Is an emerging disease forcing police to shoot hundreds of wild animals in a Pittsburgh suburb?

Public Domain by Linnaea Mallette

A local CBS affiliate, KDKA-TV, interviewed a resident about what she is witnessing:

“They seem to be sick, doesn’t seem to be rabies. The reason why they are saying they are sick is because they are not responding, moving or running away from them and they are listless. It’s like they are dying,” said Meyer.

Their video says there are hundreds of these sick animals, mainly raccoons and groundhogs, and that police say they have shot 500 so far.

However, the article that embeds the above video reports the numbers of affected animals as being dozens, rather than hundreds, and also reports that there is a theory about what is making the animals sick:

“Ross Township Police think it could be an oral rabies vaccine that state and county agencies have placed in wooded areas, either on foot, or dropped from low-flying planes or helicopters.”

 

Dogs have been sickened when they consume baited rabies vaccines intended for wildlife, so it is possible that wildlife also react badly to the antibiotics used to mark teeth and bones as evidence of exposure to the vaccines. But I don’t think the horror show happening in Pennsylvania has ever been reported before in connection with baited rabies vaccine, whether the numbers of sick animals are in the hundreds or in the dozens.  The antibiotics in the vaccine would have to have been very degraded to affect so many animals.

The virus in the vaccine being used is a live one engineered from a strain of vaccinia virus with a higher risk of causing encephalitis than the strain preferred for use in humans and pets, (at least I read that was the case in Europe.) Vaccinia is a pox virus that was cultured for use as a smallpox vaccine virus. It has escaped into the wild in the past, though, and evolved into something new. Within a few years of the discovery of vaccinia in mice in Brazil, escaped vaccinia was infecting cows and humans.

Something is making those poor animals very sick, so I hope the mystery is solved quickly.  Possibly rather than the rabies vaccine’s vaccinia virus evolving into something lethal, another disease like distemper is morphing to fill the ecological niche vacated by attempts to eradicate rabies in wildlife.  Nature abhors a vacuum.

‘Berkeley Boom’ related to suspicious carbon monoxide deaths?

Franz Marc, Fate of the Animals, 1913.

First, in late January it was a young couple and their cats – all found dead of CO poisoning.  Weeks later there is still no evidence that their heater or home office 3D printer and laser cutter caused the family’s deaths.

Now a second couple has been found dead of suspected carbon monoxide poisoning.  They lived about a mile from the Morash’s apartment.  The two clusters could be unrelated and autopsies might find another cause of death for the second couple, but right now something tragically unusual seems to be going on.

There have been clusters of CO deaths in the past caused by subterranean pockets of gases rising up into homes.  There was the Lackawanna County, PA case that still haunts victims 20 years later.  The federal EPA blamed PennDOT blasting activities for the CO release.  Here is a scientific paper on the general phenomenon.

The city of Berkeley has had some mysterious booming going on since early 2015 and continuing into this year.   And more sewer work is scheduled.  Could construction blasting of some sort be the cause of the booming sounds – or is there a natural geophysical cause?   Is any of this related to the CO deaths?  We can only hope somehow more deaths will be prevented.

Creepy clown sightings – 1896 airship mystery redux?

Gacy as ‘Pogo’ Wikipedia

Have you noticed the ‘creepy clown’ problem we are having in the United States?

‘Anti-clown spray’ helps calm Chesterfield students’ fears

Police issue warning, school goes on ‘lock out’ after reports of clowns on Long Island

It’s been going on for months and only gaining steam as it spreads from town to town, state to state, and region to region like some of sort of epidemic of mass hysteria.

Reports of Creepy Clown Sightings Across North Texas

The media is likely fueling the frenzy as practical jokers love attention.

Mystery airship Date 29 November 1896 San Francisco Call via Wikimedia Commons

The clown sighting phenomenon reminds me of the mystery airship sightings that occurred for months from 1896-1897 in the United States.   The sightings started in California and spread across the country.  The initial sightings may have been cases of mass hysteria provoked by some sort of real astronomical or geophysical phenomenon, but the copycat reports, hoaxes and fear continued feverishly for many months much like the clown sighting panic gripping the country currently.  What social psychology could be shared then and now?

In 1896, the country was still suffering from the Panic of 1893, and 1896 was an election year.  A Populist, William Jennings Bryan, was running against a more traditional candidate, William McKinley.  Sound familiar?  It certainly is. 

But things are different today, too.  There is a great deal more voter cynicism so that could explain the creepy clown symbolism, and why no innocent misinterpretation of natural phenomena launched the current hysteria.  This clown fakery was contrived from the beginning, just like the way modern campaigns seem contrived. 

The airship visions of 1896-1897 were fanciful, and though a few dark conspiracy theories circulated about them, at least they also stirred some wonder and anticipation regarding the future of air travel.   The omnipresent evil clowns of 2016 are totally negative, especially overlaid upon politics.  They conjure the symbolism of the mask of sanity hiding a darkly dangerous malevolence.   The worst creepy clowns can fool anyone for awhile.

Though some citizens see both of the major party candidates as clowns of sorts, I’m not sure that either is the horrifying clown we fear.  However, there is indeed a truly menacing masked trickster hiding in the shadows of our collective consciousness and we all know its name: The Future.

Get ready.

US military organization says pieces of rogue satellite Hitomi will enter Earth’s atmosphere on May 10th

Johnny Automatic Spinning a Top (Illustration from Physics for Entertainment by Yakov Isidorovich Perelman from archive.org)

Japan’s public broadcasting service, NHK World, reported the latest updates today on a satellite gone wild.  In late March Hitomi mysteriously began furiously spinning faster and faster, resulting in the loss of large components:

JAXA: Harmful rotation damaged satellite
…
JAXA analyzed data obtained before communications were lost. It found a glitch in the satellite’s posture control system.

JAXA engineers say the satellite’s system mis-analyzed the situation and thought that it was spinning when in fact it was almost completely stopped. Thus the satellite applied force to stop the supposed spinning, as programed.

The engineers say that that force caused harmful rotation of the satellite.

They say other errors in the preset data in the posture control system added to the problem, leading to a faster rotation of the satellite and breakup of the solar panels as well as other equipment.
….
A US military organization monitoring space debris predicts 2 objects, likely from the satellite, will enter the Earth’s atmosphere by May 10th. JAXA says they will burn out in the air and have no effect on the ground.

Worried?  I’m not.  I have the utmost confidence that we will be warned of any impending dangers since our Johnny Automatics are clearly on top of what is going on in the satellite realm per Breakingdefense.com :

By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr. on December 02, 2015 at 4:00 AM

WASHINGTON: Russia and China are investing heavily in cyber and electronic warfare, but they’re not shutting down US satellite downlinks yet. Instead, we have met the enemy and he is us — we think.

“In 2015 thus far, we have had 261 cases where we have been jammed from getting information from our satellites down to the ground segment,” said Gen. John Hyten, head of Air Force Space Command, at the Association of Old Crows electronic warfare conference.

That’s 23 times a month. “How many were caused by an adversary?” Hyten asked. “I really don’t know. My guess is zero.”

The real cause is “almost always self-jamming” where our own transmissions, radar or radio, unwittingly interfere, Hyten told reporters after his public remarks.

“The moral of that story is the electromagnetic spectrum is unbelievably complicated and the smallest mistake can create huge strategic impacts,” Hyten said, “so you have to be able to monitor the electromagnetic spectrum, from the most tactical unit all the way up to the most strategic [level].”

Self-jamming shows we don’t have enough awareness of what our own forces are doing in the spectrum, let alone of what an adversary might do, Hyten said. “We have not had a focus on it,” he admitted, but the military is now working to build that awareness.

“We’ve just been assuming that the RF [radio frequency] spectrum is a benign environment and nobody’s going to threaten us,” Hyten told the AOC gathering…”

Pulsating, brain-like colonies of tiny animals are ‘returning home’ to North American freshwater lakes…to do what?

Image source: Jan Šinko via the Encyclopedia of Life – Public Domain

Ben Jordan, KAKE Marion County, Kansas — Visitors of Marion County Lake are wondering about the strange “blobs” that keep popping up in the water…

They are strange because they look like brains yet can reach a size much larger than a human brain. One witness, Paul Porter, said, “It looked like it was pulsating a little bit but it could have been my imagination.”

It wasn’t his imagination. The brain-like colonies can actually move on their own by coordinated pulsing of the individual animals the comprise the colonies.

Colonies of a fresh water species are coming home according to scientists, and they are a sign of biological unraveling, I think. Search for reports yourself. What I see is that sightings are increasing, the ‘brains’ are growing larger, and they can ‘biofoul’ and cripple the human world’s most powerful sea vessels. Interesting to me is that they like our warming waters.

Some wildlife biologists and zoologists keep reassuring the public that these are harmless invasions, nothing to worry about. They even spin the colonies into a sign of water health because they eat algae.

Maybe they never heard about Dogger Bank itch. What the real experts in this field know is probably limited due to a lack of funding. They actually have to try to crowd-source funds to attend conferences.

Read up on freshwater bryozoans and see how little we know about a creature that may be that image out of Spiritus Mundi with a vast, pitiless gaze
slouching towards us all. Might be time for ‘the people’ to fund some research. Nobody else will do this for you.

Alabama Bound?: Abandonment of the Historical Bird Rookery at Seahorse Key, Florida

“If they (the birds) are in trouble, we know we’ll soon be in trouble” – Roger Tory Peterson, American naturalist, ornithologist, artist, and educator

And if the birds are in trouble, where would they go? Would coastal shorebirds fleeing Seahorse Key, an island that should have been their refuge in the Gulf of Mexico, choose to fly over 200 miles away and dry-dock themselves in in southern Alabama? Maybe they would if they wanted to tell us about their troubles.
What better place to get attention than in the backyard of a newspaper columnist? At least some of the birds appear to be there now, and they are scaring both the newspaper columnist and his dog. All creatures experience instinctual fear when they sense that the natural world is going catawampus.

Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)
Marlon Brando

Now it is up to Mr. Mooty to find out why those American white ibises are hiding in his backyard scaring him and his dog. He just might find out that both Seahorse Key and consequently the white ibises are not what they seem.

Then perhaps he will understand why tens of thousands of birds fled what was inside of their own eggs.

Mike O’Dell runs tours out of the little marina in nearby Cedar Key. He said on a Tuesday in May he led a group out to view thousands of birds crowding the shores of the key. On Wednesday, there was nothing. “It’s just that drastic,” O’Dell said. “There were none. It’s like a different world.”

Thousands of Birds Abandon Eggs, Nests on Florida Island

It’s not like a different world – it is a different world.  Welcome!

Ibis photo credit: by User:Terry Foote. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Anti-NMDAR encephalitis: The cow egg, the chicken egg, the adjuvant and the needle?

Tohoku J Exp Med. 2015;235(3):223-31. doi: 10.1620/tjem.235.223.
Tachibana N1, Kinoshita M, Kametani F, Tanaka K, Une Y, Komatsu Y, Kobayashi Y, Ikeda S.
Author information 1Department of Neurology, Okaya City Hospital.

Expression of N-Methyl-D-Aspartate Receptor Subunits in the Bovine Ovum: Ova as a Potential Source of Autoantigens Causing Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis

Human egg cell by KDS444 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Published online March 17, 2015

Autoimmune synaptic encephalitis is characterized by the presence of autoantibodies against synaptic constituent receptors and manifests as neurological and psychiatric disorders. Anti-N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR) encephalitis is such an autoimmune disorder that predominantly affects young women. It is associated with antibodies against the extracellular region of the NR1 subunit of postsynaptic NMDAR. Each NMDAR functions as a heterotetrameric complex that is composed of four subunits, including NR1 and NR2A, NR2B, or NR2C. Importantly, ovarian teratoma is a typical complication of anti-NMDAR encephalitis in female patients and may contain antigenic neural tissue; however, antigenic sites remain unknown in female patients without ovarian teratoma. The purpose of this study was to investigate the expression of NMDARs in the ovum. We detected NR1 and NR2B immunoreactivity in protein fractions extracted from the bovine ovary and ova by SDS-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and immunoblotting analysis. Immunoprecipitates digested with trypsin were analyzed by reverse phase liquid chromatography coupled to tandem mass spectrometry. We obtained the following five peptides: SPFGRFK and KNLQDR, which are consistent with partial sequences of human NR1, and GVEDALVSLK, QPTVAGAPK, and NEVMSSK, which correspond to those of NR2A, NR2B and NR2C, respectively. Immunocytochemical analysis revealed that the bovine ovum was stained with the immunoglobulin G purified from the serum of a patient with anti-NMDAR encephalitis. Taken together, we propose that the normal ovum expresses NMDARs that have strong affinity for the disease-specific IgG. The presence of NMDARs in ova may help explain why young females without ovarian teratomas are also affected by anti-NMDAR encephalitis.

Keywords: glutamate receptor, limbic encephalitis, N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor, oocyte, ovarian teratoma

The full text of this article is available at the link in the title.  This seems like very important research and it raises the question: if there are self-attacks on normal ova happening in the more mysterious cases of anti-NMDAR encephalitis, why is this happening?  Anti-NMDAR encephalitis is suspected of being the most common type of encephalitis in people under the age of 30 now.

I wonder if chicken egg protein also expresses NMDARs?

Ovalbumin content of influenza vaccines

Allergic reactions to measles (rubeola) vaccine in patients hypersensitive to egg protein

Source: U.S. Farm Security Administration.

Quantitation of Residual Host Protein in Chicken Embryo-Derived Vaccines by Radial Immunodiffusion

To avoid the problems of allergic sensitization against egg protein or of  eliciting immediate or delayed hypersensitivity in a previously sensitized host…

Development of recombinant ovalbumin-luteinizing hormone releasing hormone as a potential sterilization vaccine

Newly emerged disease in Arctic Ringed Seals mystifies scientists

Credit: NOAA library

Alaskadispatch.com has a disturbing report here about a horrible undiagnosed illness plaguing ringed seals in Alaska. A virus is suspected, but after sending samples to laboratories around the country, no virus or other disease causing organism has been identified yet.

Experts are very concerned about this unknown pathogen. The photos of what is does to seals are frightening and one expert worries about the disease being transmitted to other species:

Enoch Shiedt, natural resource coordinator for the Maniilaq Association in Kotzebue, said he’s received a few reports of sluggish seals hauled out on beaches this summer. But he hasn’t been able to confirm the sightings. One sighting occurred on the Kotzebue waterfront several weeks ago, but by the time he arrived, the seal had been rolled back into the water and was gone. He’s concerned the illness will spread up the food chain, affecting other animals and hunters near Kotzebue Sound.

“I’m scared they might pass it on one way or another and the whole ocean could be affected,” Shiedt said.

I wonder if the unprecedented dumping of radioactive waste from the Fukushima disaster has provoked the evolution of a super pathogen, or if the melting Arctic ice cap has unearthed a virulent ancient pathogen that we have no immunity for anymore.

Whatever the cause, the ecology of the Arctic appears to be rapidly unraveling. Just this past August a previously unknown fungus washed up on the shores of Kivalina, Alaska. It was so divergent from any marine life form known to NOAA scientists that they initially thought the huge, gooey, bright orange fungal spores were crustacean eggs.

There is still no explanation for how this unique fungus evolved, but there are research papers done at Chernobyl that describe radiation induced evolution of fungi there with results like that found in the novel orange fungal bloom in Kivalina:

Characteristics of Extremophylic Fungi from Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant
Chernobyl’s radioactive impact on flora.
Some fungi eat radiation to fuel their growth, a new study suggests

Besides the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster contamination of the ocean, in October it was announced that this year an unprecedented loss of ozone had been witnessed over the Arctic. One of the benefits of ozone is protection from UV radiation.

So we have several synergistic factors operating in the Arctic that could work together to create a new super pathogen, or to unleash an ancient one that has slumbered in a state of dormancy under the melting ice cap.

Teratomas birth defects increased by exposure to low level radiation

It turns out that the International Atomic Energy Agency and other United Nations ‘experts’ are wrong in their safety estimates of harm induced to pregnant women by low level radiation according to this report by Rueters.

By Amy Norton

NEW YORK | Wed Mar 24, 2010 3:43pm EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Rates of certain birth defects appear higher than normal in one of the Ukraine regions most affected by the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, according to a new study.

The findings, reported in the journal Pediatrics, stand in contrast to a 2005 U.N. report stating that there is no evidence of an increased risk of birth defects or other reproductive effects in areas contaminated by radiation from the Chernobyl accident.

The results point to a need for continuing research into birth defects in regions affected by chronic low-dose radiation from Chernobyl, according to researcher Dr. Wladimir Wertelecki of the University of Southern Alabama in Mobile.

“There has been a tendency to imply that the question is closed as far as the prenatal effects (of Chernobyl),” Wertelecki said in an interview.

The 2005 position statement from the International Atomic Energy Agency and other U.N. bodies may have had a “chilling effect” on research into congenital defects in Chernobyl-affected areas, Wertelecki notes in his report.

The current findings, he said, “suggest that we should re-evaluate that position.”…” Continued here.

Teratomas have been increasing ever since the advent of the nuclear age. These tumors are linked to at least half of the incidences of a devastating autoimmune neurological illness called anti-NMDA receptor encephalitis that is becoming an all too common disease worldwide.

Post is not intended as professional advice of any kind.

Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis following Guillain-Barré Syndrome

Case Reports in Neurology
Vol. 3, No. 1, 2011
Published: January 2011
A Young Man with Anti-NMDAR Encephalitis following Guillain-Barré Syndrome
Kana Tojo
Department of Medicine (Neurology and Rheumatology)Shinshu University School of Medicine (Japan)