Mad deer disease

There was a scare about mad cow disease a couple years back in the UK, but one underreported story is the presence of another prion caused disease in deer in the midwestern USA.

Wasting disease in Deer:

CWD is highly contagious among cervids: deer, elk, moose, reindeer, caribou. There’s no known cure, and it’s always fatal. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) warns us to avoid exposure to it, as no one knows whether humans can contract it or not. Unfortunately, once CWD comes to an area, it’s impossible to get rid of it...

the problem? the question if hunting and eating Venison could cause a simlar syndrome in humans. No creditable links yet, but the experts recommend don't eat the meat from the sick deer.

The link might be brain tissue: If I remember correctly, mad cow disease was spread to humans by meat contaminated by brain tissue, which is where the disease is located. Most hunters eat the meat but not the innerds of the deer they shoot, at least nowadays (in the past, poverty meant you ate everything but now often the venison is merely an addition to your food supply, so the brain/pancreas etc are discarded or fed to dogs. at least this was so when I lived in a deer hunting area of PA...maybe someone needs to check the dogs of deer hunters?)

However, the prions can spread to other animals via urine in the environment.

and then there is the question: is CWD from prions or just from a bacteria they can't identify?

Then there’s Frank Bastion’s theory that CWD is not caused by prions, but by a bacterium. Bastion, a medical doctor and biologist at Louisiana State University who specializes in TSE diseases, claims CWD is caused by a very small Spiroplasma bacterium that doesn’t have a cell wall. He believes the misfolded proteins are the result of CWD, not the cause of it. He says the lack of cell wall is the reason antibiotics, which target cell walls, don’t work.

summary:

It’s been in the United States for five decades, and we’ve still got lots of wild deer and elk, in some places too many, so it’s easy to turn a blind eye. What’s more, people haven’t contracted it. However, in states like Colorado, where CWD has existed for several decades and where prevalences are 40% or higher, cervid populations have declined precipitously. “CWD will continue to affect a treasured natural resource and might become a human health issue,” says Richards, “We’re not sure we can get ahead of it, but there’s also vast areas of the U.S. where no evidence of CWD exists. It’s up to us to do all we can to keep it that way.”

Missing clue: He's a Pediatric Neurologist

I was puzzled why the governor of Virginia thought nothing of saying if a child was born alive after a late term abortion that he would ask mom before resusitating it or even giving it routine care (i.e. the common practice alas is to put the kid in the cleanup room until it dies of hypothermia... or sometimes are rescued by a feisty nurse who takes it to the nursery and they survive).

The problem is that most of the late term abortions are done for social reasons so encouraging funding of groups to help these moms to carry the kid to term and have it adopted is the way to go.

But after I wrote the stuff below, I read that the governor was a Pediatric Neurologist.

These docs take care of autistic, mentally disabled, cerebral palsy and severe behavioral problems due to brain damage.

and a lot of neurologists get cynical and don't see the value of the lives of the handicapped (I often cite the case of one of our Chippewa patients with frontal lobe syndrome who needed a feeding tube. We had her checked by the neurologist to ask if her outbursts should be treated with medicine, and instead he spent an hour pressuring the family to pull her feeding tube and let her die. The family did not respond because of shyness, but their cousin, a nurse, on the way out told him off: that's the difference between we Indians and you white people. We don't kill our elders)..

Am I accusing him of doing such things? No, but given that he was so clueless on why so many got upset about his support of full term "abortions" including infanticide via neglect, it does make you wonder.

So I suspect the late term abortions he is discussing are not the social ones, but the ones done for things like Spina Bifida/meningomyelocoel, which might not show up on the early ultrasound.

These are "throw away" kids: see my note below about the Oklahoma Children's hospital study, but also the Baby Jane Doe case, where docs persuaded the parents not to treat her, and all the VIPS in NYC and NYTimes hailed the parents for their bravery... the kid however didn't die and did finally get treatment and is alive and well the last time I looked (which was about ten years ago).

so what he was explaining was how he would treat these kids: deliver them early so they will be hopefully born dead, and if they managed to survive, well, after all they weren't wanted by mom, so let them die in the back room.

but then another suspicion came to me.

How many of these kids did he treat in hospitals? And how many were denied ordinary care and died?

Yes, I've seen this too, and suspected it in other cases.

(I could put a long discussion on why not to give extraordinary care here, or treatment that would cause more anguish and pain for a minimal prolonging of life, which in Catholic ethics is optional).

it would be hard to prove, of course: The parents usually go along with the doctor's advice, and wouldn't realize they had an option that would keep their kid alive. And to realize they let the kid die unnecessarily would be something they would not want to face, especially since often the ambivalent feelings about the child would induce more guilty feelings.

Sigh.

First the babies, then the disabled.

The disability group NotDeadYet is planning a vigil on March 1st to remember the disabled victims who were murdered by their caregivers, often family members who got off with no punishment or a light sentence.

 In the past five years, over 650 people with disabilities have been murdered by their parents, relatives, or caregivers...

 These are just the cases that we are aware of – since we began monitoring this issue, we learn about more murders every week. We read the victims’ names, see their photographs, and gather what information we can about their lives. The criminal justice system has continued to give lighter sentences to family and caregivers who murder disabled people, and the media continues to portray these murders in a sympathetic light.

more here.

and as a physician, I suspect the numbers are higher because their deaths were considered "natural" so the coroner or their doctors just signed the death certificates, often giving the family the benefit of the doubt.

and this doesn't include "unexpected" sudden death in hospitals, or deaths from withholding simple antibiotics from these people

this is a problem for the elderly of course. But one could argue they would die anyway (which is why their deaths are often overlooked) but to kill a deformed or crippled or mentally disabled child? That makes one shudder, yet only those who have had to care for such children in the home could imagine why this is sometimes seen as an act of despiration. Ironically, these children used to be placed in institutions because their care was too much for the family, but hey, now we have "deinstitutionalization", so their families do the work, and believe me, the severely handicapped are not the problem: The problem is those caring for children with autistism, ADHD and destructive behavior.

Withholding extraordinary care can be argued as ethical by the Catholic church, especially if the burden of treatment is high. So Lolo died in his bed after refusing chemotherapy, knowing he already had mild uremia and heart disease from his high blood pressure and he was 90 years old so the Chemo probably wouldn't prolong his life very much.

which is another long lecture where I could cite cases on the pros and cons of using dialysis that would be considered torture, or not giving chemotherapy to a man whose immune system is already weak, or putting them on a respirator: we had one man with a meningocoel whose family said no, but he was competent and said yes, so lived. But when faced with his next bout of pneumonia he said no.

the destruction of the family in the modern world means there is no one to care for them, because if both parents have to work to support the family...and this is worse with a single mom.

the irony about the 80 percent  of late term abortions done "for social reasons" is that no one seems to be saying to the moms: we will arrange for you to live with a family and then help you place your baby with a family who loves them, or else help you to find a way to care for the baby yourself.

In intact families, usually this is done by the parents or aunts or cousins, and often churches have resources to point to where the moms can get help.

(been there, done that. And I know many families who have done the same for their druggie or teeenaged children who faced an unplanned pregnancy).

But of course, if you just let the mom abort the kid, the abortionist can make money.

sigh

Ebola vaccine

there is an experimental vaccine being used in the DRC to stop the Ebola epidemic.

AlJ has the details:

Yup. it's infanticide.

the zeal about late term abortion is not about womens' health (when a woman has cancer or pre eclampsia, you try to save the baby). and if the fetus has a fatal abnormality (e.g. anencephaly with polyhydramnos) you deliver the kid early because it won't live.

 In some cases when the mom has to deliver the baby due to her medical problems, the baby is so premature and has no breathing and heartbeat, and maybe a premature who is born with abnomalities isn't breathing, so maybe you might not resusitate a child with many malformations, at least you could argue this in the past:  but in a major hospital often you can save a one pound kid and malformations can be fixed, so it's hard to make that argument today.

But this is normal pregnancies: There is little excuse for late "abortions" done to kill the kid, which is why they do "partial birth abortions" despite the fact this is holds risk to the mother (i.e. torn cervix with hemorrhage or uterine perforation).

The argument is that this is rare and only done for fetal abnormalities, but the dirty little secret is that a lot of the "fetal abnormalities" are compatible with life (e.g. Down's syndrome) so delivering early and putting the kid in the corner to die is equivalent of infanticide.

but National Review has the real dirty little secret about these late abortions: according to the Guttmacher institute, 80 percent are due to social reasons.

most are done because mom decides to do it, and she doesn't see killing a baby who could live outside the womb as a problem.

when abortion was first made legal, we had some of these kids in our Neonatal ICU, but we also know some were left in the corner to die. And yes, most of them were for social reasons.

Sigh.

another dirty little secret: 50 years ago, when the docs ordered no resusitation, often the nurses took the kids to the nursery, and when the doctors ordered them not to be fed, the nurses fed them anyway.

wonder if this is still going on.

New Dengue vaccine?

The Dengue vaccine was pushed here, until they found it made some cases worse.

you see, if you get dengue once, you get sick, but if you get it again (a different strain) you can get the full hemorrhagic disease.

Wikipedia:

In 2016 a partially effective vaccine for dengue fever (Dengvaxia) became commercially available in 11 countries: Mexico, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brazil, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru, Thailand, and Singapore.^[5][6][7] In Indonesia it costs about US$207 for the recommended three doses.^[7] WHO updated its recommendations regarding the use of Dengvaxia in September 2018 based on the evidence that seronegative vaccine recipients have an excess risk of severe dengue compared to unvaccinated seronegative individuals . It is not clear why the vaccinated sereonegative population have more serious adverse outcomes. A plausible hypothesis is the phenomenon of antibody-dependent enhancement.^[8]

despite the price, it was given out here en masse before the problem was discovered (and many suspect bribery was behind the push).

 The 2017 dengue vaccine controversy in the Philippines involved a vaccination program run by the Philippines Department of Health.^[6] It vaccinated schoolchildren with Sanofi Pasteur's CYD-TDV (Dengvaxia) dengue vaccine. Some of the children who received the vaccine had never been infected by the dengue virus before. The program was stopped when Sanofi Pasteur advised the government that the vaccine could put previously uninfected people at a somewhat higher risk of a severe case of dengue fever.^[2] A political controversy erupted over whether the program was run with sufficient care and who should be held responsible for the alleged harm to the vaccinated children.^[11] 

but now there is a new vaccine: I found this Reuters article in a Japanese new site:

they are bypassing the USA... hmm wonder why. But here is the article and I hope Reuters doesn't sue me, because I'm too tired to paraphrase it:

CHICAGO--A new vaccine for the dengue virus is taking a potentially risky road to prevent the mosquito-borne disease that infects nearly 400 million people each year.

Takeda Pharmaceutical Co., Ltd., plans to seek approval for the experimental vaccine first in countries where the virus is endemic, rather than starting with the United States or Europe, whose rigorous reviews are often used as a benchmark worldwide, company executives told Reuters.

(italics mine)

The strategy mirrors one used by Sanofi SA, which licensed the world's first dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia, in endemic markets in 2015 before attempting to get approval from Western regulators, and forecast up to $1 billion (109 billion yen) in annual sales.
But the drugmaker failed to hit that target.

In late 2017, Sanofi disclosed that Dengvaxia could increase the risk of severe dengue in children who had never been exposed to the virus, triggering a government investigation in the Philippines where 800,000 school-age children had already been vaccinated.

Fallout from Sanofi's vaccine has raised the bar for demonstrating the safety of future dengue vaccines.
Takeda officials are banking on a different result, hopeful that their approach will help avoid the setbacks that Sanofi experienced.

On Tuesday, Takeda said its vaccine was effective at preventing all four types of dengue, meeting the main goal of its late-stage clinical trial. The company said no significant safety concerns have emerged, raising hopes it may be the next viable vaccine for the tropical virus that kills up to 25,000 people each year.

Takeda will first seek approval in each of the eight countries where its clinical trial took place: Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Philippines, Thailand and Sri Lanka.
 

I usually am in favor of vaccines and often fight the naive SJW who hate vaccines of all sorts and hate big Pharma, mainly because I have seen these diseases and they haven't.

But here, it does make one wonder....

Typhus in Los Angles

why? Because no one is cleaning up the garbage:

Last year set a new record for the number of typhus cases — 124 in LA County for the year, according to the California Department of Public Health.Last October, Mayor Garcetti vowed to clean up piles of garbage throughout the city to combat the typhus epidemic.
The Mayor allocated millions of dollars to increase clean-ups of streets in the Skid Row area, known lately as "the typhus zone."
Typhus Outbreak in L.A.: 5 Things to Know

There is an outbreak of typhus near downtown L.A. Here are five things to know about the disease.
But four months later, the I-Team documented huge piles of garbage just outside the "typhus zone."
"You can't solve it (the typhus epidemic) until you hit the cause," says Estela Lopez of the Downtown Industrial Business Improvement District, "and the cause of it is that you still have these mountains of trash."

(Published Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2018)
from the CDC:

not just fleas from rats, but also cat fleas:

The key to preventing flea-borne typhus is to avoid direct contact with fleas. Use flea control products on pet dogs or cats, and keep cats indoors. Prevent rats, opossums, feral cats, and other wild animals from visiting or living around your home:

• Do not leave pet food outside

• Keep garbage containers tightly covered

• Trim and remove plants around buildings

not good news for cat ladies in LA...

this is from last October, and it sounds like the city hasn't done much to stop the epidemic:

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ah but how do you get rid of fleas in the homeless? Well, in 1944, the US Army used DDT.


but then, the military is aware of how diseases can affect people:

The fleas killed more of Napoleon's Army than the Russian cannons.