Polio: the evolution of the virus vs eradification

one of the problems of using an attenuated virus is that by giving a mild case of the disease, there is a danger that the virus will evolve back into the severe disease. This is rare but a problem with the oral polio vaccine.

the danger ironically is not to the kid who got the vaccine, but to those around them who didn't get one of the polio vaccines: Usually in the US among religious groups that won't vaccinate or in the third world, where the religious leaders read the conspiracy theories and told their people not to get it.

IN other words, the problem with the anti vax movement is not that these essentially healthy people can't get away with their delusions and exaggerations of risk, but that others misinterpret their misinterpretation and so kids die.

so the CDC has a report about the world wide eradification of polio:

Global efforts have led to the eradication of two of the three wild poliovirus (WPV) serotypes (types 2 and 3), with only WPV type 1 (WPV1) remaining endemic, and only in Afghanistan and Pakistan...

I always wondered how they decided this, since many cases in these countries never see a doctor. Well, the public health people monitor sewage.

but the bad news: The polio virus that evolved from the weakened vaccine is spreading: Maybe because more kids didn't get their vaccinations during covid, or because they were told it was dangerous, so the number of people who don't have any immunity to polio has increased:

The number of polio cases caused by circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs; circulating vaccine virus strains that have reverted to neurovirulence) decreased from 881 in 2022 to 524 in 2023; cVDPV outbreaks (defined as either a cVDPV case with evidence of circulation or at least two positive environmental surveillance isolates) occurred in 32 countries in 2023

sigh.

malaria in southern USA

 CDC link

Imported malaria in three U.S. southern border jurisdictions increased in 2023, particularly among new arrivals to the United States with recent, complex transit through at least one country with endemic malaria. During the same period, entry of asylum seekers and other migrants into the United States across the southern land border increased....Imported malaria in three U.S. southern border jurisdictions increased in 2023, particularly among new arrivals to the United States with recent, complex transit through at least one country with endemic malaria. During the same period, entry of asylum seekers and other migrants into the United States across the southern land border increased.

Smallpox on the blankets: The real story?

 I have visited the site of the battle of Bushy Run, which is now just a nice meadow.

but apparently the guy who devised those tactics is now the hero of a film

ah but is he a hero or someone who did a war crime?

I had always read that it was malice and to steal the land that the Americans gave small pox blankets to the Indians. But it was actually a proposal (maybe never done) to lift the seige of Fort Pitt and save lives of those in there.

During the siege of Fort Pitt the idea was raised of infecting the Indians with small pox by giving them blankets from the fort’s smallpox hospital. William Trent’s journal entry from May 24th, 1763 described this event though some historians do not believe it to be true. Shortly after this event was alleged to have happened there was an out break of small pox among the Indian tribes.

In October of 1764 Bouquet led a force of 1500 men into Ohio country to bring Pontiacs War to a close. This treaty which Bouquet negotiated set in motion his connection to Smith’s Rebellion. It was this peace treaty that included the exchange of all white captives held by the Indians. Because the Indians were unble to return all white captives until the spring of 1765...

smallpox epidemics have been traced by historians from trade routes, but giving contaminated blankets was probably true, but as a war tactic. 

so it was done to save lives. What would have been the alternative? 

If you were there, what would you have done?

And it shows the danger of germ warfare. 

Most American born people did not have the immunity to smallpox (Europeans usually had it as a kid so were immune if they lived). 

Which is why George Washington saved the American army when it was trying to liberate Boston, where an epidemic was going on during the revolution, by inoculating those who never had the disease before they could join his troops.

DMSO: Pain relief or toxic chemical?

 the use of a solvent for pain relief that led to medical personnel caring for her to collapse was the story on a recent Murdoch mysteries.

Not the best episode, since the plot was unbelievable.

Or was it?

wikipedia page on Gloria Ramirez.

An investigation by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory proposed that Ramirez had been self-administering dimethyl sulfoxide as a treatment for pain, which converted into dimethyl sulfate, an extremely poisonous and highly carcinogenic alkylating agent, via a series of chemical reactions in the emergency room.

In medicine, DMSO is predominantly used as a topical analgesic,

a vehicle for topical application of pharmaceuticals, as an anti-inflammatory, and an antioxidant.[29] Because DMSO increases the rate of absorption of some compounds through biological tissues, including skin, it is used in some transdermal drug delivery systems. 

I remember at the time it was being touted to use for arthritis as a liniment (which is how they use it in horses). Then the fad sort of disappeared. Maybe this lady's death had something to do with it.

it is approved to treat interstitial cystitis, where the spastic bladder causes painful peeing.

Medical article discusses the way it is being used.

Because it absorbs easily into the skin, DMSO may be a beneficial alternative to other pain medications. However, further investigation into this area is needed before any conclusions can be drawn.

DMSO has also been touted for its ability to reduce the amount of leakage during chemotherapy administration, but more studies, and real-world usage, need to be done before it can be labeled as a trusted method.

Additionally, there has been some research into DMSO’s benefits when it comes to inhibiting cancer cells. A 2020 study published in the Journal of Medical Discovery found evidence of benefit. However, research is just beginning in this area, so many more studies need to be done before any conclusions can be made.

more studies? If it relieves pain, etc. shouldn't it have been approved for this by now? Ah, but no way for big pharma to make money off of a medicine that's been around for decades.

Sigh

and this article is about side effects.

Results: We included a total of 109 studies. Gastrointestinal and skin reactions were the commonest reported adverse reactions to DMSO. Most reactions were transient without need for intervention. A relationship between the dose of DMSO given and the occurrence of adverse reactions was seen.

Conclusions: DMSO may cause a variety of adverse reactions that are mostly transient and mild. The dose of DMSO plays an important role in the occurrence of adverse reactions. DMSO seems to be safe to use in small doses.....

DMSO is mostly excreted through the kidneys, but a small part is excreted through the lungs and liver.  Part of the DMSO is transformed to the volatile metabolite dimethyl sulfide, which gives a characteristic garlic- or oyster-like smell when excreted through the lungs .

DMSO may induce histamine release, which can be the reason for adverse reactions such as flushing, dyspnoea, abdominal cramps, and cardiovascular reactions .,,,,

Many studies on the use of DMSO have been performed in Russia. These studies have not been readily accessible to the global community due to the language barrier.

 So another possible miracle drug that hasn't been approved by the FDA, and few docs use it. However I suspect a lot of people are using it on the sly: when I worked in rural areas, people frequently used vetinary drugs, such as antibiotics, when they got sick. That is why the scandal of Ivermectin being banned during covid needs more publicity, and the reason a lot of our patients use herbs and unapproved medicines when they are sick.

Sigh.

Brain tapeworm

 RFK Jr said he had a brain tapeworm. 

the doctors thought it was a pork tapeworm.

old article on tapeworm in the brain.

The brain tapeworms, which cause a disease called neurocysticercosis, are most common in Central and South America. While the disease is rare in the US and Europe, the disease is "still frequently diagnosed" in migrant populations from the endemic areas, the study says. The researchers also estimate that in areas where the disease originated, 29 percent of epilepsy cases are caused by brain tapeworms. "Overall, 1.7 to 3 million persons are conservatively estimated to suffer from epilepsy due to NCC worldwide," the study says.

study here.

CDC page on the problemCysticercosis is a parasitic tissue infection caused by larval cysts of the tapeworm Taenia solium. These larval cysts infect brain, muscle, or other tissue, and are a major cause of adult onset seizures in most low-income countries. A person gets cysticercosis by swallowing eggs found in the feces of a person who has an intestinal tapeworm. People living in the same household with someone who has a tapeworm have a much higher risk of getting cysticercosis than people who don’t. People do not get cysticercosis by eating undercooked pork. Eating undercooked pork can result in intestinal tapeworm if the pork contains larval cysts. Pigs become infected by eating tapeworm eggs in the feces of a human infected with a tapeworm. Both the tapeworm infection, also known as taeniasis, and cysticercosis occur globally. The highest rates of infection are found in areas of Latin America, Asia, and Africa that have poor sanitation and free-ranging pigs

and yes there is a treatment: mild cases are merely observed and not treated, and severe cases require surgical removal. But anti parasitic medicines will sometimes work:

guidelines recommending use of albendazole with or without praziquantel for neurocysticercosis,

 but the authors also note: 

our case (as well as 4 other cases documented in the recent past) suggest a possible use of ivermectin as potential therapy for neurocysticercosis.

hmm... calling Ann Barnhardt: here's another use for Ivermectin. 

Rabies

 Here in the Philippines, about 300 people die of rabies each year. Indeed, our town just lost a young girl bitten by a street dog who didn't tell her mom about the bite.

 Sigh

ironically, the treatment of rabies by giving a vaccine during the incubation period dates back to the time of Louis Pasteur in 1885.

this works because unlike other illnesses, the period between being infected and developing the disease with rabies may be weeks or even months.

Louis Pasteur holding rabbits, which were used to help develop the vaccine for rabies. Credit: World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo

Pasteur (building on ideas from others) figured out that if a germ was made weak, you could give it to a person or animal and they will only get a little sick, but would become immune to the disease.

But rabies back then was a horrible disease and still is fatal. So how could he make the infection weak? By injecting it cross species into rabbits. The virus would be weak, but as it was inoculated into the next rabbit, would become stronger. So make a vaccine from the first rabbit which would give the rabbit a mild rabies infection, and gradually use material from the later, stronger infected rabbits.

Then make the vaccine starting with the first rabbit specimen, and give repeated shots until the final dosage was reached. This way, you could be immune to rabies.

Pasteur was not a licensed physician and could have been prosecuted for doing so — on 6 July 1885, Pasteur used his rabies vaccine, in the presence of two local doctors, to treat 9-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been severely bitten by a neighbour’s rabid dog.

Joseph Meister received a total of 13 inoculations over a period of 11 days, and survived in good health.

But even then, there might have been a question if the vaccine worked: 

Pasteur’s reluctance might also be accounted for by posthumous analysis of his laboratory notebooks, which revealed that Pasteur had vaccinated two other individuals before Meister; one remained well but might not actually have been exposed, and the other developed rabies and died.

On the other hand, since rabies is 100 percent fatal, most people would be willing to risk a fifty fifty chance of not getting rabies.  

By the end of 1885, several more desperate rabies-exposed people had travelled to Pasteur’s laboratory to be vaccinated. During 1886, Pasteur treated 350 people with his rabies vaccine, of whom only one developed rabies. The startling success of these vaccines led directly to the founding of the first Pasteur Institute in 1888.

 

quoted from Nature

or if you really want to be frightened, listen to the audiobook:

Measles outbreak in the Philippines

 Measles is here again. A nasty disease that kills kids who are malnourished, and also weakens them so they are more vulnerable to other infections (pneumonia, ear infections, tuberculosis).

 The outbreak seems to be in the southern island, in Muslim areas but the rate of getting preventive immunizations in kids has gone down after covid hit for several reasons: not just the antivax stuff on the social media but because the economy is bad and moms just don't have the energy or money to go to the clinic for the shots.

this is a follow up to my earlier post LINK

Local video from 4 months is a good discussion of how the public health system is trying to stop preventable deaths on many levels.

the discussion starts with discussing the vaccines for elders and then notes the problem of measles and also about TB and other public health problems.

I should note that I haven't heard of any measles in our area, but we are seeing kids with respiratory symptoms in our area I wonder if this is partly Whooping cough which is causing outbreaks not just here in the Philippines but in other countries at the present time.

cross poste from my main blog.

cutaneous diphtheria

 CDC report on cutaneous diphtheria.

Corynebacterium diphtheriae infections can be caused by toxigenic and nontoxigenic strains. Diphtheria toxoid–containing vaccines (DTaP, Tdap, Td) only protect against toxigenic strains. Nontoxigenic C. diphtheriae infections are most frequently associated with cutaneous disease and are not vaccine preventable. What is added by this report? Review of all Washington nontoxigenic C. diphtheriae cases during a 5-year period revealed that infection prevalence is increasing. Unstable housing and recent illicit substance use were prevalent among patients. Severe disease can manifest as endocarditis and bacteremia.

Half are addicts who inject or high risk. 

erythromycin is used, because some are penicillin resistant

The shot protects from the toxin not the germ.