Do masks stop the spread of viruses?

I don't see a lot of masks these days--occasionally at the grocery store, and even a woman driving alone on a nice day wearing a mask this week. This evening we went to a visitation, and one woman was wearing a mask. Perhaps she had a cold and didn't want to expose anyone, but masks don't stop the spread, according to all the studies done. Perhaps the best study hasn't yet been designed, but it's zero, zilch, nada. Of course, I said that in 2020, but I was shut down or blocked. https://www.city-journal.org/article/approximately-zero Don't expect die/dei hard government supporters to change--I looked at some of their explanations for this study, and they go by feels rather than facts. We've already given them so much power, I doubt they will give it back.

Cochrane Reviews--still no evidence for masks stopping the spread

In the first year of the pandemic Cochrane Library which identifies, appraises and synthesizes all the empirical evidence that meets pre-specified eligibility criteria, looked at all the then known evidence for stopping the spread of Covid.

"Cochrane has responded to the crisis by gathering its community, working closely with the World Health Organization (WHO) and other stakeholders, in developing and publishing several systematic reviews on the effectiveness of behavioural public health measures for reducing COVID‐19 infection.[1] These measures include masks, handwashing, physical distancing, quarantine, contact tracing, screening, and travel restrictions. Because COVID‐19 is still so new, however, these reviews have largely summarized effects on transmission of other viruses in non‐pandemic conditions. Policy makers must act on incomplete evidence in responding to COVID‐19 | Cochrane Library (November 20, 2020)

The results were inconclusive for masks, handwashing, physical distancing, quarantine, contact tracing, screening, and travel restrictions. That didn't stop policy makers from what they do best--making policy. OK, that's what Cochrane found 2.5 years ago, but the policy makers went right ahead, especially the teachers unions which appeared to be advising the CDC.

Now, Cochrance has again published its results of more current studies (although in my opinion there are too few since some researchers were "cancelled" or were prevented from studying or publishing their results if it went against policies already put in place using no evidence). Do physical measures such as hand-washing or wearing masks stop or slow down the spread of respiratory viruses? | Cochrane (January 30, 2023)

"We are uncertain whether wearing masks or N95/P2 respirators helps to slow the spread of respiratory viruses based on the studies we assessed. Hand hygiene programmes may help to slow the spread of respiratory viruses."

I recall writing about the mask literature in summer of 2020 at my blog and Facebook. I checked every few weeks in the medical databases for evidence that masking could stop the spread of Covid-19. I never found it, and the virus continued to spread despite masks, distancing, isolation, and vaccine/boosters. I got a lot of push back from people who knew nothing except what they'd heard from the media.

I continue to believe that masks and hand washing can reduce the spread of colds and flu by blocking the air borne molecules which transport the virus, but Covid, no. Too small to block.

Covid and Wokeism

Covid and Wokeism. This writer, David Suissa, calls them both viruses, but I'd say one is a virus, the other is a metastasis. Both have hit us at the same time creating suspicion, anger, incivility and fear. The virus is inclusive; the metastasis is exclusionary. The virus goes after our cells; the other after our souls.

"It’s odd that these two major forces have hit us at the same time. They’re mirror opposites. The fear of dying from COVID makes us small and humble and deeply grateful just to be alive. 

Wokeism nurtures the opposite of gratitude. We feel cocky, entitled and intolerant. Anyone who offends us must be attacked, if not cancelled. Any speaker who will offend us must be stopped. We have a right to not be exposed to anything that might hurt our feelings or make us feel “unsafe.” " . . .

"Wokeism is a symptom of modern decadence, when maximum convenience and comfort trigger a nostalgia for epic struggles and dramatic causes. Absent these historic movements of yesteryear, the woke must come up with endless grievances to gain power and boost their self-esteem. That’s why they can’t stand to recognize real progress—it undermines their grievance-obsessed narrative.

A key tenet of wokeism is to preach inclusion and diversity, but with a crucial catch: Wokeism scrupulously excludes ideological diversity, which would be too messy. We’re inclusive in all ways, in other words, except when it comes to your opinions.

 
COVID is truly all-inclusive. It comes after all of us. It’s straightforward. It wants to enter our bodies and contaminate our cells. . . wokeism contaminates our souls. "

Joe Rogan interviews Robert Malone--a must read

 Dr. Robert Malone on Joe Rogan's Podcast (rumble.com)

Ready for some heavy-duty listening from a virologist with nearly 100 peer-reviewed articles which have been cited thousands of times?  Twitter has blocked him--always a good sign something must be right in what he is saying.  Big Tech seems allergic to the truth, or even a hint of truth.

COVID-19: Famotidine, Histamine, Mast Cells, and Mechanisms - PubMed (nih.gov)

Cationic liposome-mediated RNA transfection - PubMed (nih.gov)

More Than Just Heartburn: Does Famotidine Effectively Treat Patients with COVID-19? - PubMed (nih.gov)

Zika Fetal Neuropathogenesis: Etiology of a Viral Syndrome - PubMed (nih.gov)

General 2 — Robert W Malone MD (rwmalonemd.com)

WHAT DO COVID, HIV AND MANY COMMON COLDS HAVE IN COMMON? — Robert W Malone MD (rwmalonemd.com)

Bioethics of Experimental COVID Vaccine Deployment under EUA: It’s time we stop and look at what’s going down. (trialsitenews.com)

The Unity Project (unityprojectonline.com)

Covid-19: Researcher blows the whistle on data integrity issues in Pfizer’s vaccine trial | The BMJ

TB vaccine is 100 years old--and it's not 100%; and flu season is coming

 Although we have the BCG vaccine for TB, it isn't 100% and other public health measures are necessary to control the disease. Killing nearly 1.5 million people in 2019, it stood as the leading global cause of death from an infectious pathogen, according to the World Health Organization. Do not expect the Covid vaccine to be perfect or 100%.

 Bile and Potatoes, 1921 | The Scientist Magazine® (the-scientist.com)

Although masks don't provide much protection against Covid19, they really help during flu season. I plan to mask up for that. And the flu will probably be baaaack with a vengeance this fall and winter.
"In the United States alone, influenza viruses cause hundreds of thousands of hospitalizations and tens of thousands of fatalities each year. During the pandemic, however, a drastic change occurred: there was a precipitous drop in infections with influenza and other respiratory viruses—and in some parts of the world, some of these pathogens are nowhere to be found.

. . . Mask wearing, social distancing, and other restrictions implemented to stave off SARS-CoV-2 are thought to be the primary culprits in the decline in other respiratory pathogens in circulation. As such measures are lifted, though, scientists are expecting the missing viruses to return—and are pondering what will happen when that occurs. " The Pandemic Crushed the Flu--What Happens When It Returns? | The Scientist Magazine® (the-scientist.com)

Cultural differences and Covid cases

I was browsing an NIH study on Covid in Boston which reported that most people hospitalized with it would recover. Good news, right? Well, there's a racial disparity. Covid19 disproportionately affects people of color, and the researchers found a large number of their patients were Hispanic (30 percent) or Black (10 percent). Well, that didn't look very alarming to me, and I'm not a demographer. So I took a quick look at the population of Boston. Now, some ZIP codes are 60-70% minority, but overall, the population is 28.2% black and either 17.5 or 19.7% Hispanic depending on the source. If viruses cared about equity, there would be more blacks and fewer Hispanics in Boston with Covid.

Because "Hispanic" is a made up term, people in that demographic are not a racial group, but black or white or multiracial people who either speak Spanish, or whose parents did. So checking further, I did find an article that seems to indicate black Hispanics do more poorly than white Hispanics, and overall, Hispanics use more intensive care and support than other groups. When the data diving has finally used up all the grant money, I think researchers will find a cultural element to these infection numbers. We have been warned about keeping our distance from the beginning of this viral spread, and if you have any experience outside your own neighborhood, you know that personal space differs widely among cultures. People of Latin American and Southern European countries require less personal space according to research, and Asians are comfortable with more distance and will start backing up if you get too close. Europeans (including the majority of white Americans), Asian Indians and Native Americans prefer something in the middle. So think about how viruses spread. Close up and personal. Little tiny virus particles clinging to bits of droplets expelled when breathing, talking or singing.

Tucker interviews virologist from China

"As it happens, February 6th, that day the paper went online, was also the date of the first coronavirus death in this country. The American media had every reason to pay attention to what the Chinese scientists found. But they didn’t. For nearly two months, the paper was all but ignored by news outlets. On March 31st, this show broadcast its contents. By then, more than 3,700 Americans had died from the coronavirus. Tens of thousands were hospitalized. We imagined there would be a serious national effort to find out where the virus came from, and how the pandemic started. But we were wrong. There wasn’t. There was silence. Once again, the people in charge of our public health infrastructure simply ignored credible evidence that contradicted the Chinese government’s version of events."

Tucker talked to the virologist who fears for her life and fled China. It's not from nature, and the release was deliberate.

Which candidate for president is chummy with China? Biden. Facebook suppressed the video of the interview. Which candidate does Big Tech support? Biden. They've "fact checked" her and pulled her account, but they covered something completely unrelated from months ago.

Facebook and Big Tech believe in censorship.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2020/09/17/tucker_carlson_on_youtube_silencing_coronavirus_opinions_this_is_what_state_media_looks_like.html

Coronavirus is novel, but the old fashioned is bad, too

While coronaviruses aren’t new, this particular one (known as 2019-nCoV) is. “We’ve seen coronavirus before, but this is a new version,” Gonsenhauser says. “So any time there’s something new people automatically go to Ebola and the zombie apocalypse, thinking that it’s untreatable and deadly. That’s not what we’re seeing. It’s certainly spreading more rapidly than SARS did, but it’s not more dangerous than other viral strains.”

As U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar stated in a Jan. 28 press briefing: "This is a very fast moving, constantly changing situation,” adding, “but, at this point, Americans should not worry for their own safety."

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/the-flu-has-killed-10000-americans-as-the-world-worries-over-coronavirus-221101770.html

We’ve been sitting in a hospital for 5 days and observing a lot of sick people with relatives and friends coming and going.  Face masks, tissues, gloves, hand sanitizers and signs in Chinese seem to be everywhere.  Still, I see a lot of medical personnel ungloved, perhaps an allergy to the latex?

I’ve been out of the news loop for some time, but I think I heard on a radio news show that 750,000,000 Chinese have been quarantined.  I can’t even imagine that—twice the population of the USA and they are restricted in movement?  I keep wondering—who gets out to repair things that break down?  Who is stocking the stores? Who is doing the transport?

This account, assembling stories from various sources, sounds quite draconian.  Even stories of people be welded inside their apartments. Have no idea if it is authoritative of just click bait. https://www.theorganicprepper.com/quarantine-in-china/

The microscopic world within us

"Thousands of species of microbes—bacteria, viruses, fungi, and protozoa—inhabit every internal and external surface of the human body. Collectively, these microbes, known as the microbiome, outnumber the body’s human cells by about 10 to 1 and include more than 1,000 species of microorganisms and several million genes residing in the skin, respiratory system, urogenital, and gastrointestinal tracts. The microbiome’s complicated relationship with its human host is increasingly considered so crucial to health that researchers sometimes call it “the forgotten organ.”

Disturbances to the microbiome can arise from nutritional deficiencies, antibiotic use, and antiseptic modern life. Imbalances in the microbiome’s diverse microbial communities, which interact constantly with cells in the human body, may contribute to chronic health conditions, including diabetes, asthma and allergies, obesity and the metabolic syndrome, digestive disorders including irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), and autoimmune disorders like multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis, research shows." 

Read at AACC (American Association for Clinical Chemistry)

This article says that 10 to 1 figure is a myth.  If you have 30 trillion cells, you'll only have 39 trillion bacteria.
Nature.

   

Tools.

Of particular interest is fecal transplantation, a procedure in which stool is transferred from a healthy donor to an unhealthy recipient (perhaps the same person, in the case of autologous stool transplant). This procedure has been 90–95% effective for treating Clostridium difficile-associated disease versus only 20–30% efficacy for antibiotics. Understanding which other diseases associated with dysbiosis of the microbiome could be corrected remains a major goal of microbiome research. The current regulatory framework in the United States, regulating stool as a drug and requiring an investigational new drug (IND) application for any application other than C. difficile, however, is a substantial barrier to research. Understanding more generally how various therapies including antibiotics, probiotics, prebiotics (essentially, fertilizer for the microbiome), phage therapy, etc. can reshape the microbiome remains a major technological and theoretical challenge.

And no DDT

In slightly more than a year, the Americas have seen more than 1.24 million cases of chikungunya virus, a mosquito-borne disease that causes high fever and debilitating joint pain.

But there are hopes for a vaccine. http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/Vaccines/50288

The non-measles outbreak is taking lives—EV-D68

“CDC and medical experts state that measles is very dangerous: for every 1,000 cases of measles there will be approximately 2 deaths. But the death risk among serious cases of EV-D68 may be several fold greater: at least 14 associated deaths reported among 1,153 cases.” Sharyl Attkisson

Ebola—the virus has taken over the news

The news and talk shows are wall to wall Ebola. Conservative talkers are trying to make Obama look bad without saying so, and the Liberals are trying to ignore all the mess Obama has made in the Middle East, where we have ONE friend, Israel.

• Flu-associated deaths according to the CDC range from a low of about 3,000 to a high of about 49,000 people. They really have no way of knowing.
• CDC estimates that 27,000 unintentional prescription drug overdose deaths occur annually in the United States, 40% from opioids.
• A total of 9,582 TB cases (a rate of 3.0 cases per 100,000 persons) were reported in the United States in 2013. 65% were foreign born. There were 536 deaths from TB in 2011, the most recent year for which these data are available.
• Number of deaths from injuries annually in the USA: 187,464. 80.1 million saw a physician or visited the ER or were hospitalized from injuries. 33,783 Americans died in traffic accidents and 32,351 died from firearms, including suicides. 16,238 homicides (2010), 49% were blacks who are 12.5% of the population, and 93% were committed by blacks. There are 289,171 alcohol induced deaths, and  418,068 for drugs.

. . . So, Ebola is probably the least of our worries.

Computer virus problems

I'm really out of commission here. I'm using an old computer xp I had in the basement. I picked up a virus disguised as a microsoft scan, so don't ever say yes to an offer to scan for viruses, even if it says it's microsoft. Don't know that I could have stopped it, but after being "cleaned" by a computer repairman, it reappeared and now the whole thing is fried.

Holiday smoochies--not yet

No kisses for Christmas or New Year's yet. They'll have to wait. We cancelled three events this week due to my husband's cold. Maybe next week?

Photo from Christmas 2001.

Filthy lucre and H1N1

Filthy Lucre usually means obscene or shameful profit, but just plain old paper money is really dirty. I learned this sanitation tip when I was clerking at Zickuhr's Drug store in high school. According to a cartoon health item on the dangers of swine flu I saw this morning viruses can live on paper money for 2 weeks. I always shudder a bit when the coffee clerk pats or rubs the top of the paper top while serving me after handling the money. It would be much better to have the customer pick up and place the cover over the cup.

When I was the veterinary medicine librarian at Ohio State we were constantly washing our circ desk where the returned books came in--zoonotic diseases, you know. Books and hard surfaces in libraries, including keyboards, are really dirty--you could probably scrape them before you washed them.

Americans have a really bad nervous tic of constantly touching their face, nose, eyes, ears or hair while speaking, either casually, in conversation or from the podium. They even do it while on the phone, although the listerner can't see them. Thirty years ago I used to attend the "brown bag" sharing of the agricultural credit group at Ohio State. Over half of the grad students were from Asia or Africa. Since it wasn't my field (I was the librarian), I would amuse myself by noting face touching and nose rubbing by the speakers. I almost never saw a 3rd world student do that--it was about 100 to 1, in favor of the Americans.