When will this shit end?

[whitehorses]

38 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

This in a nutshell is the problem with Science and Scientists (and I'm one of them!). It's why we have systematic reviews, because different studies give different results (it's also why you get sensational headlines about coffee causing cancer and then a few years later see another one saying it protects you...or some other such sensationalist nonsense, I just made that up, but you get the idea). Its entirely possible for studies to contradict each other (they aren't completely controlled and conducted in exactly the same way on the identical people in identical environments, so there's a lot of noise that skews results). There are other fairly robust studies on not just this coronavirus, but SARS, MERS and other respiratory infections that would contradict this. The study above will eventually be bundled together with all the other studies and the over-riding result will be better than the results of a single study. My interpretation of this is that you can get infected via fomites (surfaces) based on the results of other studies, but not always! 

I’m actually sort of a scientist too. Or recovering anyway. But I know precisely fuck all about all this stuff

[Deaf Nobby Burton]

15 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

And after SARS they started to regulate the wet markets a bit more, but as time went by, that became more lax. Pangolins are still illegal to trade, so they are traded on the black market in wet markets, but not listed in the inventory. This will all happen again if there isn't concentrated international pressure to stop this (and then it becomes politics, not health...we don't allow whaling, but Norway and Japan seem have found a way around it, so no doubt China will insist that wet markets are the cultural norm...the only way I can see them being properly regulated is massive fines (or damages) for outbreaks that originate in them...that too is political and I'm not a politician so I don't know how you do it). 

Yes, SARS was horseshoe bat to Civet then to humans was it not? Another example of probability, eating an obscure wild animal, or even just keeping it in close quarters with other other animals you eat will drastically increase the odds if it happening. And it will happen again, unless steps are taken to curtail it. 

[Superscally]

1 hour ago, Toilet Duck said:

Anyway (sorry, I'm a bit distracted this morning!), the suggestion vis a vis the BCG vaccine is that it does not make you immune, but it increases the chances of a mild or asymptomatic infection due to how it boosts the immune system. So, it's not that with vast swathes of the country vaccinated, they would not get coronavirus, they will, but when they do they are more likely to get a mild case if their BCG vaccination has produced a lasting immunological response. There are so many things that can influence this (age, time since the vaccination, but also underlying genetic variation and other factors that reduce innate immunity (lifestyle, comorbidities etc)), so I would expect a wide variation in the levels of BCG-driven innate immunity in any population (and we see that most COVID cases are mild, around about 80%, so what's causing that?). There are trials now administering the BCG vaccine in healthcare workers to see if it helps. If I was to design a study, I would be looking at TB antibody titres in confirmed cases who had a mild infection compared to those who had a more severe infection. We don't have a serology test for coronavirus (so we can't see at the moment who has had it), but we've had a validated serology test for TB antibodies for donkey's years (we can even distinguish between the antibodies made by the vaccine from those made following a TB infection). It might not turn out to be true, but I'd rule it out definitively before abandoning it. 

I guess it'd be hard to do a decent analysis without huge numbers, but I'd love to see someone try it. 

[Toilet Duck]

Just now, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

Yes, SARS was horseshoe bat to Civet then to humans was it not? Another example of probability, eating an obscure wild animal, or even just keeping it in close quarters with other other animals you eat will drastically increase the odds if it happening. And it will happen again, unless steps are taken to curtail it. 

That's the conventional wisdom alright, or at least what can be gathered from tracing the genetics of SARS. It's not just wild animals though, pigs and ducks farmed together have been the source of a bunch of influenza outbreaks. Bird flu doesn't generally infect humans, but it does infect pigs. Pigs can also get human flu, so they act like a pickling barrel and recombine the bird flu with the human flu to make new ones. Pigs can transmit flu to humans, so they pass on the new one to us. Hopefully we'll learn a bit more about how to control things from this outbreak. Its been over 100 years since we've had to deal with something like this, so the institutional memory on what to do is long gone (I was going to discuss our failures with HIV and AIDS, but that's another discussion entirely).

[Toilet Duck]

2 minutes ago, Superscally said:

I guess it'd be hard to do a decent analysis without huge numbers, but I'd love to see someone try it. 

Maybe a simple Mantoux test in patients who are in hospital compared to those with confirmed disease but recuperating at home? 

[Superscally]

1 minute ago, Toilet Duck said:

Maybe a simple Mantoux test in patients who are in hospital compared to those with confirmed disease but recuperating at home? 

Is that the six stabby thing (says a virology PhD holding vet who can't be arsed to Google check! 😂😂😂)

[Toilet Duck]

30 minutes ago, whitehorses said:

I’m actually sort of a scientist too. Or recovering anyway. But I know precisely fuck all about all this stuff

I used to know a lot more, now I work on Cancer (for the last 20 years or so), but I started off in infection and viruses. Just been a while! 😀

[Toilet Duck]

1 minute ago, Superscally said:

Is that the six stabby thing (says a virology PhD holding vet who can't be arsed to Google check! 😂😂😂)

It's the subcutaneous tuberculin injection. You get a lump if you have TB antibodies. They can measure different sized reactions in different patients to adjust for what might confound the reaction. Used to use the Heaf tests, but it been replaced with this one. 

Edited April 10, 2020 by Toilet Duck
autocorrect typo

[Superscally]

Right! Cheers TD! You could mail out single spring loaded injectors, with a graduated marker strip that you stick to your skin and inject next to. Take a photo, email it back. Computer analyses the size of the spot using the marker and you have an objective measure. 

[Toilet Duck]

1 minute ago, Superscally said:

Right! Cheers TD! You could mail out single spring loaded injectors, with a graduated marker strip that you stick to your skin and inject next to. Take a photo, email it back. Computer analyses the size of the spot using the marker and you have an objective measure. 

Could work! Would need some medical history to adjust the lump sizes, but in the UK, if it were ran through GPs that would be possible as you guys have good electronic health records...we are only starting to use them so there's still a lot of unconnected information in our healthcare system!

 

[Superscally]

25 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

Could work! Would need some medical history to adjust the lump sizes, but in the UK, if it were ran through GPs that would be possible as you guys have good electronic health records...we are only starting to use them so there's still a lot of unconnected information in our healthcare system!

 

Where you from?

[Toilet Duck]

1 minute ago, Superscally said:

Where you from?

Dublin! (born in Leeds, moved back home to Ireland just before I was 3, my dad was doing his PhD in Leeds Uni at the time, Geology though, nothing like what I do!). How about you?

[Superscally]

6 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

Dublin! (born in Leeds, moved back home to Ireland just before I was 3, my dad was doing his PhD in Leeds Uni at the time, Geology though, nothing like what I do!). How about you?

Scouser here, used to go out with a Dublin girl! Foxrock don't you know! 😉

By the way, I'm a council estate lad!! 

[Yoghurt on a Stick]

3 hours ago, charlierc said:

This has been the shitshow in the USA as Trump began to rave about this as a miracle option to begin to control the crisis, while America's medical experts have been more cautious. This in turn has lead to more arguments, to the point where Trump stopped the infectious disease expert Dr. Fauci answering a question on it at a press conference this week even after he said in the same conference "I'm not a doctor". Plus Fox News doing their usual thing of going "Everyone else wants this to fail because Trump endorsed it", which isn't helpful.

Anecdotally, it seems to work on some but not all cases, while Sweden has officially abandoned a trial on it. I think its one of those things that would be great if proven to work, but it needs clear proof it works otherwise it might just cause more bother than it solves.

Yeah, I didn't question my friend on this, as I just noticed it within an email that contained humour. I guess he may have been being sarcastic about Trump, but don't know. He's has a doctor of chemistry qualification and is quite scientific, so I'd gone down the lines that he was passing on 'proper' information. Now I fear that he must have been taking the piss - yet again, which is another one of his forte's.

[Yoghurt on a Stick]

10 hours ago, bamber said:

Bats and Pangolins are carnivorous. Even the most prolific carnivorous human societies have rarely eaten mammals that are themselves carnivorous. Most societies subsist on herbivores and veg. Eating  carnivores has always always been a bit of a no-no.

(Bats are mammals that can fly, awesome, that super-human ability makes them most resistant to most viruses as it turns out.)

In parts of Asia it is deemed acceptable. This is the problem.

 

Vegan solves this.   

 

Why, given the choice of chicken or fish or veg or bat would you go for bat? Some choose bat. I don't understand that? 

Thanks for the info bamber. 

Not sure why, but it reminded me of this;

 

[Toilet Duck]

9 minutes ago, Superscally said:

Scouser here, used to go out with a Dublin girl! Foxrock don't you know! 😉

By the way, I'm a council estate lad!! 

Should’ve guessed by the user name! 😁

[Superscally]

2 minutes ago, Toilet Duck said:

Should’ve guessed by the user name! 😁

😂😂

[gizmoman]

1 hour ago, WhoamI? said:

There is no traffic on our roads here, why do they need to use sirens?  Everywhere may of course not be the same, but 🤔?

My road is quieter than usual and it's rare to hear sirens during the day under normal conditions, having said that, I suppose people are more likely to step out into a quiet road so they may be doing it for safety reasons if they are travelling at speed.

[Yoghurt on a Stick]

2 hours ago, Toilet Duck said:

So the data on Chloroquine is a little less firm than the BCG angle. Vast populations don't routinely take it so the type of epidemiological evidence that is driving the interest in BCG can't be ascertained. At the moment, there's anecdotal evidence that it can work, but it hasn't been fully tested in a proper trial yet (there's loads of them underway at the moment...in fact, if you are interested, there's a COVID trials tracker up and running here). Again, it's entirely possible that it could play a role (as well as loads of other existing drugs that can be re-purposed, for example angiotensin receptor blockers used for high blood pressure), we just need to see them working in a controlled setting to roll them out as standard of care. Loads of breakthrough come from what are known as n of 1 studies (in fact, the first AIDS treatments were discovered this way), so anecdotal observations play a crucial role in finding new options for treatment (case studies have been a core part of medicine since it began). Like the BCG thing, it's worth looking into and if it works out, we'll have dodged a bullet. The more things we check, the better the chances of actually finding an answer. 

Thanks for the response.

I get what you are saying. I know that there was an anti depressant drug (can't recall it's name) which they now use as an assistant to help people give up smoking, as the first depressed people using it were reporting back that they'd suddenly given up smoking. here's hoping that something similar can be found with Covid - 19.

 

[Yoghurt on a Stick]

1 hour ago, Deaf Nobby Burton said:

Livestock is susceptible, hence the swine flu outbreak. But it’s really just a questions of probability. Bats carry a number of nasty viruses, that’s well know. It’s not necessarily that easy for those nasties to jump to another species, but it happens relatively regularly which we now know to our cost. There are lots of ways it can happen, an animal being bitten by a bat, or eating it’s droppings as an example, but every time that happens a virus doesn’t then necessarily jump species, and even then it doesn’t necessarily jump species again to humans. We don’t eat a huge variety of animals in the U.K. and we have pretty high standards of welfare and hygiene. Certainly it’s not very common at all for the few animals we do eat to mix together, not until they’ve been slaughtered at least when they’re in the supermarket or butchers ready to be eaten. So while it can happen, it’s an extremely low, virtually non existent risk. Pangolins and bats are both wild animals, the chance of them coming into contact with each other is far greater, as is the risk that a virus manages to make the jump across species, and then again to humans if humans insist on eating them. The Chinese practice of wet markets greatly increases the odds of a virus making that leap from bats. To another species, to humans. Keeping possibly hundreds of different animals together who don’t mix in the wild, alive and dead and then slaughtering them in close contact is just a question of increasing the probability of something happening.

Thanks for the informative response.

[fatyeti24]

3 hours ago, gizmoman said:

 

There she is! I was worried that in the midst of a national crisis, with our police officers handed unprecedented powers to enforce new laws, our home secretary was just gonna sit this one out. 

The horrible fucker. 

[Ozanne]

3 minutes ago, fatyeti24 said:

There she is! I was worried that in the midst of a national crisis, with our police officers handed unprecedented powers to enforce new laws, our home secretary was just gonna sit this one out. 

The horrible fucker. 

That she is, I have a thing for her, I find her pretty hot...

[efcfanwirral]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-stanley-johnson-says-his-son-almost-took-one-for-the-team-2535562%3famp

"Take one for the team" - I really hope that this isn't the start of a new rhetoric of 'Boris did this for you now you do the same for him" to justify the eventual and likely premature (if your priority is saving lives anyway) lifting of restrictions. 

[steviewevie]

11 minutes ago, efcfanwirral said:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/inews.co.uk/news/health/coronavirus-stanley-johnson-says-his-son-almost-took-one-for-the-team-2535562%3famp

"Take one for the team" - I really hope that this isn't the start of a new rhetoric of 'Boris did this for you now you do the same for him" to justify the eventual and likely premature (if your priority is saving lives anyway) lifting of restrictions. 

he will be hailed as a hero, he took on the coronavirus and he won, because he is a fighter.

[Wanderlei]

It's weird because, when restrictions are lifted, it still doesn't mean  ulnerabke people can't contract the virus and die. There will be another spike in cases when restrictions are lifted.