High blood pressure is probably the most prevalent disease in the western world. The WHO estimates that at least 20% of the world's adult population has high blood pressure (a.k.a. hypertension), which is usually defined as a systolic blood pressure over 140 mmHg and/or a diastolic blood pressure over 90 mmHg (the systolic pressure is the pressure in the arteries when the heart is contracting, while the diastolic pressure is the pressure when the heart is relaxing).

The reason high blood pressure is considered a bad thing is because it is harmful to lots of different organs. It damages the arteries, leading to heart attacks and strokes. It damages the heart muscle, leading to heart failure. It damages the kidneys, resulting in kidney failure.

A problem is that in 90% of cases, no specific cause can ever be identified. This is known as essential hypertension, which is a rather odd name, since there doesn't seem to be anything essential about it. Hypertension is non-existent among primitive hunter-gatherers, suggesting that there is something about our western lifestyle that causes it.

But rather than figuring out what in the diet and lifestyle is causing the high blood pressure, and doing something about that, most people would supposedly rather take a pill every day for the rest of their lives and be done with it. Which is why we have a bazillion different blood pressure lowering drugs, and why many people with "essential" hypertension are on two or three or even four of these drugs at the same time.

It might surprise you to learn that when blood pressure lowering drugs were first introduced to the market and prescribed to patients, there was little evidence that they actually helped the patients live longer. They were introduced solely based on the fact that they lowered the blood pressure, which was assumed to be a good thing. But here we have a bit of a problem, because if the body decides to increase the blood pressure, there is probably an underlying reason. That reason might be that certain organs don't think they're getting sufficient oxygen, and are therefore telling the circulatory system to work harder in order to increase the level of oxygen delivery.

Anyone raising concern about the safety of Covid-19 vaccines faces derision as an 'anti-vaxxer', but the real extremists are those who refuse to hear evidence that something is going badly wrong with this mass experimental intervention. Now a Public Health England report confirms that infections increase during the fortnight after vaccination.

As the vaccination programme began in earnest in January, worrying signs came from care homes, where many of the initial target population of people aged over 80 reside. At Pemberley House in Basingstoke, a third of the residents (24) died of Covid-19 in a home that had previously been free from the disease. Similar reports emerged from Germany.

The clearest indications came from small countries that strove to vaccinate their entire adult population. The British enclave of Gibraltar was supplied with the Pfizer vaccine on 16th January and the elderly were swiftly jabbed. Suddenly this tiny state, home to 33 thousand, had the worst Covid-19 morality in the world (now 2761 per million). From merely 9 deaths in December, now almost a hundred have died. The health minister angrily denied claims that the vaccine was killing people, but eventually admitted that some deaths had occurred in recipients.

A front-page article appeared in the FranceSoir newspaper about findings on the Nakim website regarding what some experts are calling "the high mortality caused by the vaccine."

The paper interviews Aix-Marseille University Faculty of Medicine Emerging Infectious and Tropical Diseases Unit's Dr. Hervé Seligmann and engineer Haim Yativ about their research and data analysis. They claim that Pfizer's shot causes "mortality hundreds of times greater in young people compared to mortality from coronavirus without the vaccine, and dozens of times more in the elderly, when the documented mortality from coronavirus is in the vicinity of the vaccine dose, thus adding greater mortality from heart attack, stroke, etc."

"Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

1: 'The Concept of Coronavirus Herd Immunity Is Deadly and Dangerous'

Since COVID19 first hurtled over the horizon, before landing upon us all with great force, I find that I have been asked to believe in many impossible things. First, I was told that attempting to create herd immunity was not achievable. It would also be extremely dangerous and would inevitably result in many hundreds of thousands of excess deaths.

Then the vaccines arrived at fantastical speed and I was told that mass vaccination, by creating herd immunity, would be the factor that would allow us to conquer COVID19 and return to normal life. I am not entirely sure which of these things is impossible, but one of them must be.

2: 'Vaccines, on the other hand, are believed to induce stronger and longer lasting immunity.'

I was then told the vaccine would provide greater immunity than being infected with COVID19. Which was interesting. I am not sure if this is actually impossible, but it seemed unlikely that anyone could make such statements after about three hundred people had actually been studied, and just two months had passed.

At the time I was aware of two people proven to have been re-infected with COVID19, out of about ten million cases. So, getting infected certainly seemed to provide a pretty good degree of immunity. A re-infection rate of 0.00005%

I also know that vaccinations can only ever really create an attenuated response. Whereas a full-blown infection triggers a full-blown immune response. So, I think it is pretty close to impossible that vaccination can provide greater protection than that from getting the actual disease. Which is why I think it is utterly bonkers we are actually vaccinating people who have circulating antibodies in their blood.

The vegan diet is on trend. How this type of diet affects health is the subject of scientific studies. In a new study from the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR), the bone health of 36 vegans as well as 36 people following a mixed-food diet was determined with an ultrasound measurement of the heel bone.

The result: on average, people following a vegan diet had lower ultrasound values compared to the other group. This indicates poorer bone health. In the study, the scientists also determined biomarkers in blood and urine. This aims to identify nutrients that might be related to diet and bone health. Out of 28 parameters of nutritional status and bone metabolism, it was possible to identify twelve biomarkers most strongly associated with bone health - for example, the amino acid lysine and vitamins A and B6.

The results show that in most cases, the combination of these biomarkers was present in lower concentrations in vegans. This could be a possible explanation for the poorer bone health. "A vegan diet is often considered health-conscious. However, our scientific findings indicate that a vegan diet does affect bone health," says BfR President Professor Dr. Dr. Andreas Hensel.

Reference: Vegan Diet and Bone Health — Results from the Cross-Sectional RBVD Study

A pregnant woman with suspected COVID-19 was rushed by ambulance to Skåne University Hospital, in Malmo, Sweden, suffering from sudden severe abdominal pain. The doctors noticed that the unborn infant had an abnormally low heart rate, which can be a sign that the baby is not getting enough oxygen.

The doctors performed an emergency caesarean section and delivered the baby within minutes. Blood tests from the baby confirmed it had severely low oxygen, and throat swabs showed that both mother and baby were suffering from COVID.

Using throat swabs from the mother and the newborn, the genome of the virus was sequenced to confirm the possibility that the infant had been infected with COVID while still in the womb. My colleagues and I - part of a study team at the hospital - found that the viral genome in the mother and the baby was identical. Since the baby had been isolated from the mother directly after the caesarean and had not come in contact with other family members when these tests were done, the findings confirmed that the baby was indeed infected before it was born.

Is SARS-CoV-2 a real virus? Are any viruses real? These may seem like odd questions to some, but there is a growing number of people out there who are rather convinced, and convincing, that viruses don't exist; or at the very least, aren't viruses as we generally conceive of them and are not infectious. Some versions of the theory claim that viruses are actually misidentified exosomes, something produced by the body's cells for transport and cleansing. Some say these exosomes are actually the product of the disease, not the cause, and that Covid-19 is actually caused by 5G, air pollution or various other toxic assaults on our bodies.

Whatever the minutiae it seems that, like "no-planes theory", "actors theory", and "flat earth theory" that all came before it, virus denial, or "no-virus theory" is latest meme to scoop up slightly unbalanced minds to be occupied by untenable conspiracy theories and highly unlikely scenarios.

Join us on this episode of Objective:Health as we look into viruses - how do we know what we know about them and how do we know that they're real? We'll be discussing some of the different no-virus theories circulating and talking about why they're unlikely to be true.


A couple of good links to check out:

https://virologydownunder.com/sigh-yes-the-covid-virus-is-real/

https://twitter.com/Ayjchan/status/1358456485051834369

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As people around the world remain isolated in their homes, avoiding close contact with others and meticulously sanitizing their hands and surfaces, scientists warn there may be unintended consequences of these necessary pandemic protocols.

While it's important to follow public health orders to reduce spread of COVID-19, experts say that all the antibacterial wipes and physical distancing could have long-term impacts on our microbiomes — the collection of microbes that live on and inside our bodies.

When we hug someone, travel to another country or get our hands dirty, we acquire new microbes, said Brett Finlay, a University of British Columbia microbiologist. Although some microbes can make us sick, others are good for us, and a diverse and rich microbiome is essential to our health, he said.

Hollywood actor urged to stop spreading misinformation after promoting 'intuitive fasting'.

Gwyneth Paltrow has been urged to stop spreading misinformation by the medical director of NHS England after she suggested long Covid could be treated with "intuitive fasting", herbal cocktails and regular visits to an "infrared sauna".

The Hollywood star, who markets unproven new age potions on her Goop website, wrote on her latest blogpost that she caught Covid-19 early and had since suffered "long-tail fatigue and brain fog".

I've been asked why I'm so skeptical when it comes to health and medical science. My answer is because I've spent many hours studying medical history, and I've seen how much damage doctors have done over the centuries. If you were to select a patient-doctor consultation at random from all the ones that have happened throughout history, your odds are probably better of selecting one in which the doctor harmed the patient than one in which the doctor helped the patient. That is certainly true if you only look at consultations happening before the year 1900.

It's a shame that medical history generally isn't part of the curriculum in medical school. If it was, maybe doctors would be more humble about what they know, and what they don't know. If I were to design a medical school curriculum, I would make the first five to ten weeks of medical school an in-depth course in medical history, with a particular focus on all the mistakes doctors and scientists have made through the centuries, and why they made those mistakes. To quote a well worn cliché, those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Personally, I wear my skepticism as a badge of pride. If I were to seek out a doctor for some medical condition I was suffering from, I would want that person to be a natural skeptic. I would want someone who won't believe something just because that's what they were taught in medical school, or because it's what they heard from a salesperson working for a pharmaceutical company.

I'm going to present four different cases from recent history, that I think show clearly why it's important to be highly skeptical when it comes to the area of health and medicine. Things can often seem to be very beneficial after a few early studies, or because common sense suggests they should be beneficial. Then when more data comes in, sometimes decades after a certain treatment has become the "gold standard" of therapy, it becomes clear that the intervention is actively harmful. In some cases, millions of people have died prematurely as a result of the intervention by this point. When this happens, when something goes from being the recommended therapy to turning around 180 degrees and becoming something that doctors recommend against, it is known as a medical reversal. Unfortunately, medical reversals are common.

Another thing that I think is unfortunate is that scientific methodology is not really something that is taught in school. People even leave university with very limited training in scientific method. This causes the large majority of the population to be unable to weigh scientific evidence themselves, and it makes them totally beholden to the opinions of others. That's why I try to use this blog to educate in scientific method. Science, just like democracy, thrives when lots of people are able to examine different pieces of evidence and think for themselves.

Anyway, let's get to the four cases.