January 11, 2012
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1 Yesterday at Safeway a little girl in front of me coughed into her arm. It seemed somewhat normal, but for some reason I thought of Stephen King's apocaplyptic novel The Stand.
2 Interestingly, I never read The Stand. It's just one of those books that seemingly everybody has read, or seen, and that simply has eluded me. It brings to mind Mark Twain's famous quote: "A classic is something that everybody wants to have read, and that nobody wants to read."
3 I am aware of the basic premise of The Stand, and I am aware that I probably watched a mini-series years ago, because images of emerging viruses seem to climb into my head whenever I think of it.
4 It's just that I have had an on-and-off cough for almost two months now. I naturally figured I could battle this, but it just keeps coming back. I have noticed at my school that it has gone from myself and one or two other people to what is looking alarmingly like an epidemic.
5 I also noticed a summer notification on the East Side Union High School District's home page of the need for students to get vaccinated for pertussis, or whooping cough. The deadline for that vaccination was September 16, 2011. After getting the cough, I looked up the symptoms, and they are exactly what everybody has been describing to me.
6 I began noticing that an incredible amount of people at my school seemed to have this, despite having gotten the vaccination.
7 I normally don't get vaccinations because a part of me seems to know that I have built up some sort of immunity to such things over the years. When you teach in schools with populations ranging from 1600 to nearly 3000 (we are close to 2700 right now.) you are going to be exposed to nearly anything that is airborne.
8 When you think about it, if you are nearly anywhere you are exposed to things on a daily basis. I used to blame my catching of a cold on anyone who would come to school obviously ill. They would breathe on me, and I would figure that I caught a cold because of them.
9 It took me a few years to figure out the absurdity of that. Just going to a Wal-Mart is going to expose you to hundreds of people.
10 But whatever this thing is seems to be happening to more and more people every day. On Friday I ran into three separate people who have this same exact symptoms: a hackingly aggressive cough that comes every few hours, and a slight bit of post nasal going on, no fevers or headaches. On-and-off sneezes, but very few. Whatever it is, the symptoms are dramatically different than a normal cold or flu, which can often put you away for weeks.
11 The bottom line is that it isn't going away. And the bottom line is that I'm seeing it everywhere. I don't mean to be paranoid, but I do mean to be alarmed.
12 This thing isn't normal. And when people have colds in the winter, they assume that everybody gets colds in the winter.
13 This thing isn't a cold. It is predominantly a cough that is aggressive every couple of hours, and then it seems to die down.
14 It will awaken you in the middle of the night; it will climb into your throat at any moment in the day. You have moments when you almost feel like you might pass out during an attack.
15 At first, I talked to one of our support staff about it. She told me that she knew other people on campus who also had it. She thought it was because they had changed the poison used for the landscaping around the school. They changed brands in the summer. Right after that she got this thing. So was it the new poison? At first I thought that it was.
16 I no longer believe that. I'm seeing people all around me who have this, but who aren't looking at it as something unusual.
17 I'm thinking that it is VERY unusual. It isn't a normal cold or flu.
18 You could walk around. You could talk to people. You have no fevers, and in many cases, you have no other symptoms except the cough.
19 Oh, it does affect the nose, but just a bit. The nose occasionally runs, but that comes and goes. The cough remains. Those are the symptoms. No fever, no headaches, nor super-stuffy noses. Just this horrific hack, and then a few nasal issues.
20 It is fairly easy for people who have it to get up and to go to work. If I had to take work off because of it, I would have had to have been out for two months. I figured that the thing is everywhere, so I decided that it shouldn't pull me away from my job.
21 I normally don't dedicate an entire DN to one particular subject, but the little girl in the store triggered all sorts of thoughts in my head. I decided to see how many DN readers have noticed this strange illness going on in their own worlds.
22 I recently read a report that the Fukushima earthquake/tsunami and subsequent nuclear meltdown last March have brought extraordinarily high levels of radiation to "air, water and milk," according to the report.
23 Congressman Gerry Connolly (D,11th District of Virginia) declared Fukushima "the single worst nuclear disaster in world history." A December 2011 edition of the International Journal of Health Services links the fallout of that disaster to over 14,000, and perhaps as high as 18,000 new deaths in the USA. Infants in particular are extremely vulnerable.
24 Here's the link:
http://www.radiation.org/press/pressrelease111219FukushimaReactorFallout.html
25 As most of you know, I am not an alarmist. But I do stay somewhat vigilant on news that isn't mainstream. Clearly somebody is keeping something from us. It worries me, because I have watched this thing emerge over the past few months.
26 In an inquiry by Congressman Connolly to the Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission Gregory Jazco, Connolly pinned Jazco into a corner when he asked if he and some of his fellow commissioners attempted to "bury some of the findings" regarding the nuclear fallout of Fukushima.
27 Jazco hedged, and equivocated that "We...uh...did have a disagreement on the release...uh of the..."
28 Connolly then interrupted, "You did," followed by Jazco's admission, "We did."
29 Scary stuff.
30 Here is a C-Span link to that conversation:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x74ber5uMU
31 I have spent the past couple of months reiterating that no news is good news.
32 I am a bit concerned about this entire story, as well as with the Nuclear Regulatory Commish's obvious cover-up.
33 I stayed awake late/early last night hunting this story down.
34 It began with my seeing a little girl in Safeway coughing into her arm. It ended with this story, which is a story with legs.
35 The entire thing is, as my old chum David Emory would put it, "food for thought, and grounds for further research."
36 Real news is sometimes bad news, but it is still the news, and it often goes unreported.
37 Let's keep an eye on this strange and mournful cough.
38 I think there's way more to it than meets the eye.
39 Peace.
~H~
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