• Categories
• Comments
• Archives

There’s been an outbreak of measles in the San Diego area, with 11 cases identified and a 12th awaiting confirmation by medical tests. Measles presents at first as flu-like symptoms including fever, but quickly expands to more unusual symptoms like conjunctivitis and an unusual rash. Measles often leads to complications, up to and includig death.

None of the 11 children diagnosed with Measles were immunized against it. This has been attributed to the growing anti-vaccination movement. The anti-vaccination movement largely believes that a preservative used in some vaccines, thimerosal, is linked to an increase in child autism. Original anti-vaccination hypotheses were that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccination was linked to child autism. These studies have been disproven. But, the conflation of worries about thimerosal and the MMR vaccination and autism has already taken root with many fearful parents.

Here’s the truth: there is no causal link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Thimerosal, which is mercury-based and hella dangerous, was never used to preserve MMR doses. Therefore, you should have every child who can tolerate it innoculated with the MMR vaccine without fear. The three diseases it protects against are all extrememly contagious, and the MMR vaccine has dramatically improved health in the US and the world.

Obviously, you have to trust doctors and the CDC on this information, which might be difficult, since they apparently did let manufacturers preserve some vaccines with a mercury-based preservative. But in truth most of the treatments that were preserved with thimerosal have long since expired (check the table here) and probably should be considered mercury-free.

I’m not saying anything definitive about autism and vaccinations, because what do I know? We were very careful about selecting what immunizations our children would get and when…and my oldest son is autistic anyway. What I am saying is that the potential risk of autism through vaccination has been examined closely by scientists, and the body of opinion is that there is no causation. I’m also saying that the supposed link between MMR and autism is a myth, and an artifact left over from 1 original study with an extremely small sample set and some unacceptable biases introduced into the study has been superseded by larger better designed studies that reached the opposite conclusions. You don’t want to mess around with the measles (Canada recently had a mumps outbreak which seems even worse).

More Information About the Measles Outbreak

Measles Information

The Preventable Plague

Vaccine choices and the San Diego Measles Outbreak

CDC report on San Diego Measles Outbreak

JP Communications has many friends and clients in the southern states of Kentucky, Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas, including in some of the specific cities where the tornadoes touched down yesterday. We were horrified to learn of the extent of the destruction, and we hope to soon hear that everyone’s families and homes and businesses are OK.

The bill for the damages caused by the line of tornadoes is going to be pretty severe. If you have family, friends or interests in the affected areas, I urge you to help out by donating to local relief agencies.

In Tennessee (TN) the Nashville Red Cross is coordinating relief efforts in the Volunteer State, which was the hardest hit.

Information on coordinating chapters of the Red Cross for the other states is unavailable at the moment. But the all draw upon the Disaster Relief Fund

Keep these people in your thoughts, and try to think of a way to try to help.

UPDATE: Wendy from the Red Cross stopped by to leave a comment and give us some good places to keep up with the Red Cross relief efforts in the affected states.

If you want to follow the Red Cross response to the tornadoes, visit: redcrosstn.wordpress.com/

or follow Twitter updates at twitter.com/redcros

Ask Jason Prescott, I have long predicted that Microsoft would make a bid for Yahoo!, but it still was a strange surprise to wake up to this morning.  In the above story, there’s a bit from an analyst that claims this is all about advertising revenue from search:

“This deal is mainly about advertising, and mainly about search-based advertising,” said the 451 Group, based in Boston. “It combines the second and third players in that market to take on the number one, Google. The main thing this brings Microsoft is a profitable advertising business, something it has not managed to achieve with its own online services business, which loses money.”

…that’s a pretty shallow look at things, probably they just had an early reading in on the memo that Ballmer sent to Microsoft employees, which is nothing more than a leak to the blogs and the press directly from Ballmer. It’s definitely not just about search. Microsoft has been making a sustained effort to drive entertainment and lifestyle options over a Microsoft software and increasing hardware platform platform. Yahoo is certainly more than just search advertising. Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Finance, Flickr, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Personals are all powerful competitors in their space. It fits in seamlessly with Microsoft’s powerful Xbox platform and gives it a much broader userbase to compete against Google’s Gmail and the other Google Apps like Google Docs. Google is still really just getting started in terms of taking on Microsoft’s dominant office productivity software, but it is definitely part of their mission, leveraging the super appealing Gmail and trying to wedge it and their improving online office suite into the picture for business customers.

Where’s Bill?

Maybe its a coincidence but I think it’s interesting that this comes immediately on the heels of a press offensive to celebrate Bill Gates’s retirement. Especially since the public celebration comes 6 months before his real departure in July.

Is This the Front Lines of Microsoft’s Endless War Vs. Open Source

One of the things, most people don’t know about Yahoo! is that they are one of the big champions of open source software, the free community developed applications that are like garlic to Microsoft’s software sales and licensing vampire. Yahoo is mainly deployed on FreeBSD, and a Microsoft takeover would be a crushing blow to many open source initiative, including Yahoo acquisition Zimbra, which has been emerging as a worthy alternative mail server to Exchange. Read more in this thread at Slashdot

No surprise YHOO closed up 47%

Yahoo’s Story About Microsoft Trying to Buy Yahoo
Funny Bitterness: An Ex-Yahoo Employee’s Advice to Microsoft

Check out this comment:

I have contacted a few mid level management people at Yahoo who could be described as, ‘Yahoo Purple Lifers”. They have intimated that they will stay and work to make any cultural changes to the organization, and I quote, “as painful as possible for the new Microsoft directors and division Veeps, short of insurrection”.

I’ll try and write something up on this attitude that seems pervasive, on my blog, over the weekend. There has been plenty of bitterness over the layoff’s already.

They are very different companies; although one could reason that this acquisition is the lawful and logical harvest of equity for Yahoo’s long term investors and employees with stock. But it takes more than a mere decision to make such a gargantuan move work.

They are Very Different cultures.

Hey! There’s one reason you might not want to buy the stock…

According to a new Forrester report, Europeans will double their spending on online marketing over the next five years from about $10.3 billion in 2006 to over $22.1 billion in 2012.

Over 25,000 consumers in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden and the UK were polled while interviews were conducted on twenty-four major European marketers.  According to the results, online marketing will account for about 18% of total media budgets in just five short years.  This includes email, search and display advertising.

According to the report “Firms will raise their online budgets primarily to better reach the growing audience that relies on the Web for a widening range of decisions.  After five years of dipping their toes into the online marketing waters, firms have come to realize that the Web is a valuable medium for client acquisition, retention and market expansion.”

This shift in spending should come as no surprise; the world audience and its attention has been moving online for some time now.  In fact, 36% of online Europeans say that they watch less television because they’re going online instead.  28% reported reading less of the newspapers for the same reason.

Consumers also cited lack of trust in advertisers as a reason for their shift towards online spending.  A whopping 67% said they didn’t believe that most advertisers were truthful in their attempts to market their products.

But 40% of online consumers said they trust sites utilizing price comparisons and 36% said they trust online product reviews originating from other users.

Forrester also interviewed twenty-four major European marketers in an attempt to gain some insight into their current online marketing strategies and their plans for the future.  They found that “All of the interviewees use banner ads, with seventeen using buttons and the same percentage using online sponsorships.  More than half of them also use rich media ads.  Interviewees cite a variety of drivers for online spend, with ten wanting to grow their business and nine saying that they are simply following their consumers.”

Most respondents said that they use paid search and seventeen said that they pay agency fees.  None of the respondents indicated that they’d be spending less on search in the next five years and about 75% of them expect to be spending more.  This is because they’ve come to realize that this type of spending yields good return on investment (ROI) and that they need to keep up with the general trend if they wish not to be left behind.  Additionally, this illustrates a widespread desire to do more targeted marketing, and where better to achieve this than over the ever-expanding Internet?