–TB. It’s back. It’s worse. Your vaccination may not save you. Who’s doing anything about it?

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Mitchell’s laws:
●The more federal budgets are cut and taxes increased, the weaker an economy becomes.
●Austerity is the government’s method for widening the gap between rich and poor, which ultimately leads to civil disorder.
●Until the 99% understand the need for federal deficits, the upper 1% will rule.
●To survive long term, a monetarily non-sovereign government must have a positive balance of payments.
●Those, who do not understand the differences between Monetary Sovereignty and monetary non-sovereignty, do not understand economics.
●The penalty for ignorance is slavery.
●Everything in economics devolves to motive.
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The July, 2013 issue of Scientific American contains an article about tuberculosis. Remember TB? Vaccination had it licked, and anyway, it only killed slum-dwellers, who didn’t get their shots, thus deserving their fate.

So why worry?

Well TB is back; it’s worse; it’s in a person near you; and even if you’ve been vaccinated, you could catch it.

Scientific American
New Genetic Insights Show How Tuberculosis May Be Evolving to Become More Dangerous
By Sally Lehrman

Today most people in the richer parts of the world think of tuberculosis, as a ghost of history. Throughout ancient times the tenacious bacterial infection consumed the bodies of untold millions, rich and poor, filling their lungs with bloody sputum.

As TB spread in the centuries that followed, it continued to attack across economic and class lines, affecting both the famous and the obscure.

Contrary to popular wisdom, rich people can get TB, but you need a weakened immune system. Right?

Wrong. It’s worse than that. Much worse.

By the early 20th century humanity had begun fighting back with public health campaigns, improved living standards, and eventually antibiotics and a modestly effective vaccine.

Although in 2011 TB sickened nearly nine million people, killing 1.4 million of them, mostly in the poorer regions of the globe, the mortality rate has nonetheless fallen by more than a third since 1990. Things are looking up—or so it may seem.

And here comes the amazing, counter-intuitive part. Having been vaccinated and having a strong immune system, may actually be a negative:

About a third of the global population harbors a latent TB infection until stress or another illness reactivates the bugs, setting transmission to other individuals in motion.

So, to be safe, make sure you don’t have stress or another illness, and don’t come near that 1/3 of the world’s population. Should be easy, shouldn’t it?

New genetic research, however, suggests that the bacterium responsible for TB could be poised to emerge stronger and more deadly than ever before — and not just because some strains have become resistant to treatment with the standard set of antibiotics.

Vaccines are designed to boost the body’s immune response. Yet for TB, this enhancement could perversely enhance transmission. A family of bacteria that has evolved to boost the immune response might be helped, not hurt, by a vaccine that has further activated the immune system.

Peter Small, now a senior program officer at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, explains: Once inside the body, the TB germ actually does not do very much. It is the body’s own attempts to rid itself of the infection that causes the most damage.

Evolutionary biologist Paul W. Ewald of the University of Louisville, backs up Small’s concerns. (He) suggests the vaccine in use today, may have inadvertently encouraged more deadly strains (of the TB bacterium) to flourish.

This suggests that improved housing and living conditions may help slow TB.

Yes, even if you yourself are not poor, fighting poverty may help prevent you and your loved ones from coming in contact with the more aggressive form of TB bacteria.

It implies the need for aid to housing, education, healthcare and nutrition for the poor – all of which not only could save the poor, but could save the middle-classes and the rich, too.

(Sebastian Gagneux, at Stanford University), foresees the need to bring together immunologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, population geneticists ande social scientists to tackle all aspects of TB’s ability to transmit itself, cause disease and adapt to different environments.

So who will pay for the better housing, better education, better healthcare and better nutrition for the poor? We are, after all, in a federal austerity mode.

And who will pay for bringing all those scientists together, in a kind of “Manhatten Project” to cure TB? Who will pay for the research and development There is, after all, a loud call for “smaller government” and less federal spending.

The National Institutes of Health reduced its spending on TB to a meager $300,000 in 1985, and the academics who studied TB practically could squeeze themselves into a single minivan.

Shall we just hope and pray the for-profit, pharmaceutical companies, voluntarily will spend millions or billions to develop a drug to cure a disease that first infects the poor (and only later, the middle and rich)?

Perhaps prayer is all we have, for as the right wing, Tea Party and Republican John Boehner assure us, the federal government is “broke.”

Stay healthy, my friends.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell
Monetary Sovereignty

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Nine Steps to Prosperity:
1. Eliminate FICA (Click here)
2. Medicare — parts A, B & D — for everyone
3. Send every American citizen an annual check for $5,000 or give every state $5,000 per capita (Click here)
4. Long-term nursing care for everyone
5. Free education (including post-grad) for everyone. Click here
6. Salary for attending school (Click here)
7. Eliminate corporate taxes
8. Increase the standard income tax deduction annually
9. Increase federal spending on the myriad initiatives that benefit America’s 99%

10 Steps to Economic Misery: (Click here:)
1. Maintain or increase the FICA tax..
2. Spread the myth Social Security, Medicare and the U.S. government are insolvent.
3. Cut federal employment in the military, post office, other federal agencies.
4. Broaden the income tax base so more lower income people will pay.
5. Cut financial assistance to the states.
6. Spread the myth federal taxes pay for federal spending.
7. Allow banks to trade for their own accounts; save them when their investments go sour.
8. Never prosecute any banker for criminal activity.
9. Nominate arch conservatives to the Supreme Court.
10. Reduce the federal deficit and debt

#MONETARY SOVEREIGNTY