Written 13 August, 2020
Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand immediately knew what to do. She takes advice only from medical advisors, none of our juggling of peoples’ lives against lifestyles. She slammed Auckland in stage 3 lockdown since 7 August, and although New Zealand now has 136 cases, it could’ve been far worse. As Normal Swann always says, “this whole pandemic started with one man”. And one gleam of hope for the US- Joe Biden, in his attempt at the Presidency, has chosen as his running mate a very experienced black woman, Kamala Harris, who said in a speech what Trump has been ignoring: that 164,000 American lives had been unnecessarily lost because of Trump’s mismanagement of the virus.
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/news/world/harris-and-biden-make-first-appearance-as-running-mates-and-excoriate-failure-trump/ar-BB17TA9u
She might swing it. and end the American madness. A professor who’s accurately predicted the win of every president since 1984, Professor Lichtmann from the American University in Washington, says Biden will win. It’d be a relief to call the world.
Much excitement and some relief – Russia announced 11 August they have a vaccine against the virus, the first in the world, which they call Sputnik 5. But they haven’t done a huge trial,a Stage Three trial, (we are all learning heaps about graphs, stats and medicine) to see if there are nasty side effects, which there would be for people like me with unusual systems, like my hyper-active one: there will be some, perhaps many, deaths. But at least, a vaccine is possible – or is it? We are all learning a lot about vaccines and the testing they need. fifty per cent of Russian doctors asked say they wouldn’t take it because it hasn’t been tested enough. It’ll be tested, but on the ordinary Russian people.
My dear friend Shelley, still imprisoned in her flat in New York sent me a New York Times article about the agility of some US doctors to vary from the usual medical school practises, and tailor treatments for odd bodies like mine. If you have one of these too, it’s a riveting read. It may save your life. I’m now thinking of wearing a medical ID bracelet, just in case. Oh – the link won’t copy. For a summary, continue below and read the comments. And subscribe to the New York Times for marvellous articles like this.
Hi everybody
Here is the link to the autoimmune rearch going on in America. It is even even more because the danger of covid to people wiyj autoimmune diseases
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/magazine/covid-cytokine-storms.html?referringSource=articleShare
You can read a snippet of it below or the whole article by going to the link above
How Covid Sends Some Bodies to War With Themselves
Many Covid-19 patients may be dying from their immune response to the virus, not from the virus itself. Can science figure out how to save them?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Aug. 11, 2020
Listen to This Article
Audio Recording by Audm
44:47
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
Back in April, as the pandemic was cresting over New York, Iris Navarro-Millán, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan, treated a Covid-19 patient, a Hispanic woman in her 60s, who would prove to be a turning point in how she approached the disease. The woman was just a little short of breath when Navarro-Millán first saw her; a day later, she deteriorated so rapidly that she was rushed to intensive care, put on a ventilator and hooked up to a dialysis machine for her failing kidneys. Navarro-Millán feared that she would die. (She survived after spending two months sedated on the breathing machine.) When Navarro-Millán saw another Covid-19 patient soon after — a white man in his 60s already struggling to breathe — her first thought was, Not again. Believing that the prevailing standard of care — which, lacking drugs to directly fight the virus, consisted primarily of supportive measures like supplemental oxygen — was insufficient, she resolved to try something different, a treatment that was heretical in some circles but that she thought could save his life.
Hi everybody
Here is the link to the autoimmune rearch going on in America. It is even even more because the danger of covid to people wiyj autoimmune diseases
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/11/magazine/covid-cytokine-storms.html?referringSource=articleShare
You can read a snippet of it below or the whole article by going to the link above
How Covid Sends Some Bodies to War With Themselves
Many Covid-19 patients may be dying from their immune response to the virus, not from the virus itself. Can science figure out how to save them?
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff
Aug. 11, 2020
Listen to This Article
Audio Recording by Audm
44:47
To hear more audio stories from publishers like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.
Back in April, as the pandemic was cresting over New York, Iris Navarro-Millán, a physician at Weill Cornell Medicine in Manhattan, treated a Covid-19 patient, a Hispanic woman in her 60s, who would prove to be a turning point in how she approached the disease. The woman was just a little short of breath when Navarro-Millán first saw her; a day later, she deteriorated so rapidly that she was rushed to intensive care, put on a ventilator and hooked up to a dialysis machine for her failing kidneys. Navarro-Millán feared that she would die. (She survived after spending two months sedated on the breathing machine.) When Navarro-Millán saw another Covid-19 patient soon after — a white man in his 60s already struggling to breathe — her first thought was, Not again. Believing that the prevailing standard of care — which, lacking drugs to directly fight the virus, consisted primarily of supportive measures like supplemental oxygen — was insufficient, she resolved to try something different, a treatment that was heretical in some circles but that she thought could save his life.
Navarro-Millán had unusual expertise for a hospitalist. Weill Cornell had asked her to move into that role when the pandemic hit, but she was a rheumatologist by training, a doctor whose specialty is autoimmune ailments in which the immune system, tasked with defending the self from invading pathogens, inexplicably turns on the body’s own tissues. Now she drew on her experience to try to help this Covid-19 patient.
She suspected that the greatest danger here wasn’t the coronavirus itself but an immune overreaction so severe that it could cause lungs to fill up with fluid and prompt organs to shut down, possibly killing the patient. Rheumatologists often describe this type of immune reaction as a “cytokine storm” or “cytokine release syndrome.” Cytokines are proteins released by cells in order to send messages to other cells — signaling, for instance, that a viral invasion is underway. The number of different cytokines is large, perhaps exceeding 100, and each one calls for a specific response. To save her patient, Navarro-Millán decided that she would have to calm his immune system and prevent that storm from getting started.
Thank you , Shelley dearest. But the New York Times is in the business of selling newspapers, so they wouldn’t let you share what Navarro -Milan has found, and now many doctors like her. I’m not in the business of selling anything, so I’ll tell. If you have this problem, she realised, paradoxically, that she had to choose for these particular immune-hyperactive patients something in the line of immune suppressing drugs. One was tocilizumab, but that stays in the body for a month and that length could have dire consequences.She decided on anakinra, which stays in the body only for hours. After just more than a week, he was sent home.The idea that th immune system can do us in is not new, but talking a hospital into doing this may be difficult. Dozens of trial are now happening with anakinra ,leronlimab,ibuprofen, even low-dose X-ray radiation. It’s wonderful to get good news out of America.