The Stigma of the Dark Ages. 🏥 Of course universal masking & testing reduces hospital acquired infections
Why are people in the dark on urgent matters? It often comes down to elite panic.
📍Vaccines require high uptake to quell transmission.
Even the measles vaccine requires high uptake to stop transmission. This has always been the case. Vaccine effectiveness for transmission has always depended upon high uptake. That’s just how it works. That’s why it’s important to have a vaccine campaign.
The Stigma of the Dark Ages.
What they’re talking about here is a society which has moved backwards, and is paying consequences already.
NPR - As the respiratory virus season approaches, where does the vaccination rate stand? November 27, 20244:47 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition By Rob Stein , Rob Schmitz Part of it is the lingering skepticism and outright hostility from the pandemic toward the COVID vaccine specifically and vaccines in general. Another factor is that people tend to underestimate how dangerous both viruses can be while overestimating vaccination risks. There's a lot of misinformation about how well the vaccines work and how safe they are. And finally, a lot of folks are just sick of vaccines because of all the shots they've gotten over the last few years. You know, put it all together and a lot of people are just feeling kind of done with vaccines. I talked about this with Dr. Gregory Poland. He's president of the Atria Academy of Science and Medicine in New York. GREGORY POLAND: “As a society right now, we're in a phase of rejecting expertise, of mistrust of any expert, whether it's science, meteorology, medicine, government - whatever it is.”
This is not unusual, there is no guarantee that society progresses forward. The Dark Ages happened, and that period was not the only time of regression on science.
MedPage Today - Nursing Homes Fell Behind on Vaccinating Patients for COVID — Billing complexities and patient skepticism partially to blame by Sarah Boden, KFF Health News December 5, 2024 Loveland has seen patients and coworkers at the nursing home where she works die from the viral disease. Now she has a new worry: bringing home the coronavirus and unwittingly infecting her infant daughter, Maya, born in May. Loveland's maternity leave ended in late June, when Maya wasn't yet 2 months old. Infants cannot be vaccinated against COVID until they are 6 months old. Children younger than that suffer the highest rates of hospitalization of any age group except people 75 or older. Between her patients' complex medical needs and their close proximity to one another, COVID continues to pose a grave threat to Loveland's nursing home -- and to the 15,000 other certified nursing homes in the U.S. where some 1.2 million people live. Despite this risk, a CDC report published in April found that just four in 10 nursing home residents in the U.S. received an updated COVID vaccine in the winter of 2023-24.
Going forward is a choice.
Public comment to CDC HICPAC committee November 2024 Infection control in healthcare. Chloe Humbert Nov 15, 2024 The Dark Ages was called that because society moved backwards from the technological advances that had come before. The fall of the Roman Empire was marked by elites who only cared about the status quo; they could’ve developed a steam engine as far back as Heron in 15 BC but didn’t bother. Going forward is a choice. In an article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases & Preventive Medicine there’s a description of what happened back then. “In medieval times, hospitals were hazardous places, Epidemic infections killed large numbers of hospital patients during this period. Hospital infection and death rates were high. When a sick person entered a hospital, his or her property was disposed of, and in some regions, a requiem mass was held, as if he or she had already died.” Going backward is a choice.
Stigma is part of a backward slide, and even if people don’t choose to go backward, we are all subject to community level leadership influences.
It’s called STIGMA. - wat3rm370n on tumblr - Oct 4th, 2024 When you hear that “people are tired of it” - that’s also part of stigma. And it’s not necessarily true that people are actually just sick of it - but they keep being told they should be. Informational learned helplessness can do that to us. Stigma is leveraged and reinforced on purpose by big money industry interests who think any reminder of danger at all is bad for business. So it’s to some degree manufactured stigma.
🗞️ In the news
USDA issues order for raw milk samples nationwide to be tested for bird flu - Bird flu virus was recently found in samples of raw milk from a California farm. By Youri Benadjaoud and Mary Kekatos December 6, 2024 Herd owners with cattle that test positive for bird flu have to provide information that allows health officials to perform contact tracing and disease surveillance. Private laboratories and state veterinarians must now report positive bird flu test results to the USDA.
CIDRAP - More people, especially those with heart disease, get flu vaccine when heart-health benefits are underscored - Mary Van Beusekom, MS - Nov 18, 2024 A pooled analysis of three randomized controlled trials in Denmark shows that adult influenza vaccine uptake improved with electronic reminders emphasizing the vaccine's cardiovascular benefits—particularly among those with a history of heart attack who weren't vaccinated the previous year. A team led by Kaiser Permanente San Francisco researchers, which published the findings yesterday in JAMA Cardiology, said the low-cost, scalable intervention should be used to drive up flu vaccination in high-risk patients, such as those with cardiovascular disease (CVD).
CIDRAP - With fourth CWD case in British Columbia, officials urged to do more to contain spread News brief December 4, 2024 Mary Van Beusekom, MS But the BCWF said more action is needed. "The BCWF is concerned that chronic underfunding and a backlog of samples submitted by hunters will hamper efforts to detect and contain this fatal disease," it said in a news release. "No additional dedicated funding was allocated for CWD in the last provincial budget."
The New Republic - Charlotte Kilpatrick/ November 29, 2024 Big Pharma Is the Only Reason Anyone Still Dies From HIV We have the means to eradicate AIDS as a threat to human life. Greed is keeping this from happening. Mandela’s battle against Big Pharma was only a small part of an ongoing war to provide equitable access to HIV medication. In the decades since his court case, taxpayer-funded research has contributed enormously to the development of new HIV treatments. New drugs can now allow people living with HIV to enjoy normal life spans, and completely reduce the risk of new transmissions. Used widely, medications should allow the complete eradication of HIV from the planet. The only obstacle the world is now facing is the same one Mandela stared down: corporate greed which prioritizes profits over human life.
Of course universal masking & testing reduces hospital acquired infections from aerosol transmitted disease.
Pak TR, Chen T, Kanjilal S, McKenna CS, Rhee C, Klompas M. Testing and Masking Policies and Hospital-Onset Respiratory Viral Infections. JAMA Netw Open. 2024;7(11):e2448063. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2024.48063 In this study, stopping universal masking and SARS-CoV-2 testing was associated with a significant increase in hospital-onset respiratory viral infections relative to community infections. Restarting the masking of health care workers was associated with a significant decrease. Limitations of our analysis included a lack of concurrent controls, possible variations in compliance, difficulty disentangling effects of testing vs masking, and potential case misclassification. However, medical record reviews suggested most hospital-onset cases were true acute cases. Nosocomial respiratory viral infections remain associated with increased length of stay and higher mortality in hospitalized populations.2-4 Our data suggest that masking5 and testing6 were 2 potentially effective measures to protect patients who are hospitalized, particularly when community respiratory virus incidence rates were elevated.
I really feel like this study determined that the tub stopped overflowing once the tap was shut off and the drain plug was pulled. It does seem that obvious.
But I guess we need 10 more studies like this before supposedly educated doctors and healthcare providers and facility executives and public health officials wake up and smell the coffee and pick up the damn clue phone and actually do something about hospital acquired infections. Or we need to keep pressing elected representatives to be responsible for actually doing their job and stepping up to what it takes to face public health challenges with solutions that are both science-based and often obvious common sense.
There are already guidelines that prevent people who feel unwell from donating blood.
I’m starting to think this issue is being pushed online because any type of controversy or fear mongering will generate attention and clicks, and drive engagement and therefore… generate money I suppose. It’s perplexing to me why people are worried that droves of people who are bedridden, feeling sick, extremely fatigued, or otherwise unwell with Long Covid would be giving blood. I seriously doubt that’s the case since it’s already a rule that you can’t donate blood if you’re even just currently feeling unwell.
It seems like people don’t realize how few people actually even do give blood at all.
I’ve noticed a zine put out and promoted by some popular online people and it contains odd fear mongering around blood donation and long covid. I wrote about how these claims were problematic because they’re so unspecific and unsubstantiated, and how the concerns really seemed overblown given existing guidelines for blood donations. It’s already a rule that you do not give blood if you’re for example just not feeling well, and that giving blood is not good for you if you’re feeling unwell, it’s not just about blood safety, it’s about patient safety.
The “concerns” that have been raised, were raised and unsubstantiated by a particular researcher with a connection to at least one doctor in a right-wing anti-vax organization, and the zine publishers already linked the issue to blood donor bans from the past stemming from a since disgraced doctor who was in the movie “Plandemic”. A doctor who went on to be a major anti-vax misinformation proponent. The article I originally saw citing this stuff curiously left out that part, so if you’re not familiar with the situation’s background most people reading it won’t realise all these connections to anti-vax right-wing weirdo stuff.
This also feels like a distraction for engagement farming using a hot button for people dating back to the HIV blood donation disasters. I am a little uneasy about how people compare the two diseases in medical ways that are not appropriate, especially as this almost seems to be a diversion to allow people to ignore the social comparisons that are applicable - such as stigma and the social determinants of health. I used to do photography at a local annual AIDS Walk fundraiser, in honor of a young AIDS activist and patient named Christopher Robinson, whose life was taken by HIV he contracted through a blood transfusion in the 1980s. That was a real horror. There were hard lessons learned about infectious disease since then that I really hope we don’t forget and go too far backwards into a Dark Age on infection control. There are always some risks with transfusions, and especially always risks with organ transplants, but also always some risk with any medical intervention — it’s always about the risks versus the benefits. And I see no reason to think there’s any looming scandal over Long Covid and blood transfusions. If there’s cause for concern, interested experts should be providing substantiated evidence, but yet that’s never cited. Nobody is pressuring Long Covid patients, or anyone else for that matter, to donate blood. And it’s already a rule that you can’t donate blood if you’re currently feeling unwell, have certain conditions (usually for the donor’s safety), or on certain medications (mostly cardiac care related).
“If you’re not the one paying, you’re not the customer.”
We’ve known this for a long time. And I still notice people recommending “free” resources, as if it being free, or open source, makes it necessarily trustworthy. There’s absolutely no guarantee of that. Whether a product or service is inherently good or bad or safe or unsafe is entirely independent from how it’s funded or who pays for it or doesn’t. Obviously how something is funded is an extra layer to consider regarding ethical concerns. But you can have an open source recipe using humanely sourced poison that’s deadly.
It’s really problematic that so often good information is behind paywalls, and disinformation is of course made free, for maximum spread for deceit. But often some “free” stuff is actually a lure to retrieve information from people, and people’s personal information is extremely valuable, especially that identifies someone as part of a particular target market. Social engineering attacks also use the watering hole strategy - seeking people out where they are likely to be with a lure they’re likely to take.
Why are people in the dark on urgent matters? It often comes down to elite panic.
One explanation for this is typically if there's a danger that people in charge are inadequately informing the public about, it’s likely a case of elite panic - where people in power typically prioritize their own position in the status quo, and prioritize keeping the public calm so that we won’t upset the apple cart, and these are priorities that are, for them, ahead of our safety, or even their own in many cases. And if anything at all, that’s all that’s going on behind the scenes. Nobody is cooking up ways to help us behind the scenes so we don’t have to worry. Anyone who is trying to help would be giving people information to facilitate us saving ourselves. Those would be the people showing true leadership, and they, perhaps paradoxically, are scarce to find in the realm of people with power. It’s an age old problem for sure.
Quote:
“It is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it... anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”
— Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (radio program) (1980)