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Comment by user24 | Hacker News Reader

> Since the late 1990’s British farmers have been vaccinating hens against salmonella [...] Amazingly, this measure has virtually wiped out the health threat in Britain.

"Amazingly"? No not really! Vaccination stops disease. It's completely expected, not amazing at all.

edit: Likewise it's not "amazing" that cases of Diptheria, Measles, Polio, etc have been drastically reduced - by 100% in some cases - since widespread vaccination began in the USA (source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2013/02/19/a-graph... )

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Many replies thought the "amazing" adjective was about the fact that vaccines work at all. Methinks you are a bit knee-jerk against people you even suspect of opposing vaccines.

I thought it referred more to the logistics of getting hundreds of producers coordinated and hundreds of thousands of chickens vaccinated in so short a time. Actually, if they have the data, it would make for fascinating study about epidemiology in vaccinated populations. Some chickens were probably missed, but once the vaccination rate reaches some critical level, the disease doesn't spread the same way.

So, no need to assume the writer is one of the "crazies" and no need to have an OT comment thread about it.

> I thought it referred more to the logistics of getting hundreds of producers coordinated and hundreds of thousands of chickens vaccinated in so short a time.

I don't think that interpretation is plausible really. The author mentioned nothing about logistics, scale, time-to-results. I don't see how you can claim that the "amazing" is supposed to refer to something the author didn't mention.

> so short a time

Twelve years?

> no need to assume the writer is one of the "crazies"

Indeed.

> no need to have an OT comment thread

I just made the comment, not the thread. No-one's baying for blood. I'm just saying it's very sloppy and potentially dangerous phrasing.

While it feels ridiculous to have an extended discussion about a mostly irrelevant adjective, I too interpret "amazing" as referring to the logistical effort.

Granted this is probably one of those disagreements that falls under "the issues of least importance cause the greatest divides".

Wiping things out full-stop is difficult - look at myxomatosis application in Australia.

"Deadly [to rabbits] disease kills rabbits. It's completely expected, not amazing at all."

And yet, rabbits have regained a significant foothold in Australia, despite myx absolutely decimating the population in the 50s. It's not just about micro-scale effectiveness, it's about effective timing and implementation. Same goes for AIDs meds in Africa, or forest fires.

> It's completely expected, not amazing at all.

It's amazing because it's the hens being vaccinated. Humans could get the infection from other sources, but apparently by and large don't.

That's hardly amazing; I've known since I was a child that the main source of salmonella was eggs and possibly raw chicken. In fact, I'd have been hard-pressed to name another place you could get it.

Iguanas.

It's a somewhat common concern with pet reptiles.

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/features/salmonellafrogturtle

Shrimp

Not to state the obvious, but ...salmon?

The bacteria is named after Dr. Salmon, not related to the fish.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salmonella#History

True, but you still can get it from salmon (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/02/smoked-salmon-salmo...).

I knew a family who had a child very seriously ill with salmonella thanks to a pet turtle. The child survived, the turtle moved on.

If you look at the data [0] on food recalls and safety warnings in the United States, you'll see that the large majority of food-borne salmonella occurs not in meat or eggs but in fruits and vegetables, particularly in ground-hugging varieties like peanuts, lettuces, peppers, and bean sprouts.

This is almost always either because (a) the vegetables are fertilized with manure (organic vegetables, in particular, carry a higher risk of fecal contamination and associated diseases) or because (b) they're processed and packed in contaminated facilities. It is a self-fulfilling irony of the regulatory regime that vegetable-processing plants, which are more likely to be contaminated, are subject to less stringent safety standards than their meat- and poultry-processing counterparts.

0. http://google2.fda.gov/search?site=FDAgov-recalls&client...

Is possible/likely that that is (partially-) chicken manure?

If so, reducing/eradicating endemic chicken salmonella might also remove it from the manure.

There was a salmonella outbreak linked to peanut butter just months ago. All of the peanut butter at Trader Joe's was recalled.

That's incorrect. Only specific variants of their peanut and almond butters were recalled. That particular manufacturer also provided their product to many other companies.

http://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/news/201209...

I think you can use the word "amazing" as a synonym for "dramatic" rather than for "unexpected". For example, I have heard people describe sunsets as amazing.

When addressing a public who largely still links vaccines and autism, they would indeed find it amazing.

To the remaining, thinking public, you're right. It's not amazing at all.

Hah, that's probably the next stop on the crazy train.

"My child ate chicken that was vaccinated, and it gave my child autism!"

On second thought, don't want to give them any ideas...

I would argue that the public doesn't "largely" believe that. The majority of parents get their kids vaccinated.

It is a small fringe of people who believe things like that; just unfortunately these same people are the most likely to catch the disease (and be unable to afford decent treatment).

The really unfortunate thing is they can compromise herd immunity, leading to people who can't be vaccinated or even people who WERE vaccinated getting infected.

I would be much more tolerant of the people who are afraid of vaccines, if it wasn't for the risk of them hurting other people with their decisions.

And even worse - they can infect (and end up causing the death of) babies who are too young to be vaccinated.

That one fact alone shows how truly reckless people who refuse to get their offspring vaccinated are.

1 in 5, for that specific linking of vaccines and autism.

Perhaps not a majority, but definitely a "large" number by my reckoning.

http://healthcare.thomsonreuters.com/npr/assets/NPR_report_v...

> When addressing a public who largely still links vaccines and autism, they would indeed find it amazing.

If forbes really are addressing those people, it's hardly helpful to describe the fact that vaccines work as "amazing".

It's lending weight to the idea that it's surprising that the vaccine worked.

Even if I was addressing flat-earthers, I still wouldn't call it "amazing" that a round-the-world yacht race ended in the same place that it started.

If Forbes wants them as readers, using the term "Amazing" makes sense. If Forbes wants to educate them, I would agree with you wholeheartedly.

Can they now stop vaccinating against salmonella, or are there other reservoirs of the disease?

It is easy enough for disease to hop continents, and the rest of the world has plenty of salmonella to share with the UK.

But how many live chickens hop continents? Or are there other ways for the disease to renter the chicken population from a non-chicken source?

Of course there are. The faecal matter (e.g. from egg shells, as described in the article) can be transferred onto hands, and from there onto clothing. The person then hops on a plane, flies to UK and goes for a stroll around British countryside, where they come into contact with some chickens.

This is contrived, admittedly, but not implausible. There are other scenarios as well. While they may all seem very unlikely, eventually contamination will occur, given how often people fly back and forth nowadays. If you keep rolling a thousand dice, eventually they will all come up sixes.

> "If you keep rolling a thousand dice, eventually they will all come up sixes"

A thousand sixes in a single simultaneous roll shouldn't happen in the entire lifetime of the universe. If your system is that safe, you're in pretty good shape. But rolling a thousand dice where you get to set aside each six you get, you should expect to get to all sixes in 30 or 40 rolls.

Whenever you're engineering a system for safety, the key is figuring out how much needs to go wrong for the system to fail, and how many opportunities you'll have for those things to go wrong. Diseases being carried from continent to continent is a fairly normal occurrence; contamination will happen fairly regularly, and the biggest protection against it becoming widespread is herd immunity.

Yes, true. My thousand dice comment was intended in vein of "if you put a thousand monkeys with typewriters in a room...". I did not mean to imply that the probability of rolling a thousand sixes is similar to the probability of contamination.

I'm assuming pretty much every other egg laying bird has the disease, even many egg laying reptiles (keeping snakes out of the chickens house is never any fun).

There was a big salmonella problem with ducks in the UK many years ago (1930s?) so people switched to eating hens eggs instead. Clearly the problem was much bigger in mass production, as then hens got it. So I think actually most birds do not have it normally.

> many egg laying reptiles (keeping snakes out of the chickens house is never any fun).

Neither of those things are a problem in the UK.

Salmonella is common with all sorts of reptiles and birds. I'm assuming that it's virtually impossible to isolate chickens from those, so they'd have to keep vaccinating indefinitely.

Salmonella exposure is still possible from other avian sources (dove, pigeon, etc).

Would you just look at all of our autistic chickens.

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