BF2S Forums Pandemic thread

it's almost as if there are statistics on deaths that can help us get out of the thicket of personal anecdotes.

it's the usual dilbert master-stroke.

guy downplayed the effectiveness of the vaccines for a year because the v1, three-year-old vaccine tech requires frequent boosters and now has a negligible effect on transmission. quote, with endless repetitions, 'the vaccines are useless'.

then he pops up with some top-rate analysis of omicron: 'hmm, it's probably actually every bit as dangerous as delta, the virologists are wrong in their assessments, just the vaccines are so good that they're protecting most people's lives'.

it's like dropping a rock into a well and waiting 7 seconds to hear the dull splosh.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 02:28:19)

nobody has ever said it has 'gone away' or 'been defeated'.

people have said that, with the treatments available, with frequent boosters, with new vaccines coming on-line, with improved therapeutics and hospital treatments, etc, that we have to consider different ways of adapting and responding to endemic levels of covid-19. not a single epidemiologist has declared the pandemic over or a thing of the past. that's just you, with your field of straw men that you're so fond of.

at this point we're going to need vaccines every three months forever

simply not true either. there are now bivalent/polyvalent boosters being approved worldwide, by moderna et al, that will confer immunity for multiple strains at once. that in-itself is a large leap forward.

antibiotics-resistant diseases are a huge problem in places like america and australia too. factory-farmed cattle are pumped full of them and human beings acquire a susceptibility as a result. pumping cattle full of antibiotics as a precaution is having every bit as large a knock-on effect on our ecology – including us as living beings in that – as mass use of insecticides in crop agriculture, and so on.

this is a non-sequitur in the context of this discussion. the threat posed by omicron doesn't have much to do with antibiotics resistance, dilbert.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 03:04:21)

... and it is a huge problem in the US and australia.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment … g-revealed
Livestock raised for food in the US are dosed with five times as much antibiotic medicine as farm animals in the UK, new data has shown, raising questions about rules on meat imports under post-Brexit trade deals.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-n … -superbugs

A lack of transparency on antibiotic use by the Australian farming industry is undermining efforts to prevent superbugs developing and spreading through the food supply, an infectious diseases physician and microbiologist has said.

“There is a lack of appropriate controls in Australia for antibiotic use in food,” said Collignon, who has sat on a number of World Health Organisation advisory committees on antibiotic resistance.

“We know the US pork industry uses four to five times the amount of antibiotics as the industry in Denmark. In Australia we don’t really know, we don’t know which antibiotic is given for which animal and how much.

but sure, let's blame the big dirty indians once again.

is there a single issue facing humanity today, whether it's climate change or antibiotic resistance, that you're not willing to turn a blind eye to in order to exempt your great white civilisation? this is almost beyond parody. australia and the US have BOTH been specifically mentioned at UN-level summits on these very fucking matters. you really are an idiot.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 03:06:18)

dude ... westerners are being exposed to antibiotic resistance by eating meat every day. indians mostly don't eat meat, ironically because of those antique and irrational religious beliefs you complain about so much.

there have been countless scare stories and letters of concern about hospital superbugs in the US, UK, and australia. the west, and western medicine, is quickly running out of antibiotics in its arsenal that can counter current hospital bugs. we have been in an arms race for at least a generation – actually, technically an arm's race ever since the invention of penicillin.

https://www.uts.edu.au/news/health-scie … bug-crisis
New research reveals Australia's superbug crisis

funnily enough, the above article mentions in particular a resistant strain of UTI. and meanwhile, this year, queensland went ahead with a trial to let people buy ... antibiotics for a UTI by visiting a pharmacist. no doctor's prescription.
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/profes … s-on-pharm

bonggg! sounds a lot like india to me.

DilDorp_Jnr wrote:

Indians Australians are dosing themselves with far more antibiotics than makes sense, its literally uncontrolled, anyone can walk into a cornershop pharmacist and buy whatever they want.

here is a topical review on the topic of superbugs in australia. a pithy read.
https://www.publish.csiro.au/ma/pdf/ma07182

In some Australian hospitals, the rates of preventable, serious and potentially fatal HCAI due to MROs are unacceptably high. The urgent need to address this is at last being recognised nationally, although in some states (e.g. New South Wales and Victoria) where the problems are greatest and have been entrenched the longest, it will not be easy to achieve adequate control. The most important prerequisite is a major culture change with acceptance of responsibility and commitment of resources by health administrators and senior clinicians, and personal accountability by all healthcare workers for best infection control practice (including hand hygiene and antibiotic prescribing)

macbeth was given some antibiotics to pop by his sister when he had a virus. so much for rigorous standards in the great white west. the fact that westerners can afford a wider and more expensive range of antibiotics than rural indians on $300 a year hardly absolves them of the crime of 'needless over-prescription'.

i don't know what it is in your frail little psychology that means every worry on your brow has to blamed on indians or asians. does it make you feel better to answer every threat or concern with 'billions of asians and indians must be killed off', or something? you need to get help.

do you just find random news articles in your daily browsing and get incensed because it mentions china or india? you seem to lack all context and clue as to what the fuck you're talking about. medical professionals in the west have been signalling for years that we are on the brink of a superbug crisis because of our own casual use of antibiotics! for fuck's sake. then you come here and pronounce that india 'must be walled off'. you are a fucking joke lmao.

Last edited by uziq (2022-10-10 03:27:51)

Maybe my sister was right. Who is a more trust sourced on drugs? Uzique or the health secretary?

Yes, how is a non-doctor getting hold of prescription antibiotics and handing them out to her friends?

Very disturbing for a govt minister to be taking this kind of decision.

Dilbert_X wrote:

Very disturbing for a govt minister to be taking this kind of decision.

Since when do people have spare "supplies" of prescription medication?

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Maybe my sister was right. Who is a more trust sourced on drugs? Uzique or the health secretary?

every single healthcare professional in the world will tell you that handing out antibiotics just about one of the worst things you can do, in terms of long-term health goals, tantamount to freely writing scrips for highly addictive opiates. not a single pharmacist or general physician would approve of what your sister is doing. especially giving out antibiotics for a fucking virus, 'just in case'. just in case what? for the secondary pneumonia you acquire at the point of death? let the hospital staff deal with that and tell your sister to read up on her fucking ethical code.

uziq wrote:

antibiotic courses are always given for 10/15 or sometimes even 30 days. you need to take a full course to fully extirpate the infection. they're designed that way very specifically.

many eejits, seemingly like the UK health minister, take them until they 'feel better' and then keep 1.5 blister packs spare. these are then doled out to friends or put in the home medicine cupboard 'for later'. they don't realise that you always have to take a full, comprehensive course each time, or you're just fucking with your own immune system and microbiome.

OK, this person is just too stupid to be in govt then, definitely not health secretary.

I'd like to once again point out that many STEM people I've talked to or listened to when this stuff comes up stress that they themselves aren't geniuses (some may cite being poor students when they were at school), and don't feel confident providing "concrete statements" on matters outside their own expertise, even closely adjacent, even if just a different area of more or less the same field.

It was definitely present in IT courses, the atmosphere of superiority. Attitudes not promoted by the professors, but not discouraged either. One of the (many) reasons I got out was the ladder of toxic computer people ahead of me. Maybe I could have wormed my way up into a cozy corporate position, but at what cost.