ages..
certain polulation grous aloready have low glutathione chronically due to the creation of cross links (advanced glycation endproducts, commonly abbreviated "AGE"s ) as we age - So we should be concerned when any of those groups, unborn children (pregnant women or women of childbearing age, infants, children, or the old or sick are exposed to them even at very low levels.
However, many pro-oxidant substances areunregulated or regulated only at extremely high levels.That leads to binary hinking and behaviors that are extremely ill advised, people thinking that chronic 24 hour a day, seven day a week levels below some 30 year old "action level" picked to apply in a workplace setting, 8 hrs day 40 hours a week..
is okay.
Here is the paper.. Note that people exposed to a plethora of pro-oxidant substances can supplement with n-acetylcysteine to improve their cells "redox status" - substantially reducing the risk of toxicity to an unborn child and cancers (reducing apoptosis - programmed cell death of exposed cells ) and preserving much of the body's finite cellular repair capacity longer..
PLOS Biology: Chemically Diverse Toxicants Converge on Fyn and c-Cbl to Disrupt Precursor Cell FunctionQuote from: AndyC_772 on Today at 06:40:25>
Quote from: rs20 on Today at 06:30:59Statistically? Should we give no credit to the measles vaccine because the 17.1 million lives it have saved are merely "statistical" "estimates"?
If that vaccine were known to have killed 1 million of the people who received it, would you give it to your children?
On balance, you certainly should. After all, it's 17 times as likely to save their lives, as it is to kill them.
People don't work that way though, which is probably why I prefer working with machines instead.