I've always said to people think before you post, not post before you think.

I personally thought it was on topic given the subject matter, and the comments.

Its your blog, not mine. If you feel its off topic, then feel free to delete the post.

Up to you though.

I'll still keep reading the blog+dansdata for your caustic wit, and keep commenting when appropriate.

Yeah... the one you were replying to. Or did you just accidentally type "@Itsacon" at the beginning of your comment?

Did you actually read the links there at the UoW site?

I am not an epidemiologist, a virologist, or an expert on AIDS. People who are epidemiologists, virologists and/or experts on AIDS generally consider the African-polio-vaccine transmission theory weak, for several reasons. I am unqualified to judge their assessment of the evidence pro and con; unless I'm going to sink a few months into getting a basic grounding in AIDS epidemiology, there's no point playing "duelling experts" on the Internet when nobody knows much about the argument they're so eager to join.

And none of this has anything at all to do with the matter at hand. Let's assume that the African polio vaccine was just crawling with SIV or HIV or both - so what? What's that got to do with modern AIDS denialism or the anti-vaccination movement?

Where does Ben Elton come into it? (ahh 4th comment).

Did you actually read the links there at the UoW site? Its actually quite a lot less crazy than you'd think.

Go ahead flame away ;)

(Honestly, where do these people come from? Do they just scan pages for keywords and then weigh in with their irrelevant opinion about AIDS or creationism or Greece-versus-Turkey or whatever? WTF does a shaky theory about contamination of oral vaccines 50 years ago have to do with a book by Ben Elton that's set in the future?)

There is considerable data that the AID's virus was most probably passed onto humans by the widespread polio vaccinations of the 50's in sub-saharan africa.

See here - http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/dissent/documents/AIDS/ for a good round up on most of those.

As for the nay-sayers against vaccination, I've actually known a family who suffered the consequences of a bad reaction to a vaccine. It was devastating to see how their child ended up for the rest her life. But, that didn't stop me from vaccinating my own children...for I've also seen the consequences of children (several, in fact) who weren't protected and ended up contracting some awful, but very preventable, diseases. I've known far more kids who have been killed or permanently affected by these diseases than the vaccines.