International
Now An Outbreak Of The Marburg Virus Has Begun
Now An Outbreak Of The Marburg Virus Has Begun
Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Why are so many unusual outbreaks…
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Authored by Michael Snyder via The Economic Collapse blog,
Why are so many unusual outbreaks of disease suddenly happening all over the planet? We were already dealing with a seemingly endless global pandemic coming into 2022, and so far this year a bird flu pandemic has resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys, the worst monkeypox outbreak in history has spread like wildfire in the western world, and now it is being reported that there is an outbreak of the Marburg Virus in Africa. We have already lost our opportunity to contain monkeypox, and that is really bad news. But if authorities are not able to successfully contain this new Marburg outbreak, we could potentially be facing a scenario that is downright apocalyptic.
The new outbreak of the Marburg Virus is happening in Ghana. The two victims that have died so far did not know each other, and officials believe that this is evidence that “the disease is spreading more widely”…
Two people are believed to have died from the extremely deadly Marburg virus in Ghana as officials gear up for a potential outbreak.
The patients, from the country’s southern Ashanti region, were not known to each other, suggesting the disease is spreading more widely.
Initial tests came back positive for the virus and the samples are being reanalysed by the World Health Organization (WHO).
Global health authorities have always warned that the Marburg virus is a good candidate for a horrifying global pandemic because it can have a very long incubation period. The following information comes from the World Health Organization…
The incubation period (interval from infection to onset of symptoms) varies from 2 to 21 days.
Illness caused by Marburg virus begins abruptly, with high fever, severe headache and severe malaise. Muscle aches and pains are a common feature. Severe watery diarrhoea, abdominal pain and cramping, nausea and vomiting can begin on the third day. Diarrhoea can persist for a week. The appearance of patients at this phase has been described as showing “ghost-like” drawn features, deep-set eyes, expressionless faces, and extreme lethargy.
All of that sounds terrible, but the next stage of the disease is truly nightmarish…
Many patients develop severe haemorrhagic manifestations between 5 and 7 days, and fatal cases usually have some form of bleeding, often from multiple areas. Fresh blood in vomitus and faeces is often accompanied by bleeding from the nose, gums, and vagina. Spontaneous bleeding at venepuncture sites (where intravenous access is obtained to give fluids or obtain blood samples) can be particularly troublesome. During the severe phase of illness, patients have sustained high fevers. Involvement of the central nervous system can result in confusion, irritability, and aggression. Orchitis (inflammation of one or both testicles) has been reported occasionally in the late phase of disease (15 days).
In fatal cases, death occurs most often between 8 and 9 days after symptom onset, usually preceded by severe blood loss and shock.
The largest previous outbreak of the disease was in 2005.
During that outbreak, 88 percent of the victims died…
The largest outbreak to date was in Angola in 2005, when 374 caught the virus and 329 died – a fatality rate of 88 percent.
A disease that has a death rate of way less than one percent ended up paralyzing much of the planet for months on end.
So what do you think will happen if the Marburg Virus becomes a true global pandemic?
Needless to say, the panic would be off the charts, and there is no cure and no vaccine…
The Marburg virus is a top concern for public health officials who are worried about the next pandemic. It has the potential to cause serious public health emergencies but there are currently no vaccines or antiviral treatments approved to treat the virus.
Meanwhile, the number of monkeypox cases continues to rise at an exponential rate.
When I wrote about monkeypox yesterday, there were 7,534 global cases. Unfortunately, Friday was the worst day for this outbreak so far by a very wide margin, and now there are 9,109 global cases.
I had been hoping that this outbreak would fade after the initial spike of cases, but instead it seems to be rapidly picking up momentum.
Here in the United States, it has already spread to 39 different states and the total number of cases has now risen to 790.
If the number of cases continues to double at a very fast pace, it won’t be too long before we have a major national crisis on our hands.
Let us hope that doesn’t happen, because this is a disease that you definitely do not want to get.
This highly mutated version of monkeypox causes extremely intense pain. In fact, one victim that was interview by NBC News said that it was “the worst pain in my life”.
Since monkeypox causes very ugly sores on the skin, many have suggested that this sounds eerily similar to a future scenario that I described in my books.
But we don’t know if monkeypox will become a true global pandemic yet. We will just have to wait and see what happens.
Of course COVID has been a global pandemic for a long time, and now it is being reported that a new subvariant that is becoming dominant in the western world is “the worst so far”…
The latest subvariant of the novel coronavirus to become dominant in Europe, the United States, and other places is also, in many ways, the worst so far.
The BA.5 subvariant of the basic Omicron variant appears to be more contagious than any previous form of the virus. It’s apparently better at dodging our antibodies, too—meaning it might be more likely to cause breakthrough and repeat infections.
Despite everything that they have tried, authorities have failed to stop this pandemic. Our planet has been hit by wave after wave, and now hospitalizations in the U.S. are spiking once again…
Eighteen states reported more cases in the week of June 30-July 7 than in the week before, according to a USA TODAY analysis of Johns Hopkins University data.
That has also led to a rise in hospitalizations, with hospitals in 40 states reporting more COVID-19 patients than a week earlier. Thirty-eight states had more patients in intensive care beds, and 17 states reported more deaths than a week earlier.
Personally, I am far, far more concerned about monkeypox.
If the number of monkeypox cases continues to explode like it has been, it won’t be too long before there is widespread panic among the general public.
And if the Marburg Virus starts getting loose in the western world we will be facing a scenario that is absolutely unthinkable.
So hopefully authorities in Africa are on top of this, because the death toll from a full-blown global pandemic would be off the charts.
* * *
It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.
International
Stock Market Today: Stocks turn lower as Treasury yield rise mutes earnings gains
A mixed set of big tech earnings, alongside modestly higher Treasury yields, has stocks moving lower into the start of the Wednesday session.
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International
People in Europe ate seaweed for thousands of years before it largely disappeared from their diets – we wonder why?
The decline of seaweed as part of the staple diet in Europe remains a mystery.
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How are we sure people ate seaweed?
We identified several types of molecules in the dental calculus that collectively are characteristic of seaweed. We refer to these as “biomarkers”. They include a set of chemical compounds called alkylpyrroles. When we detect these compounds together in calculus, we can be fairly sure where they came from. The same goes for other compounds characteristic of seaweed and freshwater plants. To have become embedded in dental calculus, the seaweed and freshwater plants had to have been in the mouth and most probably chewed. Biomarkers do not survive in all our samples, but where they do, they’re found consistently across many individuals we analysed from different places. This suggests seaweed was probably a routine part of the diet.Perceptions of seaweed
Today, seaweed is often seen as the scourge of beaches. It accumulates at the high-water mark where it can create a slippery and sometimes smelly barrier to the sea. But it is a wondrous world of its own. There are over 10,000 species of seaweed worldwide living in the intertidal zone (where the ocean meets the land between high and low tides) and the subtidal zone (a region below the intertidal zone that is continuously covered by water). Around 145 of these species are eaten today and in parts of Asia it is commonplace. Seaweed is edible, nutritious, sometimes medicinal, abundant and local. Although overconsumption can cause iodine toxicity, there are no poisonous intertidal species in Europe. It is also available all year round, which would have been particularly useful in the past, when food supplies were less reliable.Reconstructing ancient diets
Reconstructing ancient diets is challenging and is generally more difficult as you go back in time. This helps explain why we’ve only just realised how much seaweed was being eaten by ancient Europeans. In archaeology, evidence for ancient diets often comes from physical remains: animal bones, fish bones and the hard parts of shellfish. Evidence for plants as part of the diet before farming, however, is rare. Techniques to study molecules from archaeological remains have been around for some time. A key method is known as carbon/nitrogen (C and N) stable isotope analysis. This is widely used to reconstruct ancient human and animal diets based on the relative proportions of these elements in bone collagen. But the presence of plants has been difficult to identify, due to their low nitrogen content. Their presence is masked by an overwhelming signal for animals and fish.Hiding in plain sight
The evidence for seaweed had been present all along, but unrecognised. Our discovery provides a perfect example of how perceptions of what we regard as food influence interpretations of ancient practices. Seaweed was detected in chunks that had been chewed (and presumably spat out) at the 12,000-year-old site of Monte Verde, Chile. But when it is found at archaeological sites, it is more commonly interpreted as having been used for things other than food, such as fuel and food wrappings. In European archaeology, there is a longstanding perception that Mesolithic hunter-gatherers ate lots of seafood, but that when people started farming, they focused on food sourced from land, such as their livestock. Our findings hammer another nail into the coffin of this theory. Today, only a few traditional recipes remain, such as laverbread made from the seaweed species Porphyra umbilicalis in Wales. It’s still not clear why seaweed declined as a staple source of food in Europe after the Middle Ages.What are the implications?
Our unexpected discovery changes the way we understand past people. It also alters our perceptions of how they understood the landscape and how they exploited local resources. It suggests, not for the first time, that we vastly underestimate ancient people. They had a knowledge, particularly about the natural world, that is difficult for us to imagine today. The finding also reminds us that archaeological remains are minute windows into the past, reinforcing the care required when developing theories based on limited evidence. The consumption of plants, upon which our world depends, has been habitually left out of dietary theories from our pre-agrarian past. Rigid theories have sometimes forgotten that humans were behind these archaeological cultures – and that they were probably similar to us in their curiosity and needs. Today seaweed sits, largely unused as food, on our doorstep. Making the edible species a bigger component of our diets could even contribute to making our food supplies more sustainable.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
european europeInternational
EUR/AUD bearish breakdown supported by additional China fiscal stimulus and AU inflation
Weak PMI readings from the Eurozone, an increase in China’s budget deficit ratio, and renewed inflationary pressures in Australia may trigger a persistent…
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- Weak PMI readings from the Eurozone, an increase in China’s budget deficit ratio, and renewed inflationary pressures in Australia may trigger a persistent bearish sentiment loop in EUR/AUD.
- Watch the key short-term resistance at 1.6700 for EUR/AUD.
- A break below 1.6250 key medium-term support on the EUR/AUD may trigger a multi-week bearish impulsive down move.
The Euro (EUR) tumbled overnight throughout the US session as it erased its prior gains against the US dollar recorded on Monday, 23 October; the EUR/USD shed -104 pips from yesterday’s intraday high of 1.0695 to close the US session at 1.0591, its weakest performance in the past seven sessions.
Yesterday’s resurgence of the USD dollar strength has been attributed to a robust set of October flash manufacturing and services PMI data from the US in contrast with weak readings seen in the UK and Eurozone that represented stagflation risks.
Interestingly, the Aussie dollar (AUD) has outperformed the US dollar where the AUD/USD managed to squeeze out a minor daily gain of 21 pips by the close of yesterday’s US session. The resilient movement of the AUD/USD has been impacted by positive news flow out from China, Australia’s key trading partner.
China’s national legislature has just approved a budgetary plan to raise the fiscal deficit ratio for 2023 to around 3.8% of its GDP which was above the initial 3% set in March and set to issue additional sovereign debt worth 1 trillion yuan in Q4. This latest round of additional fiscal stimulus suggests that China’s top policymakers are expanding their initial targeted measures to address the ongoing severe liquidity crunch in the domestic property market as well as to reverse the persistent weak sentiment inherent in the stock market.
In addition, the latest set of Australia’s inflation data surpassed expectations has also reinforced another layer of positive feedback loop in the Aussie dollar which in turn may put Australia’s central bank, RBA on a “hawkish guard” against cutting its policy cash rate too soon.
The less lagging monthly CPI Indicator has risen to an annualized rate of 5.6% in September, above consensus estimates of 5.4%, and surpassed August’s reading of 5.2% which has translated into a second consecutive month of uptick in inflationary growth.
In the lens of technical analysis, a potential bearish configuration setup has emerged in the EUR/AUD cross pair from a short to medium-term perspective.
Major uptrend phase of EUR/AUD is weakening
Fig 1: EUR/AUD medium-term trend as of 25 Oct 2023 (Source: TradingView, click to enlarge chart)
Even though the price actions of the EUR/AUD have been oscillating within a major ascending channel since its 25 August 2023 low of 1.4285 and traded above the key 200-day moving average so far, the momentum of this up movement is showing signs of bullish exhaustion.
Yesterday (24 October) price action ended with a daily bearish reversal “Marubozu” candlestick coupled with the daily RSI momentum indicator that retreated right at a significant parallel resistance in place since March 2023 at the 65 level which suggests a revival of medium-term bearish momentum.
EUR/AUD bears are now attacking the minor ascending support
Fig 2: EUR/AUD minor short-term trend as of 25 Oct 2023 (Source: TradingView, click to enlarge chart)
The EUR/AUD has now staged a bearish price action follow-through via the breakdown of its minor ascending support from its 29 September 2023 low after a momentum bearish breakdown that was flashed earlier yesterday (24 October) during the European session as seen from the 4-hour RSI momentum indicator.
Watch the 1.6700 key short-term pivotal resistance (also the 50-day moving average) for a further potential slide toward the intermediate supports of 1.6460 and 1.6320 in the first step.
On the other hand, a clearance above 1.6700 invalidates the bearish tone to see the next intermediate resistance coming in at 1.6890.
stimulus budget deficit us dollar euro yuan gdp stimulus european uk china
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