Prevention of Viral Respiratory Infection; colds, flu, SARS, H5N1, v. pneumonia

[anthropositor]

...Uh, and you might want to encourage your brother to eat some yogurt an hour or two after each dose of oral antibiotics to re-establish the beneficial flora and fauna of the gut.  Doctors, for some reason unknown to me, often do not advise their patients to do this when they prescribe oral antibiotics.

[,.]

Thanks I will ring him up and I appreciate your kindness.

[anthropositor]

Hi Lin, 
 I answered your question, then had an afterthought and posted it.  The new post split off onto the next page.  I think you may only have seen the second post.  My computer has been giving me a lot of trouble both posting and sending PM’s  I tried without success to Email you.  At the moment I have to try to  post five or six times to get it to take once.  I am not the most computer conversant person around.  While I haven’t had a cold or flu for twenty five years my computer gets a virus lately every week or two.  I’m starting to develop a theory about that.
Anthropositor

[totalfolly]

While I haven’t had a cold or flu for twenty five years my computer gets a virus lately every week or two.  I’m starting to develop a theory about that.

Hmmm, maybe like the picture of Dorian Gray--your computer is getting your viruses! 

Anthro, I must be the only person who has tried your procedure that couldn't get it to work.  Each time I've tried, I've come down, within a couple of weeks, with the worst cold in memory.    Either I'm doing it wrong (altho I followed your instructions very carefully) or I'm the exception that proves the rule.

totalfolly

[anthropositor]

I get a similar report from someone every year or two.  In some cases, with a bit of conversation I am able to sort out why.  Doing it before bedtime rather than before going out and mixing with the public is one example.  When I ask why they don't do it before going to work instead of at bedtime, I am told something like, "I never have time in the morning."

Sort of like the guy searching for his keys under a streetlight.  When asked how he happened to lose them under the streetlight he says, "Oh, I probably lost them over by the porch but I can't see over there." 

But knowing you TF, I don't think the answer will be that silly.  Just ask yourself, were you doing it every day, or skipping some days now and then?  It IS really so easy to get too rushed in your schedule and just forget to do it.  I don't know how many times it has slipped my mind and I only realize it when I'm halfway to town.  It is why I carry small bottles of cooking oil and a ziplock baggie of Q-tips in the van.

Funny idea about Dorian Gray/Computer, but the truth of it is, it is my own ignorant fault my computer is getting sick.  I don't know how to build an impervious firewall.  I recently signed up with Norton Security but I am clueless as to exactly how much good they have done me.  They tell me the computer is free of viruses, yet still, it was spontaneously shutting me down.  I don't even know when or how I will get billed by Norton.

However, I am making headway.  For weeks, my browser was shutting down spontaneously, continuously, often while posting or Emailing or when I was doing nothing at all.

But even a blind pig finds a truffle once in a while.  I now have been on for several hours, dozing mostly, and the computer has not spontaneously closed my browser once.  I just started using a new browser, one which it turns out has a variety of useful features which make it seem like quite an improvement, like allowing me to make the print on the screen much larger than I could with the other, for instance.  Very useful for someone delaying cataract surgery.

Now I am going to hit the post button.  If this message posts, I'm off to bed.

(Well, how about that?  It posted.)

[totalfolly]

Just ask yourself, were you doing it every day, or skipping some days now and then?

Honest, Anthro, I was very good about doing it every morning.  I didn't skip any days at all.    My mornings are a little hectic, but I could do the cleansing swabbing during my shower, and the oiling hardly took any time at all so that really wasn't an issue.  The only thing I can think of is that perhaps I didn't swab quite deeply enough, but I thought I did.  The first time it happened I thought I might have already been infected before I started your procedure, but the second time it was easily two weeks after beginning.

I hope your computer problems can be resolved.  I wonder if you might want to post a question on the Bits and Bytes board--surely someone here can help you.  We have some very computer-savvy members (not me, even if that is my job for the next five weeks). 

totalfolly

[Bamawing]

Eek! Norton is eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeevil. Mccaffee is tonswaylots more better.

Although to be honest, I'm amazed that you would be picking up any viruses at all. I've never caught any, and I expect I visit riskier sites than you do.

[LIGA girl]

I would suggest to get an Apple, then viruses are a thing of the past!   

[Bamawing]

I would suggest to get an Apple, then viruses are a thing of the past!   

Is that anything like an apple a day...?

[LIGA girl]

I would suggest to get an Apple, then viruses are a thing of the past!   

Is that anything like an apple a day...?

There IS a similarity isn't there ....  ?   

[anthropositor]

Actually, in the past twenty four hours, most of the problems that have gone on for some weeks seem to have evaporated, but they may come back.  I don't know that I can take it too personally though.

I understand that these intruding viruses and spyware can originate on virtually any continent and often infect randomly thousands if not millions of computers.

It has me thinking about what the motivations for doing this kind of vandalism might be.  It occurs to me that those who make a profit on the existence of these destructive programs are the companies which sell their services to clean them out of your computers.  I am told by people a lot more knowledgeable about such things than I am, that these companies often recruit from among the malicious miscreants who used to be most active in computer crime.  What is to prevent them from infecting the computers so that they can charge for repairing them?  It reminds me of the law firms specializing in getting settlements from the IRS who advertise that they employ ex IRS agents.

This is all the more plausible, because I have had screens appear, informing me that I have a handful of viruses and several sorts of spyware on my computer, and that if I employed their services, my computer could be restored to good health.  The question is, how would these companies be privy to what viruses and spyware were on my computer, unless they themselves had invaded and searched my system?  Let me see now.  Invade a government computer or a bank or other corporate computer, enforcement is going to go into action.  A personal computer gets invaded, I don't think there is an enforcement agency that would take that seriously at all.  Doesn't seem right somehow.

Anyway, what really seemed to do the trick, at least for the past day or two, was changing browsers.  Not something that a security company is likely to advise you to do.

[Bamawing]

Actually, Anthro, that's been a theory of multiple people for quite some time - that the anti-viral companies create the very things they seek to destroy. I personally remain highly sceptical of any "warnings" that "viruses have been found." A lot of that garbage is advertising, plain and simple. While there are exceptions, most of the really bad stuff has to be consiously downloaded by the user.

Which is easier than you would think. :MEGAblush: I did it once. Got an email from "paypal" muttering something about "my account." Coincidentally, Dan and I had just had a problem with paypal a few weeks ago, so I foolishly DLed the "click here for more information" link.

Dan managed to clean it up with a minimum of damage.
 

[anthropositor]

Maybe I'm missing something.  It seems to me that it would be very much in the interests of the public and our respective governments, to determine if these companies are fraudulently representing that we have viruses and spyware infections on our computers which are not actually there, or that these companies or their surrogates actually "seeded" our computers with annoying, but easily repairable glitches (for those who designed the glitches).  What good are governments which are impotent to stop such practices, or are accomplices in allowing such "racketeering" to continue.

We know from history with certainty, that the traditional protection racketeers and other large scale criminal enterprises, often had key judges and legislators "in their pockets."  I too would like to believe that it isn't happenning today.  But the evidence to the contrary is pretty overwhelming, even to a computer dimwit like myself.

[Bamawing]

We know from history with certainty, that the traditional protection racketeers and other large scale criminal enterprises, often had key judges and legislators "in their pockets."  I too would like to believe that it isn't happenning today.  But the evidence to the contrary is pretty overwhelming, even to a computer dimwit like myself.

* Bamawing makes an odd cough that sounds strangly like "tobacco companies." Unfortunately, this provokes a coughing fit, but the subsequent coughs sound like "oil oil oil."

I actually think that the virus companies are probably legit. Most "viruses" these days are really phishing scams designed to allow thieves access to your personal information. Seriously, the worst virus problems have to be downloaded, usually disguised as something else. (This is called a Trojan Horse, for those of y'all who will be on Jepardy one day.) Now, that is not to say that they've always been so innocent. I think they've done it before, although I think they're past that stage of their evil plan now.

Spam, on the other hand... Tell me, has anyone, anywhere, ever bought anything from a spammed email? Why, then, are the spammers still doing it? I've even accidntally opened a spammed email to discover random words and no advertising at all. I think the spamblocker companies are behind that 100%.

[anthropositor]

Getting back to your respiratory difficulties TF, I've been mulling it over for the past few days, as I generally do when I get such a report.  Here are a few possibilities;  The oil swabbing, was it done in a prone position?  A certain number of people skip the laying down portion of the procedure.  Even I do, in those times when I have forgotten to do it before leaving home. But nine out of ten times, I do the oil swabbing while lying on my back on the bed.

There is no easy way to tell for sure, but it could also be that you have a bacterial respiratory infection, particularly if it went on for several weeks, and included an unproductive cough with deep congestion.

[anthropositor]

It is hard to tell for sure exactly when flu season is over because it overlaps with the myriad allergies of spring.  Seems like the folks with allergies are often just as miserable as those with colds and flu.  Living "out in the country" with industrial chicken farms and cattle in the fields accounting for a certain amount of the airborne debris, has me thinking about this, along with wild molds, fungi and yeasts, I find the healthy respiratory system quite a marvelous thing to have.

But of all the airborne contaminants we deal with, pollens certainly need to be way up near the top of the list of trouble makers, right by household chemicals and "air fresheners" and other perfumed sprays.

Thousands of different varieties of pollen.  Each with its' own size, time, weight, external configuration and other characteristics.  Tree, flower, fruit, vegetable, not to mention the grains.  Wheat and corn and the other food grains produce a lot of pollen, although I haven't heard much about these particular pollens causing much problem.

Someone remarked to me that at least pollen allergies are not contagious, like colds and other viruses.  But I'm not quite so sure. 

If we grow more crops, or engineer the landscaping in a city or a shopping center, we tend to favor trees that produce more pollen and less fruit or annoyingly litter the sidewalk with seed pods.  So the designer selects the gender which produces the pollen, rather than the seed pods and other reproductive debris that can cover the ground and pose various maintenance problems.  Pollens blow away in the wind.  But I wonder if the landscaping engineer looks at it from that perspective.

I would guess that just in the small industrial chicken farms within five miles of me, we have an intensely crowded chicken population of a few hundred thousand chickens.  This is also the neighborhood of the country with unusually frequent high winds and tornadoes.  This year already marks the highest number of tornado incidents, by a factor of more than three times.  And the storms and straight line winds seem unusually intense.  I have lost count of the flood and wind damaged counties in the state this season so far.  High winds stir a lot of things into the air.  How long it stays airborne can range from minutes to days. depending on a lot of factors.

The oiling of the nose as outlined here, is not a magic bullet that will get rid of every last vestige of distress you might be experiencing from respiratory allergic responses.  But it is very likely that you will find much less need for prescription or over the counter nostrums, and may be able to do without them entirely.

But I have been on this project for a quarter of a century now.  So it is time to work on some other things with greater vigor.  The cataracts of the past couple of years have not worsened to the extent that I can't drive, but during night time, with the glare of headlights has been getting a little problematical.  So while I have been investigating the various intra ocular lenses that are implanted in the eye to replace the cataractous original lens, I designed a visual appliance to deal with night glare and reduce its' impact on driving vision.  I now don't drive after sunset without it.

The other portion of my effort has been to find one of the new lens designs which appealed to me more than the existing state of the art.  But maybe I ought to put something on that on the eye surgery or letter to the doctor thread.  These cataracts have been quite an eyeopener for me.

I have been working on some new eyedrops, which I have now used a half dozen times in the worst eye.  The objective of course is to clarify some of the clouding of the cataract of the biological lens of the eye.  The ultimate idea of course is to also try to restore the accommodative function (the flexure focusing of the biological lens) that has become thicker and less pliable than it once was.  So far, no one seems to have much of an idea how to do that.  This is at least as hard a problem as the opacity.  And certainly, with expensive and brief surgery available, which improves vision fairly reliably, there is not much emphasis in the health industry, on trying to restore the accommodative function (the ability to variably focus). 

So one of these days, on one of those other threads or on my blog, which I haven't been adding to very much lately, I will discuss what I have learned about lenses and cataracts and surgery and the variety of other methodologies that can be employed to prolong the use of the original equipment until surgery can no longer be avoided. 

So far, it has been about 15 months since the original scheduled surgery on the right eye was canceled.  A lot has been happenning in the field.  The changes will be even greater in the years to come.  I recently found a lens which has not yet been approved by the USFDA yet.  I resist paying two thousand dollars extra for most of the accommodating lenses I have seen.  But I saw one the other day that I think may be a breakthrough.  The haptics were very much in line with what I have been brainstorming about, in terms of how much edge area actually makes contact with the zonule area of the lens capsule periphery. 

Apparently, so far only about 900 eyes have been done worldwide.  I haven't yet gotten a response back from my query about this lens and what government and commercial hoops need to be jumped through to get it.  It looks like the experimental study is over, but there will be some unknown amount of regulatory bureaucratic lag before this lens is available to a wider group of patients.  At least one limiting factor is that surgeons, already used to their established lenses of choice, are not all that comfortable with using a lens which bears little superficial resemblance to any of the lenses they have been using.

 

[Bamawing]

For more information on Anthro's eye expirements, please see "Anthopositor Hires a Surgeon"

http://www.skincell.org/community/index.php/topic,21968.0.html

[anthropositor]

Thank you Bama, that should help with my crossthreading.  Now to another "fresh" news story.


A story by Reuters reports another human case of H5N1 in Bangladesh.  A sixteen month old boy got it in January and has recovered.  It is interesting that this many months have gone by before the report was made public. 

Meanwhile, the poultry population has taken losses of 163 million dollars, representing 2 million culled chickens and 2 million eggs.  I have seen no information anywhere that well cooked infected chickens or eggs pose any risk of transmitting the virus.  The logic behind these policies continues to elude me.  Thorough cooking should remove all danger of viral transmission. 

Of course, one might want to alter the usual procedure of plucking and gutting the chickens prior to cooking, to minimise the potential exposure of chicken workers.  The chickens do not even need to be plucked.  After some pressure cooking, the chickens could be skinned, which would remove the skin and feathers simultaneously. 

Although the gutting of an animal is usually done as the first stage in butchering, there is nothing that actually requires it to be done that way. 

I just butchered a deer a few months ago, without gutting it at all, just to demonstrate that the meat would not be tainted or "soured" to use the word of my local idiot butcher.  The meat of this road kill is just excellent, and my dogs were perfectly happy to eat the skeleton and the guts for several days after I was done.  I wrote about this in some greater detail somewhere, but since blindness is currently encroaching, I am not going to root around to see where I put it.  My choices now are large print, and very large print.  And if I don't succeed in negotiating the lens I want in the first eye, my reading will be pretty well over with in less than a year.  It is one of the reasons I write less.  I would rather spend the time reading while I still can.

Of course, if I manage to get the first eye done well, I will then be able to wait a number of years before the second eye gets its' new lens.  Ill probably say more about this over on the Surgeon thread.
 

[anthropositor]

I want to talk a bit about the good news with H5N1, the strain we currently fear the most, the one that has now shown a clear ability to cross species barriers into humans in triple digit numbers now, and the present day analogue of the strain that caused the world pandemic killing unknown millions at the close of the First World War.

It turns out that there are a number of survivors still living, some of them  living with ages in the triple digits, having been older children during the epidemic when they contracted the disease.  Our astute and sophisticated medical establishment apparently was not particularly interested in this fact until very recently.  A fact which fails to surprise me.

Now though, the interest is keen.  These unusually healthy and robust elders in our midst are now the objects of considerable attention, and are being gleefully probed for their blood in the very real hope and prospect that antibodies can be mass produced that will afford real protection even before a new outbreak gets out of control.

But frankly, I wonder how good it is for these centenarians to be jabbed for these samples.

The current procedure throughout the world is, a chicken or two in an industrial chicken house is positive for the virus, wipe out the infected chicken and the whole damn chicken house,  many thousands of apparently healthy chickens.  Destroyed.  Buried.  Burned.  Who takes these losses?  The farmer.  Sort of gives him some incentive to button his lip and hope for the best, doesn't it?

I wonder if it would not be a good idea, the next time there is an outbreak, to let it run its' course through a very, very, very quarantined chicken house.  Actually take the very best care of those chickens!  (No, I don't mean to treat the stricken ones in any way.)  I just mean, feed them excellent rations and very good water, remove all corpses promptly, and see how many survivors there are.

Let us say that out of 10,000 chickens, 100 survived.  Now you have a hundred chickens you could poke with needles to get some samples to make a vaccine with which a pharmaceutical company could them make billions of dollars.  Ah, the wonders of private enterprise!

OR, you could even breed those survivor chickens, ultimately producing tens of thousands, even eventually millions or even billions of chickens, which were totally immune, not only to the deadly virulent strain, but also to a great variety of other common influenza's.  Apparently these aged survivors have, more often than not , not subsequently been troubled by colds or flu that they noticed.  In other words, the original infection seems to have made the survivors a LOT healthier.  Would it not be nice if we could make the entire chicken population of the planet much, much hardier and less prone to disease in general.

Naw, couldn't work.  Otherwise, one of those experts with all that formal training, all those diplomas and honors,in cooperation with all the high ranking health organization bureaucrats with their unique expertize in writing protocols and edicts and regulations... they would have already thought of it. 

[anthropositor]

I just noticed, it is already the middle of September.  In the past, pollen allergies, (ragweed being one of the big ones) would still be a little further off.  But from what I have been seeing in town, this year is getting an early start.  A lot of people are in considerable distress.

My guess is that it has something to do with global warming and an accelerated growth of certain widespread weeds, with a substantial increase in the volume of pollen produced.

Even though I personally am not particularly troubled by pollen, dust and fungi, I am moved to get back into the swabbing routine a bit earlier than usual this year.  Meaning today.  If you are going to get the maximum value out of this protocol it is a very good idea to make it a habitual daily practice.  Those of you who haven't yet actually done it yet will find it quite easy to do.  As soon as you come to the conclusion that you would like to prevent getting colds and flu, and very sharply reduce allergies, just read post one on this thread and get started right away.  Knowing how, but not getting around to it is of no protection whatsoever.  Only doing it daily, before going out into the public affords excellent protection.

Post one of this thread provides all the information you need.