And Here We Go Again

So, we now have the first official death from H1N1 in the United States, at least the first official one.

Given the general lackadaisical approach of public health authorities meekly acquiescing to farmers refusal to test their chickens and cows, it certainly will not be the last death:

A patient in Louisiana has become the first human in the US to die of bird flu.

The Louisiana department of health reported on Monday afternoon that a patient who had been hospitalized in the state with the first human case of avian influenza has now died.

The patient was over the age of 65 and was reported to have underlying medical conditions, the department announced in a statement.

The patient contracted bird flu, officially known as highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI), or H5N1, after exposure to a combination of a non-commercial backyard flock and wild birds.

A genetic analysis had suggested the bird flu virus had mutated inside the patient, which could have resulted in a more severe illness.

Mutating inside an infected person is kind of a thing for influenza viruses, and it will do so again.

This marked the first human case in the US linked to exposure to backyard birds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

We'll find others predating this, but it may take years of going through specimens in freezers.

The Louisiana department of health’s extensive public health investigation has identified no additional H5N1 cases nor evidence of person-to-person transmission. This patient remains the only human case of H5N1 in Louisiana, the LDH added.

And now we are relying on the good graces and the competence of the state of Louisiana to keep us safe.

Well, I'm feeling reassured.

It's Thursday ╭∩╮（︶︿︶）╭∩╮

Undeniably bad numbers, with 242,000 initial claims, well above the forecast of 220,000, while continuing claims rose to 1.89 million:

Applications for US unemployment benefits rose to a two-month high last week, at a time around the end-of-year holidays when data is volatile.

Initial claims increased by 17,000 to 242,000 in the week ended Dec. 7. The median forecast in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for 220,000 applications. A metric that helps smooth out volatility, the four-week moving average, rose as well and unadjusted data suggest the gains were spread across states.

Continuing claims, a proxy for the number of people receiving benefits, increased to 1.89 million in the previous week — which included the Thanksgiving holiday — according to Labor Department data released Thursday.

Also, the producer price index (PPI) rose by .4% last month led by ……… Eggs?

U.S. producer prices increased by the most in five months in November, but easing costs of services such as portfolio management fees and airline fares offered hope that the disinflationary trend remains in place despite stalled progress.

A surge in the price of eggs amid an avian flu outbreak accounted for much of the bigger-than-expected rise in producer inflation last month. Other details of the report from the Labor Department on Thursday were, however, mostly favorable, prompting economists to sharply lower their estimates for the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) price measures tracked by the Federal Reserve for its 2% inflation target.

So bird flu is f%$#ing the poultry industry.

And, we are seeing an increase in infections being transmitted to people.  (And cows)

We may be seeing yet another pandemic in its early stages.

And in Other Disasters

Avian Influenza has detected in Los Angeles waste water.

H5 Avian Flu Detected at Wastewater Sampling Site in Los Angeles County, Public Health Closely Monitoring Situation - Risk Remains Low

The Los Angeles County Department is investigating possible sources of H5 avian flu, which has been detected at low levels for the first time at one of the wastewater sampling sites in Los Angeles County.

H5N1 is one type of avian influenza that has been spreading among birds and mammals, leading to a nationwide outbreak. There are no reports of human H5N1 cases in Los Angeles County and the overall risk of H5N1 to LA County residents remains low. There is no evidence of sustained human to human transmission with this strain of H5N1.

Public Health is actively engaging key risk groups such as dairy and meat processing sites to identify possible sources of H5 avian flu in wastewater. The virus may have been introduced into wastewater by discarded contaminated animal products, infected wild bird droppings entering the sewage system, or animal infection. Public Health routinely monitors and tests symptomatic birds, pets, and wild mammals in LA County for H5N1 through our Public Health Laboratory.

Wastewater sampling is routinely performed as part of ongoing surveillance for infectious diseases including H5N1. H5 has previously been detected in wastewater in both northern and southern California. The virus has been detected in more than 200 dairies in California and there have been 16 human cases of avian flu in California. Public Health, in conjunction with the California Department of Public Health (CDPH), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and state and federal agriculture agencies, has been tracking the situation closely. 

While the current risk of transmission to LA County residents is low, Public Health encourages residents to follow these best practices when around animals or when consuming animal products:

• Do not eat raw milk, raw cheese, and undercooked meat products.
• Avoid unprotected contact with sick or dead animals, or materials contaminated with bird feces. The virus can spread to other birds, pets or mammals by contact with infected feces or consumption of infected animals.
• Avoid handling wild birds and observe them only from a distance. If you have to handle wild birds, even if they appear healthy, practice good hand hygiene and consider wearing a well-fitting mask. Some birds may carry the virus but appear to be healthy.
• Report sick or dead birds to local animal control agency for potential collection and testing. Sick birds or animals may not have flu-like symptoms, but instead may be unable to fly, have seizures, have difficulty walking or be found dead.
• Prevent wild birds from getting into areas housing pet birds or poultry. Also make sure wild birds cannot defecate down into areas holding pet birds or poultry.
• Take down bird feeders and communal bird baths to reduce the risk of the virus spreading from bird-to-bird.
• Residents should also keep pets away from sick and dead birds. There is some risk of the virus being transmitted to mammals such as dogs, cats, and wild mammals, especially if they eat infected, uncooked birds.
• It is especially important that people who may have exposure to infected or potentially infected birds or other animals get a seasonal flu vaccine. Seasonal flu vaccination will not prevent infection with avian influenza viruses but can reduce the risk of getting sick with human and bird flu viruses at the same time.

About H5N1

Avian flu refers to various strains of influenza A viruses that typically infect birds. While these viruses mainly affect wild birds, sometimes they also infect other animals, including wild and domestic animals (including seals, foxes, cats, and cows). H5N1 is one type of avian influenza that has been spreading among birds and mammals, leading to a nationwide outbreak. This is the first time these bird flu viruses have been found to be spreading in cows.

Signs/symptoms of H5N1 virus infection in humans may include:

• Cough, sore throat, runny or stuffy nose, muscle or body aches, headaches, fatigue
• Fever* or feeling febrile
• Eye redness (or conjunctivitis)
• Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
• Diarrhea, nausea, vomiting

*It is important to note that infection with influenza viruses, including novel influenza A viruses, does not always cause fever. Fever may not occur in infected persons of any age, particularly in persons aged 65 years and older or people with immunosuppression.

For questions or to find a nearby clinic or doctor, residents can call the Public Health InfoLine at 833-540-0473. Open every day from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.

For more information, visit our websites:

Avian flu in animals: publichealth.lacounty.gov/vet/HPAI.htm

Avian flu in humans: ph.lacounty.gov/acd/diseases/h5n1.htm

If I were superstitious I would think that it seems that we are headed for a cursed year.

Luckily for me, I'm not superstitious.

osh%$

When one talks about potential zoonotic disease transfer, there is one animal that figures prominently, and that is the pig.

So the fact that bird flu has been found in pig is the proverbial big f%$#ing deal:

H5N1 bird flu virus has been found in a pig on a farm in Oregon, the first time the virus has been seen in a pig in the United States, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported Wednesday. A second pig may also have been infected, Oregon authorities later revealed.

………

Pigs are sometimes called a “mixing vessel” for flu viruses, because they can be infected with both bird flu viruses and human flu viruses. If the animals are co-infected at the same time with two or more viruses, the viruses can swap genes, potentially creating a hybrid virus that is better able to spread to and among people than bird flu viruses typically are. This phenomenon, called reassortment, is what gave rise to the 2009 H1N1 pandemic.

Because pigs can play this role, flu experts have been worried that the H5N1 virus currently spreading in cows in the United States could make its way to pigs — though any version of the H5N1 virus in pigs would be an unwelcome development.

Best evidence right now is that the 1918 influenza strain originated from bird that was subjected to a porcine "Shake and Bake" before jumping to humans.

This is not good.

But Bibi Does Not Care

We now have increasing indications of a polio outbreak in Gaza as a result of the war, the IDF has started vaccinating soldiers.

This means that there is a very real chance of a spread of polio both in Gaza and throughout Israel, but Benjamin Netanyahu will continue to prosecute the war, because once it ends, he loses power and goes to jail for corruption.

He will likely be directly responsible for a plague being unleashed in Israel.

If that does not sound like some seriously biblical sh%$, as in the earth swallowing Korach, and the  plague that followed in בְּמִדְבַּר (Numbers), you have not studied תַּנַ״ךְ (Tanakh).

The Israeli army will begin on Sunday to vaccinate against polio all soldiers operating in Gaza or due to enter there soon, after a high concentration of the virus was found in sewage in Gaza.

Vaccination of the soldiers will take place in Israel over the coming weeks. The army says that, according to its information, there are no active cases of polio among Gazans.

Given that there is no healthcare system remaining in Gaza, there is no good information about potential polio cases either.  (Note also that in over 90% of cases, one would see only mild symptoms without paralysis)

Last Wednesday, the army was informed by the Health Ministry that a high concentration of the poliovirus was found in sewage samples from Gaza that were monitored.

As a result, the Health Ministry and IDF Medical Corps held an assessment and decided to launch a polio vaccination campaign for all ground forces in Gaza, including the combat forces and auxiliary forces.

Polio vaccines are given in Israel during childhood as part of the routine vaccination program, and the vaccination rate is 95 percent. Thus, the soldiers now in Gaza have been previously vaccinated against the virus.

Nonetheless, after situational assessment conducted by the IDF, with the participation of public health service chief Dr. Sharon Elroi-Price and senior Medical Corps officials, it was recommended that the soldiers be vaccinated again in order to further reduce the risk of infection and of transmission of the virus in Israel.

This is getting worse and worse.

Another Theory of Neanderthal Extinction

It may have been something very much like what happened when European diseases hit the Americas, resulting the transmission of diseases resulting in massive mortality.

This is not definitive proof, and I'm inclined to believe that the cause was a function of greater fecundity for H. Sapiens Sapiens as versus H. Sapiens Neanderthalis, but we may never know the truth:

Less than a decade ago, the American anthropologist James C Scott described infectious diseases as the “loudest silence” in the prehistoric archaeological record. Epidemics must have devastated human societies in the distant past and changed the course of history, but, Scott lamented, the artefacts left behind reveal nothing about them.

Over the last few years, the silence has been shattered by pioneering research that analyses microbial DNA extracted from very old human skeletons. The latest example of this is a groundbreaking study that identified three viruses in 50,000-year-old Neanderthal bones. These pathogens still afflict modern humans: adenovirus, herpesvirus and papillomavirus cause the common cold, cold sores, and genital warts and cancer, respectively. The discovery may help us resolve the greatest mystery of the Palaeolithic era: what caused the extinction of Neanderthals.

Recent advances in the technology used to extract and analyse ancient DNA has given us incredible insights into the ancient world. With the exception of time travel, it is difficult to imagine a technology capable of so profoundly changing our understanding of prehistory.

………

When a team led by Nobel laureate Svante Pääbo sequenced the Neanderthal genome, they realised that modern humans with European, Asian or Native American ancestry inherited about 2% of their genes from Neanderthals. Then, during the pandemic, it became apparent that several Neanderthal gene variants that are particularly common among South Asians influenced the immune response to novel coronavirus, making carriers much more likely to get very sick and die. It is wild to think that inter-species trysts that occurred tens of thousands of years ago impact the health of people alive today.

………

While the discovery that Neanderthals were infected by adenovirus, herpesvirus and papillomavirus will not, on its own, change our understanding of the distant past, it hints at a solution to the great mystery of the Palaeolithic era.

………

The discovery of the 50,000-year-old viruses points to an alternative explanation for Neanderthals’ demise: deadly infectious diseases carried by Homo sapiens. Having been separated for more than half a million years, the two species would have evolved immunity to different infectious diseases. When they encountered one another during Homo sapiens’ migration out of Africa, pathogens that caused innocuous symptoms in one species would have been deadly to the other, and vice versa.

The reason that Homo sapiens survived while Neanderthals disappeared is simple. Our ancestors lived closer to the equator. As more of the sun’s energy reaches the Earth, plant life is more abundant there. This provides a habitat for more dense and varied animal life, which in turn supports more microbes that are capable of jumping the species barrier and infecting humans. Consequently, Palaeolithic Homo sapiens would have carried more deadly pathogens than Neanderthals.

This is no smoking gun, but it does raise interesting questions.

 

God Does Not Like Florida Right Now

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued a travel warning to Florida because of an increase in Leprosy cases there.

God is literally getting biblical on Florida.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is warning that cases of leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, are surging in Florida and should be considered when making travel plans.

The infectious [One of the least infectious diseases out there, actually] disease primarily affects the skin and nervous system and can be easy to treat if caught early.

Leprosy has been historically uncommon in the United States, but has more than doubled in the South over the last 10 years. In a case report issued Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said that Central Florida has accounted for 81% of reported cases in the state and almost one-fifth of reported cases nationwide.

Of the 159 new leprosy cases reported in the United States in 2020, Florida was among the top reporting states with nearly 30 cases. The Florida Department of Health reported 19 cases from July 2022 to July 2023, with one South Florida case in Palm Beach County.

Between hurricanes, Leprosy, wildfires, mass shootings, Disney World, and Ron Desantis, it's abundantly clear that God is punishing them.

My guess is an improperly conducted census, (hover the mouse over to get the reference) though that is seriously old school.

Maybe be Florida is being punished for Ron Desantis?  At least how I am going to troll his Talibaptist supporters.

For the record, I do not think that God is smiting Florida because of Ron Desantis, but I do think that the Florida Governor's policy choices have made things worse in that state

Leprosy is just one consequence of putting incompetent zealots in charge of basic government functions.

I Don’t Want to Live on This Planet Any More

This is QAnon level stuff.

In case it's not obvious, what public health officials try to anticipate future threats and figure out how to ameliorate them.

Monkeypox has been an obvious candidate as an emerging infectious disease since before I wrote about that in 2003.

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

So they studied it.

I and many many other people more knowledgable about orthopoxviruses have been pointing for decades at monkeypox as a potential emerging pathogen. And you can find those articles easily in the scientific literature. https://t.co/oO6M3f3hD6 pic.twitter.com/7Gv07NczWI

— Carl T. Bergstrom (@CT_Bergstrom) May 23, 2022

I weep for the children.

On a more serious note, worries about monkeypox, a member of the same genus as smallpox, has been an object of concern for years.

As to the Brownstone Institute, they are literally an organization opposed to public health measures of all forms, because, Ayn Rand, I guess.

I used to laugh at these folks, but seeing as how they are directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans, and millions of people world wide, I don't think that laughter is the appropriate response.

We're just lucky that the current outbreak, which includes community transmission, is of the West African clade, with a mortality of around 3% untreated, as opposed to the Congo Basin clade, which has a mortality rate above 10%.

It's a Busy Day at the Dog Track

Stocks plunged at the open, triggering a freeze on trading, as "Circuit Breakers" shut down trading for the first time in 23 years.

The issue here is not risk, that is possibility quantifiable possibility of something bad happening, but uncertainty, where your numbers go ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

U.S. stocks careened lower Monday, with major indexes swinging perilously close to the first bear market in more than a decade as a price war for oil and fallout from the coronavirus frightened investors.

The selling was heavy across markets and geographies, with investors seeking shelter in government bonds, sending Treasury yields to new lows. U.S. stocks fell hard enough at the open to trigger a circuit breaker for the first time in 23 years that kept trading frozen for 15 minutes. The Dow Jones Industrial Average suffered its worst decline since 2008 and at one point came within 65 points of touching a bear market.

For the day, the Dow sank 2,013.76 points, or 7.8%, to 23851.02. It was the first time the Dow lost more than 2,000 points in a session. The S&P 500 fell 225.81 points, or 7.6%, to 2746.56, also its worst day since 2008. And the Nasdaq Composite slid 624.94 points, or 7.3%, to 7950.68.

All 11 sectors in the S&P 500 were down, led by energy, which slid 20%. Financials were down 11%. Industrials and materials both fell 9.2%.

By day’s end, the Dow, S&P and Nasdaq were all down roughly 19% from record highs set earlier this year. A drop of 20% from those highs would halt a bull-market run that began after the financial crisis. Stocks bottomed out 11 years ago, on March 9, 2009.

As an aside, this is the time when I DON'T look at how my IRA or 401(k) is doing, 

Seriously, just don't.

Getting my History Geek On

I've always had a bit of interest in the Black Death.

One of the things that I've always thought that it was not the Bubonic Plague (Y. Pestis) as we see it today.

Specifically, the spread of the Plague was blisteringly fast (5-8 km a day) for the transportation systems of the day, which mitigates against the modern plague.

There are variants of the disease that are more likely to move at this speed, most notably the marmot variant that are far more likely to infect lung tissue.

Because they allow for direct human to human (HtH) transmission, the spread is accelerated.

Now an analysis of the disease in Eyam in Derbyshire indicates that the spread of the disease was largely HtH:

Without a doubt, the bubonic plague has been one of the deadliest and most devastating infectious diseases in all of human history. The bacterial infection—caused by Yersinia pestis—has sparked dozens of outbreaks and three massive pandemics, killing hundreds of millions of people. The Justinian Plague from 541 to 767 is estimated to have killed up to 50 percent of the population at the time and spurred the demise of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the fourteenth century Black Death, which circumnavigated Europe in just a few years, ended up slaughtering as much as 60 percent of the continent’s population.

But despite the indelible mark the dark disease has left on humanity, researchers still aren’t certain how exactly Yersinia sweeps through cities and countries. The highly infectious disease has historically been linked to rodents, in which the bacteria can fester, and rat fleas, which take in and then vomit out the bacteria in subsequent bites. Thus, booming vermin populations have long been assumed to spark and sustain outbreaks. But a fresh analysis of a tiny village in England—made famous for its handling of a plague outbreak from 1665 to 1666—stands to challenge the view.

The Derbyshire village of Eyam, estimated to have a population of around 700 at the time of the outbreak, took the remarkable step of imposing a quarantine on itself—a move almost unheard of at the time. While the villagers aimed to spare neighboring parishes—which they did—the quarantine and the villagers’ detailed death records also provided a perfect opportunity for studying plague transmission dynamics.

In a new analysis of the outbreak, researchers estimate that rodent-to-human transmission accounted for only a quarter of all infections, while human-to-human transmission made up the rest. The finding, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds fuel to a hot debate among academics about how plague spreads. And more importantly, it has the potential to inform public health responses to modern-day plague outbreaks, which still occur around the world, particularly in Africa and South America (albeit on much smaller scales than historical outbreaks).

………

They arrived at the point by first digging into historic population and death records of Eyam—now known as “plague village.” The researchers looked at factors such as age, wealth, household structure, and gender of the 257 people who died of plague. The deaths, which began after the delivery of flea-infested cloth from London, lasted from September 1665 to October 1666.

Next, the researchers used a stochastic compartmental model and Bayesian analytical methods to recreate the pattern of deaths and trajectory of the outbreak revealed by the records. The model included rodent-to-human transmission and human-to-human transmission, which was estimated to occur within a fixed window of 11 days between exposure, infection, and death. (While there were oral reports that three villagers recovered from the plague, those weren’t recorded in documents so the researchers tossed them out of their main analysis. However, when they did try including them, it didn’t alter their overall findings.)

The researchers found that human-to-human transmission accounted for 75 percent of all infections, with age, wealth, and household structure playing big roles in who got sick. Kids and family members of victims were the groups most affected by the plague. The village’s wealthy were less likely to get the plague, possibly due to less contact with general village folk and vermin.

I would expect more results to support the differences between the current and historical versions will become clearer as more genetic data is collected from graves and more epidemiological studies like this one are conducted..

What Can I Say About Ebola and Fox News that Hasn't Already been said by America's most Influential Writer*

I am referring, of course to Edgar Allan Poe.

What I catch about the Fox News coverage of the epidemic (Mostly via The Daily Show and Crooks and Liars) is very similar to that of the main character Poe's short story, The Masque of the Red Death, Prince Prospero.

The impetus of cowards (Fox News and our Prince) to wall themselves off, and cower behind a facade of bombast is rather illuminating.

Damn, that U Va dropout could write.

It is kind of creepy just how much the Red Death is like Ebola.

I post the story in its entirety, it is in the public domain, after the break:

^*Poe can reasonably be credited with creating both the genres of the horror story, and the detective story. The most, the prestigious award for Mystery writing in the United States is called Edgar Allan Poe Awards are named after him for just such a reason.

Happy 9th of Av*

Not a day to get breaking news.

Case in point, a guy who had recently been in West Africa just walked into a New York City Hospital and there are concerns that he is throwing symptoms of Ebola:

Heightened concern about the Ebola virus has led to alarms being raised at three hospitals in New York City. But so far, no Ebola cases have turned up.

The latest episode involved a man who had recently been to West Africa, and who went to the emergency room at Mount Sinai Hospital in Manhattan late Sunday with a high fever and gastrointestinal problems, the hospital reported on Monday.

He is being kept in isolation at the hospital while tests are being done for Ebola, a deadly disease, but also for other illnesses that could have caused his symptoms.

Yeah, it would be the 9^th of Av.

Remind me not to eat any bat soup.

^*It is Tisha B'Av, the 9^th day of the Hebrew month Av, and a small subset of the nasty bits of Jewish history follows:

1. The report of the spies from Canaan, resulting in the people of Israel spending 40 Years in the Desert.
2. The destruction of the 1^st Temple.
3. The destruction of the 2nd Temple.
4. The Romans razed Betar, killing 100,000 Jews.
5. The Romans plowed the temple mount.
6. The start of the 1^st Crusade.  (You see it as a coming together of Christendom.  I see it as a pogrom with years of murder and rape.)
7. The expulsion of Jews from England.
8. The expulsion of Jews from France.
9. The expulsion of Jews from Spain.
10. Germany entered the WW I. (Can be legitimately claimed to have directly led to the Shoah)
11. Formal approval of the "Final Solution" by the Nazis in 1941.
12. Deportations to Treblinka from the Warsaw Ghetto begin in 1942.

Excuse me while I find something sturdy to cover my head with.

My Hunch Seems to Have Been Vindicated

I have always felt that the Black Death in Europe was from something significantly different from the Bubonic Plague as we know it now, if just because the speed of the spread was astonishingly fast (something more than 20 miles a day in Britain).

Well, a study now indicates that it was likely a variant of Yersinia pestis that was genetically predisposed to go pneumonic, meaning that the transmission would have been far faster than the flea borne variants that we see today:

It was already known as perhaps the bleakest episode in British history.

Now, new research suggests the Black Death was even more lethal than was previously thought.

The findings go further to exonerate rats as being responsible for the outbreak, which swept the country in the middle of the fourteenth century, killing vast swathes of the population.

Instead, the study claims the disease was passed directly from human to human and was, in fact, pneumonic plague – a more virulent and infectious form than bubonic plague, which has historically been blamed.

………

The same bacteria – which is almost identical to the strain still found on four continents – is responsible for both bubonic and pneumonic plague, but the experts taking part in the show concluded that the latter, which is spread by the fleas of infected rats, would not have been able to have the devastating impact caused by the Black Death.

Dr Tim Brooks, an expert in infectious diseases from Public Health England who is based at Porton Down – the Wiltshire site used by the government for dealing with biological threats – said: “As an explanation, for the Black Death in its own right, it is simply not good enough. It cannot spread fast enough from one household to the next, to cause the huge number of cases that we saw during the Black Death epidemics.”

Instead, he identified what he considers was a mutation from the bubonic plague, borne on rats, to the pneumonic variant, whereby it spread to the lungs of sufferers, who then passed it on to others, by coughing.

This makes sense, though there are alternate ways for it to spread so quickly, such as it being carried by bird borne parasites.

It is almost certain that it was Y. pestis though.

Taking Tips in Africa

Well, after many years, two studies have shown that circumcision reduces AIDS transmission by about 60%. There has been anecdotal data for years.

This answers a question I've always had, why is the US AIDS rate relatively low when the US public health infrastructure sucks, and you have Talibaptists everywhere campaigning against condoms?

The answer is dumb luck. Through historical accident, the US probably has the highest circumcision rate this side of Israel (Moslems do it too).

Unfortunately, studying wasn’t enough. It wasn’t until last March, when the National Institutes of Health stopped the African circumcision trials—it was no longer ethical to continue them, because circumcision was clearly beneficial—that the World Health Organization and other agencies did an about-face.

On Whether Y. Pestis Caused the Black Death

I discussed this on the Usenet^* group Rec.Org.SCA about three years ago.

I was watching something on the Discovery Channel, and some people were making arguments that the Black Death could not have been Yerisnia Pestis, because some of its characteristics were simply completely at odds with what is observed in modern Bubonic Plague outbreaks.

Looking back at the archives, my assessment was that it was likely a variant of the Plague with a higher affinity for lung tissues (I mention the Marmot sub-variant as an example).

In any case, Tara C. Smith just did a 4 part blog series on Y. pestis as the black death, which thoroughly convinces me that Y. pestis was Black Death.

• Part 1: Objections to Y. pestis causation
• Part 2: Examination of the criticisms
• Part 3: Paleomicrobiology and the detection of Y. pestis in corpses
• Part 4: Plague in modern times.

It's a very good read.

^*Originally called UUCP, it was a system for bouncing public BBS type messages through the internet. You can still access it, and it works fairly well, but the signal to noise ratio degraded to the point of near uselessness when AOL gave it's (l)users access to the system during the Eternal September, with the inevitable tragedy of the commons.

Thimerosal DOES NOT Cause Autism

A study has just been completed on Autism rates following the removal Thimerosal from vaccines in 2001, and the numbers are stark, removing Thimerosol made no change in the incidence of Autism spectrum disorders. (LA Times Link)

Autism cases continued to increase in California after the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal was eliminated from most childhood vaccines, according to a new report.This suggests that exposure to thimerosal is not a primary cause of autism.

Speaking as a parent of a child on the spectrum, Charlie is a very high functioning Aspergers kid, let me state that the people arguing for this are wrong.

Every peer reviewed study has shown no correlation, and while correlation may not prove causation, a lack of correlation does prove a lack of causation.

Inoculations work. Inoculations don't give your kid an Autism Spectrum disorder.

Get your kids vaccinated, for their good, and for the good of their classmates.

Of Course Fox is Screaming "Terrorism"

I was exercising (stationary bicycle), and watching TV at the Gym. CNN was focusing the bridge collapse and the trapped miners, and on the next TV over, Fox News was screaming "run for your lives, and put your trust in Bush", about the Foot and Mouth^* outbreak in the UK.

Fox News is really into creating terror as a way to hold onto viewers.

Let's be clear. This is not terrorism. The subvariant of the virus is not one commonly found, but it is very close to the one in the 1967 outbreak, which is used for vaccine manufacture at a laboratory in Pirbright, which is is within the 3- kilometer protection zone.

If someone wanted to do bio-terrorism with hoof and mouth, it would be easier to go to areas of Asia or Africa where the disease is endemic (the 2001 outbreak was the "Type O pan Asia" strain), collect samples, and cover most of the country in a car for multiple outbreaks in multiple locations.

I once priced it out, and you could probably do this for less than 50 grand.

^*Foot and Mouth and Hoof and Mouth are the same thing. The Brits call it the former, and we call it the latter.