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Polio Vaccine? Isn't that one of those terrible American inventions that have been foisted on an unsuspecting world?

First there was Yellow Fever vaccine! The there was DDT which eradicated small pox, penicillin and the sulfa drugs.

Let's not forget the "Green Revolution" and Neal Armstrong's message from the moon. Oh yeah! we are such a horrible society. We fought three major wars in the 20th Century to bring freedom and individual rights to mankind which, BTW ended the Colonial Era, (a fact that France has never forgiven us!). We founded the League of Nations, (which failed), and the United Nations, (which failed).

Yup! There's nothing positive from all our efforts!

To quote one of our prescient Senator's from the pages of Rolling Stone: "Fk'em"

Sad.
Especially in that it was Persian and Arab Muslims that made the greatest strides in science and medicine in the early Middle Ages (on the other hand, they had plenty to build on from Greek, Syrian, and Coptic Christians, and Hindus from India) but at least they were willing to take knowledge from other cultures and improve on it.

Probably some of the Muslims in Mali and Songhai in West Africa during the later Middle Ages were aware of the discoveries of scientists like al-Razi and al-Hayyan.
Just more evidence that a lot of what is so scr*wed up about Islam today is a result of a decayed and degenerated culture.

Medieval Islam , at least among the educated classes in the great cities like Baghdad, Bukhara, Cordoba, and Palermo, was a cosmopolitan and relatively secular society, at least for its time,if not necessarily as innovative as it is given credit for (but at least willing to take advantage of and improve on innovations and discoveries from other cultures.)

So much of today's Islam has become insular and pathologically hostile to progress, particularly innovations and values from other cultures.

A young Muslim lady from Canada (I believe her name is Irshad Manji) wrote a good book about this called The Trouble with Islam. Hope to get around to reading it sometime soon.

a couple years ago, there was a lot of rumors in the british press about how polio vaccine was the cause of the HIV epidemic.

As for causing infertility, there were similar reports in the Philippines, probably because there were experiments of anti HCG vaccine illegally done in that country.

Finally, look at all the "autism linked with MMR' vaccine in FR threads.

A lot of people pushing vaccines are haughty outsiders who look down on the locals (I wrote to a Brit in one magazine for federal doctors who wrote how he despised the local Christian churches for being against condoms...overlooking that condoms stored at 100 degrees in 90 percent humidity don't tend to work very well)...

so don't blame this on Islam...it's ignorance, yes, but there is both a cultural and rational explanation on why these people are refusing the vaccine

There have been several people here who have condemned vaccines for non-existent reasons. And, there was a newspaper article posted here a while back about some ex-hippie spawn that refused to vaccinate their kids -- and most who posted to it supported them. In addition, more and more people (not just ex-hippies or their spawn) in the US are refusing to vaccinate their kids. How are we (as a country) that different from these nutcases?