Author Archive

Study Shows Expanding Tick Populations in Colorado

https://www.lymedisease.org/study-ticks-colorado/

Study shows expanding tick populations in Colorado

A new study published in the peer-reviewed journal Ticks and Tick-borne Diseases shows that ticks capable of carrying diseases pose an emerging threat in Colorado.

The results demonstrate that American dog ticks are present in 16 Colorado counties where they had not been previously identified by the CDC.

Furthermore, Rocky Mountain wood ticks are found in 38 of the 64 Colorado counties, whereas they had only been identified in 33 previously.

The study leveraged several sources for the study, including ticks collected by citizen scientists as part of a free tick testing program offered by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

“The critical takeaway from this study is that Coloradans need to take preventative measures against ticks when outdoors, such as tick checks, and doctors should be more vigilant for symptoms of tick-borne diseases including those carried by Rocky Mountain wood ticks and American dog ticks,” said Linda Giampa, executive director, Bay Area Lyme Foundation.

Citizen science

“This ecology study illustrates the power of leveraging citizen science, and we are grateful for the more than 20,000 ticks that were submitted to our national program and made this study possible.”

Conducted by researchers from Colorado State University and funded by the Bay Area Lyme Foundation, the study aimed to quantify the current county-level distribution of Rocky Mountain wood ticks, Dermacentor andersoni, and American dog ticks, Dermacentor variabilis.

The study evaluated data from ticks collected by citizen scientists and evaluated  at Northern Arizona University as part of Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s Free Tick Testing program, distribution data from the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment, veterinary surveillance at Oklahoma State University, and literature data.

“It was interesting to us to see American dog ticks in unexpected counties in Colorado which appear to be invading from nearby states or traveling with people and pets. And also to show that Rocky Mountain wood ticks appear, for the most part, to inhabit counties at higher elevations than American dog ticks,” said co-author Daniel Salkeld, PhD, Colorado State University.

A red flag

“This study is a red flag that, on the county-level, it is necessary to increase tick surveillance locally, and, on an individual level, to take precautions and know the symptoms of tick-borne diseases.”

Rocky Mountain wood ticks and American dog ticks are both known carriers of Rickettsia rickettsii, which causes Rocky Mountain spotted fever, a disease that is on the rise in the US. They also carry Francisella tularensis which causes tularemia, a potentially life-threatening disease that has seen a spike in incidence in recent data.

According to this study, both species of tick were found on humans and dogs. Rocky Mountain wood ticks appear to be more attracted to humans, with this tick representing 58% of ticks attached to humans, compared to the American dog tick, which represented 92% of ticks attached to dogs.

“The citizen science approach has been critical to supporting our efforts as widespread active surveillance programs in Colorado have had difficulty due to the state’s diverse terrain and no Colorado counties regularly conduct these,” said lead author Elizabeth Freeman, MPH, Colorado State University.

More surveillance needed

“With the knowledge that there is a risk of encountering both the Rocky Mountain wood tick and American dog tick in Colorado, there should be more motivation to further enhance surveillance studies to fully understand the public’s risk of disease.”

Citizen scientists collected and provided the ticks evaluated in the study as part of Bay Area Lyme Foundation’s Free Tick Testing program, which collected more than 20,400 ticks, of which 8,954 are Ixodes ticks capable of carrying the most common tick-borne pathogens.

This new study expands on previous research identifying ticks capable of carrying Lyme and other tick-borne diseases in 83 counties (in 24 states) where these ticks had not been previously recorded.

Some of the new county reports are likely due to travel-associated exposures (e.g., Montana), but many counties, such as those in Colorado, are in close proximity to previously known locations, illustrating either spreading range of ticks or the need for expanded on-the-ground surveillance.

The research was conducted through a partnership between Bay Area Lyme Foundation, Northern Arizona University, Colorado State University and the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen).

Interactive maps show the distribution by county of the tick species collected, including western blacklegged tick, blacklegged tick, American dog tick, lone star tick. Prevalence of Rocky Mountain wood ticks in this study were not previously evaluated and reported.

Ticks sent to the initiative from January 2016 through August 2019 were tested free of charge. These data were categorized, mapped, and recorded, as well as provided to the submitter. Ticks were submitted from every state except Alaska. The program received a six-fold increase in tick submissions over initial estimates, representing unprecedented national coordination of a ‘citizen science’ effort and diagnostic investigation.

Click here to read the study.

SOURCE: Bay Area Lyme Foundation

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I am ever grateful they did not blame the climate.  Independent research has shown the climate is a nothing burger when it comes to tick and disease proliferation despite the continued narrative by corrupt science, politics, and climate alarmists.

Experts continue to speak out to deaf ears.

Category:

Lyme, research, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Testing, Ticks, Tularemia

What This Boy Learned Young About His Mom’s Chronic Lyme Disease

https://www.lymedisease.org/boy-mom-chronic-lyme-disease/

What this boy learned young about his mom’s chronic Lyme disease

It can be tough to be a kid when your mom has chronic Lyme disease. Jessica Devine and her 14 year old son Parker know all about that.

Jessica was bitten by a tick and started having serious health issues when Parker was four years old. She recently posted the following on Facebook:

When he was 6, I remember being home alone with him and was about to have a seizure. I had to guide my little boy in the dark to take a flashlight and go next door to where my parents lived (in the country—so scarier) to get help. He was so brave!

He used to keep checking on me when I would have to take supervised baths wearing a bathing suit so he knew to go get help if I needed it.

He knew what things to grab for me when I couldn’t help myself. I have a video when he was 8 and he could name all of my co-infections. I was shocked he paid that much attention. He would make me bracelets that said “brave” on them. Instead of placing “kick me” stickers on my back, he would write I AM A SURVIVOR.

He has witnessed some awful stuff as a child of a parent with Lyme. He is beyond special. Kind and compassionate and ALWAYS the first to know if something is wrong with me, even now at almost 14 years old. I cherish who he is.

His assignment for school was to write a poem. Last night he said “Mom, can you come to my room?” So I followed him, sat down, and he read me this poem. I was speechless and cried. We hugged a long time.

LIME

I hate Limes…
just the word makes me sick.
They don’t taste necessarily bad but,
they just… I don’t know…
but I do know that I hate them…
They are like budget lemons. Too scared to
be sour enough. Always, “Lemon-lime Drink”
Why not “Lemon Drink” or “Lime Drink”?
Just make up your mind already!
The color isn’t even that nice, it’s the color of barf.

A Lime is the broken alarm clock that needs an alarm clock to wake up on time.
A Lime feels like a glass of lukewarm water on a hot summer day.
A Lime is the friend in the group that is just there for the popularity…
and that it is what makes it petty.
It doesn’t try to get better… it just tears down everything around it.
Trying desperately to “get what it wants”
What is it trying to do then huh?

It ain’t trying to do anything? But it takes the lives of so many… so many…
INNOCENT PEOPLE
Who have nothing but hope and those like them.
BECAUSE THE DOCTORS DENY THEIR PROBLEMS ARE REAL
They deny that the Limes are there because they hide.
And because the doctors “aren’t good enough to look”
And those innocent people usually can’t even find the Limes until it is
TOO LATE.

But I guess I am lucky because I get to hate limes.
Me and my loved ones are here on this planet long enough to hate those limes.
And even though I am just one small piece of hope in the big picture,
It still hurts to hear when people so young are challenged so fast.
And sometimes the survivors need to help those who can’t help themselves.
Together.
Because they have hope,
because they have knowledge,
and because they have love…
Did I mention that I hate Lyme?

~Parker Devine

Jessica contracted Lyme disease while living in California. She now lives in Washington state and runs the RISE ABOVE LYME support group on Facebook.

TOUCHED BY LYME is written by Dorothy Kupcha Leland, President of LymeDisease.org. She is co-author of When Your Child Has Lyme Disease: A Parent’s Survival Guide. Contact her at dleland@lymedisease.org.

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**Comment**

Like so many patients, Jessica refuses to stay down but turns Lyme into Lymeaid by educating those in the state of California where she lives.  And like so many children of parents with Lyme/MSIDS, Parker has chosen to be a voice in the darkness.

Category:

Activism, Lyme

‘Crime Against Science’: Senate Hearing Exposes Government’s ‘Mismanagement’ of COVID Pandemic

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/ron-johnson-senate-hearing-covid-pandemic-mismanagement/

‘Crime Against Science’: Senate Hearing Exposes Government’s ‘Mismanagement’ of COVID Pandemic

Doctors and scientists from major universities and medical centers on Wednesday told the U.S. Senate, during a hearing hosted by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), what they described as a story of corruption and mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic.

ron johnson hearing covid 19 feature

Hearings were held in the U.S. Senate Wednesday with distinguished doctors and scientists from major universities and medical centers. The story they told of corruption and mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic is a turning point for humanity.

Most of the people on the panel suffered loss of income, loss of status or loss of their jobs because they publicized truths about COVID-19 and COVID-19 policies that were anathema to the medical establishment and detrimental to pharmaceutical profits.

COVID-19 policy has been a crime against humanity, and underlying that crime has been a crime against science. Science is held in high public regard, even as the reputations of most other institutions have declined in recent decades.

The reputation of science is based on open debate and logical evaluation of evidence. Debate has been stifled by people with money and power, and those same people then claim to speak for “science.”

The public is gradually recognizing the enormity of this fraud. I fear that public support for science will crumble.

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) introduced the hearing by reminding us that promising drugs for early treatment of COVID-19 were made known to him by some of the people at Wednesday’s hearing already in the spring of 2020, and yet our government agencies were advising against their use, despite long and assuring safety records.

Here are some highlights from the speakers:

Liz Willner, who created a website to make the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) vaccine safety data available in a more accessible format, explained that according to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System) data, vaccine injuries increased 20-fold in 2021 and vaccine-related deaths increased 50-fold.

Aaron Siri, a lawyer for Del Bigtree’s Informed Consent Action Network, described how the CDC created a system called V-Safe for recording a large sample of vaccine safety data, and then hid the data from the public.

Siri pressed through the Freedom of Information Act to obtain that data for more than one-and-a-half years before some of it was released. Much still remains secret.

Risk of myocarditis, Guillain-Barré syndrome, and autoimmune disorders was recognized and reported early in the Pfizer trials, and these conditions were in early specifications for the V-Safe system. In the end, none of these conditions were included, suggesting that CDC made a deliberate decision not to create a paper trail for them.

Ed Dowd, a securities analyst, reported data from Group Life insurance policies that cover healthy, employed people ages 18 to 64. The death rate in this group jumped 40% in the third quarter of 2021, coincident with federal vaccine mandates for large employers who buy these Group Life policies.

The death rate for healthy, employed people is quite low, so the absolute number of deaths continued to be dominated by people who are old and sick. The overall death rate in America increased only a little during this time, but the Group Insurance companies took a big hit.

Josh Stirling, another security analyst, summarized data from Britain’s Office of National Statistics. To date, vaccinated people in the U.K. are dying at a rate 26% higher than the unvaccinated. The increase was concentrated in young people, who have suffered a 49% increased risk of mortality to date.

Lt. Col. Theresa Long, M.D., M.S. in public health, reported that alarming increases in disabling conditions for the U.S. Army were reported right after vaccination was mandated, and these signals were dismissed as a “computer glitch.”

The glitch was fixed, but disabling illnesses and injuries continue in the Army, where they are now occurring at almost twice the pre-vaccination rate of 2020. The number of military deaths from the COVID-19 vaccines is about 50% higher than the deaths from COVID-19 itself.

Dr. Ryan Cole reported that coronaviruses as a class mutate rapidly, and that’s why we have never had a vaccine for any coronavirus in the past. A largely vaccinated public drives the virus to mutate even faster. The current COVID-19 vaccines immunize against a variant of COVID-19 that was extinct more than a year ago.

Dr. Harvey Risch, Ph.D., emeritus professor of epidemiology from Yale, reminded us that for young, healthy people, the risk of serious COVID-19 is lower than the risk of injury from the COVID-19 vaccines.

Vaccine mandates can only be justified for vaccines that lower the risk of transmitting the virus, and the current vaccines do not prevent transmission, even in the old and vulnerable groups where they protect against serious COVID-19.

Dr. Pierre Kory specialized in pulmonary medicine and critical care as a professor at the University of Wisconsin before he was dismissed from its medical school for advocating early treatment for COVID-19.

He reminded us that early treatment has always been our best line of defense for everything from the common cold to cancer. (This includes the original SARS virus of 2003.)

Thirty percent of the world’s people live in countries where hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin is taken daily as preventives, and these countries have had much lower rates of COVID-19 mortality than the “developed world”, where these medicines were discouraged. Why were early treatments for COVID-19 disparaged by the authorities?

Dr. Paul Marik, with 300 peer-reviewed publications, is the second most published expert on critical care in the world. He estimated that hundreds of thousands of American deaths would have been avoided if hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin had been adopted as early treatments beginning in 2020.

He reported that in his hospital, he was forbidden from using safe, effective treatments for COVID-19, including vitamin C. Instead, he was encouraged to prescribe Remdesivir. Remdesivir is a patented antiviral drug and costs about $3,000 per patient.

But Remdesivir can only be administered in a hospital, and antivirals are useless by the time a patient gets to the hospital, because he is well past the stage where the virus has been vanquished, and the patient is threatened by its aftereffects, including lung damage, low blood oxygenation and sepsis.

Remdesivir is highly toxic to the kidney. According to the World Health Organization, Remdesivir increases the risk of kidney failure 20-fold. Marik claimed that there are no legitimate medical uses for Remdesivir, and yet federal reimbursement to hospitals is boosted by 20% (for the entire bill) if Remdesivir is included in the treatment plan.

Kory talked straight to doctors and medical researchers:

“High-impact journals have been under the control of the pharmaceutical industry. …

“We’ve seen repeated cases of manipulation of the data to show that a company’s product is effective and, conversely, manipulated trials to try to prove to everyone that safe, effective repurposed drugs that offered no profit were ineffective or dangerous.

“There is an immense amount of corruption in medical publishing and in the conduct of science.”

Dr. Peter McCullough, Ph.D., MPH, is a heart specialist with a Ph.D. in epidemiology, and was a professor at Baylor College of Medicine before he was dismissed for his vocal stance on early treatment of COVID-19. America suffered 250,000 deaths before the COVID-19 vaccines.

Normally, the second year of a pandemic is milder, both because the virus evolves to be less deadly and because the most vulnerable people were killed in the first year. But since the vaccine rollout, we have had 750,000 additional COVID-19 deaths in America. This is not the record of a successful vaccine.

Paul Alexander, Ph.D., reported that the COVID-19 vaccines lose their efficacy and dip into negative efficacy after a few months, such that people who have been vaccinated are more likely to get COVID-19 multiple times. Vaccinated individuals only have immunity to the part of the virus that is mutating most rapidly.

As long as we keep boosting people every few months, the virus will continue to mutate and the pandemic will continue for many more years. “Had we not mass vaccinated, it is probable that we would have achieved herd immunity in the United States in the winter of 2021.”

Dr. Robert Malone, who holds the patent as the original inventor of mRNA technology, changed his perspective on the COVID-19 vaccines after he had a near-fatal response to vaccination. Vaccine development is a very slow process, and viruses mutate rapidly.

The hope for mRNA technology was that a generic vaccine platform could be developed so that a new viral genome could just be plugged into an existing technology and vaccines could be developed at warp speed.

This very promising idea has not panned out, but those who are heavily invested in the paradigm refuse to recognize the failures and the danger of mRNA vaccine technology.

Malone described the innovation of using pseudouridine instead of natural uridine as one of the four nucleotide bases in mRNA vaccines. This is a trick that causes the body not to degrade mRNA as it normally would, so the mRNA stays around much longer.

The upshot is that once the body is injected with an mRNA vaccine, the mRNA stays around and continues to generate spike protein for at least 60 days.

We have no data beyond 60 days, so it is “at least” 60 days. The vaccine was designed to do its job of stimulating immunity in the first 48 hours. After this, the continued production of spike protein serves no protective purpose, but it can continue to be toxic.

Janci Lindsay, Ph.D., professor of toxicology, reported on the vaccines’ effects on fertility, and evidence that the mRNA can incorporate into the genome and be passed through sperm or egg to the next generation.

As long as the mRNA is turned into DNA, it can be passed to the next generation through plasmids in the sperm. The spike protein might become a part of the human genome.

David Wiseman, Ph.D., pharmacologist from Johnson & Johnson, told us that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has strict standards for safety testing of “vaccines” and much stricter standards for “gene therapies,” including 5 to 15 years of follow-up for cancer and DNA damage.

The FDA did not even apply the looser “vaccine” standards when evaluating the COVID-19 vaccines, even though these mRNA products meet the definition of “gene therapies.”

Cole reported on the change in definition of “vaccine” that made possible the approval of the mRNA products, which have a very different mechanism from traditional vaccines. They should have been tested with standards appropriate for gene therapies.

McCullough emphasized that immunity provided by the COVID-19 vaccines does not extend to the nose or throat, so that vaccinated people are exhaling a viral load that is no different from unvaccinated.

This is why the current crop of vaccines cannot stop transmission, and why any argument for mandating vaccination as a public health measure is flawed. “These vaccines have no support for reducing transmission of the infection.”

So the justification for vaccination must be lowering the risk of hospitalization and death. And yet, the only clinical trials that we had were not designed to measure rates of hospitalization and death.

NB Data from the Pfizer trial showed a higher death rate among the vaccinated compared to the control group.

Malone and Alexander raise the subject of “original antigenic sin.” In teaching the body to respond to just one part of the virus with one arm of the immune system, we hijack the body’s response when a COVID-19 virus comes along a few months later that has a mutated spike protein.

The immune system is fixated on the original spike protein, and its response to the altered virus is impaired. This is a well-known mechanism for several decades, so we should not be surprised when COVID-19 vaccines show negative effectiveness after a few months.

Originally published on Josh Mitteldorf’s Substack page.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Children’s Health Defense.

This article was originally published by The Defender — Children’s Health Defense’s News & Views Website under Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. Please consider subscribing to The Defender or donating to Children’s Health Defense.

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Category:

Treatment, vaccines, Viruses

The Real Agenda Behind the American Academy of Pediatrics: Weaponizing Children’s Mental Health and Vaccines for Profit

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/profit-american-academy-pediatrics-childrens-mental-health-vaccines/

The Real Agenda Behind American Academy of Pediatrics: Weaponizing Children’s Mental Health and Vaccines for Profit

With a budget of more than $127 million and a staff of 475, the American Academy of Pediatrics functions as a corporate and government mouthpiece that touts the wares of drug, vaccine and formula manufacturers.

profit children american academy pediatrics feature

As of 2019, roughly 72,000 physicians were actively working in pediatrics or pediatric subspecialties in the U.S., many of them members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP).

Nominally, the AAP is a professional medical association (PMA), but more often than not, it functions as a corporate and government mouthpiece, including issuing policy guidance to its members stating that it is an “acceptable option to pediatric care clinicians to dismiss families who refuse vaccines.”

With total “revenue, gains and other support” amounting in 2022 to nearly $127 million — supporting a staff of 475 and a self-described role as the “#1 publisher of pediatric titles in the world” — the deep-pocketed AAP’s ability to broadcast policies desired by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and tout the wares of drug, vaccine and formula manufacturers is significant.

That the AAP’s megaphone is one-sided has long attracted the notice of critics, who point to the organization’s “preference for fashionable political positions over evidence-based medicine” and its pattern of “play[ing] both sides of the street” — with its “‘trusted’ medical advice” issued in the context of generous funding from agenda-setting foundations, corporations and government agencies.

Even in a study that the AAP itself published, which examined pediatric PMA transparency and compliance with best practice guidelines, the AAP got middling marks for both, despite benefiting from “a significantly higher average budget” compared to sister organizations that earned better scores.

Currently, the AAP is using its bully pulpit to hammer home messages about vaccination — especially COVID-19 shots — and about an AAP-fashioned children’s mental health crisis.

Plainly, both issues have the potential to be highly profitable for the drug companies that festoon the AAP’s list of top-tier donors. But the organization also appears to be on board with a more subterranean aim — weaponizing vaccination and mental health to achieve more “brave new world” control over children’s bodies and minds.

Presidential grandstanding

Throughout 2022, the AAP’s soon-to-be-outgoing president, UCLA professor Dr. Moira Szilagyi, Ph.D., was an obedient foot soldier on both the vaccination and mental health fronts.

Szilagyi was voted the AAP’s 2022 president-elect in June 2020, and throughout the pandemic, she shamelessly brandished her status as a grandmother to peddle pediatric COVID-19 shots.

In October 2021 — not long before stepping into the AAP presidency — Szilagyi opined in a CNN piece titled “Pediatrician: What I want this Covid vaccine to do for my grandchildren” that the data from the vaccine clinical trials in younger children were “very reassuring.”

But, she confessed, she felt an “undercurrent of anxiety” over the fact that her masked grandchildren, at ages 5 and 8, did not yet have access to “the best protection of all: vaccination.”

Barely a month later, the CDC’s advisors overrode concerns about Pfizer’s clinical data to unanimously endorse the jab for Szilagyi’s grandchildren and others in their age group.

In June 2022, under Szilagyi’s stewardship, the AAP issued an enthusiastic press release applauding the CDC’s recommendation of “safe, effective COVID-19 vaccines” for babies as young as 6 months old.

In October, Szilagyi even wrote to White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Ashish Jha to plead for reducing “the burdens of administering COVID-19 vaccines” to children, stating, “The nation’s pediatricians need to be supported as we attempt to vaccinate our nation’s youngest citizens against COVID-19.”

In that letter, Szilagyi — seemingly oblivious to the thousands of injuries and dozens of deaths already reported in children and adolescents who received COVID-19 jabs — expressed gratitude for babies’ and toddlers’ “access” to the shots and celebrated the imminent authorization of bivalent booster shots for kids.

In November, Szilagyi again took to CNN — this time trotting out her “heartbroken” feelings about crowded pediatric hospital wards and offering parents “reassurance” and the “advice” to get the whole family vaccinated for both influenza and COVID-19, “including boosters.”

Her actions over the past year also illustrated the AAP’s servile and co-dependent relationship with the CDC in other ways.

In 2017, BMJ editor Peter Doshi reported that the CDC is one of the AAP’s “steady funders”; from 2009 through 2016, the CDC shoveled $20 million in the AAP’s direction.

Returning the favor, Szilagyi testified in May 2022 before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies, making a case for more than $746 million in new CDC and Health Resources and Services Administration funding for the AAP’s pet causes — not all of which even concern American children.

For example, lamenting “pandemic-related disruptions” to routine childhood vaccination overseas, Szilagyi called for nearly half (48%) of the proposed funding ($356 million) to be routed to the CDC’s Global Immunization division.

Szilagyi lobbied for another hefty $205 million (28%) for the CDC’s National Center on Birth Defects and Developmental Disabilities (NCBDDD), the center that is supposed to be “search[ing] for the causes of autism” but which consistently denies any vaccine-autism connection.

CDC’s current NCBDDD director, Karen Remley, was a recent AAP CEO (2015-2018). Her predecessor at the NCBDDD’s helm (until retiring in January 2020) was Coleen Boyle, known for her early-career cover-up of Agent Orange and dioxin toxicity and later, for helping cement the fiction that vaccines have nothing to do with developmental disabilities.

Also on Szilagyi’s funding priorities list was a smaller request ($12 million) to study “sudden unexpected” infant and childhood deaths, another outcome with a probable — though AAP- and CDC-denied — link to vaccination.

The mental health dragnet

Szilagyi has a lengthy history of engagement with “vulnerable children” in the U.S.’s corrupt and dysfunctional foster care system and likes to reference those credentials.

In June, after the AAP called for mental health screening for all children from birth through age 21, medical reporter Martha Rosenberg noted in The Defender that children in foster care (and other marginalized kids) are precisely the youth most at risk of overmedication with “lucrative and dangerous psychiatric drugs — some of which can cause suicide, especially in children.”

Additional risks of across-the-board depression screening, pointed out by psychiatric experts quoted by Rosenberg, include overdiagnosis, medicalization of the “normal” and “carelessly applied labels” that, once entered into databases, become impossible to shed.

Other critics, skeptical of the “supposed” mental health crisis in young people, agree on the need to “take care in widening the net of psychiatric surveillance” and argue for the promotion of resilience rather than the celebration of vulnerability.

They also point out how the “language of harm and trauma” can be harnessed for “political motives,” including using it to censor “undesirable ideas.”

Spelling out psychiatry’s long history of “acting as an instrument for psychological, social and political control,” psychiatrist Peter Breggin has noted:

“The contemporary widespread diagnosing of children is a subtler form of social control that suppresses children rather than providing them with what they need to fulfill their basic needs in the home, school and family. Instead of reforming our educational system and improving family life, we drug our children into more docile states.”

Mental health is lucrative, however. For example, in September, the AAP earned a cool $2 million from the mental health branch of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to develop resources focused on “social media and mental wellness.”

And in October, the AAP joined 100-plus other organizations in writing to the Biden administration to urge a “National Emergency Declaration in children’s mental health,” no doubt hoping for more millions to be sent their way to address the “emergency.”

In July, Szilagyi and co-authors laid some of the conceptual groundwork for a mental health dragnet in a paper published in the influential journal Health Affairs, titled “Combating A Crisis By Integrating Mental Health Services And Primary Care.”

Cloaking their arguments in the veneer of “whole-person care,” the authors made a case for more integration of “behavioral health” into primary care — claiming that up to half of “behavioral health disorders begin by age 14.”

Describing barriers to this approach, they noted the current difficulty of sharing patient information “across integrated care team members,” criticizing “overly restrictive interpretations of federal laws and regulations.”

Perhaps that is why the AAP’s president-elect for 2023 is a health informatics expert.

Dr. Sandy Chung, like Szilagyi, is bullish on mental health, framing it as a “long-simmering” problem that the pandemic merely helped catapult into the spotlight.

Chung’s curriculum vitae and professional biographies list her work in the areas of mental health, electronic health records, “data integration” and the creation of “a national registry of child health data” as some of her primary achievements, suggesting that she is on board for the type of pervasive mental health tracking and surveillance that is giving other child health experts the heebie-jeebies.

Unfilled positions and unfulfilled pediatricians

A June 2021 article in the AAP’s own journal Pediatrics outlined a somewhat dire outlook for the pediatric profession, noting, ironically, large vacancies in “developmental and behavioral pediatrics and adolescent and child psychiatry” as well as child neurology.

The author also noted fewer applicants and more unfilled pediatric residency positions, suggesting that “strategies to strengthen the pediatric applicant pool must include … understanding factors that impact the career decisions of trainees.”

Although a large proportion of pediatricians currently in practice appears to be generally copacetic with AAP policy positions — with half of pediatric offices reporting “a policy of dismissing families who won’t vaccinate their children” — that still leaves others whose opinion differs.

In fact, in a December 2020 article in Pediatrics, apparently published to let off a little steam, a trio of university-based authors scolded the AAP and its adherents for their stance on this issue, noting, “it is wrong for clinicians not to accept vaccine refusers because they want only compliant families” and characterizing this approach as “excessively paternalistic and inconsistent with patient- and family-centered care.”

A decade ago — cited by journalist Richard Gale in CounterPunch — pediatrician Ken Stoller described the CDC’s and AAP’s all-too-effective “propagandizing” on the topic of thimerosal in vaccines:

“Now we have a generation of pediatricians … who actually need to be deprogrammed to understand what the true nature of all the neuro-behavioral problems are that they confront without any understanding of etiology or potential interventions.”

Unfortunately, ominous trends like California’s recent legislation to take away the licenses of doctors who don’t toe the party line, and similar witch hunts against independent-thinking doctors in other states, do not bode well for future medical independence.

Nor can children and their parents hope for any help from the AAP, beholden as it is not just to Big Pharma and next-generation biopharmaceutical and “gene therapy” companies, but also to population-control-oriented foundations such as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the David & Lucile Packard Foundation, infant formula companies like the disgraced Abbott Nutrition and National Security Agency surveillance partner AT&T.

Gale’s 2012 conclusion still holds: The AAP

“has failed to protect children from their greatest enemy — the pharmaceutical and chemical industrial complex. … [W]hen addressing the prevention of diseases that directly affect the medical industry, the AAP’s record is dismal.”

Category:

Psychological Aspects, vaccines

Anesthetic Concerns for Lyme Disease Patients

https://danielcameronmd.com/anesthetic-concerns-lyme-disease/

ANESTHETIC CONCERNS FOR LYME DISEASE PATIENTS

Doctors gives anesthetic medication to patient with Lyme disease.

Some Lyme disease patients require anesthetic evaluation before a procedure. Tammy Smit, MSNA, CRNA discussed a helpful approach for patients who required anesthesia for a surgical procedure in the American Association of Nurse Anesthesiology (AANA) journal. [1]

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In her article “Lyme Disease and Anesthesia Considerations,” Smit discusses three approaches:Disease awareness

Some patients may have Lyme disease that has not been diagnosed.

“Infected patients in whom the diagnosis has not yet been made or has been missed may present for invasive investigations such as biopsies or arthroscopies or for larger surgical interventions such as joint replacement or pacemaker insertion,” wrote Smit. A good history and physical examination should help.

Assessment of Target-Organ Damage

Some patients might need consultations. Lyme patients may present with Lyme carditis. Others can present with neurologic Lyme disease.

“This leads to a wide range of clinical presentations, the most common of which are headaches, cranial nerve palsies (in particular, bilateral upper and lower seventh cranial nerves), and meningitis,” wrote the author. “Borrelia encephalopathy, which rarely occurs, has also been described and is associated with disturbances in mood, personality, sleep, memory, and concentration.”

“Anesthetic practitioners should be aware of the clinical presentations of the disease as well as have a clear understanding of the anesthetic implications of the disease.”

Anesthesia-Specific Concerns

The author raised potential anesthesia-specific concerns. Central neuraxial blockade may introduce infective agents into the central nervous system.

“General anesthesia may suppress the immune system,” wrote the author. “A strong body of evidence has emerged demonstrating that volatile anesthetic agents adversely affect the function of neutrophils, macrophages, and natural killer cells…. the effect has not been described with propofol.”

“It may therefore be prudent to avoid the use of volatile anesthesia in patients with active disease and to rather make use of propofol-based total intravenous anesthesia.”

The author advised that oral antibiotics for Lyme disease be continued if a patient undergoes prolonged therapy. If they are unable to take oral therapy (i.e. being ventilated or NPO), they should receive intravenous antibiotics to cover the dosage.

Lastly, patients with cardiac or neurologic complication of Lyme may need closer perioperative monitoring.

The author concluded, “The impact that the choice of anesthetic technique may have on disease progression should be considered and discussed with the patient.”

Related Articles:

Near universal negative experiences with healthcare providers reported by Lyme disease patients
Herxheimer reaction in a 13-year-old boy with Lyme disease
Lyme disease causes a mix of symptoms including autonomic dysfunction

References:
  1. Smit T. Lyme Disease and Anesthesia Considerations. AANA J. Dec 2017;85(6):427-430.

Category:

Lyme, research