🏥 Hospitals are clearly not pandemic-ready 📌 Informational Learned Helplessness. It's exhausting 😮💨
Air quality scientist was plagiarized, then stalked, impersonated & trolled.
📍Note: Updated covid vaccine info:
A Precautionary Path with Kaitlin Sundling, MD, PhD - Updated 2024-2025 COVID vaccines for all available now Everyone aged 6 months and up should get an updated COVID vaccine, without delay! Kaitlin Sundling Sep 03, 2024. “All three COVID vaccine manufacturers have developed updated vaccine formulations to better match current variants for fall 2024....”
Doctor avoided contracting dengue while doing research — with precautions.
Travel medicine expert David O. Freedman, MD, used precautions to avoid getting sick with dengue despite repeated exposure to dengue season while running the Gorgas tropical medicine course in Lima, Peru for 20 years.
Freedman himself luckily dodged dengue all those years by following the same, time-honored precautions we still advise today. Despite "the hottest jungle climate you can imagine with maximum humidity," he always wore long sleeves and pants, applied lots of repellent containing DEET or picaridin, and never ate lunch or dinner outdoors.
Taking precautions is a better bet than not doing so.
Do we want hospitals that are clearly not pandemic-ready at all? And this when we still have a pandemic virus currently circulating?
All staff, every last person working in a hospital should be provided with N95 respiratory protection.
OSHA - By Standard Number 1910.134 - Respiratory protection. 1910.134(a)(2) A respirator shall be provided to each employee when such equipment is necessary to protect the health of such employee.
Every last person working in an environment that’s high risk for aerosol transmission of disease as a workplace hazard should be offered respiratory protection and fit-testing. That’s all over a hospital, because patients and healthcare workers are breathing the same air traveling through hallways all over facilities. Frankly it was always the case with other pathogens that put already vulnerable people at risk, and now, because of lack of community based mitigations, covid might be present anywhere.
Hospital corporations choosing to not allow or provide fit-testing to all employees should certainly not be used as an excuse not to provide N95s to healthcare workers or to deny people accommodation in healthcare settings. But, apparently that’s what’s happening in some places. This is the response given to someone after asking for ADA accommodation for the staff to wear N95 respirator masks during a medical procedure in a Massachusetts hospital:
In regards to your request that all providers and staff at the Surgical Center wear an N95 mask, this request cannot be accommodated. At the current time, physicians and staff are not required to mask in all settings. There are exceptions (i.e. during a surgical procedure, if a patient has respiratory symptoms, or if a patient/staff has had a recent COVID exposure). In addition, not all staff are fit tested for N95 masks. Fit testing is based upon job role and responsibility. Therefore, ensuring that each staff member you come into contact with wears an N95 mask is not a reasonable accommodation.
Clearly pretzel logic - and what, just to cut costs?
The blood lab I was at this summer had to go look for a mask when asked to mask. I’ve heard 2 other stories of when someone asks a healthcare provider to mask they say they have to go find someone to get them one. We’ve been in a prolonged surge, so why aren’t they wearing them by default? At a minimum N95 masks should be available everywhere in healthcare for all staff and all patients.
My letter to reps:
Healthcare providers need to be stopped from using “fit testing” as an excuse to not wear N95 respirator masks as a reasonable accommodation in healthcare to protect vulnerable people and patients undergoing procedures requiring them to be unmasked, and thus making “one way masking” impossible. This is ridiculous. Either make the healthcare providers fit test all their staff and provide N95s to all staff - because all staff should be aerosol transmission pandemic-ready after all, or mandate that there needs to be an exception to this rule for reasonable accommodation. Denying healthcare workers and patients this safety by citing that fit testing in a hospital is not reasonable is itself ridiculous. PPE cannot and should not be considered “unreasonable” in a hospital setting. Respirator masks should be available to all staff and all patients at all times since there’s no shortages anymore and hasn’t been for years now.
Please feel free to repurpose for your own letters to reps.
Air quality scientist was plagiarized, then stalked, impersonated & trolled.
Sasan Sadrizadeh. a research scientist in Sweden focused on aerosol technology, indoor air quality, and infection control engineering had work plagiarized. The work that did the plagiarizing was retracted. And then this scientist has faced having imposters sending fake emails to journals, and in the process of this went down a rabbit hole of a big fake citation industry.
Austria holds woman accountable for spreading covid to her neighbor who died as a result.
The charge was “grossly negligent homicide”. It often takes years for people to be held accountable for anything through a legal system.
Sadly, I’ve suspected that the pandemic, and the lax careless treatment of it by people with power, has given many could-be murderers an easy opportunity to kill off the most vulnerable members of our society and get away with it if they wanted to. There are guardians who refuse to allow family members in nursing homes to even get the covid vaccines. And I’ve been pointing out for years now how some people, including immunocompromised people, have no choice but to live with people who refuse to consider their safety. The idea of ushering someone off seems to almost be promoted in Sweden.
The disability woke-washing of vaccine misinformation.
Some people online try to use disability woke-washing to claim we have to listen to everybody who has some theory about how people got long covid that are brought over from anti-vax circles or from odd influencers. If someone is citing VAERS as evidence of anything, please know that is a big red flag, because VAERS is not somewhere you go for settled science of any type, it’s merely raw unverified data, and citing it to make false claims about vaccines being unsafe is part of a well-known dishonest right-wing anti-vax disinformation campaign.
No, we don’t have to entertain everyone’s unfounded warnings or bizarre unproven theories. Being pro-vax is disability justice. You don’t have to repeat anti-vax talking points and campaign against vaccines in order to support the rare cases of people with adverse reactions to a vaccination. People who, for medical reasons are unable to get a vaccine, and are not anti-vax, typically want to encourage as many other people as possible to get vaccinated. It’s not typical for someone who’s had a serious rare reaction to a medication to then demand the drug be taken off the market, no matter how many lives it’s already saved. It’s not a reasonable demand. All medications come with some risk, and that’s why we need medical science expertise to determine whether the benefits outweigh those risks. With approved and recommended vaccines, that has been determined for the general public - the benefits far outweigh the risks. If you have specific concerns, you should be discussing it with your own doctor who has a legal responsibility to give you beneficial and not harmful individualized medical advice.
The lack of public health and medical publishing on the side of the precautionary principle and public safety.
For over 4 years now I’ve wondered why the science and medical journals are simply chock full of covid contrarian, risk minimizing, anti-mask, and bullshit learning loss propaganda. Also stuff pushing dubious treatments and anti-vax assertions that are often retracted. This while there are many legitimate pro-vax pro-mask and pro-mitigation of disease with lots of scientific and public health expertise who are not getting published, or who don’t even try.
If someone can explain that to me I’d be interested. I have some of theories, but what do I know?
🗞️ In the news
CIDRAP Weather, location drive US waterborne infectious disease outbreaks, researchers say Mary Van Beusekom, MS Aug 16, 2024 Legionnaires' disease, a severe type of pneumonia caused by inhalation of Legionella bacteria from soil or water, spiked 124% with a 1-SD increase in soil moisture. Legionnaires' was the only illness more common in urban rather than rural areas. Admission rates for all pathogens were higher in small and rural hospitals, especially for parasitic diseases. Hospitalizations for parasitic diseases—primarily caused by Cryptosporidium—were 9% higher with a 1-SD climb in precipitation. "Rural communities typically use drinking water from private wells, which are vulnerable to inundation during floods, or groundwater sources, which are often undertreated relative to surface drinking water," the researchers wrote. "This is of particular concern in agricultural regions; both increased pathogen concentrations in water and illnesses have been associated with wet conditions near farms."
Bugs, mold and mildew found in Boar's Head plant linked to deadly listeria outbreak healthwatch By Alexander Tin Edited By Allison Elyse Gualtieri Updated on: August 29, 2024 / 4:35 PM EDT / CBS News "Consumers who were unaware of the recall may have eaten recalled products. People may also have a prolonged course of illness," a spokesperson for South Carolina's health department said in a statement following the new deaths. Records released by the USDA's Food Safety and Inspection Service to CBS News through a Freedom of Information Act request tally 69 records of "noncompliances" flagged by inspectors over the past year at the Jarratt plant.
The Hamilton Spectator - Opinion | School’s back and so is a COVID-19 surge: Protecting kids and precarious workers Aug. 30, 2024 Dying with COVID-19 in the acute phase may have decreased, but complications from an infection exist — more than 2 million Canadians have “long COVID” (LC). In this context, societies that see themselves as equitable, inclusive and just need to consider if they’re doing the best job protecting their more vulnerable members, like children and many precarious workers. Research shows governments are not doing the best protecting the rights of children in a crisis, and reports from workers indicate some feel abandoned and left to deal with scary health situations, largely on their own. For school staff, students, their families and communities, this all seems quite cruel. It does not need to be this way. Organizations are working to make Ontario schools safer. Ontario school safety advocates for cleaner air in schools and research shows schools are safer when things like masking and vaccination are in place. However, these measures are generally not being followed. Dr. Pantea Javidan writes, “the lack of health and safety in schools resulting from zero-mitigation policies continues to cause great physical and psycho-social harms to children and families.”
The Hill - Health experts fear RFK Jr.’s ‘dangerous’ influence on Trump by Alejandra O’Connell-Domenech - 08/31/24 Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. told conservative radio host Glenn Beck this month he would support Kennedy taking over a government agency to “blow it up.”
WHO - Data show marked increase in annual cholera deaths 4 September 2024 Conflict, climate change, inadequate safe water and sanitation, poverty, underdevelopment, and population displacement due to emerging and re-emerging conflicts and disasters from natural hazards all contributed to the rise in cholera outbreaks last year.
📍Note: September 17th is World Patient Day and the Occupy anniversary.
Quote:
In time, people become overwhelmed, and even cognitively debilitated, by the “onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until [it] becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source.” And so “censorship by noise,” particularly common in regions governed autocratically, leads people to experience crushing anxiety coupled with a markedly weakened motivation to fact-check anything anymore.”