#eula bliss

[llovelymoonn]

on fathers

ocean vuong someday i’ll love \\ kaye donachie against the mass of night \\ nailone marta sketch \\ agustin gómez-arcos the carnivorous lamb \\ henrik uldalen \\ richard siken war of the foxes (ii) \\ halsey i would leave if i could: “i am angry because of my father” \\ barbara kroll \\ @d0ll-part-s crossing the line \\ eula bliss the pain scale \\ david shelvino

kofi

[st-just]

Though toxicologists tend to disagree, many people regard natural chemicals as inherently less harmful than man-made ones. We seem to believe, against all evidence, that nature is entirely benevolent.

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

In a section of The Vaccine Book titled 'Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your children?' Dr. Bob asks 'Can we fault parents for putting their own child's health ahead of the kids around him?' This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob's implied answer is not mine.

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

After leaving the cemetery I remarked to my father that I had noticed the graves of five-year-olds and ten-year-olds and a number of teenagers but I was surprised not to have seen, in one of the oldest cemeteries in Chicago, the graves of any babies. This, my father reminded me, was probably because infants died in such large numbers during the nineteenth century that they were not routinely buried in marked graved. Later I would learn that one of every ten infants born in 1900 died before their first birthday. I would read this in a report of vaccine side effects, which concluded its brief historical overview of child mortality with the observation that now 'children are expected to survive to adulthood.'

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

For now DDT is, unfortunately, one of the more effective means of controlling malaria in some places. Applied to the interior walls of homes once a year, DDT has almost eliminated malaria in parts of South Africa. Compared to spraying DDT across millions of acres from airplanes, as was done in the United States, the environmental impact of this application is relatively small. But DDT remains an imperfect solution. Few chemical companies produce it, donors are unwilling to finance it, and many countries are reluctant to use a chemical that is banned elsewhere. 'Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor countries,' writes Rosenberg 'was its eradication in rich ones.'

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

'Why target two and a half million innocent newborns and children?' Barbara Loe Fisher asks of the Hep B vaccine. The implication behind the word innocent is that only those who are not need protection form disease. All of us who grew up during the AIDS epidemic were exposed to the idea that AIDS was a punishment for homosexuality, promiscuity, and addiction. But if disease is a punishment for anything, it is only a punishment for being alive.

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

My pregnancy, like every pregnancy, had primed me for the understanding that my body was not mine alone and that its boundaries were more porous than I had ever been led to believe. It was not an idea that came easily, and I was dismayed by how many of the metaphors that occurred to me when I was pregnant were metaphors of political violence - invasion, occupation and colonization. But during the birth, when the violence against my body was greatest, I was most aware not of the ugliness of a body's dependence on other bodies, but the beauty of it. Everything that happened to me in the hospital after my son's delivery, even the things I understand now as cold or brutal, I experienced at the time as aglow with humanity. Alarms were sounded for me, doctors rushed to me, bags of blood were rigged for me, ice chips were held to my lips. Human hands were in me and everything that touched me - in the nitroglycerine, in the machines that monitored my breathing, in the blood that wasn't mine.

Eula Bliss, On Immunity

[st-just]

'Can you imagine,' I ask a friend while reading Journal of a Plague Year, 'seeing people all around you dying from a disease, and not knowing what is causing it, or how it's passed, or who will be next?' Even as I say this, it occurs to me that my friend lived in San Fransisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, and saw nearly everyone he knew die of a disease about which almost nothing was known. San Fransisco in 1989, he reminds me, was not entirely unlike London in 1665.

Eula Bliss, On Immunity