prion like damage without prions?

 from Scisnce alert:

Diptheria

This is an old article from AlJezeerah about the measles epidemic a couple years ago here in the Philippines. 

What caused it? Hysteria about complications from an experimental Dengue vaccine given to children which if given to people who had never had dengue exposure made them more prone to get severe dengue.

all the cases of so-called “severe dengue” were relatively mild. Sanofi’s definition of “severe dengue” also contained much milder symptoms than other international definitions.

So none of the more than 30,000 children in the clinical trial died of dengue:

 yes there were some deaths in children that were blamed on the vaccine, but public health authorities said their deaths were from other causes but the damage had been done, and many parents refused to let their kids get even the routine vaccines that had been around for decades.

 

......, '

Fast forward to today.

A lot of hysteria about measles vaccine in the USA, but I wondered why the autism epidemic blamed on measles vaccine waited 30 years to start causing problems. But never mind. Parents want answers. Hopefully RFKJr will figure it out.

Measles is rarely fatal in well nourished Americans, but it is highly fatal in Africa and Asia, where a lot of children have borderline malnutrition... 

But with millions of unscreened migrants let in by Biden's policies, it may be only a matter of time that we start seeing diseases not seen in the US for a century start popping up.

 

 there has been cases of Diphtheria in migrants in Europe. because many of these were not vaccinated in their own country. But ironically many who caught diphtheria caught it  in Europe, meaning that there are clusters of mild cases, carriers, i.e. patients who carry the germ and spread it to others, or cases treated with antibiotics but not diagnosed as diphtheria in certain communities of migrants.

and so cases will continue to occur. And if the anti vax hysteria stops people from getting these vaccines that have been around since the 1920s, well, it is an epidemic waiting to happen.

so far, unlike Europe, the USA seems to be safe from epidemics:

from Grok:

Diphtheria is extremely rare in the United States due to widespread vaccination. ... a few cases have been noted in recent years: - In 2012, one provisional case was reported. - In 2019, two cases were reported, the most recent data available from sources like Our World in Data (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/diphtheria-cases-in-the-united-states) - A 2020 case report described a 33-year-old unvaccinated man in Georgia with respiratory diphtheria, likely linked to his recent incarceration and lack of childhood vaccinations.[](https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7753149/)[](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7753149/) These cases are exceptions, often tied to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated individuals, international travel, or contact with travelers from areas where diphtheria is more common, like parts of Africa, Asia, or conflict zones. The disease remains under control in the U.S. thanks to high vaccination coverage with DTaP, Tdap, or Td vaccines.[](https://www.cdc.gov/diphtheria/about/index.html)[](https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/yellowbook/2024/infections-diseases/diphtheria)[](https://www.hhs.gov/immunization/diseases/diphtheria/index.html)

more here.

 and the bad news is that unless your doctor worked or trained overseas, they might not recognize it in time for the correct treatment. Of course, if you go to an old fashioned doctor who gives antibiotics for sore throats, you might have it cured before you develop proper symptoms.

what inspired this blog post was a book I ran across while checking Project Gutenberg: a 1919 describing the public health approach to diphtheria.

 And there was a cure: Anti toxin. 

Depending on the way it is treated, diphtheria is one of the least dangerous or one of the most dangerous diseases. It is one of the least dangerous when promptly treated with antitoxin; it is one of the most[8] dangerous when the antitoxin treatment is not given, or is delayed or insufficient.

In the days before we had antitoxin one out of every three children who had diphtheria died. Now, if antitoxin is used on the first or second day of the disease ninety-eight out of every hundred children recover. The sooner diphtheria is attended to the more certain is a cure.

The toxin is the reason for those tough membranes that cause choking. 

Breathing problems. Diphtheria-causing bacteria may produce a toxin. This toxin damages tissue in the immediate area of infection — usually, the nose and throat. At that site, the infection produces a tough, gray membrane made up of dead cells, bacteria and other substances. This membrane can obstruct breathing.

there is also a real danger of myocarditis and neurological complications from the toxin produced by the germ.

Nowadays, there is treatment: antibiotics and anti toxin.

 

Alas, diphtheria is still present here in the Philippines, and seen in various Asian and African countries:    right now there is an outbreak of diphteria in the Rohingye refugees in Bengladesh

Luckily, antibiotics will help stop the infection, but the problem is the toxin produced by the germ: For this we still use anti toxin. Here is Grok's answer to diphtheria before treatment available:

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, diphtheria was a major cause of death, especially in children, with mortality rates as high as 20-50% in some outbreaks.

....Antitoxin and antibiotics, developed later in the 1890s and 1940s respectively, drastically reduced mortality, but before these, diphtheria was a terrifying and often fatal illness.

when I first started medical school in the 1960s, we still had an infectious disease hospital in our city and outside there was a bell. We were told if a child came in choking from the membrane, they could be saved by immediate tracheostomy, so they would ring the bell and any doctor in the area would come to the ER and do it.

In Dr. Versghese's book The Covanant of water, there is a description of a child being saved from choking by one of the young protagonists who does a tracheostomy under supervision of a local doctor can't do it due to hand injury.

I am surprised that there isn't more descriptions of this in various historical dramas: Dr Quinn series had one episode, but not a lot of clinical details.

 

The history of treatment is here:

In 1890, an effective treatment for diphtheria – antitoxin – was discovered by Shibasaburo Kitasato and Emil von Behring in Germany...

more HERE. 

it was made by giving the toxin to horses, starting with a small dose then increasing the dosage until the horse provided lots of antibodies, which then were removed and purified to give to people

Horse serums have a danger of severe allergic reactions that can be fatal, so now newer technology is used to produce antibodies. 

Horses were given gradually increased doses of diphtheria toxins, and their bodies built up antitoxins (antibodies) to neutralize those toxins. The horses were only weakly affected by the toxins, yet their bodies were capable of producing large amounts of antitoxin serum. The horses were bled, and the antitoxin serum was harvested from the blood and processed. When given to a human diphtheria patient, the horse’s antibodies neutralized the toxins poisoning the patient. The Department’s laboratories had a stable of serum production horses with which they provided New York and other areas of the country with diphtheria antitoxin.

what brought the treatment to the attention of the public was the outbreak in Nome Alaska:

 

Balto, one of the dogs who carried the serum, became the poster child for publicizing that there was a treatment for sipheria, (but some purists correctly point out that Togo was actually the first dog to arrive with the serum)

Wikipedia article has a lot of details: not a one time delivery, but several deliveries of the needed vaccine.

And Balto became the poster dog for those who risked their lives to save the children of Nome.

This blog has the photo of Balto's statue in Central ParkA low-relief plaque bears the words 

“Dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs that relayed antitoxins 660 miles over rough ice, across treacherous waters, through Arctic blizzards from Nenana to the relief of stricken Nome in the winter of 1925.”

ancient epidemics

 

....

....

 

....

...but is tularemia that infectious since it spread via ticks or contaminated meat? 

discussion here:

more here.

Modern epidemics of tularemia:

Actually I suspect it might have been bubonic plague, since it returned to the Hittites with Egyptian POWs...

diseases change: they often get less virulent with time, so the esymptomes might be diffrent.

And sometimes one wonders if anyone has common sense: The famous story in the Bible about the Philistines retuning the Arc of the Covenant because of an epidemic of hemorrhods, and which included golden mice with the arc, is obviously a mistranslation: Bubos in the groin (necrotic abcesses) are not the same as hemorrhoids, but I can't think of any fatal epidemic that causes heorrhoids, so I suspect this is a mistranslation.

the US Military has several books on biological warfare including which disease could be used. The Black death was used by the Mongols and attributed to the spreaed in Europe. The Japanese experiments in China during world war II including cholera and tularemia killed an estimated 400 thousand civilians.

the only biological attack on the USA was when the Germans introduced foot and mouth disease into the USA during World War I, or the cult that infected salads with salmonella to make people too sick to vote against them in an election...

the animal diseases are also a threat: a lot of the beriberi during the Philippine was against Spain and then the USA was because there was an epidemic of foot and mouth disease that killed the animals that were used to plant rice, and the imported white rice lacked the vitamin of brown rice, so people died of beriberi.

Memes and thoughts about what might be going on

 One of the minor stories that symbolized the way a faceless bureaucracy can terrorize normal people doing nothing harmful while ignoring the real problems is the story of PNut the squirrel being killed....

But since the election, it seems that the world is upside down, and things are changing. Hence the meme:

From that nasty modern Jeremiah Ann Barnhart.

so anyway, there seems to be pushback against this power grab, and it is coming from the grass roots, not from the experts.  

So will this result in the US cleaning up their house? Or will the MSM manage to destroy those trying to overturn what is called the Deep state? 

I am old enough to remember the Church committee, when this was a Democratic issue, and the problem of the FBI infiltrating anti war groups and environmental protests was a problem.

but this power grab is not limited to the unelected bureaucrats in the USA: the international types are involved. 

One reason for Brexit was that the European Union officials decided to regulate tea kettles in the UK. Alas the latest UK PM hasn't learned his lesson, and the farmers is acting up, led by a guy whose farm show opened the eyes of a lot of folks to how regulations make it difficult for farmers to grow food

   

 (and given how the EU and others are busy destroying farms under the guise of a global warming treaty, this is not the only farm protest in Europe).

 the way that Covid was used to limit people's freedom while covering up the source of the virus is a story breaking out of the censorship borg.

so was Ecohealth funding viral gain of function research in China? Attention: Stopping them from getting money from the HHS won't work 

I say this because some of these biolabs, such as one that they tried to build here in the Philippines, are funded by the US Dept of Defense 

why? to "REDUCING THE THREAT OF VIRAL SPILLOVER FROM WILDLIFE IN THE PHILIPPINES". 

Luckily one of our Solons noticed the source of funding was the DoD and not a health agency, and stopped this biolab from being built, 

but you know, there is a need for biolabs, but after the WUHAN debacle, one does wonder about these things.

 (the WMD of Saddam Hussein were things like biolabs and insecticide factories, both of which could easily be weaponized. But why would the US Dept of Defense want to seek out pathogens in the Philippines? We had an oubreak of Ebola Reston in our local pig farms awhile back, and foot and mouth disease and other pathogens are a danger to the food supply, but one still worries about seeking out germs to weaponize them.)

the covid response is now being recognized as a way to shut down the economy and to limit free speech...the problem was not the initial response: Yes, like in flu season localized shut downs etc might be warranted, but when we couldn't even deliver rice to Manila for a year without getting our drivers a 30 dollar test for covid, you can see the problem.

so the lesson was learned, right?
Right? 

Whoops.

There is a treaty being "negotiated" for the WHO to gain power to order every government to obey them when the next epidemic hits. 

Lots of talk about that on conspiracy sites. But do you trust them?

maybe tit is time to reform that office too

hopefully placing new leaders in charge of health might improve things.

and then we have the repeated claims of Russia gate: Which was later discovered to be a plot by Hillary to destroy Trump, yet no one behind this fake story has been punished.

and the lies continue. And the reason I mention Russiagate lies is this Question: How much of the pushback against Tulsi Gabbard is because she investigated the biolabs in the Ukraine?

well someone needs to monitor biolabs. 

Yes they are needed in places where animal pathogens are a danger. But why is this being done by the US Dept of Defense? 

Like Sadam's WMD, the dirty little secret is that biolabs can quickly develop bioweapons... and usually US citizens have trusted the government agencies to do this. But after hiding the origin of the Covid virus, that trust is eroding. 

Hence the reason that Trumpiboy is appointing a sceptics to run these agencies.

Some of the gain of function research is needed to figure out if a pathogen might morph into an epidemic. But the lesson of Wuhan virus is that labs leak. 

In Wuhan, the US NIH was hiding their involvement by channeling the money through a non government agency like EcoHealth

But who is investigating these labs when the funding is coming from the Dept of Defense? 

No, not Wuhan Lab (that money was from the NIH via Ecohealth, in order to hide that it was funding gain of function research that is forbidden in the USA) 

but I am talking about the attempt to fund a biolab

and no, not the involvement of the Dept of Defense in the biolabs of the Ukraine. Long nuanced discussion of that here.

But what about here in the Philippines? 

 the US Dept of defense money sent to EcoHealth to look for animal pathogens that might be a spillover into humans. One of our Senators stopped that, but with Marcos being so friendly with the US, one does worry.

Marburg outbreak under control

Rwanda has an outbreak of Marburg virus.

 

 

there is an experimental vaccine for the Marburg virus.

this is from the WHO site:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/marburg-virus-disease

Marburg virus disease (MVD), formerly known as Marburg haemorrhagic fever, is a severe, often fatal illness in humans. The average MVD case fatality rate is around 50%. Case fatality rates have varied from 24% to 88% in past outbreaks. Early supportive care with rehydration, and symptomatic treatment improves survival. There are currently no approved vaccines or antiviral treatments for MVD, but a range of vaccines and drug therapies are under development. Rousettus aegyptiacus, a fruit bat of the Pteropodidae family, is considered the natural host of Marburg virus. The Marburg virus is transmitted to people from fruit bats and spreads among humans through human-to-human transmission. Community engagement is key to successfully controlling outbreaks.

there was an outbreak in Zimbabwe when I was there according to this site. But you know, we had isolated cases of severe hemorrhagic fever of unknown origin, so I wonder if this was marburg not diagnosed.

apparently it ccan spread person to person but this requires contact with body fluids.

Once introduced in the human population, Marburg virus can spread through human-to-human transmission via direct contact (through broken skin or mucous membranes) with the blood, secretions, organs or other bodily fluids of infected people, and with surfaces and materials (e.g. bedding, clothing) contaminated with these fluids. Health-care workers have frequently been infected while treating patients with suspected or confirmed MVD. This has occurred through close contact with patients when infection control precautions are not strictly practiced. Transmission via contaminated injection equipment or through needle-stick injuries is associated with more severe disease, rapid deterioration, and, possibly, a higher fatality rate. Burial ceremonies that involve direct contact with the body of the deceased can also contribute in the transmission of Marburg virus.

Lassa fever is another hemorragic disease in western Africa.

Yes there is an Ecohealth link: Poor guys they were wanting to investigate these diseases but because they were behind the Wuhan debacle they didn't get their funded.

Ecohealth also wanted to place a multimillion dollar lab here in the Philippines and was stopped when the local senators found that the grant was from the US Dept of Defense, not from the HHS or another civilian health department.

bird flu: maybe not a problem

here in Asia, for years we have reports of humans catching bird flu, usually from close contact with chickens or who ate chickens who had the disease (i.e. instead of slaughtering them and burying them they sold the meat). Wikipedia has a long article on bird flu.

The scary part is that some think bird flu via pigs was behind the Spanish flu epidemic.

The zoonotic and spatial origins of the influenza virus associated with the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918 have been debated for decades. Outbreaks of respiratory disease in US swine occurred concurrently with disease in humans, raising the possibility that the 1918 virus originated in pigs. Swine also were proposed as "mixing vessel" intermediary hosts between birds and humans during the 1957 Asian and 1968 Hong Kong pandemics. Swine have presented an attractive explanation for how avian viruses overcome the substantial evolutionary barriers presented by different cellular environments in humans and birds. However, key assumptions underpinning the swine mixing-vessel model of pandemic emergence have been challenged  

so what is the present report on humans caring for these animals in the USA?

CDC report:

The first known cluster of human influenza A(H5) cases in the United States associated with poultry exposure occurred in Colorado; 109 (16.4%) of 663 workers performing poultry depopulation reported symptoms and received testing, and nine (8.3%) of the workers who received testing for influenza A(H5) received a positive result. All nine cases were associated with mild illness, with conjunctivitis as the most common symptom.

translation: nine of the 663 people working with these infected animals got sick from bird flu.

remember: the high mortality in other countries might have been because most people who got sick never went to the doctor to be tested, only the very sick ones, and many rural workers eat low protein diets so have less ability to fight infections.

And remember: The high mortality of Spanish flu might have been because of civilian malnutrition due to the famines caused by food blockades in world war I: and the high death rate in military due to a high viral load transmitted in crowded barracks.

So I suspect the bird flu will not be worse than Asian flu or Hong Kong flu, and after the covid kerfuffle, where panic led to unnecessary prolonged shut downs etc that probably caused more deaths than the disease I suspect civilians will no longer trust doctors even if this does morph into a major cause of death in the near future.

My cynical take: That is why the powers seeking to boss the world around by health regulations are pushing hysteria on MPox...

As for MPox: the answer to that is keep your pants on, get treatment early, and don't touch your kid if you have open pox lesions.

MPox: a minor epidemic waiting in the wings

 Science alert reports that MPox has infected 100 thousand people, but few (203) have died.

summary so far:

Firstly, mpox is now readily spreading from person to person although scientists are not entirely sure why.

well, traditionally the way animal pox spreads is via small lacerations in contact with a lesion. Such as cowpox on the hands of milkmaids. Or in this case, spread in raves via anal sex which is notorious for causing minor abrasions etc. but of course, it will spread in families via close contact (especially in poor countries where dry skin causes minor cracks in the skin, or to babies whose skin is thin.

indeed, the article states: While animal to human transmission can occur, the recent healthcare messages have focused on high-risk groups such as sex workers and men who have sex with men, two groups that have been disproportionately affected by the recent outbreak.

so shut down the raves and bathhouses. Oh no: that has been a no no since the 1980s when Diane Feinstein as mayor of San Francisco tried to do this to stem an epidemic of HepB and syphilis, but faced a recall election so changed her mind. Ironically, if she had done that, the HIV epidemic would not have spread so quickly in the USA.

but now the bad news:

Secondly, because of this sustained transmission, it is also mutating faster and two sub-clades (side branches) called clade Ib and IIb have been discovered.

ah but don't worry. Our scientists are busy mutating the virus via gain in function research so they will be prepared for the next epidemic by making a vaccine faster. those evil Republicans are complaining about this, but hey what could go wrong?

that article notes:

The gain-of-function project proposed by NIAID virologist Bernard Moss would splice genes conferring high pathogenicity from the clade I virus into the more transmissible clade II virus. The new “chimeric” (combined) virus could have retained up to a 15 percent fatality rate and a 2.4 reproductive number, a measure of transmissibility indicating every sick person could infect up to 2.4 people on average, giving it pandemic potential.

back to original article 

Thirdly, there is no licensed, mpox-specific vaccine to prevent infection, nor are there specific antiviral drugs available to treat clinically vulnerable people who can get very ill and die with the virus.

not quite true. Actually there is an unlicensed vaccineunlicensed vaccine that works fairly well to stop MPox, and that vaccine was being given out in the gay community, and there is an unlicense medicine that might work.