Blue Skies

Tallinn this morning is bright, sunny and cold. I am walking around without a coat and it isn't too bad, but everybody else ha a winter coat and I think they're on the money.

I am now in a warm restaurant (Pegasus) for breakfast of porridge and coffee.

Flying

Flying, if you can forget the horrors of an English airport, can be curiously relaxing. At present I am cruising to Tallinn above a calm sea with a beautiful sunset to watch and nothing to do but doze (my laptop is, through a stroke of luck, out of reach in an overhead locker).

Tallinn is an almost ideal flight destination because a) the terminal is brand new and efficient, b) the airport is a very short taxi ride from the city centre, and c) everyone speaks English. If the flight times were better (the plane from Gatwick lands at 23:00) it would be perfect.

Vaccinations

Two people this weekend (a public health expert and a Labour MP) have suggested that childhood vaccinations should be more strongly encouraged by the Government, either through the school or benefits systems. The resulting discussion on the BBC's comment board (link) displays an astonishing degree of ignorance about vaccines, their safety and their effectiveness (skim the first few entries and you'll see what I mean).

MMR is mentioned, of course, because the UK media persuaded significant numbers of people that it isn't safe (it is, of course, and failure to immunise is likely to kill 50-100 children this year because they weren't immunised - source) which is rather inconvenient, because Measles is a pretty impressive illness (source):

• It is highly contagious—90% of people without immunity sharing a house with an infected person will catch it,
  
• Infected people remain contagious from the appearance of the first symptoms until 3–5 days after the rash appears,
• In roughly the last 150 years, measles has been estimated to have killed about 200 million people worldwide (source),
• Vaccination programmes have reduced the Measles death toll from 873,000 per year in 1999 to 530,000 per year in 2003,
• Complications with measles are relatively common, ranging from relatively mild and less serious diarrhea, to pneumonia and encephalitis (subacute sclerosing panencephalitis), corneal ulceration leading to corneal scarring.

There are people on the BBC forum claiming that vaccines do not work (they haven't heard of smallpox, one imagines), that they are contaminated with toxins and mercury (how would this benefit the drug companies?), that they cause Autism (no evidence for this whatsoever), that they are a tool of the Government to suppress the people (who makes up this stuff?) and that natural immunity to disease can be conferred by breast-feeding (because there were no viral epidemics before the rise of milk powder).

The most worrying thing about the suggestion of compulsory vaccination is not the suggestion itself but the amazing ignorance of some of the people ranting against it. Disregarding the moral questions, it would clearly be advantageous to the health of the species to eliminate some of these viruses and many people would also clearly benefit from a beginners course in biology, or history.

Measles is small beer compared to smallpox, the only human-infectious disease eradicated so far. As recently as 1967 smallpox killed 2 million people. Since then, it has been eradicated by a wide-ranging programme of vaccination and we could do the same for measles if ill-educated, superstitious and stupid people could somehow be encouraged to immunise their children.

Plans

London this week, Tallinn next. Tallinn has some good points (10 minutes to get to work rather than 2 hours) but it is lonely, unfamiliar and fairly small. Speaking no Estonian forces me to rely on the locals speaking English but so far this hasn't been a problem - even taxi drivers want to practice.

Dilemma Resolved

Coffee.

Tallinn

I have a dilemma. I'm in a cafe in central Tallinn and I've just had lunch and coffee. Question - should I have another coffee or move on to beer? It is, after all, 16:30 here...