Tag Archives: Infectious disease

Sometimes We Don’t Know All We Think We Know

Posted on by

Yesterday France 24 posted an article detailing a series of events that contradict everything scientists think they know about the coronavirus.

The article reports:

Argentina is trying to solve a medical mystery after 57 sailors were infected with the coronavirus after 35 days at sea, despite the entire crew testing negative before leaving port.

The Echizen Maru fishing trawler returned to port after some of its crew began exhibiting symptoms typical of COVID-19, the health ministry for the southern Tierra del Fuego province said Monday.

According to the ministry, 57 sailors, out of 61 crew members, were diagnosed with the virus after undergoing a new test.

However, all of the crew members had undergone 14 days of mandatory quarantine at a hotel in the city of Ushuaia. Prior to that, they had negative results, the ministry said in a statement.

The article notes:

The head of the infectious diseases department at Ushuaia Regional Hospital, Leandro Ballatore, said he believed this is a “case that escapes all description in publications, because an incubation period this long has not been described anywhere.”

“We cannot yet explain how the symptoms appeared,” said Ballatore.

We really don’t know a lot about how this virus is spread or exactly how it works. It is a new virus, and it is going to take us a while to sort out how it spreads and how long it takes for people to come down with it.

Good News From France

Posted on by

The Gateway Pundit reported today that France has sanctioned the use of chloroquine as a treatment for the coronavirus after 78 out of 80 patients recovered completely from the virus within five days after receiving the drug.

The article reports:

The French government has officially sanctioned the malaria drug chloroquine to fight the SARS-CoV-2 virus, France 24 English reported Saturday.

“This ensures continued treatment of patients who have been treated for several years for a chronic condition with this drug, but also allows a temporary authorization to allow certain patients with coronavirus to benefit from this therapeutic route,” France’s Director General of Health Jérôme Salomon said.

The French move came after Didier Raoult, an infectious diseases specialist, reported that clinical results show 78 of 80 patients treated with chloroquine recovered within five days,.

This was Dr. Raoult’s second successful treatment against the coronavirus.

…On Thursday, France’s Minister of Health Olivier Véran said: “Hydroxychloroquine and the combination of lopinavir/ritonavir may be prescribed, dispensed and administered under the responsibility of a doctor to patients affected by Covid-19, in the healthcare establishments which take charge of them, as well as for the continuation of their treatment if their condition allows it and with the authorization of the initial prescriber, at home.”

The liberal Washington Post reported on Thursday that New York is using the drug as treatment.

“New York will use three medications — hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine in combination with the antibiotic azithromycin — contributed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and Amneal Pharmaceuticals,” The Post said, citing state officials. “The first wave of patients will receive hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin.”

This is great news.

The Homeless Are A Danger To Themselves And To The Rest Of Us

Posted on by

The once beautiful streets of San Francisco are now littered with needles and human waste. The homeless commit crimes to support various drug habits. Diseases that we have not seen in America for decades are appearing in the community. Who knows how the coronavirus will impact these people. The city does not seem to be able to deal with the problem. Where do you start?

On Tuesday The City Journal posted an article about the homelessness problem. The article reminds us that new data undermines the idea that homelessness is the result of high rents and lack of economic opportunity.

The article reports:

But new data are undermining this narrative. As residents of West Coast cities witness the disorder associated with homeless encampments, they have found it harder to accept the progressive consensus—especially in the context of the coronavirus epidemic, which has all Americans worried about contagion. An emerging body of evidence confirms what people see plainly on the streets: homelessness is deeply connected to addiction, mental illness, and crime.

Homeless advocates argue that substance abuse is a small contributor to the problem, and that no more than 20 percent of the homeless population abuses drugs. Last year, when I suggested that homelessness is primarily an addiction crisis—citing Seattle and King County data that suggested half of homeless individuals suffered from opioid addiction—activists denounced me on social media and wrote letters to the editor demanding a retraction. But according to a recent Los Angeles Times investigation, 46 percent of the homeless and 75 percent of the unsheltered homeless have a substance-abuse disorder—more than three times higher than official estimates from the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

In the interest of preventing “stigmatization,” progressives downplay the connection between schizophrenia, severe bipolar disorder, and homelessness. In general, cities have claimed that roughly 25 percent to 39 percent of the homeless suffer from mental-health disorders. As new data from the California Policy Lab show, it’s likely that 50 percent of the homeless and 78 percent of the unsheltered homeless have a serious mental health condition. For residents of cities like San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, this should come as no surprise. The people smashing up property and yelling in the streets are clearly suffering from mental illness. The numbers confirm the ground-level reality.

The article concludes:

Residents in the most progressive enclaves of West Coast cities have quietly begun to demand policy changes to address the obvious causes of the homelessness crisis. In San Francisco, city leaders have launched a new initiative to focus on the 4,000 individuals who suffer from the “perilous trifecta” of homelessness, addiction, and mental illness. Mayor London Breed has spoken frankly about the human causes of homelessness, and Anton Nigusse Bland, a physician and director of mental health reform for the city, has pledged to “develop a strategic approach to mental health and substance use services for people experiencing homelessness in San Francisco.”

This is a small but promising step. Especially now, with the threat of an infectious disease becoming a national crisis, it is imperative that city leaders come to grips with the dangers of letting people live in encampments that lack even rudimentary sanitation. We can only hope that this new awareness extends to other cities. For now, more than 100,000 people in California, Oregon, and Washington continue to languish in the streets.

Rhode Island has put in place a program that has been successful in dealing with the problem of homelessness. The problem includes counseling, drug rehabilitation, reintegration into the community and reintegration into family units. The program is a public-private partnership that has been successful in getting many of the homeless reintegrated into society. Similar programs need to be instituted on the west coast. It is a disgrace that America has not done more to help those among us living on the street. Throwing money at the problem or ignoring it is not the answer. It takes a commitment to helping the homeless deal with the mental problems that have resulted in their living on the street.

You Might Not Have Read This In The Mainstream Media

Posted on by

Yesterday The Western Journal posted some comments by Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University, a medical correspondent for Fox News, and the author of “False Alarm: The Truth About the Epidemic of Fear.”

The article reports Dr. Siegel’s comments:

“I’ve been handling these emerging contagions for about 20 years now, and I have to tell you, I’ve never seen one handled better,” Dr. Marc Siegel said regarding the actions of President Donald Trump since the coronavirus first emerged as a concern in January.

…“The task force are really top players,” said Siegel, noting the inclusion of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. Fauci is “one of the top infectious disease experts in the country,” he noted.

“They’ve been doing exactly what they’re supposed to be doing,” he said, listing actions Trump has called for such as “restricting travel, isolating patients who are sick and, trying to cut down on contact. It’s a very hard thing to do when people are pouring in from all over the world.”

CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield, a virologist, and Dr. Nancy Messonnier, an expert in vaccines who has been sounding the alarm about the virus, are also important members, he said, though he believes the “doom and gloom comment” about the inevitable spread of the virus was uncalled for.

Siegel said that the coronavirus is different from diseases such as SARS or the flu.

“SARS had about a ten percent mortality [rate], but it only affected about 8,000 people. Swine flu had a very, very low mortality for flu, but flu itself really only causes about a point-four percent death rate, and [coronavirus] is about one-point-four percent. So this is killing more than flu, but I want to make a couple of points that will reassure people,” he said.

“One, at the beginning of an emerging contagion, it always appears more deadly than it actually is. The 1918 flu is an exception, but normally as time goes on, it’s less deadly, and part of that is because you see more immunity appearing, and you also find a lot of milder cases — or even cases where people don’t get sick at all. You find that as you start to test more people,” he said.

He also noted that people who were infected but never got sick do not show up in statistics, making the virus seem more deadly than it is.

The bottom line here is that the coronavirus is serious, but it is not the 1918 flu. Wash your hands, and use common sense. Winter is ending, and hopefully the flu season will end with it!

Some Interesting Facts About The Coronavirus

Posted on by

Yesterday BizPacReview posted an article about a report by the New England Journal of Medicine about the coronavirus.

The article reports:

The report, published Friday and authored by Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, M.D., H. Clifford Lane, M.D., and Robert R. Redfield, M.D., notes that there are no known cases of children younger than 15 being infected with the respiratory disease caused by a novel coronavirus.

Fauci, a member of President Trump’s coronavirus task force, joined the experts from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to pen the editorial citing a study which “detailed clinical and epidemiologic description of the first 425 cases reported in the epicenter of the outbreak.”

“The median age of the patients was 59 years, with higher morbidity and mortality among the elderly and among those with coexisting conditions (similar to the situation with influenza); 56% of the patients were male,” the article stated.

“Of note, there were no cases in children younger than 15 years of age,” the piece continued. “Either children are less likely to become infected, which would have important epidemiologic implications, or their symptoms were so mild that their infection escaped detection, which has implications for the size of the denominator of total community infections.”

The editorial went on to note the percentage of identified cases and that the contagious virus may “ultimately be more akin” to a case of influenza.

Much of the information the mainstream media is providing on the coronavirus is simply false. The President’s task force has been working to contain the virus since January. Preventing people traveling from China to America from entering the country has probably avoided a serious epidemic. Think of the tourists in our major cities that might have been carrying the virus if the travel ban had not been in place.

This is essentially another flu. We need to wash our hands, take care of ourselves, avoid people who are sneezing and coughing, stay home when we are sick, and generally exercise common sense. Chicken soup is also a wonderful idea if you are feeling under the weather.

Meanwhile, stay safe and stay healthy.

Good News About The Coronavirus

Posted on by

The Gateway Pundit is reporting today that Washington doctors successfully treated a Coronavirus patient with experimental anti-viral medication and the patient “significantly” improved in hours. That is fantastic news.

The article reports:

Dr. George Diaz, a section chief for infectious diseases at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett joined Arthel Neville on FOX News on Sunday morning to discuss the successful treatment of the center’s coronavirus patient.

Dr. George Diaz: About a week into his course he got worse developed pneumonia. At that point given the reports we had gotten out of China… At that point we elected to give him… the experimental Remdesivir, antiviral medication. And within 24 hours he improved significantly. This was quite encouraging and he improved and thereafter remained without fever and felt much better. Over the next few days he improved to where we thought he could be discharged at home under the care of the local health district.

Arthel Neville: And you said you used, I believe an experimental anti-viral medication, that you gave this patient. Can you apply this treatment to ALL people infected with the coronavirus or does it depend on the stage of their infection?

Dr. George Diaz: Yes, at this point the CDC has been working with the authorities in China and have recently opened a large clinical trial of Chinese patients looking at those with severe disease as well as those with mild to moderate disease. We are very much looking forward to the trials.

This is wonderful news. It remains to be seen if this medication will work on all cases of the virus–viruses mutate, but it is a wonderful first step.

 

Can Anyone Stop This Runaway Train?

Posted on by

Actually, there are two runaway trains–one is federal spending and the other is overreach by President Obama. Yesterday The Daily Signal posted an article that illustrates both of them. The article was written by Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma.

The article reports:

Last week, the Senate passed legislation to address and prevent the spread of the Zika virus. However, the Senate failed to pay for it, and instead approved a $1.1 billion “emergency” spending supplemental bill that is not subject to the budgetary caps that were agreed to last year.

While congressional inattention to the budget crisis is inexcusable, it is even more disturbing that the Obama administration already has the authority to pay for a Zika response from existing agency budgets, but chose not to.

…But an international medical emergency has now become a U.S. budget emergency, a major debt crisis that will impact our children as well.

If there was a way to both respond to Zika and prevent new debt spending, wouldn’t it be reasonable to do that? The Department of Health and Human Services, Department of State, and International Assistance Programs currently have about $80 billion in unobligated funds.

A small fraction of this could be reprogrammed and redirected to respond to the Zika emergency and not add any additional debt to our nation’s children. This is exactly the type of authority the Obama administration asked for in 2009 during the height of the H1N1 virus scare.

…In a floor speech last week, I also shed light on the fact that Congress last December provided the Obama administration with authority to pull money from bilateral economic assistance to foreign countries.

They can use those funds to combat infectious diseases, if the administration believed there is an infectious disease emergency. In the middle of the Zika epidemic, the administration did use their authority to pull money from foreign aid and spend it, but they didn’t use it for Zika.

You might ask—so what did the administration spend the infectious disease money on earlier this year?

You guessed it… climate change.

It gets worse.:

In March, President Obama gave the United Nations $500 million out of an account under bilateral economic assistance to fund the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund.

Congress refused to allocate funding for the U.N. Climate Change Fund last year, so the president used this account designated for international infectious diseases to pay for his priority.

While I understand that intelligent people can disagree on the human effects on the global climate, it is hard to imagine a reason why the administration would prioritize the U.N. Green Climate Fund over protecting the American people, especially pregnant women, from the Zika virus.

The U.N. Green Climate Fund is connected to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which recently accepted the “State of Palestine” as a signatory. There is currently in place a U.S. funding prohibition that forbids any taxpayer dollars to fund international organizations that recognize “Palestine” as a sovereign state. Evidently the Obama Administration chose to ignore that prohibition and also to create more debt that our children and grandchildren will have to deal with. Someone needs to stop this runaway train.