Getting awfully close to home, guys. A vaccine is available in the US (although not currently part the routine childhood vaccination package outside of PR.) Keep an eye out, you folks in the southern tier. Dengue sucks biggly.
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Ugh. No adult vaccine.
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This is a really big deal.
I am double-plus unloving our planetâs climate catastrophe future.
This scenario sure looks ripe for [even more] disaster capitalism, including the rollout of some powerful, perhaps previously-banned pesticide(s) targeting mosquitoes and larvae. Puerto Rico already has an issue with access to fresh water / potable water.
There is a non-zero chance that Big Pharma and/or Big Ag will [try to] use the people of Puerto Rico as uh⌠test cases⌠for various approaches to mosquito control, dengue fever treatments, etc.
My only hope is what we learned from rapid COVID-19 vaccine development can influence the curve on development of an effective adult vaccine as well as a vaccine safe for children under 9 years old. Maybe we learned a few lessons that are portable.
Until that time, one (admittedly imperfect) stopgap:
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Incoming history of TB via John GreenâŚ
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For now, the risk to the public is low. According to a release from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), genetic testing by the National Veterinary Services Laboratories indicated that the H5N1 strain that spread to the cows doesnât appear to contain any mutations that would make it more transmissible to humans
My important takeaway is just how rapidly evolving and adaptable this strain is. Not a virologist by any stretch, but it seems the leap from bird physiology to mammal should be less than ruminant to human, but I do not know that. Nothing actionable in this story, but keep your eyes open. This might (or might not) become a story of concern as time goes on.
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Iâm guessing this is a good example of why pasteurizing milk is a good idea, just in case it does start becoming transmissible.
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Oh damn:
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The storm, however, lent her research a new, urgent question. A subset of Nomuraâs cohort of expectant women had been pregnant during [Hurricane] Sandy. She wanted to know if the prenatal stress of living through a hurricane â of experiencing something so uniquely catastrophic â acted differentially on the children these mothers were carrying, relative to those children who were born before or conceived after the storm.More than a decade later, she has her answer. The conclusions reveal a startling disparity: children who were in utero during Sandy bear an inordinately high risk of psychiatric conditions today. For example, girls who were exposed to Sandy prenatally experienced a 20-fold increase in anxiety and a 30-fold increase in depression later in life compared with girls who were not exposed. Boys had 60-fold and 20-fold increased risks of ADHD and conduct disorder, respectively. Children expressed symptoms of the conditions as early as preschool. âŚ
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Interesting. There have been studies suggesting stress in utero or even in maternal childhood causes differential methylation, which can pesist into the next generation even. Not quite Lamarkian evolution, but scary. Studies done on children of holocaust survivors are similar. We are screwing with generations we will never see, and i hate it.
Study finds epigenetic changes in children of Holocaust survivors.
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As an exercise, I imagine what it must be like to have survived, as any shape or age of human, the genocide of native Americans (500 Nations) in what is now the U.S. How easily I forget every day that we are on stolen land, so much of it soaked in blood.
This. Yes. And I am with you.
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This is something those of us who were pregnant during 9/11 have discussed as well.
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I hear you.
I was pregnant when I totaled the car I was driving: not good (in the end, we were all ok as far as I know.)
I sense that there are vast numbers of people born under trauma, from a traumatized mother, whether in utero or before it, during the traumatic event. Epigenetics is incredibly complex for me to even begin to understand.
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SZYF: Yes. So it was very clear around 20 years ago that DNA has two identities - an inherited identity and another identity that is formed during embryogenesis or during the time the fetus develops in the womb of the mother. Of course, the next question was, does it end there? And that is, does DNA have a third identity? Which, I call it experiential identity - the identity of past experiences that somehow also use the same kind of biochemical concepts to give DNA different identities. But then this time, this will be an identity of an experience.(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)
SZYF: But is it true only for rats? The problem is we cannot test this in humans because, ethically, we cannot administer child adversity in a random way. So if a poor child develop a certain property, we donât know whether this is caused by poverty or whether poor people have bad genes. So geneticists will try to tell you that poor people are poor because their genes make them poor. Epigeneticists will tell you poor people are in a bad environment or an impoverished environment that creates that phenotype, that property.
So we canât do experiments. We can administer adversity to humans. But God does experiments with humans. And itâs called natural disasters. So one of the natural disasters - the hardest natural disaster in Canadian history happened in my province of Quebec. Itâs the ice storm of 1998. We lost our entire electrical grid because of an ice storm when the temperatures were in the dead of winter of Quebec - minus 20 to minus 30 - and there were pregnant mothers during that time.
And my colleague, Suzanne King, followed the children of these mothers for 15 years. And what happened was that as the stress increased - and here we had objective measures of stress. How long you were without power? Where did you spend your time? Was it in your mother-in-lawâs apartment or in some posh country home? So all these added up to a social stress scale. And you can ask the question, how did the children look like? And it appears that as stress increases, the children develop more autism. They develop more metabolic diseases. And they develop more autoimmune diseases.
RAZ: So the mothers passed on the stress factor to the babies?
SZYF: Yes so we looked at their DNA, you know, when the kids were 15 years old - DNA in the blood and immune system. And we saw many, many differences in the way the epigenetics was programmed. So this, in my opinion, was, you know, one of the first evidence that in humans, too, an experience can result in long-term changes to the way genes are programmed.
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Itâs incredibly complex for the folks who study it for years to understand. Way too many confounding variables, way too many variations, way to complex a level of interaction between genetics and environment, and as we find out more about it, we keep finding more ways that it is even more complex than we thought previously. Another example of âScience is only simple and straightforward when you donât understand it at all.â The shit we are doing to our society and to our world is affecting us, our children and grandchildren, even unto the seventh generation, for all we know. But we canât do anything about it because profitâŚ
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I just want to weigh in to say, that it does suck, bigly. Also hotly.
When I had it, a doctor came to my house (she was a friend of a friend and lived around the corner) and examined me. Dengue is endemic where I was, she said âgood news, nobody dies the first time they get thisâ so youâll be better after 7 really bad days. And, my temperature was 40C, which took me most of 5 days to convert to F because I was doing it in my head, from my bed, in the middle of mild hallucinations. Itâs 104, which is not a fun temperature to be when the air is 90 and it rains every day.
All I had was tylenol, water and a big watermelon that I had cut up the day before I went down, thank goodness. Some kind soul I had never met before (but who turned out to be a cousin) brought me broth with tiny little noodles on day 6 and I was able to keep it down. It was a golden liquid blessing.
Now, I donât really know if itâs true that nobody dies the first time or if she was trying to make me feel better, but I am super careful about mosquito repellent because I do not want to try out the hemorrhagic version.
The irony is that I probably contracted it the evening I left my house in a hurry because the were sending around the trucks that blow the pesticide smoke / vapor and I wanted to avoid breathing it. So I left home without my DEET. Doh!
I was up and around after a week, doing most of what I had before, but it took almost a year before I felt truly healthy, robust and energetic again.
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OK, I am torn as to whether this is a PSA or a BSA, but it is apparently not meant as a joke. Although it would be a pretty funny one, if it were.
Constipated? Here, swallow this vibrator. Youâll be right as rain in no time! 
Results
Among 904 patients screened, 312 were enrolled. A greater percentage of patients receiving the vibrating capsule achieved both primary efficacy end points compared with placebo (39.3% vs 22.1%, P = .001 for CSBM1; 22.7% vs 11.4% P = .008 for CSBM2). Significantly greater improvements were seen with the vibrating capsule for the secondary end points of straining, stool consistency, and quality-of-life measures compared with placebo. Adverse events were mild, gastrointestinal in nature, and similar between groups, except that a mild vibrating sensation was reported by 11% of patients in the vibrating capsule group, but none withdrew from the trial.
Some days, man. Some daysâŚ
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Feature, not bug!
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Iâm seven years away from my next routine colonoscopy, and I hope by then this approach to prep will be more accepted.
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The Jynneos vaccine is recommended for those at high risk of infection, including those who have been exposed to someone with mpox, according to the CDC. Others eligible for the shot are those who identify as gay, bisexual, or a man who has sex with other men who have had more than one sexual partner or been diagnosed with more than one sexually transmitted disease in the past six months. Those with HIV or other immune-compromising conditions are also eligible.
It is not terribly easy to catch, but for those at risk, get the vaccine and keep this bastard in check.
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It looks like this is a recall limited to Japan (maybe?) but given the nature of commerce these days, worth being aware. More âeconomics over livesâ kind of shitâŚ
Some analysts blame the recent deregulation initiatives, which simplified and sped up approval for health products to spur economic growth.
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If I never have to spend a day on Jello and bouillon again, that would be great! 
Maybe capsule endoscopy might be used more for screening, too. Iâm on the every 5 years schedule (an increase from 3, which makes me nervous).
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