I know, I promised a long detailed snarky post about failed electioneering this week. I have not had time to finish it. I have about 80% of it on the laptop I call the Sickly Snail, from its very best operating speed because somebody "updated the browser" so many times that nothing but Opera from 1992 works any more, and 20% on the laptop I'm using now. The most efficient way to use the Snail is to type drafts into it and then retype them onto a computer with more memory. I've not put them together because, after being around a college kid with mono last week, I've felt as if I had mono all over again, myself, this week.
This is ridiculous. In theory the Epstein-Barr virus isn't even airborne. Well, in practice, the Epstein-Barr virus lies dormant in most adults--nearly all adult humans are immune carriers of mono, which is one reason not to kiss teenagers, even if they beg, Judge Moore--and anything that lowers our immunity, like the repeated glyphosate spray poisoning episodes we've all had this year, can reactivate EBV. Adults can come down with mono and, if we do, it's likely to be nastier than it was when we were teenagers and might not even have noticed it being worse than our average "cold."
Does glyphosate cause mononucleosis? Duh. Of course not. But glyphosate interferes with the functions of the liver. One of the functions of the human liver is to hold those lurking Epstein-Barr virus particles where they can't do us any more harm. The repeated exposure to glyphosate vapors my neighborhood has endured this year could easily be what's keeping Joe College from recovering from mono, and might easily cause me to come down with it again, heavenforbidandfend.
I talked to J. College because I'm the one who had acute mono for most of two years when I hadn't even kissed anybody. I was in Michigan. Where I had the mandatory MMR vaccine because, at the time, tests had not been invented yet to confirm that, like most baby-boomers, I hadn't even seen the doctor when those trivial "childhood diseases" were going around. I just enjoyed the quarantines...and that of course is why I say that if measles, mumps, or rubella, or all three, were risks of a vaccine against mononucleosis I'd recommend that everyone have that vaccine, but when "chronic" mononucleosis is a risk of the MMR vaccine...well...actually that was only a few batches of vaccine a long time ago, but we should be very, very careful about vaccines against trivial infections. Get immunized against diseases that actually kill people, if you're likely to be exposed to them, by all means.
Anyway, time for a little refresher course in mono awareness: Mononucleosis or glandular fever is a minor infection to which human resistance tends to be age-related. People who are infected as children usually don't notice it, nor do their parents. People who are infected in their teens or early twenties usually notice it as a persistent or recurrent "cold" accompanied by swollen lymph nodes, which may make your throat and neck feel sorer or stiffer than usual. People who are infected after age 30 are immune-compromised, so all kinds of infections can dogpile on them and they can die, usually of pneumonia, but mononucleosis by itself never killed anybody. It becomes serious only when, and because, you feel all strong and healthy and full of energy again around the time your immune system has only halfway beaten the virus, so you do something energetic and fun, take a long walk, play a game, do the sort of job normally offered to guys this age, and down you go again, and there goes another whole school term...
I forgot everything I'd learned about mitosis on one exam. I forgot to go to another exam. That teacher gave me a C for Compassion anyway, but in view of the rest of my grades I didn't want a transcript. After flunking out of university I'd look at a paper I'd written in college and think "What's this about, and who wrote it?" You're not yourself when you have mono, even when you think you are.
Mono has no symptoms that look dramatic to anyone else, or even feel as if they ought to be all that life-changing to you, but it is indeed a time-out on your life. Your best chance is to take that time-out, do only moderate amounts of moderate exercise and then take all the rest your body needs, and fight that urge to go back to work the same way you'd fight an urge to smash your little sister's nose. Mono is real, it's more boring than those who had it as children can imagine, and it is temporary. After easing slowly back into school and work you will eventually be as strong and as smart as you ever were, and resume growing up.
Apart, of course, from complications that may be identified if we-as-a-society continue unofficially testing the effects of glyphosate on kids with mononucleosis...
And, was "chronic" mono, as survived by the so-called Michigan Group of EBV/CFS/ME/ABCDEFG survivors, really a different and nastier strain of Epstein-Barr virus than people normally get? All I know is, my symptoms most definitely were complicated by inflammation of the liver, a.k.a. viral hepatitis; I've never paid for a test to pin a letter on the virus, but I have been assured that that's a separate virus that may or may not have been in the same batch of contaminated vaccine. Which is why I drink coffee through a straw. I don't want any other customers at the cafe to think "Eww ick, lips that had mononucleosis in Michigan might have touched this cup." They sanitize all the cups, but in the cafe my lips never touch a cup anyway.
Time for a book link? Here's a first book, written for grades four up, about mononucleosis...I apologize for sharing a first book. There are a lot of newer books purporting to be written for grown-ups, by doctors, on Amazon; I've not read any of them and can't pick one for you.
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| https://www.paypal.me/PriscillaKingUS/10/ |
2. How NIH Did Something Right, Then Cancelled It By Doing Something Wrong
In 2013, the National Institute of Health did something very good for the American public: They posted a detailed explanation of how and why glyphosate does affect celiacs in the same ways natural wheat gluten does, only moreso, and why continued exposure to glyphosate can potentially cause, in some cases, more life-threatening conditions resulting from chronic loss of blood, chronic inability to absorb nutrients from food, chronic immune compromise, etc.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3945755/
This article was very thoroughly researched, and insofar as it describes the actual experience of celiacs it's right on. There is no valid reason why it's not among those EPA documents linked here:
https://priscillaking.blogspot.com/2018/03/this-web-site-loves-vegetables-here-is.html
According to the EPA's e-mail earlier this week, although the official comment period was last spring, it should still be possible to post comments on those documents, individually or together. I will continue printing them out as an anthology for offline readers, but I urge online readers in the United States to use the EPA website for the most immediate results. Foreign online readers may request copies by e-mail. As far as I'm concerned, this collection totally supersedes the earlier samizdat document circulated as "The Monsanto Papers." Yes, apart from the NIH article, it consists of documents Monsanto commissioned in defense of its glyphosate product "Roundup"--and there's nothing my inner prosecuting attorney loves better than when somebody's self-defense ends up making the best case against them.
Yes, a lot of people hated Monsanto for a long time, probably about as long as the corporation has existed, for good and sufficient reason. Yes, I've been part of various boycotts at various times in my lifetime. No, this has not, in my case, meant that I just hate everything the company does. Companies are made up of working people who change jobs. Monsanto was briefly managed by a chap who convinced me and a lot of people that he was a decent human being--too decent to stay there long--and it could, at any time, have been reorganized by a lot of new stockholders and managers who were decent human beings, into a corporation no worse than, e.g., Eastman. Monsanto used, while it made acrylic yarn, to make some of the best acrylic yarn on Earth, and I would have been delighted to have had any further reason to stop hating the company. And glyphosate is of course the generic name for the chemical; other companies make other glyphosate-based formulas that are just as bad for celiacs as "Roundup" is, although each brand of poison contains different additives that may aggravate the damage it does to people with various other genetic sensitivities. (Studies about that are only beginning.)
Everybody and their dog--and especially people who live with dogs, or rear fish, or eat anything pollinated by bees!--should read that 2013 study posted at the NIH site. It documents that during glyphosate pollution episodes not only some non-celiac humans but some animals, including fish and insects, develop gastrointestinal symptoms that mimic celiac sprue. It discusses the role of glyphosate in genetic thyroid conditions that are separate from, but associated with, the celiac gene. (Celiac thyroid failure is found in different ethnic groups than Hashimoto's Disease but the symptoms, and the things individuals can do to help themselves, are almost identical.) It documents how glyphosate reactions must inevitably contribute to cancer:
"Chronic inflammation, such as occurs in celiac disease, is a major source of oxidative stress, and is estimated to account for 1/3 of all cancer cases worldwide (Ames et al., 1993; Coussens & Werb, 2002)."
Note the 271 endnotes. Whatever else time might have revealed about any flaws in Samsei's and Seneff's research, nobody can claim that it wasn't thorough.
I do find one thing in the S&S document that puzzles me. I'm not sure whether it's a false connection, or another ethnically specific reaction. In the United States, no solid correlation between prenatal glyphosate exposure and birth defects has been found. In geographically separate parts of South America and Europe, sudden outbreaks of birth defects have been found in correlation with prenatal glyphosate exposure. It would be interesting if there were an ethically tolerable way to pinpoint scientifically whether this has something to do with a genetic pattern that developed in the Pyrenees, since it's found in people of French and Spanish descent, or with some other pollutant or drug that was used by the mothers of the defective babies. As with the correlation between glyphosate and sprue, birth defects in animals have been associated with glyphosate only in some places...This is scientifically interesting, but nobody should be allowed to practice science in the absence of an ethical reaction that immediately suppresses all thoughts about scientific experimentation.
After the publication of this document, a corporation run by decent human beings would have recognized the following fact: Amoral though corporations are, continuing to produce glyphosate would be corporate suicide if and when these facts became generally known. The only sane course of action open to Monsanto or other "pesticide" producers would have been to put their chemists to work destroying all existing supplies of glyphosate before another molecule of the stuff left the factories.
Instead, Monsanto and other corporations made the criminally insane decision to participate in reckless endangerment by continuing to expose everyone to a poison that, according to Monsanto's very own self-defense, harms a majority of all test subjects in every species--fish, fowl, insect, or mammal--only in so many different ways that almost every individual seems to have a different reaction first.
In 2013, most farmers weren't spraying glyphosate directly on most food, and I personally was noticing only occasional reactions I assumed had been caused by wheat flour having drifted into something in a kitchen somewhere. Celiacs who were concerned about "losing the ability to digest other foods as well, after going gluten-free" were miserable, but they were still buying products purported to relieve their misery. The corporations could have stopped marketing glyphosate immediately and covered their back ends. As we know, they chose instead to continue encouraging farmers to use glyphosate not only as an herbicide but as a food preservative. No food is now safe for celiacs to eat. Even organically grown food can be exposed to vapors that drift in on the wind and, in the United States, so-called "organic certification" agencies have sold out and allowed "organic" farmers to use glyphosate and other selected poisons, as long as they pay their membership fees...while serious organic farmers who can't afford the fees remain uncertified.
The strong form of the celiac genetic pattern, which allows people to develop celiac sprue (only after middle age, before glyphosate poisoning became common), is estimated to occur in about one out of ten thousand people of Irish descent. Though found in Britain, Iceland, the United States, and other places to which Irish people emigrated, it's a very rare disease; it proves your connection not only to Ireland but to specific families in Ireland. Any scientific study of celiacs must, because of the rareness of the celiac gene, be considered statistically separate from any scientific study of the general human population.
A weaker form of the pattern, which produces (usually unsuspected) gluten sensitivity and susceptibility to various intractable chronic diseases, is much more common. That has been estimated to occur in one out of every four or five White people (probably overestimated in studies that occurred after glyphosate was widely used on wheat), and has been found in "pure" Black people in Africa. In people of Irish descent, if not the majority genetic pattern, it's certainly a solid minority. Those people are not true celiacs but five'll get you ten that they are the people whose glyphosate reactions mimic celiac sprue. It would be interesting to know to what extent they are the people whose relatives developed schizophrenia during the potato famine, when the only thing left for poor people in Ireland to eat was wheat...
Because celiacs are born swimming against the tide, defying the odds, working twice as hard as other people do to accomplish the same things, healthy celiacs are very "strong" people when we go gluten-free. We've over-trained. A normal healthy woman is considered fit and strong if she can lift her own weight. I can both lift and carry 10 to 15% more than my own weight; I carried my husband through the house when he was ill; I've lifted patients who were bigger than he was. A normal healthy man is considered fit and strong if he can walk thirty miles in a day. I think nothing of walking thirty miles, except that it will take up most of the day, and I would not intentionally have set out to walk 25 miles in 20-degree weather in canvas shoes. Yes, when we're healthy, celiacs are tough as nails and not to be trifled with...is that why a lot of envious wimps in these chemical corporations went ahead with a plan to kill us all, outright, by slow torture?
The outcry against this program of IRISH GENOCIDE was delayed by the fact that food processors are not required to identify the "pesticide" residues that can make otherwise healthy food indigestible or positively poisonous to those who eat it. Most people didn't know or care that farmers were spraying poison right on freshly shelled, "healthy," nuts and seeds, or on fruits that don't even have a noticeable "peel." As a result most of us had no idea why we were having celiac sprue as a reaction to gluten-free food, while many of us weren't even celiacs.
But meanwhile, while working to conceal the truth about glyphosate, the corporations even paid shills to publish this abomination, which is still online at NIH and is still being used as if it refuted Samsei's and Seneff's indisputable facts, which it does not:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705608/
Because only a few people are celiacs who have immediate, indisputable celiac reactions to even low levels of glyphosate, Mesnage and Antoniou would lead us to believe, we as a species can afford to wait for statistical proof that glyphosate will produce all those other long-term effects associated with chronic untreated celiac sprue?
The appropriate response for the U.S. federal government would be to find Mesnage, Antoniou, and their assistants, lock them in a lead-lined cell, and forcibly feed them "Roundup" through nasal drip tubes, so that appropriately shielded chemical analysts could identify exactly which of the horrific consequences of high doses of glyphosate was the immediate cause of each death. With in-cell TV cameras so the rest of the world could see which ones gushed blood, howled in pain, gagged, convulsed, became paralyzed, or just lapsed into narcoleptic comas from kidney failure. Though small in scale, this statistical study would be very valuable to the true scientific mind!
Oh, and don't forget the skin lesions...that hospital study submitted to the EPA mentioned that almost one-third of people whose glyphosate reactions sent them to hospital emergency rooms had, primarily, skin lesions. Nasal drip feeding would put most of the lesions inside Mesnage's, Antoniou's, and their accessories' bodies, but I'm sure anyone feeling the surge of sadistic rage that I get by way of a prodrome to a celiac reaction would enjoy seeing photos of the dissected bodies. I'm sure I've already seen similar...inside the mouths and around the back ends of animals who were having a now common, though formerly rare, kind of "feline enteritis," which vets now admit is a symptom of a herpes-type virus that didn't use to produce symptoms in most cats.
(All the Patchnose Family are survivors of "feline enteritis." Funnily enough, at Cat Sanctuaries closer to roads or railroads that have been sprayed more often, I'm told the condition has become chronic in their cats. Funnier still, pet care books published before 1990 didn't even discuss this messy, sometimes fatal, flea-borne infection...which seems to be exacerbated by glyphosate exposure in pet food and airborne vapor drift...)
Breathes there a baby-boomer who can't sing along, who is not already hearing the song replaying in our mind's ears:
"How many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?"
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| Why should I share my LP when you can hear the song on Amazon? I like this group a lot better than Bob Dylan. |
When a substance has as many harmful effects on humans as we all now know, beyond all doubt, glyphosate does have, anybody who continues to babble about statistics needs to be in a locked cell for life. I say nothing about feeding them.
Nevertheless, this stupid quibble about the fact that Samsei and Seneff did spell out the ways glyphosate can enable non-celiacs to share the horrors that nature intended even celiacs to be able to avoid, toward the ends of our lives--this idiotic attempt to defend the use of glyphosate was allowed to appear on the NIH web site, and to keep Samsei's and Seneff's valuable study out of the EPA dossier.
I propose a change of policy, for NIH, that will be healthier for humankind. Consider celiacs as a valuable national resource, the canaries in the coal mine. Let every new product proposed for addition to the food supply be tested by a panel of 25 celiacs, each to be compensated, say, $1000, and none to be asked to serve twice in five years--which would limit the number of new chemical additives in the food supply, which would be a good thing. If one celiac reacts to the new product, destroy all existing supplies of the product, pay each celiac, say, $1,000,000, and publish the formula as a warning against future experiments.
Whether there is another product that can harm as many people in as many different ways as glyphosate does may never be known--and should never be known. Experimentation should be curbed by the mere awareness that it might be possible to find out.
3. What Readers Can Do
Readers who use Twitter, I think it would be appropriate, and easy to type, if you just retweet this post, typing in just these three explanatory keywords: "@NIH," "@EPA," and "#Shame." The more retweets, the better.
Readers who use Twitter, I think it would be appropriate, and easy to type, if you just retweet this post, typing in just these three explanatory keywords: "@NIH," "@EPA," and "#Shame." The more retweets, the better.
Retweet this post if you are getting older, if you have ever considered the possibility that younger people may need to help you look after your physical needs, y'know, like driving and reading and stuff, and you have considered the younger people in your neighborhood and wondered whether any of them is going to be stronger than you are when they are thirty or forty years old, and you are even seventy.
(I say seventy because, for many people, that age is the beginning of "old." For non-celiacs on both sides of my family, ninety is the beginning of "old." For celiacs on Mother's Irish side, "old" can start at twenty--and we don't even have the schizophrenic pattern; we know exactly what we're going through, all the way.)
Retweet this post if you are, or know, a "Spoonie"--someone living with a chronic, incurable, probably not very visible, disease condition. Before they became an online community and chose that name for themselves, Spoonies were also known as sickies, hypochondriacs, wimps, and various other things; the one I used for myself as a young undiagnosed celiac was "Weepy Weed." (I called myself the Weepy Weed. I didn't anticipate that there'd be a community of us.) Spoonies call themselves that because of a long-ago blog post in which someone illustrated their day-to-day life in terms of taking one or two spoons out of a basket to represent each drain on their energy, and then said that the thing was that they never know at the beginning of the day how many spoons are in the basket. When we get glyphosate and similar poisons banned, some people will still be Spoonies, but all the Spoonies are going to have a lot more spoons.
Retweet this post if you remember having mononucleosis in high school or college, and don't want to have it again.
There are "leftist" and "rightist" approaches to getting glyphosate out of the food supply. I say we need both, and let whichever works faster win.
Maybe the electioneering post should have been about asking candidates how fast they can stop this Irish Genocide.
Retweet this post if you are, or know, a "Spoonie"--someone living with a chronic, incurable, probably not very visible, disease condition. Before they became an online community and chose that name for themselves, Spoonies were also known as sickies, hypochondriacs, wimps, and various other things; the one I used for myself as a young undiagnosed celiac was "Weepy Weed." (I called myself the Weepy Weed. I didn't anticipate that there'd be a community of us.) Spoonies call themselves that because of a long-ago blog post in which someone illustrated their day-to-day life in terms of taking one or two spoons out of a basket to represent each drain on their energy, and then said that the thing was that they never know at the beginning of the day how many spoons are in the basket. When we get glyphosate and similar poisons banned, some people will still be Spoonies, but all the Spoonies are going to have a lot more spoons.
Retweet this post if you remember having mononucleosis in high school or college, and don't want to have it again.
There are "leftist" and "rightist" approaches to getting glyphosate out of the food supply. I say we need both, and let whichever works faster win.
Maybe the electioneering post should have been about asking candidates how fast they can stop this Irish Genocide.
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