Where exactly did you make the connection between the antivax advocates and the topic at hand here with a rise in brain abscesses?Now we know the exact place that the magnetic superpowers are gained.
But in all seriousness this is as bad as it gets. Kids get life altering conditions, or die because an antivax community got really vocal. Its not even each childs parents fault. This problem is pointed directly at those who willfully spread misinformation, and demanded their reps be dissonant from the reality of a pandemic.
Hardly.Antivaxxers aren't the only people to blame for the increased disease burden that COVID is inflicting on us. It's anyone who was against robust public health measures of all sorts, and that includes the Biden admin and its premature victory lap.
Oh, that's easy.I never really understood why people cared so much about the mortality rate as if dying was the only bad outcome from getting sick.
Similarly, some of the pediatric genetic diseases which killed very quickly have medications which can stave off the initial hit, but then you find what is the second system to fail from the same genetic defect. And it may not be ameliorated by the same intervention.My GF works in pediatric oncology and an interesting thing she's found is as we get better at stopping kids from not dying quickly from brain cancer they see new progressions of cancer that had previously been exceedingly rare because patients would die before they could happen previously. Not really related to this article, but I found it interesting.
It'd be interesting to know if the kids had COVID and/or if they were vaccinated against COVID.
For most of the period of high abscesses, including the peak, kids could be vaccinated and had likely had COVID months to a year earlier. It doesn’t seem to be a direct effect of COVID that’s doing this.Did they have COVID? Most likely, as approximately 75% of children are estimated to have contracted it.
Were they vaccinated? Not likely, as most authorizations didn't occur until after the uptick in abscesses.
The first RSV vaccine was only approved less than a month ago, and then only for the elderly. It’s not just antivaxxers who aren’t giving their kids the RSV vaccine, it’s everyone.Now we know the exact place that the magnetic superpowers are gained.
But in all seriousness this is as bad as it gets. Kids get life altering conditions, or die because an antivax community got really vocal. Its not even each childs parents fault. This problem is pointed directly at those who willfully spread misinformation, and demanded their reps be dissonant from the reality of a pandemic.
It's a quick and relatively unambiguous metric, that's hard to dismiss -- 'dead' vs 'alive' is a pretty binary classification. "Bad outcome" is a lot fuzzier, a lot more subjective, and often harder to pin down.I never really understood why people cared so much about the mortality rate as if dying was the only bad outcome from getting sick.
True for mass shootings too.I never really understood why people cared so much about the mortality rate as if dying was the only bad outcome from getting sick.
Hardly.
And I say this based on 20 years in the medical field where training in preventing the spread of infectious diseases is CONSTANT.
Robust public health measures would have been effective ONLY if implemented within the first month of the outbreak.
But by the time China admitted they had a new disease, which was two months later, cases were already popping up all over the world among people who had never traveled internationally, meaning it was in the community.
The "stealth" nature of the disease - no symptoms in most - further hampered containment efforts. The fact is NO ONE ON EARTH had plans to combat a disease that killed a relative few, but infected most, with most never having symptoms.
What masking and all that actually did was prevent the OTHER diseases - the ones far more easy to contain - from spreading as usual. We've learned that Immunity isn't a consistent thing in humans, that it ebbs and flows depending on what's attacking the individual.
And that's ESPECIALLY true in children.
What's happening HERE is that kids were kept isolated for years, never were exposed to the normal germs that kids get exposed to at critical times in their immunological lives that help to build up immunity to them, and now are paying the price of having under-developed immune systems in a world where COVID is a new fact of life.
Like the common cold and flu, COVID will be with us forever going forward. You can NOT maintain strict isolation protocols in a functional society for very long or that society collapses. And eventually, you have to accept that a pandemic has become endemic, there's no real point to containment, so focusing on identifying and treating those who need it - just like we do for Measles and other airborne diseases.
It's fine if you want to piss all over politicians, but it was Trump who dropped the ball, not Biden. With a herculean effort, COVID MIGHT have been contained for a while longer in the U.S. had the CDC still had a pandemic response team (cut from the CDC in the 2017 budget) that could have implemented a more focused response instead of going all racist on the Chinese people.
SOMEONE would have had to say, "It's an endemic disease, we're going to have to live with it as is, so may as well go back to something more normal." That happened to be Biden, and he did that because that's what the CDC and the WHO recommend.
The long and short of it is that some kids will get sick when exposed to certain germs. A ton of kids were NOT exposed to certain germs for years. So we see a spike in those cases because they didn't get sick earlier. Under normal circumstances, over a decade or so, this isn't like to impact the ten year average number of cases in total.
If COVID has anything to do with it, then that's how life is now.
What's happening HERE is that kids were kept isolated for years, never were exposed to the normal germs that kids get exposed to at critical times in their immunological lives that help to build up immunity to them, and now are paying the price of having under-developed immune systems in a world where COVID is a new fact of life.
there's no real point to containment, so focusing on identifying and treating those who need it - just like we do for Measles and other airborne diseases.
I would assume same way other abscesses are treated: lots of antibiotics, and if that doesn’t work, surgery to drain it plus even more antibiotics.Possible consequence of a sinus or ear infection? Yikes!
Something which I didn't notice in the article, and which I'm really curious about now that I know brain abscesses exist: How do you treat one once you find it?
According to the text, the material of an abscess is "bacteria, viruses, or fungi" -- those are three different things each requiring a different type of medication to address. How would you even determine from imagery which type of organism the abscess contains, thereby to select an appropriate medication? Or is the treatment a surgical one instead? (I'm assuming radiotherapy wouldn't be used for this condition... )
You seem to have missed the obvious takeaway there where plenty of illnesses (e.g. the common flu) were laying low during strict lockdowns but they reemerged once people started living life again. COVID-19 didn't cause the common flu to come back but normal life did that."it seems linked to surges in respiratory infections that followed eased pandemic restrictions."
Gee, I wonder what virus might have been responsible for that uptick? Was there one in particular that might have had particular prominence?
(Yes, I know there was a RSV bounce too, as the article mentions. But the correlation with Covid is so obvious that surely someone is investigating a possible link. Why this isn't explicitly acknowledged is a mystery.)
The reason I clicked on this one is it seemed like a good opportunity to check in on how this cohort would react to a (fairly sloppy imo) “COVID ∴ something bad”implied narrative in mid-2023. Turns out… not quite as hung ho as the last time I checked in ~6 months ago.
It's unclear what caused the surge, but the study authors note that it seems linked to surges in respiratory infections that followed eased pandemic restrictions. Brain abscesses "are often preceded by viral respiratory infection and sinusitis, and recent trends might be driven by concurrent, heightened pediatric respiratory pathogen transmission," they wrote.
You have to do a spinal tap, which should give you some clues and which you can send for cultures.Possible consequence of a sinus or ear infection? Yikes!
Something which I didn't notice in the article, and which I'm really curious about now that I know brain abscesses exist: How do you treat one once you find it?
According to the text, the material of an abscess is "bacteria, viruses, or fungi" -- those are three different things each requiring a different type of medication to address. How would you even determine from imagery which type of organism the abscess contains, thereby to select an appropriate medication? Or is the treatment a surgical one instead? (I'm assuming radiotherapy wouldn't be used for this condition... )
For any abscess you attempt to drain it. Even in the brain. Antibiotics tend not to work well for collections of pus because there is little blood flow (the transport mechanism for antibiotics) and many of the bugs set up little biofilm walls that prevent antibodies, antibiotics and pretty much anything else from getting to the happy little buggers.You have to do a spinal tap, which should give you some clues and which you can send for cultures.
You treat for likely bacteria and add the only antiviral we have (depending on the clinical story) at the same time while waiting for the results
You might need CT guided drainage as well
Fortunately fungal is less rare, there are other clues to make you suspicious (infection elsewhere, immunocompromised host, bad diabetes), and it tends to not be as aggressive as bacterial
Right? If anything, based on the quote "concurrent, heightened pediatric respiratory pathogen transmission", sounded like they wanted to implicate RSV.You must have read a different article, because this one didn't implicate COVID in anything:
"We're not sure, but it looks like stuff that isn't COVID..."
Do check out for another 6 months. Heck, I'm feeling generous... Take 12 months off.
Most people who caught it probably didn’t even know they had it, however. Sick people aren’t usually tested for it outside of a hospital or ER. Unlike Covid-19 and the flu, there’s no vaccine for HMPV or antiviral drugs to treat it. Instead, doctors care for seriously ill people by tending to their symptoms.
Studies show that HMPV causes as much misery in the US each year as the flu and a closely related virus, RSV. One study of patient samples collected over 25 years found that it was the second most common cause of respiratory infections in kids behind RSV. A study in New York conducted over four winters found that it was as common in hospitalized seniors as RSV and the flu. Like those infections, HMPV can lead to intensive care and fatal cases of pneumonia in older adults.
Away with your nonsense.Should look into why the blood/brain barrier suddenly became more porous in the last couple of years.
Please elaborate on the mechanism that has masks be the cause of illness when masks stop being worn.Sinus infections and what not?
Any chance the masks the kids were forced to wear, that probably were not used once and tossed in the trash, are somewhat to blame?