The flagship of Cox Enterprises, the Atlanta Journal Constitution is a conservative newspaper with an excellent reputation.
The Washingtonian was a sideline for the director of a private art collection founded by his wealthy parents. It was about the high life: the best restaurants, neighborhoods, and divorce lawyers. His widow tries to continue the fluffy tradition.
I have trouble evaluating a couple of dozen candidates on a ballot. How well do you think hundreds of secretaries and interns can compare 435 members of congress? If Johnson won, it shows he'd gotten the word out with his hilarious youtube video.
You can be led by a liberal inside-the-beltway magazine if you wish. I'll take my advice from a fine conservative newspaper.
Exactly. Who would have the audacity to run against such a man? In fact, three write-ins ganged up against him. Together, they got 0.1% of the vote. Only one voter in a thousand didn't want to endorse him.
One morning in January of 1980, I suddenly felt cold. I got into a mummy sleeping bag in a warm room. I couldn't get warm. For four days, I couldn't eat, a flight of stairs was exhausting, and i couldn't get warm except in the shower. It was a mystery. Until a few minutes before I got into the sleeping bag, my health had seemed excellent.
I finally went to the neighborhood doctor. He flew into a rage when I walked in. He said he knew I had hepatitis because my eyes were yellow. He told me to get to a hospital before I infected the whole town.
I didn't know why he would insinuate that I had an infectious disease that decent citizens didn't get, unless me presumed I was a substance abuser. Why of course! I was a Vietnam veteran. You can never live down a disgrace like that.
There I was, deathly ill, cold, and weak, and I couldn't even stay in bed. He was banishing me from his town without even telling me what was wrong. It was snowing. There were already 5" on the roads. The VA hospital was 20 miles away. The trip would take an hour or so, most of it standing at bus stops in the blowing snow.
I'd never really come back from Vietnam. Now I felt like I was there, and I was glad. "Easy come, easy go, it never was my country anyway."
I'd seen pieces of Midnight Cowboy on TV. I figured I'd end up like Dustin Hoffman, dead and cold on a bus seat. It was a long walk up the driveway in the snow to the hospital. They took blood. Except for immunizations, 57 stitches for 8 wounds in the Marines, and a cortisone shot after treatment for a broken elbow had been withheld 3 years in the Coast Guard, that was the only time I'd been stuck with a needle, but the neighborhood doc seemed to have me pegged as a drug addict.
I sat for hours in the waiting area, cold, weak, and nauseous. Then I was called in to see a young doctor. He told me I had mononucleosis. Nothing could be done for me, and I'd be sick for six months. He told me to go home.
I doubted I'd make it. With no treatment, I would have been better off if I'd never gotten out of bed, but I was glad I'd come. Now I knew what was killing me. More important, he knew I was a Vietnam veteran but hadn't talked to me like scum. I'd been back 12 years, and that was a novelty.
When I got back, I found I could eat a little. For weeks, I slept around the clock, unable to stay awake more than 15 minutes. Climbing stairs was exhausting. It was six weeks before I could step outside and seven months before I felt fairly well.
Many people don't even know they have mononucleosis, but it's fatal in
2% of males. Normally, swelling of the liver and spleen is a clinical symptom. In the unlucky few, the virus explodes when it hits the liver, and they die of necrosis.
I don't think my liver ever swelled. It must have been wiped out in a matter of minutes. I believe my liver made a lot of glycogen. It could keep me going all day without getting hungry or thirsty, but I think it was like gunpowder and the virus was a spark. Without a liver to make vital substances and detoxify, I could only lie there getting cold like a corpse.
I think two things saved me. Without a liver, I don't think I was making anything to sustain the virus, and a liver can regenerate. In 96 hours, I think I had enough liver function to keep me alive, but I didn't know it because I was following civilization's hypocritical rule to pursue medical attention. That could have killed me and was probably a big setback to my recovery. Who cares? The goal of medicine is money.
Sounds like you had a really bad case. The symptoms of mono are many and varied. Often times the spleen gets enlarged, which if very dangerous. High, sustained fever is another. Many people get bad cases of jaundice. As far as I know, there's no real treatment other than to address what symptoms you present with. I had the swollen spleen, the jaundice and ran 105 temp for 10 days. It was pretty bad. 2 months later, I was much better, but was told to tread lightly because I would be more likely than others to come down with it again.
I'm glad you survived because I know how tough it can be.
If I couldn't get warm in a mummy sleeping bag in a warm room, and I was very weak, and my eyes were yellow, acute liver failure sounds like a suitable diagnosis, although I wasn't told it.
It says ACL is the rapid onset of liver dysfunction in a person without known prior liver disease. It says "hyperacute" occurs within 7 days. Mine was more like 7 minutes.
When the local doctor saw my yellow eyes, his best bet might have been acetaminophen overdose. The second might have been reaction to medication. The third, too much to drink. The usual infectious agents are Hepatitis A and B, but A comes in epidemics from contaminated food and water.
That leaves B, transmitted by sharing needles. About 1% if Americans are infected. Few are treated because only 1% have the potential to cause ALF. There was a 1 in 10,000 chance that a person would have acute liver trouble from hepatitis B. The only reason to assume I had hepatitis B was an assumption that I was a junkie. I'd lived in the community 15 years, and nothing in my behavior suggested that. It had to be because I was a Vietnam veteran. (A few years later, Johnny Carson made the serious announcement that he thought it was time for "us" to forgive the Vietnam veterans.)
The VA doctor was more polite in the way he told me to go to hell, but he, too, treated me like Lazarus. He told me there was no treatment for mono, and I mustn't drink any beer for 6 months because my liver was shot. Did he assume I was a boozer because I was a Vietnam veteran?
Somewhere I've read that in 1% of cases, mono "explodes" when it hits the liver, and the victims are normally males. That's where I got the 2% figure for males. Now I've found an abstract of research done from 1998 to 2012.
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They said ALF is uncommon, and the fatality rate is high. They studied records of 1887 ALF cases between 1998 and 2012. All were 18-44 years old and 75% male. Of these, 4 (0.21%) were caused by the EB virus. All were treated with an antiviral agent. Two died and a third needed a liver transplant.
I think ALF may be much more common. It takes lab work to diagnose it. If the criteria are met, wouldn't the doctor be likely to say it was previously undiagnosed chronic failure? Similarly, if a doctor determined that it was acute, would he even look for a link to something seemingly as unlikely as the EB virus? Many report that the cause is unknown, or perhaps he could blame a medication that might cause ALF.
Five years earlier, my father had suffered a severe illness that started the same way: suddenly, he couldn't get warm. I didn't connect the two cases because they said mine was mono and his was Epstein-Barr. We had large glycogen stores in common. He might eat a light breakfast, then not slow down to eat until 11 PM.
I figure the virus affects most livers like a torpedo hitting a battleship. You might not even notice, or you might suffer inconvenience until the damage can be repaired. I figure a liver full of glycogen is like an aircraft carrier full of aviation fuel.
As the rector of a parish with 700 households, he got the best doctors. They put him in an iron lung. His breathing soon recovered, but his legs were weak and painful for the rest of his life. He'd become a priest on account of his legs. After college, his ambition was to break in with the Red Sox. His running and jumping were exceptional. Baseball mattered more than religion to the bishop. He saw him play and recruited him.
I was lucky to be a Vietnam veteran. The doctors directed me to the gutter, and I had a pleasant recovery. For a fan of Sad Sack, sleeping around the clock for a few weeks was ideal. Think of all the idiotic TV and conversation I avoided! The day I felt strong enough to step outside, I walked two miles to the library, caught up on periodicals, and walked back. I wasn't up to par, but I was doing fine.
I experienced no usual symptoms of mono. Maybe my immune system overcame the virus fast, if not fast enough for my liver. Vitamins A and D are vital to the immune system. An enlightened diet may have been my father's disadvantage.
My mother had quit serving liver when I was a teen because medical fashion said Vitamin A was dangerous. You were supposed to get it from beta carotene, but medical fashion said to serve vegetables raw or blanched because cooking destroyed vitamins. Unfortunately, the human gut can't get much nutrition from vegetables that aren't cooked soft. You were supposed to get beta carotene in vitamin pills, but medical fashion said not to eat fat at breakfast. Without fat to trigger the secretion of bile, beta carotene doesn't become vitamin A.
My father used to love reading shirtless in the sun, but a few years before his illness, his doctor ordered him to avoid the sun because that was the latest medical fashion. Medical fashion said to get vitamin D from vitamin pills, but the usual supplement in pills was more useful to rats than humans. The supplement usually found in milk was better, but medical fashion said not to drink much.
When I enlisted, I was glad to get liver again, and I found I loved vegetables cooked soft. I didn't avoid the sun. (In Vietnam, I got so much sun that I looked like a gingerbread boy with bleached, curly hair, not the dark, straight hair I'd had at home. I guess that's how I caught the eye of the princess.)
Unlike my enlightened parents, I ate dumb, old-fashioned food and followed a dumb, old-fashioned lifestyle. I figured we dumb people must have been doing something right because there were lot more of us alive than there were smart people.
Sixteen years after his time in the iron lung, his doctor ordered him to avoid dairy products because that was the latest medical fashion. A year later, he had terminal throat cancer. Fed up with doctors, he declined treatment because it was known to be useless except of course to bring in lots of insurance money.
My siblings smugly said it was his own fault for smoking a pipe, which he'd quit on doctor's orders 20 years earlier. That was medical fashion. The medical industry ignored the Surgeon General's 1964 report on smoking. It proved cigarettes killed but noted that pipe smokers lived 3 years longer than men who had never smoked.
His cancer was rare in America but common in China, where so many people had it and so many smoked that it could be determined that there was no statistical correlation. That kind of cancer is caused by the EB virus. In ordering my father to avoid any sun or milk, the doctors crippled his immune system. The common virus that had once put him in an iron lung, came back to kill him.
No, but I think I see the connection. He died at a hospital, surrounded by family and friends, but the cause was never released. ALF? It didn't occur to the doctor to check for the EB virus? His family didn't want the public to assume he was a junkie?
There seems to be a rash of medical reversals lately, concerning things like milk, sugar, salt, etc. I think that a lot of what we hear and read is nothing more than fear mongering, based on little real world facts. That being said, I simply don't think the government should be telling people what to eat and drink. It's not their business and when it comes to facts, they aren't exactly on the top of the believable list, imo.
The problem is the research industry. A scientist has to publish or perish, or, one like Albert Schweitzer may want to publish so the public will know what he has learned. He has to publish in certain periodicals. Many times, they won't publish unless they get the copyright.
For practical purposes, that can mean the research is unavailable to the public. Subscriptions are expensive. If you aren't part of an organization that can afford subscriptions, and you don't have access to certain libraries, you may be out of luck. Besides, a corporation or government who found certain information threatening, could probably bury the research by buying the copyright. At one time, I think copyrights expired in 17 years, but now they can be extended for generations.
Schweitzer published a paper saying he'd treated hundreds of thousands of Gabonese. Their primitive diet looked unhealthful to civilized people. Besides, it was a tobacco-growing region, and they smoked so much that he often treated them for nicotine poisoning. Cancer was endemic in industrial nations; I think colon cancer was the biggest; yet Schweitzer reported that he didn't see a single case of cancer for many years, until they began eating a western diet.
It has been about a century since he published it, but I think it's still unavailable to the public.
A British doctor began treating Inuits about 1880. They traded for firearms, ammunition, tobacco, and other items, but stubbornly refused to buy western food. Their diet included lots of blubber. For fifty years, he found no cancer and very little heart disease. IIRC, his first cancer case was in 1930, after they'd finally begun eating food from industrialized nations.
As of the 1890s, pathologists had been advancing medical science for a couple of centuries. They'd found infarctions in various organs, but never a heart. The foremost pathologist in North America published a paper on the first known heart infarction, in the 1890s, four years after corn oil came on the market.
I think cottonseed oil came on the market in 1898. The motive was profit: cottonseed was a byproduct, available for almost nothing. Hydrogenated cottonseed oil, Crisco, came on the market in 1912, IIRC. Suddenly there was an epidemic of the strange new disease, the heart attack. One contemporary writer noted that it happened to people who ate a lot of pastry.
Cancers increased, especially lung cancer, which had been rare. It happened to women, too, and they didn't smoke. About 1937, when the prices of butter and lard jumped, so did sales of vegetable oil and hydrogenated shortening.
In WWII, Japan cut us off from a traditional saturated cooking oil, coconut oil. Soy oil took its place. By the end of the war, vegetable oil was a major, profitable industry. The rates of heart attacks, cancer, and obesity became alarming and continued to grow.
Now that butter, lard, and coconut oil were again abundant, the vegetable oil industry set out to discredit them through propaganda from research not available to the public. They had a scientist try a diet of fish filets and blubber. I don't think he did it many days. He announced that his blood analysis showed it was unhealthful.
That was the start of the propaganda that everybody should eat vegetable oil because saturated fat caused heart attacks. The problem was malnutrition, like using a diet of bread and water to prove bread was harmful. Such propaganda worked in a culture where the public accepted knowing only half truths because of copyrights.
IIRC, it was about 1970 that Harvard Medical School determined that partially hydrogenated vegetable oil was deadly to the heart. I'm sure they weren't the first, but when Harvard spoke, people listened. Not in this case. The vegetable oil industry had lots of money for junk science and propaganda.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, founded by a food-industry lobbyist, kept spreading propaganda that the delicious traditional fats used by restaurants caused disease, while hydrogenated soy oil was good for you. Eventually, McDonalds caved in and switched from tallow to hydrogenated soy oil. When governments outlawed it, CSPI representatives said they were ignorant slobs who didn't know any better. The Wall Street Journal disagreed.
Obesity? According to the USDA, per capita consumption of all kinds of food except vegetable oil has remained pretty constant since 1940.
Men began smoking less about 1955. Statistics said an individual's chance of getting lung cancer declined fairly quickly after quitting, but the rate among men rose for nearly 40 years as cigarette consumption declined. It began declining about 1992. Now it's a lot lower, but I think women's rates have continued to climb. If people who had never smoked often got lung cancer, that was supposed to be because somebody else smoked.
The Adkins Diet, advocating more meat and animal fat, became popular in the early 1990s. Probably more men than women were swayed. Research has shown that saturated fat protects the lungs. As long as the public were kept ignorant, the vegetable oil industry could blame cigarettes.
Frankly, I find it tiresome that politicians seems to believe they know what's best for people concerning everything from soda to light bulbs. I think there is so much nonsense out there, that I've pretty much stopped paying attention to it.
What ever the government says is bad for you, immediately go stock up. If it is food in a few years new studies will show they were wrong. If it is a light bulb in a few years studies will show the new ones are poison.
The government has never been correct on any of its doom, death and destruction predictions.
After midnight, February 6, 1951, security guards caught him at Argonne National Laboratory. He'd gotten in by throwing his overcoat over the barbed wire at the top of the fence. He ran when he saw jeep headlights, but he fell and was caught. He was carrying an automatic pistol.
He claimed he'd climbed the fence because he thought it was the airport. In his Cadillac, they found a four-page manuscript that started, "I hereby affirm the following is a true and accurate account." It claimed his car had stalled, and he'd walked through the open gate of the laboratory by accident because there were no guards.
So his stories were not to be believed. Before committing espionage, he'd written an alibi to fool his audience. On the radio, he claimed he'd been set up.
In September, Russia exploded a 38 kiloton atom bomb. In October, they exploded a 41 kiloton bomb. Harvey faced indictment for espionage. J. Edgar Hoover contacted him to ask, "Will you be my friend."
Harvey said, "Yes!" He was a friend indeed, frequently making up and airing tales of Hoover's heroism. Like any close friend, Hoover had the espionage charges dropped. And there you have the rest of the story.
For decades, we'd shown our preference for McDonalds delicious tallow fries. The CSPI had deprived us of choice. It was bad enough to use junk science and propaganda to deprive us of our choice, but it was well established that the junk their propaganda forced McDonalds and other restaurants to serve unsuspecting diners was toxic. By outlawing it, New York trumped the "liberal" propaganda and restored to restaurants and customers the right to use the traditional fats they preferred.
AFAIK, the federal government didn't outlaw trans fatty acids. They required labeling so a cost-cutting food manufacturer couldn't use that stuff without letting customers know what they'd be eating.
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