H5N1

North Kivu-Ebola: Altercation between the population and the response team this Saturday in Cantine

Via 7sur7.cd: North Kivu-Ebola: Altercation between the population and the response team this Saturday in Cantine. The Google translation:

The situation remained hectic this Saturday in Mangato district, Cantine-Aloya locality in Beni territory. 

Indeed, it was reported an uprising of the population against Ebola response teams that came from Mangina to fight against this virus in this part of the territory of Beni where many positive cases are currently recorded.  

According to Mangina's civil society, despite the sensitization, the population of Cantine persists in their doubts about the existence of this epidemic in the eastern part of the country.  

Unfortunately, he laments, patients who flee this locality come again to contaminate the city of Mangina where the virus is more and more contained by the response for some months now.

Civil society reports that it was the inhabitants of Cantine, in collusion with the Mai-Mai, who forced the response teams to turn back and that the worst would be lived if the police did not intervene in time. 

"It has been a week since Ebola cases are being registered at the Mangina Ebola treatment centers, and most of these cases come from Cantine and Mabalako. The population has risen against the response teams, all the teams have returned to the base, and we learn at the last minute that it is the mixed population of the Mai-Mai," said the civil society. 

Other sources report that a lady was hit by a bullet during this tug.

US: The return of Ebolanoia

Almost five years ago, I wrote a piece for The Tyee about Ebolanoia, a term coined by Maryn McKenna to describe the over-the-top reaction to a handful of Ebola cases in the US. Ebolanoia certainly infected a lot of American politicians, from Chris Christie to Donald Trump himself (he didn't want any Americans who'd worked in West Africa to be readmitted to the country).

It was certainly not the kind of response that would be seemly in a country that bestrode the world like a colossus, in part because it had the greatest concentration of health scientists the world had ever seen. In hindsight, Ebolanoia looks like a crack in the plaster that hints at deeper structural damage, because such damage has become increasingly apparent since then. 

More plaster is coming off the walls, and you can almost hear the building groan like a Bangladeshi sweatshop factory before it collapses altogether.

On April 15, I posted about the Ebola scare on the Texas border, where "confirmed" cases were reported in Laredo and in Ciudad Juárez across the border from El Paso. A month later I ran across a genuine fake-news site promoting the same nonsense. And it's still going on.

Texas Health and Human Services has nothing to say about Ebola on the border. The CDC has nothing to say about Ebola on the border. "Confirmed" cases are confirmed only by unnamed American border officials, who evidently report only to outlets like InfoWars and Gateway Pundit. Countless tweeters, many likely enjoying the warm spring in St. Petersburg, pick these stories up and pass them along on the #Ebola hashtag.

Recently, they even tried to tie the deaths of a young Texas couple, vacationing in Fiji, with the onslaught of presumably disease-ridden Congolese.

These liars have dropped the stories about "confirmed cases" and now report only that many Congolese migrants have arrived at the border seeking asylum. That's an interesting story, and perhaps speaks well for Congolese enterprise (or for that of some third party willing to subsidize some refugee flights to Mexico). The Congolese have come from a nation of 92 million people. About 2,000 Ebola cases have been confirmed in a few health districts of just two DRC provinces, with a total population of 10 million. So even in the hot zone, the odds of contracting Ebola are about one in 5,000.

But just as Ebolanoia made Americans terrified of anyone who'd recently been in Africa, never mind Liberia, Guinea, or Sierra Leone, now the threat is by mere alleged citizenship in a gigantic country—most of whose residents have never set foot in Ituri or North Kivu province.

As if this kind of mendacity weren't bad enough, I'm reading Mark Honigsbaum's excellent new book The Pandemic Century, whose subtitle is "One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria, and Hubris." One chapter describes an outbreak of plague that hit the Mexican quarter of Los Angeles in 1924. The response of the politicians was cover-up, and the media obliged. When the news eventually got out, it also triggered alarms about imaginary hordes of diseased Mexicans sneaking across the border to infect upstanding Anglo-Saxons. 

Ninety-five God-damn years later, InfoWars and Gateway Pundit have driven spikes through the heart of any belief we might still have in progress. Yes, we've advanced scientifically and technologically and medically in countless way, but we've also dragged millions of people with us who have never abandoned their medieval view of the world ("Black plague? Burn the Jews!"). Whether they're in hostile North Kivu villages, or sitting behind keyboards anywhere in the world, they—not Ebola—are the biggest threat to global health we now face.

US homeopaths claim 'therapies' prevent measles and 'cure' autism

Via The Guardian: Exclusive: US homeopaths claim 'therapies' prevent measles and 'cure' autism. Excerpt:

Thousands of American children are being put on homeopathic alternatives to vaccination by practitioners who claim they can prevent measles and “cure” autism, the Guardian has learned. 

At least 200 homeopaths in the US are practicing a controversial “therapy” known as Cease that falsely asserts that it has the power to treat and even cure autism. The acronym stands for Complete Elimination of Autistic Spectrum Expression.  

The “therapy” relies in part on administering high doses of vitamin C. Advocates falsely say it repairs the harm caused by vaccination – a double untruth as most vaccines are safe and there is no link between vaccines and autism, a condition for which there is no cure.  

In addition 250 homeopaths, some of whom also practice Cease, are promoting “homeoprophylaxis” that advertises itself as an “immunological education program”. More than 2,000 American children have been put on the program which claims to build natural immunity against infectious diseases, though there is no scientific evidence that it works. 

Parents who opt to follow Cease or homeoprophylaxis are potentially exposing their children, as well as others around them, to life-threatening illness. The implicit message behind both therapies is that vaccines are harmful and should be avoided.  

The spread of such ideas, amplified through the proliferation of anti-vaxxer theories on social media, has begun to have a profound impact on public health in the US. Last month the number of measles cases reached a 25-year peak. 

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 1,001 individual cases of measles have been confirmed in more than 20 states this year alone.

When defending vaccines gets ugly

Via The New York Times: When Defending Vaccines Gets Ugly. Excerpt:

Peter Hotez is no stranger to vitriol. An outspoken proponent of vaccines in a state with one of the most vocal anti-vaccine lobbies in the country, Dr. Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, has been harassed at lectures, threatened online and blamed for his daughter’s autism. 

In early May, he took to Twitter to lament a report from the Texas health department showing a 14 percent increase in the number of parents seeking vaccine exemptions in the state. In response, State Representative Jonathan Stickland accused Dr. Hotez of being in the drug industry’s pocket and referred to his science as self-serving “sorcery.”  

“It’s one thing to have emotional parents or angry activists coming after you,” Dr. Hotez says. “It’s really quite another to get it from elected officials.” 

Attacks on scientists who defend vaccines are nothing new. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Paul Offit, a vaccine expert at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, received so many credible death threats resulting from his pro-vaccine advocacy that the F.B.I. assigned him a bodyguard. 

But the public health stakes are higher today. The percentage of unvaccinated children has quadrupled since 2001, vaccine-preventable diseases like measles are creeping back as a result, and mistrust in science — the fuel powering this crisis — has migrated from the fringes to the center of American life. The denigration of individual scientists is a chilling aspect of that mistrust; experts say it skews public discourse by scaring vaccine proponents into silence.

So far, the assaults on Dr. Hotez’s work and character have been more off base than threatening. The diseases he studies afflict the poorest of the poor; they spread in places where bare feet routinely mingle with open sewage and where people have only contaminated water to drink and bathe in. 

His work has produced results — in the past decade or so, he has managed to nudge vaccines for several such diseases, including hookworm, into Phase 2 clinical trials. But this is not exactly cash-cow science. 

“I haven’t even paid off my mortgage,” Dr. Hotez says. “They keep saying that I’m making all this money off my work, and my wife keeps saying, ‘If only!’”  

The undermining of one of humanity’s greatest public health triumphs has many causes — not just mistrust of science, but also political opportunism, cultural amnesia and social media’s ability to bring together like minds and to grant even the most wildly inaccurate premises an aura of truth.

But to reverse the current trend, the mistrust in science and medicine will have to be repaired.  

That will not be easy, especially when some of that mistrust is propagated by elected officials. President Trump, for instance, spent years consulting with prominent anti-vaxxers and suggesting that he believes vaccines cause autism. 

The president did eventually reverse his position on the issue, telling reporters that parents need to “get the shots” for their children — a welcome change. The more officials who make clear to uncertain parents that vaccines are safe, lifesaving and crucial to public health, the better. Beyond that, political leaders can address the current crisis by increasing funding for health departments that are best positioned to combat rampant misinformation, and by passing laws to make it harder for parents to skip crucial shots.

Canada: New Brunswick moves to ban non-medical exemptions to school immunizations in wake of measles outbreak

Via The Globe and Mail, a report by The Canadian Press: New Brunswick moves to ban non-medical exemptions to school immunizations in wake of measles outbreak. Excerpt:

Facing a measles outbreak, New Brunswick is moving to ban non-medical exemptions to its school-based immunization program, meaning parents who won’t vaccinate their children for personal-belief or religious reasons would be forced to keep them home.  

If enacted, the ban on non-medical exemptions would give the province the strictest vaccination policies in Canada. Only New Brunswick and Ontario have mandatory school immunization programs and both allow parents to opt out for personal reasons in addition to medical ones. British Columbia plans on introducing a similar program in September. 

New Brunswick Education Minister Dominic Cardy said the province needs to find new ways to improve vaccination rates, given that preventable illnesses such as measles are on the rise. New Brunswick is facing an outbreak of measles that has so far infected 11 people. Most of them were exposed to the virus at a high school near Saint John. Mr. Cardy said just as officials don’t allow weapons in schools, neither should they allow unvaccinated children.  

“When we’re talking about public schools, public safety comes first,” he said in an interview. “[Parents] cannot and do not have the right to send their children to school to endanger others.” 

Mr. Cardy said the focus is on getting the measles outbreak under control, so there is no timeline for when the non-medical exemptions could be phased out. 

With the number of measles cases on the rise worldwide and public-health experts sounding the alarm about parents who refuse or are reluctant to have their children vaccinated, officials are scrambling to find ways to increase confidence in vaccines and boost immunization rates. 

A growing number of jurisdictions are turning to vaccine exemptions as the answer. Medical exemptions are given to children with allergies or health conditions that don’t allow them to be vaccinated. But non-medical exemptions are granted to those who object to vaccination because of their religious beliefs or personal convictions. In some cases, such as in Ontario, non-medical exemptions were created after lobbying by antivaccination advocates.

DRC: Hostile to vaccination, health worker dies of Ebola in Katwa

Via Actualite.cd: DRC: Hostile to vaccination, health worker dies of Ebola in Katwa. The Google translation:

A health worker opposed to the Ebola vaccine, which strikes the provinces of North-ekivu and Ituri for nearly ten months, died of the virus on Monday in Katwa, North Kivu, said the ministry of health.    

The nonvaccinated health worker, by refusal, is among the six new confirmed cases and among the new community deaths, reported Tuesday evening by the ministry of health in its bulletin. "The cumulative number of confirmed / probable cases among health workers is 106 (5.5% of all confirmed / probable cases)," says the health authority in its newsletter.  

Of these, 36 have already died. They are among the 1,287 confirmed and probable cases that have died to date. The response to the Ebola outbreak is fraught with distrust and some kind of denial of disease by the people. They consider Ebola as a Western business, a strategy to exterminate them or a fact of witchcraft.

US measles outbreak now worst since 1994 after 60 new cases reported

Via The Guardian, a Reuters report: US measles outbreak now worst since 1994 after 60 new cases reported. Excerpt:

The US recorded 60 new measles cases last week, taking confirmed cases for the year to 940, the worst outbreak since 1994 and since measles was declared eliminated in 2000, federal health officials said on Monday.

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported a 6.8% increase in the number of measles cases in the week that ended 24 May, in an outbreak that has reached 26 states. The agency has been providing weekly updates.  

Experts warned that the outbreak is not over as the number of cases edges closer to the 1994 total of 958. That was the highest number since 1992, when the CDC recorded 2,126 cases.

To calm nervous families, Pakistan changes polio vaccination tactics

Via The New York Times: To Calm Nervous Families, Pakistan Changes Polio Vaccination Tactics. Excerpt:

After serious setbacks in April led to a cluster of new polio cases, Pakistan is revamping its vaccination strategy in a renewed effort to wipe out the virus. 

The country is one of just three — along with Afghanistan and perhaps Nigeria — in which polio is still endemic. Eradication of the virus in Pakistan is crucial to the drive to rid the world of polio, once and for all. 

Now, vaccination teams will take a friendlier approach, ask fewer questions, make fewer follow-up visits, and stop recording extensive details about the families they visit, Pakistan’s polio eradication program announced.  

Families were intimidated by the questions, and vaccinators spent too much time filling out the registration forms introduced in 2016, said Babar Atta, the polio coordinator in the prime minister’s office, according to local media. 

 A new vaccination drive is scheduled for the second week of June; thousands of teams will spread out around the country trying to reach almost 40 million children under age 10. 

Many vaccinators will go house to house, while others will look for families with young children in refugee camps, train and bus stations, and at highway checkpoints.  

Pakistan has had 17 cases of polio paralysis this year; it had only three by this date last year, and only 12 in all of 2018.  

In mid-April, widespread panic among parents in Peshawar and the surrounding northern tribal areas forced the suspension of a national immunization drive.  

A scaremongering video spread on Twitter, purporting to show students collapsing after getting an expired batch of vaccine.

The video seemed obviously fake. The boys in it flop prone across a hospital bed on cue after the speaker waves his hand; one even makes a funny face on camera. Also, expired vaccine — if it was expired — is harmless.  

Nonetheless, “our TV channels found it profitable to cover this nonsense,” Aziz Memon, a textile executive who leads Rotary International’s involvement in Pakistan’s anti-polio campaign, said in an interview in New York. “It became a national event.” 

Rumors spread that 50 children had died; mosques used their loudspeakers to tell parents to rush their children to medical care. Hospitals were swamped as more than 25,000 children arrived. 

“No one had died,” Mr. Memon said. “But we had to call everything off.”  

Local politics were behind the scare, he said. District elections were underway and the conservative Jamaat-e-Islami party was trying to discredit the polio campaign, which is supported by Prime Minister Imran Khan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf party. 

The man speaking in the video was arrested. 

To restore confidence, Mr. Memon added, the district health and communications ministers appeared on television giving vaccine drops to their own children.  

Because suspicion of the campaign remains high in some areas — vaccinators have been accused of marking targets for American drones — interactions with families will now be briefer and less intrusive.

US: Despite measles warnings, anti-vaccine rally draws hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews

This is the kind of story that makes me think the real health threat facing us is a stupidity pandemic, so widespread we're all too stupid to recognize what's happened to us.

Via The New York Times: Despite Measles Warnings, Anti-Vaccine Rally Draws Hundreds of Ultra-Orthodox Jews. Excerpt:

MONSEY, N.Y. — An ultra-Orthodox rabbi falsely described the measles outbreak among Jews as part of an elaborate plan concocted by Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York to deflect attention from “more serious” diseases brought by Central American migrants. 

A pediatrician questioned whether Jews were being intentionally given “bad lots” of vaccines that ended up giving children a new strain of the virus. And Andrew Wakefield, the British doctor whose study linking measles vaccines with autism was widely discredited and condemned, appeared via Skype to offer an almost apocalyptic vision of a world in which vaccines were giving rise to deadlier immunization-resistant diseases. 

“We Hasidim have been chosen as the target,” said the rabbi, Hillel Handler. “The campaign against us has been successful.”  

Since the measles outbreak began last fall, the health authorities have embarked on a sweeping and exhaustive campaign, repeatedly urging people to get vaccinated and fighting the spread of misinformation. They have made special efforts in the ultra-Orthodox communities of Brooklyn and Rockland County, N.Y., where the disease has been spreading most quickly. 

But the rally on Monday in Monsey, a Rockland County town about 30 miles northwest of New York City, vividly illustrated how the anti-vaccine fervor is not only enduring, but may be growing: Hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews packed a ballroom for a “vaccine symposium” with leaders of the anti-vaccination movement.  

Organized by a Monsey-based Jewish group, the event also showed how the movement was gaining ground: Greg Mitchell, a Washington-based lobbyist who represents the Church of Scientology, attended the meeting and addressed the crowd, offering to be their “voice in the public-policy game.” 

The gathering was denounced by local elected officials, health authorities and some ultra-Orthodox rabbis, who said the speakers were spreading propaganda that could cause the outbreak to deepen, risking the health of countless people.

Where will measles break out next? Chicago, Los Angeles or Miami, scientists predict

Via The New York Times: Where Will Measles Break Out Next? Chicago, Los Angeles or Miami, Scientists Predict. Excerpt:

Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami are the cities most likely to see the next measles outbreaks, according to an unusual new study. 

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and Johns Hopkins University mapped the 25 American counties most at risk of measles because of their vaccine-exemption rates and proximity to airports.  

A similar map published last year proved surprisingly accurate at forecasting many of this year’s cases. But both groups of scientists failed to predict the measles outbreak that began in Brooklyn, currently the nation’s largest.  

These prediction models need refining, one expert noted, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention should make it a priority in order to get ahead of measles cases. 

The study, published this week in The Lancet Infectious Diseases, found that Cook County, which includes Chicago, was likeliest to experience a measles outbreak. Los Angeles and Miami-Dade counties were next, followed by New York’s Queens County and the counties that include the cities of Seattle, Phoenix, Fort Lauderdale, Las Vegas, Houston and Honolulu.  

To assess risk, the researchers looked at how many children in counties across the country had nonmedical vaccination exemptions — which include “religious,” “philosophical” or “personal belief” exemptions, depending on state law.  

The team then focused on counties with international airports, because every American outbreak since 2000 has begun with a case imported from overseas.  

They gave greater weight to airports with many passengers arriving from countries with thousands of measles cases, including India, China, Mexico, Japan, Ukraine, the Philippines and Thailand. 

However, both studies failed to foresee what is now the country’s largest outbreak — the one among Orthodox Jews in the Williamsburg neighborhood of New York — which is in Brooklyn, not Queens.

(The Lancet authors said their forecasts were correct about two-thirds of the time, as long as counties “spatially adjacent” to the ones they saw as potential hot spots were included.) 

In September last year, the virus spread from Ukraine to Orthodox Jewish communities in Israel. One month later, Orthodox Jews from New York carried measles almost simultaneously to Brooklyn and to suburban Rockland County, N.Y. The outbreak spread from New York to Orthodox communities in Michigan. 

“What we did not calculate at all was that it would come from Israel,” said Sahotra Sarkar, a professor of philosophy and integrative biology at the University of Texas at Austin and a co-author of the new study.  

A similar study published last June in PLOS Medicine ranked the risk of measles outbreaks in 18 states with philosophical or personal belief exemptions to vaccination. The research was prescient: almost half the “hotspot” metropolitan areas the scientists noted — particularly Washington State, Texas and Michigan — saw outbreaks this year.  

“In the major leagues, that’s an all-star batting average,” said Dr. Peter J. Hotez, a director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development and a co-author of the PLOS Medicine study. 

Dr. Hotez and his colleagues did not look at New York State because it does not have “philosophical” exemptions to vaccination, although the state permits religious ones — a loophole that the legislature is considering eliminating. 

“What I never expected was an outbreak in Jewish communities,” Dr. Hotez joked. “In my book, Jews make the vaccines.” (Dr. Hotez, who is Jewish and researches vaccines against tropical diseases, cited such pioneers as Albert Sabin, Jonas Salk, Stanley Plotkin and Rachel Schneerson.)