Good News

Not that it's going to get BKjr to budget on his "position", but maybe more people will get the word, and stop being quite so silly.

Of course, news of the positive effects on the human brain probably won't mean much to people who are already pretty demented by their conspiracy fantasies.

Hope a little. Pray a little.

Shingles vaccine may actually slow down dementia, study finds

If these findings are confirmed, “then this would be groundbreaking for dementia,” an expert said.

A common vaccine meant to ward off shingles may be doing something even more extraordinary: protecting the brain.

Earlier this year, researchers reported that the shingles vaccine cuts the risk of developing dementia by 20 percent over a seven-year period.

A large follow-up study has found that shingles vaccination may protect against risks at different stages of dementia — including for people already diagnosed.

The research, published Tuesday in the journal Cell, found that cognitively healthy people who received the vaccine were less likely to develop mild cognitive impairment, an early symptomatic phase before dementia.AI Icon

Crucially, the study suggests that the shingles vaccine — two doses of which are recommended for adults 50 and older or those 19 and older with a weakened immune system — may help people who already have dementia. Those who got the vaccine were almost 30 percent less likely to die of dementia over nine years, suggesting the vaccine may be slowing the progression of the neurodegenerative syndrome.

“It appears to be protective along the spectrum or the trajectory of the disease,” said Anupam Jena, a professor of health care policy at Harvard Medical School and a physician at Massachusetts General Hospital who reviewed the paper.

There are few effective treatments for dementia and no preventive measures outside lifestyle changes.

“These findings are promising because they suggest that something can be done,” said Alberto Ascherio, a professor of epidemiology and nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health and a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. “Obviously, the vaccine was not designed or optimized to prevent dementia, so this is sort of an incidental finding. In some ways, we are being lucky.”

The results have led to cautious excitement among researchers.

If these findings are confirmed, “then this would be groundbreaking for dementia,” said Maxime Taquet, an associate professor at the University of Oxford who has conducted research into shingles vaccination and dementia risk. “I think there’s no other word for it.”

Protection across the dementia spectrum

Research has linked common vaccines, including for shingles, to lower dementia risk.

For these observational studies, there is a “healthy vaccine bias,” said Ascherio, who wasn’t involved in the study. “People who get vaccines tend to be healthier in general than people who don’t” because they may have different health-related behaviors.

Because randomized controlled trials — the gold standard in medical research — aren’t often feasible in the real world, scientists who conducted the research published Tuesday took advantage of a historical quirk in how Wales rolled out its shingles vaccination program in 2013.

Only Welsh adults born on or after Sept. 2, 1933, were eligible for the vaccine. Those born right before were ineligible, meaning the public health policy effectively set up a “natural experiment” comparing two near-identical groups of people who either met the vaccine eligibility cutoff or missed it.

“The question then is: Where do you start with this vaccine during the disease course? And does it have benefits for those who already have the condition?” said Pascal Geldsetzer, an assistant professor of medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and a senior author of the research.

The vaccine was not only associated with a 20 percent reduction of dementia diagnoses, but also a 3.1 percent reduction in diagnoses of mild cognitive impairment over nine years.

“It suggests that from a clinical public health perspective, we should be providing this potentially at early stages, maybe on a regular basis,” Geldsetzer said.

There doesn’t seem to be a time when it’s too late in the disease progression to derive benefits, he added.

Dementia, in its final stages, can lead to death.

During the nine-year follow-up period, almost half of the 14,350 individuals who had dementia in the study sample died of dementia, meaning it was recorded as the underlying cause on their death certificate.

“Bad dementia can lead you to aspirate and have respiratory arrest,” said Jena, who wasn’t involved in the study. “Bad dementia can lead you to be unable to care for yourself.”

The shingles vaccine decreased deaths due to dementia by 29.5 percent. Even when looking at all-cause mortality, the shingles vaccine was associated with a 22.7 percent reduction.

These results “suggest that there is a slowing of this degenerative process,” which seems to be “striking good luck that the vaccine designed for something else would slow a degenerative process,” Ascherio said.

The magnitude of the effects is “almost too good to be true,” said Taquet, who wasn’t involved in the study.

“If those effect sizes really pan out in randomized control trials, then this would be perhaps one of the best treatments we’ve had for dementia in a while, which is the reason why we need to be quite cautious with interpretation,” he said. “That’s why we need the randomized control trials, but I think they really provide the strongest possible push for randomized control trials.”

Shingles vaccines today, research tomorrow

There are study limitations that need to be worked out.

For one, the study looked at the older shingles vaccine using a weakened version of the live varicella-zoster herpes virus. That vaccine has been discontinued in the United States, as well as in the European Union and Australia, and has been replaced with the Shingrix vaccine, which is more effective at preventing shingles and may also be associated with a lower risk of dementia.

However, it’s unknown whether the newer vaccine is also associated with a reduced risk for mild cognitive impairment or death due to dementia, researchers said. Despite its strengths, and its being as close to a randomized controlled trial without being one, the study is still correlational and cannot get at causation.

Still, experts unanimously encourage eligible people to get the vaccine, which reduces the reactivation of the varicella-zoster virus. The virus causes chicken pox in childhood and remains dormant in neuron clusters within the spinal cord. When reactivated in adulthood, the varicella-zoster virus manifests as shingles, which is characterized by a burning, painful rash and can sometimes cause lifelong chronic pain conditions or serious complications in a subset of people.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends two doses of a shingles vaccine for adults 50 and older or those 19 and older with a weakened immune system. But uptake has been relatively low: In 2022, 34.4 percent of eligible Americans, including those with weakened immune systems, had received at least one dose of a shingles vaccine in their lifetime.

In the meantime, researchers are pushing for randomized controlled trials as well as studies to understand why the vaccine is protective, which can teach us something fundamental about dementia and help develop better treatments.

“It’s very important that we understand what it is that we’re targeting, because it might allow us to design even more precise therapies,” said Taquet, who is considering running these studies.

Geldsetzer is working to raise money for a randomized controlled trial to directly test the older shingles vaccine on dementia risk, which he said should require less investment because it’s known to be safe and have other benefits.

There’s a lot of excitement to work on this from other researchers, he said, but he’s had no luck getting the money.

“They’d be thrilled to do this if there’s the funding to do so,” Geldsetzer said. “Just excitement unfortunately is not enough.”

Update

Over the last 26,504 days,

my Survival Success Rating is 100%

I can live with that.

🤞🏻 Not Sure What Luck Means Here

It's a shitty thing to do, so I really don't wish ill for anyone. But I'll absolutely admit to being sorely tempted when it comes to Trump.

I'm putting this up as a counter to the plethora of "no big deal" videos that are on every channel.

Calling Dr Kennedy

Quick - somebody get hold of BKjr and tell him those evil science nerds are trying to inject heavy metals directly into our brains!

Research on reversing Alzheimer’s reveals lithium as potential key

Years of investigation by scientists at Harvard has revealed that lithium is deeply involved in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to new treatments.

Seven years of investigation by scientists at Harvard Medical School has revealed that the loss of the metal lithium plays a powerful role in Alzheimer’s disease, a finding that could lead to earlier detection, new treatments and a broader understanding of how the brain ages.

Researchers led by Bruce A. Yankner, a professor of genetics and neurology at Harvard Medical School, reported that they were able to reverse the disease in mice and restore brain function with small amounts of the compound lithium orotate, enough to mimic the metal’s natural level in the brain. Their study appeared Wednesday in the journal Nature.

“The obvious impact is that because lithium orotate is dirt cheap, hopefully we will get rigorous, randomized trials testing this very, very quickly,” said Matt Kaeberlein, former director of the Healthy Aging and Longevity Research Institute at the University of Washington, who did not participate in the study. “And I would say that it will be an embarrassment to the Alzheimer’s clinical community if that doesn’t happen right away.”

Cue the private equity assholes to buy up all the lithium rights - can't have affordable healthcare now can we.

Yankner, who is also the co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for Biology of Aging Research at Harvard, said: “I do not recommend that people take lithium at this point, because it has not been validated as a treatment in humans. We always have to be cautious because things can change as you go from mice to humans.” He added that the findings still need to be validated by other labs.

Although there have been recent breakthroughs in the treatment of Alzheimer’s, no medication has succeeded in stopping or reversing the disease that afflicts more than 7 million Americans, a number projected to reach almost 13 million by 2050, according to the Alzheimer’s Association.

Pathology images from the brain of an Alzheimer's mouse model. The images show that when the mice are treated with a very low dose of lithium orotate, it almost completely eradicates the amyloid plaques and the tau tangle-like structures. (Harvard)

Lithium is widely prescribed for patients with bipolar disorder, and previous research indicated that it held potential as an Alzheimer’s treatment and an antiaging medication. A 2017 study in Denmark suggested the presence of lithium in drinking water might be associated with a lower incidence of dementia.

However, the new work is the first to describe the specific roles that lithium plays in the brain, its influence on all of the brain’s major cell types and the effect that its deficiency later in life has on aging.

Results of the study by Yankner’s lab and researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and the Rush Alzheimer’s Disease Center in Chicago also suggest that measuring lithium levels might help doctors screen people for signs of Alzheimer’s years before the first symptoms begin to appear. Yankner said doctors might be able to measure lithium levels in the cerebrospinal fluid or blood, or through brain imaging.

How our brains use lithium

In a healthy brain, lithium maintains the connections and communication lines that allow neurons to talk with one another. The metal also helps form the myelin that coats and insulates the communication lines and helps microglial cells clear cellular debris that can impede brain function.

“In normal aging mice,” Yankner said, “lithium promotes good memory function. In normal aging humans,” higher lithium levels also correspond to better memory function.

The depletion of lithium in the brain plays a role in most of the deterioration in several mouse models of Alzheimer’s disease.

Loss of lithium accelerates the development of harmful clumps of the protein amyloid beta and tangles of the protein tau that resemble the structures found in people with Alzheimer’s. Amyloid plaques and tau tangles disrupt communication between nerve cells.

The plaques in turn undermine lithium by trapping it, weakening its ability to help the brain function.

Lithium depletion is involved in other destructive processes of Alzheimer’s: decay of brain synapses, damage to the myelin that protects nerve fibers and reduced capacity of microglial cells to break down amyloid plaques.

Lithium’s pervasive role comes despite the fact that our brains contain only a small amount of it. After examining more than 500 human brains from Rush and other brain banks, Yankner’s team discovered the naturally occurring lithium in the brain is 1,000 times less than the lithium provided in medications to treat bipolar disorder.

Li-Huei Tsai, director of the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and who was not involved in the study, called it “very exciting,” especially when many in the field, including her own lab, have focused on genetic risk factors for Alzheimer’s.

“But clearly genetic risk factors are not the only things,” said Tsai, who is also Picower professor of neuroscience. “There are a lot of people walking around carrying these risk genes, but they are not affected by Alzheimer’s disease. I feel this study provides a very important piece of the puzzle.”

Pathways for treatment

Alzheimer’s treatments mostly help to manage symptoms and slow the decline it causes in thinking and functioning. Aducanumab, lecanemab, and donanemab, all lab-made antibodies, bind to the harmful amyloid plaques and help remove them.

Donepezil, rivastigmine and galantamine ― all in the class of medications known as cholinesterase inhibitors ― work by replenishing a chemical messenger called acetylcholine, which is diminished in Alzheimer’s. Acetylcholine plays an important role in memory, muscle movement and attention.

Yankner and his team found that when they gave otherwise healthy mice a reduced-lithium diet, the mice lost brain synapses and began to lose memory. “We found that when we administered lithium orotate to aging mice [that had] started losing their memory, the lithium orotate actually reverted their memory to the young adult, six-month level,” he said.

Lithium orotate helped the mice reduce production of the amyloid plaques and tau tangles, and allowed the microglial cells to remove the plaques much more effectively.

Yankner said one factor that might help lithium orotate reach clinical trials sooner is the small amount of the treatment needed, which could greatly reduce the risk of harmful side effects, such as kidney dysfunction and thyroid toxicity.

Aside from its potential in treating Alzheimer’s, Yankner said lithium orotate might also have implications for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, an area his lab is investigating.

“That needs to be rigorously examined,” he said. “But we’re looking at a whole slew of disorders.”

BKjr Is A Fuckin' Idiot

Florida reports 21 cases of E.coli infections linked to raw milk

Aug 4 (Reuters) - The Florida Department of Health said on Monday that there have been 21 cases of Campylobacter and E. coli infections linked to drinking raw milk in the state, including six children under 10.

The state health department reported seven hospitalizations linked to the consumption of raw milk containing disease-causing bacteria from a particular farm in Northeast/Central Florida.

"Sanitation practices in this farm are of particular concern due to the number of cases," the health department said.

The Shiga toxin-producing E. coli and Campylobacter infections can cause diarrhea, vomiting and stomach cramps. In severe cases, they can cause kidney failure, which is of particular concern for children, the health department said.

In Florida, raw milk is sold only for non-human consumption as pet or animal food, which limits sanitary regulation efforts. Containers must be clearly labeled that the raw milk is for animal consumption only.

Federal health officials have warned against consuming raw milk due to the bird flu outbreak in the United States.

U.S. Health Secretary Kennedy has been a proponent of raw milk.

A Health Influencer

BTW - when 23 million Americans aren't getting enough to eat, it's time to make some real changes.

Fuck the rich

Feed the poor

Or feed the rich to the poor

But yeah - fuck the rich

Entering A Dark Time

Two cities stopped adding fluoride to water. Science reveals what happened

Calgary, Canada, and Juneau, Alaska, show how ending fluoridation can affect health

Warren Loeppky has been a pediatric dentist in the Canadian city of Calgary for 20 years. Over the last decade, he says, tooth decay in children he’s seen has become more common, more aggressive and more severe. Many of his young patients have so much damage that he has to work with them under general anesthesia.

“It’s always sad seeing a young child in pain,” Loeppky says. “Dental decay is very preventable. It breaks your heart to see these young kids that aren’t able to eat.”

Loeppky notes that many factors can contribute to tooth decay in children, including their diet and genetics. Still, he believes part of the problem is linked to a decision made in the halls of local government: In 2011, Calgary stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water.

“This decision of city councilors was surprising to the general public, but shocking and alarming to dentists, to pediatricians, to anesthesiologists and others in the health care field, who knew what it would mean,” says Juliet Guichon, a legal and ethics scholar at the University of Calgary who formed a group that advocated for adding fluoride back to drinking water in the city.

Several studies have shown that fluoride is a safe and effective way to prevent tooth decay. It recruits other minerals, such as calcium and phosphate, to strengthen tooth enamel and fend off acid made by bacteria. Oral health can also affect a person’s overall health.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that communities across the country add 0.7 milligrams of fluoride for every liter of water. It’s up to state and local governments to decide if they want to follow that recommendation. In 2022, the CDC reported that 63 percent of Americans received fluoridated water.

But that practice now is coming under new scrutiny. In March, Utah became the first state to ban fluoridation; many local governments across the country are also debating the issue. And on April 7, Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told news reporters that he planned to tell the CDC to stop its recommendation.

Adding fluoride to water has been contested in the United States since the practice became widespread in the mid-20th century. Opponents have historically voiced health concerns, including about tooth staining and disproven worries that fluoridated water could cause bone cancer, as well as claims that fluoridation amounts to mass medication and violates individual freedoms. More recently, people have pointed to research showing an association between fluoride and lowered IQ in children. But those findings, which have been heavily criticized, looked at fluoride concentrations much higher than those found in most Americans’ drinking water.

What happened in Calgary, as well as in Juneau, Alaska, which stopped water fluoridation in 2007, may be a cautionary tale for other municipalities. Science News spoke with researchers and other experts in both cities to understand what can happen when local governments opt to stop adding fluoride to drinking water.

Looking into the mouths of second-graders in Calgary

Lindsay McLaren says she never anticipated becoming a self-described fluoridation researcher. As a quantitative social scientist at the University of Calgary, she studies how public policies can affect the health of a population. She hadn’t given much thought to fluoridation until 2011, when the Calgary City Council decided to remove fluoride from the city’s water.

The move prompted McLaren to design a study looking at how the dental health of the city’s children fared once fluoride was removed. She recruited dental hygienists to go to schools and inspect the mouths of second-grade students. Some went to schools in Calgary and others went to schools in Edmonton, a similar city in the same province that still fluoridated its water.

In Calgary, the team surveyed 2,649 second-graders around seven years after fluoridation ended, meaning they had likely never been exposed to fluoride in their drinking water. Of those, 65 percent had tooth decay. In Edmonton, 55 percent of surveyed children had tooth decay. While those percentages may seem close, they mark a statistically significant difference that McLaren calls “quite large” on the population level.

“Compared to Edmonton kids, Calgary kids were now considerably worse as far as dental health goes,” McLaren says. Other factors, including diet and socioeconomic status, did not explain the differences between children in Edmonton and Calgary, she says.

In 2024, another study found a higher rate of tooth decay-related treatments for which a child was placed under general anesthesia in Calgary than in Edmonton. From 2018 to 2019, 32 out of every 10,000 children in Calgary were put under general anesthesia to treat tooth decay, compared with 17 for every 10,000 children in Edmonton.

The findings didn’t surprise local dentists, says Bruce Yaholnitsky, a periodontist in Calgary. “This is just obvious to us. But you need to have proper science to prove, in some cases, the obvious.”

Analyzing Medicaid claims in Juneau

Years before Calgary’s city council opted to remove fluoride from its water, members of the local government in Juneau made a similar decision.

Jennifer Meyer says she first became interested in studying the effects of lack of fluoridation in Juneau after moving there in 2015. At the time, she had two young children; a third was born in Juneau. She was surprised at how much dental work, including fillings, she noticed among many other preschool and elementary school children.

“I thought ‘Wow, what’s going on here?’ Because I could see a lot of the decay and the repairs,” Meyer says.

Juneau had stopped adding fluoride to its drinking water in 2007 after asking a six-member commission to review the evidence around fluoridation. A copy of the commission’s report obtained from Meyer, a public health researcher at the University of Alaska Anchorage, shows that two commission members opposed to fluoridation made claims about the health effects that Meyer says are “false” and “not grounded in quality investigations.”

The commission’s chair criticized anti-fluoride positions, at one point writing that part of the literature was based on “junk science.” But he ultimately recommended that the city stop fluoridation, claiming that the evidence about its safety at low concentrations was inconclusive. With the commission’s members split at 3–3, the Juneau Assembly voted to end fluoridation.

Meyer and her colleagues analyzed Medicaid dental claims records made before and after the city stopped fluoridation. They found that the average number of procedures to treat tooth decay rose in children under age 6, from 1.5 treatments per child in 2003 to 2.5 treatments per child in 2012.

The cost of these treatments in children under 6 years old, when adjusted for inflation, jumped by an average of $303 dollars per child from 2003 to 2012.

Meyer says that increased Medicaid costs for dental treatments ultimately end up being paid by taxpayers.

“When politicians decide to withhold a safe and effective public health intervention like fluoridation, they are imposing a hidden health care tax on everyone in their state or community,” Meyer says.

Continued calls to end fluoridation

Today, many opponents to fluoride in water cite a controversial systematic review released last year by the National Toxicology Program, which is nestled in HHS and evaluates the health effects of substances. That August 2024 review concluded with “moderate confidence” that water with more than 1.5 mg of fluoride per liter was associated with lowered IQ in children.

But that dose is more than double the CDC’s recommended amount. And the review authors couldn’t determine if low fluoride concentrations like those found in treated drinking water in the United States had a negative effect on children’s IQ. In addition, merely finding an association does not prove that higher levels of fluoride caused lowered IQ, the NTP notes on its website.

More broadly, Meyer says, “ending fluoridation … based on weak or misrepresented evidence is not a precaution, it’s negligence.”

Juneau remains without fluoridated water. In Calgary, though, residents voted in 2021 to bring it back. With 62 percent of voters opting to reintroduce fluoride, the margin was higher than it was in the 1989 vote that brought fluoride to Calgary in the first place. Guichon says McLaren’s study, combined with “determined advocacy,” helped bring the electorate to the polls.

“More people voted to reinstate fluoride than voted for the mayor. So that’s a success,” Meyer says. “But in America, we are entering a dark time.”

Science News

BKjr Is A Schmuck

The guy carps about the "sudden explosion of childhood diseases".

It goes like this, Mr Brainworm:

Pluto didn't just pop up outa nowhere in 1930 - we're pretty sure it was there the whole fuckin' time, just kinda waitin' for us to discover it.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Melanie Matheu, PhD (@melanie_matheu_phd)

Science vs Influencers

They have questions, and that's all they need. The point is to collect the money that the clicks bring. If they propose a solution, you're more likely to leave their platform and go look something up - and that they cannot have.

Dr Jessica endeavors to do a little answering.

Overheard

For literally decades, Republicans have blocked legislation for:

• Paid sick leave
• Paid family and medical leave
• Universal childcare
• Universal pre-K
• Expanded child tax credit
• Programs to support prenatal, maternal, and reproductive health

Stop wondering why so many people want fewer children.

War Famine Disease & Pestilence

I think those are the real Four Horsemen Of The Apocalypse.

And nobody's better at inviting them in than Diaper Don Trump.

• He says he's the Peace President, but he talks about invading Canada, Greenland, and Panama - and he tells a dick like Putin he can do whatever he wants to our friends and allies
• He says he's the Prosperity President, but he does everything you need to do to turn the economy on its head
• He says he'll deliver the cleanest air and water you ever saw, but he guts the entire apparatus of safety regulations that keep the corporations from poisoning everything
• He says he'll Make America Healthy Again, but the guy he puts in charge at HHS is a freak who buys into every piece of quackery that comes down the fuckin' pike

The CDC Buried a Measles Forecast That Stressed the Need for Vaccinations

The move — along with the CDC’s explanation — is a sign that the nation’s top public health agency may be falling in line under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines.

Leaders at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention ordered staff this week not to release their experts’ assessment that found the risk of catching measles is high in areas near outbreaks where vaccination rates are lagging, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica.

In an aborted plan to roll out the news, the agency would have emphasized the importance of vaccinating people against the highly contagious and potentially deadly disease that has spread to 19 states, the records show.

A CDC spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that the agency decided against releasing the assessment “because it does not say anything that the public doesn’t already know.” She added that the CDC continues to recommend vaccines as “the best way to protect against measles.”

But what the nation’s top public health agency said next shows a shift in its long-standing messaging about vaccines, a sign that it may be falling in line under Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines:

“The decision to vaccinate is a personal one,” the statement said, echoing a line from a column Kennedy wrote for the Fox News website. “People should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine and should be informed about the potential risks and benefits associated with vaccines.”

ProPublica shared the new CDC statement about personal choice and risk with Jennifer Nuzzo, director of the Pandemic Center at Brown University School of Public Health. To her, the shift in messaging, and the squelching of this routine announcement, is alarming.

“I’m a bit stunned by that language,” Nuzzo said. “No vaccine is without risk, but that makes it sound like it’s a very active coin toss of a decision. We’ve already had more cases of measles in 2025 than we had in 2024, and it’s spread to multiple states. It is not a coin toss at this point.”

For many years, the CDC hasn’t minced words on vaccines. It promoted them with confidence. One campaign was called “Get My Flu Shot.” The agency’s website told medical providers they play a critical role in helping parents choose vaccines for their children: “Instead of saying ‘What do you want to do about shots?,’ say ‘Your child needs three shots today.’”

Nuzzo wishes the CDC’s forecasters would put out more details of their data and evidence on the spread of measles, not less. “The growing scale and severity of this measles outbreak and the urgent need for more data to guide the response underscores why we need a fully staffed and functional CDC and more resources for state and local health departments,” she said.

Kennedy’s agency oversees the CDC and on Thursday announced it was poised to eliminate 2,400 jobs there.

When asked what role, if any, Kennedy played in the decision to not release the risk assessment, HHS’ communications director said the aborted announcement “was part of an ongoing process to improve communication processes — nothing more, nothing less.” The CDC, he reiterated, continues to recommend vaccination “as the best way to protect against measles.”

“Secretary Kennedy believes that the decision to vaccinate is a personal one and that people should consult with their healthcare provider to understand their options to get a vaccine,” Andrew G. Nixon said. “It is important that the American people have radical transparency and be informed to make personal healthcare decisions.”

Responding to questions about criticism of the decision among some CDC staff, Nixon wrote, “Some individuals at the CDC seem more interested in protecting their own status or agenda rather than aligning with this Administration and the true mission of public health.”

The CDC’s risk assessment was carried out by its Center for Forecasting and Outbreak Analytics, which relied, in part, on new disease data from the outbreak in Texas. The CDC created the center to address a major shortcoming laid bare during the COVID-19 pandemic. It functions like a National Weather Service for infectious diseases, harnessing data and expertise to predict the course of outbreaks like a meteorologist warns of storms.

Other risk assessments by the center have been posted by the CDC even though their conclusions might seem obvious.

In late February, for example, forecasters analyzing the spread of H5N1 bird flu said people who come “in contact with potentially infected animals or contaminated surfaces or fluids” faced a moderate to high risk of contracting the disease. The risk to the general U.S. population, they said, was low.

In the case of the measles assessment, modelers at the center determined the risk of the disease for the general public in the U.S. is low, but they found the risk is high in communities with low vaccination rates that are near outbreaks or share close social ties to those areas with outbreaks. The CDC had moderate confidence in the assessment, according to an internal Q&A that explained the findings. The agency, it said, lacks detailed data about the onset of the illness for all patients in West Texas and is still learning about the vaccination rates in affected communities as well as travel and social contact among those infected. (The H5N1 assessment was also made with moderate confidence.)

The internal plan to roll out the news of the forecast called for the expert physician who’s leading the CDC’s response to measles to be the chief spokesperson answering questions. “It is important to note that at local levels, vaccine coverage rates may vary considerably, and pockets of unvaccinated people can exist even in areas with high vaccination coverage overall,” the plan said. “The best way to protect against measles is to get the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine.”

This week, though, as the number of confirmed cases rose to 483, more than 30 agency staff were told in an email that after a discussion in the CDC director’s office, “leadership does not want to pursue putting this on the website.”

The cancellation was “not normal at all,” said a CDC staff member who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisal with layoffs looming. “I’ve never seen a rollout plan that was canceled at that far along in the process.”

Anxiety among CDC staff has been building over whether the agency will bend its public health messages to match those of Kennedy, a lawyer who founded an anti-vaccine group and referred clients to a law firm suing a vaccine manufacturer.

During Kennedy’s first week on the job, HHS halted the CDC campaign that encouraged people to get flu shots during a ferocious flu season. On the night that the Trump administration began firing probationary employees across the federal government, some key CDC flu webpages were taken down. Remnants of some of the campaign webpages were restored after NPR reported this.

But some at the agency felt like the new leadership had sent a message loud and clear: When next to nobody was paying attention, long-standing public health messages could be silenced.

On the day in February that the world learned that an unvaccinated child had died of measles in Texas, the first such death in the U.S. since 2015, the HHS secretary downplayed the seriousness of the outbreak. “We have measles outbreaks every year,” he said at a cabinet meeting with President Donald Trump.

In an interview on Fox News this month, Kennedy championed doctors in Texas who he said were treating measles with a steroid, an antibiotic and cod liver oil, a supplement that is high in vitamin A. “They’re seeing what they describe as almost miraculous and instantaneous recovery from that,” Kennedy said.

As parents near the outbreak in Texas stocked up on vitamin A supplements, doctors there raced to assure parents that only vaccination, not the vitamin, can prevent measles.

Still, the CDC added an entry on Vitamin A to its measles website for clinicians.

On Wednesday, CNN reported that several hospitalized children in Lubbock, Texas, had abnormal liver function, a likely sign of toxicity from too much vitamin A.

Texas health officials also said that the Trump administration’s decision to rescind $11 billion in pandemic-related grants across the country will hinder their ability to respond to the growing outbreak, according to The Texas Tribune.

Measles is among the most contagious diseases and can be dangerous. About 20% of unvaccinated people who get measles wind up in the hospital. And nearly 1 to 3 of every 1,000 children with measles will die from respiratory and neurologic complications. The virus can linger in the air for two hours after an infected person has left an area, and patients can spread measles before they even know they have it.

This week Amtrak said it was notifying customers that they may have been exposed to the disease this month when a passenger with measles rode one of its trains from New York City to Washington, D.C.

BKjr Is Moron

RFK Jr. Unveils Disturbing Plan to Combat Bird Flu

Trump’s health secretary has proposed the worst idea, as egg prices continue to skyrocket.

Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks that the bird flu should be allowed to spread unchecked to identify birds that could be immune.

Kennedy said in a recent Fox News interview that farmers “should consider maybe the possibility of letting it run through the flock so that we can identify the birds, and preserve the birds that are immune to it,” an idea that experts say would be dangerous and hurt the poultry industry.

“That’s a really terrible idea, for any one of a number of reasons,” Dr. Gail Hansen, a former state veterinarian for Kansas, told The New York Times.

Every new infection of the H5N1 virus is a chance that it will mutate and become more powerful and spread further, although it still hasn’t been proven to spread between people. But if it were allowed to spread through millions of birds, “that’s literally five million chances for that virus to replicate or to mutate,” Hansen said.

While Kennedy’s department doesn’t have any regulatory powers over farms, Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins agrees.

“There are some farmers that are out there that are willing to really try this on a pilot as we build the safe perimeter around them to see if there is a way forward with immunity,” Rollins said on Fox News in February.

If this plan actually goes into effect, the virus would spread among a larger number of birds, putting more people and other animals at risk of infection. Right now, if a poultry farm has a positive test for the virus, it is reimbursed for culling its flocks to prevent its spread.

If the virus were allowed to spread on purpose, bird flu “infections would cause very painful deaths in nearly 100 percent of the chickens and turkeys,” Dr. David Swayne, a poultry veterinarian and former USDA employee, told the Times, adding that it would be “inhumane, resulting in an unacceptable animal welfare crisis.”

Kennedy isn’t even operating on the right information: He claimed in one interview that the virus didn’t seem to affect wild birds, but there are many documented cases of wild birds dying from H5N1. Kennedy also theorizes that some chickens and turkeys may be immune, but scientists say that poultry lacks the genes needed to resist the virus.

It seems that Kennedy’s pseudoscience is spreading unchecked as well. He’s already been putting his anti-vaccine beliefs into practice at HHS by curtailing multiple vaccine research projects and directing resources toward researching the debunked conspiracy that vaccines cause autism. His latest idea on the bird flu is dangerous and could end up having disastrous consequences for public health and U.S. agriculture.

Microplastics

Today's Not Sorry Not Sorry

BKjr is a fraud and a raving freak, who has used his fraudulent raving freakishness to bilk tens of thousands of grieving and scared-shitless parents out of tens of millions of dollars.

I fuckin' hate these people.

National Cancer Institute Employees Can’t Publish Information on These Topics Without Special Approval

Vaccines. Fluoride. Autism. Communications involving these and 20 other “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics will get extra scrutiny under Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Employees at the National Cancer Institute, which is part of the National Institutes of Health, received internal guidance last week to flag manuscripts, presentations or other communications for scrutiny if they addressed “controversial, high profile, or sensitive” topics. Among the 23 hot-button issues, according to internal records reviewed by ProPublica: vaccines, fluoride, peanut allergies, autism.

While it’s not uncommon for the cancer institute to outline a couple of administration priorities, the scope and scale of the list is unprecedented and highly unusual, said six employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly. All materials must be reviewed by an institute “clearance team,” according to the records, and could be examined by officials at the NIH or its umbrella agency, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Staffers and experts worried that the directive would delay or halt the publication of research. “This is micromanagement at the highest level,” said Dr. Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association.

The list touches on the personal priorities of HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime anti-vaccine activist who has repeatedly promoted medical conspiracy theories and false claims. He has advanced the idea that rising rates of autism are linked to vaccines, a claim that has been debunked by hundreds of scientific studies. He has also suggested that aluminum in vaccines is responsible for childhood allergies (his son reportedly is severely allergic to peanuts). And he has claimed that water fluoridation — which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has called “one of the 10 greatest public health achievements of the 20th century” — is an “industrial waste.”

In confirmation hearings in January, Kennedy said that he was not “anti-vaccine,” and that as secretary, he would not discourage people from getting immunized for measles or polio, but he dodged questions about the link between autism and vaccines.

Another term on the list, “cancer moonshot,” refers to a program launched by President Barack Obama in 2016. It was a priority of the Biden administration, which intended for the program to cut the nation’s cancer death rate by at least half and prevent more than 4 million deaths.

The list is “an unusual mix of words that are tied to activities that this administration has been at war with — like equity, but also words that they purport to be in favor of doing something about, like ultraprocessed food,” Tracey Woodruff, director of the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco, said in an email.

A directive on topics requiring prepublication review at the National Cancer Institute was said to be circulated by the agency’s communications team. Credit:Obtained by ProPublica
The guidance states that staffers “do not need to share content describing the routine conduct of science if it will not get major media attention, is not controversial or sensitive, and does not touch on an administration priority.”

A longtime senior employee at the institute said that the directive was circulated by the institute’s communications team, and the content was not discussed at the leadership level. It is not clear in which exact office the directive originated. The NCI, NIH and HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions. (The existence of the list was first revealed in social media posts on Friday.)

Health and research experts told ProPublica they feared the chilling effect of the new guidance. Not only might it lead to a lengthier and more complex clearance process, it may also cause researchers to censor their work out of fear or deference to the administration’s priorities.

“This is real interference in the scientific process,” said Linda Birnbaum, a former director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences who served as a federal scientist for four decades. The list, she said, “just seems like Big Brother intimidation.”

During the first two months of Donald Trump’s second presidency, his administration has slashed funding for research institutions and stalled the NIH’s grant application process.

Kennedy has suggested that hundreds of NIH staffers should be fired and said that the institute should deprioritize infectious diseases like COVID-19 and shift its focus to chronic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity.

Obesity is on the NCI’s new list, as are infectious diseases including COVID-19, bird flu and measles.

The “focus on bird flu and covid is concerning,” Woodruff wrote, because “not being transparent with the public about infectious diseases will not stop them or make them go away and could make them worse.”

AntiVax

Their champion zigged when he was supposed to zag. Now they don't know what the fuck to do.

A Dead Kid In Texas

It's up to 124 cases now. Five of them were vaccinated.

FIVE OUT OF 124 - that's 4%

Measles, once eliminated in the U.S., sickens 99 in Texas and New Mexico

Health authorities warned of further spread. Most U.S. measles cases this year involved people 19 and under and those without a confirmed vaccination.

Nearly 100 people across Texas and New Mexico have contracted measles, state officials say, escalating anxiety over the spread of a potentially life-threatening illness that was declared eliminated in the United States more than two decades ago.

Ninety cases of measles — the majority affecting children under 17 — were detected in Texas’s South Plains, a sprawling region in the state’s northwest, the Texas Department of State Health Services said Friday. The spread marks a significant jump from the 24 cases reported earlier this month. The DSHS said “additional cases are likely to occur in the outbreak area and the surrounding communities.”

Nine other cases were recorded in New Mexico as of Thursday, all in Lea County, which borders the South Plains region. New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) urged those in the county with symptoms to call their local health offices.

Measles, which is most dangerous to children under 5, can cause a fever, cough, runny nose, watery eyes and tiny white spots, called koplik spots. As the disease progresses, some may experience a measles rash, which looks like small raised bumps or flat red spots.

There is no specific cure or treatment for measles. One or two in every 1,000 children who contract measles are projected to die, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in 2019, with pneumonia being the most common cause of death.

The United States declared measles eliminated in 2000, meaning the disease had not spread domestically for more than 12 months. It credited the achievement to widespread immunization campaigns after the vaccine became available in 1963.

However, the national vaccination rate for measles has dropped in recent years, particularly since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. Even a small decline in vaccination can significantly increase the likelihood of an outbreak. Measles can “easily cross borders” in any community where vaccination rates are below 95 percent, according to the CDC.

Most cases recorded this year have occurred in people who were unvaccinated or whose vaccination status was unknown, the CDC said.

The disease’s comeback has occurred in tandem with the rise of anti-vaccine rhetoric propagated on social media and among some public officials.

President Donald Trump — a longtime vaccine skeptic — has a mixed record on the subject. His choice for health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has a history of spreading vaccine misinformation and recently promised to scrutinize childhood vaccination schedules, blaming them as a potential contributor to the rise in chronic diseases, the Associated Press reported this month.

While on the campaign trail, Trump pledged to cut federal funding for schools that required vaccines.

In the decade leading up to the measles vaccine’s introduction in 1963, the disease killed an estimated 400 to 500 people in the United States each year and caused an estimated 48,000 hospitalizations annually, the CDC said. So far, about a quarter of the cases recorded this year have resulted in hospitalizations, either to isolate the infected person or to treat complications.

- and -

Texas child is first confirmed death in growing measles outbreak

The unvaccinated school-age child is the first confirmed fatality in Texas’s worst measles outbreak in three decades.

LUBBOCK, Texas — A child has died of measles in Texas, the first confirmed fatality in the state’s worst outbreak in three decades, state health officials said Wednesday.

The unvaccinated school-age child was hospitalized in Lubbock last week, according to the Texas Department of State Health Services.

Officials have reported 124 cases in Texas, mostly in west Texas, since late January, and nine cases in a neighboring New Mexico county. Nearly 80 percent are children, who are more susceptible to the vaccine-preventable disease.

“It’s heartbreaking,” said Katherine Wells, Lubbock’s director of public health. “My heart just goes out to the family. And I hope this will help people reconsider getting children vaccinated.”

Summer Davies, a physician who cared for the child when they were first hospitalized this month at Covenant Children’s Hospital here, said the patient arrived with a high fever and struggled to breathe without assistance.

The child’s respiratory symptoms grew progressively worse, and then heart problems were diagnosed. Several days ago, the child was moved to an intensive care unit and placed on a ventilator before dying.

The child was otherwise healthy, Davies said.

The patient “could have lived a long, happy life, and it is really heartbreaking when it’s something you know you could have prevented or that is preventable and ended in something like this,” said Davies, a pediatric hospitalist.

Davies said she has seen about nine measles patients during the current outbreak. She had never previously encountered the disease.

While many children recover from measles, some die of pneumonia caused by the virus or a secondary bacterial infection.

Vaccination rates are below average in rural Gaines County, the center of the outbreak, where 80 cases have been reported. The deceased child’s hometown was not released. Many patients in rural areas with limited health-care options have been treated at hospitals in Lubbock, one of the closest large cities.

During President Donald Trump’s White House meeting with Cabinet officials Wednesday, Trump was asked about the measles outbreak, and turned to his new secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., one of the country’s most prominent critics of childhood vaccination, to answer the question.

Kennedy said the federal health department is “following the measles epidemic every day.”

Kennedy said he thought there were 124 people who had contracted the disease, mainly in Gaines County, and “mainly, we’re told in the Mennonite community.” He added: “There are two people who have died, but … we’re watching it, and there are about 20 people hospitalized, mainly for quarantine.”

Lara Anton, a spokeswoman for the state health department, said the agency is aware of only one death in the outbreak. She said patients are not being quarantined at hospitals. They are taken there for critical care, she said.

Kennedy added: “We’re watching it. We put out a post on it yesterday, and we’re going to continue to follow it.”

He appeared to play down the seriousness of the outbreak. “Incidentally, there have been four measles outbreaks this year in this country. Last year, there were 16. So it’s not unusual,” he said. “We have measles outbreaks every year.”

A measles outbreak is defined as three or more related cases. The case tally in Texas in the first two months of the year has eclipsed the annual U.S. case count for each year between 2020 and 2023, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2024, the country had 285 measles cases.

The CDC recommends children receive two doses of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. One dose is 93 percent effective against measles and two doses is 97 percent effective, the agency says.

Public health officials and experts say the Texas outbreak illustrates the consequences of declining vaccination rates. Measles is a highly contagious virus that causes fever and rashes and can also cause long-term neurological complications and death.

In Texas, five of the measles patients were vaccinated; the rest were unvaccinated or their vaccination status was unknown. Eighteen patients have been hospitalized.

“During a measles outbreak, about one in five people who get sick will need hospital care and one in 20 will develop pneumonia,” the Texas health agency said in a news release. “Rarely, measles can lead to swelling of the brain and death. It can also cause pregnancy complications, such as premature birth and babies with low birth weight.”

The outbreak in Texas comes as Trump elevates skeptics of vaccines to the government’s highest health posts.

Kennedy asserts that the risks of the vaccines outweigh the risk of disease.

Kennedy drew criticism for a 2019 trip to Samoa, where he met with activists who were calling for Samoans to skip measles vaccines five months before the island nation experienced a measles outbreak that infected thousands and killed 83.

But during his confirmation hearings, Kennedy said he supports the measles vaccine and would do nothing to discourage people from receiving it.

During his seven terms in the House of Representatives, Dave Weldon, Trump’s nominee to lead the CDC, was a leading proponent of the false claim that vaccines cause autism.

Sicknesses

Measles in Texas (not a lot of cases, but 2 counties now), and TB in Kansas (mostly KC).

So what's the over/under for when we see more than a few more cases because of the Super Bowl?

Or will we? Here's hoping all those fuckin' anti-vax morons dodge the bullets.

KU Medical Center experts work to control tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas

Faculty at KU Medical Center are working with state and local health departments to contain the spread of the disease.

In January, Kansas made headlines across the country for experiencing the largest outbreak of tuberculosis in the United States since the country began tracking TB cases in the 1950s. Since then, that claim has been downgraded to the largest incidence of the disease over the span of one year.

But that doesn’t mean the TB outbreak hasn’t held the attention of public health officials in the two Kansas City-area counties, Wyandotte and Johnson, where the outbreak is located. Those include faculty at the University of Kansas Medical Center who are working with Kansas state and county health departments to identify those at risk, treat people infected and mitigate the spread of the disease.

The United States has an overall low incidence of TB. Why is Kansas experiencing this outbreak?

“I don’t think there’s necessarily anything unique about Kansas, any secret sauce, so to speak,” said Erin Corriveau, M.D., MPH, associate professor in the departments of Family Medicine and Community Health and Population Health at KU Medical Center. Corriveau also serves as medical director of the Johnson County Department of Health and Environment and was the deputy health officer and medical director of the TB division in Wyandotte County until July 2024.

An age-old disease once known as “consumption” because of the weight loss and apparent wasting-away of its victims, TB is caused by a bacteria that most often affects the lungs but can also infect other organs including the brain, skin, spine and kidneys. It is spread through the air when people with TB sneeze, cough or spit. Initial symptoms typically include cough, fever, weight loss and night sweats.

Corriveau cited social factors as potential facilitators of the outbreak in Kansas. “The area has industries and workplaces where people work in close proximity, as well as multigenerational large households,” she said. “And there are many people living with chronic conditions, which may not even be diagnosed, that make them more vulnerable to infectious diseases, including TB. And a lot of people don’t have access to care.” Access to care enables early detection and treatment that can prevent the disease from spreading.

As of February 7, 2025, there have been 67 active cases of TB associated with the outbreak, and 79 latent (inactive) infections diagnosed, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE). People with latent infections do not have symptoms and are considered not contagious. But without treatment, their infections can develop into active TB weeks or even years after exposure.