@SeaGreenEyez And here I am a reading specialist and I totally read "a" as "the". Turns out there's a difference.

Nature's way of decreasing the surplus population. Some folks help by not getting vaccinated.
Others do equally stupid shit.
‍

@KKGator And Darwin wins again.

@K9JetLee999 He has a pretty good record.

Are you saying that it says that children are the ones dying from drug overdoses?

@Jolanta It mentioned all ages but primarily young people. A previous report on NPR mentioned that the suicide rate has gone way up among Millennials as many feel there is no future. Drug use was one method used.

@SeaGreenEyez The report was about Seattle. However, it also stated this was a nationwide trend.

@SeaGreenEyez I can't get this as I'm not an online subscriber but no I read a report by Danny Westneat in last Sunday's Times. 'Shadow Epidemic' has passed Covid here'

@SeaGreenEyez Some time ago I read a report on Fentanyl. It is being produced in huge factories and is a major issue in drug addictions. This latest report said, in the Seattle area, drug overdoses is now killing more than Covid and some numbers were given. Of course statistics can always be fudged. When I post I welcome discussions about the report. I often learn things and get into dialogue with others, which I need. One way to exercise one's brain is through dialogue.
As far as the suicide part goes, that is a touchy subject with me. A letter appeared on the front page of our local paper which made me mad. Suicide should not be considered a problem when people are suffering (from some disease). I wrote a letter which appeared in all three of our local papers. I posted this letter several times on the site.

@SeaGreenEyez My comment about the drug being produced in large quantities was not about China but Mexico. The article was in the Atlantic. I agree totally with this issue of our poor concern about decent health care. We are sooo far behind even some developing countries in this area. This is clearly a rich - poor issue as the rich don't want to have to get the same (dis) service as every one else. In developed countries it also means more taxes. There is another area people often miss is that in countries like ours with a high immigration (again policy not people) rate means more cultures and languages make it much more expensive to serve everyone. It's a big problem with public schools which some (corporations) want to hide.

@SeaGreenEyez Drugs are a necessary evil. I'm in pain 95% of the time unless I make my own poppy seed tea.That helps me so much. I can't get anything worth my time from a doctor.

@K9JetLee999 An article from the "People's Pharmacy" talked about how those in 'our stage of life' often have multiple drugs some of which are given to counteract another drug. I have one medication and a doctor once told me, when I complained about a downside, that I should take another to counteract that drug. Seems like, more and more, doctors are simply drug pushers BUT they often do so as they have little time to talk about lifestyle changes and most people will not even consider changing their lifestyle and simply want a pill.
[spokesman.com]

@jackjr I'm pretty sure a pill isn't going to stop me from aging. I don't expect that from a doctor but I don't want to be in pain 24/7. I had lumbar surgery where the bone was so decrepit they put the supports in sideways instead of back to front. That's been the place chiropractors love to put every ounce of their strength and weight on and that area is painful all the time.
Well lets add a permanently fractured left ankle as well. Everyone all my life kept saying, "its just a sprain" NO it was freaking broken over and over. So now if I don't wear support I just fall down. I fall at least once a week. Falling at my age just creates a new painful area. Recently I fell and tried to make it to the counter but caught my underarm on the counter only and continued to fall. This tore and made sore all the muscles across my chest and up my shoulder. I also fell again in the same damn place and it hurts even more. I get aches radiating all in my arm. I have poppy seed tea and it helps. I don't expect anything my doctor does to help me. He just ups my vitamins. They don't whip out pills where I go. All I got is vitamins to contradict each other. It's TN and they had the highest drug use by teens in the US.

@K9JetLee999 Soo sorry to hear of your issue. It makes me feel my issues are all minor.

Recently, I spoke to a neighbor. She is a retired nurse and is in her mid 70's. Her husband is in his 80's and has been in great pain for a couple of years. When I spoke to her I asked about Ed. She said he was all better. Some new technology included a metal wire being put along his spine. A rechargeable battery was implanted. The electrical pulse relieves all his pain and now he can walk upright and has no more pain. A few days later I talked to a guy in our gym (his wife often accompanies him). They are i their 70's. He said she had a bone on bone arthritis in one hand. The doctor removed a part of one bone and put in some sort of living graft. The graft formed scar tissue and that scar tissue acted as cartilage for the joint. Some of the new treatments are amazing.

50+ years ago I was in an accident and got a broken ankle. Furthermore the cartilage dissolved so the joint had to be fused. I was told best case would mean a cane the rest of my life and the worst case, crutches. I was 23 and no way with either. There was a lot of pain for years but I hike, Skied, played Racquetball and so on. I finally figured out why (a comment from the doctor then) 'blood flow' keeping active, even under some pain, mean the blood flow can help alleviate the healing process and the pain. Of course that was then and I don't know how things would work out now. Still, a part of my recovery means constant working out and walking.

It's not the big pharma that is the problem but the chemical and food industries. Admen with campaigns for high fat, sugar and added chemicals. In the meantime maybe leave the people who choice to vax along and go after the real culprits.

Having a healthy lifestyle is definitely a good thing but no guarantee. My father had one of the healthiest lifestyles of anyone I've known. Ate very healthy by today's standards and exercised daily until he died suddenly at 88. On the other hand his father (my grandfather) was a pack of cigarettes a day smoker until he was in his 60's and ate an drank whatever he wanted, passed away peacefully in his sleep at age 100.

Here you will find the history of Polio and the development of the Polio vaccine. This is the part that I would like to highlight because it refutes your claim that ONLY "7000 people died from Polio". "By the mid-20th century, the poliovirus could be found all over the world and killed or paralyzed over half a million people every year. With no cure, and epidemics on the rise, there was an urgent need for a vaccine." Sometimes there are worse things that death-paralysis is among those things, IMHO.

Polio is a highly infectious disease, mostly affecting young children, that attacks the nervous system and can lead to spinal and respiratory paralysis, and in some cases death.

Polio has existed since prehistoric times – ancient Egyptian images show children walking with canes, with withered limbs characteristic of the disease.

While it affected children around the world for millennia, the first known clinical description of polio, by British doctor Michael Underwood, was not until 1789, and it was formally recognized as a condition in 1840 by German physician Jakob Heine.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, frequent epidemics saw polio become the most feared disease in the world. A major outbreak in New York City in 1916 killed over 2000 people, and the worst recorded US outbreak in 1952 killed over 3000.

Many who survived the disease faced lifelong consequences. Deformed limbs meant they needed leg braces, crutches or wheelchairs, and some needed to use breathing devices like the iron lung, an artificial respirator invented for treatment of polio patients.

By the mid-20th century, the poliovirus could be found all over the world and killed or paralysed over half a million people every year. With no cure, and epidemics on the rise, there was an urgent need for a vaccine.

A breakthrough occurred in 1949, when poliovirus was successfully cultivated in human tissue by John Enders, Thomas Weller and Frederick Robbins at Boston Children’s Hospital. Their pioneering work was recognized with the 1954 Nobel Prize.

Not long afterwards, in the early 1950s, the first successful vaccine was created by US physician Jonas Salk. Salk tested his experimental killed-virus vaccine on himself and his family in 1953, and a year later on 1.6 million children in Canada, Finland and the USA.

The results were announced on 12 April 1955, and Salk’s inactivated polio vaccine (IPV) was licensed on the same day. By 1957, annual cases dropped from 58 000 to 5600, and by 1961, only 161 cases remained.

Salk was committed to equitable access to his vaccine, and understood that elimination efforts would not work without universal low- or no-cost vaccination.

Six pharmaceutical companies were licensed to produce IPV, and Salk did not profit from sharing the formulation or production processes.

In a 1955 interview, when asked who owned the patent for IPV, he replied: “Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

A second type of polio vaccine, the oral polio vaccine (OPV) was developed by physician and microbiologist Albert Sabin.

Sabin’s vaccine was live-attenuated (using the virus in weakened form) and could be given orally, as drops or on a sugar cube.

With the Salk vaccine in wide use by the late 1950s, United States interest in testing this new kind of vaccine was low.

Hilary Koprowski had carried out the first test of a live-attenuated vaccine on humans in 1950, and further trials took place in what was then the Belgian Congo (a territory now largely covered by the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

Like Salk, Sabin tested his experimental vaccine on himself and his family; but he had to go further afield for larger-scale trials.

After a team of Russian virologists visited his lab in 1956, Sabin travelled to Leningrad and Moscow to work with them later that year.

He struck up a longstanding collaboration with Mikhail P Chumakov, who was also responsible for tests of the Salk vaccine in the Soviet Union, and Chumakov carried out initial tests of the live-attenuated vaccine using a seed virus that Sabin had provided.

Trials carried out in the Soviet Union, on 20 000 children in 1958 and 10 million children in 1959, and in Czechoslovakia, on over 110 000 children from 1958 to 1959, proved the vaccine was safe and effective.

Independent review of the trials for the World Health Organization by United States specialist Dorothy Horstmann endorsed their findings – a crucial validation in the time of the Cold War.

The ease of administering the oral vaccine made it the ideal candidate for mass vaccination campaigns. Hungary began to use it in December 1959 and Czechoslovakia in early 1960, becoming the first country in the world to eliminate polio.

In 1962, Cuba began to administer the OPV in nationwide immunization programmes. OPV had an added benefit that paved the road to eradication. While IPV protected the vaccinated child, it did not stop the poliovirus from spreading between children.

OPV, on the other hand, interrupted the chain of transmission, meaning that this was a powerful vaccine to stop polio outbreaks in their tracks.

In 1979 Rotary International started a multi-year project to immunize 6 million children in the Philippines.

In 1988, the World Health Assembly passed a resolution to eradicate polio – to achieve its permanent reduction to zero, with no risk of reintroduction – and in the same year, the Global Polio Eradication Initiative (GPEI) was launched.

The Assembly’s work towards this milestone was complemented by the efforts of Rotary International, who wanted to keep the momentum of smallpox eradication going to ensure that no child was unnecessarily paralysed for life ever again.

Immense contributions by individual countries were combined with international initiative and assistance, with WHO working to support the global collaboration.

With WHO’s assistance, vaccine production was also expanded globally, with significant capacity developed in countries including India and Indonesia. In 1995, mass vaccination campaigns took place in China and India.

National Immunization Days were coordinated in 19 European and Mediterranean countries in 1995, and in 23 African countries in 2004. By 1994, polio had been eliminated from the Americas, and by 2000 the Western Pacific was polio free.

By 2003, polio remained endemic in only 6 countries – and by 2006, that number had dropped to 4.

The 21st century saw further advances, with cases brought down by more than 99% worldwide in less than 2 decades.

WHO’s South-East Asia region was certified polio-free in 2014, the African region in 2020, and the Eastern Mediterranean region has restricted the virus’s reach to just a handful of districts.

As at July 2021, only 2 cases of wild poliovirus have been recorded globally this year to date: one each in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

But alongside the success of the OPV comes a disadvantage: continued use of the vaccine poses a risk to wiping out the disease.

While OPV is safe and effective, in areas where vaccination coverage is low, the weakened vaccine virus originally contained in OPV can begin to circulate in undervaccinated communities.

When this happens, if it is allowed to circulate for sufficiently long enough time, it may genetically revert to a ‘strong’ virus, able to cause paralysis, resulting in what is known as circulating vaccine-derived polioviruses (cVDPVs).

If a population is adequately immunized, it will be protected against both wild and vaccine-derived polioviruses.

Watch this short video and learn how different strains of the polio viruses emerge and how to stop them.

[who.int]

You really think only 7,000 people have died from polio? Well, I'm really not surprised. It's right in line with so many other idiotic things you have written here.

@SeaGreenEyez Yeah I don't know how some people can be so misinformed. The really weird thing is that giving them good information, steering them to good sources, never seems change their minds. They just remain entrenched in their wacko beliefs. It's a lot like religious zeal.

@Dhiltong

Although polio was the most feared disease of the 20th century, it was hardly the deadliest. There was a million vaccines given out with 10 years testing. Compared to Covid vaccines months tested and billions given out. When it kills all the lab tested animals, it's not good enough for me. Didn’t take the polio or flu nor covid shots, guess what? no sickness and same with my friends who didn't.

@MyTVC15 If polio was still an issue today we'd probably have an industry devoted not to a vaccine but iron lungs made in 7 colors with plugins for internet/wi-fi connects and color braces, canes, etc.

@silverotter11 Sadly, I think you are right.