The curse of Ebola and thank God for Fags…
Ebola is coming whooo! Sky news is beside itself with excitement – a new nightmare on Sky1; Cameron is holding Cobra meetings to see if Britain is ready for this new challenge, the World Health organisation is warning against consuming raw bushmeat and ‘having sex or coming into contact with’ infected bats. Raw bushmeat is not much of a problem in country which prefers horse meatballs for dinner – and no one is explaining how you tell if the fruit bat you are making amorous eyes at is infected or not.
As if we didn’t have enough to worry about – but relax, help is at hand.
God created Fags for a reason…
A drug has been discovered to combat Ebola, so experimental that it is not yet licensed for use in the US. The two American aid workers sadly infected with Ebola, Nancy Writebol and Dr. Kent Brantly, were fortuitously both in Liberia; so since the U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn’t have any authority over the use of the drug outside of the USA, supplies were flown from Kentucky where it is made, to Liberia, and both aid workers are now being treated with it.
Dr Kent Brantly is now in hospital in Atlanta – Nancy Writebol is expected to follow him shortly. The FDA won’t say whether they will still be treated with the ‘Zmapp’ drug once inside the US – it would currently be against the law. It would take a hard heart to cease treatment now. They are both doing well as of today.
Where do Fags come into it, you say?
Well, if it wasn’t for those of us who have generously smoked our way through thousands of fags for six hundred odd years, the tobacco plant would have been eradicated as a weed years ago.
As it is, it is the Reynolds Tobacco plant’s subsidiary, while looking for new uses for the tobacco plant, who discovered ‘Zmapp’ and is extracting it from tobacco leaves…
The anti-smoking brigade will no doubt say that it is their campaign that has forced the company to look for new uses for the plant – but if they had had their way the crop would have been treated to a flame thrower centuries ago…..
I somehow doubt Reynolds will be allowed any good publicity out of this.
- Pericles
August 5, 2014 at 3:26 pm -
I suspect the Centers for Disease Control (Usually) — a new handle to which recent events entitle them — would simply tell the F.D.A. to take a running jump. If they want to conduct a medical experiment, they’ll do so, thank you very much.
ΠΞ
- Dioclese
August 5, 2014 at 3:36 pm -
Typical American hypocrisy
- never60
August 6, 2014 at 1:57 pm -
absolutely. and it makes me feel so thankful to live in a country that is so much more honourable – that would never, ever condone such practices.
- never60
- Ho Hum
August 5, 2014 at 4:05 pm -
You really had me worried there, with that headline
I had thought that you, who like most of us here were brought up in an altogether different age, were going to tell us that, as one of the first lines of defence this side of the Channel, we had had a rush of volunteers from the good city of Brighton, priding themselves as to their willingness to be guinea pigs for us all, and hopefully immunising themselves from the plague that might be unleashed.
Thank goodness that that is not what you meant
- Mudplugger
August 5, 2014 at 4:45 pm -
Never knew there was such a concentration of smokers in Brighton – all puffing away merrily, I assume.
- Mudplugger
- Mrs Grimble
August 5, 2014 at 5:53 pm -
From what I’ve been reading, only one dose of ZMapp is needed for treatment – it’s a cocktail of ready-made antibodies against the virus. So the two infected Americans won’t need any more of it, and indeed are making a good recovery. In any case, the FDA allows the use of non-approved drugs in exceptional circumstances, and appear to have done so in this case.
Incidentally, we’re not talking about ordinary tobacco plants here, but a species called Nicotiana bethamiana that’s being used in several other drug research programs. - The Blocked Dwarf
August 5, 2014 at 6:32 pm -
“‘There is a plant that looks like a box-thorn, it has prickles like a dogrose, and will prick one who plucks it. But if you can possess this plant, you’ll be again as you were in your youth’”-Epic of Gilgamesh (NO not the one from the Smurfs, that was “Gargamel”!)
I have always wondered if the ‘Plant of Eternal Youth’ was infact a real plant , a form of tobacco now long extinct…
There is evidence in the bible that the ‘Tree of Life’ was infact a plant or a bush and the Native Americans tell how the Mother Goddess gave humanity tobacco.Oh and ‘like boxthorn’ would suggest it was a member of Solanaceae , as are Goji……*cover your ears, Children* and tobacco.
- Mrs Grimble
August 5, 2014 at 7:56 pm -
“But if you can possess this plant, you’ll be again as you were in your youth”
So, a Sumerian version of Viagra, then? (OK, I’ve already got me coat…) - never60
August 6, 2014 at 2:13 pm -
trouble is/was, to possess the plant and live to tell the tale proved impossible. a lesson for us all?
- Mrs Grimble
- The Slog
August 5, 2014 at 8:58 pm -
It’s enough to make one go back to Capstan Full Strength, sugar in tea, full-cream milk, two brandies after lunch, Atlas Mountains dope, and deep fried Mars bar with large chips plus full salt and vinegar.
In Woody Allen’s great Movie Sleeper, he wakes up in the future to find that McDonalds is a global cure-all. This is life imitating art. Hurrah.- Make It Stop
August 6, 2014 at 3:15 pm -
Aaah Capstan Full Strength! I used to buy my Dad a packet as a Christmas stocking filler when I was but a child (yes, a real child, alone buying fags for her Dad – cue social services insisting I sue said – now late Dad) The Capstans were a treat for him, he usually smoked Woodbines with no filter. The Woodbines were the fags he taught me to smoke with. Proper Dad that. He also taught me how to use a lathe, make lightening in a vacuum chamber and to impress my ten year old friends with a display of phosphorus taken out of the jar with a pair of tongs. All essential skills in our home in the 1960s
- Make It Stop
- Rightwinggit
August 5, 2014 at 9:06 pm -
In sleeper: “Have a cigarette, it’s good for you!”
- nisakiman
August 5, 2014 at 9:45 pm -
I followed a link to a blog yesterday which was somewhat sceptical of the Ebola ‘epidemic’:
Even according to WHO figures, the spread of Ebola in Africa is as nothing as compared to the amount of people who die in the West of ordinary common-or-garden influenza every year. You’re looking at a total of 456 deaths overall, for Ebola, against an annual figure of deaths from influenza of 250,000 and 500,000. Both these figures come from WHO health reports, and do remember the Ebola figure of 458 is overall, whereas the flu figures are yearly.
I haven’t checked as to the veracity of those figures, but I’m inclined to believe them. But what interested me more was another assertion:
Kenema Government Hospital in Sierra Leone, which has been at the eye of the Ebola storm, houses a US biosecurity level 2 bioweapons research lab with links to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Soros Foundation. There, US biodefence scientists have been working on viral fevers such as Ebola for decades.
……………….
It’s a matter of public record that this biowarfare lab has been working on developing various strains of Ebola for more than 40 years, which begs the question, how on earth would they expect to control it in a battleground situation? I think the answer to that is they couldn’t, and that weaponised Ebola is not and was never intended to be used just on the enemies’ troops, but on the ordinary civilians too. The Geneva Convention must be turning in its grave.
According to American Kabuki, who has researched this subject more deeply, this Soros/Gates lab has, so far, been unable to develop a strain of Ebola that will be virulent enough, and certainly not one which will spread in cooler climes than are found in Africa.
He says:
“They’ve been trying to weaponize Ebola for over 40 years. They can’t do it because the Mayinga strain of Ebola (the only known strain to be contagious through aerosol transmission) kills people too quickly for it to work as a broad spread bio weapon.Tinfoil hattery? Dunno, but it’s food for thought.
And perhaps, despite the fact that they’re using a different strain of tobacco to produce the antidote, it is a chemical common to all the Nicotiana variations that in fact acts as the antidote. And perhaps that’s why TPTB are so frantically trying to get us all to give up smoking, because selective eugenics won’t work if all the wrong people are resistant (and by extension, all the ‘right’ people aren’t resistant) to the disease they would like to unleash on us to effect their idea of targeted population control.
Blimey! I’m glad I bought that roll of extra-thick commercial tinfoil – that should protect me from the cosmic rays those lizards on the moon keep aiming at my head…
- GildasTheMonk
August 6, 2014 at 1:46 pm -
Nasty stuff, Ebola, producing a syndrome known in the medical world as Disseminated Intravascular Coagulation, DIC, colloquially referred to as Death is Coming.
The normal repair functions of the blood run out of control and you bleed to death internally; in some respects you melt.
I wrote all about the science for my articles on the Black Death. Anyone want a reprise? Don’t all shout at once….- Make It Stop
August 6, 2014 at 2:59 pm -
Gildas, I really enjoyed your Black Death pieces. I have spread the links to them to a few vet friends, who found them interesting too.
- GildasTheMonk
August 6, 2014 at 3:06 pm -
Thanks, MiT – that’s nice to know!
- GildasTheMonk
- Make It Stop
- never60
August 6, 2014 at 2:08 pm -
you make it sound like a natural, but uncontrollable, form of warfarin. now, I wonder……….
- Dioclese
August 7, 2014 at 6:26 pm -
I love the way that in order to control the spread of the virus, they effectively seal off the country – until an American catches it and then they fly not just one, but two cases home in a private jet. I suppose we should be grateful that they didn’t just use a public airliner. Let’s face, the yanks are just daft to do that.
And on the subject of weaponising Ebola, let’s not forget that wonderful conspiracy theory a few years back that HIV escaped from a US BioWeapons establishment.
Those who remember Terry Nation’s wonderful TV series ‘Survivors’ take note. (Mind you, they should have stopped after series 1 and never done the remake, but I digress!)
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