Health & WellnessS


Bug

CDC says up to 450,000 in U.S. have red meat allergies due to alpha-gal syndrome spread by ticks

Deer tick
© CDC/ReutersA deer tick, or blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis. Scientists have discovered a new bacteria species causing Lyme disease in the U.S. Midwest.
Thousands more Americans are now testing positive each year for alpha-gal syndrome — a condition spread by tick bites that causes allergic reactions to eating red meat. New data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows up to 450,000 people in the U.S. may have been affected since 2010.

These figures mark a steep increase in cases since alpha-gal syndrome was first reported among a handful of Virginians in 2008 after being bitten by ticks.

Many cases are also likely going undiagnosed, the CDC now says, citing "concerning" knowledge gaps found in a separate study among American doctors surveyed about the red meat allergy.

Comment: As if that wasn't enough to worry about, there is also tick-borne Lyme disease: For the conspiracy-minded, it's even worse:


No Entry

Mercury pollution is worsening a mental health crisis in this Indigenous community

grassy narrows first nation
© Randy Risling / via Getty Images
Mercury poisoning among members of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in Ontario, Canada, is contributing to high rates of attempted suicide among Indigenous youth. That's according to a new study out of the University of Quebec in Montreal published this month in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

The study analyzed data from 162 children and 80 mothers, parsing data on mercury levels in umbilical cords and hair, as well as from surveys on fish consumption and mental health. Researchers concluded that three generations of mercury exposure are linked to today's youth attempted suicide rates.

Donna Mergler, professor emerita at the University of Quebec in Montreal and lead author of the study, said she and her co-authors found that women from Grassy Narrows who ate a lot of fish during pregnancy were more likely to have children with both emotional and behavioral problems.

Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

This pro-mask 'study' is why you should NEVER 'Trust the Science'

Mask Study
© Off-Guardian
Last week it was reported that the Australian state of Victoria may be considering "permanent" facemask mandates to achieve "zero-Covid".

Now, we don't need to get into the personal liberty implications of such a law, or the near-infinite supply of evidence that masks don't work to prevent the transmission of respiratory disease.

They don't work, they never worked. Mandating them was a political move designed to make the fake Covid "pandemic" appear real, and their continued use is a symptom of brainwashing or a by-product of chronic virtue signaling.

The mask debate, such as it was, is over.

No, the only aspect of this development worth talking about is the "evidence" used to support the position - and trust me, the quotes are entirely justified.

The "study" which claims to demonstrate the benefits of permanent masking was published in the Medical Journal of Australia last week and titled "Consistent mask use and SARS‐CoV‐2 epidemiology: a simulation modelling study".

"Simulation modelling study" is very much the key phrase there. For those who don't know, "simulation modelling studies" involve feeding data into a computer programme, then asking it to form conclusions.

Clearly, they are only as reliable and useful as the data you use. In fact, you can very easily make them produce any result you want by feeding in the "right" (bad) data.

In this particular modelling study they started out by telling the computer that cloth masks reduce transmission by 53% and respirators reduced it by 80%:
Odds ratios for the relative risk of infection for people exposed to an infected person (wearing a mask v not wearing a mask) were set at 0.47 for cloth and surgical masks and 0.20 for respirators
Essentially, they told their computer that masks prevent disease...and then said "ok, computer, since you now know masks prevent disease - what would happen if everybody wore them all the time?"

The computer then told them - obviously - that nobody would get sick.

Because they made it logically impossible for it to say anything else.

But there's a bit more to it.

Microscope 2

How we know Covid really did suppress flu and why it's important

Covid Virus illustration
The flu was substantially suppressed across much of the world for the first two years of the Covid pandemic.

Many, many people disagree with me on this point, more than ever before. While I'm generally happy to let ideas I think are wrong persist alongside my own point of view, this is an exception, because it touches on the phenomenon of viral interference, which is very real and very important.

Properly understood, viral interference calls into question the entire rationale for non-pharmaceutical interventions to slow the transmission of viruses and suggests that mass vaccination against old endemic pathogens like influenza is a very bad idea - even in a fantasy world where those vaccines are absolutely safe, and especially if they're in any way effective.

Comment: See also:


Bullseye

14 Covid 'myth-busters' that didn't age well

facts fact checking graphic
It seems such a long time ago when an awkward, contrarian group of people known as 'lockdown sceptics' were reviled in the mainstream media. How misguided and immoral they were! As the COVID-19 pandemic continued to make waves, columnist Dan Hodges wondered whether anyone had ever been so proved so wrong. Somewhat incoherently, Hodges used the phrase 'lockdown denier', not as in denying the existence of this regime, but for its criticism.

COVID-19 saw the emergence of an industry of fact-checking websites and censorship of alleged misinformation, portrayed as a danger to public health and safety. Official sources were almost as focused on refuting competing ideas as on providing supposedly useful and accurate information. A good example of this was a guide against 'coronavirus fake news' issued by Castle Point MP Rebecca Harris in autumn 2020, probably following the publication of the Great Barrington Declaration by three eminent scientists challenging lockdown orthodoxy. It is well worth retrospective review: was officialdom right?

TV

Link found between childhood television watching and adulthood metabolic syndrome

television screen nbc logo
© Unsplash/BNN
A University of Otago study has added weight to the evidence that watching too much television as a child can lead to poor health in adulthood.

The research, led by Professor Bob Hancox, of the Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, and published this week in the journal Pediatrics, found that children who watched more television were more likely to develop metabolic syndrome as an adult.

Metabolic syndrome is a cluster of conditions including high blood pressure, high blood sugar, excess body fat, and abnormal cholesterol levels that lead to an increased risk of heart disease, diabetes and stroke.

Health

'Millions may be at risk': Houston hit with 'alarming' syphilis outbreak

syphilis blood vial
Health officials in Houston, Texas, are grappling with a syphilis outbreak among the population.

The city's health department reported Thursday that there was a 128 percent increase in cases of the illness among women in the area and "a nine-fold rise in congenital syphilis in Houston and Harris County."

Syphilis is a sexually transmitted infection (STI) that could have serious complications if an individual leaves it untreated, per the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Comment: See also:


Arrow Down

How a highly effective vaccine turns into a mediocre vaccine - or worse

woman vaxx
© ReutersFourth dose for a 90-year-old in Netanya, Israel
Detected fraudulence aside, there is no stronger criticism of a study than refuting the key result by using the study data. That opportunity does not arise often.

I present a striking example, pertaining to a study from Israel. Trying to be methodical, my article is somewhat on the long side, but the implications at the end are radical and broad.

Goldin et al. estimated the effectiveness of the Pfizer vaccine on several Covid-related outcomes, including death, in residents of long-term care facilities in Israel (mean age of 83 years). The large cohort (over 43,000) was heavily skewed towards vaccinated residents (90%). Only about 4,000 residents were not vaccinated.

Using a statistical method called survival analysis, the authors reported two age-adjusted values of vaccine effectiveness (VE) against Covid-related death:
Skipping ten days after the first dose, VE was 72%.
Skipping about seven days after the second dose, VE was 85%.
Goldin et al. also analyzed all-cause death as an endpoint, which many researchers have omitted. Most important, two of their figures (below) show the cumulative number of Covid deaths and all deaths at several time points — from which we can compute the cumulative number of non-Covid deaths. The latter data has been consistently hidden in studies of vaccine effectiveness.

Comment: Correct interpretation is the key. This is one example coming to light.


Beaker

Aspartame is a 'possible' carcinogen: the science behind the decision

aspartame
© BSIP SA/AlamyAspartame is used to sweeten thousands of food and drink products.
More research is needed to investigate a potential link between the common sweetener and cancer.

The cancer-research arm of the World Health Organization (WHO) has classified the low-calorie sweetener aspartame as 'possibly carcinogenic'.

The International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) in Lyon, France, said its decision, announced on 14 July, was based on limited evidence for liver cancer in studies on people and rodents.

However, the Joint FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) said that recommended daily limits for consumption of the sweetener, found in thousands of food and drink products, would not change.

"There was no convincing evidence from experimental or human data that aspartame has adverse effects after ingestion, within the limits established by previous committee," said Francesco Branca, director of the WHO's Department of Nutrition and Food Safety, at a press conference on 12 July in Geneva, Switzerland.

Comment: There is a massive amount of research clearly showing the dangers of aspartame and other chemical sweeteners. They just aren't from the approved sources. Big Pharma and Big Ag are able to shut out these studies from the mainstream


Syringe

Did covid injections save lives?

covid vaccine
The benefits claimed from the covid injections (now reduced to an assertion that they prevent severe disease and deaths - claims that infections or transmission are reduced having been jettisoned) are heavily dependent on a measure of the number of deaths per case. Unfortunately, due to inconsistencies in the way "cases" are measured this data has to be taken with a pinch of salt. Furthermore, there is no historic data on how data on cases changed over time for previous respiratory viruses. Having a disproportionate number of cases per deaths for a third wave of an influenza variant might be the norm. No-one knows. All that we do know is that historically waves of hospitalizations and deaths for influenza have been of a similar size and duration each year.

Joel Smalley has analysed the data from Florida and has broken it down by age group. Here are the death curves for the over 65s in Florida. It is a repeating pattern.

covid vax death 1
Figure 1: Deaths in Florida for over 65 year olds. Total deaths (black line) over the baseline (dotted black line) at the top and covid deaths (green) with the weekly excess deaths in grey bars.