Doctors in Illinois are attempting to establish a connection between a respiratory ailment that has sickened hundred of school-age children in the state and a virus called Enterovirus 68 that has sent more than 300 children to the hospital in Missouri.

According to Reuters, hospitals in Illinois have placed age restrictions on visitors in an attempt to keep the highly infectious virus from passing from child to child.

In late August, hospitals in St. Louis and Kansas City reported a sharp increase in children with the kind of wheezing and coughing normally associated with asthma, high fevers, mouth blisters, skin rashes and body aches.

Eating carbohydrates is harmful to your health. Find out what one neurologist says about changing our diets.

When it comes to life-threatening infections, antibiotics have been a GodSend, however for minor infections the following antibiotics are troublesome and are known to cause some nasty side effects.
The antibiotic family I am referring to are fluoroquinolones. You may also see it referred to as quinolones. The following make up the quinolones: Ciprofloxacin, Cipro, Ciloxan eye drops, Levofloxacin, Levaquin, Quixin, Moxifloxacin, Avelox, Vigamox eye drops, Norfloxacin, Noroxin, Ofloxacin, Ocuflox, Floxin, Floxin Otic, Floxacin, Trovafloxacin, Trovan and alatrofloxacin.

Side effects include sudden severe insomnia, hypnic jerks, tendon and cartilage tears, brain fog, weird sensations like bugs crawling on you, headaches, buzzing, pain, tinnitus (ear ringing), face-down fatigue, moving abdominal pain and every thyroid symptom possible.

For people with thyroid disease, these antibiotics are especially worrisome because the quinolone antibiotics are built with a fluoride backbone. It is important to note that fluoride is extremely toxic to your thyroid. Combining quinolone antibiotics with Levothyroxine (a T4 drug) may lead to reduced absorption of thyroid medicine and cause changes in TSH. From a functional medicine perspective, fluoride competes with iodine which is necessary to make T4.

A potentially severe virus that has plagued hundreds of children across a 900-mile stretch in the Midwest in recent weeks has made its way to Colorado.

The severe respiratory illness, which in some cases is believed to have been brought on by human enterovirus-68, an uncommon respiratory viral pathogen, is impacting mostly children, including several in Colorado.

Angie Anania, a spokesperson for Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children in Denver, said five different children have been checked into their hospital because of this virus this week alone.

One 13-year-old was discovered unconscious and barely breathing on Wednesday. He was placed on a ventilator and has slowly improved, Anania said, but he was still in the hospital's intensive care unit as of Friday.

As we have previously reported, CNN so far is the only mainstream media (MSM) outlet to report on the CDC whistleblower story regarding CDC senior vaccine scientist Dr. William Thompson, who has come forward to confess that the CDC has withheld key information linking vaccines to autism. This is the one story the MSM does not want to cover, because they have repeated the CDC's mantra for years now that there is no evidence that vaccines cause autism.

The CNN story that was published on their website reporting about Dr. Thompson marginalized the significance of his public statement, and did not report on the contents of his taped conversations with Dr. Brian Hooker, where he expressed deep sorrow for remaining silent all these years. (See: MSM Marginalizes CDC Whistleblower Story on Vaccine-Autism Coverup) So far, other MSM outlets have not said much about this news, as it seems the story is still too "hot" for them to touch, as events continue to unfold.

Sierra Leone announced it will implement a four-day "lockdown" across the country in an attempt to contain the spread of Ebola. The Friday move came as the World Health Organization stated that the virus has so far claimed over 2,000 lives in Africa.

Beginning September 18, the nation will prohibit residents from leaving their homes for four days, with the hopes that health officials will be able to detect early-stage cases, Ibrahim Ben Kargbo, a presidential advisor in Sierra Leone, told Reuters.

"The aggressive approach is necessary to deal with the spread of Ebola once and for all," he said.

Unfortunately, the news was accompanied by worsening statistics from the World Health Organization (WHO), which announced on Friday that out of the roughly 4,000 people that have been confirmed to have the virus, 2,105 people have died in Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Nigeria.

An aide to Sierra Leone's President has said the president was "seriously" contemplating a nationwide shutdown to contain spread of Ebola.

For weeks now there has been speculation about a planned 21-day nationwide quarantine to prevent sick people from moving around, a situation that has seen the virus spread uncontrollably.

The government had denied that it intended to take such drastic measures to contain the virus but the aide Ben Kargbo, a insider in the government, said Wednesday that President Ernest Bai Koroma was now considering it.

"The decision has not been taken yet, but to stop people from running around, this is very important," he said in an interview.

"If we move to that direction let no one blame the President because he is trying to save lives," he added.

A doctor who just returned from treating Ebola patients in West Africa predicts the current Ebola outbreak will go on for more than a year, and will continue to spread unless a vaccine or other drugs that prevent or treat the disease are developed.

Dr. Daniel Lucey, an expert on viral outbreaks and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Medical Center, recently spent three weeks in Sierra Leone, one of the countries affected by the Ebola outbreak. While there, Lucey evaluated and treated Ebola patients, and trained other doctors and nurses on how to use protective equipment.

The current Ebola outbreak, which is mainly in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia, has so far killed at least 1,552 of the more than 3,000 people infected, making it the largest and deadliest Ebola outbreak in history. It is also the first outbreak to spread from rural areas to cities. Strategies that have worked in the past to stop Ebola outbreaks in rural areas may not, by themselves, be enough to halt this outbreak, Lucey said.

"I don't believe that our traditional methods of being able to control and stop outbreaks in rural areas ... is going to be effective in most of the cities," Lucey said yesterday (Sept. 3) in a discussion held at Georgetown University Law Center that was streamed online. While the World Health Organization has released a plan to stop Ebola transmission within six to nine months, "I think that this outbreak is going to go on even longer than a year," Lucey said.

Sometimes the artifice of writing - metaphors, historical comparisons, the just-so quote - fails. The Ebola outbreak in West Africa demands directness: We are about to witness a human catastrophe that could destroy large portions of a continent and pose a global threat. And the response of the world, including the United States, is feeble, irresponsible and disrespectful of nature's lethal perils.

American health officials and nonprofit groups are bringing back the same report from the region. In Liberia, the rate of new infections has probably already moved from a linear to an exponential curve. The same may be true within the next week or so for Sierra Leone and Guinea. The normal countermeasures for an infectious disease - isolation, case investigation, contact tracing - are increasingly irrelevant given the rate of increase. Local health care infrastructure, which barely existed in the first place, is overwhelmed. People have lost faith in the large clinics, where 50 percent to 60 percent of patients who enter do not leave alive. And those in need of emergency care for other conditions - such as heart attacks or complicated births - are often frightened of clinics and hospitals, and are dying without treatment.

The international response is inadequate and disorganized. The World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations provide "road maps." But, according to one infectious disease expert, "there is no one to implement command, control and communications. No one." Multiple, uncoordinated organizations are attempting to confront a disease that is out of control. "They are quibbling over 25 to 30 bed units," the expert vents. Meanwhile, WHO has revised its prediction of new Ebola infections upward to 20,000 by year-end. Other models indicate more like 100,000.

Once the growth of an outbreak becomes exponential, the tools normally at the disposal of health officials have limited value. It may require military airlifts just to deliver sufficient rubber gloves, aprons, soap and buckets to highly affected areas. Doctors Without Borders is calling for the deployment of civilian and military medical teams to provide triage centers, field hospitals with isolation wards, mobile diagnostic labs and systems for the management of corpses.

Unusually high levels of respiratory illness have been reported this week in Nationwide Children's Hospital's emergency department, and samples are being sent out for testing to see whether a rare virus might be to blame.

"Obviously, it's a concern," Dr. Mysheika Williams

Roberts, medical director and assistant commissioner at Columbus Public Health, said of the volume of respiratory cases. "What we are experiencing is unusual for us this time of year."

Last week, respiratory symptoms were the chief complaint of an average of 52 patients per day in the hospital's emergency department. From Sunday through Tuesday of this week, respiratory symptoms were the chief complaint of an average of 73 patients per day, a 40 percent increase.

Some of those illnesses might be cases of human enterovirus 68, Roberts said. That virus apparently has sickened dozens of kids in the Kansas City, Mo., area, in recent weeks.