RIGHT SPEAK: Deadly Fungal Outbreaks Are On the Rise Since Covid; Australian COVID Inquiry Promotes “let it rip,” Denounces Public Health Measures, and other C-Virus related stories

Deadly Fungal Outbreaks Are on the Rise Since Covid:

A largely unnoticed surge of rare but deadly fungi is accelerating around the world, helped by the Covid-19 pandemic and a warming planet that appears to be training them to survive at higher and higher temperatures.

While the pandemic’s grisly scenes of packed intensive care units and rows of patients on intubators have largely faded from public view, its legacy in the form of driving fungal spread is only now being understood by doctors and scientists.

At the same time, climate change may have been helping these fungi adapt and evolve to heat, amounting to a war of attrition against the natural defence that the body’s 37C set point provides.

Mild fungi are everywhere, causing irritations like a black toenail or dandruff. Serious ones, like Candida auris that clings to the surface of medical equipment in hospitals and thrives in chronically ill people with weak immune systems, are far less common but kill as many as half of those infected.

A new data analysis shows that C. auris has emerged across about 20 geographies since the pandemic started, and is now on every continent except Antartica. Severe illness-causing fungal outbreaks have also start occurring among young, healthy people, signaling the pathogens’ growing strength.

While the number of recorded cases of these deadly fungi are still small compared to other diseases, their pace of spread in the last few years is worrying researchers, as is the fact that mutations are making them more drug-resistant than ever before. Millions of cases also go unrecorded as the pathogens play an indirect role in killing people with illnesses from cancer to HIV.

First discovered from the ear canal of a patient in Japan in 2009, C. auris has since colonized intensive care units across the world. In the US, 2,377 people were sicked by the fungus in 2022, the latest year for which comprehensive data is available, more than seven times the number in 2018 when the infection became a notifiable disease.

In China, 28 cases were reported from hospitals in 2018, jumping to 182 in 2023. Incidences in Europe also nearly tripled between 2018 to 2021.

“People are aware of fungi on their toenails, but they don’t really think of fungi as increasingly causing life-threatening human diseases,” said Sarah Gurr, a professor specializing in fungal infections at University of Exeter. “The world is just waking up to the need to diagnose fungal infections in humans accurately and more quickly.” --->READ MORE HERE

AP Photo/Mark Baker

Australian COVID inquiry promotes “let it rip,” denounces public health measures:

The report of a government commissioned inquiry into Australia’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic was released on Tuesday.

The inquiry spanned a year. The report runs to 892 pages. It is, however, completely worthless from an analytical or scientific standpoint, adding nothing to an understanding of pandemics and public health in general, or the experience of COVID-19 in particular.

Instead, the report is a crude promotion of the profit-driven “let it rip” policies that persist to this day. It is noteworthy only as yet another marker of the assault on public health and the rights of the population that this homicidal program has entailed.

That conclusion was preordained. When the Labor government initiated the inquiry in September last year, they instigated a “public discussion” that focussed solely on the adversity associated with public health measures, such as social distancing, lockdowns and school closures. In one interview, for instance, Labor’s Health Minister Mark Butler referred to these measures, declaring: “We don’t want to do that next time. We don’t want to do that in the next pandemic.”

The government selected a three-person panel that was always going to arrive at the conclusion Butler had already outlined. Robyn Kruk, who has been in the upper echelons of the public sector bureaucracy, working with pro-business governments for decades, was its chair. Economist Dr Angela Jackson was on the panel. The only individual of the three with medical expertise was Professor Catherine Bennett, Deakin University chair of epidemiology.

Throughout the pandemic, Bennett was one of the epidemiologists who most aggressively supported the lifting of public health measures and insisted that the population would have to “live with the virus.” Under conditions where many principled epidemiologists and doctors sharply denounced this policy, the selection of Bennett as the sole public health expert on the panel made a mockery of its purported independence. --->READ MORE HERE