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.

follow the money

the modern world is morphing physicians from being ethical professionals to people who fill in the blanks and follow the guidelines blindly (even though the guidelines often are based on biased or inaccurate data, or worse, based on cost effective ideas of who should live or die or get treatment).

For later reading : BoingBoing discusses.

more here.

Taking the Red Pill about Marijuana

Soros' "open society" has been pushing drug legalization for at least 30 years, and the cutting edge is legal marijuana: pushing it as if it were needed for cancer pain, glaucoma, etc. when often there were legal drugs that worked just as well.

We docs know about the problems: our psych patients all smoke it, our criminals all smoke it, and of course, a lot of those in car wrecks were high when driving, but never mind.But the real problem is with families: Kids neglected (and often cared for by grandparents) because mom is a druggie, unmarried girls with druggie boyfriends who can't keep a job because they are high all the time, and mainly the drug culture that makes the idea of being high/happy is the most important thing in life.

the problem with marijuana is the long halflife: Take a drink, and in an hour you are sober. Take weed, and you might get a small buzz but it stays in the system so your drug level reaches a steady state of being high if you are a regular user.

and of course, it is a gateway drug.

cigarettes have a bad press, but as I used to point out to my patients: they only kill the body, not the soul (they enhance your ability to think and relax, not get you high). But steady marijuana use is like the lotus eaters: You stop caring about normal life.

As the "marijuana is harmless" meme has convinced a lot of states to legalize social use, a couple of people are finally getting the problems published.

LINK

You don’t expect the New Yorker and Mother Jones to be places where you read anti-marijuana articles, but Tell Your Children, the new book by former New York Times reporter Alex Berenson is knocking some people flat. The book examines what we know scientifically about marijuana use, and it turns out to be pretty damn scary..... In his New Yorker piece, Malcolm Gladwell writes straightforwardly about the overwhelming scientific evidence that marijuana is a hell of a lot more problematic than many of us think. .... Read his piece to find out why. Or even better, check out Stephanie Mencimer’s detailed report in Mother Jones, the San Francisco-based left-wing magazine...A 2002 study in BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal) found that people who used cannabis at age 15 were more than four times as likely to develop schizophrenia or a related syndrome...In 2017, the National Academy of Medicine issued a report nearly 500 pages long on the health effects of cannabis and concluded that marijuana use is strongly associated with the development of psychosis and schizophrenia...

and something we knew but was ignored in all the press: That the marijuana of today is many times more powerful/toxic than that which was used in the 1960s.

 But the marijuana sold today is not what we smoked, which at 1 percent to 2 percent THC was the equivalent of smoking oregano. Today’s weed is insanely more potent, as are products like “wax” and “shatter”—forms of butane hash oil designed to be vaped or dabbed that come pretty close to 100 percent THC. And these high-potency products usually contain very little CBD oil, the ingredient in cannabis that’s supposed to account for many of its supposed health benefits.

none of this is in the propaganda pro pot articles in the MSM of course.

call me cynical. Drugging a population to keep them in line is nothing new, from cheap gin in the London slums to the pushing of alcohol on the AmerIndians, it works: Yes, more aggression but less targeted aggression.

and the real problem is the cultural change that doesn't see getting high as a problem. Quick: when was the last time your church gave a sermon on this? It has worked before.

incontience computer devices

Digital Trends report on modern computer like devices: and two of them are to help caregivers.

one is a timer to remind you to go to the bathroom:

The Dfree is a device that uses ultrasound to monitor and detect the movement of the bladder, communicating to an attached smart device that it’s time to go to the toilet. While that may seem initially odd, this device is a lifeline for sufferers of incontinence, and a huge aid for their caregivers, reducing the stress caused by such issues, and increasing the ability of sufferers to live independently.

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another is to tell people if the diaper is wet.

We’ve already seen breathing-monitoring baby clothing at CES this year, but Monit takes baby-monitoring to a whole new level with its smart diaper device. Attaching to the outside of a diaper, Monit’s smart device detects when a diaper needs changing and alerts a caregiver a change is required. Monit claims the device can tell the difference between pee and poo, and hopes the device can reduce the instances of urinary tract infections and diaper rash.