Scientists mystified, wary, as Africa avoids COVID disaster

Another more than slightly ... wrote:

correctomundo wrote:

this word that I just typed and everyone knows the meaning is not a real word!!!

Did you forget or did you never know?

The virus is Novel Corona Virus Disease 2019.

you mean to say we don't ever shorten words and phrases??? are you that obtuse??

Another more than slightly ... wrote:

correctomundo wrote:

so a population of 1.2 billion is covered by languages spoken by 400 million?

your math is off buddy... NOW who is being racist?

Are you h-loper or h-loper's b!tch? Who told you only 400 million spoke Arabic, English & French?

people who study language not some internet dope who can't do math.

Mystified huh? Maybe they should, you know, do some research. This isn't that hard.

Yet they can enough of the current doping drugs to be some of best runners in the world, weird!

A big thank you for reposting this. I didn't read this article... not sure how I missed it.

It makes a LOT of sense and it pigtails right on to my main point. Something big is at play in Africa and we need to find it. Whether it's the tuberculosis vaccine, herbal remedies, or genetics, we need to get to the bottom of it. Genetics should be easy to verify or eliminate. Just look at deaths of Central African ethnicity who grew up outside of Africa. There should be millions in the US and Europe.

IDK about the BCG vaccine. I'm pretty sure every solder gets a TB vaccine when they go overseas. Maybe it conveys a modicum of protection that combines with the other factors.

My huge concern is that public health leadership wants to go all-in on a select few measures (masking, vaccines, social distancing) with draconian measures (i.e., Austria) while completely ignoring other promising tools in the toolbox.

If I were in charge, I'd immediately begin human challenge tests on the top dozen or so promising therapeutics... vitamin D, zinc, melatonin, ivermectin, HCQ, chloroquine, and those other off-label drugs that have been mentioned. (A human challenge test is a trial where the subjects are purposely infected.) Some of the therapeutic studies could overlap with, say, 40 subjects being given ivermectin, 40 given HCQ, and so on. Given the anticipated mortality rate, you could probably test 1,000 subjects with only one anticipated death. Preventives would require a lead time of several weeks to build up blood levels to sufficiently high levels. For example, it takes 8 months for vitamin D levels to plateau once a supplement is started. Again, I don't think vitamin D is a miracle cure, but D, C, melatonin, and zinc are dirt cheap. What if, combined, they reduce the death rate by 30%? That's nearly a quarter-million fewer deaths in the US! Will they? That's the point.... 5.15 million people are dead from covid and we don't even know!

Low vaccination rates and low Covid cases.

High vaccination rates and high Covid cases.

Real hard to figure

Couch Potato wrote:

Sham 69 wrote:

It's because they're outside all day. There are no bars in Africa. When it get's too hot they just sit under a tree. COVID spreads in indoor buildings with ventilation, but people in Africa don't have this.

#Geography

#TheThirdWorld

#ChristianityRocks

LMAO! I thought that my home town (Jhb, South Africa) was wild until I went to Kampala in Uganda. Bars are open all night from Sunday to Saturday over there. You will not sit under a tree in Kampala I promise you, you will go back to the US with a massive hangover and couple of mixed race kids lol

He is gay as the summer breeze so would just go home with a sore ass whole.

There s no money to be had in africa by big pharma so nothing to see here....

Agree entirely,

And on a different post, to your credit, you did say: "Something big besides obesity is at play here. I suspect it has something to do with malaria and widespread prophylactic use of antimalarial drugs, but discussing antimalarial drugs quickly devolves into choosing political sides"

Which is along the lines of what the article i linked to is pointing towards.

Importantly, I agree, the reason for their lower serious hospitalizations and deaths needs to be researched in greater depth,

Over 400 million people were treated with Ivermectin during MDAs in 2019 alone, primarily in Africa, with over four billion treatments administered via MDA to date, supporting the case that Ivermectin is a safe drug

There is a genetic factor that has a clear risk factor for severe COVID-19 reaction, the Vindija 33.19 Neanderthal genome. A genome that exists in large amounts in europe, north america, and the indian subcontinent.....but is almost completely unknown in far east asia, and in africa. And what places seem to have the fewest severe reactions to COVID-19? East Asia and Africa.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2818-3

Note. This genetic cluster doesn't stop you from getting covid, but it appears to have a huge correlation with severe disease and death rates.

So glad you bumped this thread. I was doing my usual COVID reading today and came across this article suggesting there may be pre-existing immunity to sars-like coronaviruses (or cross reactive immunity, at least) among Africans that may explain their low case rate. Once again, natural immunity wins out. It's about time Western world learns the virtues of strengthening your immune system via exposure rather than the usual perverse, futile and self-destructive propensity to keep oneself and one's children in hygienic bubbles. The antibiotic soaps, antiviral sprays etc are more toxic than covid sniffle if you happen to be otherwise healthy person. Such stupidity abounds

https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/viruses/viruses-13-02325/article_deploy/viruses-13-02325.pdf

There are bars in Africa and I've been to some. But in many places, there are bottle stores that are outside because the weather is so nice in the evenings. There is a very young population, which would radically decrease the COVID death rate, and very much takes place outdoors. Cities would be in far worse shape than lightly populated rural areas. Stores exist, of course, especially in cities, but probably the majority of shopping is at outdoor open markets. Then too obesity is nearly nil in sub-Saharan Africa (it's pretty high in North Africa). But you just can't conclude anything here with zero good stats.

1. Ivermectin is highly effective against Covid and is widely used in Africa as an anti parasitic.

2. Covid jab seems to be impairing immunity. UK data shows that vaccinated people over the age of 30 are twice as likely to get covid as unvaccinated.

3. Vitamin D levels are possibly higher due to their lifestyle. Vitamin D levels are important in combating Covid.

Africa has the many of the lowest obesity rates by nation in the world and the average life expectancy is 15-20 years younger than the median covid death. Throw in abundant ivermectin, plenty of sun exposure to keep vitamin D levels up and no fertile ground for Big Pharma to exploit.

This is NOT rocket surgery.

It comes and goes. At the start of this year it looked like we'd beaten Covid -- we being Uganda. There were very few cases that, at one point in April, the Covid ward in Mulago, the national referral hospital, had only three patients. People relaxed, stopped wearing masks, police stopped cracking down on bars, churches got full, etc.

Well, we were laying the grounds for another wave. Delta cases started rising in mid-May and by June everyone was taking notice; social media was one unending stream of death announcements, people sick with Covid, etc. We went back to total lockdown in June, if I remember correctly.

Cases are down since August, when the lockdown was reopened. I think I haven't heard of anyone dying of Covid for more than a month -- prominent or not (I only see those on Herman Cain award subreddit). But it doesn't mean that we've beaten it. Case numbers are lower, of course, and we have had very few deaths, even at the height of the different waves. Make of that what you will.

As for the person saying we don't have a word for Covid, where is that from? There is no single African language. In any case, the Rwandans (where they speak one language) do have a word for it. In Uganda, the different languages have a word for it. In the two languages I am most familiar with, the word for Covid would translate to "the brutal/harsh flu".

If the antimalarial drugs you're thinking about are chloroquine, then you're wrong. It hasn't been used here for more than a decade; we moved to variants of artemether and artesunate because chloroquine was no longer effective. Not even sure if you'll find it stocked in pharmacies since it treats nothing I know of. The malaria prophylaxis, usually prescribed to tourists and other foreign visitors, is doxycycline; again, no chloroquine.

The first line treatment for malaria was either chloroquine or quinine, usually given with fansidar. The first two, especially chloroquine, have been phased out. You might get fansidar today, but usually alongside artesunate or artemether.

And the horse dewormer, I'd never heard of it until this year. The deworming medication of choice here is albendazole.

barney23 wrote:

The first line treatment for malaria was either chloroquine or quinine, usually given with fansidar. The first two, especially chloroquine, have been phased out. You might get fansidar today, but usually alongside artesunate or artemether.

And the horse dewormer, I'd never heard of it until this year. The deworming medication of choice here is albendazole.

Ivermectin developers won the Nobel for use of ivermectin in humans in 2015. It has been used safely in humans with billions of doses. Yet you think it is some obscure "horse dewormer"? Nice straw man there, hairyambe. Covidiocy at it's core.