Saturday, March 16, 2024

Haiti: A microcosm of failed states.

from CBN:

The low IQ problem that he mentions is a problem: not genetic but due to childhood malnutrition. WHen I was in rural Zimbabwe, where the babies got prolonged breast feeding and we had nutrition supplements sold at baby clinic the IQ was essentially normal, especially in kids who went to school where there was lunchtime food supplements.,

Then I worked in Liberia, and the low IQ was a major problem. Why? poor city slums. Women encouraged to use formula (or used it because they had to work) and then couldn't really afford enough to buy enough to keep the kid nourished.

So in Zimbabwe, usually we had moms with 5 to 8 kids, and most lived, but in Monrovia, many of the moms had six pregnancies but only one or two kids.

The gangs can destablize the country because Papa Doc Duvalier used them and voodoo to control the population

Ironically, there are educated Haitians: Many of them went to newly independent African countries that spoke French to find jobs, especially the DRC.

the do gooders who criticized Duterte who kept the Philippines from deteriorating into being run by drug cartels, and the same ones who are criticizing the mass arrests in ElSalvador, are making things worse.

and I am glad he mentioned the fraud by the Clinton Foundation: something that is rarely mentioned in the US media..

Thursday, March 14, 2024

preventive medicine keeps kids alive

Childhood deaths are down.

“Behind these numbers lie the stories of midwives and skilled health personnel helping mothers safely deliver their newborns… vaccinating… children against deadly diseases, and (making) home visits to support families,” Unicef Executive Director Catherine Russell said in a statement. 




For example, after throwing out the Taliban, midwife training led to a huge decrease in maternal/child deaths. 

Routine vaccinations also lowered the death rate from measles and whooping cough.

and encouraging family planning that enables spacing of children, along with encouraging prolonged breast feeding, also helps.

and the general lowering of the poverty rate led to better food so the kids had better immune systems. That is why the covid shutdown was a disaster here in the third world.

the resurgence of an obsolete form of Islamic fanaticism will reverse these trends in many countries.

 And the anti vax types will ignore the good of the vaccines leading to deaths.

and the green movement to ban fossil fuels will make the economy worse by raising food prices and by subtle things like making LGP gas to cook with too expensive, so back to using wood (causing indoor pollution and asthma in kids, not to mention deforestation).

Sigh.



Saturday, March 9, 2024

Adults spreading monkeypox to kid and prostitutes

From Legal Insurrection: a report of hetero sexual transmission of MPox 

so what about the kids?

 Concerns are focused on the number of children exposed to the infectious agent, from an infected adult in schools, preschools, and daycare. There have been 16 confirmed cases of Mpox since the start of the year in Mecklenburg County. 96% Male 67% Black At least 120 people have been exposed. Of those, 40 of them were children, officials said.

it is unclear if this was one person who exposed the kids, or how they were exposed since the article says individual, not individuals...and note: This is exposed, not actual cases.

“The individual who was infectious was around those individuals for an extended period of time,” Washington said.

presumably no hand washing and changed diapers?

The local paper's story is no longer there and the main story is in the nytimes, meaning behind a pay wall.

the MPox outreach was to the affluent white gay community, who changed their behavior, but since there wasn't an outreach to the black community, who is less tolerant of such things, the news didn't get around. So the NC outbreak is mainly in black males: Meaning it is harder to diagnose due to the dark skin .

Local site has info on who is affected.

at the end of the article, there is a link about a more recent heterosexual spread of Mpox in the Congo: and a lot of the ladies were sex workers.

dirty little secret: dry vagina might be part of the reason, just like with HIV: long acting contraception like Depo Provera and some BC pills dry the vagina, and often men like dry vaginas for greater pleasure, so women will use a drying agent/herb for this.


For the study, researchers interviewed 51 of 164 patients who were admitted to Kamituga (Kiva province of the DRCongo) hospital September 2023 through January 2024. Of that group, 24 were professional sex workers. The most common symptoms were fever and oral and anogenital lesions. Two deaths were reported.

so lady prostitutes? note this part:

Heterosexual partners were mainly affected, suggesting that heterosexual contact may be the main form of transmission. The investigators wrote that professional sex workers –primarily young women–were the dominant occupational group, suggesting that they and their clients may be at higher risk for contracting mpox.

Friday, March 8, 2024

Lung cancer Asian women

 Our cousin Daisy was diagnosed with lung cancer a few years ago. She is a non smoker.

Original article notes that kaiser in California is noticing such things.

Instapundit notes this and has a discussion of possible causes.

Laneet article one and two.

my comment:

Lancet article states:A growing body of evidence suggests that genetic predisposition may also contribute to the epidemiology of lung adenocarcinoma in Asian women who are non-smokers
https://www.thelancet.com/j...
They blame smoking, cooking fumes and air pollution. I should note that smoking here is a couple of cigarettes a day, not a pack a day. And cooking nowadays is with LPG but in the poor and up to a few years ago it meant wood fires inside the house.

 

Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Baby Body parts

 the Federalist has an article about the lucrative selling of baby body parts from abortion clinics, something that O'Keefe revealed two years ago and was sued for doing so.


New documents obtained via public record request by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) reveal contracts and conversations between Planned Parenthood and the University of California San Diego (UCSD) where the abortion provider agreed to supply aborted fetal body parts to the school explicitly for “valuable consideration.” In exchange, the university would grant Planned Parenthood ownership of all “patents” and “intellectual property” developed through research and experiments using the supplied fetal tissue.

note: They aren't selling them for money. That would be crass.  and illegal. But they will keep the intellectual property and patents, which are much more lucrative than just selling body parts.

“This new evidence shows Planned Parenthood sells late-term aborted baby body parts in violation of federal law, for far more money than has ever been discussed before,” said David Daleiden, founder and president of The Center for Medical Progress. Transferring aborted human fetal tissue for “valuable consideration” is a federal felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison or a fine of up to $500,000.

the article also discusses an agreement with Univ of Pittsburgh on training young docs/medical students how to do abortions.

why is this important? Because this is about midterm abortions, which are tricky, and the body parts must be fresh and intact. So no cutting the kid up in parts. So no giving poison to kill the kid before the fetus is expelled intact.

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

ít's an epidemic

 MMR:


Routes of Drug Use Among Drug Overdose Deaths — United States, 2020–2022 Weekly / February 15, 2024 / 73(6);124–130

Summary What is already known about this topic? More than 109,000 drug overdose deaths occurred in the United States in 2022; nearly 70% involved illegally manufactured fentanyls (IMFs). Data from the western United States suggested a transition from injecting heroin to smoking IMFs.

What is added by this report?

From January–June 2020 to July–December 2022, the percentage of overdose deaths with evidence of smoking increased 73.7%, and the percentage with evidence of injection decreased 29.1%; similar changes were observed in all U.S. regions. Changes were most pronounced in deaths with IMFs detected, with or without stimulant detection.

/////

the cdc also has several articles on suicide clusters. It is well known that suicide ideation is contageous. I suspect the transgender stuff, school shootings, gang warfare etc all have similar contageon, made worse by films, tv, and nowadays social media

In 2021, approximately 48,000 lives were lost to suicide in the United States (1). During this time, suicide was among the 10 leading causes of death among persons aged 10–64 years and the second leading cause of death among children and adolescents aged 10–14 and adults aged 25–34 years. Suicide rates peaked in 2018, followed by two consecutive years of declines (5%) during COVID-19; during 2020–2021, rates nearly rebounded to the 2018 peak (1,2). Age-adjusted rates increased approximately 36% from 10.4 suicides per 100,000 population in 2000 to 14.1 in 2021 (1,3). Many more persons think about or attempt suicide. In 2021, a total of 12.3 million U.S. adults reported serious thoughts of suicide, 1.7 million attempted suicide (4), 22% of high school students seriously considered suicide, and 10% attempted suicide (5).

When a group of suicides or suicide attempts occur closer totogether in time, space, or both than would normally be expected in a community, they are defined as a suicide cluster (6,7). Suicide clusters are rare and are believed to comprise only a small proportion of overall deaths by suicide; for example, in the United States, an estimated 1%–2% of teenage suicides are part of clusters

Monday, February 19, 2024

vaccine hesitency: Macedonia has whooping cough

Global voices reports that there is whooping cough in Macedonia.

Between January 1 and February 14, 2024, the Institute for Public Health of Republic of North Macedonia registered 28 cases of whooping cough (pertussis), mostly in unvaccinated babies. This is more than twice the total the number of cases in the previous five years (2019–2022) which amounted to 9.

Epidemiologists warn that children who haven’t been vaccinated should not go to kindergarten to avoid epidemics that threaten the health and life of both children and seniors.

According to Panovski, the misinformation and disinformation around vaccines that was rampant during the COVID-19 pandemic brought about the fear of vaccines and lack of trust, which increased the number of anti-vaxxers. “Skopje has the lowest percentage of vaccinations, specifically in the urban municipalities Centar and Karpos. The anti-vaxxers caused a great deal of trouble,” he says.

 

actually I have seen whooping cough in the USA, twice: Both in kids who didn't get the vaccine because of health problems (hospitalized) that delayed their routine shots. 

Both were very sick, and what alerted me to one was the high WBC...the other was sick and I sent her to ICU and they were annoyed that it was not from her primary health problem (severe GEReflux with recurrant pneumonia, but just whooping cough). 


 So where did they catch it? Most of the kids had had the DPT vaccine back then. But I suspect that the nasty chest cold with terrible cough but not high fever in my adult patients was probably whooping cough... 

 Of course I also saw some cases in Africa. So now with the hysteria (rightly or wrongly) about covid vaccine, we will be seeing these common diseases again because parent won't get their kids the routine shots. We saw this after the Dengue vaccine debacle here in the Philippines.

sigh.