Octopus Overlords

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Fri Dec 02, 2022 3:23 pm Might be time to figure out what comes after purple.

Spoiler:

Since the start of the outbreak in November, at least 59 measles cases have been identified in Columbus and Franklin, Ross and Richland counties, and there have been 23 hospitalizations, according to Columbus Public Health.

Of those cases, 56 were in unvaccinated children. The other three were only partially vaccinated, meaning they received one dose of their MMR or measles, mumps and rubella vaccine when two are needed for a person to be considered fully vaccinated.

When parasitic worms make it into a scrotum, they have a ball—and dance like nobody's watching.

But in a hospital in New Delhi, India, doctors were watching. And they caught the dangling disco on film, down to their lymphatic limbo line, according to a short report appearing in the New England Journal of Medicine this week.

The parasitic worms in this case were Wuchereria bancrofti, which are spread by mosquitoes in some tropic and subtropical areas of Asia, Africa, the Western Pacific, the Caribbean, and South America. The wriggling ravers stream through the human lymphatic system. Adult worms can live for five to seven years and, when they mate, can produce millions of boogying babies, called microfilariae. Together, they cause a disease called lymphatic filariasis that can lead to tissue swelling (lymphedema), elephantiasis, and, in men, swelling of the scrotum.

More people are falling seriously ill with the flu in the United States than with COVID-19, a demonstration of this year’s severe influenza season – but also of the waning seriousness of a pandemic that once brought the world to its knees.

Figures collected by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention show that the weekly rate of hospitalizations for the flu has reached 5.9 per 100,000 people, a level not seen at this time of year in more than a decade.

Hybrid immunity—the combination of vaccination and a prior infection—seems to offer the strongest, most durable protection. But the incremental benefit of repeated boosters or treatment on top of this is less certain. Public-health agencies and professional groups aren’t giving much direction. Right now, the CDC recommends that everyone age 5 or older get the bivalent booster, regardless of prior infection status. (The agency does say that patients “may consider” delaying the latest shot until three months after they last got sick with COVID.) Treatment guidelines from the National Institutes of Health and the Infectious Diseases Society of America are no help, either. NIH merely notes that “the efficacy of these treatments in patients who have been vaccinated is unclear,” while IDSA describes the value of treatment for immune populations as a “critical unanswered question.” Yet this unanswered question now applies to nearly everyone on Earth.

Pharmaceutical companies don’t have much incentive to sort this out, given that their treatments are widely available and reaping record profits. “I don’t think they want more data because more data might show the drugs don’t work,” David Boulware, an infectious-disease physician at the University of Minnesota, told me. I asked Pfizer and Moderna whether the companies had plans to run new, large-scale clinical studies of their COVID shots and drugs in vaccinated and previously infected individuals, but neither responded to my inquiry.

After the discovery of the aromatherapy spray as the outbreak source, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) learned that a previously healthy pet raccoon, owned by the family of the Texas patient, had broken a bottle of the implicated aromatherapy spray and walked through the liquid. On April 3, 2021, approximately 2 weeks after this exposure, the raccoon displayed acute neurologic symptoms consistent with neurologic melioidosis† and died from an undetermined cause 3 days later. The carcass was wrapped in a cloth robe and buried on the family’s property.

In October 2021, the source of a multistate outbreak of melioidosis that involved four human cases in Georgia, Kansas, Minnesota, and Texas was identified as an aromatherapy room spray imported from India

Environmental suitability modeling studies for B. pseudomallei suggest that the soil and climate in parts of Texas are suitable for B. pseudomallei (1). Because of concerns about establishment of B. pseudomallei in soil within a setting where the pathogen is not known to be endemic, and out of an abundance of caution, staff members from Texas DSHS Region 2/3, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 6, and CDC traveled to the Texas property on April 19, 2022, to determine whether there was evidence of B. pseudomallei contamination and to decontaminate the burial site. Thirty-two environmental samples§ were collected from the burial site and surrounding area, including soil, tree root fragments, and water from a stream downhill from the site. Soil samples were collected directly above, below, and adjacent to the carcass; 10 radial soil samples were collected at 2-, 4-, and 6-ft (0.6-, 1.2-, and 1.8-m) intervals around the carcass, oriented toward the natural drainage path, down to the stream (Figure). The raccoon carcass was found at a depth of approximately 1 ft (30 cm), and 12 tissue samples were collected during field necropsy.¶ After sampling, EPA staff members immediately decontaminated the carcass and excavated soil within a 2-ft (0.6-m) circumference of the carcass in germicidal bleach (8.25% sodium hypochlorite, diluted 1:3 with water) overnight for approximately 15 hours (4).

The milk and dairy products Wisconsin is known for have long been pasteurized products. Sales and distribution of raw milk have remained forbidden. That does not mean there haven’t been some knockdown battles in the past decades over raw milk. In 2010, the Wisconsin Legislature went so far as to make raw milk legal.

But then-Gov. Jim Doyle vetoed the bill and kept pasteurization regulations in place. And a coalition grew up to make sure the Legislature would never hurt “America’s Dairyland” again by loosening food safety with raw milk. Wisconsin’s major agricultural and medical organizations worked hand-in-hand on the issue.

Now one of those groups, the Wisconsin Farm Bureau has flipped. At its policy conference in December 2022, a southwestern dairy farmer persuaded fellow delegates that a post-pandemic market exists where more consumers are demanding raw milk.

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:28 pm It occurs to me that we're running on reverse psychology at this point. If you want them to avoid it, have a scientist recommend it. If you want people to do it, have a public health official tell them that they can't. I actually live in fear of what common-sense societal defense people are going to decide to turn on next.

The problem is that we keep trying to fight that kind of thinking with rationality, data, and facts. Not only does that not work, it's detrimental to the cause, as it is fighting anti-science with "Science says..."

You can’t use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they didn’t use reason to get into

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Tue Dec 13, 2022 5:01 pm Haven't seen anything to suggest PCR testing is problematic, no. The at-home rapid tests? Absolutely.

I have been hearing stories about people that have been symptomatic for 3+ weeks and keep testing negative for everything (COVID-19, Flu, RSV) a doctor tries testing them for. Not as "sexy" but it could be parainfluenza. There are quite a few other illnesses but the above three are getting the most headlines right now.

Losing taste is...certainly not a good sign regardless.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:58 pmThere's definitely so much going around and it seems like (anecdotally) anyone that did any type of gathering for Thanksgiving or Xmas (and adjacent holidays) caught something.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:48 pm

Blackhawk wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:28 pm

The problem is that we keep trying to fight that kind of thinking with rationality, data, and facts. Not only does that not work, it's detrimental to the cause, as it is fighting anti-science with "Science says..."

To steal from Neil deGrasse Tyson (who was also stealing from others):

You can’t use reason to convince anyone out of an argument that they didn’t use reason to get into

Pretty sure childhood vaccines are next. Possibly seat-belt and helmet laws. Possibly smoking indoors. Bigger picture I'm concerned about workplace protections as it's in the financial interests of corporations to pressure for rollbacks, eliminations and exceptions. There's been a push over the last 20 years to get governmental agencies (municipalities) out of the business of providing drinking water to communities. The idea here would be to push for the privatization of domestic water supplies, which I'm sure will work out great.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:48 pm
Until we collectively accept and value public and environmental health as a core element of our society, I fear we're in a downward spiral.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 12:58 pm

Can you find out if something like this would be acceptable to a local pharmacist to get you Paxlovid?

Sorry to hear about all that illness. There's definitely so much going around and it seems like (anecdotally) anyone that did any type of gathering for Thanksgiving or Xmas (and adjacent holidays) caught something.

MHS wrote: ↑Thu Jan 05, 2023 3:25 pm We didn't last year and it caused a bunch of hard feelings so I sucked it up. Won't be making that mistake again no matter how much fallout there is over it

It was his yellow, bloody eyes that gave his illness away. The previously healthy 18-year-old showed up at an emergency department in the Netherlands after two days of fever, vomiting, and diarrhea. His heart was beating rapidly and his abdomen was a bit tender.

The whites of his eyes were splotched with blood, a sign that blood vessels on the surface of his eyes had burst. Areas that weren't bloodied were a jaundice yellow. Lab tests would later indicate he had acute kidney injury as well as liver dysfunction. But an equally important clue as to what was causing his acute illness was the mention that three weeks prior he had fallen into a canal.

In all, it was a textbook case, according to a report published recently in the New England Journal of Medicine. The man had a rare but severe bout of leptospirosis, which is a bacterial infection marked by fever, jaundice, kidney failure, and hemorrhage. The source: a fall into a canal that was likely tainted with the urine of infected rodents.

Smoove_B wrote: ↑Sat Jan 07, 2023 4:18 pm Leptospirosis outbreaks are usually associated with disaster/emergency events - flooding and earthquakes in particular. Interesting story, regardless - thanks. I've added it to my library!

Usually, 94% to 95% of kindergarteners are vaccinated against measles, tetanus and certain other diseases. The vaccination rates dropped below 94% in the 2020-2021 school year, during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study released Thursday found rates dropped again in the 2021-2022 school year, to about 93%.

The pandemic disrupted vaccinations and other routine health care for children, and also taxed the ability of school administrators and nurses to track which children weren’t up-to-date on shots. CDC officials said decreased confidence in vaccines is another likely contributor.

“I think it’s a combination of all those things,” said Dr. Georgina Peacock, director of CDC’s immunization division.

A so-called “super strain” of gonorrhea—against which many types of antibiotics are less effective or not effective at all—has been identified in the U.S. for the first time, health officials said Thursday, raising further concern that a post-antibiotic era is approaching.

The case, identified in Massachusetts, was successfully treated with ceftriaxone, an antibiotic recommended to treat the disease, state health officials said in a news release. A higher-than-recommended dose wasn’t required to clear the infection, a state public health spokesperson tells Fortune, though the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently doubled the recommended dose.

The newly identified strain showed reduced susceptibility to three types of antibiotics and resistance to an additional three, including penicillin. It marks the first U.S. case in which all recommended drugs were less effective or completely ineffective, the state health department said in a Thursday bulletin to clinicians.

The case serves as “an important reminder that strains of gonorrhea in the U.S. are becoming less responsive to a limited arsenal of antibiotics,” health officials said in a statement.

A woman in Washington state is facing electronic home monitoring and possible jail time after spending the past year willfully violating multiple court orders to have her active, contagious case of tuberculosis treated and to stay in isolation while doing so.

Last week, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department announced that it was "monitoring" a case of active tuberculosis in a county woman who had refused treatment.

"Most people we contact are happy to get the treatment they need," Nigel Turner, division director of Communicable Disease Control, said in a press announcement last week. "Occasionally people refuse treatment and isolation. When that happens, we take steps to help keep the community safe."

But reporting by The News Tribune discovered that the woman's refusal to heed public health guidance is a long-standing challenge for local officials. Documents filed in the Pierce County Superior Court and reviewed by the Tribune found that the woman's first court order for involuntary isolation dates back more than a year ago, to January 19, 2022.