Ambergris

September 15, 2023

Indian authorities rush to contain a deadly Nipah virus outbreak in Kerala
Rhea Mogul
By Rhea Mogul, CNN / Stringer/Reuters
—
A state in southern India is taking measures to contain an outbreak of the Nipah virus after two people died from the rare and often deadly disease, shutting schools and testing hundreds to prevent its spread. Kerala’s chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said the virus has been detected in the state’s Kozhikode district, urging residents to exercise caution and follow the health department’s safety guidelines.

Two people have died from the virus, he said in a statement Wednesday, the state’s fourth outbreak since 2018. “We should not be afraid, but face this situation with caution,” Vijayan wrote on social media.

Nipah is a zoonotic virus transmitted from animals to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). However, it can also be transmitted through contaminated food or directly between people. Infection with the virus can cause mild to severe disease, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Symptoms often begin with a headache and drowsiness but can quickly transform into a coma within a matter of days, the CDC says. It can also cause acute respiratory syndrome – where the lungs cannot get enough oxygen to the body – and fatal encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain.

There is no vaccine, and treatment is limited to supportive care.

So far in Kerala, more than 700 people have been identified as close contacts and are being tested for the virus, the state’s health minister Veena George told reporters on Wednesday. Of those, 77 are considered “high risk,” she said, adding the group has been asked to remain at home and monitor their health. Authorities in Kozhikode have shut some schools in the district, its district collector said in a statement Wednesday. Meanwhile, seven villages have been declared “containment zones,” Reuters reported.

Multiple outbreaks in Kerala
Kerala experienced a deadly outbreak of the Nipah virus in 2018, killing 17 people and causing widespread panic in the state. More than 230 people were tested during that time as authorities embarked on a rigid contact-tracing operation to contain its spread. Among the dead was a nurse who was treating patients at a hospital in Kozhikode. The following year, Kerala put more than 300 people under surveillance after a man was diagnosed with the virus. The state had another outbreak in 2021, claiming the life of a 12-year-old boy.

Nipah virus was first identified during a 1998-1999 outbreak in Malaysia, where nearly 300 people were infected and more than 100 died, according to the CDC. More than a million pigs were euthanized to halt its spread. The virus was named after the village of Kampung Sungai Nipah in Malaysia, where pig farmers contracted the disease. During that outbreak, most human infections resulted from direct contact with sick pigs or their contaminated tissues, according to the WHO. There have been subsequent outbreaks in India and Bangladesh, with more than 600 reported human cases between 1998 and 2015, it added.

Human-to-human transmission of the Nipah virus has also been reported. According to the WHO, between 2001 and 2008, around half of reported cases in Bangladesh were due to human-to-human transmission resulting from workers providing care to infected patients.

The virus is on the WHO’s list of epidemic threats in need of urgent research and development.

September 11, 2023

Well made and vacuum sealed, it's good for at least three months, or until a week after you open it, assuming any lasts that long. If any does, I'd question whether it was well made. Most of the time, for us vacuum sealed meant in a ziplock bag, because that's what we had.

Here's a riddle I never figured out. Fat with no meat in it can stay good. Meat without fat can stay good. Pemmican is completely lean meat mixed with a ton of purified fat, and it stays good (or as "good" as something as essentially nasty as pemmican ever gets). But fatty meat goes rancid. I'm sure someone has figured this out but, as I said, I never did.

September 11, 2023

You are going to find all kinds of opinions as to whether dehydrating ground meat is safe. It's called "gravel" if you want to look it up.

Dehydrating shrimp is safe, but the best result I had was dehydrating the tiny canned shrimp. As much as good fresh or frozen shrimp costs, the stuff you get out of dehydrating it is really disappointing. Dehydrated, the little ones can add a lot to a camp meal.

Dehydrating venison and beef is easy, and I have always done it with normally a lot of success. With venison, a little goes a long way, and cut it against the grain or you will be chewing forever. I tried a lot of marinades, since I try to minimize soy, and ended up with a dry pack of salt with some sugar and spices, which the meat juices liquefy pretty quickly. Massaging this in gets it distributed pretty well, but not as uniformly as a liquid marinade, and it's more intense than a liquid marinade. I compensate by cutting the beef a bit thicker, twice the thickness of a saltine cracker instead of one saltine thick, and along the grain, and by drying it to a harder stage. The result can have like a corned beef flavor, but doesn't have to.

Most US store-bought pork has so much fat in the muscle that it goes rancid no matter how you try to dry it.

Getting turkey at the holiday sales and drying that very lean breast meat while eating the dark meat fresh (or canning it) is a great move. You dry (slow-cook) poultry at a high salt level and/or high dryer temp, of course. Also, given the state of poultry packing houses, smell it constantly to check for off odors unless grew and slaughtered it yourself and are sure of the health and cleanliness of the meat.

It's best to put an oven thermometer in your drying chamber, so you know you are keeping your food out of the "danger zone" of bacterial growth until you are sure your salt/sugar concentration and/or dryness is sufficient to block bacterial growth.

If stuff is too salty to enjoy at the other end, you can simmer it to draw the salt out, and use the salty water to cook other things in. However, if you're hiking and camping, your taste will probably run to enjoying more salt than you like at the house because you're sweating out more.

Danger Zone" (40 °F - 140 °F) | Food Safety and Inspection ...

September 11, 2023

I miss you, Arby

September 1, 2023

I never knew they didn't develop acidity on the counter, but it kind of makes sense.

That is a treasure trove of recipe links.

August 31, 2023

I have a puppy. I have an angry cat. Neither can be allowed out at night. I have puddles EVERYWHERE.

August 27, 2023

She does not know. She was afraid I would freak out over losing a pet, I think. If the hen had died of infection, the whole meat would be tainted, clearly. I was just thinking she had the beginnings of bumblefoot (staph) or something like it and wanted to make sure that infection didn't get into one of my soup packets.

In brighter news, my young quail have begun laying.

August 26, 2023

So today my best hen died of unexplained causes after she had been molested by the puppy (although she seemed to have recovered from that) and possibly by an unknown egg-raiding predator that came by yesterday. I assumed she would be buried or thrown in the trash, but the next thing I knew, the housekeeper was dipping her carcass in a scalding pot, so we plucked her out. Found a foot that was somewhat swollen and flushed red on the bottom, and agreed it would be scrapped due to infection. Then we found out she had been egg-bound on top of her other troubles, and I feel horribly guilty. Egg-bound is something I could have helped with, had I paid more attention.

I have some mighty hearty stews to look forward to, but today's chicken noodle soup (from a freezer packet) was sad eating. I got the head in my bowl, and I sneaked it into H's.

Edit--to be clear, she was in distress when H found her. Upon seeing her, I immediately pulled out my super-sharp bread knife, which H took away from me on the apparent assumption I would not know what to do with it.

August 26, 2023

Sourdough seems to have a mind of its own. Different colonies have different tastes, different temperature preferences, everything. Have you tried starting over?

August 19, 2023

Note my emphasis--this is unrelated Malaria.

A case of locally acquired malaria has been confirmed in Maryland, the state Department of Health said Friday. The person was briefly hospitalized and is recovering at home.

The agency declined to give more details about the person except to say they live in the Washington, D.C., area. They did not have a history of recent travel outside the US or to other states where locally acquired malaria has been reported. Nine cases have been reported this summer in Florida and Texas, the first in the US in 20 years, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Dr. David Blythe, director of the Maryland Department of Health’s Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Outbreak Response Bureau, said at a briefing Friday that the new case involves the parasite Plasmodium falciparum, which can cause more severe illness than the strain in the Florida and Texas cases, P. vivax. EMPHASIS ADDED

Marylanders who have unexplained fever or other malaria symptoms such as muscle aches, nausea, vomiting or diarrhea should check in with their health care provider, Blythe said.

Malaria spreads through bites from the Anopheles mosquito. Most Americans who catch it do so overseas in areas where the disease is more common, such as in Africa. In the years before the Covid-19 pandemic, about 2,000 cases were reported annually in the US, mostly travel-related, the CDC says. Maryland has about 200 travel-related cases each year.

“We have not seen a case in Maryland that was not related to travel in over 40 years,” Maryland Department of Health Secretary Laura Herrera Scott said in a news release. “We are taking this very seriously and will work with local and federal health officials to investigate this case.”

August 12, 2023

Maybe this will be the impetus for them (and you) to move together somewhere.

Although maybe not to Central Asia.

August 11, 2023

In some places, feeding them is legally the same as owning them, and you can be held liable for what they do. Also for hoarding, if you have more than the local limit.

I'm trying to work up a new budget. My plans are all on hold right now.

August 7, 2023

I would be intensely curious as to what books those were, so precious they had to be kept, yet hidden. Then they'd probably be old phone books and used find-a-words and all, chosen for size and page color.

August 6, 2023

Nail polish remover removes superglue. Soak like it was Madge's Palmolive.

August 5, 2023

PM and I are going to an Italian restaurant with a reputation for lovely desserts to have a mutual "not exactly our birthdays" lunch with the big puppy. Little puppy might go with us or might stay with H's son.

I always ate summer trombo when it was summer-squash sized.

August 5, 2023

That fourth pyramid really resonates, doesn't it?

August 5, 2023

Thank you. The day doesn't matter. Nobody actually knows what day I was born.

August 3, 2023

There are a lot of videos out now, including one by a youtube guy with a lot of videos I quite like, arguing that MSG is wholly harmless. People have quoted --not him, but people saying exactly the same thing, often in exactly the same words-- after making me dog-sick by sneaking it into my food to prove I would not react.

I also get horrible stomach-aches from cherries, one of my favorite foods, and from other completely natural things that are generally regarded as safe. When I hear people argue that people like me are either reacting psychosomatically or have a political agenda, I want to put poison ivy in their salad and see how they like it. Because, like millions of other people, I would find it completely harmless, so I don't see why anyone in the world should be whining about getting to eat it without warning that it's in the food.

August 3, 2023

He might want to get better, and he might be ready to move on to what's next. :sigh:

I have a friend whose wife moved into hospice yesterday. Even if you've been on the outs with someone, and they've had some pretty rough times, and even when you've been expecting it, this is gut-twisting news. My heart aches for them, as I know your heart aches for your neighbors.

Remember to take pictures of things like that before you clean them, so GS can see the results of his actions. Otherwise your statements could sound like the grownups in a Peanuts cartoon: wahwah...wawahwawahh.

August 3, 2023

Thank you

August 2, 2023

I've had a really quiet day, which is what I wanted. No puddles all day, either (knock on wood).

Both cats are giving me extra affection, of the "are we forgetting something, Mommy?" sort, but joke's on them...we are out of cat food and out of the kind of tuna that seems safe for the older cat, and the shopping trip was postponed to tomorrow.

July 31, 2023

I fought for two years and then wrote off over $40k just in personal property...not counting the roof, which was another story. And you wouldn't believe the shortcuts they started taking with the construction there at the end.

I sincerely regret not getting a lawyer.

July 31, 2023

Get some cut wood to fill the bottoms of the bed, especially if you can get half-rotted firewood from someone. The wood will hold some water, more as it rots, and the roots will use it as it rots down. The wood will also help keep the soil from compacting too fast, and is a sight cheaper than bought dirt.

Lump charcoal is better for the plants than wood, but costs more.