Happy Orange Gnome

Lately, I’ve been watching a lot of television (the outdoors is currently cold and unpleasant) and I’ve noticed a disturbing trend in the herpes medication commercials. Mainly, that there are so many couples featured in them.

I don’t know about you, but if I found out that my husband had herpes, he wouldn’t remain my husband for very much longer. In fact, I’d probably murder his sorry ass and I sure as Hell wouldn’t let him anywhere near my vagina ever again, even if he was taking Valtrex to control his outbreaks (ew ew ew fucking ew!)

Generally speaking, if you have periodic outbreaks of anything, I’m going to pitch you to the curve. Outbreaks are a deal breaker for me.

For example, I would be extremely displeased with periodic outbreaks of choreographed song and dance with the villagers. Those villagers must toil day and night in my mines and fields, if we are to achieved the quotas set forth by the Five Year Plan.

I AM NOT GOING TO HAVE STALIN MURDER MY ASS AGAIN!

That reminds me. Being Joseph Stalin is also a deal breaker for me.

I just really hate moustaches. Although, I am impartial to beards with moustaches, but not without moustaches.

I’m weird like that.

Can someone please send me some gauze? I think my brain is leaking out my ear!

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I was watching Oprah today (a momentary lapse in judgement) and Jenny McCarthy was on talking about her son’s autism.

“Coming up next: Jenny tells us what she thinks caused her son’s autism…”

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

If she says inoculations, I’m going to be very upset.

And then I was very upset.

She blamed the MMR (measle, mumps & rubella) vaccine and the use of thimerosal, which contains a tiny amount of mercury, for her child’s autism.

Her evidence? Her child became autistic some unspecified amount of time after the MMR inoculation.

The problems with her evidence?

1. Thimerosal is no longer used in the U.S. and Canada in any childhood vaccines, except in some flu vaccines, yet autism rates are supposed to be rising. (In fact, it probably wasn’t used in her son’s MMR vaccination.)
2. If small amounts of mercury cause autism, how come nobody ever blames fish?
3. There are children that get the MMR vaccination after they have become autistic and people that are autistic that have never had any inoculations. What caused it for them?
4. There have never been any credible studies that have found a link between vaccines and autism.

And now there are people that have watched Oprah that will not have their children vaccinated, because of Jenny’s socially irresponsible, anecdotal, bullshit “evidence” about autism.

I hate to think about children that could possibly contract a horrible disease and die because of this stupid stupid show. It might be none. It might be one.

One is way too many.

And to all people that still believe that vaccines will give your child autism, I offer to you my own personal belief:

It is better to live with autism than it is to die from measles.

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Every year, for about the last five years, people in the media have been predicting that, come flu season, there’s going to be a bird flu pandemic and it’s going to infect 99% of the world’s population and 50 billion lives will be lost.

And every year, more people die from getting hit in the head with a coconut than from the bird flu.

My ultimate summation? THE BIRD FLU PANDEMIC ISN’T COMING!

But, Laurel, the last flu pandemic was the Spanish Flu in 1918. Aren’t we long overdue for another one?

Hey, I haven’t seen any bubonic plague pandemics around here in a while, either. Isn’t it about time for another one?

Pandemics don’t run on a schedule. Life is far too dynamic for that. The next pandemic could be a 1000 years from now. It’s really hard to tell how and when a virus is going to mutate.

Also, wasn’t there some sort of really big war going on, when the Spanish Flu happened, that might have had a lot of countries’ governments a little too busy to deal with the flu?

I heard that in humans the bird flu has a 70% mortality rate. Doesn’t that worry you!?

First of all, yes, about 70% of the known cases of people with bird flu have died, but I suspect that the vast majority of actual cases is unknown and most of the people that have died from bird flu are from developing nations, where just about any disease is likely to kill you.

Also, in most of these cases, the disease was discovered postmortem. Most people that were infected with the bird flu, probably survived and just thought it was the regular flu (the symptoms are practically the same), so they weren’t put in the statistics.

So what is the actual mortality rate? I don’t know, but it ain’t no 70%. I suspect that it’s actually pretty close to that of the regular flu.

It’s the morbidity rate that you have to be worried about and right now, it’s at about 0.000000001%.

If there isn’t really anything to be worried about, at the moment, what is all this fuss about?

1. It makes good television.
2. People stocking up on Tamiflu and shotgun shells boosts the economy.
3. Deep down, everyone wishes that everyone else was dead. We want the pandemic to happen.

And, yes, I am a doctor, so I do know about these things.

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