Five simple facts about masks: 1
FFP2+/N95+ masks filter out fine aerosols.
They're built to capture tiny airborne particles that surgical masks simply don’t catch.

Ten Pathogens that are airborne: 1
Covid

I keep getting messages and hearing snippets from people who sit in various cross-department government working groups.

Over the last couple of years there’s been a steady drumbeat of concern, but recent ones have felt a bit more like panic: Things like mortality rising higher than births in some parts of the country, antibiotic resistance creeping up, disability claims rising, sickness absence climbing...

I quite like the bold insanity of the people who claim that the reason that there wasn't officially much flu, noro, adeno, rsv etc around in 2020/21 is because *they were all around but governments pretended they were covid*.

But It accidentally points to something profound. That year those things (flu, norovirus, adenovirus, rsv, para influenza) *weren't around to cause death*.

So covid infections actually caused *a lot more excess than people have realised*.

I had an interesting conversation last week that I've been trying to process.

It was with a therapist who I'm supporting, and they said it was ok to share this thread and its contents. I'm going to call them Sam, because I tried writing this saying 'they' the whole time and I kept on getting confused. I have also changed a couple of minor details to preserve anonymity.

We have a group of lovely birthing groups and parenting groups that use some of our building regularly, and I get to chat to them - women who are pregnant and women who have young babies.

They are *in a bad way*. In one of the expectant mothers groups, two of the nine had to stop work early due to complications in their pregnancies.

The problem with science denial is that once you start, you just can't stop.

When you deny any science, you switch on an overrule function in your brain that you can use on any information you dislike.

The more you use it, the more effective it becomes. And the more detached from reality your brain becomes.

It's absolutely time to talk more about this.

This kind of scabies that they're describing in here is *horrific*, and it's a result of *a weakened immune system*.

But LadBible are mistaken to think that it's just in Devon...
It's everywhere here.

But there's worse news... It's not just scabies that's a problem...

If by 'growths on my eyeballs' she means pterygium, then here's the chart for that in England.

https://twitter.com/BirdieBittern/status/1993721423659995527

If, on the other hand she means conjunctival deposits...

Here's that bad boy:

😮I want to smash something.
I've just stumbled across the official NHS coding guidance for U07.3 - 'Personal history of Covid-19' - and it left me on the floor.

🚨When paired with the data on the number of times it is currently used, it is a huge unknown national scandal. The ICD-10 codes are the codes that are entered into NHS hospitals activity databases.
So when someone gets healthcare, it's for a reason, so they look up the code for that reason, and put the code into the database.

There's absolutely zero doubt in my mind that things have changed.

But *how*?

I've been sharing a lot of these graphs over the last month, but each chart looks at the *small* picture.

I have a big picture brain.
So here's a thread about the *big* picture. You can see in this image charts with loads of different *shapes*.

They all chart the same time span.
They're all from the same geographical area and age range.
They all chart the same type of data - 'hospital episodes'.

What on earth is going on.

Seriously.

Where are the doctors raising the awareness about this?
Where are the journalists screaming?

What is wrong with everyone?

Hospital episodes for babies with heart valve problems in England. Two to four year old infants with heart problems.

Yesterday I started posting a long breakdown of women's health issues that appear to have seen a change of trend since the population embraced widespread repeat covid infections.

This is part two. You don't need to have read part one first.

They're just collations of charts in no particular order, although there is running commentary and some observations along the way, so it is well worth reading that one, and I'll be posting a third too.

https://x.com/1goodtern/status/1993047994879688862?s=20

In light of the fact that repeated studies suggest that women are more likely to be develop Long Covid, I think it's really important to know what's happening with the different health conditions that specifically affect women.

This is a painful thread at times. Older working age adults...

Covid infection affects every part of the body, every body system, and every body function, but it *loves* the lungs.

So how does that play out in hospital episode data... And Parainfluenza virus (also not flu) pneumonia...

If Covid infections damaged the heart and *persisted* in the heart...
I would expect there to be an increasing failure rate in heart transplants. Oh, would you look at that.

There are a lot of prostate glands in the news.

Men don't normally like talking about them until something goes wrong, and then they like talking about them even less.

But it's time to talk about them. Acute prostatitis diagnoses have more than doubled suddenly.

Acute prostatitis is a sudden infection or inflammation of the prostate. It causes fever, pain, trouble peeing, and a very unwell feeling.

For years, people who have been reading the science have been warning that covid infections cause immune system disruption.
Not in a mysterious hand-wavy way.
In a very specific, well-understood biological way: Covid infections damage B cells and destabilise antibody production.

I had a catch up with an old friend yesterday.

He works on WHO programmes to reduce the global burden of long term illnesses.

This is probably a more interesting thread than I thought it was going to be. We met decades ago, when my main thing was engineering interventions for transmissible disease, especially:
Clean water
Clean air

10 things most doctors don't know anything about: 1
How transmission of infections happens

I don't think enough people understand the significance of the difference *and* connection between *dysregulation* and *deficiency*. Dysregulation is a *going out of control*.