"New Gov’t Task Force Calls for Screening Every Adult, Pregnant Women for Depression
By Brandon Turbeville
January 27, 2016
********
What about individuals who don’t want to seek counseling, take antidepressants, or otherwise engage in a “treatment policy?” In addition, what about those individuals who are diagnosed as depressed for legitimate reasons or as a natural reaction to a specific event? What about the over-diagnosing of individuals as depressed when that is simply not the case at all?
Read for instance the U.S. News and World Report article by Lauran Neergaard which reads more as a press release than anything else. Neergaard attempts to explain the need for screening in the following way.
She writes:
Depression can go unrecognized, especially if patients don’t seek a diagnosis. Updating 2009 guidelines, the task force reviewed years of research and said Tuesday that screening for depression remains an important part of primary care for adults of all ages. This time around, the guideline separately addresses pregnant and postpartum women, concluding they, too, benefit from screening.
A variety of screening questionnaires are available, such as one that asks how often, over the last two weeks, patients have felt bad about themselves or felt like they’re a failure, had little interest in doing things or experienced problems sleeping, sleeping or concentrating.
Still undetermined, the task force said, is how often to screen, given that a person’s circumstances and risk could change over time.
Those aren’t new recommendations; several other health groups also have long urged depression screening, although there’s no data on how often it’s done. But the task force says one key is that appropriate follow-up be available to accurately diagnose those flagged by screening — and then to choose treatments that best address each person’s symptoms with the fewest possible side effects.While examining the possibility that a medical issue or symptoms being suffered by a patient can be linked to depression, the idea that catch-all screenings should be in place is not only reminiscent of Brave New World, but is taken directly from the book. So are, I might add, the solutions to it.
Still, the constant screening of adults without a shred of concern for their own choices and decisions, cannot help but remind us of Scotland’s horrific practice and program called GIRFEC (Getting It Right For Every Child). Based on the idea of “supporting the wellbeing of children,” Scotland is now witnessing an approach in which every child is now given their own caseworker and every action, reaction, behavior and feeling of both the child and the parents is literally scrutinized by government. The result is that children are being ripped from loving homes. In homes where children do reside, parents are often so terrified of having them taken that anything resembling a normal family life brings the fear of a government social worker to the forefront of a parent’s concern.
Notice also how Neergaard describes the screening process and the questionnaires that are available. Some questionnaires ask questions like how often patients have felt bad about themselves or how often they have felt like they are a failure over the last two weeks. Others ask if the patient has little interest in doing things while others want to know if the patient has had trouble sleeping or concentrating. These are legitimate questions, but the answers to these questions, particularly if they are given to a medical doctor, psychiatrist or social worker, whose views of the world are dangerously narrow, could have far reaching and long lasting ramifications for the unsuspecting patient.
Parents may be visited by a child services agent, who generally is more than eager to confiscate their children. Some patients may be visited by a law enforcement agent, demanding they turn over their guns. Others may be forcibly hospitalized. All this because they made the mistake of trusting their physician or answering a question honestly.
Not only that, but look at the nature of the questions. In a country with massive unemployment yet still a notoriously consumerist and money-obsessed society, how could one who spends hours a day staring at a box that reinforces their own inadequacy not feel bad about themselves? And how bad is bad? Is bad feeling like you’re worth absolutely nothing or is bad feeling like the jogging suit you’re wearing makes you look ridiculous in front of people who are better dressed?
How often have you felt like a failure? Try asking this question to an individual who has lost his job because it has been sent to China so big corporations can reap bigger profits. Or perhaps to someone who is in the process of losing their home because they could not pay their mortgage after they lost their job. Or perhaps their wife became ill and, in the freest country in the world, they went bankrupt in order to save her life? Suppose if one asked that question of a man who had recently been released from prison for the hardened crime of possessing a plant, knowing his youth and any ability for his future are now virtually gone. Is it conceivable that these people may feel like failures?
Of course, the recommendations also suggests going after other easy targets such as pregnant women and those who have just given birth. These two population groups are notoriously in flux in terms of their emotions due to the fact that they are carrying a living human being in their bodies or have just given birth to one. Both exhibit a number of blips on the radar screen for any fanatical mental health professional to seize upon if they so desire.
As already mentioned, one of the most concerning aspects of these recommendations is the utter lack of concern or even acknowledgement of the patient’s right to refuse treatment or even refuse to be screened.
Allowing doctors, social workers or any other authority figure to violate rights based upon their conclusion that a person is suffering from a mental disorder is a slippery slope indeed.
In fact, it is such a slippery slope, that it would be best to stay far away from the edge. Scientific and mental health dictatorship has been experimented with in the past – we would be wise not to allow ourselves to repeat it....
--MORE--"
Heck, while I was over there I ran into a good friend:
Gov’t Using the Psychology of “Lockdown” to Make Martial Law the Norm
Oddly, there was nothing in my Globe on the active shooter drill in San Diego and what really happened (gave a listen there yesterday and his efforts do need to be acknowledged sometimes).
Now, to stay on topic(?):
"Panel calls for depression screenings during, after pregnancy" by Pam Belluck The New York Times January 26, 2016
The recommendation comes in the wake of new evidence that maternal mental illness is more common than previously thought; that many cases of what has been called postpartum depression actually start during pregnancy; and that left untreated, these mood disorders can be detrimental to the well-being of children.
Meaning you are getting an agenda shoved in your face, and since when has the lying government given a damn about children?
"In a furor with echoes of the crisis in Flint, Michigan, parents in and around Sebring no longer trust the water coming out of their taps — or the explanations from community leaders — after learning just days ago that high levels of lead were detected in some homes over the summer. Residents in the rural area of about 8,100 people near the Rust Belt city of Youngstown are demanding to know why they were kept in the dark for months. Children are being tested for lead poisoning. Schools have been closed for three straight days. Bottled water is being passed out. And state regulators are calling for a criminal investigation of the water plant manager. ‘‘How long has this been going on?’’ Nina McIlvain asked Tuesday as she loaded bottled water into her car. Over the summer, seven of 20 homes where the water is routinely tested showed excessive levels of lead. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency said the operator of the small water system that supplies Sebring and two other villages failed to notify the public within the required 60 days and submitted ‘‘misleading, inaccurate or false reports.’’ Plant superintendent James Bates denied he falsified reports, calling the allegations an ‘‘outright lie.’’ Village Manager Richard Giroux maintained on Tuesday that he was not aware of the problem until last week. But a letter released by the Ohio EPA showed that he was told in December. Anger and frustration have been boiling over since Thursday, when the village warned that children and pregnant women shouldn’t drink the tap water. A standing-room-only crowd filled a council meeting Monday night, demanding answers and action.
Could this be the tipping for the $cum political cla$$ of this country?
The mayor told one mother whose son showed elevated lead levels that it was too early to blame the water entirely, prompting a chorus of jeers. Classes were called off after tests showed that two drinking fountains at separate schools in Sebring had lead levels that exceeded EPA standards. Lead can cause learning disabilities and behavior problems in children. Many researchers say that no amount is safe for youngsters. State regulators said they believe the contamination was triggered by water that for some reason had become too corrosive and caused lead pipes leading into homes to leach heavy metal into the drinking water. Regulators asked the water plant to treat the water to reduce its corrosiveness. The most recent round of testing at the homes that had elevated lead over the summer showed that only one had detectable levels, said Ohio EPA spokeswoman Heidi Grimmer. ‘‘That tells us what the village is doing to treat the water is starting to work,’’ she said.
Then drink up!
In Flint, high blood levels of lead have been found in children in the mostly poor, black Rust Belt city of 100,000, where the crisis has led to allegations of environmental racism. Sebring [is] a predominantly white, middle-class community of mostly older, neatly kept homes."
Well, that strikes down that straw man regarding the water, and can you trust what is coming out of your tap -- or the pos politician giving you answers in your town?
At least they care about your kids!
Sorry, but I was feeling a little Flinty.
Now I'm depressed!
The recommendation was part of updated depression-screening guidelines issued by the panel, an independent group of experts appointed by the Department of Health and Human Services. In 2009, the group said adults should be screened if clinicians have the staff to provide support and treatment; the new guidelines recommend adult screening even without such staff members.
Katy Kozhimannil, an associate professor of public health at the University of Minnesota, said, “Policymakers will pay attention to it. Increased screening and detection of depression is an enormous public health need.”
Maybe it's something in the water! Literally!
The panel gave its recommendation, which was published in the journal JAMA, a “B” rating, which means depression screening must be covered under the Affordable Care Act.
It's already unaffordable and they just added more cost.
For years, obstetricians and other health care providers who saw women during and after pregnancy often felt ill equipped or reluctant to ask about problems like depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Maybe they shouldn't be asking then. If the person wants to tell them, well, that's their choice.
Dr. Samantha Meltzer-Brody, the director of the perinatal psychiatry program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said many women are reluctant to share symptoms with doctors on their own. If a mother is “feeling so anxious you’re going to come out of your skin or feeling that you’re going to harm your baby, you may think: ‘Oh my God, I’m having these crazy feelings and nobody’s talking about it. I must be a terrible mother.’”
No one screened Melissa Mead, 30, of The Dalles, Oregon, during or after her first pregnancy, five years ago. Shortly after her son Brady’s birth, “I experienced postpartum depression, anxiety and OCD,” she said, and “I didn’t know what it was.”
Mead cried constantly, barely slept, rarely left home and was “scared to death that my baby was going to suffocate,” she said.
Not to make light of it, but stop reading the goddamn newspaper and watching TV then!
At her job as an optician, she said that people asked, “‘Isn’t everything so wonderful?’ and I was like ‘I kind of feel like dying on the inside,’ and you don’t want to say that because you’re afraid what people will think of you.”
That saddens me in so many ways. Here women have this incredible gift crucial to the survival of the species, something that should be celebrated by us all. We should all be doting on mothers, privately and as a society, including the state. But they have better places to spend money, and how many mothers have been either murdered or had their fathers and mothers, husbands, brothers and sisters, and sons and daughters taken from them by the U.S. war machine all these years?
Think that makes 'em depressed?
After a year, she saw a psychiatrist for talk therapy. When her second son, Emmett, was born, and she had more symptoms, including fearing that she would stab herself with a kitchen knife, Mead tried several medications until one worked. She now volunteers for Postpartum Support International.
She isn't Palestinian, is she?
Might be more than depression then, huh?
Just a disposition to violence, right?
The panel said evidence showed that cognitive behavioral therapy was helpful to mothers. It said that the use of some antidepressants during pregnancy could cause “potential serious fetal harms,” but that “the likelihood of these serious harms is low.”
They want the pregnant mom on antidepressants, huh?
So when do the mothers start shooting their kids?
Dr. Michael Pignone, a professor of medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an author of the recommendation, which was issued by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, also emphasized that “untreated depression has a lot of adverse consequences itself.”
Among them, experts say, are that pregnant women with depression often take poorer care of their prenatal health. And maternal mental illness can affect children, leading to behavioral problems, emotional instability and difficulty in school.
Besides citing evidence that screening accompanied by even minimal counseling helped women with depression, the panel found that screening caused no harm.
That is where print article ended. Web kept pushing.
“A decade ago there was more concern that screening pregnant and postpartum women for mental health would do more harm than good,” said Wendy N. Davis, the executive director of Postpartum Support International. “Medical providers would say to me, ‘If I screen and she screens positively for depression and anxiety, I’m afraid that it will just make her feel more scared, or there’s more stigma to that label.’”
But, she said, “screening tools actually can give a language for both the providers and the patients to feel comfortable talking about it and prevent the stigma.”
The panel recommended that clinicians have the ability to diagnose and treat women, or to refer them elsewhere.
That is crucial, said Dr. Lee S. Cohen, the director of the Center for Women’s Mental Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. “I applaud identifying women who are ill,” he said. But “will she be appropriately referred, will she get treated whether it’s medication or therapy, and over time does she actually ever get well?”
The only state that requires screening, New Jersey, has had mixed results because too few treatment options have been available. While pediatricians and obstetricians were trained to screen, they were not compensated for screening, a study by Kozhimannil found.
A dozen other states, including New York, now have laws encouraging screening, education and treatment. And Bill de Blasio, New York City’s mayor, recently announced a goal of universal screening of pregnant and postpartum women, saying it “should be a part of routine care.”
Eventually it will be EVERYONE!
Routine screening could have benefited Jenna Zalk Berendzen, 40, of Cedar Falls, Iowa, even though during her first pregnancy, five years ago, she was studying to be a nurse practitioner and had medical knowledge. She also had a family history of postpartum depression but had assumed “it’s not going to happen to me,” she said.
That will get the eugenicists, er, geneticists involved.
A week after delivering a son, Maxwell, depression “hit me very, very severely,” she said. She felt suicidal, and at one point, while her husband and baby were sleeping, “I had in front of me 15 bottles of different kinds of meds,” she said. “I would open the bottles up and I would close them, open them and close them. I didn’t want to die, I just thought, ‘It’s never going to get better.’”
Zalk Berendzen ultimately found effective treatment, and has since weaned herself to a low dose of medication. She had no symptoms with the 2014 birth of another son, Samuel. She now works in gynecology at UnityPoint Health in Waterloo, Iowa, where, she said, “Within the last year, we’ve started to recognize we need to be screening every woman.”
You want to know what is depressing?
--more--"
Yup.
I'm starting to feel Zika because I was not aware of certain other things, e.g.
http://www.foxnews.com/health/2016/01/20/transgenic-mosquito-ready-to-join-brazils-war-on-zika-virus.html
for starters, and the rest gets gets cryptic from there in so many ways; however, they do diagnose the symptoms for which you should watch.
Thankfully, I'm sure billions will soon follow to pharmaceutical companies to develop vaccines that can be admini$tered. Remember, we live in an age of technological miracles that can be "made" to happen.
I must admit, it has seemed to me lately that the ma$$ media are only talking to themselves and those who will be left behind, if you will. Over the last few months I've noticed a subtle change in tone, as if they have moved past even the pretense of paying attention to the masses of humanity in their care. They are ignoring us as if we no longer exist, and the frightening thought after Davos is that what do they have planned for us all?
"Officials in Brazil urge women to avoid pregnancy due to Zika virus" by Jenny Barchfield Associated Press January 26, 2016
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects — but he also says the war is already being lost.
Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil’s Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country’s Carnival celebrations. Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said Tuesday details of the deployment are still being worked out.
Good luck with that "war."
An obvious imposition of martial law, and who can argue?
But the minister also said the country has failed in efforts against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
The war is already lost?
‘‘The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito,’’ the ministers told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.
A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.
I feel that is what the globe-kickers are planning for most of us, and this is recent.
Up until a few weeks ago I still like they needed us. Now it has become clear that the population of planet Earth has become to unruly and it is time to thin the herd, so to speak.
The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus’ symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didn’t become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.
More on that below, as that is where my printed paper ended the piece.
The World Health Organization repeated Tuesday that the link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.
Like we would believe anything they say.
But worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.
One of them, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 new confirmed cases of Zika on Tuesday, though none involve pregnant women. One case had been reported earlier.
Related:
"Puerto Rico is revising its fiscal and economic reform plan to reflect a jump in the island’s projected deficit and a steep drop in anticipated revenues. The government said the deficit is now projected to grow to $16 billion from $14 billion over the next five years due to the US commonwealth’s worsening economic crisis. Officials also said they expect revenue to fall by $1.7 billion over that period. The government also extended projections within the five-year plan by another five years at the request of creditors, noting the deficit could grow to $24 billion by 2025. Puerto Rico is seeking access to a bankruptcy mechanism as it struggles with $72 billion in public debt the governor has said is unpayable. The island has defaulted on several payments and faces its first lawsuit over the government’s diverting of funds to meet certain payments. US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is expected to visit Puerto Rico Wednesday to talk about the crisis. He demanded last week that Congress approve legislation by March to deal with it."
It's a U.S. territory, right?
Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.
Good luck with that. The regulation of sex, I mean. Seems like that has been a problem since the beginning of the species.
Now if you wanted to secretly sterilize them..... ??????
Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled or even quadrupled where it’s still available in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika virus and microcephaly.
At least some bu$ine$$ activity resulted from this crisis.
Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in the country in all of 2014.
Castro’s remarks have proven controversial, both in and outside Brazil.
World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier said he hadn’t seen the remarks, ‘‘but in general terms I think that this would be a bit of a fatalistic approach because this should mean we could lay down all our approaches now and declare the war lost.
‘‘I don’t think this is the case,’’ he added at WHO headquarters, in Geneva.
In Brazil, some called for Castro to be fired.
Where's Trump today?
‘‘He is incapable of occupying his position,’’ wrote Helio Gurovitz, a columnist with G1, the internet portal of the Globo television network. ‘‘To prove that Castro doesn’t have the capacity to occupy such an important position, at such a delicate moment with the spread of the epidemic, all that’s needed is a selection of such comments.’’
Both Brazil’s Zika outbreak and the spike in microcephaly have been concentrated in the poor and underdeveloped northeast of the country, though the prosperous southeast, where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located, are the second hardest-hit region. Rio de Janeiro will host the Aug. 5-21 Olympic games.
Will they?
Should they?
On Tuesday, officials in Rio also ramped up their fight against the Aedes aegypti, dispatching a team of fumigators to the Sambadrome, where the city’s Carnival parades will take place next month, and the region’s governor was distributing mosquito-fighting vehicles for poor suburbs of the city.
Officials in another hard-hit South American country, Colombia, also ramped up efforts against Zika on Tuesday.
Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria visited the city of Ibague, a hotbed of Zika, to start a ‘‘Tour of Colombia’’ campaign to educate local officials on how to fight the mosquitoes. Colombian officials say they've recorded more than 13,500 suspected cases and President Juan Manuel Santos said there could be 600,000 cases by year’s end.
The WHO’s Lindmeier said Tuesday that the U.N. agency plans a special session on the virus during a Geneva meeting of its executive board on Thursday.
--more--"
For some reason, the Globe left that out.... as they did this:
BOMBSHELL: Declassified Memo Proves the Pentagon had ZERO Evidence of WMDs in Iraq
Nothing in my Globe about that. There is just the staying in Afghanistan forever now (“What we’ve learned is that you can’t really leave,” which is why so many of us were and are against all these wars in the first place) and do the $ame thing all over again, $ame as in Iraq, $ame as in Vietnam, $ame as anywhere the U.S. empire is based or has a puppet ruler in place -- as war criminal cretin Don Rumsfeld makes the late night rounds with a disgusting sellout shilling for his new app.
I wonder why Colbert didn't ask him about D.U. disfigurements.
Speaking of such things the exposure of organ harvesting has been turned on it's head.
Instead we get heartwarming stories without knowing where from came that kidney.
Speaking of being born again, get this:
Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections recommends how to cut US prisoner count
Do you know who is Charles Colson (no professor David Duke he)?
The thumping you here is George Orwell spinning at light speed.
Do the recommendations really matter?
It's the agenda that's the thing, and prisons are starting to cost too much.
Time to lock things up for today.
".... It's classic. It's tragic. It is unspeakably sad and there is nothing I can do about it except watch.
In these times, nothing is what it appears to be unless you have that rare example of the dispassionate, objective awareness ...and then things are just what they appear to be... but who could you tell about it? You are, that lonely voice in the wilderness, crying out with the pebbles of Demosthenes's in your mouth, so it is all garbled and incoherent, against the sound of the sea that roars just beyond the reach of the trees that grip the Earth at the cliff's edge. You know there is nothing you can do but watch; one of billions that twist and turn in a shadow dance, flitting images of temporary forms... in a dream.
They are laughing in your face, as they apply their Eugenics program world wide, with the vaccines and Zika viruses, the wars, the poisoning of food products, the water. There's no need to list these things again. They've been listed often enough. What can we do?
--MORE--"
NDUs:
"Schizophrenia is characterized by delusional thinking and hallucinations. The researchers pieced together the steps by which genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. That risk, they found, is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning, in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections between neurons as it matures."
They need to get a “biological handle on the genetics” so they can get inside your brain.
What do you do when it is the government that is delusional and the ma$$ media is passing off agenda-pushing, scripted and staged productions as real events?
See: New lawsuit seeks replacement of Flint’s lead pipes
Oh, yeah, government lies to you, too.
I haven't read any blogs yet and am planning to do some clean up work today.
UPDATE:
Mich. lawmakers approve another $28m for Flint water crisis
The funding received quick and unanimous approval. It is the second round of funding enacted since the crisis was confirmed in the fall."
The whole tone of the thing is the public $ervants who $igned off on it all to save a few bucks and then lied about it are now some sort of heroes.
And they wonder why we don't want to drink this swill anymore?
FURTHER UPDATE:
So what is with the kidneys and body parts being sold in Bo$ton?
"Officials in Brazil urge women to avoid pregnancy due to Zika virus" by Jenny Barchfield Associated Press January 26, 2016
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Brazil’s health minister says the country is sending some 220,000 troops to battle the mosquito blamed for spreading a virus suspected of causing birth defects — but he also says the war is already being lost.
Marcelo Castro said that nearly 220,000 members of Brazil’s Armed Forces would go door-to-door to help in mosquito eradication efforts ahead of the country’s Carnival celebrations. Agency spokesman Nivaldo Coelho said Tuesday details of the deployment are still being worked out.
Good luck with that "war."
An obvious imposition of martial law, and who can argue?
But the minister also said the country has failed in efforts against the Aedes aegypti mosquito that transmits Zika, dengue, chikungunya and yellow fever.
The war is already lost?
‘‘The mosquito has been here in Brazil for three decades, and we are badly losing the battle against the mosquito,’’ the ministers told reporters as a crisis group on Zika was meeting in the capital, Brasilia.
A massive eradication effort eliminated Aedes aegypti from Brazil during the 1950s, but the mosquito slowly returned over the following decades from neighboring nations, public health experts have said. That led to outbreaks of dengue, which was recorded in record numbers last year.
I feel that is what the globe-kickers are planning for most of us, and this is recent.
Up until a few weeks ago I still like they needed us. Now it has become clear that the population of planet Earth has become to unruly and it is time to thin the herd, so to speak.
The arrival of Zika in Brazil last year initially caused little alarm, as the virus’ symptoms are generally much milder than those of dengue. It didn’t become a crisis until late in the year, when researchers made the link with a dramatic increase in reported cases of microcephaly, a rare birth defect that sees babies born with unusually small heads and can cause lasting developmental problems.
More on that below, as that is where my printed paper ended the piece.
The World Health Organization repeated Tuesday that the link remains circumstantial and is not yet proven scientifically.
Like we would believe anything they say.
But worry about the rapid spread of Zika has expanded across the nation, and the hemisphere beyond. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has advised pregnant women to reconsider travel to Brazil and 21 other countries and territories with Zika outbreaks.
One of them, the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, reported 18 new confirmed cases of Zika on Tuesday, though none involve pregnant women. One case had been reported earlier.
Related:
"Puerto Rico is revising its fiscal and economic reform plan to reflect a jump in the island’s projected deficit and a steep drop in anticipated revenues. The government said the deficit is now projected to grow to $16 billion from $14 billion over the next five years due to the US commonwealth’s worsening economic crisis. Officials also said they expect revenue to fall by $1.7 billion over that period. The government also extended projections within the five-year plan by another five years at the request of creditors, noting the deficit could grow to $24 billion by 2025. Puerto Rico is seeking access to a bankruptcy mechanism as it struggles with $72 billion in public debt the governor has said is unpayable. The island has defaulted on several payments and faces its first lawsuit over the government’s diverting of funds to meet certain payments. US Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew is expected to visit Puerto Rico Wednesday to talk about the crisis. He demanded last week that Congress approve legislation by March to deal with it."
It's a U.S. territory, right?
Officials in El Salvador, Colombia and Brazil have suggested women stop getting pregnant until the crisis has passed.
Good luck with that. The regulation of sex, I mean. Seems like that has been a problem since the beginning of the species.
Now if you wanted to secretly sterilize them..... ??????
Repellent has disappeared from many Brazilian pharmacies and prices for the product have tripled or even quadrupled where it’s still available in recent weeks since the government announced a suspected link between Zika virus and microcephaly.
At least some bu$ine$$ activity resulted from this crisis.
Nearly 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly have been reported in Brazil since October, compared with fewer than 150 cases in the country in all of 2014.
Castro’s remarks have proven controversial, both in and outside Brazil.
World Health Organization spokesman Christian Lindmeier said he hadn’t seen the remarks, ‘‘but in general terms I think that this would be a bit of a fatalistic approach because this should mean we could lay down all our approaches now and declare the war lost.
‘‘I don’t think this is the case,’’ he added at WHO headquarters, in Geneva.
In Brazil, some called for Castro to be fired.
Where's Trump today?
‘‘He is incapable of occupying his position,’’ wrote Helio Gurovitz, a columnist with G1, the internet portal of the Globo television network. ‘‘To prove that Castro doesn’t have the capacity to occupy such an important position, at such a delicate moment with the spread of the epidemic, all that’s needed is a selection of such comments.’’
Both Brazil’s Zika outbreak and the spike in microcephaly have been concentrated in the poor and underdeveloped northeast of the country, though the prosperous southeast, where Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are located, are the second hardest-hit region. Rio de Janeiro will host the Aug. 5-21 Olympic games.
Will they?
Should they?
On Tuesday, officials in Rio also ramped up their fight against the Aedes aegypti, dispatching a team of fumigators to the Sambadrome, where the city’s Carnival parades will take place next month, and the region’s governor was distributing mosquito-fighting vehicles for poor suburbs of the city.
Officials in another hard-hit South American country, Colombia, also ramped up efforts against Zika on Tuesday.
Health Minister Alejandro Gaviria visited the city of Ibague, a hotbed of Zika, to start a ‘‘Tour of Colombia’’ campaign to educate local officials on how to fight the mosquitoes. Colombian officials say they've recorded more than 13,500 suspected cases and President Juan Manuel Santos said there could be 600,000 cases by year’s end.
The WHO’s Lindmeier said Tuesday that the U.N. agency plans a special session on the virus during a Geneva meeting of its executive board on Thursday.
--more--"
For some reason, the Globe left that out.... as they did this:
BOMBSHELL: Declassified Memo Proves the Pentagon had ZERO Evidence of WMDs in Iraq
Nothing in my Globe about that. There is just the staying in Afghanistan forever now (“What we’ve learned is that you can’t really leave,” which is why so many of us were and are against all these wars in the first place) and do the $ame thing all over again, $ame as in Iraq, $ame as in Vietnam, $ame as anywhere the U.S. empire is based or has a puppet ruler in place -- as war criminal cretin Don Rumsfeld makes the late night rounds with a disgusting sellout shilling for his new app.
I wonder why Colbert didn't ask him about D.U. disfigurements.
Speaking of such things the exposure of organ harvesting has been turned on it's head.
Instead we get heartwarming stories without knowing where from came that kidney.
Speaking of being born again, get this:
Charles Colson Task Force on Federal Corrections recommends how to cut US prisoner count
Do you know who is Charles Colson (no professor David Duke he)?
The thumping you here is George Orwell spinning at light speed.
Do the recommendations really matter?
It's the agenda that's the thing, and prisons are starting to cost too much.
Time to lock things up for today.
".... It's classic. It's tragic. It is unspeakably sad and there is nothing I can do about it except watch.
In these times, nothing is what it appears to be unless you have that rare example of the dispassionate, objective awareness ...and then things are just what they appear to be... but who could you tell about it? You are, that lonely voice in the wilderness, crying out with the pebbles of Demosthenes's in your mouth, so it is all garbled and incoherent, against the sound of the sea that roars just beyond the reach of the trees that grip the Earth at the cliff's edge. You know there is nothing you can do but watch; one of billions that twist and turn in a shadow dance, flitting images of temporary forms... in a dream.
They are laughing in your face, as they apply their Eugenics program world wide, with the vaccines and Zika viruses, the wars, the poisoning of food products, the water. There's no need to list these things again. They've been listed often enough. What can we do?
--MORE--"
NDUs:
"Schizophrenia is characterized by delusional thinking and hallucinations. The researchers pieced together the steps by which genes can increase a person’s risk of developing schizophrenia. That risk, they found, is tied to a natural process called synaptic pruning, in which the brain sheds weak or redundant connections between neurons as it matures."
They need to get a “biological handle on the genetics” so they can get inside your brain.
What do you do when it is the government that is delusional and the ma$$ media is passing off agenda-pushing, scripted and staged productions as real events?
See: New lawsuit seeks replacement of Flint’s lead pipes
Oh, yeah, government lies to you, too.
I haven't read any blogs yet and am planning to do some clean up work today.
UPDATE:
Mich. lawmakers approve another $28m for Flint water crisis
The funding received quick and unanimous approval. It is the second round of funding enacted since the crisis was confirmed in the fall."
The whole tone of the thing is the public $ervants who $igned off on it all to save a few bucks and then lied about it are now some sort of heroes.
And they wonder why we don't want to drink this swill anymore?
FURTHER UPDATE:
So what is with the kidneys and body parts being sold in Bo$ton?
