Mpox Gets Its Second Designation As “International Health Emergency”
Apologies to all for the repeat mailing. A reader pointed out to me there was a faulty link regarding the Pakistan polio situation and I have corrected that. Cheers and enjoy the upcoming Labor day weekend.
The resurgence of Mpox in the Congo is reaching out along the trucking routes to adjacent African countries exactly as predicted. It is actually the new and improved Monkey Pox, the more lethal Clade 1b, nurtured by the sex trade in remote Congo and with the ability to spread by sexual contact. In short order it has spread to: Cote d’Ivoir, Liberia, Ghana, Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, and Kenya. The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) remains the epicenter of the epidemic with more than 16,000 cases in the last year and 548 reported deaths. I recently suggested that it wouldn’t take long to spread to Europe, and this week Sweden announced its first case. As we well know from recent history, there are always many more cases than are recognized early on in an epidemic such as this, and Pakistan is now reporting 3 cases that appear to have been contracted in the UAE. In my last post I enumerated the reasons why this virus won’t be the cause of the next massive global pandemic, but with a mortality rate of 3% or even higher, plus a great deal of morbidity, this little package of DNA and protein has already caused a great deal of misery with more on the horizon. The designation of a PHEIC by the WHO is designed to garner assistance from the more more developed world to combat the epidemic. Notice I said more developed, not richer—with the US National Debt at over $35 Trillion, and 76% of our government tax income going just to service the interest and repayment of maturing debt obligations, rich is a term I won’t bandy about. China has been extremely active in Africa, loaning money hand over fist to African nations at terms they cannot repay, so it will be interesting to see how much China contributes to the humanitarian effort.
Deadlier strain of mpox spreads to multiple African countries. https://www.science.org/content/article/deadlier-strain-mpox-spreads-more-african-countries
The giant summer surge of COVID here at home continues unabated, albeit with some minimal evidence that it may have peaked. Reports from California indicate that many folks, spooked by the current wave of disease there, have been unable to access booster doses of vaccine, with major pharmacy chains reporting that their current inventory is either expired or exhausted. The FDA approved the new fall booster two days ago, and that should available in early September. If you are one of the millions of people who had COVID over the summer, and plan to take a dose of the new vaccine, I’d recommend waiting until the early winter peak respiratory season begins. If you are in a very high risk category, with poorly durable immune response to both infection and vaccination, then get the new booster as soon as possible (the CDC says at least 2 months after an episode of infection). The usual CDC graphs below show that even with the protection from severe disease the population has built up over the last four years, the appearance of new mutants (K.2, K.3, K.3.1) with such incredibly high transmissibility have put as many people in the hospital as last year’s summer surge. It was wishful thinking to believe that somehow COVID would be less severe each successive year, until it became a mere nuisance. We seem to be left with a situation like Influenza, which hospitalizes and kills a very significant number of people every year—and we should expect bad years when a new mutant arrives with enhanced ability to evade our immunity, or worse with some increased severity factor. Very bad years for hospitalization and deaths will occur when such a mutant arrives after a few mild years, when folks have been lulled into vaccine complacency, and time has erased much of their prior immunity.
Let’s revisit the Polio virus, another nasty bug which refuses to play by human rules. Pakistan, one of the two countries where natural Wild Type Polio continues to circulate, has reported more cases so far this year than last. Failure of the program to eliminate this scourge with the current oral polio vaccine approach is certainly not for lack of trying, as the following statistics reported by Al Jezeera indicate.
According to a Qatar-based publication,
despite administering 300 million doses of oral vaccine every year,
with the support of 350 000 vaccinators, and with an expenditure of
USD 9.3 billion from 2013 to 2023, the country has failed in
eradicating the disease.
The hinterlands of Pakistan and all of Afghanistan are not “normal” parts of the world. This is not a place where people who disapprove of the general concept of vaccination, or perhaps have a problem with the safety validation of just one particular vaccine, make a fuss on social media; this is a zone where Islamic fundamentalists routinely target and murder public health vaccinators, and even kill the armed government guards sent to protect them—and kill them by the hundreds. Beyond this nearly incomprehensible reality is the fact that mass vaccination in the third world with the oral polio vaccine as it exists today is doomed to failure. This approach has already unleashed upon the world new mutant polio viruses, derived from the vaccine strains, and which account for the overwhelming number of cases of paralytic polio disease in the world. Beyond this, in my opinion, the current approach is fatally flawed, since the oral vaccines fail to produce adequate immunity in a substantial number of poorly nourished third world children. If they can’t eradicate the now freely circulating vaccine derived mutant polio viruses, by saturating the populations with hundreds of millions of oral vaccine doses, why in heaven would they imagine that they will eradicate Wild Type Polio? And is the original Polio virus even the major problem today—or is it the mutant vaccine virus which does basically all the paralyzing?
The last item this week concerns the fascinating issue of fluoride in your drinking water. The people who are programmed to immediately distrust everything single thing the government does or recommends will inevitably be occasionally right. If you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, sooner or later you will end up with one of Hunter Biden’s masterpieces—just don’t expect anyone to pay money for it unless you have influence in high places. To keep this short, it was realized in the 1940’s that people who lived in areas with high natural fluoride concentrations in the drinking water had fewer cavities. Fluoride was added to some areas drinking water and indeed dental caries decreased. BaaDaBing, and this was widely adopted around most of the country. But how much was the “right amount” was essentially a guess, and other possible long term consequences were unstudied and unknown. People who questioned the wisdom of this were summarily dismissed as ignorant no nothings, members of the brotherhood of flat-earthers and anti-vaxxers.
Fast forward, and the governmental agency the National Toxicology Program just issued an analysis of all published research on fluoride exposure and neurodevelopment, and concluded that exposure to drinking water with twice the currently recommended concentration of fluoride (0.7 mg/L) is associated with a decrease in achieved IQ. This report is scheduled to be published soon in a prominent peer reviewed journal. All well and good you’re thinking, we are getting half that level. But, originally water in the US was fluorinated to a government recommended level of 1.5 mg/L from the 1950’s until 2015. In that year the level was decreased because of the high occurrence of dental fluorosis, which is fluoride toxicity causing discoloration of teeth. The WHO still recommends a level of 1.5. So fluorosis was an unintended consequence of a public health initiative begun without any of the normal studies which would be required before a drug could be approved for general use. Now it appears there might have been another unintended consequence of greater concern. Also to consider is that drinking water is estimated to be only 40-70% of total fluoride intake, which varies widely around the country. Fluoride in large amounts is quite toxic, an accident in the 1940’s caused 40 people to be be exposed to pancakes at a Salvation Army kitchen where sodium fluoride had been mistaken for good old sodium chloride and 12 folks died.
Fluoride Exposure: Neurodevelopment and Cognition https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/completed/fluoride
So there you have it this week, viruses and minerals arrayed against us. Could tap water be responsible for the intellectual quality of American politicians and the people who vote for them? In colonial America people drank beer and spirits to avoid illness from the drinking water. Now that we know any amount of alcohol is bad for you, and unpasteurized milk is a minefield, the choices are narrower. Go ahead and hit the like button and save a friend’s IQ by forwarding this post.