(Tweet text: “So many people still wearing masks. I just want to ask you. If a pair of underwear, really thick ones, high quality cotton, can’t protect you from a fart, then how will a mask protect you from covid??”)

This tweet has been living rent free in my head for days. It’s clearly crazy, but not so crazy that it completely defies any attempt to respond. So for reasons I don’t quite understand — and against my better judgement — I’m going to attempt to answer the Senator’s question.

At its most basic, the answer is that underwear is not a mask. Masks — at least the kind of masks people wear to avoid COVID-19 — are specifically designed to filter the air passing through them. But until seeing this tweet, I had never considered that someone might expect underwear to filter out the smell of farts. As far as I knew, that’s not what underwear is for.

When it comes to the SARS-Cov-2 virus that causes Covid, there are a couple of common ways it spreads. In the early days, it was mostly thought to be a matter of droplets blown into the air by a cough or sneeze. These droplets are relatively large, often large enough to see with the naked eye, especially when lit correctly, as in this photo of a sneeze:

As you might imagine, almost any cloth placed over the nose will absorb some of that mess, possibly even underwear. I have never seen a similar photograph of a fart,^[1]If you have one, do not send it to me. And don’t tell me why you have it. but if farts were composed of droplets, then underwear would soak up most of them. But since we can still smell farts^{[citation needed]} we know that a meaningful amount of the fart smell escapes capture by underwear.

It might just be that the underwear is absorbing most of the droplets, but that our noses are sensitive enough to detect the relatively small percentage of fart droplets that escape the underwear. I’ve never checked (and I don’t want to know), but it could be that most farts would smell much worse coming from a naked butt. When someone farts in the office, we might only be smelling, say, 25% of it, leaving us to wonder if eliminating 75% of the droplets is better than nothing.

With Covid, the answer is a clear “Yes” because it turns out that Covid exposure has a dose effect: The more Covid virus particles you are exposed to, the more likely you are to catch it, and the worse it’s likely to be. This means that even a poor mask material (like underwear) could reduce your Covid exposure enough to offer some protection.^[2]If the people coughing up the Covid are also masked, we get an even greater benefit since that reduction occurs twice. A 75% reduction might not be enough to keep us from smelling a fart, but it could keep us from catching Covid, or protect us from a severe case of Covid.

Unfortunately, filtering out droplets is not enough to protect us from Covid because the SARS-CoV-2 virus can also travel as an aerosol — a fine invisible mist that lingers in the air for many minutes. A loosely woven piece of cloth like a pair of underwear won’t do much to stop aerosol particles flowing through the gaps between the fibers. And so, in a sense, Marjorie Taylor Green is correct: For the most part, underwear won’t stop Covid.

Which is why we wear masks not underwear.

The material that makes up most surgical masks — and all N95 and KN-95 filtering face piece respirators — is a non-woven material that provides a dense microscopic forest of fibers specifically designed to filter particles from the air. It traps larger particles simply because they are too big to fit between the closely-space fibers of the filter. Smaller particles fit through the gaps between fibers but they are still trapped when they slam into a fiber and stick to it through one of several chemical, mechanical, or electrostatic mechanisms. Think of it this way: To a virus particle 0.1 micron in size, a piece of filtration material a millimeter thick is a forest of fibers 10,000 times its size. That’s a long way to go without getting stuck to something.

These kinds of respirators have been in use healthcare and other industries for decades, and are well understood. They are known to easily filter Covid-sized particles, and they’ve been tested against actual Covid in the lab. At the risk of repeating myself, masks filter Covid from the air better than underwear because masks are designed to filter things the size of Covid from the air.

In the replies to Marjorie Taylor Green’s tweet, some people comment that they can still smell farts while wearing a mask.^[3]They don’t say what kind of mask, but let’s assume it’s an N95 or equivalent. This suggests that whatever it is they’re smelling is neither droplets nor an aerosol — both of which would have been almost entirely removed by the mask.

I was unable to verify what fart smells are made of,^[4]And I have exhausted my tolerance for clicking on search results about farts. but I can make a pretty good guess at what to do about them. I think if the Marjorie Taylor Green crowd are really concerned about fart smells, the solution is probably an activated carbon (charcoal) filter mask. Activated carbon is spectacularly porous giving it a huge amount of surface area — an ounce of activated carbon has almost a million square feet of space. The molecules of fart gas passing through an activated carbon filter should get stuck somewhere on that vast surface, leaving nothing but clean air.

I can support this guesswork with two real-world data points: First, cat poop and human poop can’t be all that different,^[5]We’re all mammals, and we eat the same kinds of food, and what goes in must come out. and I can confirm from experience with litter boxes that activated carbon air filters eliminate the smell of cat poop. Second, it turns out there actually is a brand of underwear designed to absorb farts, and it uses activated carbon as well.

I’ve not seen filtering face piece masks that have activated carbon filters, but if fart smells are a serious concern, you can get activated carbon filters in elastomeric half-masks from Home Depot.^[6]This was my sneaky attempt to trigger anti-maskers.

The tl;dr version: I expect my masks to stop Covid because my masks are designed to stop Covid. If Marjorie Taylor Green wants to stop farts, she’s going to need activated carbon filters, not underwear.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at What Marjorie Taylor Green doesn’t know about masks… or underwear

It’s been 14 days since my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. As a general rule, that’s long enough for my body to have had its full immune response. Based on vaccine trial data, I should now be about 95% protected from Covid. And even if I do catch it, the symptoms are unlikely to be very serious. My immune system is now prepared for the fight.

You hear that Covid?

If ever we meet, you’re not gonna kill me. I’m gonna kill you.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Fuck Off, You Spiky-Protein Asshole!

Unbeknownst to my immune system, my wife and I just took the 80-mile drive to get our second dose of the Pfizer vaccine. As I write this, my cells are reading the mRNA from the injection and dutifully producing vast numbers of spike proteins, which are expressed on the surface and left over in the debris from dead cells.

My immune system is noticing the onslaught of the spiky invaders, and it’s realizing that this particular invader is a lot more durable than it seemed. Clearly, my immune system is going to have to ramp things up and make a lot more antibodies, because this is war.

So far, I can’t really feel it. My shoulders are sore, but that could easily be from something I did around the house yesterday, or from spending 4 hours in the car when I’m not used to that much driving. I just took my temperature, and it’s on the high side of normal for me, but it’s not actually out of my normal range, and it’s not high enough to count as an actual fever. My wife, on the other hand, is reporting a strong headache, and she may be headed for a worse time. I reported the aches and pains to v-safe, but I left out the slightly elevated temperature.

I sure hope this doesn’t get too interesting…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Onslaught!

Vaccination eligibility had been extended by the State of Illinois for some time, but the county we live in was refusing to go along. They claimed the vaccine supply was insufficient, but that seemed odd, given that the County had comparable vaccination rates to the state as a whole. Finally, some time last week, my wife and I decided we had waited long enough.

I spent some spare time researching vaccine sources, and then on Saturday night I stayed up late, periodically checking a few different vaccine enrollment sites. The CVS site looked the most promising, and after it went offline for maintenance around 2 am, I figured that when they came back up they’d probably have appointment slots available. So I kept refreshing the screen. Over and over and over.

Finally, at about 5:30 am, the CVS site came back up, and there were appointments available. The site listed about 15 vaccination locations in Illinois, but about half of them were too far away to be practical. Furthermore, CVS was apparently still in the process of standing up vaccination programs at several of the listed stores, including the two closest stores to where I live, because they never seemed to have appointments available, no matter how often I checked. The nearest store with available appointments was in a town about 80 miles away.

(There were actually several closer openings at CVS stores in the suburbs along the southern edge of Chicago, but I knew that they were all located in or near largely black Chicago neighborhoods. No one would accuse me of being particularly woke, but my wife and I had agreed that we didn’t want to swoop in and take vaccine doses away from people who were more vulnerable than us. Not when we had a good car and work hours flexible enough for us to drive 80 miles to get vaccinated.)

Most of the available appointments were on Thursday — presumably because that was the newest day available for scheduling, but the store appeared to have had several cancellations on Monday, leaving a few slots open. I decided to start booking a Monday appointment for my wife as quickly as possible.

I had already pre-scouted the CVS sign-up process a few days earlier by signing up at another store which had some openings. (It was 300 miles away, so it wasn’t a realistic option.) I backed out at the last step, so I didn’t waste an appointment slot, but after this practice run I had all the bits of information I needed to sign up — insurance group numbers, date of birth in the proper format, and so on — sitting in a Notepad window, where I could quickly cut-and-paste them to the enrollment form.

I worked fast enough to get my wife a Monday appointment, but when I circled back to sign myself up, it was too late. All the Monday appointments had been taken. So I signed up for a Thursday afternoon appointment, and I finished quickly enough that I was also able to sign my wife up for an appointment at the same time. The next morning, after making sure my wife didn’t mind waiting a few days so we could go together, I cancelled her Monday appointment.

The drive down was nice, and much quicker than expected, so we picked up some late lunch at a nearby pizza joint, and then we returned to CVS and sat in the parking lot for a few minutes until it was time to go in.

It was kind of anti-climactic. I mean, for the last year we have been living a classic science fiction plot: Alien invaders show up and start killing people, and all seems hopeless until a bunch of clever scientists invent a way to stop them. And here we were, about to have the scientists’ invention injected into our arms. But all that happened was we waited in line a few minutes, showed a lady at the consultation window our IDs and insurance, and then sat down for a temperature check and a few more questions, and then the nurses gave us our shots. That was it. No trumpets played. There was no Chris Nolan BWAAAA on the soundtrack. We just moved to a couple of other chairs to sit out the 15-minute wait for a reaction, and then we left.

So far, other than my shoulder being slightly sore, nothing has changed. We are just as vulnerable to COVID-19 as we ever were. But in about nine days our adaptive immune systems will be making antibodies targeted for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. It’s unclear how well this will protect us, perhaps 50-80% against symptomatic COVID-19. After the second booster shot (coming in 3 weeks), that should rise to about 95% protection. And even if we get Covid, it shouldn’t be too serious.

This will undoubtedly improve the quality of our lives. Nevertheless, we will still want to be careful and keep wearing masks for a while. In part, that’s just to avoid alarming other people. But there’s also the problem of the new Covid variants, especially the B.1.351 variant and its genetic cousins. Our vaccinations will offer only partial protection against them, and while our vaccine-primed immune system will probably keep them from turning into a serious health problem, we could still pass the variant virus on to other people who haven’t been vaccinated yet. If that remains a risk for much longer, we may eventually have to get one of the B.1.351-specific booster shots that vaccine makers are working on.

Basically, the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t really over until people stop getting COVID-19. But my wife and I are now a tiny part of a big first step toward making that happen.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at The First Step Back Toward Normal

That’s the question Orac asked last month at Respectful Insolence. It’s kind of an odd question, since the main piece of evidence he discusses is Ronald Bailey’s pro-vaccination article at Reason Magazine, one of the flagship publishers of libertarian thought. Here’s the main point of Bailey’s argument:

People who refuse vaccination for themselves and their children are free-riding off herd immunity. Anti-vaccination folks are taking advantage of the fact that most people around them have chosen the minimal risk of vaccination, thus acting as a firewall protecting them from disease. But if enough refuse, the firewall comes down and other people get hurt.

Oliver Wendell Holmes articulated a good libertarian principle when he said, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.” Holmes’ observation is particularly salient in the case of whooping cough shots.

…

To borrow Holmes’ metaphor, people who refuse vaccination are asserting that they have a right to “swing” their microbes at other people. There is no principled libertarian case for their free-riding refusal to take responsibility for their own microbes.

Orac’s evidence of libertarian anti-vax leanings is in the response at Police State USA, and a bunch of Facebook comments about Bailey’s article. Orac quotes a few of the dumber comments:

Explain how not getting a vaccination yourself puts someone else at risk. If you get sick and they are vaccinated then they won’t get sick because they a vaccinated against it right? Oh, vaccinations don’t actually protect against getting sick?!? Then why do we get them.

…

Herd Immunity is more Bullshit from Big Pharma with NO logic behind it!

That’s certainly uninformed anti-vaccination nonsense, but all it proves is that libertarianism is not totally free of anti-vax goofballs. Neither are the Democrats or Republicans. A few idiotic comments hardly make the case that libertarianism is a good home for anti-vaxers.

In fact, far from shunning vaccines, libertarians have complained that the government-controlled vaccine market often experiences shortages, a problem rarely seen with more commercial medications that trade in a freer market. And when Reason Magazine published their “45 Enemies of Freedom” edition, they picked anti-vax nutjob Jenny McCarthy as #28, saying that “hundreds of thousands of fearful parents have needlessly endangered the health and lives of their children.”

Orac also objects to this comment, without realizing it’s substantially different:

How about “I DON’T WANT TO!”? That’s about as libertarian as it gets. There is no such thing as a positive obligation in libertarian philosophy and that includes an obligation to be vaccinated.

From the libertarian viewpoint, there’s a world of difference between saying “X is a good thing” and saying “the government should force people to do X,” and that’s true whether X is getting vaccinated, wearing motorcycle helmets, or drinking smaller beverage portions. The government does not enforce its rules with a gentle hand, and even the most trivial infractions are ultimately enforced by men with guns who will drag you off in shackles, lock you in a cage, and take your stuff.

Ronald Bailey’s article is actually part of a Reason debate with Dr. Jeffrey Singer over vaccination policy. Neither debater questions the general efficacy of vaccines, both reject the autism danger, and both debaters think getting vaccinated is a good idea. Those are not the questions being debated. The libertarian issue in question is whether the government should force people to get vaccinated.

Questioning the appropriateness of forcing medical treatments on people against their consent is not some kind of crazy fringe concern. One of the cornerstones of medical ethics is that all treatments require the informed consent of the patient. If a patient refuses even lifesaving treatments, doctors will generally respect that decision.

There are exceptions, of course, but the issue is complex, confusing, and worthy of careful thought. In most cases it’s also highly controversial, such as the requirements in some states that women seeking abortions receive a medically unnecessary trans-vaginal ultrasound, which involves placing a probe into the woman’s vagina. There’s also a long history of school systems pressuring parents into putting their children on psychoactive drugs, ostensibly for the child’s benefit, but apparently also as a tool for classroom management.

I’ve written about doctors who perform invasive procedures on patients in the name of the war on drugs, and this country has a disgraceful history of involuntary sterilization of people with undesirable attributes, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and of course the Nazi atrocities that led to some firm rules about informed consent which have informed medical ethics all over the western world. Generally speaking, this is not good company to be in, and I think that before implementing plans to forcibly vaccinate people we should give careful consideration to alternatives such as education.

It’s one thing to believe — as Ronald Bailey and Orac both apparently do — that the utilitarian social benefits of vaccination outweigh the violation of self-ownership and personal dignity that forced vaccinations would necessarily entail. But it’s disingenuous to lump this libertarian objection in with the generic anti-vax crowd that denies the effectiveness and safety of vaccination.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at It’s Not Anti-Vax, It’s Anti-Force

When an apparently drunk man peed in a Mount Tabor reservoir around 1:30am last night, he set off an unprecedented chain reaction.

A security officer who had been watching the man and his four friends drinking from the reservoir guard tower alerted police, then called on the water bureau to take the reservoir offline. Using a new $23 million remote control system, just installed in April, the bureau immediately shut off the pipes leading from the reservoir. The guard and a police officer confronted the men and got their information, including the alleged 21-year-old pee-er.

Then, the water bureau made the call to dump the entire 7.2 million gallons of water in the reservoir, at a cost of over $35,000. That’s one expensive trip to the bathroom.

On top of that, the city is working with the district attorney to consider pressing charges against the pee-er, perhaps to help recoup some of the cost. Water Bureau administrator David Shaff isn’t sure what the charge would be exactly, “Well, I just dumped 8 million gallons, there’s maybe a ‘theft’ in there somewhere… He has some idea that he’s made a mistake, but he has no idea how big.”

[Emphasis in the original.]

His mistake wasn’t as big as the one the Water Bureau just made by dumping all that water. Maybe I’m missing something but doesn’t the Water Bureau clean the water? Not to mention that when you dilute a bladder’s worth of urine with seven million gallons of clean water, for all practical purposes the resulting water is still urine-free. Especially since urine itself is mostly water.

Also, urine is normally sterile, so the only risk is from bacteria if the guy had an infection that could get into the urine stream. Another story indicates that he was out that night with four other people. I haven’t done the math, but my guess is that those people face a greater health risk than the population of Portland because they probably touched a guy who had just peed without washing his hands.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at A Dumb Story About Pee

I’m at home for a few minutes to check on Dozer the cat. He seems to be getting a bit better. He’s still weak, but I don’t think he’s in pain. He’s been feeding himself, and he gets up and walks around a bit. If this keeps up, I’ll probably take him back to the vet to try to figure out how best to care for him.

My wife and I are now both really glad we didn’t agree to let the emergency vet euthanize him. I think the lesson here is that we should keep in mind that an emergency vet is for emergencies. As soon as they told us there was no immediate emergency, we should have just left and taken him to the regular vet the next day.

And yes, I’m a little less angry at the world.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Wife and Cat Update

This post by Ken Gibson at Windypundit was originally published at Eradicating a Virus

Now we have to refer to the flu pandemic as H1N1 so we don’t offend the pig farmers, the National Pork Board, or God forbid the pigs.The hell with that. 

From now on, I’m calling it FFKAS or the “Flu Formerly Known as Swine”.

This post by GaryO at Windypundit was originally published at No Offense

The doctor took a look at his foot, did some tests, and declared it infected. He wanted to admit my father to the hospital for a few days, but after my father’s experience last time, he didn’t like the idea. The doctor agreed instead to send him home with a huge dose of antibiotics—the V.A. pharmacist told me he’d never seen a dose that large before—provided we promised to come back on Wednesday for a followup.

Everything was fine when I took my dad for the followup visit, but I noticed that he was more worn out by the trip than usual.

The next day, Thursday, my father fell down in his room, slamming his back against the bedframe. He said he had gotten light-headed. My mother called for paramedics, and they decided to take him to the emergency room. Since he’s already a patient at the V.A. hospital, they agreed to take him there.

The ER did X-rays, and all kinds of tests. His back was fine, other than a nasty bruise (he’s on blood thinners, so all bruises are nasty) but they decided to admit him for observation, and maybe also to complete the course of antibiotics.

While he was there, they also discovered a problem with his lungs which they have been treating. His bedroom will get a new piece of medical equipment when he goes home.

If he ever goes home.

The title of this post, “nosocomial,” means “hospital caused,” as in “hospital caused disease.” This is a concept that has become an important part of my dad’s life, and therefore of my life.

My father is old and has arthritic knees, so walking has been difficult. With support, such as a walker, he manages to get up and around the apartment, going to the bathroom, adjusting the fan in his room, and coming into the living room to watch television with my mother.

During the first two weeks of my father’s stay in the hospital, they kept him resting in bed, with no physical activity at all. I don’t know much about medical care, so maybe a full bed rest was necessary, but the cost has been high: With so little activity, my father’s legs lost whatever conditioning they had, and he was unable to walk, even with assistance or a walker.

The hospital’s next step was to move him to a rehab ward and give him physical therapy every day. I’m sure that was the right thing to do, but it wouldn’t have been necessary if they had given him some exercise earlier in the process.

Rehab took about a month to get him back to where he was when he was first admitted. However, trapped in a dull, boring, and poorly-lit hospital room for days on end, my father began to show signs of delerium. His short-term memory went bad, he had a hard time expressing himself, he became obsessed with features of his environment, and he lost the ability to think about and explain his needs to the staff or to me. I know my father’s 88 years old, and his mind hasn’t been at its sharpest for a while now, but this was a sudden, steep, and frightening decline in his mental state.

His doctors assured me that they had checked for every possible physiological malady that could cause such an acute change in his behavior, and there was nothing. By process of elimination, it had to be caused by the environment of the hospital. They say that part of the problem is the unfamiliar environment, so I’ve been making the drive to see him every day for several weeks to try to help him improve. It may be working, because he’s returning slowly to his old self.

Late last week, the doctors started telling me they were planning to discharge him on Sunday, so my family started gearing up for it: Buying supplies, fixing up his room, putting his portable oxygen tank in the car.

Then on Saturday, they told us his white blood cell count was a little high. They thought it could be a reaction to some of his medication, but they were taking blood and urine samples anyway.

Sunday morning, his doctor told us he turned out to have a urinary tract infection, so they wanted to keep him in the hospital while they fought it.

On Monday, they apparently identified the infection as some sort of multi-drug resistant organism, so they isolated my father in a private room. I have to wear gloves and a gown whenever I see him, and I wash my hands thoroughly afterwards.

Again, I’m no doctor, but I do know a little about science. Organisms don’t appear spontaneously. Bacteria can only come from other bacteria of the same type. Since my dad didn’t have this infection when he moved to the rehab ward, he must have acquired it when he got there. Since even now he can’t walk without effort, I don’t think he was wandering around and visiting other patients.

No, someone gave him this infection. Either they were carrying it themselves, or they transfered it from another patient. Either way, it’s a breakdown in infection control: Somebody didn’t wash their hands, or they didn’t wipe down an instrument between patients. Hospitals are notorious for this kind of problem. Even before this, his ward had ongoing outbreaks of MRSA and VRE.

To summarize, my father comes in with a foot infection, gets dizzy from antibiotics and falls, is hospitalized for that, loses his ability to walk during the bed rest, has to get therapy to walk again, then catches an infection, for which he needs intravenous antibiotics.

All of this may well be unavoidable given the current state of medical care, but at this rate they will spend more effort—and he will spend more time—dealing with the maladies caused by his hospital stay than with the medical problems he had when he came in.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Nosocomial Blues

I wore latex gloves to avoid catching what he had, but apparently I wasn’t careful enough. Now I’m puking and crapping and running a fever of 101.6°F.

My father’s diagnosis was gastroenteritis, so I figure I’ve got the same thing. If this were an episode of House, that would be misdirection, and I’d really have some rare and dangerous condition that mimics gastroenteritis in its early stages before the more disturbing symptoms start.

My father is 45 years older than me, so they gave him IV liquids and a big dose of Cipro and admitted him to the hospital for a few days.

Me, I’m going to ride it out at home.

Blech.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Got the Fever

All I know about hospitals I know from House. The real thing is just as annoying as on TV, but much, much slower. Everything seems to happen at a glacial pace. That’s probably a good thing, since they save the speed for emergencies, but it’s frustrating and tiring.

The worst part is that it’s so hard to understand what’s going on. In my little world of computer programming, photography, and blogging, I understand in considerable detail how things work or how to make them work. Even when it comes to things I don’t usually do myself, such as auto repair, I understand what it is that I want out of the process—”make that noise stop”—but at a hospital, I don’t even understand what they’re trying to do most of the time. It’s an uncomfortable lack of control or input.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at At the Hospital Yesterday

More than a decade’s use of mobile phones does not increase the risk of brain cancer, according to one of the largest studies yet conducted into the link.

…

The latest study published in the US Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is a follow up to a study in 2001. It extends to an average of eight and a half years the period during which mobile users were monitored, with a maximum of 21 years.

(Hat tip: Hit & Run)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Your Cell Phone Is Not Killing You

It’s well-written, but I’d like to address a side issue that rubs me the wrong way. The author touches on it in her opening sentence:

At a time when the mere threat of avian flu or SARS can set off a coast-to-coast panic—and prompt the federal government to draw up contingency plans and stockpile medicines—it’s hard to imagine that the national response to the emergence of AIDS ranged from indifference to hostility.

This is an echo of a certain resentful tone that I’ve noticed before when people affected by AIDS discuss the public health response to other diseases. One of the commenters makes it a little clearer:

So interesting that you point that out, everyone so worried about chickens. No one cared when so many of my friends were dying each in there own individual horrible way.

Obviously, I’m not condoning indifference and outright hostility against AIDS victims. The public health system responded poorly to the early days of the AIDS epidemic. One of the things that struck me while reading Randy Shilts’s riveting And the Band Played On is the way public health officials uttered a depressing progression of statements about the emerging crisis:

• It’s not a priority because only 5 people have died.
• It’s not a priority because only 20 people have died.
• It’s not a priority because only 100 people have died.
• It’s not a priority because only 1000 people have died.

Of course, the best time to try to stop an infectious disease is before it infects a whole lot of people. It’s as if these policy makers didn’t understand the implications of the word contagious.

Actually, I think there’s a grain of truth to that. I’m pretty sure that much of the foot-dragging in the early years was due to routine bureaucratic inertia. The kinds of people that climb to the tops of government agencies by winning budget battles and currying favor with political power brokers are not necessarily the kinds of people you want in charge when something terrible happens. We had another reminder of this when hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans.

Still, I have to believe that a big part of the problem responding to AIDS was due to dislike for the types of people the disease was infecting. When people affected by AIDS get angry about that, I can’t begrudge them their feelings. The have every right to be angry and to act on that anger.

What does bother me, however, is the attitude of resentment towards the response to bird flu. The injustice here is the weak response to AIDS, not the strong response to bird flu.

[Clarification: I’m pretty sure the author of the original article doesn’t really want bird flu to receive an ineffective response. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.]

I’ll start with the hyperbole in the comment and just point out that the big panic today is not about the birds, of course, but about the people that will get sick and die if the disease spreads to humans.

The flu we hear about every year hits most people as sniffles, coughing, fever, and soreness. But for a portion of the population—newborn babies and the elderly—influenza is a deadly disease that kills about 35,000 Americans every year. Worldwide, the annual death toll is around a quarter million. It’s the equivalent of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 happening every year.

There are several active flu strains evolving from year to year, so every year we get hit by something a little different. In some years, the death toll rises to half a million. In a few years, it rises much higher.

If you asked any influenza epidemiologist about his worst-case scenario, he’d probably say it’s a repeat of the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. Nobody is sure how many people died, but the lowest number I’ve found is 25 million, and nobody would be surprised if it really killed twice that many.

This brings us to the reason everyone is so upset about bird flu. It’s genetically very similar to the Spanish flu. And based on the 100 or so human cases so far, the resemblance doesn’t end with DNA. Bird flu has killed 40% of the people who’ve caught it.

[Update: According to Bird Flu Breaking News there have been 229 cases of bird flu in humans, 130 of them fatal. That’s a 57% mortality rate.]

In a typical flu season, about 10% of the people in the United States come down with the flu. If the bird flu spreads to humans and follows the same infection pattern, it could kill 12 million people in this country alone.

Of course, that figure is a statistical fiction. Bird flu in humans is a rarity, so we are unlikely to have much natural immunity. The infection rate could be much higher than 10%. Then again, bird flu is presumably rare in humans due to some biological barriers. If those barriers hold, the infection rate in humans could remain tiny until the disease burns out in the avian population. Nobody knows how these factors will balance out.

Even if bird flu hits us hard, we really can’t extrapolate what will happen based on our annual experiences with flu because we can do things to fight bird flu that we would never do to fight seasonal flu. We can cancel sporting events and musical performances and movies. We can close the schools for a few months. We can shut down non-essential businesses and restrict travel. We’ve seen influenza before, and we have some pretty good ideas what to do about it.

And that’s the biggest reason you can’t compare bird flu to AIDS: We know all about bird flu, but AIDS was something new and mysterious.

We didn’t know what virus caused it, or even if it was a virus. It wasn’t even clear that it was an infectious agent. Some doctors thought it might be a side effect of some new kind of club drug. That sounds strange now, knowing what we know, but at the time everyone knew of drugs that could compromise the immune system, but no one had ever heard of a virus with that ability.

And the kind of virus it was, a retrovirus, had only been identified as a class a few years earlier. The first AIDS cases presented with mysterious diseases. It took a while to figure out that these were opportunistic diseases, and that the main problem was with the patients’ immune systems. Equipment for doing T-cell counts had only just started to become available.

It’s been 25 years since AIDS was discovered. Descriptions of influenza have been found that date back 2500 years. It’s an old enemy that we have learned how to fight.

I imagine that someday, eventually, AIDS will be an old enemy too. There will be ever-improving treatments for those infected, and a vaccine to protect those who aren’t. AIDS will become just another once-deadly disease being held in check by medical science.

And maybe someday epidemiologists in Africa will spot a dangerous new strain of HIV emerging among the simian population and crossing over to humans. And maybe this strain will be just different enough from the known strains that our vaccines and treatments might not work as well as we’re used to. That’s pretty much what’s going on with bird flu right now. Let’s hope that any such new strain of HIV is handled like bird flu and not like AIDS was handled the first time it emerged.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at HIV/AIDS and the Avian Flu

At a time when the mere threat of avian flu or SARS can set off a coast-to-coast panic–and prompt the federal government to draw up contingency plans and stockpile medicines–it’s hard to imagine that the national response to the emergence of AIDS ranged from indifference to hostility. … People with the disease were routinely evicted from their homes, fired from jobs and denied health insurance. Gays were demonized by the extreme right wing: Reagan adviser Pat Buchanan editorialized in 1983, “The poor homosexuals–they have declared war against nature, and now nature is exacting an awful retribution.” In much of the rest of the culture, AIDS was simply treated as the punch line to a tasteless joke: “I just heard the Statue of Liberty has AIDS,” Bob Hope quipped during the rededication ceremony of the statue in 1986. “Nobody knows if she got it from the mouth of the Hudson or the Staten Island Fairy.” Across the river in Manhattan, a generation of young adults was attending more funerals than weddings.

…

I almost died. I was in the hospital and my doctor told me to call my parents and arrange the funeral. Chrisanne did just that. We were arranging my funeral as I lay in my hospital bed with my blue checkered gown wetting myself and sweating so bad they were changing my beddings three times a night. I was 35 years old. I had already been infected since the late eighties. The tip of the disease. I lived long enough, stayed away from the hospital just long enough to watch every single one of my friends waste away to ash. I had seen more death before I was 40 than anyone in my family.

Read the whole thing.

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at 25 Years of HIV

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Good luck, Virginia

It sounds pretty tentative, and I certainly don’t know enough to evaluate it, but it’s fascinating if you’re interested in that sort of thing.

(Hat tip: Marginal Revolution)

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Abnormalities of Brain Circuitry (Minicolumns) in Autism

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at …From My Cold, Dead Hands.

In the battle against childhood obesity, well-intentioned government policies that encourage healthy eating face a daunting challenge from the proliferation of fast-food establishments right outside the schoolhouse door, a new Chicago-based study shows.

The median distance from any Chicago school to the nearest fast-food restaurant is about a third of a mile—a walk of little more than 5 minutes for an adult—according to the study by Boston researchers, published today in the American Journal of Public Health.

Almost 80 percent of public and private schools in Chicago had at least one fast-food restaurant within about a half mile, exposing children to “poor-quality food environments in their school neighborhoods,” according to the researchers from Children’s Hospital Boston and the Harvard School of Public Health.

…

The study found 79 fast-food restaurant chains clustered around some 1,300 Chicago schools. McDonald’s restaurants made up 16 percent of the 613 fast-food sites, followed by Subway, Dunkin’ Donuts, KFC, Burger King, and other chains.

The article makes it sounds like fast food restaurants are predators stalking the little children.

Well, why not?

The cheerleaders for the nanny state have demonized booze, cigarettes, and firearms by spreading fear about the effects on “the children.” People have been joking for years that fast food would be next. I guess so…

This post by Mark Draughn at Windypundit was originally published at Fast Food Predation