Pig man?

Another cure for the fatal type of pulmonary hypertension is lung transplant, but they are lacking enough organs.

This article in Popular mechanics discusses a potential new source:
Pig human transplants...

The article discusses the "ethics", but in Catholic theology it is not a problem. Pig human chimera would be an ethical problem if a lot of genes are transplanted, but not if only a few genes are introduced. (if a lot of genes are tranplanted to make a chimera like the "underpeople" based on animals in the books of Cordwainer Smith, they would be considered human by the church, and the UKBishops even said chimeras with a lot of human genes should be adopted and raised as humans, not just culled and killed for convenience).

But the real danger is not ethics; it is infecion: there is a real  potential for causing epidemics. 

the existence of xenotropic endogenous retroviruses and the clinical evidence of long-lasting porcine cell microchimerism indicate the potential for xenogeneic infections. Thus, further trials should continue under regulatory oversight, with close clinical and laboratory monitoring for potential xenogeneic infections.

I am listening to a lecture on the population collapse of the Americas because the Europeans accidentally introduced a lot of diseases.

the missing clue to why this happened is the lack of domesticated animals in the Americas.
 
: in neolithic times, the close contact of humans and domestic animals resulted in a lot of viruses and bacteria migrating from animals to human beings. So there were local epidemics, and later, as trade routes expanded, (often via the silk road trade, the monsoon trade in the Indian Ocean, or the migration of the many steppe peoples such as the Huns, the scythians, the Samartans, the mongols, the turks, who tended to be able to move quickly between China and Iran and then Europe) the result was huge pandemics, but those who survived had more immunity...

So the "population collapses" in Eurasia happened, but they happened many times in pandemics, which often were followed by dark ages and recovery. But even the worse pandemics were one at a time, and the worst case scenerio was 50 percent population drop.

In the Americas, it was a twofold problem: One, everyone got sick at the same time, so there was literally not enough people who were well and able to care for the sick, and two: repeated epidemics of different diseases, so that the survivors of smallpox could then die of influenza or hepatitis B or measles in later epidemics.

Notice I said Measles? A big killer today in malnourished children. This is one of several diseases that are around all the time, but mainly kill children because the adults in the area are survivors of the disease. This means adults are still around to care for sick kids, and keep the civilization around.

But introduce measles into a new area, and it is a different disease.


Measles evolved from animal "rinderpest" about a thousand years ago. Many other diseases similarly are due to animal contact. HIV is probably from monkeys (from the custom of eating monkey meat in parts of Africa: the press didn't mention this part, so some people were under the impression the cause was a funny sexual perversion...of course, Americans think monkeys are nice cuddley animals too, but  most Africans and Asians know better.)

Pigs are a big problem here, because they carry a lot of diseases. Trichinosis gets the most attention, as does tapeworm, camplobacter, cryptosporidium, etc.but the main danger are the viruses that evolve into a human form, such as influenza.

The reason for "flu" epidemics is close contact of peasants with their pigs (and most bird flu cases were in those who raised chickens: wild fowl to free range chickens, which is why Jakarta banned people from raising fighting cocks in their back yards, but the real worry is if the bird flu mixes with pig flu and infects humans).



Note about chickens here in the Philippines: usually city folks buy chickens raised cheaply in chicken farms. Some do raise chickens for eggs, but you have to keep them caged, or they will hide the eggs in a nest.
Eating chickens can free roam, but are in danger of becoming dog food for feral dogs, or a meal for poor people who are hungry (one of our neighbors has some wandering around,  and I fear our dogs might attack them. However, those chickens are huge, and probably fighting cocks, not eating chickens.

Fighting cocks are ususally kept outdoors under a small shelter, with their leg tied to a post. That way they don't wander off, and they won't attack passing children. As for dogs, the cocks are vicious and can take care of themselves. But those who own and breed the chickens make friends with the chickens when they train them, so are at risk for contacting bird flu.


Just as an addendum: I didn't mention Ebola virus. Ebola Reston infects monkeys, and some of the monkeys were brought to the Philippines where they were kept and bred to sell to research places in the US...and some of the Ebola Reston spread to pigs, including local pigs.

Luckily, unlike monkeys, the pigs only got flu like symptoms, but in one local outbreak, a few humans felt ill, and several had blood tests showing they had caught and survived a mild case of the virus. Luckily it did not spread, which is saying a lot since in the Philippines, the sale of "double dead" meat and infected animals killed and sold instead of having their carcasses destroyed is a problem.

The sine wave EKG

Wired has a good story on germs resistant to modern antibiotics.

Lots of fake smoke, but also lots of real problem in the story to worry about.

Back to the good old days of dying from minor infections that ended up killing you...

---------------------------------------

Unrelated anecdote about paying attention to one problem and overlooking another.

When I was a medical, the problem was penicillin resistant staph.

So those with infections were put into an isolation ward, where they didn't spread it (but maybe where the care of other problems was lousy). The care was low level, sort of at a nursing home level, which was not good news if you got a really bad problem unrelated to your infection.

So when the nurses reported one patient was having symptoms, I was sent to the isolation ward to see a patient I didn't know and do an EKG...(I was a student, and didn't have much experience in EKG reading, but we were given "scut" work to do, so the hospital didn't have to hire a low level aide to do the work...).

So I got the EKG machine and found it was rarely used and no one ever fixed it. I could only get two leads to work, and got a strange sine wave pattern.

I showed it to the intern, a woman who hated me and the other female student, and she bawled me out and told me to find another machine.

So I searched around and found another machine, and redid the EKG, and voila, again it was a sine wave pattern.

Source: http://cdn.lifeinthefastlane.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/ECG_Hyperkaemia_L.jpg

so again, I took the EKG up to show to the intern, knowing I would again be bawled out in public for being incompetent. Luckily, she was talking to the Resident, who grabbed it out of my hand and said "Oh My GOD".

Her potassium was 8, a fatal level, but sometimes due to a "false positive" lab error if the blood hemolyzed. So the laboratory didn't call us with a "headsup", but the result was put into the "inbox" at the nurses station at 3 pm, which was about the time the resident took over and started treating her for diabetic related hyperkalemia.

(she survived).

So I often complain about all those regulations we have to follow, but these regulations were put into place to prevent things like this: A lab result that was a dangerous level would now be required by law to be called to the doctor, the first EKG machine, (which was rarely used) would be checked ever month or so by someone that it worked...

----------------------------------- a version of this was cross posted to BNN.

Eugenics: it wasn't just Tuskegee

If you read a story about the gov't trying to get docs to talk to their patients about "end of life"  "choices", what they mean is to try to talk patients into not getting treated if they are too old or chronically ill.

And if you read that we need more such "outreach" to minorities, they mean we need to pressure more minorities to sign papers saying let them die.

don't believe me? Try this story about an ethicist who long denied she wanted to kill people, but now the NYTimes comes out with an admiring story on why she wants to do it. Apparently a person with a damaged brain, confused by drugs who pulls his breathing tube out needs their preferences followed?

I don't think so. 

The story is phrased as if he was dying, but the dirty little secret is that the docs did all they could because he had a chance to live. True, he might be left disabled, but that was not and should not have been part of their decisionmaking (if for no other reason that they are doctors, not fortune tellers, and no one can really predict such things).

But of course, a husband who is disabled is a pain in the neck, so of course confronting this made her think about legal killing, or letting him go.

Yes, must "educate" folks.

 The way Julianne Dickelman tells it, people make plans for their lives. They plan for a birth, marriage and retirement. But people aren't so good when it comes to their life's end.

 "We plan for everything in our lives except for this," she says. "We have birth plans, but we don't really have death plans."

 Dickelman is project manager for a new effort in Whatcom County called End-of-Life Choices Advance Care Planning Initiative. Its goal is to help county residents make clear what kind of end-of-life medical care they want, or don't want, via a written plan they make now, in case they can't communicate their wishes later.

notice they never want to educate folks that they might have a chance to live with treatment? Nah. Make them feel guilty that they will be a burden on their families if they live, and of course don't mention the gov't won't have to pay for their care.

At least that article is about a fairly affluent area in Washington state (where I suspect one of the subjects is how to kill  grandmom yourself).

the real problem are those minority patients who just won't stop treatment.

Washington Post article about the problem.
Those folks just won't let us kill them.

After lives in which they often struggle to get medical care, African Americans and other minorities are more likely than whites to want, and get, more aggressive care as death nears and are less likely to use hospice and palliative-care services to ease their suffering, according to a large body of research and leading experts.

 As a result, they are more likely to experience more medicalized deaths, dying more frequently in the hospital, in pain, on ventilators and with feeding tubes -- often after being resuscitated or getting extra rounds of chemotherapy, dialysis or other care, studies show.

 "I think we need to be very attentive to attending to suffering in our patients and do everything we can to help minimize and ameliorate it," said Richard Payne, who runs Duke University's Institute on Care at the End of Life. "African Americans and other minorities are at greater risk of not dying well."

notice it is not about the wishes of the patient, but that of the doctors, who see the treatment as suffering, not as a chance to live. There is a discussion of how people who see life even when suffering as meaningful for them, but then goes on to say ethics committees need to be part of the decision.

In other words, autonomy only means if you want to die, not want to live.

Also note that part about "coma". Too often this has been stretched (like in the case of Nelson Mandella) to "vegetative state" or those confused by delirium or medicines.

a typical example is this one which can be summarized in two words: Die sucker.

 On June 9, 2013, South Africa’s best-selling weekly newspaper, The Sunday Times, reported that Mandela’s long-time friend Andrew Mlangeni publicly stated: “You (Mandela) have been coming to the hospital too many times. Quite clearly you are not well and there is a possibility you might not be well again.”

Mandela’s long-time comrade recognized and verbalized the end-of-life equation whether the rest of the world wants to hear it or not. I applaud him.

The dirty little secret is that some of these folks go home and live longer, but never mind.

as this article admits: If you come home but continue to need care and/or are confused, you are a burden to others, so better you kill yourself.

Again, the "fortune telling" error of logic is here: because no one can tell if a person will live or not, if they will be disabled or not. But the real danger is assuming even if they live, they won't be productive citizens.

the phrase "useless eaters" comes to mind, but never mind.
 Nelson Mandella's recent illness is a good example. Guess what: he is still alive and recovering.

But this article  starts with the usual suspects, affluent white people who are activists in the "right to kill die movement": I had to help my mother to die. Not really. Your other choice was to give her food, but never mind. By cooperating with a depressed person who says they want to die, what you are doing is telling them their life is useless, so if they love you they should die.  Don't say: But mom we love you and you are not a burden. And never mind about alternatives, like decent pain control and hospice care.

as for Mandella: the article admits that Doctors said he was in permenant vegetative state, but he wasn't.

Go figure. Of course he wasn't: He was sedated, and you can't diagnose PVS for three months (I should add: 3 months without sedatives) and even then 40 percent are misdiagnosed.

so into the memory hole with all those who were cheerleading him to die:
From the UKGuardian 18 July:

Whereas the announcement in June that Mandela was in a critical condition brought sombre crowds to the Mediclinic heart hospital for what resembled a wake, on Thursday the mood was closer to a street party with bursts of song and jubilation. Members of the statesman's family visited him there and, according to his daughter Zindzi, gave him a collage of family photos as a present. "Tata (our father) is making this remarkable progress and we look forward to having him back home soon," she said....

 Bill Clinton, the former US president, told the meeting: "Although he is old and frail and fighting for his life and, as Hillary and Chelsea and I have seen in visiting Qunu over the last couple of years, he doesn't hear so well and he walks with the benefit of an elevated walker, what is in his heart still glows in his smile and lights up the room through his eyes." 

So what brought me to write all this?

Well Mrs Gay Caswell, a metis in Canada, remembers the time when her people were denied syphilis treatment in the name of experimentation, and other atrocities against her people by good socialists.

which is why such people end up suspicious of vaccines etc.

I should add that the Hepatitis A vaccine was experimentally given on one of the Sioux reservations in South Dakota, to see if it would work on children. Never mind that hepatitis A wasn't a big problem: we rarely saw any cases in children or adults, most of the liver problems being from alcohol.

and then there was the Red Lake streptococcus experiment: the first epidemic was wiped out by surveying the population and treating every case of impetigo, because there was a strain of strep that caused kidney failure. (Indians develop severe ecsema from sun allergy, which easily gets infected...so it is not purely a hygiene lack problem, which is what a lot of folks imply).

But when it returned, the docs decided only to treat those who came to the hospital. So six folks developed kidney disease (two of them on dialysis when I worked there were from this experiment). and that was by the University of Minnesota.

a lot of Americans see death as preferable to not being productive and independent, or preferable to suffering. So some are eager to give out death, especially to others, and are morally blind that this translates to killing the most vulnerable in society, instead of trying to help them.

But in poor areas, where suffering, disability, and other woes are common, it is a part of life, to be borne with stoicism. My Indian patients saw it as a road given to them by the Creator that they had to travel.

When we had a lady with frontal lobe syndrome and inability to swallow, we asked a neurologist the best medicine to control her overemotional reactions, and he spent the entire visit telling the family that they should stop feeding her. The family, being Indian, meaning they are polite and don't open up to strangers, kept quiet, but at the end of the meeting, one cousin turned to him and told him off: that's the difference between we Indians and you white folks. We take care of our elders, not kill them.

the "WAGD" story of the day

From the UKMail:

A bioterrorism attack could spread to several continents before it is even detected, according to a startling new scientific study. 
The study found that if a small group of terrorists infected themselves with a disease such as smallpox and walked around London, then the pathogens could spread to up to four nations before doctors managed to diagnose it. 
'A deliberate smallpox release is likely to assume an international dimension even before the epidemic is identified,' the researchers wrote in the  study, which was published in this month's Scientific Reports, a trade publication. 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2377452/Bioterrorism-Study-reveals-attack-spread-continents-detected.html#ixzz2a7VJ4fLe
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

Reality check: you wouldn't need terrorists to spread it in London.

The "Dark winter" scenerio was smallpox released at a truck stop in Oklahoma city.
 
A Tom Clancy novel had it released at the Olympics.

But the reality is blowback: the country that sponsored the bioterror attack would itself end up with a lot more casualties than the US or advanced countries in Europe or Asia.

That would defer most countries, except maybe the eco terror types who were behind the attack in the Clancy novel. Indeed, I loved how he "punished" them: He dropped them in the middle of the Amazon jungle sans supplies, so they could enjoy a nice green lifestyle.

When 911 happened, we actually were given instructions on what to do if smallpox was released. You isolate/encircle the outbreaks and vaccinate everyone (hoping that the vaccine would induce immunity before the virus worked). It told you how to set up a clinic in the local schools, and all the little details on how to get everyone vaccinated.

If you remember, the scare back then was anthrax: ordinary anthrax, not the resistant kind, but it had been treated not to clump, so it could stayed small enough to enter the lungs easily and kill. Why anthrax? Well, no blowback: it will kill or infect those breathing the treated spores, but will not spread from one person to another.

Cat allergy? There is hope

BBC reports the cause of cat allergies has been found.

De Plague De Plague

Most of the history of the plague acts as if it occurred only in western Europe.
medievalists also links to an article on the plagues in Egypt.

also at medievalistsnet: The plague in India.
and a list of stuff on the black death.

---------------------------------------
Defoe's book on the London plague is a classic, but is fiction, and he was not an eye witness.

Grescham college has a bunch of neat lectures on disease in British history, including this one about the plauge.

The ten plagues of history...note that some minor plagues were included because they occurred in Europe.

 But they do note the smallpox etc. that decimated the Americas, and the 3rd plague pandemic:

“Third Pandemic” is the name given to a major plague pandemic that began in the Yunnan province (pictured above) in China in 1855. This episode of bubonic plague spread to all inhabited continents, and ultimately killed more than 12 million people in India and China alone

But the Antoinine plague, (that killed Marcus Aurelius, not his son) depopulated the Roman empire and weakened it...it says a lot about Rome that the empire didn't collapse then.

This plague, along with the plague of Cyprian, not only weakened Rome but contributed to the collapse of the Han empire of China...

article about McNeill's book on plagues in history. 

In 1976 McNeill forged that path with a sweeping book that took a new approach to disease history. Plagues and Peoples (Anchor Press/Doubleday) focused a biological lens on the ebb and flow of human civilization, from prehistory into the 20th century, and the picture that emerged showed a pattern of what he calls "fateful encounters" between infectious disease and world events: China's ancient Han Dynasty, like the Roman Empire, was brought down in part by epidemic illness, McNeill argues, and during the 14th century the Black Death proved a similarly "shattering experience" for the Mongol Empire. Only by taking disease into account can one explain Athens's failure to defeat Sparta during the Peloponnesian War, a conflict that transformed the ancient Greek world. Greek historian Thucydides described a sudden, devastating plague that struck in 431 BC, wiping out a quarter of Athens's land army and inflicting "a blow on Athenian society," McNeill writes, "from which it never entirely recovered." The historian also brought disease to bear on such diverse phenomena as the rise of Christianity and Buddhism, the caste system in India, and the expansion of the British Empire.

the debate is if these were "measles" (which can easily kill those who have never been exposed to it) or smallpox, or pestis, but the problem is that plagues evolve over time: the classic example being syphilis, which originally killed people quickly...

DNA studies are the final decider: And so the black plague was indeed Y.Pestis, and the plague of Athens typhoid, and the Spanish Flu a type of bird flu...

and it doesn't take an epidemic to think "what if"...for example, Stalin survived smallpox, FDR survived polio, and Churchill survived being hit by a car...

-------------------------------------------
Camus' book The Plague is about a fictional outbreak in Algeria. The book is an allegory on the spread of fascism, Nazi takeovers in particular, and the theme is that it is important for people to decide to fight it. PDF HERE>

Iris scanners?

TeaAtTrianon has links to an article on using Iris scanners to check if your kids are getting on the right school bus.

The Blinkspot scanner syncs with a mobile app that parents can use to see where their child is. Every time a child boards or exits the bus, his parent gets an email or text with the child's photograph, a Google map where they boarded or exited the bus, as well as the time and date.

LINK 

so what could go wrong?

well, professional criminals will use contact lenses and other means to get around these things, and of  course, they could merely hack the database and change the information.

and what no one wants to check: If repeated infrared scanning will lead to premature development of cataracts.

one of the ironies of the Philippines is that everyone wears badges: even kids in schools.

I find it ridiculous: politicians steal millions of pesos but they are worried about identifying who is in school.

-------
update PDF about infrared light and eye damage.

says stuff about LED lights too.. for further reading...