Public Health News | Measles outbreak, RFK Etc

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What does elbows up mean?
Elbows up is a hockey reference, means to protect yourself from opposing players. It's a Canadian rallying cry against Trump's imperial ambition.

 
Elbows up is a hockey reference, means to protect yourself from opposing players. It's a Canadian rallying cry against Trump's imperial ambition.

Oh. Hockey. LOL. A major sports I know basically nothing about. I'm aware that they use pucks and sticks and there's a guy called the goalie who can be optionally tied to the goalposts to help him stay upright.

Actually, I know most of the rules, I think. I just don't care to watch or follow.
 


This particular subtype of bird flu was first discovered in China in 2013. One reason why H7N9 is worrying is its deadliness when it spills over into humans. According to the World Health Organization, most reported cases of human H7N9 have resulted in severe illness. Of the 1,568 total H7N9 cases documented globally since 2013, 616 people have died—a 39% fatality rate.

The last known U.S. outbreak of H7N9 among poultry occurred in 2017. But in early March, it made its unwelcome return on a farm in Noxubee, Mississippi. According to WOAH, the virus was detected in a flock of nearly 50,000 commercial broiler breeder chickens. Genetic testing confirming the strain’s identity was completed late last week.
 

This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”

Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.


Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.

But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.

The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.
 

This year the world should have been “talking about the virtual elimination of HIV” in the near future. “Within five years,” says Prof Sharon Lewin, a leading researcher in the field. “Now that’s all very uncertain.”

Scientific advances had allowed doctors and campaigners to feel optimistic that the end of HIV as a public health threat was just around the corner.


Then came the Trump administration’s abrupt cuts to US aid funding. Now the picture is one of a return to the drugs rationing of decades ago, and of rising infections and deaths.

But experts are also talking about building a new approach that would make health services, particularly those in sub-Saharan Africa, less vulnerable to the whims of a foreign power.

The US has cancelled 83% of its foreign aid contracts and dismantled USAid, the agency responsible for coordinating most of them.
The don and elon classes don't want diseases eradicated that disproportionately kill classes of people they don't like.
 
shocked faces ready?


Doctors in West Texas are seeing measles patients whose illnesses have been complicated by an alternative therapy endorsed by vaccine skeptics including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.

Parents in Gaines County, Texas, the center of a raging measles outbreak, have increasingly turned to supplements and unproven treatments to protect their children, many of whom are unvaccinated, against the virus.

One of those supplements is cod liver oil containing vitamin A, which Mr. Kennedy has promoted as a near miraculous cure for measles. Physicians at Covenant Children’s Hospital in Lubbock, Texas, say they’ve now treated a handful of unvaccinated children who were given so much vitamin A that they had signs of liver damage.

Some of them had received unsafe doses of cod liver oil and other vitamin A supplements for several weeks in an attempt to prevent a measles infection, said Dr. Summer Davies, who cares for acutely ill children at the hospital.

“I had a patient that was only sick a couple of days, four or five days, but had been taking it for like three weeks,” Dr. Davies said.

While doctors sometimes administer high doses of vitamin A in a hospital to manage severe measles, experts do not recommend taking it without physician supervision. Vitamin A is not an effective way to prevent measles; however, two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine are about 97 percent effective.

At high doses, vitamin A can cause liver damage; dry, peeling skin; hair loss; and, in rare instances, seizures and coma. So far, doctors at West Texas hospitals have said they’ve seen patients with yellowed skin and high levels of liver enzymes in their bloodwork, both signs of a damaged liver.
 
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