Social Destruction?

[Rasputini]

hahahaha ok then :P

[can't sit still]

I too would consider your CV to be a very adequate background. Are you familiar with the work of Madeleine Mumcuoglu ? She worked under the direction of Jean Lindemann. She developed the first protocals for Sambuca Nigra.
Flu Remedy - Health, Nutrition, Medicine, Vitamins, Herbs, Natural Healing: Articles
In animal trials it gave 100% protection for H5N1. The control group had 100% mortality. H5N1 was reported 86% fatal in humans in Korea, I believe. It's recombinant powers are unbelieveabl;
Tamiflu Resistance in H1N1 in Turkey
It remains to be seen just how long they can keep a lid on it. Today H1N1,,, tomorrow, who knows?
I've never been to Sub-Sahara Africa. After getting Ramses Revenge and Dehli Belly and Moctezumas Revenge, I had no desire to see what else I could pick up. I drank out of the Nile not knowing about shistosomiasis.
Kathmandu seems to be THE place to get Hep. Irian Java seems to be a good place to get malaria. Some of the mutations are really bad. I recently recommended cats claw to a guy with Malaria. It shows indications of effectivnes with the spirochetes from Lyme. I thought it might help for malaria. It was better than telling him "geee, that's too bad"
India is the supreme testament to the powers of the human immune system. Though I do believe I read the figure of 68% gastroenteritis for the population of Benares [Varanasi] Nothing like a good swim in the Ganges to recharge your flora and fauna.

Vancomicin is slowly being trod under. Do-it-yourselfers with antibiotics are spawning new challenges. As humanity presents 6 billion new hosts, oportunists are moving in.
The "new" TB wants back in our lives. BSE would like to be a close friend. The new [old] influenza kills mostly healthy people. It's not a good time for a weakened immune system.

Fido, Homo-sapiens is trying to make the whole planet his niche. Those in the marginal areas are at high risk if they don't have lots of money. As our numbers increase, there are more poor shifted to marginal areas. They die.

I believe that the Greeks invented the form of birth control that involves the least killing [and dying] Males trysted witrh males until they were financialy able to support offspring. Then , they switched to females. This resulted in fewer abandoned children and a lower birth rate.
Europe resorted to endless wars to maintain constant populations. The pop of Britain was maintained at 5 million for centuries until the industrial revolution allowed a much higher food production.
The Amerinds in the Yucatan peninsula endured endless cycles of famine and war. The Yucatan peninsula is raised up seabed. It's just limestone with very few nutrients. There aren't even any rivers because the limestone is so porous. The flora is very nutrient poor and won't support a large number of fauna [man] The fauna came up with the idea of taking and killing captives to maintain the pop levels.

You may have seen Apokalyptica. It's terribly inaccurate but you get the idea. They considered it better to kill than to starve to death.

There are just too many people. If their own land won't support them, they are going to die,,,or be supported by others. Is it "better" to let 5 million die now or to let 50 million die when there is no longer enough food to feed them.

We're entering a "phase" where there is not enough food to support all our numbers. Sure, you can produce enough food today for everyone, but eventually, there will come a time when you can't. Isla de Pascua [Easter Island] reached that point. Polynesia has had other episodes of mass famine. Search "long pig"

Here is a graph to think about FOOD, LAND, POPULATION and the U.S. ECONOMY
Our ocean fisheries are in collapse [about 50 % of them]

Some think that our pop is runaway Culture Change - Overextension: our American way of life is not sustainable

Others are very pessimistic azcentral.com | Phoenix Arizona News - Arizona Local News

When you talk about saving people and providing healthcare, you need to look at the long-term results. People will always compete for living space. Idi Amin killed 1.4 million of the Matabele,,, or was it the ngoronongoro. The Hutus and the Tutsis killed 1/2 million or so.

If there isn't some kind of responsible population control [birth control], there will always be some mechanism that will diminish our numbers.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by can't sit still

I too would consider your CV to be a very adequate background. Are you familiar with the work of Madeleine Mumcuoglu ? She worked under the direction of Jean Lindemann. She developed the first protocals for Sambuca Nigra.
Flu Remedy - Health, Nutrition, Medicine, Vitamins, Herbs, Natural Healing: Articles
In animal trials it gave 100% protection for H5N1. The control group had 100% mortality. H5N1 was reported 86% fatal in humans in Korea, I believe. It's recombinant powers are unbelieveabl;
Tamiflu Resistance in H1N1 in Turkey
It remains to be seen just how long they can keep a lid on it. Today H1N1,,, tomorrow, who knows?

I'm not familiar with her. The recombinant potential of H5N1 is not especially great compared with other flu serotypes. The issue is that avian H5N1 is barely transmissible at all between humans (there are only a handful of human cases that were likely picked up from another human), but there is great concern for recombination between avian H5N1 and a human influenza virus in the same host. This might result in a much more transmissible virus with the virulence of native avian H5N1.

But the thing is that's not entirely likely. Avian flu is so lethal to humans because it predominantly infects the lower respiratory tract. Conventional human flus are so transmissible because they predominantly infect the upper respiratory tract. So this recombination event would have to change the cell tropism of the virus, and it might do so in a way that attenuates its virulence.

As for the link, I think we're very much in need of new antivirals in general, including anti-influenza ones. Amantidine and Rimantidine are gone for most flu these days, and Tamiflu is not going to survive forever as our only drug (along with Relenza). But to be fair, Tamiflu has very little importance in any kind of management of a flu pandemic. The issue will have to be global monitoring and very quick quarantining. Flu is most transmissible in the 2 days before symptoms develop and the first 2 days of symptoms, which means that most people who are contagious are either completely healthy or only have mild symptoms. This makes case identification extremely difficult.

Nonetheless, I have a sneaky feeling that avian H5N1 will never cause a human pandemic. I could be wrong, but keep in mind that this has been an ongoing panzootic (pandemic in animals, i.e. birds) for several years now, tantamount to the way the 1918 flu was in humans. After a certain point the circulating H5N1 will run out of antigenic shifts and the surviving bird populations will be immune. This will greatly decrease the prevalence and incidence of this virus.

I've never been to Sub-Sahara Africa. After getting Ramses Revenge and Dehli Belly and Moctezumas Revenge, I had no desire to see what else I could pick up. I drank out of the Nile not knowing about shistosomiasis.

You're less likely to get schisto from drinking the water than you are from wading in it. The free-living form of schistosomiasis (cercariae) infects humans by penetrating skin. Drinking from the Nile is more likely to give you run of the mill hepatitis A, typhoid, salmonellosis, dysentery, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, etc, etc. Mmmm. Schistosomiasis is very rare in travellers, because they just don't get a very big inoculum -- but it does happen every once in a while.

Kathmandu seems to be THE place to get Hep.

If you're referring to hepatitis A, which is the major food/waterborne one, it has a worldwide distribution and it's endemic in the United States. Eastern Europe and Russia have a lot of hep A, but then again so does the entire developing world.

Irian Java seems to be a good place to get malaria.

The biggest risk area for malaria BY FAR is sub-Saharan Africa. Trust me on this one, my research is on malaria. In fact 90-95% of all malaria deaths in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, and if I recall correctly about 2/3 of all malaria cases imported into the US are from sub-Saharan Africa. The other places in the world with very high endemicity of Plasmodium falciparum (the most lethal species of the parasite) are southeast Asia (esp the Thai-Myanmar border) and some of the nearby islands like Papua New Guinea and (as you mentioned) Indonesia. South / Central Asia and the Americas have more Plasmodium vivax which is less deadly, but there is P. falciparum around as well.

Some of the mutations are really bad.

For drug resistance, yes absolutely. For virulence maybe -- this was what my research was on at Harvard. We've submitted my article for publication, still hasn't been reviewed yet.

I recently recommended cats claw to a guy with Malaria. It shows indications of effectivnes with the spirochetes from Lyme.

Please do me a favor and NEVER EVER do that again. Malaria is fatal in 25% of non-immune patients who do not receive antimalarial therapy within 14 days.

Lyme disease has killed less than 10 people ever -- in fact you'd be hard pressed to find more than 2 or 3 cases in the entire medical literature, despite 10s of thousands of clinical cases. I've treated probably hundreds of cases in my career (I was at possibly the world's largest pediatric Lyme center during my fellowship in Boston). Malaria kills 2 million people a year. Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete, which is a kind of bacteria. Malaria is caused by an apicomplexan protozoan, which is not even remotely related to the Lyme spirochete.

Cat's claw is a very cool plant, and I expect great things from it, but in vitro activity of a plant extract does not mean that it's even absorbed at all by humans, let alone that it distributes in effective concentrations to the site of the infection. You don't know whether it's a concentration or interval dependant drug, which means you don't know the dose or the frequency. And you also don't know the toxicity. If you get it wrong with Lyme disease, chances are your Lyme arthritis, meningitis, or carditis will get completely better anyway even with delayed therapy (chronic post-Lyme symptoms occur at the same frequency in people who have never had Lyme before, so they're probably misattributed to Lyme).

I thought it might help for malaria. It was better than telling him "geee, that's too bad"

This is not water you want to be treading in. Malaria is a life-threatening medical emergency in a non-immune patient (i.e. someone who has not been infected with malaria multiple times yearly for their entire life).

Vancomicin is slowly being trod under.

Vanco is hardier than you think. It's amazing that Staph has remained susceptible to it for as long as it has. There are Vanc-intermediate strains of Staph out there now, and the rare case of Vanc-resistant Staph. Vanc-resistant Enterococcus is a different story, it's a big problem. On the other hand, Vancomycin is a pretty crappy drug -- slow bacterial killing activity, poor penetration into infected lung or into the central nervous system, annoying need to monitor drug levels. We have some good new anti-Staph drugs (linezolid, daptomycin, tigecycline are on the market now, dalbavancin and ceftiboprole are in the pipeline, and there are several others) that are good substitutes for Vanco against MRSA. But you're right that drug resistance is going to outpace anything we do so long as we use antibiotics as we do. As a mentor of mine once said about drug-resistant bacteria, "You get smart pretty quickly when you grow up every 20 minutes".

Do-it-yourselfers with antibiotics are spawning new challenges. As humanity presents 6 billion new hosts, oportunists are moving in.
The "new" TB wants back in our lives. BSE would like to be a close friend. The new [old] influenza kills mostly healthy people. It's not a good time for a weakened immune system.

I'll grant you TB and influenza (though influenza does NOT kill mostly healthy people, it still preys on the old, young, and infirm -- avian flu is an exception). BSE is hopefully going to be relegated to a rarity as it's been. But HIV is going nowhere quick, and I have a feeling that we're going to see progressively more vector-borne disease in the US, especially as the climate warms. We have some horribly nasty mosquitos endemic in the United States, particularly Aedes aegypti (the vector for dengue and yellow fever), and Aedes albopictus, which is an aggressive mosquito that was inadvertentle imported to the US, which can bite many different animals and carry many different diseases.

Yes, my username here is a mosquito.

If there isn't some kind of responsible population control [birth control], there will always be some mechanism that will diminish our numbers.

Reducing infant and child mortality reliably slows population growth, especially when birth control is available.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

The predictors I mention are supported by a tremendous amount of actual research, including large scale interventions with control groups. Philosophical musings have never solved practical problems on this scale, nor will they ever. Cultural change happens because people's living conditions change, not the other way around.

To be sure there is a cyclic relationship between diseases of poverty (both social and medical) and the stability and "social control" in such a society. But when you look at the research what you repeatedly see is that poverty regresses again and again to disease and mortality as strong independent predictors.

And societies with strong social control do not necessarily benefit from development, modernization, or stability -- after all, didn't Afghanistan under the Taliban have an extremely tight social control system? And yet it had the highest infant mortality rates and lowest life expectancy in the entire continent of Asia. Zimbabwe's public health has gone down the crapper ever since Mugabe turned it into a police state. How about Guinea-Conakry under Toure? The thread that unites these examples is that the social control is imposed by an oligarchy, and trickle-down discipline has never worked on a large scale. You want to change culture, then address what people are suffering from first.

What actually distinguishes the rich from the poor is lack of choice, and lack of control. If they had control, and if they had choice, would they use their choice to surrender their control of events and accept poverty? It is obvious that the rich are rich because they choose to be. How many who are poor would choose to be rich if they had a choice? That problem is what people are suffering from. Disease is only a symptom.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

What actually distinguishes the rich from the poor is lack of choice, and lack of control. If they had control, and if they had choice, would they use their choice to surrender their control of events and accept poverty? It is obvious that the rich are rich because they choose to be. How many who are poor would choose to be rich if they had a choice? That problem is what people are suffering from. Disease is only a symptom.

I disagree, but what do I know, it's not like I do international health for a living.

[Fido]

Originally Posted by Aedes

I disagree, but what do I know, it's not like I do international health for a living.

There is no such thing as international health just as there are few examples of national health. It would interfere with the making of money and the accumulation of wealth. The worst sort of individual in the world is one continually trying to put a cork in a bottle that is all mouth and no bottle. You can't keep ahead of disease. You do make it possible to spread disease far an wide. No one ever tries to limit individual freedom if it means exploitation, and no one tries to limit freedom if it means quarantene, and that should have been done in regards to aids, and many other less significant diseases. Ultimately capital determines your resources, and capital is happy to see the dispossessed drop dead rather than asking for equal rights, entitlements, control, or choice. You may be in a growth industry. You are like a traffic cop trying to direct the course of a river in flood. So long as people live where they should not and medicine tries to treat symptoms rather than causes, -the ill and the injured will create diseases faster than you can cure them. Why not just treat yourself?

[can't sit still]

Aedes, the guy with malaria had had it for 15 years. I would never make any kind of recommendation to someone who had just been infected. The influenza that I was referring to that kills the healthy was the 1918 type. Life Extension foundation says that the bird flu would mimic that variant.
Since you've been to Sub-Sahara Africa, you know that the people in the very rural settings have very little access to both doctors and birth control. Cuba is the opposite.
Indians seem to have the mentality that high infant nortality is the norm. They just continue to have kids hoping that some will survive to work in the fields and care for the parents when they are elderly.
Many cultures just don't want to avail themselves to birth control. Uganda seems to fall in that category. Same goes for medical care. I worked 10 years driving around Mexico with caravans of motorhomes and motorcycles. A guy in a motorhome hit a girl who ran onto the highway. I went with him to the police station as a translator. She was in ICU with an edema and a fractured radius. She was there mostly for observation. Her parents were hill people. They yanked her out of ICU and took her to a brujo. She died 1 1/2 days later. They blamed the American.
The hantaviruses seem to have some new competition as the bogeyman; New kind of killer virus discovered in Bolivia - 18 April 2008 - New Scientist
I'm sure that DOD already has samples.
The challenges facing mankind seem to increase every day. Predatory capatalism seems hell bent on killing those who can't afford to PAY for medical care or PAY for high-priced food. Social responsibility or charity seem to have gone out the window. If you can't pay,,,, you die.
With the sun going into a very active cycle, crop destruction is going to get far worse. Life is tough.

[Aedes]

Originally Posted by Fido

There is no such thing as international health just as there are few examples of national health. It would interfere with the making of money and the accumulation of wealth.

If you only knew how wrong you were. Morbidity and mortality do not respect national boundaries. Smallpox was eradicated by an international campaign, just as (hopefully) polio will be within the next couple years.

The worst sort of individual in the world is one continually trying to put a cork in a bottle that is all mouth and no bottle.

No, the worst sort is the person who rants and raves from an armchair without ever actually getting their feet dirty and understanding the problem.

You can't keep ahead of disease. You do make it possible to spread disease far an wide.

Really? Do you have an understanding of basic epidemiology, and particularly the basic reproductive number for various pathogens? Because if so you'll know that diseases CAN be controlled and their spread truncated using various infection control measures.

I'll grant you that the world, with its population density and with international travel, makes it inevitable that we will have to be reactionary to new problems that spread faster than we can control them. But that is why international health efforts focus on infrastructure development, public health, nutrition, human rights, and education, rather than pure disease management.

No one ever tries to limit individual freedom if it means exploitation, and no one tries to limit freedom if it means quarantene, and that should have been done in regards to aids, and many other less significant diseases.

Really? Tell me how THAT would have been possible. We didn't even have diagnostic tests for HIV until several years into the epidemic, which was almost definitely ongoing in sub-Saharan Africa throughout the 1970s and possibly before. So how exactly would you have gone and quarantined everyone, when there were hundreds of thousands if not millions of unidentified cases by the time we even had a case definition or diagnostic test? Aside from the ethics, it would have been impossible anyway -- and it would also mean anticipating the spread of the disease and the difficulties we've faced controlling it now 25+ years later, which was impossible at the time. Fantasize away, but it wouldn't have worked.

Originally Posted by can't sit still

Aedes, the guy with malaria had had it for 15 years.

P. falciparum cannot become chronic, so if this is true he didn't have the deadliest kind. P. ovale and P. vivax can be chronic and relapsing, and P. malariae can be chronic -- but all three of these are easily cured by conventional drugs. None of them has significant drug resistance. (All the major drug resistance problems are in P. falciparum).

The influenza that I was referring to that kills the healthy was the 1918 type. Life Extension foundation says that the bird flu would mimic that variant.

We don't know that to that degree, though that is a concern. Avian flu has some similarities to the 1918 flu, but the thing is that avian flu is not pandemic -- if it becomes pandemic in humans it may be biologically much different than the version that rarely infects humans now.

People have a lot of resignation about child mortality. In Africa they usually call it God's will, but you know they don't act like it's just matter of fact. I saw a woman once who had lost five children, and she was utterly devastated.

But in poor societies birth rate directly corresponds to infant mortality rate. It has mainly to do with yield -- you need to have 10 kids to guarantee that a few will survive to adulthood. And when infant mortality drops, population growth drops -- it always happens. And the opposite is true as well. It's not just in India -- in the United States in 1900 the infant mortality and the population growth rates were more or less identical to Nigeria today.

Hantavirus is a regional problem, in the US especially in the Four Corners area. But we have bigger things to worry about on a global scale.

[Aristoddler]

...


This has gone from a discussion about the generation gap, to malaria and different species of mosquitoes.
Anyone know the latest Stanley Cup standings, while we're at it?

[Rasputini]

HAHAHAHAH I know eh. I keep getting emails for this thread and everytime its about something totally different... Just yesterday I was exchanging ideas with someone on education, now its malaria. haha