I do not understand why people who write or post online so often choose to live in self-imposed ignorance. Thanks to the web explosion and Google, it is possible to find out pretty much anything in just a few minutes. The other day I needed to know how much IGF-1 growth factor is present in human gastric fluids. Took just a few seconds to find a World Health Organization report with a nice table of IGF-1 levels in various bodily fluids.
But at the same time, few people seem to use it. At least that is the conclusion I come to when I read ignorant Metafilter posts about Hepatitis B vaccination:
Another example of vaccine madness, babies within 48 hours of being born are being vaccinated against hepatitis B. That’s bloody insane…there’s virtually no risk of an infant being infected, so why pump these chemicals into their little bodies?
It took me about 15 seconds at Google to find a CDC estimate that as many as 1.5 million Americans suffer from Hepatitis B which they contracted as children. Thanks to the vaccine, Hepatitis B prevalence in people under 20 has declined dramatically, and it is mostly people in the 20-40 range who were not vaccinated as children who are contracting the disease.
Personally, there’s nothing worse than writing something only to have somebody else point out that it is wrong. When I still worked for the local paper I was on an harsh deadline for a film and I incorrectly claimed that South Africa was allied with the Axis powers during World War II. That was more than a decade ago and it still bugs me that I got that wrong.
I love Google because it makes fact checking a snap in about 99 percent of cases. Why more people don’t use it for that purpose is beyond me.