Last week, NPR, KFF Health News, and New Orleans Public Radio WWNO reported that the state had forbidden the health department and its workers from promoting annual flu shots, as well as vaccines for COVID-19 and mpox. The policy was explicitly kept quiet and officials have avoided putting it in writing.
Gee, who could have predicted this?
(Narrator: “Honestly, anyone with a functioning brain.”)
And RFK jr will fix this right up. If there is no data, there is no story, right? Fixed!
Close the CDC, and voilà! No more disease.
Holy crap. I just discovered the existence of a thing called Christian Healthcare Ministries. It’s been around since 1981. Now…their website insists over and over and over that they are absolutely NOT health insurance. Except you do pay a premium, but they call it a monthly cost. And there is a deductible, but they call it your Personal Responsibility. Where it does differ from health insurance is that they will not cover preexisting conditions, they won’t cover you at all if you aren’t a Christian and don’t live your life according to their version of Christian principles (no homo, ok?), and that there’s not actually any guarantee to cover anything at all ever. There are so many exceptions and exclusions I got lost trying to keep track of them. One … interesting? … example: if you adopt a special needs child, they ain’t covering any of that shit. You should be having your own babies like God intended. Or, if you insist on adopting, you’d better make sure they’re normal and healthy.
I do not understand how shit like this is allowed. It’s clearly health insurance. You pay a monthly fee, they cover a certain amount of your healthcare expenses after you meet your deductible. They’re just not complying with any of the regulations of health insurance. It’s so obviously a scam, and yet it has existed for 43 years. Call your scam a Christian charity, and apparently no rules apply to you. And if you go by the actual teachings of Jesus, I’m way more Christian than this outfit, and I’m an atheist. God, this pisses me off.
They are awful and they should not exist. They exploit people’s understandable mistrust of health insurers to take in huge profits while denying claims. And because they aren’t health insurers, none of the rules or safeguards, pathetic they may be, apply to them.
On December 27, WHO announced the results from 430 samples: The outbreak was caused by a familiar enemy — or, more accurately, multiple familiar enemies. Patients had acute respiratory infections — think COVID, flu or rhinoviruses — complicated by malaria as well as widespread malnutrition.
Honestly, I find this sadder than a new pathogen. These are things that we have treatments for, but they are killing people because they are too poor for the high and mighty to give two shits about their lives. On the other hand, this is pretty much how the US healthcare system works as well, if you think about it. I really hate this timeline.
Had this argument with my older brother (RN) in 1994. I was NOT in a coma, but I broke my leg (displaced fracture) and my HMO wanted me to wait 14 days for a preauthorization referral to an orthopedic surgeon. My brother was like, well, it’s technically not life or death.
When the ortho doc took a look at my xray, he immediately scheduled surgery for the next day. My fracture was healing itself incorrectly. He also bumped a lot patients who had office appointments schedued, which made me feel bad. (Remember this whenever your doctor runs late—shit happens.)
That was in 19-fucking-94, and we still haven’t learned shit.
Not true at all. The insurance vampires have learned how to be much, much bigger assholes. That’s learning something.
Well, shit.
While some viruses like herpes and West Nile may cause changes in the brain, CMV is not currently known to do this, Segil says.
Says the adult neurologist. In my field, CMV contracted in utero is recognized as a devastating disease that eats brains.
So i am not shocked that it may have effects on adult brains as well. Seeing how this pans out be interesting.
Among the 47 studies with a high risk of bias, the pooled difference in mean IQ scores between the higher-exposure groups and lower-exposure groups was -0.52, suggesting that higher fluoride exposure lowered IQs. But, among the 12 studies at low risk for bias, the difference was slight overall, only -0.19. And of those 12 studies, eight found no link between fluoride exposure and IQ at all.
Among 31 studies that reported fluoride levels in water, the NTP authors looked at possible IQ associations at three fluoride-level cutoffs: less than 4 mg/L, less than 2 mg/L, and less than 1.5 mg/L. Among all 31 studies, the researchers found that fluoride exposure levels of less than 4 mg/L and less than 2 mg/L were linked to statistically significant decreases in IQ. However, there was no statistically significant link at 1.5 mg/L. For context, 1.5 mg/L is a little over twice the level of fluoride recommended by the US Environmental Protection Agency for US community water, which is 0.7 mg/L. When the NTP authors looked at just the studies that had a low risk of bias—seven studies—they saw the same lack of association with the 1.5 mg/L cutoff.
One would think that this would be touted as supporting our current water fluoridation standards. It will not, it will be cited by RFKjr and MAHA as supportive of their stupidity. Is JAMA kissing the ring now? Maybe. Will watch closely to see if they start publishing “vaccine safety” papers next.
At a time when most people have probably polished off their holiday leftovers, Belgium’s food agency has issued a surprising seasonal health warning: don’t eat your Christmas tree.
(So many possible places to post this… The food topic? The holiday topic? The recalls topic? I chose this topic because it is described as a health warning.)
Whatever the incident was, it left the cyber pro with a broken neck, but he wasn’t aware of this at the time. He had no symptoms other than some “manageable neck pain,” and nothing out of the ordinary showed up on a routine X-ray and an MRI wasn’t possible due to insurance delays.
Temporary quadriplegia because they wouldn’t approve an MRI. If it’s temporary.
FTA:
an MRI wasn’t possible due to insurance delays.
A week later, Rogers started losing some sensation in his hands and tried to have the MRI rescheduled, but the approval from his insurance company never came. While waiting for said approval, he and his family holidayed in northern California and by the time he returned on December 30, he says he lost “about 20 percent sensation and a similar amount of mobility in both arms.”
We get this all the time. “Have to do 6 weeks of PT before an MRI will be approved.” is a very common one. For someone who is in acute pain or suffering from neurological deficits, this is not OK. Insurance companies have morphed into functionally preventers of healthcare. It’s never about the patient, it is always about the shareholder’s profits.
The CDC says there is currently no evidence of human-to-human transmission and the risk to the general public is low. However, public health experts say they are worried the virus could mutate and become more transmissible, amplifying the need to ramp up testing and to stockpile vaccines.
And guess who is gonna be responsible for the response? Yeah, we’re fucked, man. And that’s the good news.
“Given the number of cows that have been infected, the number of birds that have been infected and the fact that the virus essentially mutates every time it replicates, I’m kind of surprised that the mutations that they’re talking about haven’t happened yet,” he said. “So, I actually think there’s a bigger barrier to it becoming a real problem.”
That’s the bad news.
Ya know… not to make light of another possible pandemic, but… You’d think all the right wing religious nutjobs would look at the fact that the Covid pandemic started on Trump’s watch, and now it looks like we’re getting another, and then put 2 and 2 together… Their god loves to use plagues to make points, doesn’t he?
