Every year the developed countries of the world spend around $1.435 trillion dollars on medical research. They spend that money because they know that medical research prolongs life expectancy, and leads to better quality of life as well.
All that research gives us better drugs, better vaccinations, and better health care systems. That is why the average life expectancy in Australia is now around 83, while in our nearest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, that figure is just 63. In Sierra Leone, the average life expectancy is 46.
In spite of this, some people want to turn their backs on the trillions of dollars of research money and expose their children to the risk of diseases that could be easily prevented. Worse still, they want to expose other people to the risk of diseases that may flourish because of their stupidity.
In case you haven't realised, I am talking about the suggestion that a child care centre might be opened in Byron Bay solely for children who have not been vaccinated.
Forgive me for not having the medical vocabulary of some of my doctor friends, but words like stupid, irresponsible, selfish and wilful spring to mind. Then again, maybe I'm too judgmental of people who've clearly been having too much whoopee weed up in the hills.
What these people should be doing is getting their children vaccinated. Moreover, they should be glad that they have the luxury of doing so.
That's because there are people who cannot be vaccinated, and they rely on everyone else doing the right thing to avoid the epidemic spread of diseases like whooping cough, tuberculosis, measles and so on. These are people with immune disorders, who are on chemotherapy, newborn babies, the elderly and the very ill.
If everyone else gets vaccinated, and we keep the vaccination rate above 95 per cent, then these diseases have a much harder time finding a host and hence a much harder time of spreading to the weak and vulnerable.
Setting up a child care centre solely for unvaccinated children - not just a centre which allows unvaccinated children in - is the perfect way to spread disease.
As the Oxford Vaccine Group warns: "If you live in an area where vaccine coverage is low, and your child is not vaccinated, it's quite likely that many of the people they come into contact with will not be vaccinated either.
"If one of these people gets an infectious disease like measles, they can easily pass it on to the other unvaccinated people around them, and in some cases the disease can then spread very quickly through the population."
Maybe, if these parents don't care about their own children, they should consider the life of a vulnerable person who might be infected by their unvaccinated child.
Amidst this insanity, scientists in the UK believe they have found a way to attack viruses in the same way that broad spectrum antibiotics attack bacteria. Dr Paul Kellam of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute said they have found a gene that inhibits the ability of viruses to penetrate the membranes of cells, and thus prevents them infecting people.
"This now opens the possibility that in the future, as we understand the body's own set of defences, there is a real arsenal of broad-spectrum anti-viral genes there, with a mechanism we can use to provide very good therapeutic targets."
That means an answer to the 18,000 hospitalisations and 1,500 to 2,500 influenza related deaths in Australia each year, as well as the other viruses we face.
Of course, this assumes people will avail themselves of the fruits of the $1.435 trillion spent on medical research each year. It assumes they won't render that research nugatory.
Perhaps we should send these people to Sierra Leone to see what happens when disease, death, poverty, and chronic stupidity hold sway.