Inhale. Inhale. Exhale, exhale, exhale.

[venta]

Help... my views are under attack! It seems that something I arbitrarily claimed on someone else's LJ is very wrong.

My claim was: everyone (in the UK, for approximately accurate values of everyone) had the BCG jab (ie TB vaccine) at secondary school. It seems that this isn't true, though.

What we need is a poll.



[Poll #1789614]


In not-entirely-unrelated news, hjalfi and I concluded last week that the goverment's current welfare and NHS reforms are not an attempt to undermine the system, but a genuine desire to improve the quality of today's literature. The more starving, tubercular people we have in poor housing, the more poetry we get. Fact.

Comments

[d-floorlandmine.livejournal.com]

I managed to break the school system for that one. Due to having been, for a number of reasons, a North London public school proto-oik, my school, stuck somewhere in the 50s, did the Common Entrance Exam and shipped out pupils at 13. So they helpfully did the booster before we moved to the big scary world.
Then we moved to South London, where schools tended to shunt pupils at 11, and where they did the booster at 13, but, so it seemed, after I'd arrived. So they hit me with the six-needle check in my first year there, which came up nicely (it's actually still possible to see the marks on my forearm). But for some reason, the nurse checking the reactions decided that that couldn't possibly be the reaction, and I must have a non-reacting test site elsewhere on my forearm, so I was scheduled for a second jab, which would probably have gone amusingly nuclear.
Fortunately for my upper arm, my mother was a GP, and was therefore believed when she told them that I'd already had the booster the previous year.
I still remember one of the lads in our year developing an awesome (to a 13-year-old boy) manky crater on his upper arm, though ...

[venta.livejournal.com]

Interestingly (if Wikipedia is to be believed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacillus_Calmette-Gu%C3%A9rin#Method_of_administration)) the prick test isn't testing immunity. It's testing "likelihood of bad shit happening if vaccine is administered", of which immunity due to prior vaccine is one cause.

I suspect that "amusingly nuclear" would have turned out to be more nuclear than amusing :)