Imane Khelif

On this day:

1536
Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, is arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason, and witchcraft
1568
Mary, Queen of Scots, escapes from Loch Leven Castle.
1611
King James Bible is published for the first time in London, England, by printer Robert Barker.
1808
Outbreak of the Peninsular War: The people of Madrid rise up in rebellion against French occupation. Francisco de Goya later memorializes this event in his painting The Second of May 1808.
1863
American Civil War: Stonewall Jackson is wounded by friendly fire while returning to camp after reconnoitering during the Battle of Chancellorsville. He succumbs to pneumonia eight days later.
1945
World War II: Fall of Berlin: The Soviet Union announces the capture of Berlin and Soviet soldiers hoist their red flag over the Reichstag building.
2008
Cyclone Nargis makes landfall in Myanmar killing over 138,000 people and leaving millions of people homeless.
2011
Osama bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and the FBI’s most wanted man is killed by the United States special forces in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

***

Activists who were planning to sail a ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - appearing to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
Two months ago, Israel shut all crossings to Gaza, preventing all goods, including food, fuel, and medicines from entering, and later resumed its military offensive, ending a two-month ceasefire with Hamas.
The Freedom Flotilla Coalition said it had planned to sail to Gaza with people, including climate activist Greta Thunberg on board, and "challenge Israel's illegal siege and blockade".


***

Rightly understood, capitalism is simply the name for the economic component of the natural order of liberty. It means expansive ownership of property, fair and equal rules for all, economic security through prosperity, strict adherence to the boundaries of ownership, opportunity for charity, wise resource use, creativity, growth, development, prosperity, and abundance. Most of all it means the application of the principle that every human person has dignity and should have that dignity respected. --Sirico

This definition, if true, means that opposition to capitalism should be cautious.

***

Imane Khelif

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif remained in the news throughout the Paris Olympics 2024 campaign. Labeled as a biological man by many, Khelif went on to win a gold medal in the women's 66kg category despite her eligibility for the competition being questioned. Months after the conclusion of the Paris Games, a new controversy erupted after a leaked medical report confirmed that Khelif was in fact, a genetic male.

She has internal testicles and XY chromosomes. While, unfortunately, there were no hormone levels revealed, as per the report, the condition hints at a disorder called 5-alpha reductase insufficiency.

This is rare. It was first found years ago in a South Pacific family with characteristic physical findings: atypical genitalia (ranging from female-appearing to undervirulized male), hypospadias, and isolated micropenis. There is usually little facial hair and little male pattern baldness. The internal reproductive structures (vasa deferentia, seminal vesicles, epididymides, and ejaculatory ducts) are normal, but the testes are usually undescended, and prostate hypoplasia is common. Fertility in this group is low but occurs.

The basic defect is an autosomal recessive gene responsible for the conversion of testosterone to dihydrotestosterone, a much stronger androgen crucial to male development. Its deletion has no effect on females.

So genetic males with the enzyme defect have a spectrum of developmental abnormalities, but usually appear female at birth, develop some secondary male characteristics at puberty due to rising testosterone levels, but do not convert those rising testosterone levels to the more powerful dihydrotestosterone.

Enterprising pharmaceutical scientists saw an opportunity to shrink prostates medically--and perhaps reduce baldness--so they spent a fortune isolating the missing enzyme and then trying to block it. The result was finasteride, which blocks the enzyme, shrinks the prostate in adults, may limit prostate cancer development, and reduces hair loss. It's sold as Proscar, Avodart, and, cosmetically, as Propecia. So a small subset is applied to all.

Enter the unfortunate Ms. Khelif, world champion.

GP-1 and Economies

Since 1969, major U.S. projects receiving federal funds must submit an Environmental Impact Statement  (ETS) under the National Environmental Policy Act. In 1985, the Chicago Transit Association’s Final EIS for the Orange Line ran 378 pages. The 2022 Final EIS for the Red Line Extension is 50 times longer, at 17,899 pages. That’s for a project that’s half as long.

The planned Red Line Extension is projected to cost seven times more per mile than the Orange Line, which we completed in 1993.

***

In 1900, US income (GDP) was $4,096 per capita in 2023 dollars, while in 2023 it was $81,695. The US poverty rate fell from 56% to 11.1% over the same period. How was such a dramatic increase in our widely shared standard of living possible? The answer (without explaining how it came about) is increased labor productivity. Each worker has been able to produce more and more and hence earned a higher income.

***

GP-1 and Economies

Ozympic and Wegovy, both GLP-1 agonists that contribute to weight loss, are made by Novo Nordisk from Denmark.

The GLP-1 boom has been such good news for Novo Nordisk that rising drug exports are currently driving the majority of Denmark’s GDP growth—since late 2021, Danish GDP has increased by 3.6%, but economic growth would have been 0% without the contribution of rapid increases in pharmaceutical manufacturing output. In fact, the pharmaceutical boom has been so strong that it has almost singlehandedly made Denmark one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union.

Most of that pharmaceutical production boom has gone towards meeting foreign demand for GLP-1 drugs, especially in the United States. Real Danish goods exports have increased by roughly 37% over the last four years.

Interestingly, despite the country’s increase in economic output over the last two years, Denmark has struggled to fully translate the GLP-1 boom into rising personal spending or domestic investment. Real Danish household consumption and capital formation have both been stagnant for more than three years, mirroring many of the economic struggles seen in Germany and many other parts of the EU.

To some extent, that should not be particularly surprising—pharmaceutical manufacturing is not a labor-intensive industry and the returns to successful drug discovery usually come in the form of increased corporate profits. Yet Denmark is economically synonymous with the Nordic model that has long successfully converted innovative growth into broad-based welfare, and Novo Nordisk itself is unique for being majority-controlled by a charitable fund that is now the world’s largest. 

The task ahead for them is clear—to continue the current GLP-1 boom while more durably translating it into general economic prosperity.--Apricitas

A Downside of Diversity

Sen. James G. Blaine once said, that the U.S. was long “the only country with a known birthday. All the rest began they know not when, and grew into power, they knew not how.”

***

President Biden repeated a claim about turning down an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy, where he purportedly wanted to play football, during his commencement address at West Point on Saturday.
Biden told West Point graduates that Republican Sen. J. Caleb Boggs, whom he defeated to become a U.S. senator, had "appointed" him to the Naval Academy years before they ran against each other in 1972.
The president recounted that before his interview, "I found out two days earlier they had a quarterback named Roger Staubach, and a halfback named Joe Bellino. And I said, I'm not going there. I went to Delaware. Not a joke."

***

A Downside of Diversity

For the first time, the number of Americans who use marijuana just about every day has surpassed the number who drink alcohol that often, a shift some 40 years in the making as recreational pot use became more mainstream and legal in nearly half of U.S. states.

In 2022, an estimated 17.7 million people reported using marijuana daily or near-daily compared to 14.7 million daily or near-daily drinkers, according to an analysis of national survey data. In 1992, when daily pot use hit a low point, less than 1 million people said they used marijuana nearly every day.

On the regulatory side, the U.S. is about to downgrade the medical concerns for the drug from Schedule One to Three, based on the available research.

So, a question. 

The major problem holding back the successful commercialization of marijuana is its inconsistency. The industry is fragmented in almost every way. The product has no standardization, with different plants grown in different sites with different characteristics and chemical concentrations, some of which have never been examined. There are different preparations, packaging, and shipping processes. Consequently, the product is unreliable as a brand and major efforts are underway to standardize them. 

That said, how can the safety experiments on the drug be relied upon?

Pot

Two Jordanian nationals were arrested trying to break into a U.S. Marine base in Virginia. A local report stating that one of the two individuals was a Jordanian foreign national who “recently crossed the southern border into the U.S.” and also that one of them is on the U.S. terrorist watch list has, strangely, not been clarified or even addressed.

***

President Biden asserted executive privilege over the audio of his two-day interview with the special counsel investigating his handling of classified documents, as Republicans threatened to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt for refusing to relinquish the recordings.

***

The leftist approach to government creates inequality that far exceeds the inequality produced by the market. --kling

***

A 2017 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine examining road closures for marathons found a small but significant increase in mortality among people with heart trouble on marathon days, apparently caused in part by ambulance delays.

***

Pot

This is a bit long, cut out of an interview with Dr. Bertha Madras, an established marijuana researcher. But there are some important ideas--as well as some admittedly strange, subjective elements--that most people would see as cautionary. The pivotal point is the suggestion to reduce marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Last week media outlets reported that the Biden administration is moving to reclassify marijuana as a less dangerous Schedule III drug—on par with anabolic steroids and Tylenol with codeine—which would provide tax benefits and a financial boon to the pot industry. A crucial change is that Schedule III drugs are easier to bring across state lines--and thus sidestep state regulation.

Bertha Madras thinks this would be a colossal mistake. Ms. Madras, 81, is a psychobiology professor at Harvard Medical School and one of the foremost experts on marijuana. “It’s a political decision, not a scientific one,” she says. “And it’s a tragic one.” In 2024, that is a countercultural view.

A 2022 survey sponsored by the National Institutes of Health found that 28.8% of Americans aged 19 to 30 had used marijuana in the preceding 30 days—more than three times as many as smoked cigarettes. Among those 35 to 50, 17.3% had used weed in the previous month, versus 12.2% for cigarettes.

In 2015 the World Health Organization asked Madras to do a detailed review of cannabis and its medical uses. The 41-page report documented scant evidence of marijuana’s medicinal benefits and reams of research on its harms, from cognitive impairment and psychosis to car accidents.

She says, the “addiction potential of marijuana is as high or higher than some other drugs,” especially for young people. About 30% of those who use cannabis have some degree of a use disorder. By comparison, only 13.5% of drinkers are estimated to be dependent on alcohol. Sure, alcohol can also cause harm if consumed in excess. But Ms. Madras sees several other distinctions.

One or two drinks will cause only mild inebriation, while “most people who use marijuana are using it to become intoxicated and to get high.” Academic outcomes and college completion rates for young people are much worse for those who use marijuana than for those who drink, though there’s a caveat: “It’s still a chicken and egg whether or not these kids are more susceptible to the effects of marijuana or they’re using marijuana for self-medication or what have you.”

Marijuana and alcohol both interfere with driving, but with the former there are no medical “cutoff points” to determine whether it’s safe to get behind the wheel. As a result, prohibitions against driving under the influence are less likely to be enforced for people who are high. States where marijuana is legal have seen increases in car accidents.

"My lab showed unequivocally that blood levels and brain levels don’t correspond at all—that brain levels are much higher than blood levels. They’re two to three times higher, and they persist once blood levels go way down.” Even if people quit using pot, “it can persist in their brain for a while.”

Levels of THC—the main psychoactive ingredient in pot—are four or more times as high as they were 30 years ago.

There’s mounting evidence that cannabis can cause schizophrenia. A large-scale study last year that examined health histories of some 6.9 million Danes between 1972 and 2021 estimated that up to 30% of young men’s schizophrenia diagnoses could have been prevented had they not become dependent on pot.

Another cause for concern, she notes, is that more pregnant women are using pot, which has been linked to increased preterm deliveries, admissions of newborns into neonatal intensive care units, lower birth weights and smaller head circumferences. THC crosses the placenta and mimics molecules that our bodies naturally produce that regulate brain development.

“What happens when you examine kids who have been exposed during that critical period?” Ms. Madras asks. During adolescence, she answers, they show an increased incidence of aggressive behavior, cognitive dysfunction, and symptoms of ADHD and obsessive-compulsive disorders. They have reduced white and gray matter.

What about medicinal benefits? Ms. Madras says she has reviewed “every single case of therapeutic indication for marijuana—and there are over 100 now that people have claimed—and I frankly found that the only one that came close to having some evidence from randomized controlled trials was the neuropathic pain studies.”

Instead of bankrolling ballot initiatives to legalize pot, she says, George Soros and other wealthy donors who “catalyzed this whole movement” should be funding rigorous research: “If these folks, these billionaires, had just taken that money and put it into clinical trials, I would have been at peace.”

It’s a travesty, Ms. Madras adds, that the “FDA has decided that they’re going to listen to that movement rather than to what the science says.”

                                            ***

There is plenty to concern us here. The big question is the quality of research. One element limiting marijuana's commercial success is the fragmentation of the industry. There is no consistency of product--from day to day, producer to producer, facility to facility--so a consistent user base has not developed. Think Sam Adams or Lowenbrau where the customer never knew what taste he was buying. While that is a problem for manufacturers, it is a nightmare for research. There is simply no way to assess the drug in the world because there is no prototypical plant. Second, there is a very strange concentration of popular social pressure at work. Why do these radical political groups have such uniform support for these drugs? It's like seeing the Climate Child at the pro-Palestine demonstrations; that is simply peculiar.

And if a researcher like this has reservations, enthusiastic fast-tracking seems peculiar as well.

In Dog Years

In Dog Years

The biotech company Loyal announced that it had moved closer to bringing to market a drug that improves the life expectancy of dogs. “The data you provided are sufficient to show that there is a reasonable expectation of effectiveness,” an official at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration informed the company in a recent letter. (Loyal provided a copy of the letter to The Times.)

The drug is a long way from approval and the F.D.A. must still review the company’s safety and manufacturing data. But conditional approval, which Loyal hopes to receive in 2026, would allow the company to begin marketing the drug for canine life extension, even before a large clinical trial is complete.

More are in the pipeline. A team of academic researchers is currently conducting a canine clinical trial of rapamycin, which has been shown to extend the lives of lab mice. And Loyal is recruiting dogs for a clinical trial of another drug candidate, dubbed LOY-002.

Importantly, the cellular activity of these early drugs is known and so will attract further analysis and refinement. That is to say, the research will be more targeted and will get better.

Longevity studies, by definition, take a long time and, while dogs match well with human studies, they have a much shorter life span, which exaggerates the time requirements. And subjective evaluation is very inaccurate.

But these studies are coming. Metformin has shown evidence it improves survival rates in healthy controls. Then, of course, the quality of life question will arise, as will the therapeutic possibilities.

AI and the Elderly

Today there are more city dwellers in Kenya than there were in all of Africa in 1950.

***

Since the president took office, the Biden administration has finalized 551 rules with a total cost of $359.9 billion and a paperwork burden of 220.1 million hours, the AAF reported. At the same time in his presidency, the Trump administration had issued 617 rules with a regulatory burden of $6.9 billion and 42.8 million paperwork hours, while the Obama administration had issued 797 rules with a regulatory burden of $209.3 billion and 134.5 million hours.

***

Below is an article on AI as a companion. Here is a site where GPT is a teacher. readtrellis.com

***


AI and the Elderly


Loneliness is widely quoted to be as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes daily. It increases the overall risk of death by 26%. 25% of adults over 65 in the UK suffer from it. It's found that a "reduction in loneliness from 'severe' to 'moderate' would have the same well-being benefit to the average person as a rise in income of £9,537 per year." Severe loneliness means 'often' or 'always', and moderate means' some of the time'. In 2020 (the study year), an equivalent rise in net income increased healthy life expectancy by five years! Dramatic, considering socializing with AI will be cheap.

Cowen has an article championing CHAT for the elderly.

"At the outset, there will be confusion about the technology from older people. There always is. But the relentless steamroller of progress will quieten the rejection, especially in the face of financial incentives:

Increasing socialization counters the deteriorating impact of loneliness. AI will do this cheaply. Therefore, families will be incentivized to socialize their parents with AI (bespoke to the demographic, like vitamins, and to the individual, like a newsfeed).

AI will replace some care visits, which are often paid for by the family. Therefore, AI would reduce the cost of the care families currently have to fund.

The state will begin to prescribe a daily AI conversation. These conversations will assess health, identify trends, and reduce perceived isolation. It will be entertaining, and adherence will be high. Social stimulation will create a healthier older generation with better health outcomes.

As we saw above, shifting from severe to moderate loneliness has enormous benefits. Loneliness may disappear entirely, eliminated by human and non-human intervention. Therefore a relatively small amount of social interaction could have vast public health benefits. I haven’t done the maths, but increasing the healthy life expectancy of 25% of the population by five years sounds significant.

There is also the immediate cost saving from the shift online. TV penetration is in decline. In the US, only 50% of households will have pay TV in 2026, down from 91% in 2010. Typically pay-TV costs $60 USD per month. ChatGPT costs $20. It will get cheaper."

Stats/"Is Schrödinger's Cat Male?"

             Stats/"Is Schrödinger's Cat Male?"

A characteristic of the modern West is the peripheral has moved to the center. Everyone is in the spotlight. This change in how we think is as important as what we think. Some stats and perspectives. (Some of this information is presented from reviews written when these questions were thought to be illnesses. The DSM-5 still classifies GD as a diagnosis.)

Gender dysphoria (GD) according to Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders (DSM 5) is defined as a “marked incongruence between their experienced or expressed gender and the one they were assigned at birth.” It was previously termed "gender identity disorder."

Children or adolescents who experience this turmoil cannot correlate to their gender expression when identifying themselves within traditional societal binary male or female roles, which may cause cultural stigmatization.

According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition, gender dysphoria prevalence accounts for 0.005–0.014% of the population for biological males and 0.002–0.003% for biological females. In both Japan and Poland, the prevalence of gender dysphoria is higher in biological females.

According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT-affirming countries.

Disorders of Sexual Development (DSD) are human illnesses that cause the development of ambiguous genitalia in newborns and children. This is not dysphoria.

Most DSDs can be diagnosed and the outcomes predicted; physicians use the diagnosis to advise parents on which gender the child is likely to identify with. For instance, the most common cause for a DSD is congenital adrenal hyperplasia — which can result in ambiguous genitalia for XX children. This is an illness of the adrenal glands where steroids are made imperfectly. This is a treatable biochemical defect. Between 90% and 95% of people with the condition identify as female.
Adrenogenital syndrome is 100% curable. (This was the condition of the Press sisters, two women who were untreated by the Soviet state so that they could compete in women's international sports. Tamara Press dominated the women's field events in the late 50s and 60s.}

As many as 1 out of 30,000 adult males seek sexual reassignment surgery (sex change).

At least 1 out of 100,000 adult females seek sexual reassignment surgery (sex change).

About 80% of mothers and 45% of fathers of individuals with Gender Identity Disorder had a psychiatric problem or had psychiatric treatment.
About 24% of children live with their mothers only, with the absence of a father or surrogate father figure at home according to the 2012 U.S. Census figure (double the 1977 figure.)
In homes of boys that are severely disturbed with Gender Identity Disorder, the father is absent 100% of the time.

According to a recent national survey, 1.4 million individuals (0.6%) in the United States identify as transgender.

Complete androgen insensitivity syndrome affects 2 to 5 per 100,000 people who are genetically male. Partial androgen insensitivity is thought to be at least as common as complete androgen insensitivity. Mild androgen insensitivity is much less common. In androgen insensitivity, male hormones and anatomy are normal but the cells do not recognize androgen stimulation and do not develop maleness. This, like the adrenogenital syndrome, results in a true dichotomy between the genetic and phenotypic. 

The model Hanne Gaby Odiele in 2015.

8,920: number of provisionally reported TB cases in the United States in 2019 (a rate of 2.7 per 100,000 persons) .

Testicular cancer occurs in about 1 in 100,00.

Birth defects affect one in every 33 babies (about 3% of all babies) born in the United States each year.

Each year, about 6,000 babies born in the United States have Down syndrome. This means that Down syndrome occurs in about 1 in every 700 babies.

So, how does the psychodynamic work? Or is this just a variation of the gender spectrum? And the DMS-5 definition implies "distress;" what about those who experience no distress? 

An opinion from an article on Johns Hopkins' McHugh, who works the dynamic side. A piece: "Dr. McHugh does not believe surgery cures gender dysphoria. He thinks that condition, along with anorexia and body dysmorphia, is a “disorder of assumption,” characterized by an “overvalued idea,” or a ruling passion that “fulminates in the mind of the subject, growing more dominant over time, more refined, and more resistant to challenge,” as he has written.
In the case of anorexia, the overvalued idea is that it’s good to be thin. The primary goal of the psychiatrist ought to be to help the patient change behavior. The prevailing standard of care for sufferers of gender dysphoria—“affirmative care”—is the opposite: It calls for mental-health professionals to accept both a patient’s self-diagnosis of gender dysphoria and the corresponding behavior."

We are in a fascinating time where we minutely search for norms. But that search is beginning to include diverse seekers. All data is available for comment and available to all. It is a time where the removed observer is at a disadvantage.

Trump/Ferguson

 

                                                             Trump/Ferguson

One of the Virus mythologies is that Trump opposed the lockdowns and ignored the epidemiology models. But the federal government directly and explicitly adopted a policy based on Neil Ferguson’s Imperial College model on 3/16.  And Trump specifically touted Ferguson’s model and spent most of the year explicitly citing its projections to claim credit for lives it supposedly saved.

The Trump critics are probably on the wrong side of this. The Ferguson model is nuts. And the adoption of his model allowed incredible assumption of power by the government at the expense of the citizen. They would have been much more effective had they criticized Trump for adopting the crazy Ferguson numbers but that would have required that they diminish the Virus' threat.

And the threat was more important than anything.

Viral Numbers

 

                                                   

                                                                Viral Numbers

COVID-19 INFECTION SURVIVAL RATES (per CDC)

Ages 0-19:    99.997%

Ages 20-49:  99.98%

Ages 50-69:  99.5%

Ages 70+:     94.6%

Seasonal Flu Infection Survival Rate (for population as a whole): 99.90%

So, what is happening?  We seem to be responding out of proportion to the Viral threat. Why is that? Certainly, caution, especially among the more vulnerable, is reasonable. And certainly, people should be cautious around the more vulnerable. But should industries be shut down? Lives ruined? Families disrupted? Commerce stopped? And even traditional and constitutionally independent cultures are allowing tremendous power centralization without discussion.

It seems as if the culture says "yes" to all these questions. The real question is "Why?"  

Viral Notions

 

                                                                Viral Notions

Several opinions on the Virus:

 This seems as if it ought to be more controversial: yesterday the state of California implemented a COVID-19 “health equity” metric mandating that counties demonstrate that they are investing in “eliminating disparities in levels of transmission” affecting disadvantaged communities, or have already eliminated such disparities, as a condition of being allowed to reopen economic activity any further. Simply achieving a satisfactory overall low rate of transmission will not be enough.--Olson 

So the draconian limits in the society have to meet all sorts of unrelated elements before being removed.

As of Wednesday, some 3,700 medical and public-health scientists had signed the Great Barrington Declaration calling for a more balanced approach, which would allow “those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk.” Donald Trump and most Republican governors would sign that declaration. Joe Biden and the Democrats would not, ever. If Mr. Biden wins—throwing in as well his intention to raise taxes amid the pandemic should Democrats gain control of the Senate—the return of the U.S. to economic and social normalcy is going to take a very, very long time.--Henninger. Why this is not more regarded is obscure to me; petitions signed by people with degrees is a coup de grace in climate arguments.

If we are missing 90% of cases in the U.S. and 95% in the world, this has obvious implications for the death risk from Covid—it is flu-like. And yet responsible news organizations and institutions like Johns Hopkins continue to invite their audiences to compare Covid’s death tally against a “confirmed” case count devoid of systematic meaning. This is the statistical equivalent of sampling subjects at the morgue and in kindergartens to estimate the fatality rate of people involved in car accidents. You will certainly find individuals who survived and didn’t survive car accidents, but your computed rate will be nonsense. I have news for Americans: All of our data about the prevalence and deadliness of the flu are estimates, except for pediatric deaths, which are actually counted. If, as we do with Covid, we relied on “confirmed” flu tests for how many are infected and what percentage die, we would be wildly and catastrophically misinformed about the flu’s real prevalence and its real deadliness.--Jenkins. Estimates? We are destroying the economy on a guess?

“The remedy for this self-imposed economic harakiri, this desperate and destructive attempt at self-harm that is governments’ pandemic response, is exactly that: end it. Abolish. Abandon. Cease and desist. Have governments get out of the way and individuals make choices of their own, choices adjusted to their own risks and risk tolerance – not a mindless one-size-fits-all solution that takes very little account of real people’s lives.” – Joakim Book.

And, just to stir the pot, there are cases of reinfection emerging.

Forgotten

                                                                    Forgotten

Studies show silver diamine fluoride stops decay in 60 to 70 percent of cases with one application. A second application six months later boosts the treatment’s long-term effectiveness to more than 90 percent.

In addition to killing cavity-causing bacteria, the treatment hardens tooth structure, desensitizes the tooth and even stops new cavities from forming. Applying the liquid on the exposed root surfaces of older adults once a year is “a simple, inexpensive, and effective way” to prevent cavities, a 2018 study concluded. 

This has been around for 100 years and used in Europe for decades.

Scurvy was “cured” as early as 1497, when Vasco de Gama’s crew discovered the power of citrus…but this cure was repeatedly lost, forgotten, rediscovered, misconstrued, confused, and just generally messed around with for hundreds of years, despite being a leading killer of seafarers and other explorers. By the 1870s the “citrus cure” was discredited, and for nearly sixty years, scurvy — despite being cured, with scientific research to back it up — continued killing people, including men on Scott’s 1911 expedition to the South Pole. This went on until vitamin C was finally isolated in 1932 during research on guinea pigs.

And, of course, Roman concrete. They mixed lime and volcanic ash and, after packing the mixture into wooden molds, they submerged it all in seawater. The saltwater then set off a chemical reaction–it hydrated the lime in such a way as to make it react with the ash, which ultimately formed an incredibly sturdy, solid bond.

Solutions, all in plain sight.

The Flu and the Zombie Apocalypse

                                 The Flu and the Zombie Apocalypse

A major element of this pandemic, aside from paranoia, is ignorance-induced speculation. Here is some knowledge-based speculation, at least as paranoid-inducing, from The Scientist. This fits nicely with the rumors that Big Ten athletes are showing myocarditis when infected with the Virus.


"One of the earliest links between influenza and neural dysfunction was a correlation between the 1918 Spanish flu, caused by a subtype called H1N1, and an epidemic of Parkinson’s a few decades later. In the 1940s and early 1950s, diagnoses of the neurodegenerative disease appeared to increase abruptly, from 1–2 percent of the US population to 2.5–3 percent, then fell back down to 1–2 percent, Smeyne (a neurobiologist interviewed in the article) says. “Basically, 50 percent more people in those years got Parkinson’s.”

The evidence to suggest that influenza infection caused the neurodegenerative disorder was tenuous, to say the least, but the correlation was enough for Smeyne to investigate further. With his colleagues, he shot nonlethal doses of H5N1 or H1N1 up the noses of six- to eight-week-old mice, then tracked how the viruses spread through the animals’ nervous systems. The results were startling, he says: some viruses weren’t blocked from entering the brain by the blood-brain barrier—a semipermeable layer of cells that separates the central nervous system from the body’s circulation. H5N1, for example, could easily infiltrate nerve cells in the brain and kill them, and it appeared to especially target the dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra. And while the H1N1 flu strain couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, it still caused central nervous system immune cells called microglia to flow into the substantia nigra and the hippocampus, causing inflammation and cell death in the area.

“So these were two different flus, two different mechanisms, but the same effect in a sense,” says Smeyne, who moved to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia in 2016. “They were inducing inflammation and death in the parts of the brain that we see degenerate in Parkinson’s disease.”

Smeyne’s experiments aren’t the only ones to suggest that viral infections can contribute to neurodegenerative disorders, and the connection is not limited to influenza. Several different viruses, including measles and herpes, can give rise to symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in rodents, for example. And levels of herpesvirus are higher in the brains of people who died from Alzheimer’s than in those without the disease, while some HIV patients develop dementia that appears to be associated with the infection.

“Viruses are often ignored in relation to neurodegenerative diseases,” Yale University neurobiologist Anthony van den Pol tells The Scientist. “That’s in part because there’s no clear sign that a virus causes a neurodegenerative disease. But it might.”"

So, every bug comes with the potential of some population damage somewhere at sometime in the future, neurologic, reproductive, personality. We, from rheumatic fever to Bright's Disease to Shingles are just waiting for collateral damage to emerge. 

That should be quite concerning to a culture that has so much faith in fine-tuning Nature.

 

Nature

                                                         Nature

Six months into this pandemic, Americans still dramatically misunderstand the risk of dying from COVID-19:
On average, Americans believe that people aged 55 and older account for just over half of total COVID-19 deaths; the actual figure is 92%.
Americans believe that people aged 44 and younger account for about 30% of total deaths; the actual figure is 2.7%.
Americans overestimate the risk of death from COVID-19 for people aged 24 and younger by a factor of 50, and they think the risk for people aged 65 and older is half of what it actually is (40% vs 80%).

Strangely the experts are confused by the disparity. They assume that people will look at the stats objectively and come to the obvious conclusion that the virus discriminates; it strikes obliquely, favoring and impacting one victim over another.

But this, in the egalitarian world is impossible. The nature of life is evenhanded. Only white men are bigots.

Horizontal vs. Vertical

Honesty is beginning to creep into the education debate. As the Virus pressures all areas of social contact, the practicalities of subways, classrooms, athletic events and all are beginning to become valid topics of discussion. And, as with most practicalities, the results are harsh. While some are dependent upon mass transit, we may find the contagion risk too great. Alternatives--and more likely bikes and not carpools--may be the result. So, too, the scrutiny of education may be revolutionary--not because of the changes we may want to affect but rather the clarity it might bring. Technology can substitute well in teaching, for classrooms and dorms. But that may not be the real definition of education, as we are beginning to see. What could easily be applied to college learning--online classes, living at home, virtual classrooms--would not substitute for college as seen by the student. For the student sees the university as more and less than education. The student sees university as an "experience," a netherworld between childhood and the working adult world. A summer camp with periodic exams. Goldilocks, in every way.

                                    Horizontal vs. Vertical

Dr. David L. Katz is the founding director of Yale University’s C.D.C.-funded Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center and an expert in public health and preventive medicine.

Katz wrote an Op-Ed in The Times recently. He argued that we have three goals right now: saving as many lives as we can, making sure that our medical system does not get overwhelmed — but also making sure that in the process of achieving the first two goals we don’t destroy our economy, and as a result of that, even more lives.

For all these reasons, he argued, we need to pivot from the “horizontal interdiction” strategy we’re now deploying — restricting the movement and commerce of the entire population, without consideration of varying risks for severe infection — to a more “surgical’’ or “vertical interdiction’’ strategy.

A surgical-vertical approach would focus on protecting and sequestering those among us most likely to be killed or suffer long-term damage by exposure to coronavirus infection — that is, the elderly, people with chronic diseases and the immunologically compromised — while basically treating the rest of society the way we have always dealt with familiar threats like the flu. That means we would tell them to be respectful of others when coughing or sneezing, wash their hands regularly and if they feel sick to stay home and get over it — or to seek medical attention if they are not recuperating as expected.

Because, as with the flu, the vast majority will get over it in days, a small number will require hospitalization and a very small percentage of the most vulnerable will, tragically, die. (That said, coronavirus is more dangerous than the typical flu we are familiar with.) As Katz argued, governors and mayors, by choosing the horizontal approach of basically sending everyone home for an unspecified period, might have actually increased the dangers of infection for those most vulnerable.

People of the Wheel

                    People of the Wheel*

A strange reference popped up in an interview where politicians were praising one another, a reference to how well they did during "the Ebola threat" during the Obama administration. (This was in contradistinction to the government's current anti-viral performance.) It is probably not a good idea to bring Ebola up.

Ebola is a virus with several subset that, in humans, is savagely fatal, or up until recently has been. In some respects it has been managed well and the oft-maligned WHO can point to it with some pride; they have, in between great dinners, managed the outbreaks--if with some admittedly homicidal preventive techniques by the "host" countries.

But the history of Ebola research raises real concerns.

Ever since the Russian Biopreparate bio-weapons program, where researchers  developed weaponized microorganisms and new, lab-created illnesses, to kill people at random, the Americans have had labs devoted to counter these anti-human experiments. On several occasions, Ebola has been encountered outside of such labs by accident. The teaching case is Ebola Reston.

Reston's appearance in 1989 was the first-ever Ebola virus that emerged outside of Africa and was also the first known natural infection of Ebola virus in nonhuman primates. When it was first discovered among laboratory monkeys in the United States, the source was immediately traced back to the Philippines to a monkey breeding/export facility. The second outbreak was in 1992–93. The third episode in 1996 was the last known outbreak before Reston ebolavirus reemerged in pigs in 2008.

Nonhuman primates (NHPs)are used for preclinical research, disease modeling, drug development, experimental infections, and biological production and testing. M fascicularis is the only indigenous simian species in the Philippines; collection sites and quantities are government regulated. Regulated.

The original outbreak was first detected among imported NHPs in a quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, USA. This outbreak was initially suspected to be simian hemorrhagic fever (SHF), another viral disease caused by an arterivirus, and indeed SHF virus was isolated from the animals. However, Ebola virus was also noted by electron microscopy and indirect fluorescent antibody assays in the cultures.

Remember, these are regulated breeding facilities and labs. And, of course, such an infection had never been seen before.

At the time, the virus was identified and its behavior was unknown. Unknown. There was an exposure to human handlers who knew they were exposed--and they went home. To their families.

It turned out that a small proportion the personnel in the lab had developed antibodies to the virus but, it appeared, this particular subset of the virus did not infect humans. (Despite the common natures of the subtypes, the Reston virus does not convey immunity to either Marburg or Zaire.)

Now, this news item from Fort Dietrich, Md.: In June, 2019, an inspection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found leaks and mechanical problems with the lab’s new chemical system to decontaminate wastewater. The institute was also working with Ebola and the agents known to cause the plague and Venezuelan equine encephalitis when high-level research was voluntarily halted. 

In 2009, research at the lab was suspended after the discovery that more than 9,200 vials, about one-eighth of its stock, wasn’t listed in the institute’s database.

Now, how good is the containment policy in Wuhan?

What are these people doing? And why do we have faith in any of them?

*In the original movie adaptation of the novel I Am Legend, The Last Man on Earth (1964), bacteriologic warfare destroys humanity except for a few humans and a group of crazed remnants bent on killing anyone loosely connected to science whom they call The People of the Wheel.

The Coronavirus Cover-Up

                  "The Coronavirus Cover-Up"   

The Critic is a conservative British magazine with an arresting article sent by Don called "The Coronavirus Cover-Up" By Kapil Komireddi.

These are some sample paragraphs and, if accurate, may predict an entirely new post-virus debate. It is appalling. If true we are in the hands of monsters and morons.

"The calamity unfolding all around us did not emerge from a void. It originated in China. And its eruption into a global pandemic is inseparable from the nature of the regime that has ruled China since 1949. Had the authorities in that country intervened early to contain the fresh strain of the Chinese coronavirus, COVID-19, there would likely have been 95 percent fewer casualties. Instead, China’s one-party state created the conditions for the spread of the virus. For weeks, it suppressed information and punished those who shared it.
........

Once the virus made its inevitable outward march, claiming lives beyond China’s borders, the CPC mounted a major public relations exercise that exploited common human decencies to evade accountability. Criticism of the Chinese government was equated with racist prejudice against ordinary Chinese people. The result: rather than confront China, precious energies were exerted to avoid the trap set by China. In February, the Mayor of Florence launched a campaign encouraging Italians to “hug a Chinese”, describing it as a “fight of solidarity and unity against virus”. The People’s Daily, a mouthpiece of the CPC, applauded young Italians advertising their virtuousness on the Internet with photos of themselves hugging Chinese tourists without mentioning a word about the mortal perils of human contact.

China didn’t owe an apology or an explanation to the world: the world owed China proof of its anti-racism. There was no time, of course, to ponder the irony of the most xenophobic despotism in the world, which has interned a million ethnic Uighur Muslims in Xinjiang, cleansed Tibetan Buddhists from their homeland, and deluged restive regions with Han settlers, setting itself up as the certifying authority on what constituted anti-racist behavior. There was no time to remember that, just three years ago, the state museum in Wuhan had put on an exhibition likening Africans to wild animals."

The link:

https://thecritic.co.uk/the-coronavirus-cover-up/?fbclid=IwAR2WsS3LbuOKjepMV0RTN33_4pdC8YcV07P1Op7QazY4vZG_gs54422K1WI

Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses

                            Bad Rumors, Righteous Responses


Facebook Inc said it will take down misinformation about China’s fast-spreading coronavirus, in a rare departure from its usual approach to dubious health content that is presenting a fresh challenge for social media companies. How "dubious" is defined is anyone's guess.

Here is a particularly delicious one.

There is a theory that China obtained the coronavirus via a Canadian research program, and started molding it into a bioweapon at the Institute of Virology in Wuhan.

The narrative is that the virus, which was developed by infectious disease experts, may have originated in the Wuhan-based lab of Dr. Peng Zhou, China's preeminent researcher of bat immune systems. The lab specializes in how bat immune systems adapt to the presence of viruses like coronavirus and other destructive viruses. Somehow, the virus escaped from the lab, and the Hunan fish market where the virus supposedly originated is merely a ruse.

Now, a respected epidemiologist, who recently caught flack for claiming in a twitter threat that the virus appeared to be much more contagious than initially believed, is pointing out irregularities in the virus's genome that suggests it might have been genetically engineered for the purposes of a weapon, and not just any weapon but a really deadly one.

In "Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag", Indian researchers are baffled by segments of the virus's RNA that have no relation to other coronaviruses like SARS, and instead appear to be closer to HIV. The virus even responds to treatment by HIV medications.

Just as if it were built.

Plague

                                Plague

In 1918, the influenza pandemic took the lives of more people than died in World War I. World War I. It was the most devastating epidemic recorded in world history. It infected 500 million people around the world, including people on remote Pacific islands and in the Arctic, and resulted in the deaths of 50 to 100 million. You could not hide.

In two years, a fifth of the world's population was infected. The flu was most deadly for people ages 20 to 40, unusual for influenza which is usually a killer of the elderly and young children. It infected 28% of all Americans (Tice). An estimated 675,000 Americans died of influenza during the pandemic, ten times as many as in the world war. Of the U.S. soldiers who died in Europe, half of them fell to the influenza virus and not to the enemy. A half. An estimated 43,000 servicemen mobilized for WWI died of influenza (Crosby).

Compare this to the Black Death. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30–60% of Europe's total population. In total, the plague may have reduced the world population from an estimated 450 million down to 350–375 million in the 14th century. It took 200 years for the world population to recover to its previous level. The plague recurred as outbreaks in Europe until the 19th century.

The most widely accepted estimate for the Middle East, including Iraq, Iran and Syria, during this time, is for a death rate of about a third. The Black Death killed about 40% of Egypt's population. Half of Paris's population of 100,000 people died. In Italy, the population of Florence was reduced from 110,000–120,000 inhabitants in 1338 down to 50,000 in 1351. At least 60% of the population of Hamburg and Bremen perished, and a similar percentage of Londoners may have died from the disease as well. In London approximately 62,000 people died between the years between 1346 and 1353. Before 1350, there were about 170,000 settlements in Germany, and this was reduced by nearly 40,000 by 1450. In 1348, the plague spread so rapidly that before any physicians or government authorities had time to reflect upon its origins, about a third of the European population had already died. In crowded cities, it was not uncommon for as much as 50% of the population to die. The disease bypassed some areas, and the most isolated areas were less vulnerable to contagion. Monks and priests were especially hard-hit since they cared for victims of the Black Death.
Caregivers always die first.

(couple of sources, incl wiki)

Viral Particles

                                              Viral Particles

Some tidbits--talked about but not proven--about the virus:

China’s National Health Commission Minister Ma Xiaowei said the incubation period for the virus can range from one to 14 days, during which infection can occur, which was not the case with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

Ma Xiaowei made a startling statement Sunday about the Wuhan coronavirus: He said people can spread it before they become symptomatic. “This is a game-changer,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a longtime adviser to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. This has tremendous implications as you get no signal as to who to quarantine. This allows the virus to hide and spread from asymptomatic--but infected--people. This is very dangerous. The healthy guy beside you might be a carrier.

Experts at Lancaster University estimated there may already be 11,000 people infected in Wuhan – and that only one in 20 infections has come to medical attention. The experts calculated the number could grow to 190,000 by February 4.

About 5 million residents had already left Wuhan before the lockdown

So far, there are 2,886 confirmed total cases of the coronavirus. All but 61 of them are in mainland China. The death toll so far is 81. If you can believe what is said by any government.

But cases have also been found in France, the U.S., Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea and elsewhere. That list includes the world’s three largest economies (the U.S., China and Japan).

And now the topper: The word “coronavirus” is an anagram of “carnivorous.”

The Virus

                                        The Virus

A 53-year-old fitness trainer died on Wednesday after checking into a hospital in Wuhan a little more than a week earlier, said his niece. His family had expected the death certificate to reflect the deadly coronavirus because as his condition deteriorated, his doctors told his family he was suffering from an untreatable virus in his lungs.

Instead, it recorded “severe pneumonia” as the cause of death, she said. The relatives of two other people who died in separate hospitals in Wuhan this week also described similar situations, saying the causes of death had been given as “viral pneumonia.”

The relatives of all three said the deceased hadn’t been included in China’s official count of 41 deaths attributed to coronavirus.

The Beijing News, a newspaper, reported this week that many patients weren’t officially labeled as carrying the new virus, even though their doctors and nurses said they were.

So, it is going to be hard to get objective information here. That said....

                                          *********

Dr. Dena Grayson is an M.D. and researcher who has years of training developing Ebola treatments. Unfortunately, she is also a politician. In 2016, she ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic nomination for the United States House of Representatives for Florida's 9th congressional district. With that caveat, here are some of her tweets about this coronavirus:

a. Having YEARS of experience developing an Ebola treatment, I was concerned about this Coronavirus Outbreak from the outset, because this coronavirus strain is very contagious, causes severe illness, and NO treatments or vaccines are available.

b. Unlike H5N1 "bird flu" (which does not spread easily between people) or SARS (which was spread by only a handful of "super spreaders"), this coronavirus DOES appear to spread easily between people, even after making the jump from an animal (this is not common).

c. In addition to being highly contagious, this novel coronavirus can cause a SEVERE infection that can kill even healthy people. It's rare to see BOTH of these (bad) attributes in the same novel virus. Usually, it's one or the other.

d. Per @CDCgov, "Early on, many of the patients in the outbreak in Wuhan, China reportedly had some link to a large seafood/animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread." Now, many newly diagnosed patients have NO connection to the market, supporting human-human spread = BAD

e. Ominous signs. Forbidden City (major tourist attraction) is now closed, and tours in #Beijing are now canceled. I fear that #Beijing soon may be locked down, joining at least 11 of cities in #China with a collective 50+ million people