2606 Flu shots etc.

 Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Me: Virginity is important only to men who fear comparison.

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I saw "O'  Horten", a Norwegian movie with subtitles, at Proctor's in Schenectady this evening.  It was about a train engineer's retirement.  The trains were his whole life, and the day he is to drive his last route, he misses the train.  From then on, he discovers retirement is what the internet reviewers describe as "a precise, deadpan drama of slapstick existentialism".  I enjoyed it.

For most of the movie I wondered if they had "smell-o-vision".  Horten smoked a pipe, and every time he lit up I could swear I smelled the pipe tobacco.  Later I noticed that the woman next to me was holding a large container of hazelnut Starbucks brew.

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Will someone please explain to me why Roman Polanski is suddenly the victim?  I understand the arguments for and against his extradition.  I understand that the woman doesn't want to get involved.  But this isn't a civil case, where she is allowed to drop it.  It's crimes against the state, and the specific victim can't drop it.  And although she's adult now, at the time she was thirteen years old!  And it's not like she was a Lolita, who welcomed his advances.  Even drugged she said no multiple times, and begged to go home, and he raped her multiple times in one day.

So how the blazes is he now the victim?

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I listened to NPR on the way to Schenectady this evening.  Alan Chartock was interviewing some woman in the health field about the H1N1 virus and immunizations, and an interesting but unpublished Canadian study.  The study found that people who got last year's  seasonal flu shot were more likely to come down with H1N1 than people who didn't get last year's shot.

Weird.

None of the investigators can explain it.  They went on for some time about how everyone is so confused by the statistics.  The woman said that people are making decisions based on the study, a study which a) none of them have read, since it's unpublished, and b) even those who have read it can't understand it.

I don't understand why they don't understand.  It seems pretty simple to me.

Last year's shot was voluntary.  So the people who got it (let's call them Group 1) were those who felt they were most likely to be exposed to seasonal flu by nature of their jobs or contacts, or those who go to their doctors a lot, or those who were at risk because of other chronic illnesses.   People who didn't get the shot (Group 2, which includes me) were those who didn't feel they were likely to catch it, or rarely go to the doctor, or who are very healthy.

So it's reasonable to assume that Group 1 people would be more likely to pick up H1N1 by nature of their jobs or contacts, and more likely to be diagnosed because they see their doctors a lot, or because they get more seriously ill because of pre-existing conditions.   Group 2 people might catch it just as often, but remain undiagnosed as H1N1 because they didn't bother going to the doctor, and were never tested.

I know several people who were very ill over the past few weeks (The Man, a few others), and not one of them were tested for H1N1.  They just suffered and then got better.  They'd be solidly in Group 2, and would show up in the report as not having got last year's shot, and not having caught H1N1.

It's exactly the same problem as with self-selected surveys, where only the people who have something outrageous to say bother to answer, giving skewed results.

The majority of people counted as having H1N1 are those who were and are concerned about the flu enough to get the seasonal shot, and who go to the doctor when they get sick.  The rest simply "didn't answer".  We really don't know about them.  There may be not greater succeptability among those who got last year's seasonal flu shot.  Maybe it just looks that way. 

Making decisions based on this study is akin to making decisions based on a Playboy write-in survey.
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