Covid, RSV and Dengue... and don't forget diarrhea

 

By the way: lots of covid, most recovering, but one, a young pregnant nurse who didn't get the vaccine due to pregnancy, died last week. Sigh. And a lot of toddlers sick with respiratory symptoms. Locals blame covid, but I suspect it is RSV, which is a bad but common virus that hits toddlers.

africa outbreak covid

 fast forward to 23 minutes

...........

91 percent recovery rate.

But he also mentions Ebola is under control but now Marburg virus has broken out in west Africa.

when I worked in Africa, one of our nurses who survived an outbreak of hemorrhagic type fever and he was used to donate antibodies to try to treat cases

I thought this was Marburg, but apparently it was Lassa fever. LINK

and here is an article on the vaccine for that disease:

the reason DARPA invented the mRNA technology was to get a vaccine quickly for the next infectious disease coming out of Africa.

pdf link.

there is an experimental Marburg vaccine according to the 2010 article:

The experimental Marburg vaccine is based on a weakened vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV) used to carry and display a component of the Marburg virus. VSV is an infectious disease of horses, cattle and pigs. Dr. Feldmann and his colleagues also have developed a similar experimental VSV-based vaccine against Ebola. Both vaccines are recognized by the same immune cells in the body as Ebola and Marburg viruses, activating the immune system to fight off the target virus.

drug use in the military

 discussed at StrategyPage

Wakefulness can be a potent weapon, especially for commandos or troops engaged in prolonged combat, like the Battle of Fallujah in 2004 and similar long-term and intense operations. Without these wakefulness drugs, you would have to either pull troops out of action so they could rest or leave them in and risk having them make fatal mistakes. Either way, you have a problem because there are never enough troops to get the job done. But with the wakefulness medications, you can solve the problem, for a few days, anyway.

Prolonged use of these drugs is not healthy. But neither is being drowsy during combat. 

.....................

anti vax use this poorly devised study

 Lancet

To prove vaccines are evil and that DPT caused lots of deaths.

But the causes of deaths?

the numbers are too small to make that conclusion.

There were 18 deaths between 3 and 5 months of age: 3 had cough and respiratory infections as the main symptom, 3 had fever (presumed malaria), 2 were due to diarrhea, 5 had diarrhea and vomiting, 1 was a sudden death, and 4 had no information on cause....

Conclusions

DTP was associated with 5-fold higher mortality than being unvaccinated. No prospective study has shown beneficial survival effects of DTP. Unfortunately, DTP is the most widely used vaccine, and the proportion who receives DTP3 is used globally as an indicator of the performance of national vaccination programs.

It should be of concern that the effect of routine vaccinations on all-cause mortality was not tested in randomized trials. All currently available evidence suggests that DTP vaccine may kill more children from other causes than it saves from diphtheria, tetanus or pertussis. Though a vaccine protects children against the target disease it may simultaneously increase susceptibility to unrelated infections.

or maybe not.

The range of diseases that killed the kids is high. Some are viral and other bacterial or protozoa, all of which have a different immune response.

Seasonal disease variation, the comparison to children outside the cohort that live in the community, the water supply, whether or not mom breast fed (or stopped breastfeeing because of pregnancy and used dirty water in formula to feed her kid), the observation if there was a malaria outbreak in some areas, all are not in the analysis.

This was done in the1980s. And they compared it to earlier statistics. 
Right. As if the statistics were accurate. Especially where infant and toddler mortality was high.

lots of statistics are being thrown at you in the article, to confuse you. But the numbers are too low.

And they ignore that quite a few "unvaccinated" kids actually had been given DPT by another program. They ignored this.

here in the Philippines, some parents stopped all immunizations for their kids, and we had an epidemic of measles

in 2019

Since January, the Philippines has had one of the worst measles outbreaks in the world: more than 33,000 cases and 466 deaths from the vaccine-preventable disease. 

and here is why some stories might be biased: People in a lot of cultures tell you what they think you want to hear, not what is "true":

so some of those who had measles had their moms claim they got the shot:

"Most of the time the mothers will tell us that they've had their child immunized, because they're afraid of being scolded," 

 another alternative: They got the shot, but the vaccine, which deteriorates if not stored correctly, no longer worked.

covid update

I have been posting about covid on my other blog. part of the reason is that it is mixed with political or local news here in the Philippines. Hydoxychloroquin might or might not work (depending on the study) but now it is PC to say it doesn't work.

but the next big thing is dog dewormer medicine:

polio

one of the problems of oral polio vaccine is that it is an attenuated "live" vaccine: a weakened form of the infection. Alas, in one out of a million cases, it will mutate back to the severe form.

this is not a major problem because with universal vaccination, the mutated virus does not spread, because every one is immune.

But that's not what happens where vaccination rates are low

that is what happened here.

But note: the numbers are low:

 In 2019, 358 cVDPV2 cases were reported, representing a fourfold increase over the 71 cases reported in 2018 and more than tripling the number of countries with outbreaks, from five (2) to 16. As of August 2, a total of 236 cVDPV2 cases in 17 countries have been reported in 2020. Among 33 cVDPV outbreaks reported during July 2018–February 2020, 31 (94%) were caused by cVDPV2 (1).

infectious disease update

I am posting about the Corona virus on my main blog LINK

and have been too lazy to cross post here, since I'd have to remove the political stuff and that would take time.

however, if you are interested in infectious disease, check out the Teaching company videos that they posted on youtube: A course in infectious disease: