Trump Administration Condemns Millions To Die

The following is a small part of an excellent article at Propublica.org: 

For weeks, some of the federal government’s foremost authorities on global health have repeatedly warned Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other leaders about the coming death toll if they carried out the Trump administration’s plan to end nearly all U.S. foreign aid around the world.

In their clearest accounting yet, top officials have estimated the casualties: One million children will not be treated for severe acute malnutrition. Up to 166,000 people will die from malaria. New cases of tuberculosis will go up by 30%. Two hundred thousand more children will be paralyzed by polio over the next decade.

Instead of acting on the repeated warnings, top administration officials, including the State Department’s director of foreign assistance, Peter Marocco, thwarted their own experts’ efforts to keep the U.S. Agency for International Development’s most vital programs up and running, according to internal memos and estimates compiled by global health leaders at the agency and obtained by ProPublica.

President Donald Trump’s political appointees, along with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, pressed ahead with their plan to dismantle USAID by ignoring and impeding staff who tried to protect lifesaving operations — even as the administration publicly insisted that those programs remained online.

During exchanges outlined in one of the memos, a DOGE engineer emailed staff and said they were not allowed to review the programs they were canceling. At another point, USAID’s then-deputy chief of staff, Joel Borkert, told agency personnel to take a “draconian” approach to approving waivers.

Climate Change Poses New Health Problems

 

A Surgical Mask Will NOT Protect You From Coronavirus

(The photo above, from Getty Images, was found at wgbh.org.)

Anytime the media does a story about the Coronavirus, they show pictures of people wearing surgical masks (like in the picture above). This is true not in just Asia, but in other parts of the world also. These people evidently believe these masks will keep them from getting the new virus. And this belief is resulting a shortage of those masks.

But there is a bigger problem than that -- It doesn't work! A surgical mask will not protect you from the Coronavirus.

Here's the truth from Laura Geggel at livescience.com:

Can wearing a medical face mask protect you against the new coronavirus? It's a question many people, including pet owners who are putting canine face masks on their dogs, are asking. 

If it's a regular surgical face mask, the answer is "no," Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious-disease specialist at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, told Live Science.  . . .

The surgical mask is intended for surgeons, because these products do a good job of keeping pathogens from the doctor's nose and mouth from entering the surgical field, Schaffner said. 

In some Asian countries, such as Japan and China, it's not uncommon to see people wearing surgical masks in public to protect against pathogens and pollution. But those masks don't help much in the context of a virus, Schaffner said. "They're not designed to keep out viral particles, and they're not nearly as tightly fitted around your nose and cheeks," as an N95 respirator, he said.

"Could they be of some use? Yes, but the effect is likely to be modest," Schaffner said.

He noted that some people wear surgical masks because they are sick with a cold or the flu and they don't want to get other people sick. But if you're sick, it's best just not to go to public areas. "That's the time to stay home," Schaffner said.

A better way to avoid getting the coronavirus is to, first and foremost, postpone any travel to China, where the virus originated and has infected more than 11,000 people, according to The Washington Post. You can also thoroughly wash your hands; avoid touching your eyes, nose and mouth with unwashed hands; avoid close contact with people who are sick; and disinfect frequently touched objects and surfaces, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported. 

As for pet owners putting face masks on their dogs, there's no evidence that dogs can even catch the coronavirus, so "you don't need to do that," Schaffner said.

Measles Is Making A Big Comeback Thanks To Anti-Vaxxers

Just a few years ago, the United States almost had measles eradicated. But now the disease is making a huge comeback. The number of cases as of July is 1,148 cases, and it looks like that number could exceed the 1992 total of 2,126 before the end of the year.

This did not have to happen. It is solely caused the the anti-vaxxers, who are passing along misinformation about vaccinations. They want Americans to believe that vaccinations are dangerous, and can cause autism. That is not true, and their claims are based on one British study that has been debunked repeatedly.

The measles vaccine is remarkably effective. But if the number of people refusing to vaccinate their children (because of the bad science they have been shown) continues to grow, we could return to the bad old days when measles hospitalized 48,000 each year and killed 400-500 people.

Measles Outbreak Sets A 21st Century Record

The number of new measles cases in the United States in 2019 is the highest of any year in this century -- and that's for only four months of this year. Imagine how high it will be by the end of the year!

We can thank the idiots in the anti-vaxxer movement for this for spreading lies about vaccines.

From NPR.org:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports 695 measles cases in 22 states.

"This is the greatest number of cases reported in the United States since measles was eliminated from this country in 2000," says a CDC statement issued late Wednesday. . . .

"The longer these outbreaks continue, the greater the chance measles will again get a sustained foothold in the United States," the CDC said.

Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said in a statement that the rise in measles cases is "avoidable."

"Measles is not a harmless childhood illness, but a highly contagious, potentially life-threatening disease," he said. "We have the ability to safely protect our children and our communities. Vaccines are a safe, highly effective public health solution that can prevent this disease. The measles vaccines are among the most extensively studied medical products we have, and their safety has been firmly established over many years in some of the largest vaccine studies ever undertaken." . . .

The measles outbreaks were largely imported by unvaccinated travelers who were exposed to the disease in another country and then on their return to the U.S. exposed other unvaccinated people. If a community is highly vaccinated, then the outbreaks are minimal or don't happen at all.

"However, once measles is in an under-vaccinated community, it becomes difficult to control the spread of the disease," said the CDC. . . .

The states with reported cases of measles are Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Texas, Tennessee and Washington.

The GOP Has A Communicable Disease (Trump Fever)

(This caricature of the Republican Party in trouble is by DonkeyHotey.)

There is a school of thought that the biggest problem right now is the Trump administration, and once Trump is gone things can return to normal. That underestimates the problem. The Republican Party is now diseased (with Trump Fever), and that disease has spread far beyond the White House. It has infected the GOP Congress and the GOP base. The real question is whether the Republican Party can survive this disease -- or is it fatal.

The following is part of an excellent op-ed by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post:

The Republican Party has a communicable disease. It has been intimate for so long with President Trump that it acts pretty much as he does. He lies and then Republicans lie about his lies — they don’t matter, just noise, the wall is more important, etc. These evasions are intended to suggest that moral squalor can be cleansed by a jump in the Dow Jones or a handshake with Kim Jong Un. The months of Trump have taken a toll. The GOP has been stripped of its dignity and honor by a president who has neither. . . .

The title of the 1966 movie “What Did You Do in the War, Daddy?” stemmed from a question the producer-director Blake Edwards’s son had asked him. A similar question has to be asked of Republican officeholders by their own children: What did you do to stop Trump?

What, Daddy or Mommy, did you do to insist on presidential honesty? Did you just look away and cowardly maintain that Trump’s behavior — his intellectual, political and spiritual corruption — was beside the point? And when, Daddy or Mommy, did you condemn his lies or not shake the hand of a man who dissed John McCain’s heroism? Did you demand that the president account for his bizarre relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his insidious attempt to cow the press? Did you confront him for suggesting that the indictment of two Republican congressmen should have been delayed until after the midterm elections? Tell me, Mom and Dad, did you ever sing Bob Dylanwhen you were a kid: “How many times can a man turn his head/Pretending he just doesn’t see?” Look, our freedoms are blowin’ in the wind.

The most shocking thing about Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” is that the appalling no longer shocks. There’s not a member of Congress who does not know the truth of Woodward’s depiction of Trump as out of control and, in a way, out of his mind — downright dangerous. The revelations were of degree, but not of kind. The feeble act of faux heroism on the part of then-adviser Gary Cohn — he swiped documents off Trump’s desk — deserves a mock medal. Where was Cohn’s denunciation of Trump when he left the White House? Where were his harrowing details, anecdotes — anything? Silence. . . .

By now, we have all become inured to Trump and his antics. We know he’s a liar — some 4,713 false or misleading claims since his inauguration, according to The Post’s Fact Checker database. The consequence is that lying has become normalized, like killing in a time of war. Trump has infected much of the Republican Party. The lie has become its First Principle — and there is no second. The GOP is diseased, in the tertiary stage of moral cowardice. It may never recover.

Donald Trump May Have A Degenerative Brain Disease

(This photo of Donald Trump was found at CNN.com.)

I have written before about Trump's psychological problems (and I still believe he has at least some psychological issues -- including a raging narcissism). But Trump's behavior may not be limited to psychological problems. He may actually have an organic degenerative brain disorder.

Dr. Ford Vox, who practices brain injury medicine, has written an excellent article about this for Stat.com. The article is well worth reading in it's entirety, but I post here just the reasons Dr. Vox gives for saying Trump should be tested for brain disease. He writes:

Here’s the evidence on which I base my conclusion that it would be prudent for the president to be tested for a brain disorder.

Language and executive dysfunction

Language is closely tied with cognition, and the president’s speech patterns are increasingly repetitive, fragmented, devoid of content, and restricted in vocabulary. Trump’s overuse of superlatives like tremendous, fantastic, and incredible are not merely elements of personal style. These filler words reflect reduced verbal fluency. Full transcripts of the president’s interviews with outlets like the New York Times and Time reveal the extent of his disorganized thought patterns.

The problem becomes especially apparent in the transcript format, where his thinking is no longer camouflaged by visual accompaniments to communication like facial expressions and gesticulations. Some outlets have sought to protect the president, forgiving his lapses by declining to publish full transcripts. When Politico published a leaked transcript of the Wall Street Journal’s July interview, we learned that the president’s intellectual curiosity rises to the level of introductory geography: “You call places like Malaysia, Indonesia, and you say, you know, how many people do you have? And it’s pretty amazing how many people they have.”

The president made that remark in response to a question about the ideal corporate tax rate, demonstrating the degree to which his thinking drifts. The problems with language expression extend to language interpretation, the likely source of the president’s gross misunderstanding of London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s message to his city in the wake of a terror attack in June.

Dysfunction of social cognition and behavior

Some of the president’s most concerning behaviors suggest a decline in social cognition: reduced insight and awareness into the thoughts and motivations of other people, coupled with symptoms like impulsivity and disinhibition that make him behave rudely and create needless controversy.

The decision to fire FBI Director James Comey in the middle of the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election is an example of an impulsive decision that was greatly damaging to the president himself, assuming he was not actually trying to cover up his own complicity in the matter under investigation. Contradicting his own communications staff by disclosing that the Russia investigation was one reason he fired Comey is an example of disinhibited behavior. Rashly threatening Comey with a recording he did not have is reflective of poor emotional control.

Trump’s easy Twitter trigger finger, most recently retweeting British far-right videos he apparently knew nothing about simply because the social media platform promoted these videos in his feed, reflects poor impulse control. Numerous problematic moments in the Trump presidency, such as his volunteering top secret Israeli intelligence to the Russian ambassador or volunteering that his immigration restrictions were indeed a “travel ban,” reflect an inability to contain himself.

We saw this most recently with his inability to make it through a simple White House ceremony honoring Navajo code talkers without making an ethnically derogatory reference to an opposition political figure.

The president’s decision to launch into a fight with a Gold Star wife and mother who lost their soldier in Niger is also reflective of impaired social cognition. It could also signal memory decline, since it seemed as though he had not learned from a similar imbroglio during the campaign.

Episodes like these often occur because of impaired frontal lobe brain systems. These typically provide some degree of restraint from saying the first thing that crosses your mind. In a healthy brain, these ideas must make their way through multiple layers of checks and balances that take into account the social propriety and appropriateness of the audience for a given remark. Such frontal impairment often does not stop at troublesome communication, but has physical manifestations such as childlike facial expressions and physical restlessness, both features we see in Trump.

Dysfunction in memory, attention and concentration

The integrity of other primary cognitive domains like memory, attention, and concentration are tied up in all of the problems I mention above. Memory impairment is specifically implicated in episodes like forgetting to sign orders — not once, but twice — that were the purposes of the press events the president was attending. Attention and focus are key to forming memory; the lack of either makes it more likely to forget why one was in a room in the first place.

The persistence of fixed beliefs about the crowd size at his inauguration, President Obama having a fraudulent birth certificate, or millions of undocumented people voting for Hillary Clinton suggest either a shocking willingness to lie, which falls into the behavioral dysregulation category, or a memory disorder that hobbles the president with fixed delusions that cannot be swayed by contradictory information. The New York Times opinion section has catalogued an astounding collection of the president’s lies so extensive that such lying implicates the cognitive systems that undergird one’s hold on what has happened in one’s life.

If the president is questioning whether the “Access Hollywood” videotape of himself celebrating a lifestyle rife with misogyny and sexual assault is really him, that worries me more about a memory disorder than a particularly poor effort at gaslighting.

..............................

The president’s apparent symptoms are advancing and warrant medical evaluation by relevant specialists. Given the sensitivity of his case, an independent panel would be appropriate. It’s entirely possible that the president does not have predementia or is not progressing toward dementia. But he is definitely behaving as such.

In either scenario, I do not think this is an individual who is fit to serve the office.

Public Overwhelmingly Supports Required Vaccinations

Diseases that we had nearly eliminated here in this country are now raging back. The reason for this is that parents have been granted the "right" to refuse to vaccinate their children. Some are refusing because they mistakenly believe vaccinations can cause autism, and others simply because they see this as some kind of "freedom" right. They are wrong.

This has nothing to do with freedom or rights. Vaccinations are a public health issue, and the growing number of parents refusing to vaccinate their children are putting not only their own children at risk, but also others (especially those too young to have been vaccinated, those who are ill with something else like cancer, those who have had their immune system weakened in some way, and even a tiny amount of healthy people who have been vaccinated (since vaccinations are about 99% effective).

And many people in the United States are getting tired of those people who put others in danger. The charts here were made from a CNN / ORC Poll -- done between February 12th and 15th of a random national sample of 1,027 adults, with a margin of error of about 3 points (slightly higher for the separate groups). Note that 78% of all adults in this country think all children should be required to be vaccinated -- and that feeling runs across all demographic groups (running between 70% and 86%).

And a smaller, but still significant majority of 58% of Americans think children who have not been vaccinated should not be allowed to attend public schools. I agree.

Vaccinations Are A Public Health Issue (Not A Choice)

Those of us who are older remember a time when disease took far too many human lives. But we also remember that vaccinations began to control many of those diseases. Smallpox and polio have almost been completely eliminated by required vaccinations, and others (like measles, mumps, & rubella) were significantly reduced -- and on their way to being eliminated. This was a good thing, because many lives were saved.

But recently a new movement has developed -- the anti-vaxxers. These people don't think vaccinations should be a requirement, but a parental choice (and some would do away with vaccinations altogether). Sadly, a few celebrities jumped on the anti-vaxxer bandwagon, giving it a kind of weird credibility (even though these people were not scientists or doctors).

The anti-vaxxers latched on to a study done by a British scientist that said early childhood vaccinations were the cause of autism. That study has discredited by many scientists and doctors, who pointed out the many flaws in the study. But the anti-vaxxers cling to the discredited study, because without it there is simply no way to justify their position. And they seem to have been partially successful in spreading their flawed and dangerous message (as is evidenced by the chart above).

But there now seems to be another aspect to the anti-vaxxer movement. Look at the chart below, and compare it to the one above.

If the only reason to oppose required vaccinations was the mistaken belief that it caused autism, then the two charts should be very close to identical -- but they aren't. Note that a much higher percentage of Americans think vaccinations should be a parental choice (instead of a requirement) than believe it causes autism.

Why do they believe this? All I can figure is that they look at the issue as one of free choice or rights -- that it is a parent's right to refuse to vaccinate their children. I find this idea to be an absurd one. Vaccinations have nothing to do with freedom or rights -- they are a public health issue.

One of the obligations of government is to protect the public. It is why we use tax dollars to fund a standing military, and it is why we fund police agencies in all cities and localities -- and it is why we pass laws. We don't recognize the "right" of anyone to murder a fellow human being, or to hurt them. Why then would we allow people to hurt others by refusing to vaccinate their children?

These people are not just endangering their own children (which would be bad enough), but they are also endangering other people. They are allowing disease to continue to exist, and continue to take human lives -- and that is inexcusable. The government doesn't just have the right to protect the public by requiring vaccinations -- they have a solemn duty to do so.

4 In 10 Don't Trust The Gov. To Handle An Ebola Outbreak

The top chart is from a Pew Research Center survey done between October 2nd and 5th of a random national sample of 1,007 adults, with a 3.6 point margin of error.

The second chart is from a Gallup Poll done on October 4th and 5th of a random national sample of 1,016 adults, with a margin of error of 4 points.

Both of the polls show the same thing (and therefore tend to verify each other) -- that between 37% and 41% of the general public (or around 4 out of every 10 Americans) doesn't really trust the federal government (i.e., the CDC) to properly handle an outbreak of the Ebola virus in this country.

Those polls celebrated the positive aspect -- that a majority did trust the CDC (and were not worried about catching the Ebola virus). I found it more interesting that such a significant minority did not trust the CDC, because I was surprised that it was as large as about 40%.

It is generally recognized that the Center for Disease Control (CDC) in the United States is among the best in the world (if not the best). Why do so many doubt their ability to control an outbreak of Ebola in this country? This is especially puzzling, since Ebola is not an airborne virus (which you can get from someone sneezing or coughing in the same room). You must actually have contact with a sick person's blood or other bodily fluids (and even then, the person is not contagious until they start showing symptoms).

This reminds me of the irrational fear in the general public when AIDS first became widely know. People were told that AIDS patients were not a danger (unless you were planning to swap bodily fluids with them), but people overreacted in spite of being told that -- and they went to ridiculous lengths to avoid those patients. Maybe it's just natural for Americans to go off the deep end when a new danger is exposed. And it doesn't have to be a disease -- since we have overreacted to the threat from terrorism also, even though it is still a minor threat in this country (since we have a greater chance of dying from scores of other things).

Contagion

(This bit of humor was found on the blog of Yellowdog Granny. You can click on the picture to get a bigger version that's easier to read.) Sometimes I think this is true. Instead of fulfilling our role as the inheritors of this planet, we seem bound and determined to be its destroyers. The only real question is whether we destroy it (and ourselves) before we get to other worlds, and begin their destruction also. The really sad part is that man possesses the intelligence and ability to save our planet (and ourselves). We just refuse to do so.