I am still recovering from Dengue Fever, and with this epidemic causing a lot of illness in SE and South Asia, some sites are noticing a post Dengue syndrome of fatigue and achiness and brain fog in up to half of those with severe disease.
this actually is seen after a lot of viral and bacterial infections, but in the olden days it was considered common and normal so you just labored on despite the problems (or if you were a woman you took to bed: why middle class women suffer more from these things may be because of biology or maybe because we feel things more).
What you have to realize is that the Philippines is in the midst of a Dengue epidemic, but that statistics might not be accurate:
mild cases of dengue never get diagnosed because fevers are common and hey who wants to get checked for Covid and maybe go into isolation etc. when it is probably just a fever;
There are a lot of cases of Dengue locally, mainly in kids. And yes, covid is still around: One of our relatives visiting for Undas (Nov 1, when we commemorate the dead) caught it and has been in quarantine for two weeks and is now fit to go back to the USA.
So anyway, the hype and hysteria of the MSM is all about Covid, but now that someone got Dengue in Arizona expect to read lots of propaganda blaming it on global warming.
Except it's not global warming: it's the mosquitoes, and the spread via populations moving around taking the disease with them.
If you have to point a finger at someone to blame, then blame Rachel Carson who demonized DDT and essentially led to banning it's use to kill mosquitoes, because it was killing eagles, so this cheap prevention was banned.
But of course, you don't need DDT: You need to drain puddles and sitting water to destroy the larvae which are wiggling in the water but breathe air. There are several ways to do this: Fish will eat the larvae, which is why we had koi and then talapia in our water fountain, and it is why the city covered the open drainage ditches a couple years ago. And spraying sitting water with light oil (or in today's world, insecticide) will kill the larvae.
There are a lot of scary diseases out there, and some that we presume cause only epidemics in poor countries were once common in Europe and nothern USA.
So why worry about mosquitoes? Well, Dengue for one. But the same mosquito that carries Dengue also spreads yellow fever.
Why do I say this? History.
Did you know that the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia killed ten percent of the population?
and it killed more soldiers in the Spanish American war in Cuba than the enemy...but after the Spanish American war, public health authorities decided the best way to stop it was to eradicate the mosquito
this article is about the history of Yellow fever.
The Yellow Fever Commission, founded as a consequence of excessive disease mortality during the Spanish–American War (1898), concluded that the best way to control the disease was to control the mosquito.
William Gorgas successfully eradicated yellow fever from Havana by destroying larval breeding sites and this strategy of source reduction was then successfully used to reduce disease problems and thus finally permit the construction of the Panama Canal in 1904. Success was due largely to a top-down, military approach involving strict supervision and discipline (Gorgas, 1915).
in 1946, an intensive Aedes aegypti eradication campaign was initiated in the Americas, which succeeded in reducing vector populations to undetectable levels throughout most of its range.
much of this was before the vaccine was developed in 1930s, and before DDT was developed in the 1940s.
A couple years ago, there was a major epidemic of yellow fever (2016) in Angola which was controlled partly from the vaccine ... eventually 25 million people got the vaccine.... and a few local Chinese workers brought it back into China, which diagnosed the cases and stopped the disease before it spread to the public.
Alas, the vaccine shortage badly affected Brazil, (2017-2018) where yellow fever hides in the monkeys of the jungle and gives them outbreaks every couple of years.
By the way, this mosquito also carried Zika.
Remember those screaming headlines showing poor ladies in Brazil and their microcephalic babies? But the dirty little secret is that the powers that run the world were exaggerating the risk of fetal malformation (which were rare in other countries with the disease) in order to pressure governments to legalize abortion, and also so they could use the newfangled genetically modified mosquitoes and other fancy methods to stop the epidemic. Yes, zika did cause fetal malforation, but some greens wonder why this was mainly true on the poorer areas of Brazil but the problem was less severe in other areas of South America, and that maybe chemical exposure was involved.
But where is the hysteria in the MSM about Dengue?
Maybe now that a few cases of Dengue have been diagnosed in Arizona, the MSM will notice that it's around. And blame global warming.
And heaven help the world if another epidemic of yellow fever gets out of control: International travelers from high risk countries are required to show they had yellow fever vaccine, but no one in the US seems to be worried about those crossing the border without papers.
In summary: Dengue (and Zika and Chikunguya fever and even Yellow Fever) are spread by mosquitoes that are not being controlled: so outbreaks of these diseases are not due to global warming: it's the failure of the public health departments that are not controlling mosquitoes.
The article then discusses Dengue.
Dengue spread started in this century, partly due to soldiers and civilian populations moving around after World war II. And it tends to be in urban areas, where it can spread from person to person and there are a lot of areas with puddles and sitting water where the mosquito can breed. And as I mentioned before, a lot of mild cases and asymptomatic cases never get diagnosed, but if a mosquito bites them it can spread to others.
Is there a vaccine? Yes, but if given to people who never had deangue, it can incrase the risk of the severe form of Dengue.
The children of the poor neighborhoods of Manila were the guinea pigs for this flawed vaccine which was given to 700 thousand children. but reportedly killed half a dozen kids who developed the severe frm of dengue as a result. NPR report here.
But after these deaths were reported, the distrust of any vaccines led to parents skipping their baby's routine shots, so we had measles and polio cases...
and this is one reason that the public health authorities of the Philippines, who were offered thousands of doses of the mRNA vaccine in January 2021 never signed off on the papers to get it early. The problem was that the DOH had to agree to lift liability for side effects of the shot and they didn't quite trust the drug companies. As a result, the public covid campaign was delayed for months (although some people were getting the Chinese vaccine privatly, and some mayors were importing the shots, the public vaccine outreach was delayed: I got my Astrozeneca shot in August, and the mRNA wasn't available here until later in the year.)
Yes, Covid was real, and we knew young and old who died of it, but now, despite a large number of cases in public health surveys, the death rate remains low, while people are dying of other diseases, like undiagnosed cancer, untreated high blood pressure and diabetes, etc.
as for the anti vax hysteria against the covid vaccine: what you need to know is that the original covid killed a lot of high risk folk, so the initial push to give the high risk folks vaccine saved lives.
But now most cases are of the milder omicron strain of covid, where there are lots of cases but few deaths. And I wonder if Dengue is now surging in Asia is because the public health department was busy fighting covid with tests, masks, vaccines, and isolation, they don't have a lot of money left over to stop the mosquitoes.
But despite this, some big shots insist on giving shots and boosters galore to everyone: Not just to elders and high risk people but also to kids and young adults, who are not at high risk. To make things worse, there is some suspicion that numerous boosters (not a single shot) might be behind the epidemic of myocarditis and clots in young people...,
So no, I am not anti vax: But the anti vax hysterics do have a point that the response was excessive and the hysteria pushing shots to low risk folk at a time when the covid strain going around is much weaker than the original one means this response might now be a bit overblown.
But the real problem was the shut down of society, which is causing a recession.
Flatten the curve: makes sense. But for two years? And after they had given the vaccine to high risk folks?
To make things worse, the powers that seem to be running the world are busy pushing global warming, knowing that hey their propaganda to make people obey them worked in the epidemic, so let's expand our power to get rid of fossil fuel.
Dirty little secrwet: between the economic shut down and the anti fossil fuel hysteria of the powers that run the world, we here in Asia are facing a huge famine in the next year or two: and it is man made and preventable.
The anti fossil fuel policies such as being pushed by the Biden and Trudeau administrations, (plus Russian aggression against the Ukraine) are the real reasons that the world is facing a major famine in the next year or two.
Here in the Philippines, farmers (like our family) rely on disel and gasoline to run farm machinery to irrigate, harvest, mill and dry the rice crop. (we still plant by hand, but those machines are commonly used in other Asian countries and they too need diesel to run).
Then there is the huge increase in the price of fertilizer (including organic fertiizer which we use for our organic rice crop). This is a world wide problem.
Add to that the price to transport or import rice to feed the poor in the cities.
We probably won't make a profit this year thanks to the increase price of diesel and the huge increase in the price of fertilizer.
Sigh.
from 2016
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