
Blah Blah
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Everything posted by Blah Blah
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Zoonotic viruses can emerge from anywhere seenbeen, where there is intensive contact between animals and people. Where do you think swine flu comes from? We all farm pigs. We live with the risk of new viruses all the time. You also do not always need a vaccine to manage a virus either. Anti-viral drugs do an effective job against some viruses. On food consumption and production, how do you tell an entire nation what they can and can not eat? Bats are the most virus ridden species on the planet, but still, people eat them all across Asia.
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I would also recommend SAD lamps to those for whom lack of sunlight affects mood.
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Sadly that may well be the case mrwb, especially if the virus regularly mutates in the same way Influenza A does. It is just too early to know yet. We have to remain hopeful that either effective drug treatments or a working vaccine emerge. We have a level of biotech now that scientists could only have dreamed of in 1918. This gives us a better than average chance of finding a way through at some point.
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"Britons could be limited to two or three drinks when pubs reopen, a government adviser has suggested." As though this will actually work. It is completely deluded to think that environments where people are able to gather in enclosed spaces can be allowed before this virus is under complete control. The most effective barrier to a second wave, is social distancing and mass testing. So the reopening of business needs to be done with that in mind.
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Easiest/nearest farm that wants people to help harvest?
Blah Blah replied to womanofdulwich's topic in The Lounge
Several things happened. New legislation around employment law and introduction of a min wage. In field mechanised packing vehicles, enabling produce to be delivered straight from the field. A supermarket war driving down wholesale price and driving demand up. This means that workers on farms now need to hit minimum productivity thresholds, often keeping pace with a packing machine in front of them, and as you say, a lot of the work is backbreaking, especially at a required pace. -
Even without the current pandemic, an alert would be raised to doctors by the emergence of any unusual factors in patients. Everything starts with a few unusual cases. Pathogens constantly evolve, so there is a constant radar looking for that. It is too early to know what is going on and if it is in any way related to Sars Cov2.
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Easiest/nearest farm that wants people to help harvest?
Blah Blah replied to womanofdulwich's topic in The Lounge
Many farms house seasonal workers in caravans because there just aren't enough people locally to do the work. But there is the added complication now of the virus. How are workers transported to the farms? How are they accommodated? A shortage of seasonal workers was already a developing issue because of Brexit though. The pandemic has just made it worse. -
There already seems to be two strains of Covid in circulation, which may be one of the several possible reasons why some people in comparable age groups get mild symptoms and others severe. But the science just does not know yet. It takes time to observe and understand a new pathogen. The only known is that SARS viruses can mutate. With the Spanish Flu pandemic, the subsequent waves drove mutations that began to impact other age groups. Children do not have the abundance of ACE2 receptors that Covid so far has latched onto in adults. But if this virus is already mutating into something else that has different protein coding, then it becomes even more vital that we get find a way to deal with this virus asap.
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A lot of that had also to do with their abundance of biotech facilities who began producing test kits immediately and in bulk. One small company alone was able to produce 1.4 million kits in just six weeks. This speed to mass testing was crucial in containment and slowing the rate of spread. We are not without biotech facilities here either. Pharma is our second biggest export to the EU after motor vehicles for example. But for some reason, the UK government delayed before looking for that scaled up production of tests. The USA waited even longer. The outcomes speak for themselves.
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The table in your link is 11 years old! There are different grades of pay according experience. The average for top specialists in Germany is around ?120k. In the UK it is around ?140k. The top salary of a GP in Germany is ?78k and ?74K in the UK. So not paid significantly less or more really.
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Indeed she did Alan. And that is not a statement based in fact, but an opinion,shaped by what exactly?
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seenbeen Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > and other health care professionals who received > free training as midwives, nurses, physios, > nutritionists and then promptly flee into the > private sector. Utter tosh. All of those positions require a degree level of education which the STUDENT pays for through the student loan scheme. Even when bursaries existed, they in no way covered the costs of getting those degrees. Most of those degrees are also done at teaching hospitals. No detail of anything in that article either. The NHS is not the same thing as the Armed services either.
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This is why I think Boris made a point of referencing the international diversity of the NHS staff that looked after him. On policy though, I could list many things but take just the nursing bursery for example. Taking that away doesn't help us to get more British nurses trained and into the NHS. So you can not have it both ways. Either you embrace the contribution made by migrant workers in the NHS (and don't bring in silly limits to the starting salary for future migrants, over what any sector actually needs), or you invest properly in training and education, to produce the numbers of young people that not only want to consider a career in the NHS, but (especially when it comes to doctors and nurses) have the talent and passion for science at school level. Also, the other aspect of under resourcing is that NHS personnel are often pushed to the limits of their productivity, often with consequences for their own health and mental wellbeing. These are all things that are worse under Tory governments than they are under Labour ones, as Tory governments tend to squeeze funding in real terms. And as much as everyone is suddenly aware of how hard NHS workers work, and appreciates the risks they are taking, I fear that when this is over, and in the light of the huge public debt that will have to be addressed, that any good will expressed now, will not translate into addressing the things I mention above.
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Why are garden parties with members from different households allowed???
Blah Blah replied to aloevera's topic in The Lounge
This is precisely why other countries with equal levels of infection and death rates went further. If the breaking of the rules now are leading to an increase in infection rates, we will see that begin to come through in the figures in about two weeks time. Hard to keep people cooped up indoors in hot weather though, especially where people are living in small or crowded households. Government might need to rethink policy. Expecting under resourced police to monitor behaviour is not realistic. There just aren't enough of them. -
Whilst she is highly qualified in the area of public health and epidemiology, it is still a government appointment, and there are going to be moments where she tows the government line on policy.
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I am so pleased that worked out scotlass, and thank you for giving the little fellow a chance of life. This is the forum at its best. All angles covered and a happy outcome.
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Unbeknownst to you Cat, there may be a front line worker living on your street, in your neighbourhood. It can not be underestimated how appreciated those workers feel hearing the nation come out every week to clap for them. It is a gesture of solidarity, lets them now they are not forgotten while mostly everyone else stays safe at home. Try to see it for the way it is meant to be seen maybe? :)
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So pleased to hear that scotlass. They are a great rescue group and hopefully will get the little fellow back to the wild as soon as possible :)
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And their advice for birds here; https://www.londonwildlifeprotection.org/found-an-animal/ We don't have a car but I am sure someone would help to get the bird to one of the drop off points.
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Try these folks. https://www.londonwildlifeprotection.org/ They have an emergency number for injured birds 07909 795064
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???? gromit. Of course there is a point in a vaccine.
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By the time Beijing caught wind of the cover up by local authorities in China, and sounded the alarm, the virus had already spread across borders. So stopping flights at that moment would not have prevented the spread of something so infectious with its various incubation periods. We focus on flights because that is the quickest way to travel anywhere, but land borders are also crossed easily, boats still sail and so on. All the processes followed from thereon are the established processes for pandemic management. Isolation of cases and contact tracking for example, but what changed that response into the subsequent social distancing and then lockdown (also established stages of pandemic response modelling) are the realisations around infectiousness and severity of symptoms. Hindsight is a wonderful thing and it is important to try and understand the pressure on science and governments when new viruses emerge. Epidemiologists train for a worst case scenario they hope never to have to put into action. It's a big call to make and what follows, depends on the success of the race to develop vaccines and treatments. On flights still coming here with no checks, I don't know why any government would not automatically quarantine travellers. But you could also ask why public transport was allowed to run as normal for as long as it did and so on. That is in between navigating all the silly conspiracy theories out there and those who just refuse to believe there is even a virus at all. There is a clear clash emerging between the ethics of saving lives and political interests around economic concerns. For me it is not a question of either/ or. Pandemics do happen. There will always be lives lost and there will always be economic impacts. The same is true of global wars. Those that come through best, are those best able to adapt to the new world that emerges.
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That was a very good interview and worth watching on iplayer Artclub. What she actually said is that coronaviruses are good at not leaving a strong immunity memory (something already understood by virologists), but that you do not have to use the virus you are trying to combat to create a vaccine, and that there is a difference between immunity left by recovery from a virus and immunity given by a vaccine. Artclub's initial question is a very good one. Given that most vaccines are created by using the virus you are trying to combat to teach the body to create antibodies to fight that particular virus, how do you do that for a virus that doesn't teach the body to do that in those that catch the virus and recover? Sarah Gilbert answers that in her Marr interview. She explains that you can teach the body to produce the antibodies to fight certain antigenic processes, that may be used by a variety of viruses. Her vaccine is not using SARS Cov2 at all, but the Adenovirus which she hopes will produce a stronger immune response. She explains how COVID19 latches onto the bodies ACE2 receptors and how that ACE2 receptor is the key factor in the age and gender differentials we are seeing in symptoms and mortality, and that vaccines do not work as effectively in older people as they do younger people (but that can be addressed with booster vaccines as often as they are needed). She also touched on antigenic shift and drift a little too. That is the part that interests me because it is the indicator as to how difficult this virus might be to manage moving forward. She seems to say that minor antigenic drift observations are being seen already as opposed to the major antigenic shift we see with the seasonal flu virus. If it stays that way, then while we may never totally eradicate this virus, it may end up being entirely manageable once we have vaccines in play. Her interview is 17 mins in Artclub and I think it answers your question very succinctly while also explaining some of the main challenges in developing a vaccine that can be widely used. :)
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Yes Edcam. The cleaning Plough Man refers to, works because the chemicals in use destroy the surface of the virus, thereby erasing the antigen ability to infect live cells. There is absolutely NO evidence of UV rays destroying SARS viruses. If you look at table 2 of this link you can see how much lower the coronavirus SnS is compared to other viruses. This is outside the range of UV light that destroys human skin cells. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1280232/ Where UV light destroys human cells, it is between 200 and 280 nanometres. There is already UV emitting equipment in hospitals like this, that is used to kill pathogens. While it is effective against a whole range of things from Ecoli to MRSA, no tests conducted so far show any effectiveness against coronaviruses. Even more worrying is results published today showing no evidence of immunity from having recovered from the COVID virus. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are not dealing with a pathogen that follows the rules of most other viruses here. Disinfectant and good hygiene practise may be our only effective prevention for some time to come.
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