Measles spreading in Europe

[Victorian Gray]

Yeah, but it seems a dangerous way to sow discord. Spreading that sort of stupidity is a dangerous option because it can spread right back to your own population. They'd be better to get people arguing over sports teams or something, I reckon.

You're talking about a govt run by a guy who poisons people he doesn't like with radiation and military poisons.

 

[1prophet]

Also

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-45294192

"Social media bots and Russian trolls have been spreading disinformation about vaccines on Twitter to create social discord and distribute malware, US researchers say.

Troll accounts that had attempted to influence the US election had also been tweeting about vaccines, a study says."

The only reason they are effective is because of the schisms created long ago that have turned into large chasms today which are turning the United States of America into the Divided States of America were people trust the government less and less but still have a need to trust someone and are easily led astray by those with devious purposes who exploit that need.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...01/30/how-americans-lost-faith-in-government/
How Americans lost faith in government

The Tet Offensive opened a crippling credibility gap — one from which we've never recovered.

Remains of two unidentified Americans killed during the 1968 Tet Offensive are carried in flag-draped coffins in Vietnam on Aug. 14, 1974. (AP)

January 30
Fifty years ago today — on Jan. 30, 1968 — roughly 67,000 troops affiliated with the National Liberation Front, a.k.a. the Viet Cong, launched a massive invasion of South Vietnamese cities on the eve of the New Year’s celebration of Tet. Known thereafter as the Tet Offensive, the maneuver brought the Viet Cong enormous troop losses but fundamentally shook the confidence of many Americans, calling into question assurances by President Lyndon B. Johnson that the United States was turning the corner in Southeast Asia and that the enemy’s resources were nearly spent.

The Tet Offensive quickly produced a plunge in support for the war. A Gallup poll from March of that year showed that the portion of Americans describing themselves as “hawks” dropped from 60 percent to 41 percent, while the portion calling themselves “doves” rose from 24 percent to 42 percent. More fundamentally, the overwhelming show of force by the NLF widened the already yawning “credibility gap” and set the groundwork for a decades-long erosion of public trust in government and public institutions.

In this sense, President Trump, whose White House brings mendacity to new and unparalleled heights, is only the most extreme embodiment of a pattern that began a half-century ago.

It all began with a lie.

Initially certain that the war in Vietnam could be won in six months — and loath to rally popular support for a war that might deflect attention, will and resources from domestic policy priorities — the Johnson administration downplayed Vietnam at every critical juncture. Amazingly, neither Johnson nor any other senior official announced or acknowledged that the president had committed ground forces to Southeast Asia. Even when reporters observed evidence of this commitment — including the mass arrival of troops in Vietnam — the administration dissembled, insisting that the mission had not changed. “American troops have been sent [to] South Vietnam recently with the mission of protecting key installations there,” the State Department answered casually.

Only in June 1965 did the department’s spokesman acknowledge that the government had committed to lend “combat support to Vietnamese forces.” But when asked when the president had granted the authorization, he answered, “I couldn’t be specific, but it is something that has developed over the past several weeks.”

The White House soon compounded its credibility problems. If Johnson would not acknowledge that he had committed the nation to war, he certainly could not disclose its cost. So in 1965, he buried Vietnam expenditures — which totaled roughly $5 billion (almost $39 billion in today’s dollars) — in the Pentagon budget. It would shock members of Congress when, six months later, in the middle of the fiscal year, the administration was forced to request a sizable supplementary appropriation to cover the swiftly mounting costs of the war. By 1967, even as Johnson continued to play down the budgetary implications of Vietnam, the war costs approached $26.5 billion for the fiscal year.

So why did the administration lie?

Vietnam posed a grave threat to Johnson’s cherished Great Society — an ambitious slate of programs that included Medicare and Medicaid, assistance to primary and secondary education, Head Start and nutritional assistance for struggling families and students. The administration found itself struggling to pay for both guns and butter. Additionally, wartime spending — funded largely by mounting deficits — created a spiral of inflation that undermined much of the administration’s domestic policy and political standing.

The White House could have financed the war and kept inflation in check had it raised taxes, but asking Congress for a tax increase to finance the war was impossible when the president couldn’t (or wouldn’t) admit what it cost. Such a request would also have provoked a coalition of conservative Republicans and Southern Democrats to demand that Johnson slash domestic spending.

For 2½ years preceding the Tet Offensive, the White House prevaricated, jawboning with labor and industry leaders to keep wages and prices down (without much success) and denying the full extent of the war commitment. In December 1965, Murrey Marder of The Washington Post introduced the term “credibility gap” to readers. It caught fire quickly. “The old C&O canal which runs north from Georgetown is bounded by the Cumberland Gap at one end and the Credibility Gap at the other,” one satirist noted.

Decades before Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee Sanders turned White House press briefings into exercises in fiction and fancy, Johnson’s press secretary, Bill Moyers, struggled to conceal the president’s quandary from reporters. It became all the more difficult as Moyers himself grew uncomfortable with the administration’s war policy. Moyers became “less and less successful as presidential press secretary,” White House aide Harry McPherson observed, in no small part because he engaged in frequent “background” discussions in which he attempted to represent the president as also conflicted about Vietnam.

The result was confusion among the press corps: Should reporters believe what the president said, what Moyers voiced publicly or what Moyers shared privately? Or none of the above? By late 1966, some members of the press spoke disparagingly of the “Moyers Gap.”

Whatever inclination Americans had to give their president the benefit of the doubt ended with Tet. Weeks later, CBS’s Walter Cronkite — by some estimations the most trusted man in America — famously repudiated the “optimism of the American leaders” and called into question the “silver linings they find in the darkest clouds.” Johnson is reputed to have said that if he had lost Cronkite, he had lost the country.

In the decade that followed, a series of economic crises and political scandals — most notably Watergate — only widened the credibility gap. By the start of the 1980 election season, trust in public institutions hit record lows. On the eve of LBJ’s electoral victory in 1964, 78 percent of Americans thought that the government could be “trusted to do the right thing” either “always” or “most of the time.” By the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, however, that figure had plunged to 26 percent.

Ironically, even though Americans distrusted leaders in both parties with approximate equivalence, Republicans benefited from this trend. After all, if government wasn’t to be trusted, shouldn’t we have less of it? When Johnson was president, 47 percent of voters thought that “people in government waste a lot of money that we pay in taxes”; when Reagan ran the tables in 1980, a resounding 78 percent of respondents voiced this position. Americans also grew more likely to agree that “the best government is the government that governs least.”

Fifty years after the bottom fell out under Johnson, many of his legacy programs — programs that provide health care to the elderly and struggling, education programs and school meals to poor children, civil rights protections to minorities — are on the chopping block in no small part because Americans have been conditioned over time to distrust their leaders.

And as things currently look, the credibility gap is only likely to grow wider.

On the eve of LBJ’s electoral victory in 1964, 78 percent of Americans thought that the government could be “trusted to do the right thing” either “always” or “most of the time.” By the eve of Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, however, that figure had plunged to 26 percent.

Ironically, even though Americans distrusted leaders in both parties with approximate equivalence, Republicans benefited from this trend. After all, if government wasn’t to be trusted, shouldn’t we have less of it? When Johnson was president, 47 percent of voters thought that “people in government waste a lot of money that we pay in taxes”; when Reagan ran the tables in 1980, a resounding 78 percent of respondents voiced this position. Americans also grew more likely to agree that “the best government is the government that governs least.”

Fifty years after the bottom fell out under Johnson, many of his legacy programs — programs that provide health care to the elderly and struggling, education programs and school meals to poor children, civil rights protections to minorities — are on the chopping block in no small part because Americans have been conditioned over time to distrust their leaders.

And as things currently look, the credibility gap is only likely to grow wider.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Americans have been conditioned over time to distrust their leaders.

And they got it right. Some are even starting to understand "leaders" are willing puppets and their primary purpose is to ensure the general public is properly taken advantage of to benefit a relative handful of individuals.

 

[esquared]

Well big enough anyway. In addiction to understand basic science I read enough history to know that historically something like half of all children born died really early mostly due to diseases that we can now prevent.

It is a matter of time before Polio and Smallpox makes a comeback if people don't wise up.

Smallpox has been eradicated decades ago.
It exists, IIRC, in 2 labs in the US and in Russia.


polio is nearly eradicated:
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/10/24/bill-gates-humanity-will-see-its-last-case-of-polio-this-year.html

There are a few cases that are linked to the old vaccine (phased out), where the virus had mutated among people who have not been vaccinated.

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/4/17530642/polio-vaccine-outbreak-drc-who

 

[Zorba]

Stupidity fixing itself?

Unfortunately, it might be stupidity killing someone else's infant that isn't old enough to get a vaccine yet. This is why I was pretty happy that our pediatrician told us that if one of his patient's parents refuse a vaccine for a non-medical reason, he will no longer see them. He doesn't want them bring in a disease to his office that could kill younger kids that aren't vaccinated yet. He also said that he gets enough patients without dealing with crazy people.

 

[Zorba]

The answer involves hours of lectures for all the details, but the gist is a quick wiki reference for immunological memory.

The mortality rate (death rate) for pneumonia and influenza ranges from 5-10%.

https://articles.masslive.com/news/...fluenza_pneumonia_related_deaths_epidemic.amp

This last year was pushing 10%. I personally was almost one of those statistics as I spent 4 days in the hospital and 2 in the ICU with septic shock.

The problem is many people think they "got the flu" when they just had a cold or any number of 24-hour viruses.

I've known multiple health middle aged adults that died from the flu. My father died from septic shock, likely from the flu virus, although the exact virus wasn't confirmed.

 

[ch33zw1z]

Unfortunately, it might be stupidity killing someone else's infant that isn't old enough to get a vaccine yet. This is why I was pretty happy that our pediatrician told us that if one of his patient's parents refuse a vaccine for a non-medical reason, he will no longer see them. He doesn't want them bring in a disease to his office that could kill younger kids that aren't vaccinated yet. He also said that he gets enough patients without dealing with crazy people.

Good doc.

 

[shortylickens]

I have not been "conditioned" to distrust my leaders.
If I have been "conditioned" at all it would have been to blindly trust authority.

But I have two working brain cells and decided on my own not to be so stupid and weak willed. And yes, I did serve 9 years in the United States Navy. I was never blind. I thought for myself. Sometimes that helped me, sometimes it made people irritable. But for the most part, I am glad to be a free-thinker. If that also makes me suspicious of the government, so be it.

 

[IronWing]

Is Putin the new Sauron?

 

[Jhhnn]

This is where the Russians excel, where Putin excels, throw up a bucket of chaos and navigate the fall out. Any sort of distort and riot he can inject he will take.

Strength is a relative thing. If you can't build yourself up then tear down the other guy by spreading FUD in their population. It'll paralyze 'em with dissension & masks a lot of corruption.

It dovetails nicely with what the GOP has been doing to this country since Gingrich, tearing down the govt of the People.

The more Woo people believe in the more they will believe in. Doesn't really matter what kind it is because it creates a way of thinking that's exploitable by Woo artists.

 

[Muse]

Actually I am pretty hazy about how vaccines (and immunity in general) works. Where does your body store the information about how to deal with a given virus, and is there a limit on how much such information it can retain? Immunity can wear off, right (hence the need for booster shots for some things)? So your body does 'forget' how to deal with some viruses eventually?

Do yourself a favor and read up on it. There's plenty of stuff out there, websites that will educate you if you're willing to invest an hour.

The body builds immunity by creating antibodies. They are the body's reaction to pathogens, which is what infectious viruses are. Immunity can wear off, but that effect is extremely variable. You don't need a booster smallpox vaccination or polio vaccination, but the early polio vaccines were not one and done affairs. You do need boosters for some things, such as tetanus. I got one not long ago.

Flu strains mutate rapidly, so a vaccine that was effective against last year's dominant strains is apt to be ineffective this year. That's why efforts are continuous in identifying what strains are at large now, and labs are continuously creating flu vaccinations that are as up to date as possible. Flu tends to hit hardest in the winter months. When it's summer in the northern hemisphere it's winter in the southern hemisphere. Therefore, strains at large down there give a heads up what the labs need to be doing in developing current vaccinations for the upcoming winter in the north. To a great extent, flu vaccines are of uncertain effectiveness. That's because forecasting what strains are going to be dominant is like doing long range weather forecasting. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they are very wrong. But even a relatively ineffective flu vaccination is apt to give you some immunity. It's better than getting no vaccination. And as noted above, even if the vaccination doesn't keep you from getting the flu, if you do get it your case is apt to be milder than if you didn't get it. I ALWAYS get mine. I hate getting sick.

 

[WHAMPOM]

Apparently Europe has their own problems with people not getting vaccinations

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna922146

While in America/USA a disease with polio like symptoms is infecting children.

 

[Victorian Gray]

While in America/USA a disease with polio like symptoms is infecting children.

It's turned up in Canada as well. They have no idea what's causing it.

https://www.cbc.ca/radio/whitecoat/...sis-targeting-kids-appear-in-canada-1.4872205

 

[paperfist]

Ok that pisses me off, pisses me off i didnt think of that vector my self to begin with. Who would be driving such a campaign?

You have people like Jenny McCarthy saying that her kid got autism after getting vaccines.

This may get me some heat... I dont take the flu shot. My line of thinking is that if I can fight it off myself my immune system will be better for the experience + as I understand it you have less than 50% at actually getting the right flu shot. Shit. Am I an anti waxer!!

I don't get it either. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I haven't gotten a cold in 4 years. Previously I got them all the time.

 

[cytg111]

I don't get it either. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I haven't gotten a cold in 4 years. Previously I got them all the time.

Damnit man, Im on the same roll here, dont jinx it...

 

[pmv]

Do yourself a favor and read up on it. There's plenty of stuff out there, websites that will educate you if you're willing to invest an hour.

The body builds immunity by creating antibodies. They are the body's reaction to pathogens, which is what infectious viruses are. Immunity can wear off, but that effect is extremely variable. You don't need a booster smallpox vaccination or polio vaccination, but the early polio vaccines were not one and done affairs. You do need boosters for some things, such as tetanus. I got one not long ago.

Flu strains mutate rapidly, so a vaccine that was effective against last year's dominant strains is apt to be ineffective this year. That's why efforts are continuous in identifying what strains are at large now, and labs are continuously creating flu vaccinations that are as up to date as possible. Flu tends to hit hardest in the winter months. When it's summer in the northern hemisphere it's winter in the southern hemisphere. Therefore, strains at large down there give a heads up what the labs need to be doing in developing current vaccinations for the upcoming winter in the north. To a great extent, flu vaccines are of uncertain effectiveness. That's because forecasting what strains are going to be dominant is like doing long range weather forecasting. Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they are very wrong. But even a relatively ineffective flu vaccination is apt to give you some immunity. It's better than getting no vaccination. And as noted above, even if the vaccination doesn't keep you from getting the flu, if you do get it your case is apt to be milder than if you didn't get it. I ALWAYS get mine. I hate getting sick.

I had a go, but couldn't understand the first description I found.

I entirely get the part about viruses mutating (flu being infamous for that), but I'm not clear on how immunity wears off for other reasons, i.e. your body 'forgetting' how to cope with some viruses (but not others?).

Main thing I've concluded is that we should wash our hands more frequently than most of us do (while staying this side of OCD). Seems like that would help a lot with flu outbreaks. And with zombie apocalypses.

I've also never been clear on how bacteria evolves to defeat anti-biotics. I mean, I get how evolution works in general, but surely there's a limit to how complex a bacterium can become, so if it changes to able to evade one anti-biotic, would it not develop a vulnerability to another? Why are only a finite number of anti-biotics possible, such that a bug could become immune to all of them?

We need self-replicating nano-bots to hunt down and physically destroy bacteria. and viruses. Until they go wrong and start attacking the wrong targets, I suppose.

 

[Paratus]

I had a go, but couldn't understand the first description I found.

I entirely get the part about viruses mutating (flu being infamous for that), but I'm not clear on how immunity wears off for other reasons, i.e. your body 'forgetting' how to cope with some viruses (but not others?).

Main thing I've concluded is that we should wash our hands more frequently than most of us do (while staying this side of OCD). Seems like that would help a lot with flu outbreaks. And with zombie apocalypses.

I've also never been clear on how bacteria evolves to defeat anti-biotics. I mean, I get how evolution works in general, but surely there's a limit to how complex a bacterium can become, so if it changes to able to evade one anti-biotic, would it not develop a vulnerability to another? Why are only a finite number of anti-biotics possible, such that a bug could become immune to all of them?

We need self-replicating nano-bots to hunt down and physically destroy bacteria. and viruses. Until they go wrong and start attacking the wrong targets, I suppose.

Anti-biotic resistance works like any other evolved trait.

• Take a population of bacteria and realize that just like humans each bacteria has slightly different traits in amounts and magnitudes than all the other similar bacteria
• Expose the population of bacteria to something harmful.
• It should be obvious that since each bacteria is slightly different the harmful effect will effect each bacteria slightly differently - killing some quicker than others.
• Now if the harmful thing is say 1000C heat no population of bacteria will survive that.
• As an example if the harmful thing is an antibiotic which say depends on a certain set of receptors being on the bacteria for the antibiotic to latch onto then some bacteria in population will have fewer receptors while others will have more.
• Those with fewer receptors will not be poisoned as quickly.
• If the amount of antibiotic isn’t enough to kill those with the fewest receptors then those bacteria will survive and pass along their genes to the next generation.
• After several generations you’ve got a population of bacteria that’s immune to that concentration of antibiotic. Incidentally this is why they tell you to always finish your course of antibiotics once you start.

Anyway that’s a really rough idea of how antibiotic resistance occurs.

My guess is @zinfamous could explain better.

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

Anti-biotic resistance works like any other evolved trait.

• Take a population of bacteria and realize that just like humans each bacteria has slightly different traits in amounts and magnitudes than all the other similar bacteria
• Expose the population of bacteria to something harmful.
• It should be obvious that since each bacteria is slightly different the harmful effect will effect each bacteria slightly differently - killing some quicker than others.
• Now if the harmful thing is say 1000C heat no population of bacteria will survive that.
• As an example if the harmful thing is an antibiotic which say depends on a certain set of receptors being on the bacteria for the antibiotic to latch onto then some bacteria in population will have fewer receptors while others will have more.
• Those with fewer receptors will not be poisoned as quickly.
• If the amount of antibiotic isn’t enough to kill those with the fewest receptors then those bacteria will survive and pass along their genes to the next generation.
• After several generations you’ve got a population of bacteria that’s immune to that concentration of antibiotic. Incidentally this is why they tell you to always finish your course of antibiotics once you start.

Anyway that’s a really rough idea of how antibiotic resistance occurs.

My guess is @zinfamous could explain better.

Couple things. The mechanisms of resistance are varied. In the classical case of penicillins, resistance occurs when mutations produce enzymes that degrade the penicillin molecule at the beta-lactam ring. Break that and there's no antibiotic. So chemists add other chemical groups to the ring that hinder the enzyme, and that lasts for a while until another mutation develops. You aren't wrong, I'm just going into a little bit more detail with a specific instance.

As far as how the body "remembers", there are a few types of cells who develop receptors in response to antigens in the body. The complete process is complex and incompletely understood, but a good deal is. These cells work to notify the immune system that there's something in the body that does not belong and other components come in to play. The main thing is that these cells serve as the memory and they live perhaps a decade. When they divide the receptor configuration which serves as "memory" is also duplicated. The thing to remember is that division is infrequent and over time the population degrades and a "booster" is required, or another exposure to the disease organism.

That's a very very simple and incomplete explanation of things, but someone was asking how the body remembers, and that's probably adequate at this level.

 

[Muse]

You have people like Jenny McCarthy saying that her kid got autism after getting vaccines.



I don't get it either. I don't know what's wrong with me, but I haven't gotten a cold in 4 years. Previously I got them all the time.

I've heard such things for years, but one person is not a study.

 

[pmv]

Anti-biotic resistance works like any other evolved trait.

• Take a population of bacteria and realize that just like humans each bacteria has slightly different traits in amounts and magnitudes than all the other similar bacteria
• Expose the population of bacteria to something harmful.
• It should be obvious that since each bacteria is slightly different the harmful effect will effect each bacteria slightly differently - killing some quicker than others.
• Now if the harmful thing is say 1000C heat no population of bacteria will survive that.
• As an example if the harmful thing is an antibiotic which say depends on a certain set of receptors being on the bacteria for the antibiotic to latch onto then some bacteria in population will have fewer receptors while others will have more.
• Those with fewer receptors will not be poisoned as quickly.
• If the amount of antibiotic isn’t enough to kill those with the fewest receptors then those bacteria will survive and pass along their genes to the next generation.
• After several generations you’ve got a population of bacteria that’s immune to that concentration of antibiotic. Incidentally this is why they tell you to always finish your course of antibiotics once you start.

Anyway that’s a really rough idea of how antibiotic resistance occurs.

My guess is @zinfamous could explain better.

I didn't do a good job at explaining what my issue was. I get the general principal of 'natural selection' (which is what you describe). But it's more to do with my feeling that there must be an upper-limit on total complexity of a bacterium before it ceases to be a bacterium. Thus it can't really evolve into something else that retains all it's existing strengths and also adds more resistances, it can only change, so that for every new resistance there must surely be new vulnerability? As if a military aircraft In order to fit in chaff has to give up its flares.

So I suppose my question is more about why there aren't an infinite number of possible anti-biotics such that each time a bacteria mutates to resist an old one, we can just produce one that the new mutated bacteria can't handle. And I suppose that's because we don't engineer anti-biotics as we do anti-aircraft weapons, we are, I assume, limited to a finite number that already happen to have evolved naturally?

 

[pmv]

The more Woo people believe in the more they will believe in. Doesn't really matter what kind it is because it creates a way of thinking that's exploitable by Woo artists.

Why wouldn't you believe in Woo?

Hard Boiled was pretty great. Maybe Woo's art suffered a bit when he went Hollywood, though?

 

[Hayabusa Rider]

So I suppose my question is more about why there aren't an infinite number of possible anti-biotics such that each time a bacteria mutates to resist an old one, we can just produce one that the new mutated bacteria can't handle. And I suppose that's because we don't engineer anti-biotics as we do anti-aircraft weapons, we are, I assume, limited to a finite number that already happen to have evolved naturally?

As simple as bacteria may seem, the truth is that it's quite the reverse. They have developed over hundreds of millions of years to be environmentally adaptable and have the machinery to cope with a wide variety of substances and organisms that would otherwise eradicate them. Their adaptability, their ability to respond individually and through a rapid development by virtue of short life cycles means that it's impossible to get ahead of them. Remember the problem isn't to kill the bacteria but to do so in a way that isn't harmful to the host. I can cure you of all disease with absolutely no failure possible. I cut off your head. You see that killing off bacteria isn't entirely the thing.

The medical standard isn't effective, it's safe and effective. What is "safe"? In practice it's "safe as possible"- so administering medications to kill an infection but might harm you is sometimes necessary. As a rule it's not desireable.

Adaption speed of organisms is greater than our ability to create compounds which are vastly different in toxicity such that people are cured safely. It's likely a race we perpetually lose for the imaginable future.

 

[dank69]

Stupidity fixing itself?

Unfortunately in these cases stupidity often puts everyone at risk.

 

[paperfist]

I've heard such things for years, but one person is not a study.

I’m big enough to count as 2 people. If you meant McCarthy then she’s not the only one.

Damnit man, Im on the same roll here, dont jinx it...

Lol cool I’m glad there’s another confirmed case. I really thought something was wrong with me.

 

[Jhhnn]

Fucking idiots. There's a civic duty to be vaccinated. That's not hard, is it?

People who shirk that duty get really weird about it, too, & try to defend their actions with attacks against the truth-

https://www.jpost.com/Israel-News/Measles-outbreak-intensifies-among-haredim-570004

Measles is an eradicable disease, like smallpox & polio. It has no host other than people. Once it's gone from the wild, it's gone forever & nobody will need to be vaccinated for it.