Dr. Anthony Fauci

This begins our 3rd season of attendance. Cheryl got an email apprising us of potential lengthy admission delays owing to enhanced security measures in the wake of myriad ongoing death threats aimed at Dr. Fauci.

 

We arrived well in advance of our usual time. The long line was already shuffling around the entire opera house property. Rain ensued.

 

When we finally got to the entrance, TSA airport-style measures were in place: your pockets emptied and placed on tables aside full-body scanners, with additional wanding for those who set off the scanners.

 

Inside, groups of armed Baltimore County Sheriffs Deparment tactical officers stood about, Kevlar'ed up.

 

All pretty surreal.

 

 

Start time was delayed. Sold out crowd.

 

Dr. Fauci was magnificent. You owe it to yourself to read his memoir.

 

 

"Public Health" expenditures comprise less than 3% of the total U.S. healthcare spend. The bang for the buck is in fact dispositive. Yet...

 

THEN, FRIDAY MORNING, I ARISE TO THIS STUPID STUFF

 

 

 

WTF? “TAKE HEPATITAS B SHOT AT 12 YEARS OLD, OR OLDER”

 

My late elder daughter, Sissy, was born in 1968 with undetected congenital Hepatitis-B. Her birth mother turned out to be an asymptomatic Hep-B carrier. I noted in 1997 at the outset of Sissy’s fatal cancer illness:

...Dr. Wren informed us that Sissy was positive for hepatitis-B (HBV), that it was likely congenital—passed on to her by her mother (my ex-wife)—and that it had surely caused her cancer. Given the HCC latency period of 20-30 years, any other explanation—such as picking up HBV during adolescence that could lead to cancer a mere decade hence—was highly unlikely.

This was baffling. Wouldn't it also have been passed on to others in the family, as it had not been? No, Dr. Wren insisted, sexual and/or in-utero transmission, while frequent, would not be inevitable. Sissy, however, had to have been born with hepatitis-B. Nothing else fit.

Subsequent family blood tests would provide both relief and agonizing confirmation. Sissy's stepmother, my partner of two decades, tested negative—as expected, given her years-long ongoing participation in thoroughly screened blood and platelet donation drives. Our son (Sissy's half-brother) also tested negative. Danielle—Sissy's direct sibling—on the other hand, tested positive for HBV antibody (indicating exposure to hepatitis-B), supporting Dr. Wren's assessment of congenital transmission. Finally, my assay; it would throw me into a black funk from which I have yet to recover.

While in Baltimore in early June of 1967, a year before Sissy was born, I retired one night feeling ill and awoke to acute flu-like aches and nausea accompanied by flaming orange eyeballs, yellow skin, and a rash not unlike that generated by poison ivy. Doctors at John Hopkins University Medical Center diagnosed my condition as "acute infectious hepatitis-A." Probably contracted, they mused, during my stay the prior month in Sacramento, California, where U.S. soldiers returning from Vietnam were found to be rapidly spreading the readily-transmitted disease.

I recovered quickly, and thought little more of it, except for the recurrent mild discomfort of always having to reveal my 1967 bout of hepatitis"A" during subsequent medical, dental, or insurance exams. Providers and underwriters obviously paid the matter equally little heed, for no adverse findings ever emerged. My hepatic and serological data during twenty-odd years of ensuing physicals were uniformly stellar.

"No, you had it, but got over it" my physician explained. It had indeed been hepatitis-B, not "A" that I'd experienced nearly three decades earlier. The assays weren't all that precise back then, she observed. Nowadays we can discriminate between viral strains  "A" through "G."

Oh, dear God. Was it me? But...

My therapist would hence recommend that perhaps a grant of self "absolution" was in order: that who "gave" HBV to whom prior to Sissy's conception was probably unanswerable—and was undeniably irrelevant to the task at hand. Yes, but there is somehow scant solace in such counsel...

Had Sissy gotten an HBV vaccination at birth she would likely still be alive today. Donald Trump, go to Hell.

____ 

 

AND, OH, YEAH,  DIFFERENT BOZO TOPIC:
HOW ABOUT THIS BEAUT?

 

 

Next Tuesday? Isn't that Federal Govt Shutdown day?

 

CODA 

I guess we'll see. 

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

RFK Jr. testified before a Senate committee today. Well, I can’t get those three hours of my life back… Hostile, rude, argumentative, combative, evasive-to-outright-dishonest, condescending, imperious. Obnoxious. Just like his boss.

 

Robert F. Kennedy Jr

confirmed by the Senate 52-48 to head HHS.

 

Try to imagine my disgust. Click either post above.

 

My late elder daughter, Sissy

YO, MR "MAHA" RFK JR

 

Scientific American

Our brains are full of plastic.

This was the fun news I read earlier this week while picking up dinner take-out, packed in plastic containers, crammed in a plastic bag and accompanied by Styrofoam cups. Great, I thought, convenience culture is killing us.

But is it? This is the problem with the slew of research finding microscopic shards of plastic in our arteries, kidneys and livers, the findings that our oceans, food, soil and air are teeming with tiny bits of Tupperware. Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us. And because research takes time, while scientists are trying to answer question, we just keep inhaling, eating and drinking tiny pieces of plastic.

Why? Regulatory action has never really stopped the U.S. plastics industry from cranking out more plastic, even as clean air and water advocates try to fight the industry’s pollution problems in court and locals wage grassroots wars to slow the permitting of more plants that spew all those toxic chemicals. And now, back in office, is a president beholden to fossil fuel interests (where petroleum and natural gas are plastics precursors), a leader who uses his new powers to demand the use of plastic straws, and an administration that is hell-bent on crippling EPA’s mission to keep us safe rather than empowering it.

Meanwhile, we do not know what all this plastic is doing to us. And no one currently in charge seems to care… [ read all of it ]

ERRATUM

ERRATUM

Click above.

UPDATE

Sonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms.

She’s desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health threats, has gone quiet in the weeks since President Donald Trump took office.

“Without more information, we are blind,” she said.

Flu has been brutal this season. The CDC estimates at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 deaths from the flu since the start of October. At the same time, the bird flu outbreak continues to infect cattle and farmworkers. But CDC analyses that would inform people about these situations are delayed, and the CDC has cut off communication with doctors, researchers, and the World Health Organization, say doctors and public health experts.

“CDC right now is not reporting influenza data through the WHO global platforms, FluNet [and] FluID, that they’ve been providing information [on] for many, many years,” Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the WHO, said at a Feb. 12 press briefing.

“We are communicating with them,” she added, “but we haven’t heard anything back.”

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO…

Ugh. 

_________