Reader wants Congress’s support for Alzheimer’s
Dear editor,
Alzheimer’s disease doesn’t strike just the elderly. The 200,000 Americans diagnosed with dementia before age 65 also need services that include in-home care, transportation, and caregiver support.
I watched my close friend’s brother suffer for ten years after being diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s at the age of 57. I know from experience the heavy burden (and the eventual painful loss) that families in this circumstance endure.
Alzheimer’s Association advocates have asked members of Congress to cosponsor the Younger Onset Alzheimer’s Disease Act, which would amend the Older Americans Act to serve these families as well as families of the elderly.
I am grateful that Congresswoman Kim Schrier has cosponsored this bipartisan legislation because she serves on the committee that must approve it. Please join me in urging Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell to join her as a cosponsor of the bill.
All our members of Congress must continue to actively support policies that address Alzheimer’s disease as the national public health crisis it is.
Sincerely,
Ken Geisen
Maple Valley
Reader disagrees with Rep. Schrier on vaccinations
Dear editor,
Regarding “Immunize every child,” I am deeply concerned about Representative Schrier’s sponsorship of HR 2862, which seeks in part to surveil vaccination rates, research “vaccine hesitancy,” and combat risk-awareness efforts. People are “vaccine hesitant” because they no longer trust the media, the medical system and many of our governmental agencies, which largely act as marketing arms of the profit-driven pharmaceutical companies.
What Representative Schrier labels as “misinformation” is actually the missing information from much of the public discourse: vaccines have not been tested against placebos; the manufacturers have no liability; the US government has paid $4 billion compensation to victims of vaccine liability and death; and there is a vast body of scientific literature eludicating the complex problems with vaccines.
The “safe and effective” slogan is inaccurate and misleading. Science has barely scratched the surface of understanding how the exquisitely complex human immune system functions.
The recent measles cases in the U.S. demonstrate the limitations and unintended consequences of the MMR vaccine. We have the highest uptake of the vaccine that our country has ever seen, but this mass vaccination program has caused the displacement of the infection from school-aged children, where it was a rite of passage and usually harmless, to adults whose vaccines have waned and, in some cases, to infants whose vaccinated mothers were not able to provide passive maternal immunity because they had not experienced the natural infection.
Those born prior to 1957 have lifelong immunity because they had the wild infection when they were younger. There has been only one possible measles death in the U.S. in the past decade despite 10s of millions of people having compromised immune systems and despite pockets of vaccine-free people and huge populations of vaccinated adults whose immunity has waned. Dr. Schrier’s “ticking time bomb” reference is a fear tactic.
Rather than spending $105 million of taxpayer dollars to surveil and suppress the vaccine risk-aware, why not repeal the 1986 National Childhood Vaccine Injury Compensation Act and instead fund testing for a safer vaccine program? If vaccines make children healthier, why not prove it by data mining existing health records, retrospectively comparing vaccinated children to unvaccinated? Addressing the concerns of those who advocate for transparency and medical freedom would be much more productive.
Sincerely,
Lisa Templeton
Covington
