Science writer Jessica Snyder Sachs has an interesting op-ed in today's New York Times, explaining why you should get your flu shot and skip the chicken pox parties. It's a taste of the material in her excellent new book, Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World (Full disclosure: I provided a blurb for the book.)
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Here's some sheer awesomeness in the form of an explanation of germ theory denialism:
Nature study has taken a turn from the macroscopic to the microscopic.
People believe a lot of wacky things. Some of these things are merely amusingly wacky, while others are dangerously wacky. Among the most dangerously wacky of things that a large number of people believe in is the idea that germ theory is invalid.
The longer I'm in this whole skepticism thing, the more I realize that no form of science is immune to woo. For example, even though I lament just how many people do not accept evolution, for example, I can somewhat understand it.