IF you are not a daily recipient of the Global Health Now (GHN) newsletter, I strongly advise against starting. I do these things so you don’t have to. After all, I am not averse to a bit of ‘global health’ provided it is evidence-based, equitable, necessary and does not require me to start wiping my bottom with leaves.
The concept of global health now seems to be a platform for highlighting inequities we can do little about, guilt induction among the populations of Western countries and most recently conveying panic generated in Geneva at the WHO about relatively mild diseases to the rest of the world. In fact, global health is the superhighway along which the panic-laden WHO buses travel. No sooner has one bus gone (Covid-19) than another one (monkeypox) comes along.
It took them longer than I expected but they have got there now. Recent issues of GHN have been highlighting similarities between Covid-19 and monkeypox. Recently GHN reported how the ‘US monkeypox outbreak is marked by vaccine disparities’. Apparently ‘black people make up a third of US monkeypox cases but have received 10 per cent of vaccine doses’; this is being ascribed to ‘distrust of the medical establishment’.
That would be the medical establishment which recommended locking them down for nearly two years, wearing disgusting face masks which everyone knew did not work, and enforcing vaccine mandates and vaccine passports for a vaccine which was not necessary, did not work and is known to be potentially harmful. All power to the elbows of black Americans who have seen the light over the medical establishment ahead of the rest of the population.
Meanwhile, monkeypox has been ‘jostling’ the experts’ understanding of the disease. Once thought not to be transmitted asymptomatically, they now think that it can be. Bet you never saw that one coming. In further news, monkeypox patients are ‘exhibiting a plethora of symptoms not previously linked to the disease’ including ‘lesions in the throat or rectum’; but we have been here before in these pages.
A worrying symptom associated with monkeypox has been uncovered: it is ‘inflammation of the heart’, also referred to as myocarditis or heart muscle inflammation, which I am sure is receiving maximum attention and being played for all it is worth in an effort to get people lined up for jabs. It is worth noting that the above is based on a single case report and it ‘highlights the possibility of cardiac manifestations in patients with monkeypox infection’.
Contrast that with the known and widespread risk of myocarditis among young males following Covid-19 vaccines, the demonstrable increase in deaths among professional footballers (compulsorily vaccinated) on the field of play and the concomitant reaction described in the American Heart Association’s flagship journal Circulation as ‘rare and mild’.
Here is what that rare and mild condition can do to you: first ‘reduce the heart’s ability to pump blood. Myocarditis can cause chest pain, shortness of breath, and rapid or irregular heart rhythms (arrhythmias)’; then ‘if left untreated, myocarditis may lead to symptoms of heart failure, where your heart has trouble pumping blood the way it should. In rare cases, it leads to other problems, such as cardiomyopathy’. But not to worry, apparently ‘many people with myocarditis go on to recover completely’ but ‘the condition can also cause permanent damage to the heart muscle. This can lead to complications like arrhythmia and heart failure’. And it should only lay you low for six weeks; who wouldn’t want some of that?
If ever there was evidence for the social construction of diseases, we now have it in abundance. Just as with the ‘social construction of reality’ (Berger & Luckman if you can stand to read it) whereby nothing is real until it is experienced, and the reality depends on who is experiencing it, we have the same with these infections. The symptoms are clearly context-dependent and depending on what the context of the sufferer is, for example of myocarditis, they may or may not be taken seriously.
