Thursday, January 23, 2014

How Stupidity Affects our Children

If you ever find yourself in a presence of parents in a developed country like the US, or somewhere in Europe, you will almost always get someone who is anti-vaccination. They come up with the typical set of excuses, from natural (nothing unnatural around my family), semi-scientific (maybe vaccines cause autism, and after all, they are not 100% effective), and religious (aborted tissue in vaccines?), to plain wacky (I'd rather have my child contract the disease, the natural way). Why is it more visible in developed countries? I guess, because most of the parents in those countries do not have to actually see their kids being severely sick, or even dying from an easily preventable disease.

However, it is very enlightening to see how those diseases have been spreading and popping up in rich and seemingly rational countries all over the world, in the last years. This is exactly what Council on Foreign Relations did in their visualization:


Notice, how much the points are concentrated where people are better off? And they are growing...

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