The Post-Partisan Emporium

  The Infectious Disease Frenzy By  David Bell In our enlightened age the public seems tirelessly bombarded with warnings of existential threat from infectious disease. Another distant outbreak is spreading, this time it could be Disease X ! “…and there is no vaccine …!” How, one might ask, is our species still extant? A few decades ago, life was less torn by impending doom. Public health officials were investigating diarrhoea outbreaks linked to the local café. The Woodstock festival happened during the last large influenza pandemic, and no one really noticed, let alone wore a mask. They just listened to the music, lived as their ancestors had, and somehow managed to expand the species. Medical technology and biotech innovation have blossomed since Woodstock. If you had a heart attack in the 1960s, you got some morphine for pain and a firm mattress, a bit of nitroglycerin under the tongue or some basic drugs to steady an erratic heartbeat. Now you will be rushed into a maze ...

  Human to human hantavirus The evidence does not match the alarm Dr Clare Craig When severe pneumonia aboard the MV Hondius was attributed to hantavirus this month, the reporting moved quickly from a handful of sick passengers to the claim that a rodent-borne virus had begun spreading efficiently from person to person. There were comparisons with the first weeks of covid, evacuations in biocontainment units, weeks of enforced isolation, and a call from Deborah Birx for routine PCR testing of passengers who had no symptoms at all. The World Health Organization has felt the need to declare in public that this is not the start of another pandemic. As always there are two primary false claims: 1. Human to human transmission – i.e. we are all at risk 2. 30% mortality rate – i.e. we are all going to die Where did the alarm originate? How good is the evidence that hantavirus spreads between people? Hantaviruses spread between rodents, which carry it without illness and shed it for l...