Get Serious About the Flu

One thing becoming more apparent in this worrisome flu season is the need for a universal flu vaccine.

The world must develop a better flu vaccine that gives broader protection against changing strains, a vaccine that you get only once or twice in your lifetime. Medicines for many other diseases have those capabilities because governments have committed the time and money needed to eradicate, or effectively control them.

The flu is considered more of a seasonal nuisance that kills mainly those near the end of life or those weakened by other health problems. So it doesn’t rate high on government research spending priorities.

It should because the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that influenza seriously sickens three to five million people worldwide every year. World deaths are estimated at 290,000 to 650,000 annually.

 U.S. spending on research for an effective flu vaccine is far less than spending for a vaccine for HIV, which experts say is a very long way off. In Canada, millions of taxpayer dollars are spent providing flu shots and advertising and promotion aimed at increasing awareness. Not enough is spent on finding a new and effective vaccine.

Current flu vaccines are based on 1940s research and in terms of effectiveness have not advanced much since then. Most years the flu vaccine is 40 to 60 per cent effective; this year the effectiveness is only 10 to 30 per cent.

This winter’s flu epidemic tells us why we need to take flu more seriously and commit more money and effort to find a universal vaccine. Hospitalizations this winter in the U.S. are double those of last year and Canadian confirmed cases have surpassed 20,000 with 82 reported deaths.

The main villain this winter is H3N2, a very nasty virus responsible for the 1968-69 Hong Kong flu pandemic that killed one million people around the globe.

More disturbing is the fact that this year H3N2 is killing children and young adults. By the end of last week 30 children in the U.S. had died and the numbers were mounting daily. There have been several news reports of young, healthy and physically fit adults getting the flu and dying quickly.

That was the trademark of the most devastating flu outbreak in modern times – the 1918 pandemic. It killed an estimated 50 to 100 million people worldwide, many young, healthy individuals.

Some people believe that a pandemic as serious as 1918 cannot happen again. We have flu vaccine now, even if it is not perfect, other spectacular medical advances and much better health care systems. However, the world has four times more people than in 1918, millions of them travelling between continents every day.

Flu can spread with lightning speed through today’s world and vaccine manufacturing and distribution are too slow to outrun an 1918-style pandemic.

As Michael Osterholm, a globally respected infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota, wrote in the New York Times earlier this month:

“Deploying them (current vaccines) against a severe global pandemic would be equivalent to trying to stop an advancing battle tank with a single rifle.”

Osterholm and other medical professors have said there will be global pandemics. The only unknown is how serious they will be.

A catastrophic flu outbreak could develop from a Chinese poultry flu virus named H7N9. It has been restricted mainly to birds but has been mutating to allow transmission to and between humans.

As of last month the United Nations reported 1,623 cases of H7N9 in humans. Of those infected, 620 died. That latter number is very scary. More than 38 per cent of people infected by that flu virus died.

The U.S. Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) says H7N9 is the influenza virus most likely to cause a pandemic.

So far most human cases of the H7N9 have involved persons who have touched live or dead poultry, poultry feces or contaminated food.

Flu viruses are mutating constantly and if this one changes enough to allow easy human-to-human transmission the world could be in serious trouble.

That’s why governments need to spend more to accelerate the quest for a universal vaccine.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

Play less nice?

Just as I was beginning to think that 2018 is going to be a kinder and gentler year I turned on the television. Definitely a mistake.

Exploding on the screen was an advertisement for a new movie titled Proud Mary. Mary is a killer for hire and the commercial showed me an awesome display of booming handguns and rifles, plus fireballs and violent car crashes. The air was thick with lead as hundreds of rounds were fired in brief clips from the film.

Mercifully it was only a commercial and not the full film, which I will avoid.

I tuned then to the World Junior Hockey Championships and had the misfortune of catching a commercial break in the on-ice action. The commercial was a new Nike creation that shows a nice-guy Canadian hockey player taking his pre-game training run.

In 90 seconds the guy knocks over a row of garbage cans, passes a kid destroying a garage door with hockey stick and puck, terrorizes a motorist, knocks over some mannequins, smashes through a glass plate at the arena and elbows numerous players on ice.

As he skates down the ice he smiles widely, revealing the words Play Less Nice tattooed on his teeth.

The message to Canadian athletes, kids in particular, is that Canadians generally are gentle folks, who when they take to the field or the ice should not play nice.

Am I overreacting by finding the ad offensive and just plain stupid? Maybe I am, because I have heard no complaints or outcries about the ad. And violence has become so common that large parts of society have become immune to it.

Ask people on the street if they feel there is too much violence on television, in video games and other forms of electronic media and a large majority will say yes. Yet violence in media continues to increase.

There are stacks of studies showing that violence in media has become more graphic, more sadistic and more sexual in recent years. There also are hundreds of studies showing that there is a connection between media violence and aggressive behaviour among people, particularly children.

The American Psychiatric Association has reported that by age 18 the average U.S. youth will have seen 16,000 simulated murders and 200,000 acts of violence.

Research has shown that people who consume a lot of violent media tend to see the world as a war-like place where aggressive behaviour is normal. Also, the more violence we consume, the less sensitive we become to real-life violence, and less empathetic to the suffering of others.

Perhaps just as important, some people who consume a lot of violence through media begin to see the world as a much more hostile place than it actually is.

A quote in Psychiatric Times some years back keeps coming to mind.

 “You turn on the television, and violence is there,”  Emanuel Tanay, a forensic psychiatrist for more than 50 years was quoted in the medical trade magazine. “You go to a movie, and violence is there. Reality is distorted. If you live in a fictional world, then the fictional world becomes your reality.”

It is easy to begin identifying with the characters we see on screens. We see the characters solving their problems through violence, and find ourselves imitating them to solve our own.

So according to Nike if you are not achieving what you want to achieve by being a nice Canadian, then play less nice.

Americans play less nice and we see the results. The U.S. National Coalition Against Domestic Violence estimates that 20 people per minute are physically abused by an intimate partner.

Americans are 25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries.

Analysis of FBI data shows that 11,000 people in the U.S. were murdered with guns in 2016 compared with 9,600 in 2015, an increase of roughly 15 per cent.

The Nike commercial was created by Wieden and Kennedy, a large American advertising agency. It’s an American message that belongs among Americans, not Canadians.

Unfortunately that’s not likely because most of what Canadians view on television, video games, movies, and video sites like YouTube comes from America.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y

Year of the twins

The New Year brings huge news ­- there will be no nuclear war with North Korea. That’s my New Year’s scoop, based on a remarkable discovery.

Through deep-dive investigative reporting I have learned that  Kim Jong-un and Donald J. Trump are related. They are in fact twins! That’s right, born into the same family, but separated at birth.

So stop fretting about nuclear war because twins, although they sometimes yell at each other, will never harm each other.

Some will say that is ridiculous. Fake news! But look at the evidence.

Kim and Trump look alike. Both are chubby and have penguin-like gaits.

Their dumpy physiques are the result of bad diets. Kim binges on imported Swiss cheese, while Trump inhales four Big Macs at a lunch sitting.

Both men are obsessed with their hair. Trump grows his long on the side and combs it over to cover his bald spot. Kim has gone to a trapezoid doo that looks like an old-fashioned desk telephone perched on his head.

Kim has decreed that all North Korean males wear their hair similar to his. Trump has not gone that far, probably because most American men cannot afford boxcar quantities of blonde dye and hair spray.

Neither is a picture of sartorial elegance. Kim wears a dark and dull Mao tunic while Trump prefers his baggy blue suit and bright red tie that hangs well below his belt so it points suggestively to his crotch.

Their educations have been similar. Neither was very bright in school.

Kim went to a top private school in Switzerland where he became addicted to cheese and basketball. He flunked there so his father moved him to a public school and into a lower grade. Trump went to two different colleges but got better grades in sports than anything else.

Both men are fabulously wealthy, Kim the richer by far. Kim is the wealthiest person in North Korea with access to $5 billion and owns a private island. Trump is only the 248^th wealthiest person in America with $3.1 billion.

Kim recruits young virgins to his Gippeumjo, which are ‘pleasure squads’ for his entertainment. Trump says that because he is a celebrity he can do anything with women he meets, including grabbing them by the genitals.

Both Trump and Kim like to be referred to as Dear Leader, and each is Commander-in-Chief of his armed forces, but neither has any military experience. Trump missed Vietnam because of heel spurs that don’t seem to have restricted his golf game. Kim learned war manoeuvres by playing video games.

These twins are loud and boastful guys. Kim brags that he learned to drive at age three and invents cancer cures in his spare time. Trump boasts his greatest asset is that he is not mentally ill but in fact a “very stable genius”.

Recently Kim boasted that his nuclear missiles  can reach any part of the U.S. and he holds the nuclear button at his desk. Not to be outdone, Trump boasted that his nuclear button is bigger and stronger than Kim’s.

Each shouts a lot. When Trump doesn’t like someone, he yells “You’re Fired” and they are gone. When Kim doesn’t like someone he shouts “Ready, Aim, Fire” and staff arrive with a body bag to carry the corpse away.

Sure, they yell at each other a lot, but that’s only sibling rivalry, done in fun. I mean if you had a twin who was obsessed with war toys you too would affectionately call him Little Rocket Man. It’s only natural.

So what more evidence is needed to show that they are in fact twins and will not start throwing nukes at each other?

Even their names give clues to their personalities. The un in Jong-un means peaceful or kindness. Trump in its earliest English form means breaking wind.

Email: shaman@vianet.ca
Profile: http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B001K8FY3Y