Health & WellnessS


Target

Mediocrity and moderation: Distinguishing between conflated concepts

workout equip
© Luis Reys
I read an article by Adam Ellwanger entitles "I Don't Even Lift, Bro" and feel compelled to comment. It essentially casts the behaviors of the author as "moderate" indicating at one point that "moderation is a virtue." I agree with that very much, but I didn't see any defense of moderation within. What I did see was summarized eloquently by William Hunter Duncan thus: An Ode to Mediocrity.

What Adam has done is conflate moderation with mediocrity. By the standards he outlines, he demonstrates he misunderstands the role resistance training has in optimizing health. He doesn't see the utility. This is mind boggling to me. Of all the things you could allocate time and effort to in life, one of the things with the largest magnitude return on investment is resistance training. Let us examine why resistance training is useful.

Syringe

Past COVID infection 'as good as vaccines' at preventing severe illness

swab test
While the research suggests that natural immunity could be just as good as vaccines at preventing serious illness from COVID-19 infection, the study's authors encourage people to still get vaccinated, to avoid any complications from any initial infections.

Previous COVID infection boosts long-term immunity and lowers the risk of hospitalisation and death at the same level as vaccination, new peer-reviewed research shows.

The study, led by the University of Washington and published by The Lancet medical journal, is said to be the "most comprehensive study to date" on the impact of natural immunity for the disease.

"For people who have been infected with COVID-19 at least once before, natural immunity against severe disease (hospitalisation and death) was strong and long-lasting for all variants (88% or greater at 10 months post-infection)," researchers said.

Comment: See also:


Beaker

Lab-grown meat's impending CANCER problem: 'We could eat malignant chicken tumors by the bucket load'

lab grown meat fake meat
© The National Pulse
"Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous..."

Lab-grown meat, touted as the "cruelty-free" food of the future by everyone from the World Economic Forum to Hollywood mega-celebs like Leonardo DiCaprio, may have a fatal problem, according to a new Bloomberg story.

The problem is that the materials used to make the product - "immortalized cell lines" - replicate forever, just like cancer. Which means, in effect, that they are cancer. Although these cell lines are widely used in scientific research, they've never been used to produce food before.
"Immortalized cells are a staple of medical research, but they are, technically speaking, precancerous and can be, in some cases, fully cancerous... [but d]on't worry: Prominent cancer researchers tell Bloomberg Businessweek that because the cells aren't human, it's essentially impossible for people who eat them to get cancer from them, or for the precancerous or cancerous cells to replicate inside people at all."

Bloomberg BusinessWeek
Industry types are "confident" that eating such products poses no risk — although there isn't any hard data — but it's not difficult to see, even if the products are "proven" safe, how people might be put off by the thought they're eating a glorified tumor.

Comment:


Attention

Australia's drug regulator hid vaccine deaths from the public, concerned that 'disclosure could undermine public confidence'

covid vaccine
Documents obtained under Freedom of Information (FOI) request by Dr Melissa McCann reveal that the TGA appears to have hidden numerous vaccine-induced deaths from the public view, including those of two children.

Dr McCann shared the shocking revelation in her address at the Covid Vaccine Conference, hosted by Clive Palmer's United Australia Party over the weekend in Brisbane, Melbourne and Sydney. The event featured leading ICU physician Dr Pierre Kory, cardiologist and epidemiologist Dr Peter McCullough, and McCullough's collaborator, author John Leake.

Addressing sold out crowds, Dr McCann shared the extraordinary lengths she had to go to to extract causality assessment documents relating to the TGA's investigation of reported deaths after Covid vaccination, which were obtained under FOI request in a process that took six months. Dr McCann lodged the request after seeing an unexpectedly high number of patients coming through her clinic experiencing adverse events after immunisation (AEFIs). She also noticed a high number of serious AEFI reports in the in the DAEN database, including the reported death of a 14 year old in October 2021.

Arrow Down

Big-Pharma kept quiet about cancer risks of Zantac for 40 years

Zantac
© Sobo & Sobo
The insidious vaccine debacle may seem to have come out of nowhere, but pharmaceutical and regulatory rot has been growing for decades.

The story of Zantac, the common heartburn medicine, is both awful and good - it's awful because one of the most common drugs on the market may have been causing cancers for forty years. It's good only because the story is finally being told and 70,000 people are suing GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). The "good" here is the hope that some justice might finally be done, and because the public might find out just how ghastly the industrial pharma octopus really is, and how welded it is in the system.

It's time to burn down the unholy empire of Big Pharma and Big Government and start again.

This is not a case of one bad egg in the system, it's the story of a system that virtually creates bad eggs

Glaxo was a little company in the 70s that took one of the most popular drugs on the market, Tagamet, tweaked it enough to patent a "better version", then aggressively out-marketed it, and eventually bought out the companies that made Tagamet to become the $70 billion GlaxoSmithKline giant.
"By 1989, Zantac was worth $2 billion. It accounted for half of Glaxo's sales and 53% of the market for prescription ulcer remedies."
But the common heartburn drug Zantac, or ranitidine, which drove their profits — also broke down into NDMA which is a known carcinogen, and there were warnings of this in 1981 and 1982, but it wasn't until September 2019 that an independent lab tested for NDMA and found it in every sample and at alarming levels. By April 2020 the FDA forced every manufacturer to stop producing and selling the drug altogether. Now, the court cases have started.

Most of the Bloomberg story — which is worth reading in full — focuses on just how badly behaved GlaxoSmithKline have been by hiding the early data for forty long years. But GSK also chose not to do more tests when it should have; it did not try to transport and store the drug in ways the reduced the contamination, and it did not advise the public to take the tablets outside meals. There is no sense that customer health mattered.

To me the bigger question that is never asked, is why drugs like this are not tested by publicly funded groups before they get approval to be rolled out en masse? The tests that were finally done in 2019 are not two-year studies involving thousands of people, they are just lab tests for contamination. What is the point of all the public health funding, the regulatory agencies, and public universities if they aren't used to defend the public?

If the FDA has the legal power to approve drugs or ban them, shouldn't it also bear the responsibility when it gets that wrong?

Under legal cross examination the director of research and development admitted they had known for almost 40 years that ranitidine could degrade under conditions of high temperature and moisture ... .

Newspaper

9 dead from marburg virus disease, 'outbreak' reported in Equatorial Guinea

marburg
© Carol Valade/AFP/Getty ImagesGuinean medical workers register for anti-Ebola vaccines after an outbreak of the illness in 2021.
Equatorial Guinea has confirmed its first outbreak of the Marburg virus, a highly infectious and deadly disease similar to Ebola, following the deaths of at least nine people, the World Health Organization (WHO) said on Monday.

The small Central African country quarantined more than 200 people and restricted movement last week in its Kie-Ntem province after detecting an unknown hemorrhagic fever. Neighboring Cameroon also restricted movement along its border over concerns about contagion.In addition to the nine deaths, Equatorial Guinea has reported 16 suspected cases of Marburg virus with symptoms including fever, fatigue and blood-stained vomit and diarrhea, the WHO said.

Comment: It doesn't appear to be an outbreak of great concern yet, however it's worth noting.

See also: Did West Africa's ebola outbreak of 2014 have a lab origin? - And the critical covid connections


Syringe

Planet Normal: 'People should be made aware of link between Covid jab and heart problems'

Planet Normal podcast
Telegraph Science Editor Sarah Knapton joins columnists Allison Pearson and Liam Halligan on Planet Normal, a weekly podcast featuring news and views from beyond the bubble

Vaccines undoubtedly allowed the country to get back to normal after the coronavirus pandemic, but information about potential side effects is not as well publicised as it should be.

That's the view of the Telegraph Science Editor Sarah Knapton, who spoke to columnists Liam Halligan and Allison Pearson on the latest Planet Normal podcast, which you can listen to using the audio player above.

"I do think there is some sort of link between heart problems and the jab," Sarah told the podcast.

Star

I'm pro-science. That's why I'm anti-mask

georgina rodriguez
Actress Georgina Rodriguez holds her face mask as she arrives for a screening at the Venice Film Festival
"Are you anti-mask?" "Are you anti-vax?" "Are you anti-science?"

Employees of Levi Strauss & Co repeatedly pummeled me with these questions during 2020-2022, when I was the company's brand president. Why? I advocated in defense of children: against the masking of toddlers, against closed playgrounds and youth sports, for open public schools.

I'm not exactly sure what an anti-science person is. But that's not me. I'm pro-science. And that's why I'm anti-mask.

Comment: We live in an upside-down clown world where war is peace, freedom is slavery, and "trust in the science" means to have blind faith in the untested, unproven, and unsafe...
War is peace orwell



Health

US registers rise in highly infectious norovirus causing stomach illness

Norovirus
© Kateryna Kon/Science Photo Library/Getty Images/Science Photo Library RFNorovirus, computer illustration. The disease causes nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea and abdominal pain. CDC says positive tests for virus, which causes nausea, diarrhea and stomach pain, peaked at 16% in January.
The US is seeing a rise in the norovirus informally called the stomach flu or stomach bug, according to the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with positive tests for the contagious illness peaking at 16% in January.

The rise in infections spans the US, according to the healthcare agency, with infection rates not seen since last spring.

The illness is highly infectious, spreading easily through close contact with others, touching surfaces or consuming contaminated food or beverages. Those infected can shed billions of particles with the illness, and only a few particles can make a person sick.

Syringe

The CDC lied: The mRNA wasn't meant to "stay in the arm"

mRNA
The CDC's information page on Covid-19 vaccines contains the following bullet points on "How mRNA COVID-19 vaccines work:"
First, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are given in the upper arm muscle or upper thigh, depending on the age of who is getting vaccinated.

After vaccination, the mRNA will enter the muscle cells. Once inside, they use the cells' machinery to produce a harmless piece of what is called the spike protein.... After the protein piece is made, our cells break down the mRNA and remove it, leaving the body as waste.
Or, in other words, as we have long been told, "it" - the mRNA - "stays in the arm." And then, after having instructed the muscle cells to produce the spike, is disposed of.