Category: Health Tips

Apparently I should be following this.

The year was 900 AD, and the air in Baghdad was heavy with the smell of woodsmoke, spice, and something far more dangerous.

Deep inside the Caliph’s palace, a group of advisors stood around a massive table, debating a problem that would define the health of the empire.

The Caliph wanted to build a great hospital—a Bimaristan—that would be the finest in the world.

But Baghdad was a sprawling, crowded metropolis of nearly a million people, and disease was a constant, invisible shadow in the narrow streets.

Where could they possibly build a place of healing where the air itself didn’t rot the patients from within?

They turned to a man known as Rhazes.

He was a man of science, a polymath who had already written hundreds of books on everything from smallpox to philosophy.

Rhazes didn’t look at maps or listen to the political whims of the city’s elite.

Instead, he called for his assistants and gave them a command that sounded like the work of a madman.

He told them to go to the butchers’ stalls and buy several slabs of fresh, raw meat.

Then, he instructed them to hang these pieces of meat on tall poles in various quarters of the city.

One was placed in the bustling market, another near the stagnant canals, one near the palace, and others in the high, windy outskirts.

People stopped and stared as the bloody cuts of meat were hoisted into the air.

They whispered that the great doctor had finally lost his mind.

But Rhazes wasn’t interested in the gossip of the crowd; he was conducting a silent, deadly experiment.

He knew that disease was often carried by ’miasma’—the foul, putrid air that seemed to linger in certain parts of the city.

He believed that the air which rotted food the fastest would surely rot the human body just as quickly.

Day after day, under the blistering sun of Mesopotamia, Rhazes began his rounds.

He visited every single pole, his eyes scanning the texture of the flesh and his nose catching the first scents of decay.

In the crowded center of the city, the meat turned grey and slimy within forty-eight hours.

Near the water, the stench became unbearable by the third morning.

But in one specific spot, the meat remained remarkably red and firm.

While the other samples were crawling with flies and black with rot, this single piece of meat seemed to resist the inevitable.

Rhazes had found his answer.

He pointed to that specific patch of ground and told the Caliph: ’This is where you will build.’

He had used the most basic laws of nature to find the cleanest, most circulating air in the entire city.

It was a primitive version of what we now call environmental science.

When the hospital was finally completed, it became a sanctuary of recovery rather than a place of death.

Rhazes went on to lead the hospital, implementing revolutionary ideas like keeping detailed patient records and separating those with contagious diseases.

He understood that the environment was the first line of defense in medicine.

Long before the invention of the microscope or the discovery of bacteria, a man with a piece of meat proved that the invisible world around us is the key to our survival.

He didn’t just build a hospital; he built a blueprint for how we design our world today.

True wisdom is the ability to see the extraordinary in the ordinary.

Ibn Abi Usaybi’a, History of Physicians / National Library of Medicine

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

by Alex Berensen

How many times does Zeynep Tufekci have to be wrong before we all agree to ignore her?

Zeynep Tufecki — the sociologist who became famous during Covid for telling New York Times readers no more and no less than what health bureaucrats thought they should know — just warned the world about hantavirus!

Years after Covid blew into our lives, the main thing standing between us and the next global pandemic is luck… [and] that luck may well be running out.

—

Sorry, my mistake.

That’s not Zeynep warning about hantavirus.

That’s her warning about bird flu in November 2024.

This is her warning about hantavirus!

Wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread… [or] the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too…

Wait, dang it, wrong again.

That wasn’t hantavirus either! That was Zeynep writing in August 2024 about mpox [nee monkeypox].

Hold on, I know Zeynep has screamed about hantavirus like Chicken Little after an-all night crack binge recently offered careful, measured public health advice.

Ahh, here it is:

There’s no question that another pandemic will strike, but no one knows when or which virus will be the cause…

If we’re lucky, this hantavirus outbreak will peter out… if we are unlucky? It should be unthinkable, but here we are.

—

(Just Zeynep being Zeynep, with apologies to Manny Ramirez)

Unthinkable, indeed.

Maybe let’s think about it instead.

To review: people generally are infected with the pulmonary variant of hantavirus after inhaling urine or feces from infected wild mice or rats. Most people do their best to avoid inhaling rat urine, so human hantavirus infections are pretty uncommon.

The first two patients in this outbreak are German birdwatchers who likely contracted it after they visited a landfill in Argentina. They then spread it to several other people aboard a cruise ship, more or less the ideal vector for passing viruses, respiratory or otherwise.

Hantavirus can spread from person-to-person, according to a 2020 New England Journal article that tracked an outbreak in Argentina in winter 2018-2019 which infected 34 people and killed 11. But doing so almost always requires prolonged and close contact with an infected person showing symptoms, often in social settings where people are likely to be talking loudly and with their mouths close together. Even hospital workers caring for patients during the Argentina outbreak faced almost no risk.

And the outbreak in Argentina ended quickly once authorities isolated people with hantavirus and asked their close contacts to quarantine.

In other words, hantavirus is not Covid or the flu. Though it can spread between people, its primary target is its rodent hosts and its mode of transmission zoonotic — from animals to humans. This is very typical for more lethal viruses like hantavirus, which burn through humans too fast to spread quickly.

Nor is hantavirus likely to have changed much since that outbreak; it is generally very slow-mutating.

In only the last two years, Zeynep Tufecki has sounded urgent warnings about three different viruses that collectively kill a couple of hundred people a year worldwide (mostly from hantavirus, mostly in Asia).

By way of comparison, about 150 people die every hour of every day from traffic accidents globally. Nor is there any evidence that hantavirus, mpox, or even bird flu are becoming or will become more dangerous in the wild.

Why? Why do Tufecki and all the other panickers in the legacy media and health bureaucracies keep doing this?

Three possibilities come to mind.

First, health bureaucrats need to stay employed. Your fear is their work.

Second, talking up these threats is a backdoor way to lionize vaccine companies — mRNA companies in particular, which supposedly can produce vaccines against emerging threats very quickly — and thus attack Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom Tufecki mocks in her hantavirus piece.

And third, all this nonsense distracts from the fact that the only really serious respiratory virus epidemic in 100 years almost certainly leaked from a lab and would never have happened had virologists not caused it.

Here are two predictions that are LEAD-PIPE LOCKS — as the guys advertising to gamblers on late-night sports-talk radio used to scream.

First, this hantavirus outbreak will burn out quickly, with a death toll in the double digits at most. (I’d say single, but I want to be conservative.)

Second, Zeynep will be back in 2027 or 2028, 2029 at the latest, to warn her faithful sheep audience at the New York Timee about pigeon flu or funkypox or Sars-Cov-6 or whatever.

Why wouldn’t she? Being wrong doesn’t matter.

Fear is her business. And business is good.

In another fascinating medical story, the NYT published a bizarre article, if you can call it that, headlined “Inside the Interstitium, the Human Body’s Hidden Pathways.” I’ll file this story under the category of medical innovation of the kind we haven’t seen in the last 25 years. In short, suddenly and unexpectedly, scientists discovered a third circulatory system in the human body that they had never noticed before.

What’s most exciting, from a nerdy alt-health perspective, is that the discovery could explain most of the difference between Western and Eastern medicine. For centuries, Western medicine has recognized two major fluid-circulation systems: blood and lymphatic. Turns out they missed one. (In response, the American Medical Association issued a statement saying they are “cautiously optimistic” that the human body does not contain any more surprises, and that they are “reasonably confident” they have now found all the important parts.)

Researchers studying tattoo ink migration in the body found that fluid‑filled “interstitial spaces” throughout the body’s connective tissue were not just isolated pockets as they’d supposed, but were in fact one continuous network. They are calling it “the interstitium.”

There are pretty significant implications. The existence of this major fluid pathway could explain how cancer cells spread after they metastasize. It could explain how inflammation in one part of the body causes inflammation in another. It could explain how acupuncture works.

The story wasn’t exactly “breaking.” The lead researchers first published their findings in 2018. It has taken eight years for a major media outlet to cover the story, which is actually pretty fast by the standards of heterodox medical discoveries. By comparison, the medical establishment spent roughly forty years confidently telling patients that stomach ulcers were caused by stress before finally admitting they were actually caused by bacteria. The researcher who proved it, Barry Marshall, had to drink a beaker of the bacteria to get anyone to pay attention.

The good news is that scientists studying the interstitium have not yet been required to drink anything.

Still, one detects a lingering whiff of resentment. The Times chose to break this potentially civilization-altering medical discovery not as a written article, but as an interactive multimedia scroll that requires approximately 17 minutes of clicking to read what could have been three pages of text. This is the journalistic equivalent of announcing the discovery of fire by interpretive dance.

Anyway, the discovery of the interstitium is potentially another major challenge to orthodox medicine’s historical certainties. Welcome to 2026’s accelerating medical revolution.

https://open.substack.com/pub/coffeeandcovid/p/revolution-and-renewal-tuesday-may

The world’s first “immortal” human cells, the HeLa cell line, was started by researcher George Otto Gey (and his lab assistant Mary Kubicek) back in 1951 at Johns Hopkins.

They took a tiny sample of cervical cancer cells from Henrietta Lacks, isolated cells from it (essentially starting from one or a few specific cells), put them in a culture dish/flask with nutrient-rich medium (no body needed), and — unlike every previous human cell attempt — they just kept dividing and staying alive indefinitely.

Those cells (and all their descendants) have now been thriving on nutrients alone for over 74 years and are still used in labs worldwide today.

Here’s a clear, straightforward link to the story:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks (the HeLa page has all the details on Gey’s work and how it started).

A shorter, easy-read version from the BBC:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zv6cydm

The Real Truth About Health Panel

Three leading voices in health and science sat down together, and the conversation is one every parent needs to hear.

Jeffrey Smith joins Dr. Stephanie Seneff, one of the world’s leading researchers on glyphosate and neurological health, and Dr. Michelle Perro, integrative pediatrician and author of Making Our Children Well, for a panel discussion that pulls back the curtain on what is actually happening in our food system right now. This is the kind of conversation that rarely makes it to mainstream media.

They cover the toxins showing up in school lunches. The quiet deregulation of gene editing technologies that are reshaping crops without safety testing or labeling. The biotech lobbying that keeps these practices in place. And most importantly — what parents can do about it.

This is not a conversation about distant policy debates. Whether you’re a parent, educator, or simply someone who cares about what goes into our food supply, this panel is well worth your time. It is about what children are eating today, and what that means for their health tomorrow.

Click to view the video: https://rumble.com/v75c6pe-biotech-deception-deregulation-and-school-lunch-risks.html