In Ontario we have … parents that are dumb as rocks, but our kids are pretty smart, eh.
lulz
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That is one freaking awesome kid!
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Most people want their kids to do better than they do. I guess it’s nice to be reminded that there’s all kinds of people in the world?
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This is a good, proper way to rebel against parental “authority”.
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Perhaps the parents thought that their stupidity was due to vaccinations?
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Yay for apples falling VERY far from their tree!!!
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I was a nurse in Washington state for years. When I was working in a doc’s office I remember my first case of whooping cough. An entire family of five including a baby. It was bad, and when I asked why nobody was vaccinated I was given all the usual stupid responses. They did vaccinate everyone after that. They were damn lucky there weren’t any dire consequences.
Im not a nurse anymore but folks ask me for advice now and then. I like asking if they are vaccinated and looking extremely concerned when they say no.
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I thought the disease reservoir came from the soil and environment so 100% eradication isn’t an option.
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No, polio is a human virus that can be contracted from the soil/water/environment into which an infected person has been shedding it. No more infected people leads to no more infected soil 
Global eradication could be very close if the current efforts can be maintained. From the link: “In the first half of 2015 we have seen the lowest number of cases ever during this period, with just 33 cases in 2 countries as opposed to 122 cases in 9 countries at this time in 2014. This progress needs to be maintained through hard work to end transmission in endemic countries and to prevent future outbreaks”
(Even success won’t be an entirely simple event though, because the cheap-ass live vaccine (once used by necessity in countries with a large population and no money) has the potential to mutate and in rare cases cause a sickness in people who lack polio vaccination. So the (more expensive) inactivated vaccines that we use in the west will be needed to complete the eradication and fence off any occurrences until that possibility passes, and so work is ongoing to develop a much cheaper inactivated vaccine)
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and this kind of nonsense doesn’t help
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When I was a kid, I knew a scrawny old guy who happened to walk with a slight limp. Once I asked him about it. I thought maybe he’d hurt his foot since the last time I’d seen him or something. He said no, he’d had polio when he was a kid. I thought oh yeah right, that’s what FDR had, that’s why he was in a wheelchair, my friend must have been born before the vaccine, that makes sense.
Now I am the old guy, and people currently having kids have never met anybody in their lives who survived polio. For them it’s not real?
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Santa? Not real.
Ghosts? Not real.
Vampire squirrels? Not real.
Polio? Fucking really real.
I’m going to take my kids out and get a vaccine booster at this rate. Fuck this noise and fuck those backwoods yokels.
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Though, if one were feeling a little ethically disinhibited, it might actually have some domestic utility against anti-vaxers.
Hey, y’know who else thinks that vaccines are a sinister western conspiracy? Terrorist muslins, incubating sharia polio on their hajj, that’s who! Do you want America to be like Pakistan or Nigeria? Why do you hate America so much?
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It’s actually not a half-bad idea. Lets screw with their brains a bit.
My grandmother, still alive and kicking, has a leg brace from late teen polio.
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To be serious for a moment, the whole sea-of-humanity spiraling around the Kaaba, thousands of people kissing and rubbing the black stone, is pretty ideal for incubating and spreading MERS and TB and whatever else lives in about a million people’s mouths/on their hands.
I can’t believe we don’t hear about people ending up quarantined all the time after getting something nasty from such relics as the black stone, or the blarney stone.
My dad, his older brother, and at least two more people from our village in Canada caught polio in 1947. The one girl died. My uncle was only mildly affected. My dad and the other boy had life long physical disabilities. Dad spent at least 2 years of his life in hospital and used a brace on one leg and crutches all the time I knew him. He also suffered long term damage to his heart valves which killed him in his early 60s.
Fortunately, he lived long and out-goingly enough for many people of my generation to have known him and their kids too. His grandkids will all continue to be great ambassadors for polio vaccination. (Ridiculous to think that should be necessary.)
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None of this even addresses Post-Polio syndrome, which my grandmother suffers from and which she helped get recognition during her work as a nurse.
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Actually, I used to play paintball with a guy who was one of Polio’s last victims in the US. He wore leg braces and wasn’t very mobile, but if he had decent cover he would make you pay for underestimating him.
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