Diseases to keep an eye on.

 ScottAdams (Dilbert) comments about recent reports that Measles is capable of wiping out immunity for other diseases and wonders if Covid might do the same thing.

Uh, Scott Scott Scott: the effect of measles on the immune system has been known for years:

A JAMA article in 1932 noted that children with measles often had their latent Tuberculosis become active. And when I worked in Africa 40 years  we knew this: Often the kids who didn't die of measles would develop TB or croup/RSV a couple of weeks later. Indeed, a recent article in Nature wrote about this in 2019  

In the podcast, he discusses long covid and wonders if this is also associated with immune problems, but mainly he wonders how common is long covid, where people are weak, tired, and have various symptoms that interfere with their ability to work. 

But actually a lot of diseases do this: the problem of  mononucleosis causing severe fatigue in college students is well known. And I've seen it after viral/mycoplasm pneumonia. And now there are reports from India about a similar problem after having Dengue.

So is my lack of energy due to lazyness, or long Dengue?

By the way: There is a huge Dengue epidemic in Asia going on right now. But it is being ignored in the western press because most people don't die of it, and it is not spreading so far to the west. 

Yes, there is a vaccine for Dengue but it has potential lethal side effects, something that the Philippines learned about only after they were used as guinea pigs to test the vaccine. And no one wants to publicize this embarassing episode for fear of making people distrust vaccines that actually save lives. We saw this in the Philippines, where parents hearing about the problem refused to get their kids routine immunizations, so kids died of measles and other diseases that routine baby shots prevent.

Sigh.

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If you liked Covid, you'll love the next "we are all gonna die" epidemic:

Bird flu is resulting in the death of millions of chickens and other birds, but Nature magazine notes it now is spreading mink to mink at a farm in Spain and the problem is that minks are mammals. What happened?

Genetic sequencing showed that the animals were infected with a new variant of H5N1, which includes genetic material from a strain found in gulls, as well as a genetic change known to increase the ability of some animal-flu viruses to reproduce in mammals. The new variant puts bird flu in “uncharted territory”, says Wendy Puryear, a virologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Researchers have warned that, without careful precautions, the disease might eventually spread among people.

That should worry you because there are suggestions that the 1918 influenza epidemic that killed an estimated 50 million people was a form of bird flu. 

It's only a matter of time until these mutations, which occur spontaneously in nature, mutate enough to make human sick.

Which is why a couple years ago there was a lot of hysteria and plans by the public health types learn about the virus.

So scientists are working hard investigating the bird flu virus to find out what happened and why. And they are also doing research into the virus, saying that they plan to find an attenuated version of the virus for a human vaccine.

Good for them. Except: UH OH:

the same scientists who still insist that covid came from nature, not a lab leak, (and condemning you if you dare to suggest otherwise), are now on record defending bird flu manipulations. To save live of course.

Houston Public media Jan 27, 2023;

The government really has a strong interest on behalf of all of us, in the public, in knowing when researchers want to make a virus more lethal or more transmissible, and understanding how that would be done and why that would be done, and whether the benefits are worth it," says Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Oh, but scientists would never manipulate bird flu to make it more transmissable to humans, so why worry.

Except they already have.

...in 2011, there was an outcry after government-funded researchers altered a bird flu virus that can be deadly in people. Their lab work made this virus more contagious in the lab animals that are stand-ins for people.

italics mine. 

Critics said they'd created a super flu. Proponents said that viruses sometimes have to be manipulated in the lab to see what they might be capable of; in nature, after all, mutations occur all the time and that is how pandemic strains emerge.

and these same scientists are annoyed that the US Government dares to try to stop them from similar experiments in the future. 

...Ron Fouchier, the virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands, whose lab did the bird flu experiments over a decade ago, said in an email that he'd hoped the experience of going through a pandemic would simulate more research, not "unnecessarily delay or restrict it."

why? Because SCIENCE. 

"I am avidly, absolutely pro-science and pro-research, and in particular pro-infectious disease research," says Inglesby. 

But he says there's a very small part of that research "where there is the potential for very high risk if things go wrong, either by accident or on purpose. And so we have to get the balance right, between the risks that could unfold and the potential benefits."

update: The Houston NPR article has been edited yesterday, but the original one can still be found on Miami NPR:

 

this video is from 8 years ago: 

Murphy's law says that if anything can go wrong, it will.

And lab accidents releasing pathogens are so common that there is a Wikipedia page about it. 

Captain Trips call your office. They are at it again.

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update: The original article is HERE.

If you have a scientific background you might want to read the whole thing. 

Virology under the Microscope—a Call for Rational Discourse

translation: IF you question our positionn, you are irrational.

But they do list a lot of success stories by similar research.

The problem? Few of these examples were gain of function research that mutated viruses to make them more lethal or more easily transmissable. Much of the examples are about making the viruses weaker, or how to use viruses to enhance the immune response for vaccines (as was done for the British AZ vaccine and some of the Ebola vaccines).