Recently in Disease Category

Via Western Confucian, here's an hourlong presentation about swine flu from a Sister Teresa Forcades, a Spanish nun who is also a physician (and, alas, a pro-abortion feminist, which has nothing to do with her competence on medical matters)

An English-language summary of her remarks is here. The gist is that she believes the H1N1 panic may have been falsely ginned up for the sake of increasing the power of the state on a false pretext. A key piece of evidence for her case: the undisputed fact that Baxter, a vaccine manufacturer, sent a batch of contaminated vaccine to the Czech Republic, where it just happened to have been discovered by a researcher. Had people been vaccinated with this stuff, it would have killed untold numbers, and likely set off a new and very deadly global flu pandemic (according to a Bloomberg report on the Baxter error, up to 70 million could have died worldwide if the deadly avian flu virus in the Baxter vaccine had gotten into the human population). The conspiracy-theory take on this is that the Baxter foul-up, which the company admitted, was no accident, but a deliberate attempt to manufacture a global health crisis.

Basically, Scary Flu Nun warns people to be scared of H1N1 vaccines, saying that they could be dangerous to your autoimmune system, and could be used for nefarious political purposes. She says take the flu vaccine if you want, but nobody should feel panicked into doing so by a false and manufactured sense of crisis. She strongly hints that she believes a transnational conspiracy might be behind trying to frighten people about the flu for political purposes. She's either a smart lady who sees through some nasty things, or a dangerous conspiracy nut whose advice might make a lot of people sick or dead. Your comments invited.

Via E.D. Kain, Robin Cook envisions what would happen if the extremely virulent but relatively weak swine flu crossed with the extremely lethal but hard to transmit avian flu. It's a horror story. Excerpt:

Instead, it would be a novel of a horrendous contemporary event: a new Black Death. Of course, this plague won't be a revisit of Y. pestis; we won't see black buboes and excruciatingly painful suffering. But death is death, and in the plague I speak of there will be a lot of it, possibly equal in scale to the Black Death, but unfolding even faster. If that is the case, there will be a degree of worldwide societal chaos that taxes the imagination. And this is no far-fetched fiction. Despite all we know about biological science and despite all the wizardly powers of modern medicine, with its vast pharmacopeia and its array of sophisticated devices, this new plague might well happen. I say this not just as an author of medical thrillers, but as a medical doctor with four decades of experience in surgery, infectious disease, and emergency medicine.

More:

Is there a chance these two subspecies [swine flu and avian flu] could hook up and help each other? The answer is definitely yes, and that is the worry because one of influenza A's most disturbing characteristics is its ability to indulge in recombination of its 11 genes, which are arranged on its eight pieces of RNA. This produces what is called genetic shift -- in other words, transfer of entire genes or gene combinations, and hence traits.

What happens then? You should read the Cook piece to get his forecast. Part of it: "Plague will be a worldwide infectious holocaust."

Come back, Balloon Boy, let us think of your happy frolicking some more!

Or at least have a lot less to do with weight loss than we think? It could be true, according to scientists. Excerpt from Time magazine:

"In general, for weight loss, exercise is pretty useless," says Eric Ravussin, chair in diabetes and metabolism at Louisiana State University and a prominent exercise researcher. Many recent studies have found that exercise isn't as important in helping people lose weight as you hear so regularly in gym advertisements or on shows like The Biggest Loser -- or, for that matter, from magazines like this one.

The basic problem is that while it's true that exercise burns calories and that you must burn calories to lose weight, exercise has another effect: it can stimulate hunger. That causes us to eat more, which in turn can negate the weight-loss benefits we just accrued. Exercise, in other words, isn't necessarily helping us lose weight. It may even be making it harder.

Why is this? More:

The problem ultimately is about not exercise itself but the way we've come to define it. Many obesity researchers now believe that very frequent, low-level physical activity -- the kind humans did for tens of thousands of years before the leaf blower was invented -- may actually work better for us than the occasional bouts of exercise you get as a gym rat. "You cannot sit still all day long and then have 30 minutes of exercise without producing stress on the muscles," says Hans-Rudolf Berthoud, a neurobiologist at LSU's Pennington Biomedical Research Center who has studied nutrition for 20 years. "The muscles will ache, and you may not want to move after. But to burn calories, the muscle movements don't have to be extreme. It would be better to distribute the movements throughout the day."

For his part, Berthoud rises at 5 a.m. to walk around his neighborhood several times. He also takes the stairs when possible. "Even if people can get out of their offices, out from in front of their computers, they go someplace like the mall and then take the elevator," he says. "This is the real problem, not that we don't go to the gym enough."

In the end, what and how we eat matters a lot more than the exercise we get. This piece made me think about how I'd returned this summer to using my elliptical trainer, but hadn't seen the weight loss I would have expected (though it's dramatically increased my cardio and aerobic capacities). I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if I had unconsciously compensated for my exercise by giving myself permission to eat more when I eat. It's also true that except for that half hour burst of exercise, I'm rather computer-bound and sedentary all day long.

I told you on Friday that a friend and CC blog reader from North Carolina said Bernie Madoff has cancer. The New York Post reported it this morning, and the story is getting weird.

Assuming the story is true, let me put a question to you: how do we pray for a bad man like Bernie Madoff?

Do we pray that he will recover from his cancer? Do we pray that he will use this time to get right with God and his victims, insofar as that is possible? Do we withhold our prayers, believing that he is getting what he has coming to him, considering his crimes? Or what?

Here's what I pray: that Madoff will be open to the grace of the Holy Spirit, and will use what time he has left to repent and to reconcile himself to God and those he abused. My secondary prayer would be that he would recover, but only if it is for the greater good of his soul. This is from a section of my Templeton Cambridge paper, in which I discuss "The Theology of Illness" by Jean-Claude Larchet:

The Orthodox theologian Jean-Claude Larchet, in his book "The Theology of Illness," draws out Verghese's point well:

For illness always calls into question the basis, the framework an the shape of our lives, including the life-patterns we have acquired, the free use of our bodily and psychological faculties, our system of values, our relations with other people, even life itself. This is because in times of illness the inevitability of death becomes a stark reality. ... Far from being an event that touches only our body, and that for a limited time, illness often forces us to assume a spiritual struggle that involves our whole being, and destiny. ...

...Orthodox Christianity brings to the holistic treatment of a sick person a philosophically ascetic orientation increasingly alien to the way we live and think in the modern West.

For example, Orthodoxy encourages believers to pray for good health, but more importantly, to pray for what is most spiritually useful. Orthodoxy enjoins the patient to see his illness in the entire context of his life, and how it can be used to deepen his relationship with God. Elder Zacharias, a monk from the Orthodox monastery in Essex, England, tells of a woman who approached him with a diagnosis of six months to live. She had incurable cancer. "Wonderful," he told her. "You have six months to prepare for the most important encounter of your life." She used that time to work with him, in prayer and counseling, to meet God. He reports that on his final visit with her, her body was ravaged, but her face was luminous. She told the elder that she didn't feel worthy of the grace of having that illness. Orthodox Christianity could not prevent death, but it helped this woman imbue her suffering with meaning, and to bear it with grace, dignity, and even, in the end, joy.

If Bernie Madoff is dying of cancer, then it might be the one thing that saves his soul. We must hope so, and pray for that. Sometimes what hurts also heals. Sometimes it's the only thing that heals. This is not, of course, to say we shouldn't pray for his physical recovery -- it would be perverse to pray for him, or anyone, to get sick and die! -- but that we should pray that God will allow what's best for Madoff to happen. We shouldn't presume to know what that is. That's what I would want people -- both my friends and my enemies -- to pray for me if I were to contract a terminal illness.

Swine flu is all over England, as you've probably read, and I'm wondering if I ought to emulate the Italian students pictured here arriving in the UK with masks on as a prophylactic against the virus. Are these things effective? They've always struck me as all about psychological reassurance, not about keeping the flu away. But I don't know.

That link takes you to a Time magazine story, which bring us the following exciting news:

Although the good news is that most H1N1/09 illnesses have been extremely mild, the rapidity of its spread -- and the fact that young people seem to be especially vulnerable -- still worries global health officials. "We don't know if it will actually ever completely go away," says David Butler Jones, the public health chief of Canada, which has been unusually hard-hit. "We're still seeing new cases, so nobody should let down their guard."

The real test will come in the fall, however, when the Northern Hemisphere's flu season returns with a vengeance. (Southern Hemisphere nations are currently in the early weeks of their flu season, and H1N1/09 has caused real trouble in Argentina, which has more than 130 confirmed deaths -- second only to the U.S.) There is always a chance that the virus could become more virulent when it returns in the fall -- just as the deadly 1918 pandemic did.

Let me stipulate that I would rather not catch swine flu, not now, not ever. I certainly don't want to pick it up while in England, not least because I'm due to fly immediately upon return to Alaska for a week-long seminar at the Orthodox cathedral in Eagle River. But if, perchance, I did get the stuff, would the silver lining be that I'd be immune from a more nasty version that might hit the US this fall?

Have any of you readers had swine flu? I don't think I know anyone who has. Everyone says it's mild, at least for most people. So maybe it's not so awful to get it now, as a kind of inoculation against a more deadly strain. Yes? No? UK health officials seem to frown on that sort of thing. A more practical question: if I were to contract swine flu in the UK, would it be wiser to hole up in a hotel room until I recovered, rather than risk traveling and spreading it to others on the plane, and (what I'd really be concerned about) bringing it home to my family?