Here is Dr. Klotman’s Week 219 viral diseases update. The highlights are:
- The 2024 Influenza season is essentially over
- H5N1 bird flu has now been found in chicken flocks, dairy cows, and Texas wastewater
- Infected chicken flocks have been/are being destroyed
- While pasteurized milk poses no threat of H5N1 transmission, drink raw milk at your own risk
- H5N1 virus has been found in nine (unnamed) Texas cities in North, South, Central and East Texas
- RSV infection in people >60 can cause severe respiratory illness; the new vaccine prevents it
- COVID is still circulating
- Domestic cases are few
- If you are planning foreign travel, you may want to consider getting a COVID booster and maybe a prescription for Paxlovid to carry with you
- There is still no announcement regarding an updated m-RNA COVID vaccine
A couple of related items, not mentioned in Dr. Klotman’s video, have crossed my computer screen. The first is a CDC notice that the RSV vaccine is associated with a higher incidence of Guillain–Barré Syndrome (GBS) – an ascending, symmetric paralysis that can be lethal. GBS appears sporadically and may be preceded by an infection. RSV vaccine-related cases are unexpected and not sporadic cases.
The second item has to do with another viral illness; this one is transmitted by mosquitoes – Dengue. This virus causes sporadic illness in the Southern US in some years, but with climate change, it is becoming more common as our environment becomes more hospitable to the Aedes mosquito species that usually transmits the virus. Dengue symptoms include fever, headache, muscle and joint pains, rash, and in severe cases, hemorrhage and death. The Dengue virus is a flavivirus – a virus family that includes Yellow Fever, West Nile, and Zika viruses. If Climate Change is a hoax, I can only say that its ecological impacts are very real – Dengue is one of many.