#or infectious diseases

[cynically-optomistic]

I dont think there should be a time frame on panic actually

[dsudis]

Help win cleaner indoor air!

The Airborne Act (H.R. 9000) creates incentives to clean up indoor air! It offers tax credits to commercial building owners for conducting indoor air quality assessments and making upgrades to ventilation and air filtration.

Indoor air quality upgrades can reduce substantially airborne diseases—protecting our health and decreasing health care expenses, lost wages and lost productivity.

[pandemic-info]

Excerpts:

���Some things that I love that I can’t do any more are exercising, lifting weights, hiking and reading an hour a day,” he said. ...“Having to still think about Covid fucking sucks. Trust me, I get it,” he said. “But empathy alone is not enough without actions of solidarity.”

According to one report, 400 million people have been affected by long Covid. But it is under-diagnosed and misunderstood. McGorry said in the video he hesitated to speak publicly about his health “primarily because of fear of career discrimination and also people making assumptions about what I can and can’t do”.

...having to convince people that accessibility and disability justice are social justice issues in the first place is incredibly dehumanizing and exhausting and usually very fruitless.”

One of the most common ways disabled people are discriminated against is people making assumptions about their capacities and not consulting them about it.

I’m new to experiencing it first-hand, but a lot of the systemic oppression that disabled people face is neglect. It may not be outright vitriol. If you don’t take the action to make the space accessible, we can’t be there, or we can’t be there safely. We have to risk our lives.

We’re used to being told that you get healthier by putting in effort. But with long Covid, to recover, many experts say to do less and rest. I was a personal trainer for a decade, including during my first two seasons of Orange Is the New Black. I was heavily indoctrinated into diet culture and thin supremacy. We’re taught you just have to keep pushing. A person that I help care for is mostly housebound, and often bed-bound. I was in a session with them with a neurologist recently, who was like, “But you should get up and walk around the block.” So it runs deep.

As an able-bodied person, you trust that your doctor is going to steer the ship if something pops up. But if I were to wait for them and not be proactive, my health would have continued to decline. So, for me, it looks like reading studies, following people who are at the forefront of the science, and cross-referencing with other people in the [long Covid] community. 

Before I had long Covid, when I was unconsciously invested in ideas of health and goodness and virtue, there was pride in being a good patient at the doctor. ... The more you have a complex illness, the more you end up having to push and advocate for certain things, including masking in the offices, which is absolutely exhausting.

I think people don’t understand that. You’re asking, “Hey, would you mind protecting my life?” When someone’s like, “Oh God, what a pain in the ass,” experiences like that make you reticent to ask in the future.

If we’re only focused on individual change and not on the systemic issues that actually have a larger impact on health, like poverty and lack of access to medical care, then what we’re doing is not really about health. It’s about thinness and desirability and social status. If we don’t have accessible healthcare, both for cost and when people feel safe to show up and not get infected, what we’re doing is not health. We’re excluding the people that actually need it the most, which in any other social justice issue we would understand is a huge fucking problem and that something needs to be done about it.

...it really comes down to respirators and getting updated vaccines, which most people just do not do these days. The science is really clear that getting Covid over and over again is not good for anyone. I... And I understand that it emotionally costs something – to admit that there is a risk disrupts the illusion of denial and back to normal.

[the-shadows-request-candy-corn]

Trump may be about to sign the death sentence of the National Institute of Health, and, by extension, the Office of Lab Animal Welfare.

He gutted research animal protections.

Any vertebrate that isn't a mammal will have no rights.

Neither will mice or rats.

If NIH grants are stopped, researchers can't pay anyone. They can't perform research. They can't pay for veterinary services.

They won't be required to provide veterinary services.

The only medical research that will happen will be self funded by big pharma, and they can torture the animals and skew all the lab results that they want.

Just like Musk did to the primates in his neuralink research.

I don't know what's going to happen to me or anyone else at the university where I work. My job is to make sure the animals are treated humanely and to provide veterinary care. I'm especially scared about what's going to happen to those research animals if veterinary staff gets laid off. The USDA only covers mammals, and it doesn't even cover all of them. Every rat I've ever made a tiny paper gift box full of marshmallows for, every mouse I've ever watched grow up, every rodent I've ever separated from an aggressive dominant brother and then treated their tiny wounds, they have no protections if NIH goes down. Decades of research into humane handling, euthanasia, and animal behavior will be tossed aside and wasted.

Please, do everything you can. Protest. Contact your representatives. Anything you can do. Do it for science, for medicine, for people's lives, for people's jobs, and for the animals.

[covid-safer-hotties]

Source

[thehappyvet]

Where do people get this misconception that every single wildlife case at a vet clinic is euthanased so it's better to not take them in even if they're obviously hurt or sick and in need of treatment?!?!

Friendly reminder that a member of the public should not be able to easily pick up or catch a wild animal. We are not in a disney movie. If you can pick it up*, 80% of the time its extremely hurt or sick.

Wildlife, and most animals for that matter, do not show pain as humans do. That does not mean they are not in pain and suffering.

Veterinarians only euthanase wild animals that are suffering from extreme injury or illness, or animals that would stress themselves to death in a hospital setting that cannot be released and survive in the wild with their issue.

We do euthanase some animals, but that's because it's the best welfare decision for that animal and its specific problem.

Maybe trust the professionals trained in providing treatment to animals instead of some Karen on Facebook who demonises vets because she can't understand a bird with multiple wing and shoulder fractures is very unlikely to regain flight and return to the wild and her plan of keeping it means it will live a life of chronic pain and suffering.

*Disclaimer: If you live in a country where diseases such as rabies are endemic, you should not handle wildlife at all if you are not trained or vaccinated. This post is not recommending members of the public handle wildlife in any country.

[reasonsforhope]

"Since it was first identified in 1983, HIV has infected more than 85 million people and caused some 40 million deaths worldwide.

While medication known as pre-exposure prophylaxis, or PrEP, can significantly reduce the risk of getting HIV, it has to be taken every day to be effective. A vaccine to provide lasting protection has eluded researchers for decades. Now, there may finally be a viable strategy for making one.

An experimental vaccine developed at Duke University triggered an elusive type of broadly neutralizing antibody in a small group of people enrolled in a 2019 clinical trial. The findings were published today [May 17, 2024] in the scientific journal Cell.

“This is one of the most pivotal studies in the HIV vaccine field to date,” says Glenda Gray, an HIV expert and the president and CEO of the South African Medical Research Council, who was not involved in the study.

A few years ago, a team from Scripps Research and the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) showed that it was possible to stimulate the precursor cells needed to make these rare antibodies in people. The Duke study goes a step further to generate these antibodies, albeit at low levels.

“This is a scientific feat and gives the field great hope that one can construct an HIV vaccine regimen that directs the immune response along a path that is required for protection,” Gray says.

-via WIRED, May 17, 2024. Article continues below.

Vaccines work by training the immune system to recognize a virus or other pathogen. They introduce something that looks like the virus—a piece of it, for example, or a weakened version of it—and by doing so, spur the body’s B cells into producing protective antibodies against it. Those antibodies stick around so that when a person later encounters the real virus, the immune system remembers and is poised to attack.

While researchers were able to produce Covid-19 vaccines in a matter of months, creating a vaccine against HIV has proven much more challenging. The problem is the unique nature of the virus. HIV mutates rapidly, meaning it can quickly outmaneuver immune defenses. It also integrates into the human genome within a few days of exposure, hiding out from the immune system.

“Parts of the virus look like our own cells, and we don’t like to make antibodies against our own selves,” says Barton Haynes, director of the Duke Human Vaccine Institute and one of the authors on the paper.

The particular antibodies that researchers are interested in are known as broadly neutralizing antibodies, which can recognize and block different versions of the virus. Because of HIV’s shape-shifting nature, there are two main types of HIV and each has several strains. An effective vaccine will need to target many of them.

Some HIV-infected individuals generate broadly neutralizing antibodies, although it often takes years of living with HIV to do so, Haynes says. Even then, people don’t make enough of them to fight off the virus. These special antibodies are made by unusual B cells that are loaded with mutations they’ve acquired over time in reaction to the virus changing inside the body. “These are weird antibodies,” Haynes says. “The body doesn’t make them easily.”

Haynes and his colleagues aimed to speed up that process in healthy, HIV-negative people. Their vaccine uses synthetic molecules that mimic a part of HIV’s outer coat, or envelope, called the membrane proximal external region. This area remains stable even as the virus mutates. Antibodies against this region can block many circulating strains of HIV.

The trial enrolled 20 healthy participants who were HIV-negative. Of those, 15 people received two of four planned doses of the investigational vaccine, and five received three doses. The trial was halted when one participant experienced an allergic reaction that was not life-threatening. The team found that the reaction was likely due to an additive in the vaccine, which they plan to remove in future testing.

Still, they found that two doses of the vaccine were enough to induce low levels of broadly neutralizing antibodies within a few weeks. Notably, B cells seemed to remain in a state of development to allow them to continue acquiring mutations, so they could evolve along with the virus. Researchers tested the antibodies on HIV samples in the lab and found that they were able to neutralize between 15 and 35 percent of them.

Jeffrey Laurence, a scientific consultant at the Foundation for AIDS Research (amfAR) and a professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College, says the findings represent a step forward, but that challenges remain. “It outlines a path for vaccine development, but there’s a lot of work that needs to be done,” he says.

For one, he says, a vaccine would need to generate antibody levels that are significantly higher and able to neutralize with greater efficacy. He also says a one-dose vaccine would be ideal. “If you’re ever going to have a vaccine that’s helpful to the world, you’re going to need one dose,” he says.

Targeting more regions of the virus envelope could produce a more robust response. Haynes says the next step is designing a vaccine with at least three components, all aimed at distinct regions of the virus. The goal is to guide the B cells to become much stronger neutralizers, Haynes says. “We’re going to move forward and build on what we have learned.”

-via WIRED, May 17, 2024

[tomorrowusa]

People need to be reminded of Trump's woeful incompetence which came to a head during the pandemic emergency and resulted in the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.

The Obama administration successfully dealt with the threats from swine flu and Ebola. There was no swine flu disaster, there was no Ebola disaster, and there was even no Zika disaster because competent people were running the US. Near the end of Obama's term, his National Security Council staff put together a 69-page playbook on how to deal with pandemic emergencies. It's called "Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents". Of course Trump ignored the document and plunged the nation into COVID hell.

Trump team failed to follow NSC’s pandemic playbook

Michelle Obama, in one of her best speeches ever in Kalamazoo this weekend, excoriated Trump's incompetence.

Michelle Obama laced into Donald Trump in a searing speech in Michigan on Saturday, accusing the former president of “gross incompetence” and having an “amoral character” while challenging hesitant Americans to choose Kamala Harris for US president. “By every measure, she has demonstrated that she’s ready,” the former first lady told a rapt audience in Kalamazoo. “The real question is, as a country, are we ready for this moment?” [ ... ] In raw and strikingly personal terms, she asked why Harris was being held to a “higher standard” than her opponent. Trump’s handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and his failed attempt to cling to power after losing the 2020 election should alone be disqualifying, Obama argued. But now the people who worked closest with him when he was president – his former advisers and cabinet secretaries – had stepped forward with a warning that he should not be allowed to return to power.

ICYMI, here is Michelle Obama's speech in Michigan.

Too many people have been afflicted by Trumpnesia. They seem to have forgotten the catastrophe that happened starting on 22 January 2020 when the first COVID infection was discovered on US soil. On that day Trump told CNBC: "we have it totally under control" and "it's going to be just fine".

Instead of following Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents, Trump did the usual bullshit Trump things like criticize the Oscars and rage-tweet from the bathroom. He belatedly declared a state of emergency on Friday the 13th of March – the day after the stock market crashed.

Don't let anybody in real life get away with describing the Trump years as some sort of utopia.

Some people disingenuously claim they don't know enough about Kamala Harris despite her 20 years in public service. We all know more than enough about Trump's egregious ineptitude which turned a national emergency into a prolonged national nightmare.

[transfemmbeatrice]

taskmaster contestants ask you things......... TWO (part one)

[amaditalks]

The thing that I will never get over nor forgive is the lying.

Enough white women lied to pollsters, phonebankers, and canvassers at their doors about voting for Harris against their husbands’ wishes, or wanting to vote for Harris but being concerned about what their Trump supporting husbands would do that an entire PSA campaign arose, and talking points went out to phone bankers from every organization to remind those women that their votes were private and that their husbands could never find out who they voted for.

But then those white women went out and they voted for the rapist in almost the exact same percentages as they did in the last two elections. 

Why all the performance? It feels like an intentional ratfucking effort.

There is a pernicious moral rot and an integrity vacuum amongst white voters. And it’s only other white people who can fix that.

[thewalrusespublicist]

Hello! Love your blog and your takes, objective and sane and well researched chefs kiss! I had a blast scrolling through it like it was my feed yesterday lol can you elaborate on klaus and Paul if possible? People mostly talk about them like it’s already understood but I don’t understand 😭 I’m kinda lost on their (all of them, including stu) dynamic during the hamburg years specifically when it comes to Paul

Aww thank you anon! Tbh I was starting to feel a bit down about my blog and what I was putting out ( the eternal crisis on how to give full answers and opinions without being stupid, boring and annoying lol). So I really, really needed this. :)

Oh Paul vs/and the Exsis, it's quite a long one so buckle up.

Disclaimer: all of the people involved are essentially art kids/young adults who are famously the most exhausting people on the planet. Do not blame them for being dramatic, it's their natural state of being.

If we want to go into Paul and Klaus, we have to kind of start with the John, Paul and Stu. Now these three are a mess that's too big to go into here (though I have THOUGHTS about how Stu is utilised in the Beatles narrative that I'm more than happy to share if asked lmaooo). But in short(ish):

John and Paul had had an intense year and a bit of closeness. Then John meets Stu at art college.

John and Stu become c l o s e for many reasons (being peers, living together, similar artistic leanings + ego, Stu being a gentle guide to John, sharing art projects/poetry/long letters and feelings etc.) They became 'closer than two men' a friend had seen (remind us of anyone gang?). Most importantly, John could be open about his feelings with Stu in letters. If John had BPD which I subscribe too, I think Stu was his 'favourite person' and as Aunt Mimi said his 'special' and 'closest friend' from this period up until his death (though imho the transference back to Paul was starting prior to his death).

It's not clear what exactly happens as there's differing accounts but Stu uses his money to buy a new bass as John wants him to come to Scotland then Hamburg and play bass as he will 'look good'.

Paul doesen't like being relegated to the seat behind John and Stu when he used to sit next to John. He also isn't thrilled when he gets to Hamburg and not only does he get to sleep in the other room with just Pete but Stu cannot be arsed to play because he's hanging out with his hot new girlfriend Astrid (more on her in a sec). Our boy has spent a lot of money he doesen't have and given up on further education to be here and is jealous and annoyed.

Paul and Stu probably were friends and I think their mutual antipathy is overegged. HOWEVER, can't be denied that Paul is jealous of Stu and Stu is jealous of Paul (and getting flare-ups from increasing brain damage). John and Stu tease Paul and steal his money, Paul is mean to Stu (as are the others encouraged by John). Do I think John was playing games with both of them? Yup. They end up scuffling onstage because Paul said something about Astrid (not clear what, one account is that Paul said that Stu could borrow money off Astrid if he needed it which isn't really that bad a dig but who knows Yoko??).

Why is this dynamic important? Because it directly impacts the 'Exsis' (Klaus, Jurgen and Astrid's) group's relationship with Paul:

The Exsis were young artists living in Hamburg. They were artistic, cool, interesting and edgy. They were paramount in introducing the Beatles to cool new concepts, aesthetics and ideas. They also took themselves VERY seriously ie pretentious as all hell.

Astrid met Stu at Kaiserkeller and hit it off. They embarked on an all-consuming romance.

Letter from Stu to Astrid, c.1961

I've seen people say they were the proto-John and Yoko in terms of making their romance the whole world and influencing John years down the line and I can see that. With Astrid and Stu it's far more endearing though because they ARE young and the right age to have a relationship like that. Stu is popular with the Exsis in general and brings them into the Beatles group.

The Exsis didn't like or trust Paul. Astrid said later it was because Paul was 'too nice' which she herself admits is a ridiculous reason. The others also thought he was a bit of a show-off. It makes sense though if you're cool and edgy and want to stick it to the world to be sus about a guy being friendly show-off with seemingly no inner world. The other problem was a perfectly reasonable one imo, you're not going to like your friends frenemy who you don't connect with. Compound that with Paul not taking drugs as much as George or John and being in the other room and you begin to have a division.

Paul had been popular his whole life, like from what we know since-primary-school-popular. He had never been in this position before, let alone in a foreign country. I believe it became a bit of a brutal feedback loop. Paul's response to this type of behaviour consistently it to go more surface level, snide and passive aggressive. The natural response of any group with a designated 'ugh' person is to become more shady and exclusionary. The cycle continues and gets worse. Stu letters back home at this time says that in a shocking turn of events Paul is hated by everyone but Stu 'just feels sorry for him' (lmao OF COURSE you do Stu, its giving 'loathing' from Wicked lol). Klaus drew a lot of artwork of the early Hamburg Beatles that includes this highly unpleasant picture of Paul in 1961 which I think says a lot:

Klaus is also a musician and fancies himself a place on bass. When Stu leaves to pursue art, Klaus asks John if he could take over but John says that he thinks Paul is going to do it.

Klaus has later gone on to say that he thinks he was a better bass player for the Beatles' sound at the start and then Paul developed into being better for the group. It's one of those I cannot believe those words actually left your mouth and you are not deeply embarrased moments. But it's important to keep this desire and viewpoint in mind.

Klaus stays in touch with all of them and close to John and George, George especially. They visit Klaus on holiday in tenerife in early 60s and Klaus later draws the Revolver artwork.

This whole context of how they met and Hamburg is crucial and has to be taken into account when hearing Klaus' statements. Klaus and Paul started off with a lack of connection and with Paul on the outs, the Exsis got an incomplete view of Paul and an inaccurate snapshot of the Beatles dynamic overall. This is why when Klaus says 'Paul was always slightly apart from the others' and that 'divorce was inevitable' from early 60s we should remember that that is what Klaus is expecting to see as that's what he saw in Hamburg.

Klaus wanted to be the bass player (and was holding out hope to join a band with George and John in the 70s), was really close with George and suffers as many did with 'John Lennon aspiring boy bestie syndrome' (JABBS). Paul had what Klaus wanted and from the Hamburg experience, you could see why Klaus thought he might have an in and may have been jealous of this 'shallow' Paul of all people having the connection that he felt he should/could have with John and George. As with most sufferers of JABBS, he took John's side with everything, always refused to say any regrets about his involvement in How do you Sleep and thought Paul was fine with the song because 'he was even closer to John than [he] was. (Again Klaus to put yourself in that level of closeness with John that it's comparable to Paul is ???.) JABBS and its secondary condition PMIETGSH (Paul McCartney isn't even that good shut up) are virulent diseases that incapacitate sufferers objectivity and judgement, so it's fair to say that Klaus is a source you have to take with a pinch of salt on the early 70s period.

It seems that Klaus and Paul did get on a lot better the older they got (probably without the jealousy complication of George and John) and developed a sweet friendship. Here is Klaus' tribute to Paul for his 80th:

Here is the jam session he's talking about:

He now wants Paul to live in his house lmao so things have gotten warmer. But Klaus and Paul's dynamic is a great example of how and why natural bias, little jealousies and spats can consciously or subconsciously influence our internal narrative and why we need to be so careful about not taking one perspective as gospel.

[sandboxer]

it’s actually very boring the way some people will claim to be a “freak” and kink-positive and then make these very funny “jokes” about how they couldn’t possibly reblog art where a character happens to have their shoes off, they couldn’t possibly put an ounce of detail into the feet in their art even when the legs are perfectly rendered… because what if people think they have a foot fetish, how mortifying would that be, lmao imagine having a foot fetish, don’t you dare accuse me of something so WEIRD!

[republicansaretheproblem]

The Sacklers own Perdue Pharmaceuticals which developed Oxycontin, various addictive opiods, and they are generally considered a main driving force behind the opiod epidemic.

[nando161mando]

COVID denialism and misinformation has led to Olympic athletes not even washing their hands because they wrongly think it will help them become more resistant against disease.

There is no evidence handwashing weakens your immune system. There is no evidence that adopting unsanitary practices makes your immune system stronger. But there is a lot of evidence that handwashing and other precautions protects you and others from infectious diseases, especially in risky environments like bathrooms.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HermanCainAward/

https://www.sorryantivaxxer.com/

[covid-safer-hotties]

Also preserved in our archive

(Of course, no mention of masks or prevention. Just the largest TB outbreak in US history. Nothing to see here.)

[serpentface]

Cold sores are thought to be best addressed by lancing the sore to remove polluted blood, washing with vinegar, applying a paste of honey + tansy + horsefat. In frequently recurring cases, it's considered best practice to also shave the face to eliminate any lingering traces of infection. This is the most psychologically devastating thing that Brakul has ever experienced in his life.