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" I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it. "
Eula Biss
Time
First
Book
Related Quotes:
" I think that protecting children at the age where they're most vulnerable against diseases that are highly contagious is prudent. "
Eula Biss
Children
Most
Think
" Art-making was part of my daily life from a very young age, and I still love that kind of everyday art-making. "
Eula Biss
Life
Age
Daily
" I think there's a temptation to try to think of people who don't vaccinate as a homogenous community, but I'm not convinced that's true. I'm not even sure that the word 'community' is totally accurate there, you know. "
Eula Biss
Think
People
Know
" Nigeria and Pakistan are two countries that have had a lot of trouble with polio. And part of the reason is that there's a lot of political unrest, and people really distrust what the government is doing. That has an effect on people's health, and it has an effect on the health of children. "
Eula Biss
Children
Health
Government
" There's a lot of essay writing that could pass for journalism and journalism that could pass for essay. Some of it is just taxonomy. "
Eula Biss
Writing
Journalism
Essay
" What I saw when I was doing research is that in pursuit of a middle ground, people will kind of split the difference between the two extremes that they're hearing. And I think what's problematic is that people are seeing vaccinating on schedule, on time, as an extreme position. "
Eula Biss
People
Time
Research
" We've been using vaccination in some form for hundreds of years now. We have almost nothing in our modern medicine that we've been using that long, and it's been consistently productive even though, you know, the older vaccines were much more dangerous than vaccines we're using now. "
Eula Biss
Nothing
Now
You
" A vaccine introduces a small amount or a tempered version of the virus into the body - just enough to that the body is able to recognize it and deal with it when it encounters it again in the future. "
Eula Biss
Just
Again
Body
" I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague. "
Eula Biss
Page
Questions
Pursue
" Bram Stoker's 'Dracula,' in my reading, is really obviously about disease and our relation to disease. "
Eula Biss
Dracula
Reading
Really
" On the pro-vaccine side - and not everyone does this, but I saw it enough for it to make me really uncomfortable - is a tendency to accuse people who are wary of vaccination of being stupid and not understanding science. "
Eula Biss
Science
Stupid
Me
" There's a cultural expectation that everyone will be immunized, in part to protect the entire population. When people refuse that expectation, they're indulging in a certain kind of political or social immunity. "
Eula Biss
Expectation
Kind
People
" In the case of Pakistan, the CIA actually used a fake vaccination campaign to try to locate Osama bin Laden, so now vaccination is associated with espionage. "
Eula Biss
Now
Campaign
Fake
" Herd immunity is, it turns out, not incredibly easy to understand. It took me quite a bit of reading before I fully grasped it. But understanding herd immunity is essential to understanding why we vaccinate the way we do. "
Eula Biss
Easy
Way
Reading
" Fears that formaldehyde from vaccines may cause cancer are similar to fears of mercury and aluminum, in that they coalesce around miniscule amounts of the substance in question, amounts considerably smaller than amounts from other common sources of exposure to the same substance. "
Eula Biss
Same
Common
Question
" If your child's going to ride in a car or go swimming or play soccer, all of those things involve risk. And if your child doesn't do any of those things, then they're probably sitting too much, and that involves risk, too. "
Eula Biss
Soccer
Child
Ride
" Imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community. "
Eula Biss
Imagine
Single
Body
" In some areas, immunity has been eroded so much that the child who's not vaccinated is now actually more vulnerable to the complications of infectious diseases. "
Eula Biss
Child
Some
Now
" Some of the most interesting research that I did was about risk assessment and how ordinary citizens like me handle risk assessment and how irregular our risk assessments are. "
Eula Biss
Me
Research
Risk
" One of the shortcomings of our medical system is that doctors have very little time with their patients. "
Eula Biss
Time
Little
Doctors
" I think that people's resistance to vaccination isn't going to disappear until we address some of the nonmedical reasons for that resistance and people's discomfort and distrust of the government. That's bigger than what most medical professionals can handle. "
Eula Biss
Medical
People
Think
" In the 19th century, smallpox was widely considered a disease of filth, which meant that it was largely understood to be a disease of the poor. According to filth theory, any number of contagious diseases were caused by bad air that had been made foul by excrement or rot. "
Eula Biss
Number
Air
Bad
" My mother wrote poetry when I was young - I have an early memory of the sound of her typewriter - and my father told me inventive bedtime stories. "
Eula Biss
Mother
Father
Her
" I talked to lots of people who are vaccine-hesitant, and I actually was one myself until I got further into this project, and most of them actually are in my demographic: so well-educated people with advanced degrees who are upper middle-class and have read quite a bit on the subject. "
Eula Biss
Got
Who
Project