@cant sit still,
can't sit still wrote:I too would consider your CV to be a very adequate background. Are you familiar with the work of Madeleine Mumcuoglu ? She worked under the direction of Jean Lindemann. She developed the first protocals for Sambuca Nigra.
Flu Remedy - Health, Nutrition, Medicine, Vitamins, Herbs, Natural Healing: Articles
In animal trials it gave 100% protection for H5N1. The control group had 100% mortality. H5N1 was reported 86% fatal in humans in Korea, I believe. It's recombinant powers are unbelieveabl;
Tamiflu Resistance in H1N1 in Turkey
It remains to be seen just how long they can keep a lid on it. Today H1N1,,, tomorrow, who knows?
I'm not familiar with her. The recombinant potential of H5N1 is not especially great compared with other flu serotypes. The issue is that avian H5N1 is barely transmissible at all between humans (there are only a handful of human cases that were likely picked up from another human), but there is great concern for recombination between
avian H5N1 and a
human influenza virus in the same host. This might result in a much more transmissible virus with the virulence of native avian H5N1.
But the thing is that's not entirely likely. Avian flu is so lethal to humans because it predominantly infects the lower respiratory tract. Conventional human flus are so transmissible because they predominantly infect the upper respiratory tract. So this recombination event would have to change the cell tropism of the virus, and it might do so in a way that attenuates its virulence.
As for the link, I think we're very much in need of new antivirals in general, including anti-influenza ones. Amantidine and Rimantidine are gone for most flu these days, and Tamiflu is not going to survive forever as our only drug (along with Relenza). But to be fair, Tamiflu has very little importance in any kind of management of a flu pandemic. The issue will have to be global monitoring and very quick quarantining. Flu is most transmissible in the 2 days before symptoms develop and the first 2 days of symptoms, which means that most people who are contagious are either completely healthy or only have mild symptoms. This makes case identification extremely difficult.
Nonetheless, I have a sneaky feeling that avian H5N1 will never cause a human pandemic. I could be wrong, but keep in mind that this has been an ongoing panzootic (pandemic in animals, i.e. birds) for several years now, tantamount to the way the 1918 flu was in humans. After a certain point the circulating H5N1 will run out of antigenic shifts and the surviving bird populations will be immune. This will greatly decrease the prevalence and incidence of this virus.
Quote:I've never been to Sub-Sahara Africa. After getting Ramses Revenge and Dehli Belly and Moctezumas Revenge, I had no desire to see what else I could pick up. I drank out of the Nile not knowing about shistosomiasis.
You're less likely to get schisto from drinking the water than you are from wading in it. The free-living form of schistosomiasis (cercariae) infects humans by penetrating skin. Drinking from the Nile is more likely to give you run of the mill hepatitis A, typhoid, salmonellosis, dysentery, giardiasis, cryptosporidiosis, etc, etc. Mmmm. Schistosomiasis is very rare in travellers, because they just don't get a very big inoculum -- but it does happen every once in a while.
Quote:Kathmandu seems to be THE place to get Hep.
If you're referring to hepatitis A, which is the major food/waterborne one, it has a worldwide distribution and it's endemic in the United States. Eastern Europe and Russia have a lot of hep A, but then again so does the entire developing world.
Quote:Irian Java seems to be a good place to get malaria.
The biggest risk area for malaria BY FAR is sub-Saharan Africa. Trust me on this one, my research is on malaria. In fact 90-95% of all malaria deaths in the world are in sub-Saharan Africa, and if I recall correctly about 2/3 of all malaria cases imported into the US are from sub-Saharan Africa. The other places in the world with very high endemicity of Plasmodium falciparum (the most lethal species of the parasite) are southeast Asia (esp the Thai-Myanmar border) and some of the nearby islands like Papua New Guinea and (as you mentioned) Indonesia. South / Central Asia and the Americas have more Plasmodium vivax which is less deadly, but there is P. falciparum around as well.
Quote:Some of the mutations are really bad.
For drug resistance, yes absolutely. For virulence
maybe -- this was what my research was on at Harvard. We've submitted my article for publication, still hasn't been reviewed yet.
Quote:I recently recommended cats claw to a guy with Malaria. It shows indications of effectivnes with the spirochetes from Lyme.
Please do me a favor and NEVER EVER do that again.
Malaria is fatal in 25% of non-immune patients who do not receive antimalarial therapy within 14 days.
Lyme disease has killed less than 10 people ever -- in fact you'd be hard pressed to find more than 2 or 3 cases in the entire medical literature, despite 10s of thousands of clinical cases. I've treated probably hundreds of cases in my career (I was at possibly the world's largest pediatric Lyme center during my fellowship in Boston). Malaria kills
2 million people a year. Lyme disease is caused by a spirochete, which is a kind of bacteria. Malaria is caused by an apicomplexan protozoan, which is not even remotely related to the Lyme spirochete.
Cat's claw is a very cool plant, and I expect great things from it, but in vitro activity of a plant extract does not mean that it's even absorbed at all by humans, let alone that it distributes in effective concentrations to the site of the infection. You don't know whether it's a concentration or interval dependant drug, which means you don't know the dose or the frequency. And you also don't know the toxicity. If you get it wrong with Lyme disease, chances are your Lyme arthritis, meningitis, or carditis will get completely better anyway even with delayed therapy (chronic post-Lyme symptoms occur at the same frequency in people who have never had Lyme before, so they're probably misattributed to Lyme).
Quote:I thought it might help for malaria. It was better than telling him "geee, that's too bad"
This is not water you want to be treading in. Malaria is a life-threatening medical emergency in a non-immune patient (i.e. someone who has not been infected with malaria multiple times yearly for their entire life).
Quote:Vancomicin is slowly being trod under.
Vanco is hardier than you think. It's amazing that Staph has remained susceptible to it for as long as it has. There are Vanc-intermediate strains of Staph out there now, and the rare case of Vanc-resistant Staph. Vanc-resistant Enterococcus is a different story, it's a big problem. On the other hand, Vancomycin is a pretty crappy drug -- slow bacterial killing activity, poor penetration into infected lung or into the central nervous system, annoying need to monitor drug levels. We have some good new anti-Staph drugs (linezolid, daptomycin, tigecycline are on the market now, dalbavancin and ceftiboprole are in the pipeline, and there are several others) that are good substitutes for Vanco against MRSA. But you're right that drug resistance is going to outpace anything we do so long as we use antibiotics as we do. As a mentor of mine once said about drug-resistant bacteria, "You get smart pretty quickly when you grow up every 20 minutes".
Quote:Do-it-yourselfers with antibiotics are spawning new challenges. As humanity presents 6 billion new hosts, oportunists are moving in.
The "new" TB wants back in our lives. BSE would like to be a close friend. The new [old] influenza kills mostly healthy people. It's not a good time for a weakened immune system.
I'll grant you TB and influenza (though influenza does NOT kill mostly healthy people, it still preys on the old, young, and infirm -- avian flu is an exception). BSE is hopefully going to be relegated to a rarity as it's been. But HIV is going nowhere quick, and I have a feeling that we're going to see progressively more vector-borne disease in the US, especially as the climate warms. We have some horribly nasty mosquitos endemic in the United States, particularly
Aedes aegypti (the vector for dengue and yellow fever), and
Aedes albopictus, which is an aggressive mosquito that was inadvertentle imported to the US, which can bite many different animals and carry many different diseases.
Yes, my username here is a mosquito.
Quote:If there isn't some kind of responsible population control [birth control], there will always be some mechanism that will diminish our numbers.
Reducing infant and child mortality
reliably slows population growth, especially when birth control is available.