Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we profile some of the strange outbreaks happening of late - some weird new infections and some old 'favorites', previously thought eradicated, making a comeback. We speculate on some of the reasons we may be seeing what we're seeing and ways that one can protect themselves from falling victim to the cootie invasion.
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Running Time: 01:00:49
Download: MP3 — 55.3 MB
Here's the transcript of the show:
Doug: Hello and welcome to Objective Health. I am your host Doug and with me today are Elliot, Erica and Tiffany.
All: Hellos.
Doug: Today we are talking about the cootie invasion. Very scary stuff. So I don't know if you've been paying attention to the headlines. It's not even just lately. It's been over the past couple of years that it seems like there's a lot of these freak diseases, infections, crazy things popping up; everything from these olde timey STDs making a comeback or even other diseases as well, not just STDs but other diseases and other infections making a comeback that are medieval age diseases. But then there's other things where it's not even things that we've ever seen before or at least that we know of having seen before. But it just seems like there's a lot of weird things going on.
So we wanted to talk a little bit about this, the mysteries, the olde timey diseases making a comeback and other strange infections going on. Maybe we can actually start off with the STDs or STIs. I noticed when I was in school they used to call them STDs but I think now they've changed it to STI for sexually transmitted infection as opposed to sexually transmitted disease.
But there have been a number of countries that have started to report comebacks of different sexually transmitted infections, ones that we seemed to formerly have a handle on and that weren't really that common anymore. They seem to be coming back. Syphilis seems to be the big one. Syphilis all of a sudden is back and Europe in particular is having a surge in these things. Apparently Iceland is the leader.
Tiffany: What?! Why are they the leader in that? I'm thinking, what's going on in Iceland? I thought it was such a serene and tranquil place. It turns out it's a hotbed for syphilis.
Doug: Yeah, I know. It's weird. Apparently they've had an 876% growth in their syphilis cases there whereas Ireland is second place with 224% growth while Britain and Germany have both seen their syphilis rates more than double. I don't know, it's really crazy.
This article that we had about it was an RT article. What they were blaming it on was more or less that condoms have become less of a thing now. During the 1980s everybody was really careful with sex and protected sex because of the big HIV/AIDS scare. But apparently that has gone by the wayside at least somewhat, and people are perhaps being a little more reckless with their sexual behaviour.
So they blame it on that. They also blame it on the rise of these dating apps. There are apps which are just hook up apps. They're saying that that has led to a much more promiscuous culture which I would agree with. So they blame it on those two things as the leading reasons for why we're starting to see these STIs come back.
What they're also saying is that two-thirds of the cases reported between 2007 and 2017, were men having sex with men whereas heterosexual men constitute about 23% of the case and women about 15%. I don't know if that just means women in general or heterosexual women. So it seems to be primarily in men. Even if you look at heterosexual sex it's 23% men as opposed to 15% women. I don't know exactly why that would be. Maybe we lucky men tend to harbour the infection a little bit more readily than women.
Erica: In the articles we were reading it also talked about not using condoms as much because of the fear of HIV and AIDS being not so prevalent in peoples' minds so that may be why we're seeing a rise as well because all of a sudden condoms are no longer being used to prevent these types of things.
Tiffany: Well also along that line, there's the prophylactic medication that some people use for HIV/AIDS. I think they call it Prep. So people take this medication every day prophylactically to protect themselves from contracting AIDS or HIV. So whether or not it actually works, maybe that can also be a factor in people not taking HIV as seriously as they used to.
Doug: That's a prophylactic medication that works for HIV/AIDS?
Tiffany: Well that's what the claim is. In the US we have actual drug commercials. I've seen a few of those commercials for that medication that they call Prep. It's supposed to protect you against HIV. I guess this would be an unintended consequence.
Doug: Yeah. The crazy thing is that it's not just syphilis. Apparently in the US there's been a national surge in chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. Sorry, I already mentioned syphilis, but chlamydia and gonorrhea as well are reaching record highs. In 2016 there were 1.6 million cases of chlamydia, 470,000 cases of gonorrhea and 28,000 of syphilis in the US. So they are all making a comeback.
Tiffany: So is it because people are getting sluttier? I think that's part of it but is it also because maybe their immune systems are weaker and they can't fight off anything? I'm sure that a person could be exposed to some kind of sexually transmitted disease and not contract it if their immune system can fight it off. But if you look at the statistics for the rise in STIs as well as the rise in a bunch of other diseases that we're going to talk about, it's not all just people having sex. I think a lot of it is decreased immunity for some reason.
Erica: Definitely.
Doug: I think that's probably a good point. If you consider how much the immune system has to deal with on a daily basis, things that in the past we never really had to deal with. The immune system was basically about pathogens more or less, but there's so many things that set off the immune system now, to the point that even food that we eat causes immune reactions in a lot of cases.
Or the pollution that's all around us and all these different things that lower immunity, like cell phone radiation, wifi radiation, all that kind of stuff as well, I think that's a good point Tiff. I think maybe it might not be that there's more sex going on or that the diseases and infections are necessarily more virulent. It might just be that we are weaker.
Tiffany: Mm-hm. There's always been these, what I'll call the 'old school doctors', the people used to write about health back in the early 1900s. They were really big proponents on how is the inner terrain, not necessarily viruses or bacteria that are attacking us. If your inner terrain is compromised for whatever reason, you're going to fall ill. I don't know. I'm just hypothesizing.
Doug: I think it's a good point. Interestingly, while we're on the topic of diseases and in the US in particular, what's going on in Los Angeles right now? Comebacks of typhus, tuberculosis. There was one doctor recently, Dr. Drew Pinsky who said that 'There is an imminent outbreak of bubonic plague because of the growth of the homeless population and the failure of the state and local authorities to deal with rodent problems.'
So apparently the homeless situation is so out of control in Los Angeles right now that they're all living on skid row. There's piles of garbage everywhere. There's human waste everywhere and it's causing a rat problem that is out of control, or rodents in general, and that's causing a rise of all these crazy diseases. When's the last time you heard of anybody who had typhus or tuberculosis in a western country? You just don't hear about it. But apparently even over the last year the homeless population has risen 12% to nearly 60,000 people...
Elliot: Wow!
Doug: ...in Los Angeles. Sixty thousand people living on the streets in Los Angeles! That's the size of a medium sized town.
Tiffany: Yeah, and when you say piles of garbage, I don't know if people have a big picture of what that means because I've looked at some YouTube videos and it's like blocks long covering the whole sidewalk, going into the street of just garbage. They'll clean it up. Of course there has to be a public outcry before they clean it up. But these huge piles of garbage attracting all these rats. And that's the problem, because, allegedly, typhus is transmitted by fleas that get on the rats and then they bite the people.
So there's all this garbage and debris and it's not just the homeless people who are coming down with this.
Doug: No.
Tiffany: People who work downtown LA, a lawyer who worked at City Hall came down with typhus. I think this might actually be Maxine Waters' district. {laughter}
Doug: Yeah, I think it is. Apparently they're calling that area now the typhus zone. It's actually got that as its nickname. "Where do you live?" "Oh, I'm in the typhus zone."
Elliot: I think it's understandable that things would spiral down to this kind of condition. I'm no expert in the history of disease when it came about, but from what I understand, the basic knowledge is that many of these different kinds of diseases which were transmittable via things like rats were more common a couple of hundred years ago when we didn't have things sanitation, when we didn't have sewage systems, when you had open sewers on the streets, when there was mass poverty, etc.
So it seems like us in western civilization have moved past that but now we're going back towards that in many of the cities.
Doug: Yeah.
Elliot: And it's not just the case in Los Angeles. It's the case in Paris. It's the case in San Francisco. It's the case in London. In London there is an epidemic of so-called diseases that we have eradicated. People are starting to get them. Tuberculosis. This is becoming way more common and it seems to parallel quite closely with this rapid decrease of quality of life for certain groups of people. Homelessness is on the rise. People are shitting in the streets. Paul Joseph Watson has done several videos on this, that people in Paris actually don't want to walk in certain areas because there's too much poo on the floor. {laughter}
Doug: Unbelievable!
Elliot: There seems to be very serious health consequences of this. I think our natural revulsion for fecal matter is a biological intuitive understanding that "Okay, when you come into contact with waste, then that's a bad thing." But when you have the governors and the council members and the heads of these cities investing more of their resources in transgender, liberal, ideological bloody policies which no one really cares about, and then they actually deprive the people living in the city, of basic things like toilets and toilet rolls and medicines and things, it's the natural outcome of something like that. That's my impression anyway.
Doug: I think that's a very good point.
Tiffany: Maybe this is kind of like a top down situation. The policies, like you were saying Elliot, the policies of corruption, the people in government not really caring about their constituents, all of this leads to the homelessness, the poverty, which causes overcrowding in the cities and the tent cities. Then that leads to the pile up of garbage and the pooing in the streets. So it's not like any of this can be looked at in isolation. I think that if you look at society as a whole, I think we're disintegrating in multiple ways and this is just a physical health aspect of the general disintegration of the cultures across the world.
Elliot: And as they say, as above, so below. But there's also aesthetically when you see junk on the street, piles of junk in a really modern city, a wealthy city, piles of junk, feces on the floor, homeless people, drug addicts, crime, perhaps that's an external manifestation of what is happening on a collective level, either locally or collectively, at least in the west. So it's interesting how that plays out.
But it's funny because actually what you're saying there Tiff, the systemic corruption and the lack of care that these elites have for the populace as a whole, that is going to come to bite them in the bum eventually because for the people in these cities, the homelessness is going continue to grow very likely. The disease rates are increasing. Disease doesn't really specify who it gets per se. There is of course the innate immune aspect to it. So okay, if you have a healthy, robust immune system then you might be better off to protect against these things but if you've got a disease like typhus or Ebola in Los Angeles, some kind of epidemic, then that's going to take out a lot of people potentially.
Erica: Things like TB have been around for a long time. I grew up in San Francisco and it was prevalent in the homeless back in the 1970s. A big part of it is spreading through breathing and microbes and whatnot, but it wouldn't take a whole lot of effort to just have people tested and to try and deal with the situation. But as you were saying Elliot and Tiffany, those people are just pushed aside. Until somebody like the lawyer in Los Angeles gets sick, nobody really cares. But there can be ways of addressing it so it doesn't continue to spread through the population.
Doug: Maybe cleaning up all that garbage would work. Just a thought. I don't know.
Tiffany: That would be a start at least.
Doug: Totally. I know that they were talking about fumigating a lot of the city buildings. They had fumigated a police station or something like that, that had been fined because it was so infested. I think there were a couple of other city-owned buildings where city employees were working and a woman ended up getting typhus. But that just seems like Band-Aid solutions. Honestly, you can fumigate a building but if right outside there are giant piles of garbage, it's probably not going to stay clean for very long.
It reminds me of when I first moved out on my own. I was a student and I lived in an absolute shithole of an apartment building and there were roaches. They would come in and spray for roaches in one part of the building so all the roaches would run to another part of the building and then they'd just come back again. They'd spray another area and they'd just come back to the other place. They'd come in and spray our part of the building. We had to leave for a day or something like that and then we'd come back and have a couple of days of no roaches and all of a sudden they'd be back again. It's the same idea. Unless you get to the root cause of the problem, you're going to have these pests show up again and it's not going to do anything about this disease.
Erica: It's the same with rats. The same applications of eliminating and they just move from building to building. When you think about people being "activists" - I don't know if you folks have seen this whole pressure to clean up all the plastic in the ocean - and that's a great thing, but why aren't people, especially in a place like Los Angeles with about four million people, that there wouldn't be grassroots organizations that say, "Hey, let's spend our Saturday dealing with the trash in our city".
Doug: Well they probably don't want to because they'll end up with typhus. {laughter} Or tuberculosis. Apparently in 2013 they identified a new strain of tuberculosis that was circulating among the homeless population. So it's a brand new version of tuberculosis.
Tiffany: The LA strain?
Doug: I guess so. The fancy Los Angeles version of tuberculosis.
Erica: Well believe it or not they do have a test and a prick, not an immunization but if you test for tuberculosis in your lungs they can give you a skin test. Do you know Tiff what they treat tuberculosis with? Is there some treatment?
Tiffany: I can't remember the specific name of the antibiotic but it turns your pee orange. A problem with treating tuberculosis, especially if you're homeless and maybe you're using drugs or something, you have to really be compliant with that and it lasts for several weeks at least. So if you're not going to take your antibiotics over the course of several weeks to a couple of months, then you're not going to get cured from the TB.
Doug: So compliance would probably be an issue there.
Tiffany: Yeah.
Doug: Well, crazy. What else can we talk about? How about the plague of Lyme disease that seems to be stretching across the entire world at the moment? It seems like Lyme is everywhere and while the officials won't recognize that there's any such thing as chronic Lyme disease, they say that it's just an acute condition and that a course of antibiotics takes care of it and then there's nothing to worry about. Whereas what people are experiencing and what many Lyme-literate MDs are actually documenting and talking about, is that the infection can become chronic and it is much, much, much worse when it becomes chronic.
Tiffany: But there are some health officials who won't even admit that chronic Lyme disease is a thing...
Doug: Yeah, including the CDC.
Tiffany: There was an investigation into why and there were a lot of conflicts of interest turning up. Either some of the people on the panels who were deciding on this chronic Lyme disease debate about whether it existed or not, have links to test kit manufacturers for Lyme disease. Some of them were linked to pharmaceutical companies. So it's all a big mess. But I don't understand why the CDC would go against that.
We did a show on Morgellons disease back before we came to YouTube. The CDC doesn't want to admit that Lyme can be a chronic problem just like they don't admit that Morgellons disease exists. I always wondered, why would the CDC not want to admit to a disease being prevalent? They're all about diseases. That's their whole thing. It seems like maybe they can make some money off of it. They make money off of lots of other things but why?
And then there are these whispers that maybe Lyme disease has been weaponized. When you consider that, maybe that is one of the reasons why the CDC doesn't want to cop to the truth about Lyme diseases? I don't know.
Elliot: Yeah, it's interesting that the doctor who originally is said to have discovered Lyme, whose name was Burgdorfer I believe, and that's what the borrelia burgdorferi was actually named after, which is the name of the infection. But it was interesting to read that he apparently was a bioweapons specialist. He actually specialized in creating or researching techniques to use biological materials or life forms in the form of bacteria and things, to actually use as a weapon against enemies. I guess that could be anyone and neutralize your targets using a bacteria.
So that's the kind of stuff that they were researching. Then you've got the widespread denial on the part of mainstream medicine, conventional medicine and health policy, that this doesn't even exist. Yet there's up to 300,000 cases which are diagnosed every year and there are people who are literally completely sick with this disease and not many people even believe that they have it.
Doug: Yeah.
Tiffany: One problem with that is that the Lyme disease tests are highly inaccurate. When you read about Lyme disease they always say, "Look for that bull's eye rash" but less than half of the people who come down with Lyme disease actually get that bull's eye rash. Then the tests are often inconclusive or they give a false negative result. I think for the test kit, they source the bacterium from one tick and they got it down to one specimen, but it came from a tick. It wasn't Lyme that had infected someone else. So they're testing all these new cases against this one specimen and it doesn't even apply to all these people. If you're in Europe and you come down with Lyme disease and you take a test in the US it might not even detect it. And vice-versa.
Doug: One thing that is also controversial and not widely disseminated is that a lot of doctors are actually saying that you don't only get Lyme disease from tick bites. The mainstream perspective is that the only way you can get Lyme disease is from a tick. You can't get it from another person. You can't get it from your pets or anything like that. But that's actually turning out to not be true. Apparently there was a study that showed the strong possibility that Lyme is actually sexually transmitted or can be sexually transmitted.
They did a study. I don't remember the details exactly but they were looking at married couples and they would find Lyme in the semen or vaginal secretions of the couple that were identical. So it's very likely that they had passed from one person to another. You can also get it from urine. They have found the spirochetes, the bacteria, in urine from pets or feces of pets. So if you're cleaning up after your pets you might actually get them. And you can actually get it from pets as well, if a tick jumps from your pet onto you. But that's still technically through a tick.
But the point is that they don't really seem to know very much about Lyme disease. The fact that they think it can only come from a tick is obviously wrong. I shouldn't say it's obviously wrong, but it's likely wrong. The virulence of this disease and where it's found suggest that it is not only from tick transmission.
Erica: Over 60% of patients don't even remember being bitten by a tick but the ones that do, there are over 30 different pathogens that can be co-infections with the Lyme disease and those co-infections don't respond to the standard treatment of antibiotic application. So again, as we were saying at the beginning of the show, I'm wondering if it's this breakdown of the immune system and maybe people would normally be able to fight it off, but as you were saying Doug, their immune systems have that little window of opening and these 30 other possibilities break down the body as well.
Doug: Maybe just to back up a bit, there was a representative, Chris Smith, who was asking the Department of Defense to investigate the possible involvement of the Department of Defense biowarfare labs in the weaponization of Lyme disease in ticks and other insects from 1950 to 1975. So he actually did this officially, asking them for this information. He's basing a lot of this on a book that was called Bitten - the Secret History of Lyme Disease and Biological Weapons by a gentleman named Chris Newby. They actually interview Dr. Burgdorfer who is a bioweapons specialist.
So if this actually was something and it looks like it probably was, then what's to say that Lyme disease wasn't actually created in and of itself, that the disease itself wasn't an invention? Because apparently it's quite similar to syphilis, oddly enough, which we were talking about at the beginning of the show. Maybe it's just genetically modified syphilis that they put into ticks to infect us all.
Tiffany: I think one of the pathologists who studies Lyme was saying this because he was hearing about primary, secondary and tertiary phases of Lyme disease that mirrored all the symptoms of primary, secondary and tertiary syphilis and the fact that the spirochetes of Lyme disease and syphilis are like cousins, it just seems like a huge coincidence.
Doug: I wonder if they were experimenting with this as a way of attacking the enemies of the state and some got out of the lab or something along those lines. Who knows? Maybe they decided to turn it on their own population. It actually wouldn't surprise me.
Erica: Wouldn't they think about the long-term effects of something like that, that...
Doug: No!
Erica: ...they're not immune as well?
Doug: They never do.
Erica: Maybe they went after the preppers, people who live in the forests and don't have a lot of urban development around them and don't go outside. I don't know.
Doug: While we're on the tinfoil hat subject, we could talk about another tick-borne illness that actually makes people allergic to meat. I remember when this first was coming about. It was a couple of years ago when there were rumours of this circulating but it turned out to actually be a thing. I remember there were a lot of people in the paleo-keto community who said, "They're doing it on purpose. They're trying to stop us from eating meat and being ketogenic" and all this kind of stuff. It sounds kind of crazy but still at the same time, maybe they're like, "The ketogenic diet is the pathway to transformation. We've got to mute that. We've got to nip that in the bud. What can we do? Oh, I know, a meat allergy. We'll just stick it in this tick."
Tiffany: I don't know. Who can say? There are crazy people in the world and there are forces at work that we can't really fathom so I don't know. There's lots of possibilities, at least for me.
Doug: Yeah. I think so. What else can we talk about? How about treatment-resistant fungal infections?
Erica: Yay! {laughter}
Doug: Apparently there's been a lot of press about antibacterial resistance and antibacterial resistant bacteria like MRSA or any numbers of other ones that are resistant to antibacterials. They have developed the ability to not be affected by anti-bacterials. Apparently the same thing is happening with fungal infections. There are a number of fungi, fungal infecting agents, that are no longer responding to antifungal drugs and there are a number of people who have these fungal infections that they're not able to treat. They can't do anything about them because they're completely resistant to these antifungal drugs that have always worked in the past.
There's some speculation that this isn't actually from an overuse of antifungal drugs like it has been with the anti-bacterials but that it is actually because they use antifungals to treat food crops as well and that by having those sprayed on the food crops, you're getting a little bit every time you eat some so that ends up lightly exposing some of these fungi to these antifungals which is how they build up resistance. So rather than blaming the medical cartel on this one, it might actually be because of farming.
Erica: And there's the ability for these types of microbes to adapt. So if you're being exposed to them in your gut you have to continue adapting. What's a good example of a fungus? Toenail fungus is one that I think of, the chronic overgrowth and they just keep adapting and pretty soon it's going to be super-fungus, going back to the agriculture model of super weeds. You keep using this stuff on the food and then it gets into people's bodies and people are adapting.
Doug: Apparently it's particularly bad with lung diseases because the lungs are a place for certain types of fungus to take hold. It's warm, it's moist, perfect conditions for a fungus. If untreated, those things can actually form tumorous masses in the lungs. It can kill people. Also, people who have asthma are quite susceptible to these infections, particularly if they're using the inhalers because that is not so good for the immune system so it brings the immune system down and then the fungus can actually take hold. So a lot of people with asthma are in danger of getting these treatment-resistant fungal infections.
Tiffany: I think that a lot of people who are immunocompromised, whether it's because of overuse of steroid asthma medications or because they had cancer at some point and had chemotherapy or if they have any kind of autoimmune disorder, I think a lowered immune system plays a big part in a lot of these diseases that we're talking about but not at the beginning. But I think this is particularly true of these fungal infections because a lot of the people who die are in ICUs in hospitals.
Doug: What else guys? What other crazy diseases are right around the corner threatening us all?
Tiffany: Well there's treatment-resistant candida.
Doug: Is there?
Tiffany: Yeah, I think they found the first case in Japan in 2009 and then it spread to places like South Africa, some place in South America and the US. Mostly people get it in hospitals which are really gross places. They have the beds in hospitals and once the patient is discharged they're supposed to come in and totally disinfect the bed but there's a lot of nooks and crannies in those hospital beds. Of course you have to consider how well the staff is cleaning and what products they're using. Sometimes, even with the best techniques, these funguses or fungi develop resistance to any kind of normal cleaning methods. So if you can avoid being in a hospital, try and stay out of them because they're really dirty places.
Elliot: It kind of seems ironic that the place that you go to when you're the most vulnerable, physically speaking, when you are the sickest and you are the most vulnerable to any kind of super bug or killer infection, it's ironic that that place is actually the place which harbours the most deadly infections in today's age. But what can you expect when you adopt a framework, like this whole notion that actually attacking bacteria with antibiotics is the be-all and end-all and there's not going to be any negative consequences of that further on down the line.
The doctors who originally started using antibiotics were warning against this. They've been warning against this for a very long time, saying "Save these antifungals, antibiotics, antivirals for end-stage, last resort kind of scenarios where you've tried everything else and nothing works. Save it until that because you are going to see resistance." And no one listened and in fact they just went ahead and started prescribing copious amounts of things that weren't even bacterially related. So you've got a viral infection? Ah! Have some antibiotics. Okay, well now this is the logical progression. Bacteria, fungi, they are much like any other species. They will detect what's going on in the environment, they'll network with one another because that's what we do, they'll network and they'll devise a way to overcome that barrier and actually proliferate under different conditions. So it just seems like we're probably going to be seeing this a lot more.
Doug: With the fungal infections as well, using the antibacterials in our food, in cattle and pigs and chickens, feeding them antibiotics, not because it's necessary because they have an infection or anything like that, but it makes them grow bigger and faster and fatter. That's another place where we're getting exposed as well.
Erica: And also this idea of being too clean all the time and the hygiene hypothesis obsession. I get the hospital needing to sterile but even in everyday life, even starting very young with children, being almost obsessive with cleanliness in the sense that washing with the Triclosan antibacterial soaps, everything is sterilized and not giving the body an opportunity to adapt to normal things in the environment and that may be fungus. That may be things that could proliferate but not going to those extreme measures to kill it off. It seem the theme of our show is how really out of balance everything is and how it's just going to extreme levels. I'm not telling people not to wash their hands but it's just being obsessive to the point like with the Clorox wipes. It's hard to say. I don't know if I'm getting my point across. I just feel it's extreme.
I know you shared this before Doug, maybe on a previous show here that we have on YouTube, that fear of anything that's not sanitary.
Doug: Yeah. It does seem to be a bit extreme, this obsession with over-cleanliness.
Erica: We had an article that we carried on SOTT. It was back in 2012 but it's called The Hygiene Hypothesis - Can Being Too Clean Harm Your Health? There was a study done about the suppressed immune system of adults and they were talking about how the immune system learns how to fight illness and disease by being exposed to it. It then builds defences. When we don't allow that to happen by normal exposure to microorganisms, then the immune system doesn't know how to fight off these things and then we become vulnerable. I think we're seeing that in these very subtle ways with the outbreak of candida resistance and fungus resistance and a lot of different things. Even in the environment we're seeing it with these red tides and outgrowth of algae making people sick in their respiratory systems. It just seems like everything is so screwed.
Doug: Yeah.
Elliot: Yeah, flesh-eating bacteria like necrotizing fasciitis which just tears someone up from inside out and can devour the skin and flesh on their leg in the space of six hours. So someone goes to sleep and wakes up with barely any leg. That is actually what's happening on the east coast in the US, Florida. This is actually becoming quite a common thing now. It wasn't necessarily reported until a couple of years ago and now it's becoming really quite common, particularly on the east coast of the US for whatever reason. There have been cases where people have literally gone out walking, gone out for a stroll on the coast, walking through some shallow, warm waters, say on the Florida coast and come back and they've got a small itch or maybe a pimple or what seems to be a bite. Then they'll come down with a fever that night. The next day they might be rushed into hospital because they've gone into some kind of metabolic crisis and then they'll be pronounced dead in 24 to 48 hours because they've contracted this flesh-eating disease that's eaten half of their chest.
I don't recommend anyone doing it, but for those who are interested in the physiology, go ahead and type it into YouTube or Google and you can see it and it is real, these kinds of infections can't be treated unless you get to it very quickly. So one of the recommendations is that if you do come up with any kind of graze, cut or bite after being in water - you don't even have to be in the water, you could just be walking on the beach, it makes it a bit difficult because most of us get cuts and scratches on the beach - but they say that if you develop a fever after that or any strange kind of symptoms which don't seem related to what would normally occur, then get it checked out because it could potentially be something quite nasty.
I'm interested in why on earth this is happening now. I'm thinking is it probably a conglomeration of factors? You've got the chemical aspect which is you've got a bunch of crap being released into the ocean. You've got plastics, you've got chemicals. You've got industrial pollutants going up into the sky then coming down into the rain water and polluting the sea and the oceans, killing the fish and probably destroying the whole microbiome so I'm guessing there's some factor involved there. Perhaps allowing some kind of pathogen weird bacteria to change the balance in some way and that seems to be quite detrimental to humans.
So there's that aspect to it. There's also the EMF. Okay, do we know how bacteria respond to that? I wrote an article on it a couple of years ago. When you expose certain types of bacteria to electromagnetic radiation then some of them become antibiotic resistant. Some of them actually develop certain resistant strains and become more pathogenic, more damaging to human beings. That is a possibility as well. Is that what's happening? Are they picking up on that?
Then there's also the extraterrestrial factor. The past few years there's not been so much in the past year or two, but in the past decade we've had massive increases in fireballs, meteorites, these kind of things coming into the atmosphere. We wouldn't even know how many of those dump into the ocean. There are a couple of scientists in the past who posited that these things can harbour certain viruses and things which, when they're introduced within the earth's atmosphere and actually plummet down into earth, can be extremely pathogenic for human beings. They can wipe out entire civilizations potentially.
So there's that. Also, are these bacteria responding to the fluctuation in solar activity which is also happening? So stuff's going kind of crazy on a level of physics with the earth. Things are changing in some way. I don't know if anyone knows, but the weather is going crazy and people are going crazy as well. We talk about this all the time, so why wouldn't bacteria go crazy? It's only expected.
Doug: Good point.
Elliot: I'm kind of excited to see what's going to come of this stuff. How far is it going to go? Are we going to have mutant bacteria turning people into zombies and stuff?
Tiffany: My thought always goes to zombies too Elliot. {laughter}
Doug: Yeah, zombies.
Elliot: You've just gotta sit back and watch the show, haven't you, and try to do what you can to boost your own immune system, hopefully so that you don't become a zombie.
Doug: Well maybe we should talk about that. How can we deal with the fact that there are all these crazy freaking diseases? You don't want to be super paranoid about this kind of stuff and become one of those people who walk around in a bubble suit, has a mask on and all that kind of stuff because they're afraid of all the possible exposures to these diseases and things. But we've mentioned a couple of times that the state of one's immune system really is going to dictate whether or not these things affect you or how badly they affect you. So what do you think? What can we do to boost our immune systems?
Tiffany: I'd say the one thing you can do, not necessarily what you should add but something that you shouldn't do is take vaccines because - and I'll go back to syphilis here - there is a lot of speculation and a lot written about how they were trying to eradicate smallpox, to get rid of smallpox and vaccinate against smallpox. They ended up causing syphilis with the smallpox vaccine. So you never know. When you start injecting foreign matter into yourself, you never know what's going to happen. So that is one way to avoid any kind of assault on your immune system unnecessarily.
Doug: It's better to build up a natural immunity to these things anyway, in my personal opinion. Everybody has to do their own research and figure it out as far as vaccines are concerned, but I think you make a pretty persuasive argument Tiff.
Just in general, eating the right foods, getting enough sleep. Those are actually really important as far as keeping your immune system in functioning order, not getting too much exposure to electromagnetic radiation. All the things that we talk about pretty much on every show are things that you can work into your lifestyle that will naturally keep your immune system functioning properly. Just missing a night of sleep or not getting enough sleep for enough consecutive days will have a definite effect on your immune system.
It's almost something to be lauded to be able to go with as little sleep as possible. "Oh yeah, I'm so busy I'm getting no sleep." "Oh good for you man! You're working really hard." But really, you're really damaging yourself by doing that. I think those simple lifestyle factors are important steps to keeping your immune system in proper functioning order.
Erica: I'd like to add the importance of reducing stress. We did a show on it last week because as you were saying Doug, lack of sleep and eating bad food, the stress component too. You can worry yourself until your immune system is shot as well. So really addressing stressors in your life and making sure that they don't get the best of you in that sense. On a light note, going back to that hygiene hypothesis of not being so worried about everything being clean all the time. It can really exhaust you mentally and physically as well.
Elliot: Just for boosting immunity, there's a couple of things which can help as well. There's some pretty good studies on vitamin D actually. There's lots of mechanism which have been laid out as to why vitamin D is useful in terms of its upregulating certain types of genes which protect your cells from these pathogens and stuff. Theoretically it makes sense. Actually there are some human trials using vitamin D and finding that it does have beneficial effects on their inflammatory markers, their recovery time and that kind of stuff. So if you do come down with some kind of infection, I think some extra vitamin D might help. Ideally, if you're getting enough sunlight, if you're eating animal fats then vitamin D should be in a good place. There's one herb - I'm not sure how you pronounce it - it's called astragalus.
Doug: Astragalus.
Elliot: Astragalus. It has used to boost the immune system in the past. I think you would use it as soon as you felt that you were coming down with something. I'm not sure if it can be used in any of these really horrible conditions like TB. I know that high doses of vitamin C can be and have been effectively used for that, ideally IV vitamin C if you can get hold of that. But apparently astragalus can also be given in IV and it's pretty good when it's in IV.
So if you have access to IV you could have vitamin C and astragalus. But it's generally good for that. Then there are other things like zinc, zinc acetate. Ideally, if you're eating enough red meat then I think you should be in a pretty good position. As long as you're not a vegan. You don't want to be a vegan and come into contact with some of these nasty infections because that's not going to be good.
But then if you get something like MRSA on your skin, let's say that you go to the hospital, you come down with MRSA, you have a skin infection, we've covered this on the show, but there are a couple of accounts of people using kombucha topically. I would probably go for colloidal silver, iodine, kefir, kombucha. Just off the top of my head. Anyone else think of anything that might be helpful?
Erica: I think just taking those foods like fermented foods, sauerkraut, kimchee, building up the microbiome so your gut can fight off, especially internal types of things that go on. As you were saying, kombucha. I'm not a big fan of how that tastes.
Doug: Oh, I like it.
Erica: But fermented foods are great. Information overload in the fermented food area but, finding those beneficial microbes in your food.
Doug: Well I think we've covered quite a bit. That's probably our show. Did you guys have anything else you wanted to add? Freaky diseases, immune boosting.
Erica: There's so much.
Doug: Yeah, we didn't even talk about Ebola.
Erica: We'll have to save it for another show.
Doug: Exactly. Okay, well thanks everybody for joining us on this episode of Objective: Health. We will be back with another show next week. Don't forget to like and subscribe below and we will see you next time.
All: Good-byes.
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