>Date: Sun, 19 Feb 2006 22:10:45 -0500 >From: Karen Balle <[log in to unmask]> > >As someone who actually had Guillain-Barre, I find your scare tactics to >try to convince people not to feed raw to be intellectually dishonest. Personally, I find the debate on raw feeding vs. kibble to be disingenious on this forum and most others. Personally, I find this issue more compelling on FHL, as there it it seems to play out more based on research data (or the need therefor) and less on personal-anecdotal evidence or perceived authority. I've looked at the research and I've found little conclusive evidence to justify the claim that one feeding method is better than another. There are risks with both methods. The question becomes a personal issue of what risks is the person willing to accept & which method is the person more comfortable with. >Guillain-Barre is a horribly debilitating, paralytic condition. For >you to suggest to people that, by feeding their ferrets raw, they could >cause their ferrets to become quadripoligic (even if just for a short >period of time) in order to try to convince them of your way of thinking >is disingenious. In the U.S., everyone who gets the flu vaccine is asked to sign a waiver stating they've been informed it may cause GBS, however rare that is. Does that "scare tactic" mean nobody should get the vaccine? GBS can be much more severe than you make it out to be. My sister contracted GBS shortly after childbirth, post-partem post-surgical infection, & post vaccine. Its impossible to determine what "caused" it. GBS certainly is not necessarily "for a short period of time". GBS can kill... in my sister's case, it left her permanently totally blind & deaf and lame in one leg. For 2 yrs the only way to talk to her was to spell out capital letters on her cheek & listen for her response, though now she uses braille & sign-languare alphabet. And she's now on her 4th yr of treatment with plasmapheresis & IV-IG, though she is no longer in the excrutiating pain she was in when she 1st got it (lying in the hospital screaming "if you love you you'll kill me"). The point I'm making, and that I believe Sukie was making, is that many diseases are mysterious. We can't definatively tell people what will or won't happen. We can only tell what COULD happen and let the individual make the decision they are most comforatable. I don't consider that "scare tactics". "Scare tactics" would be parking my sister in her wheelchair outside a flu vaccine clinic or outpatient surgical center with a sign reading "this could happen to you", knowing full well GBS can also be result of viral infection or ingested pathogens. If someone had said this to my sister she probably still would've had the vaccine (as she always had), had her baby (whom she loves dearly) and had the past-partem surgery to repair vulval lessions. Life, itself, is unpredictable - all we know is potential, not factual. "Intelligence is like 4-wheel drive. It allows you to get stuck in more 'remote' places." ~ Garrison Keillor ~ [Posted in FML issue 5160]