Trichinosis

Pork chops in a skillet. (Elena Veselova/Shutterstock)

I've always stuck to pork that is well done, but I've always kind of wondered about trichinosis. I've made a couple of inquiries over the years, but I never got any kind of a helpful answer. Now we've got a story in Willamette Week that explains the current situation. Seems trichinosis has been pretty much eradicated from the farmed pork supply. It still exists in wild animals, so you want to careful about eating that bear you just shot.

Battle of Trafalgar

HMS Victory Copper Bottom

Liz goes for a cruise on the River Tawe and picks up some tidbits:

Three facts from my trip: Swansea has the second biggest tide in the world; the battle of Trafalgar was won thanks to the copper-bottomed boats of the British Navy, the copper having been produced in Swansea; and the only known occasion when yellow fever was transmitted in the UK was when a number of infected mosquitoes travelled to Swansea from Cuba with a cargo of copper ore.

Liz, Swansea and the River Tawe are all in Wales. Have I posted anything about Yellow Fever before? More than I realized. 

Longevity Vs. Retirement Age

California Bob sent me a paper from the King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals that contained this table:

Table 1 – Actuarial Study of life span vs. age at retirement.

 

Age at Retirement	Average Age At Death
49.9	86
51.2	85.3
52.5	84.6
53.8	83.9
55.1	83.2
56.4	82.5
57.2	81.4
58.3	80
59.2	78.5
60.1	76.8
61	74.5
62.1	71.8
63.1	69.3
64.1	67.9
65.2	66.8

Numbers are based on retirees from Boeing Aerospace. Curious, the longer you work the sooner you die. I suppose these numbers could be peculiar to the working environment at Boeing, but I find it hard it to imagine such a situation.

Real Talk About Nicotine

Hrayr Karagueuzian on radioactive particles in cigarettes
UCLA

Handwaving Freakoutery has a post up about cigarettes, nicotine and the evil CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention), a branch of the evil Federal government. It's great stuff, but he left out my favorite theory about lung cancer: 

It's the radioactive lead in the fertilizer that is used on tobacco plants in the field. Some dude did a study many moons ago and found that lung cancer lungs were full of radioactive lead.

Google found a bunch of links that apparently confirm my theory.

The post had a couple of terms that I had to look up:

• Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) are a class of drugs that inhibit the activity of one or both monoamine oxidase enzymes: monoamine oxidase A (MAO-A) and monoamine oxidase B (MAO-B). They are best known as effective antidepressants, especially for treatment-resistant depression and atypical depression.[1] They are also used to treat panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, Parkinson's disease, and several other disorders.
• Nootropics, also known as “smart drugs” are a diverse group of medicinal substances whose action improves human thinking, learning, and memory, especially in cases where these functions are impaired.

Pack Members Don't Think

Banksy - Morons

How did we get here? Near as I can tell, it's morons setting moronic public health policy. Brian agrees with me. Here's the introduction:

Public Health Erred on the Side of Catastrophe by Brian McGlinchey

Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, proponents of lockdowns, shelter-in-place orders, mask mandates and other coercive government interventions have characterized these measures as benevolently “erring on the side of caution.”

Now, as the grim toll of those public health measures comes into ever-sharper focus, it’s increasingly clear those characterizations were terribly wrong.

What’s less readily apparent, however, is how the very use of the “erring on the side of caution” framing was injurious in itself—by thwarting reasoned debate of public health policies, diverting attention from unintended consequences, and buffering the Covid regime’s architects from accountability.

To understand how the misuse of “erring on the side of caution” performed a sort of mass hypnosis that coaxed populations into two years of submission to disastrous, overreaching policies, consider how the expression is typically used.

In everyday life, one might err on the side of caution by:

• Leaving for the airport an extra 30 minutes early
• Carrying an umbrella when there’s a 25% chance of rain
• Opting for a less-challenging ski slope
• Going back into the house to make sure the iron is unplugged
• Getting a second medical opinion

Generally speaking, “erring on the side of caution” in everyday life means lowering risk with a precaution that has a negligible cost.

That's not how it has played out, has it? 

COVID-19

I've got a theory about this whole COVID-19 and Fauci's fumbles. Rumor has it that the US was funding a research laboratory in Wuhan China to conduct gain-of-function experiments on certain virii. Then a new virus starts making people sick in that same Wuhan China. Now you're the guy charge with protecting the health of the 330 million people living in the USA, whatchya gonna do? Shit, if this shit that's making people sick came from that lab, this could be really bad. Bad as in 14th Century Black Plague bad. Better go to the public health equivalent of DEF-CON 4 and close all the windows, bolt the doors, and proclaim panic: the bugs are coming!

The problem with any new disease is you don't know how bad it's going to be. Is it going to be annoying or deadly? How contagious will it be? How will it be transmitted? By intimate contact?  By droplets floating in the air? They might only be dangerous until they dry up. Or maybe even dry particles could transmit the disease. Nobody knows until somebody does some research, or until people a bunch of people start showing up dead, and then it's pretty much too late. Better to clamp down early and clamp down hard. Better be safe than sorry.

Turns out that COVID-19 is not all that deadly, maybe 50% more deadly than the regular flu, so in hindsight, the draconian lockdowns and mask requirements were overkill, and there seems to be some doubt that they had any beneficial effect at all. And what about the regular flu? Haven't heard a word about it. That strikes me as kind of weird. Might just be an effect of our distorted news reporting system. Nobody cares about old stuff that might kill you, we want to hear about the new stuff that might kill you.

Back before COVID-19, there was a new variety of flu every year and every year you had to get a new vaccine. You were supposed to anyway. I never got one. I thought it was stupid. Maybe because we didn't have flu vaccines when I was growing up, of maybe I had the flu once when I was a kid and I was sick for a couple of days but it was so long ago I forgot how bad it was. Whatever. But now it's 2021 and I just got vaccinated for COVID-19, a bug that is two years old. Of course we've got new varieties of COVID popping up here and there and I expect we're going to start seeing new vaccines showing up here along with noisy obnoxious campaigns to get everyone vaccinated with the latest and greatest goop. No thanks. It's been five days since I got my second Pfizer jab and while I am walking and talking, I am still not right. I have a low grade headache all over the outside of my head, what feels like a sinus infection behind my left eye, my left eye is prone to watering and I have a red spot on my cheek. I only mention the last because my family noticed and pointed it out to me.

I had no intention of getting the vaccine, but I had a conversation with my wife about it. She is a bit anxiety prone, so I agreed to do it to alleviate her concerns. So all this trivial suffering is my own fault for being agreeable.

P.S. I remember hearing about gain-of-function when I was reading The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston, which was about the campaign to eliminate smallpox. It's kind of fucked up.

Everybody's Right, Everybody's Wrong

Largest Cities in the World
I finally finished The Demon in the Freezer by Richard Preston. It's all about the CDC (Center for Disease Control), the WHO (World Health Organization), and the campaign to eradicate smallpox. Along the way he visits the military, bio-weapons and virus engineering. Pretty grim stuff.

At the end of book he mentions the largest cities in the world and what would happen if a nasty bug got loose in one of those places. Which led me to look up the largest cities (spreadsheet above, taken from Wikipedia).

If COVID-19 was as contagious and deadly as some people claim, I would expect that we would be hearing about zillions of deaths from some of these places. It might be that I have my filters set too high and that is keeping such reports from reaching me, or maybe America is just so self centered that we don't have time to worry about the zillion COVID-19 deaths all over the rest of world. Or maybe the disease is just getting started and later on this year we will start seeing those reports. I don't think that will happen, and in any case I certainly hope it doesn't happen.

Which got me to thinking that this whole lock down, mask wearing paranoia thing is just people showing that they are part of the in-crowd, kind of like standing in line at Starbucks to pay $5 for a fancy cup of coffee, or waiting in line for 20 minutes to get an ice cream cone at Salt & Straw. Dang, I came across a story about this phenomena not too long ago and I thought for sure I linked to it, but now when I need it, I cannot find it.

And now we've got riots going on all over the place. Some people say it's because of the black man killed by the police in Minneapolis. That might have been the trigger, but I think it's because there are a bunch of people who are not happy about the way things are going. Yes, there are some people who are just attracted to social activity, the more active the better. But most people, if things are going well, have better things to do than protest. You put the screws to a large segment of the population, like our fearless leaders did to about half of the people who work for a living, and you're going to get some push back and this is what it looks like.

Problem is we have this fantasy that everyone deserves the same respect and treatment whereas in reality people range from savages to saints. You send a bunch of saints into the jungle to deal with a bunch of savages and you are very likely to end up with a bunch of dead saints.

Potatoes

Potato Planters - Jean-François Millet - 1861

Peasant Cultures Abide
POSTED ON MAY 15, 2020 BY RAZIB KHAN
Many years ago I read Tim Blanning’s The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Modern Europe: 1648-1815. Some portion of it was dedicated was the attempt of scientifically oriented rulers to encourage the cultivation of potatoes amongst their subjects. Today Russia is huge on potatoes, but during the reign of Catherine the Great, this was not the case. Blanning outlines the resistance of the superstitious and backward Russian peasant in particular to the new wisdom of the agronomists. Truth be told, these illiterate peasants really didn’t give reasons for potato aversion. They simply pointed out that planting potatoes was not “how it was done.”
This Russian skepticism was common among European peasant cultures. But there was a major exception: Ireland. The Irish cultivation of the potato allowed for prosperity and population growth. By 1800 one third of the population of the United Kingdom were Irish.
This changed. The potato famine led to mass starvation and emigration.
We all know the reason: the famine. The reality here is that Russian stubbornness may not have been easy to rationalize, but the rejection of “expertise” in this case was socially meritorious.

Stolen Entire from Gene Expression

Health Care Debate

Dialysis Machine
Because this blog is about things, and I'm not going to clutter it up with a bunch of yucky sick people.

The Detroit gang dropped a couple of links in my inbox this morning. First, a YouTube video: Jimmy Kimmel Fights Back Against Bill Cassidy, Lindsey Graham & Chris Christie, and second, a Washington Post story. I didn't watch or read either one, because:

This whole medical insurance debate is complete and utter horseshit. (Heh, my new catch phrase.) What we need is real information, but we're not getting it. It might be out there, but digging it out would be a lot of work, and why bother? Nobody in power is listening, they are all listening to each other trying to score political points by telling bullshit stories.

Our healthcare system is built on a fantasy, a fantasy that is carefully nurtured by everyone with a financial interest, like doctors, lawyers, insurance executives and media moguls. This fantasy has doctors curing all diseases, patients recovering fully and leading happy, productive lives. Oh, that happens occasionally, and for common afflictions that are well understood, it might even be the norm. But the more people you have, the more variation you have and the more obscure, inscrutable diseases show up. Life is a terminal disease. People spend their lives trying to be happy. They should spend their time getting ready to die.

Health care is a trillion dollar business in this country. All those people who are engaged in the debate over insurance are just trying to influence the trajectory of that money so that more of the random spray that emanates from such a powerful stream will land on them and make them rich. Because even a single droplet from that trillion dollar stream is worth a million bucks.

Since we don't have any facts (not that they would do us any good), here's a couple of stories.

A guy I know works as a dialysis nurse. He hooks up patients who are in need of dialysis to the machine and monitors the blood cleaning process. One Sunday he gets called in to run the procedure on a patient. The guy is old and in bad shape. He is swollen up like a whale. Joe (our nurse), hooks him up and runs the process for a while, but eventually the guys blood pressure starts falling and eventually it falls so much that he has to stop. The guy is still as big as a whale and still in bad shape, but he's done all he can do. Joe (all male nurses are named Joe, at least in this blog) estimates that the guy only has a few days to live, but his wife is demanding that the doctors do something. Like what, sweety? He's dying. Sad, but life is like that.

A couple of months ago a friend had gone into the hospital for some kind of test. The test involved anesthesia, so after the test we were waiting in a hospital ward for the anesthesia to wear off. While we are waiting a nurse starts talking to another patient (an elderly woman by the sound of it, they were obscured by drapes), getting her medical history, and in particular, a list of the drugs she is taking. So the patient starts telling the nurse all the drugs she is taking. It's not just one or two or even a dozen. I swear there must have been a zillion, she went on and on and on. When she gets near the end, she tells the nurse she is taking Oxycodone. And why are you taking that, asks the nurse? Because I'm addicted is the reply. WTF? I didn't think addiction was a valid medical reason to prescribe narcotics, but then I'm old. Maybe the rules have changed. Or maybe the old lady was just a garden variety addict and the rest of her story was just a cover she was selling in order to get more of that sweet, sweet oxy.

Update six hours later: Here's another story from one of my correspondents.

I don't think anecdotal stories move our knowledge base forward. That being said, my aunt, may she rest in peace, had a lousy rheumatologist. He prescribed so many bad meds to avoid operating on her arthritic knee that she developed serious health issues from the drugs. Ultimately at 80+ years old we had a big conference. The right solution was a morphine patch. She became an addict. We spoke daily and I could tell by her voice when the patch needed to be replaced and she was starting withdrawal. They tried taking her off to no avail. So for the last 15 years of her life she was a morphine addict. She still did volunteer work as a retired licensed clinical social worker. She still worked as a locally renowned stained glass artist, she still traveled, she still...  Looking at her life from the outside, one could wonder at and judge the medical interventions. But she had quality of life and wanted more until the day she called me and said she was ready. 

So the politicos are making a big fuss about the dangers of narcotics, but they aren't telling us the whole story. Meanwhile, here in Oregon simple possession of heroin is now a misdemeanor. Will this put a curb in the fentanyl trade?

On the left, a lethal dose of heroin; on the right, a lethal dose of fentanyl.

“Anyone who is so deep into their addiction that they would use fentanyl is not worried about jail.” - Jordana Goldlist

Fat

Francis Bacon 1617

Gary Taubes, a science writer, has written an essay dissing a report from the American Heart Association. He opens with this quote:

The human understanding, once it has adopted opinions, either because they were already accepted and believed, or because it likes them, draws everything else to support and agree with them. And though it may meet a greater number and weight of contrary instances, it will, with great and harmful prejudice, ignore or condemn or exclude them by introducing some distinction, in order that the authority of those earlier assumptions may remain intact and unharmed. – Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, 1620

He goes on at some length laying out just what is wrong with the AHA's report, but Frank's quote pretty much sums it up.

The AHA wants you to believe animal fats are bad for you and vegetable fats (oils) are good for you. Gary thinks their evidence has been cherry picked. I think the AHA is operating on a political mandate to get people to eat more vegetables and less beef, because that will cut their grocery bill and it will make it look like inflation is not as bad as it really is. But wait, they have already removed beef from the consumer price index calculations, so maybe that's not it. Maybe they just hate ranchers and pig farmers. I don't why that would be, but I will wager that big money is a factor.

Via Detroit Steve.

Lucky Iron Fish

Lucky Iron Fish

I just stumbled over this. Evidently many Cambodians has a problem with anemia due to a lack of iron in their diet. A Canadian research project found a way to help alleviate the problem, and now there's an organization devoted to distributing these iron fish.

Now I'm wondering if Cambodia has always been short of iron, or whether this is a recent development. Or could it be that the problem was always there, it's just been aggravated by the enormous population growth. And if it's always been a problem, have the Cambodians developed an affinity for iron, much like the Irish?

Now I'm going to walk out on a limb and wonder if this might have something to do with the Khmer Rouge coming to power back in the 1970's.

Superbug Scourge

Pseudomonas Aeruginosa Bacteria

Reuters has a story about how anti-biotic resistant pathogens are killing untold numbers of people. It's long and involved. I read the first few paragraphs. Yes, there is a problem. Yes, there are many horror stories. Yes, the government is incompetent. That's what you get with a democracy. Shoot, that's what you get with any kind of government since all governments are made of people. All problems will be solved when our new robot overlords arrive and take control.

Problem I have with death statistics is they don't discriminate on matters of age or predicted life span. For instance, I would consider a disease that kills 10,000 young adults every year to be much more serious than one that kills 10,000 people over the age of 75. And what about cases with multiple contributing factors? How much should you worry about a disease (besides cancer) that kills 10,000 people who already have stage 4 cancer?

I'm thinking these kind of statistics need to be adjusted by the expected lifespan of those involved. Subtract their age at death from their nominal expected lifespan to get the number of years lost. Say that our expected life span is 75 years, then the deaths of 10,000 young adults with an average age of 25 would be reported as 500,000 years lost, whereas the deaths of 10,000 people 70 years old would be reported as 50,000 years lost.

Via Detroit Steve

The Sugar Conspiracy

The Production Of Sugar

The Sugar Conspiracy is a great story about the foibles of men who are supposed to know better. Via Detroit Steve. Just for grins I put a together a list of all the actors in this psycho-drama, there are so many.

Quarantine

Monrovia, Liberia. A US airman uses razor wire to delimit an Ebola treatment center. 

(AFP Photo/Pascal Guyot)

We've been watching The Blacklist. It's a very formulaic cop show with lots of secret spy stuff. One episode from last season had a guy die in a bank. An official somebody was on the scene in seconds and declared that he had died of a contagious disease and placed the bank under quarantine, which means the coppers drew guns on all the customers in the bank who were rushing for the door. On one hand it was very silly, on the other hand the show was only 40 odd minutes long, so it's understandable that the writers would want to compress a week-long procedure into a two minute long scene. I mean, we have a bunch more stuff we have to cram in here.

All this talk about Ebola reminds me of Typhoid Mary, which is where a lot of these public health issues first got some attention.

The basic premise of The Blacklist is that there are all kinds of people operating outside the law, and some of them are very organized and very powerful, and possibly insane. For instance, some of the tragedies we hear about, like where a ferry capsizes or an airliner crashes, are not accidents at all, but deliberate acts taken to kill one particular person (see "The Freelancer"). All the other people who die in the tragic accident are of no concern to the killers, just so much collateral damage.

The same idea was floated in The Madmen of Benghazi: the 747 was blown up over Lockerbie Scotland in order to kill one person. It wasn't done to call attention to themselves, that was a mere side effect. What's worse is the person they were trying to kill was not even on the plane. It's doubtful the "true" reason will ever be proven, and even if it is proven to some people's satisfaction, there will always be some who won't accept that version of the story.

There are a couple of reasons I like The Blacklist. One is that I like the idea that there vast criminal operations going on all over the world. I much prefer it to the Disneyfied version we keep telling ourselves. The other is the idea that someone not restrained by rules of evidence and those nasty constitutional amendments can obtain all the information they need to make a snap judgement. Oh, yeah, forget about the 'reasonable doubt' thing as well. All we need is one good whiff and boom! We know who the culprit is. Makes for a much more satisfying story.

Update: Posthip Scott sent me a link:

NBC's Medical Correspondent Is Quarantined for Ebola, Goes Out Anyway