Escherichia coli – E. coli for short – is a bacterium with two faces. Some strains produce toxins that cause gastrointestinal disease. Set these aside. We’re concerned with the other strains that live innocuously in the colon. They’re among the most abundant gut bacteria and only cause trouble if they reach other body sites.
This happens if the gut contents leak during surgery, for example, or via a ruptured appendix. More commonly, particularly in women, gut E. coli reach the urinary tract and swim upwards, causing UTIs (urinary tract infections). Some strains are especially adept swimmers; five or six ‘uropathogenic’ lineages account for half of all UTIs.
In total, E. coli causes 80% of all UTIs, with 150 million cases annually worldwide. Most are painful but self-limiting ‘cystitis’, reaching no higher than the bladder. These used to be treated with trimethoprim. Nowadays, owing to trimethoprim resistance, nitrofurantoin is preferred. A few reach the kidneys and, worse, then spill into the bloodstream. That’s bacteraemia – bacteria in the blood – which can trigger life-threatening sepsis.
E. coli accounted for a third of all U.K. bacteraemias in fiscal year 2019-20, with a tally of 43,395 cases, mostly in the elderly. Hospitals in England are obliged to report these, so numbers should be robust. UTI ‘overspill’ accounts for at least half; gut leakage for a quarter. Most UTI-origin cases develop in the community and enter hospital through A&E.
Around 18% of E. coli bacteraemia patients die in the U.K. This rate roughly doubles if treatment is inadequate, usually because the E. coli strain was resistant to the first antibiotic given. (The patient must be treated immediately but it takes two days for the lab to get results, creating a window for error.) Mortality must be similarly high among untreated bacteraemias. Keefer, at the end of the pre-antibiotic era, found 35% deaths.
Right, that’s the background. Now, look at case incidence for England (figure 1). Three points stand out: 1) a long upward trend to 2019-20; 2) summer peaks, never properly explained and 3) a big step down at the start of the Covid pandemic. It hasn’t gone up again.
This step isn’t apparent – with a caveat below – for the subset of hospital-onset E. coli bacteraemias (figure 2), or for Klebsiella (not shown), which is related to E. coli, but is largely a nosocomial (hospital-caught) pathogen.
Why?
Five possible explanations can be dismissed:
- COVID restrictions suppressed them. This lacks plausibility. E. coli bacteraemias involve the patient’s own gut flora. Lockdowns, social distancing, masks etc. don’t alter proximity to our own gut. Moreover, case numbers didn’t rebound after restrictions eased over a year ago.
- A denominator issue. This is unlikely for figure 1, where rates are expressed per 100,000 population, and a delve into the raw numbers (table below) shows exactly the same pattern. There is an issue for figure 2’s hospital-onset cases, which are reported per 100,000 occupied bed days. Here, the raw case numbers are flat from 2012/13 to 2019/20, with a 16% drop in 2020/21 and a partial rebound in 2021/22, perhaps reflecting a different case mix through the pandemic or altered hospital occupancy. Hospital-onset cases are often gut-surgery-related, not urinary.
- Hospitals are failing to report cases. This can’t be wholly dismissed. But, were it the major factor, one would expect the tally of community-onset cases to show the same rebound in 2021-22 as for hospital-onset cases. It doesn’t. What is more, reported Klebsiella bacteraemias rose continuously to 2021-22.
- SARS-CoV-2 killed the patients who develop E. coli bacteraemias. Some erstwhile PHE colleagues believed this in 2020, and it may be part of the story. But Covid deaths are fewer now, and new people are reaching decrepitude, making them vulnerable to E. coli. So, numbers should have bounced back, but haven’t.
- The change from trimethoprim to nitrofurantoin reduced the number of UTIs progressing to bacteraemia. It would be nice if this was true, but it isn’t. The switch in prescribing was progressive, largely from 2016 to early 2019. It can’t explain a much later and steeper fall in bacteraemias.
So, we’re left with the likely explanation: that community patients whose UTIs ‘go bad’, leading to potentially fatal bacteraemia, aren’t presenting at A&E. Maybe they are not even receiving treatment for the underlying UTIs in the first place. A drop of 60-70% in UTI diagnoses was asserted early in the pandemic, with only a partial ‘recovery’ by October 2020. Formal publication and extension of these important data is still awaited.
Next, consider two strands of anecdotal evidence. First, Carl Heneghan stresses how easily a UTI is missed in 92-year-old Mrs Jones who – as so often with the very elderly – lacks typical symptoms. Rather, she “is a little confused and a bit wobbly on her feet, though all her observations are normal”.
She’d be even harder to diagnose via a telephone consultation, should she be able to book one. Which brings us, secondly, to the ex-wife of a prominent Cabinet Minister calling her GP apropos a respiratory tract infection.
After 47 attempts to get past the ‘engaged’ tone (my phone logged them), I finally got through to a recorded message about how busy they were, and I was placed in a queue. I actually felt grateful.
I waited a further 40 minutes before the receptionist finally answered, only to be told – you guessed it – that no appointments were available.
On Tuesday, the infection was much worse. I tried again. This time it took 45 minutes to get through. Again, no appointments were available. The receptionist suggested emailing.
It’d be no easier for a UTI. And it’d be harder if, unlike Sarah Vine, you are 92 years old, a little confused and wobbly on your feet. It’d be tempting to give up. Numerous missed UTIs and consequent community-onset bacteraemia seem very likely.
As has been widely flagged, the U.K. is persistently recording 10-15% excess mortality. Unusually large numbers of deaths are occurring at home. My view is that these deaths overwhelmingly comprise groups who didn’t or couldn’t access medical attention over the past two and a half years. At present cardiac deaths are prominent. Still to come is a large slab of deaths from cancers that would have been treatable had they been diagnosed in 2020, but which were diagnosed late.
But somewhere, hidden among the total, is a slice of my missing community-onset E. coli bacteraemias. A mortality rate of 35%, as in the pre-antibiotic era, would predict 1,750 deaths among missing 5,000 patients, half of them preventable with adequate antibiotics. So, a little under a thousand annually. But, it’ll be significantly higher if, as is very likely, more untreated ascending UTIs has led to more undetected bacteraemias than before the pandemic.
Dr. David Livermore is Professor of Medical Microbiology at the University of East Anglia.
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Good morning Britain!
I’ll just say:
Can I say HELLO! I’m in the library…
(Apologies to Trigger Happy TV trigger happy tv i’m in the library at DuckDuckGo )
Don’t you all usually do this good morning routine in Todays Update comments, rather than here in News Roundup?
The Update is strangely quiet.
I’ll be Anne Diamond, you can be Mike Morris.
Never heard of them. I like Neil Diamond though.
Ah, this is like the old days…
Anne Diamond in 1987.
Ezra Levant
@ezralevant
At the request of Trudeau, @GoFundMe
has just stolen $9,000,000 from the truckers. Rather than automatically refunding it to the donors, they say they’re going to give it to groups of their own choosing. What a windfall for Black Lives Matter, Greenpeace and Planned Parenthood!
https://twitter.com/ezralevant/status/1489744172202569731
Not sure he’s necessarily correct about the recipients – the release he attaches from GoFundMe says: “we will work with organisers to send all remaining funds to credible and established charities verified by GoFundMe“, which might mean approved recipients amongst the protesters, and refunds are available.
Nevertheless this is a gross betrayal of the donors and caving in to the regime’s lies about the protesters.
Find alternatives to GoFundMe.
It’s alright, nine million dollars stolen is a statistic as well…
They’ve moved to Give Send Go which is a Christian fundraising site that doesn’t pull those kinds of shenanigans:
https://www.givesendgo.com/FreedomConvoy2022
Apparently so many people are trying to donate they’re crashing the servers, so be patient.
There’s also this campaign which has less attention but is legit:
https://givesendgo.com/Warroomcanadanet
If you’re in Canada you can send an e-transfer directly to tbofconvoy2022@protonmail.com.
I realise with so many crazy faciomarxist stories from around the world to cover, our editors have to pick and choose.
In my opinion, the disruption of mass in Australia by the stasi, and the truckers protests in Ottawa and the developing one in America, deserve headlines in our Daily Sceptic.
Especially as the lying media censor them.
“They’ve moved to Give Send Go which is a Christian fundraising site that doesn’t pull those kinds of shenanigans:“
When you understand just how corrupt the leftist elites in government and in big business are, and how duped the masses are by their bs, the only solution is to look for principled groups outside the leftist consensus. The only ones you can trust to at least try to resist the dictats of power.
And I’m not even a Christian.
EL omits to mention that GFM’s press statement offers a link to a refund form. Refund requests have to be submitted within the next two weeks. No reason to hesitate, is there!
Grim.
Reminds me how the major bank cards and PayPal blocked funds raised for Assange and Wikileaks in 2010, throttling that campaign, which had shown signs of gaining significant traction.
And how the same forces ganged up to try to throttle Parler because it was committed to protecting freedom of speech for conservatives.
The donors should get every penny refunded if gofundme refuses to pay the donations to the intended recipients, including any admin fees they may have charged. Damn cheek!
Edit: it should be an automatic refund, not ‘on request’.
Mixed article in the Guardian where a group of Covid ‘experts’ including Neil Ferguson and Devi Sridhar say what they got wrong. Comrade Susan Michie saying she regrets not being more of a mask fanatic from the off
Peak Plandemic
Who can describe the most peak plandemic scenario? Here’s mine:
It’s a four way video call between Captain Tom from his garden, Kate Garraway’s husband Derek Draper, Joe Wicks and Elton John. And they’re discussing global citizenship and plant based meat in a video sponsored by Microsoft and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Neil Ferguson and Devi Sridhar are “covid” experts? Only in the Guardian (I hope)!
What’s the McDonald’s plant thing like then? Any better than their other rubbish?
(Full disclosure – I sometimes buy from them!).
I nearly had McDonald’s sponsoring that video call, you read my mind! Haven’t tried their plant based simulated meatburger yet. And that’s as a life long vegetarian who also goes to the dark side on occasion.
I used to be, and still maintain that many people eat rather more meat and dairy than is good for them. One of my major points has been that if excesses of consumption relating to meat, dairy, clothes, and now such things as bio-fuel were reduced, and if we had good government (rather than the nonsense of the last two years), there would be no food shortages any time soon. Instead of which millions (and maybe hundreds of millions) of extra people go hungry in the “developing world” because a bug is going round. A bug that is nothing like the black death, or even the “Spanish” ‘flu.
It’s a revolting piece of pseudo mea culpas. They leaven their righteous correctness by simperingly admitting to being a teensy-weensy bit wrong on some minor points. It’s an unedifying stew of arrogance, ignorance and impenitence.
It’s exactly what you’d expect.
I also feel sorry that these poor little lambs were also misunderstood by the festering, doltish masses.
I don’t know how many people on here remember Q magazine used to have a ‘Who The Hell…?’ article every month where a celebrity was invited for interview and the article was opposite of what they thought and was actually used to humiliate them. If you were doing similar for Covid those three would be near the top of my list for interview.
“Jews are ‘white’ “???
Not in Zimbabwe they’re not. Honestly, there’s some right ignorant idiots out there.
Some of us remember the Falashas. Ethiopian Jews, black as your hat but as Jewish in religion as anyone could wish. They were welcomed to Israel when they fled persecution from people in their own country, who were also as black as your bat.
I watched a film about that. Something to do with a fake diving resort. Reasonably entertaining.
There are tiny enclaves of Jews in several places around the world, especially India and Africa.
Sammy Davis Jr. was Jewish by conversion.
“There’s no alternative to post-‘pandemic’ pain”.
If only the BBC had been saying that 24/7 from March 2020…
They weren’t, and Fishi Rishi wasn’t, but I was.
What a pity I wasn’t Chancellor at the time. Or anybody else with a couple of functioning neurons in their brain.
I just watched the famous ‘Question Time’ on BBC. It’s remarkable that Fiona Bruce, with all the resources of the BBC at her disposal, and with a world leading immunologist sitting there who either supported her or at the very least did not correct her (embarrassingly for Imperial College yet again) trots out the same blatantly incorrect figures that 90% of the people in Intensive Care with COVID are unvaccinated.
Could these experts and media people please just read the readily available public information such as the UKHSA vaccine report, and see that there were 4,807 unvaccinated people in emergency care and 10,448 double or triple vaccinated in the 4 weeks to Jan 23rd – around 32% not 90%.
With experts and media people like that no wonder the world has disappeared down a rabbit hole over the last couple of years.
And by the way excellent performance by the former philosophy student who managed so well to stand his own against some of the nonsense spouted by the panel !
Lies,damm lies, you know the rest!!
Robert Malone is sufficiently fed up to be in the mood to sue all the idiots who question his credentials, so people would be wise to be careful.
I think it would be fantastic if he did sue them all as at the moment you have sneering hordes who think they can say whatever nonsense suits their preconceived dimwit narrative, and then patronise anyone who tries to set the record straight, and as for the Twitter zombie crowd…Lord preserve us!
Interested to see the Vitamin D research. This benefit of Vitamin D has been known from the beginning of the epidemic, of course. And yet the government did not think to issue free pills – or even advice to take them.
This seems very similar to their Invermectin strategy, where they keep doing studies showing the benefit but never get around to recommending the medicine.
It is quite obvious that a decision was made early on that vaccines were to be the thing that saved us, and all other treatments were to be suppressed to give vaccines the best chance of appearing to be a ‘wonder drug’. People were killed in order to defend the political decision to spend a fortune on a novel untested technology that ended by not working.
I do wish the Sceptic would think about the ‘standing up for women’ strand in the updates. It was Feminism which pursued the ‘gender is a social construct’ narrative for years. I don’t agree with the trans changing rooms agenda – be they male or female – but the chivalrous approach of the Sceptic, women as brainless non-innovators, with nasty men foisting horrid things on them, is not the true story. You may enjoy the Karen Straughan videos – ‘Dismantling Feminism’ on YouTube. Question everything? Well, you seem very mainstream and reactionary on this topic.
WE’VE GOT OURSELVES SOME CONVOYS!!!
An auspicious day for freedom fighters all over the country
That reads; get the vax and still obey the rules designed for the unvaxxed.
The Daily Mail leading article on energy that is included in the roundup also includes a paragraph on prescription drug addiction as a result of lockdown. The last sentence is an excellent example of the ‘reverse ferreting’ currently in play. It reads ‘This silent epidemic of health misery is another stark illustration of the devastating collateral damage of lockdown’.
Quite a change!
https://uk.yahoo.com/news/shambolic-covid-pcr-testing-rules-153206332.html
Just seen this. It talks about the widespread variations in PCR thresholds across the country. It’s an Oxford University study. They’re a bit slow on the uptake though-we’ve been saying this here almost from the beginning of mass testing.
Latest on the fun and games here in The Western Lands.
Lockdownunder Update: There’s A Whole Lotta Goin’ Goin’ On.
Read this and weep
https://www.leicestermercury.co.uk/news/leicester-news/leicester-mum-stopped-seeing-son-6605605
Fortunately it is now resolved but only after solicitors became involved.
Boycott Go Fund me. Truckers money being held back and may be diverted to other causes.
Why not go and pay them a visit?
https://corporateofficeheadquarters.org/gofundme/
You are becoming an embarrassment locked away in your Finnish bolthole.
All mouth and no trousers.
On the Left’s love of censorship.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/brandon-smith-leftists-use-mass-censorship-because-they-dont-have-guts-engage-fair-debate
Nice takedown of the stupid presentation that enlightened/misled Boris on climate change.
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/boriss-climate-briefing-information-editing-or-wholly-misleading/
First signs of major trouble in ESGland and wokeland as Blackrock departs and gets headwinds.
https://amgreatness.com/2022/02/04/woke-capital-wont-save-the-planet-but-it-will-crash-the-economy/
“France relaxes requirements for travellers from UK”…what absolute sphericals; just check out the numbers on Worldmeters.com – for many days now, despite the French Consulate trying to suggest that the UK, by the governments own words quoted back at us originally, is facing a tidal wave of cases, the truth has been the exact opposite; “case” numbers are 2x/3x higher within France /Germany but still these corrupt EU members are using travel restrictions as a stick because of Brexit. If their logic was “true” they would be shutting their borders to all EU countries currently designated as “green” ( UK = amber, from a “special case” designation removed recently).
Has anyone wondered, if the “official” response from these countries is to “vaccinate” their entire population, why they allow travellers to present a certificate of CV recovery as an acceptable means of demonstrating CV status (rather than a CV Pass), but then still go on to request a pre departure LFT test within 48 hours out from 24 hours pre departure?
Is it just me or is that “position” as bombproof as a paper air raid shelter ? The logical extension of accepting a CV Recovery cert is that “vaccines” are …..not needed?
New mutant strain of HIV detected in the Netherlands. Is this:
(a) The cover story for covid jabs destroying people’s immune systems.
(b) Proof that sars-cov-2 is in fact a pneumonia with HIV added via GoF research.
(c) To grow the ‘most vulnerable’ pool and justify further injections to ‘protect’ them.
(d) Just another hoax to keep the population afraid of something.
(e) Freddie Mercury’s revenge.
This is typical of the media and people’s inability to pay attention for longer than 3 seconds. The more infectious strain was active between 1990 and 2010. It is very treatable and no more deadly. This is mentioned in the last 3rd of the article I read.
You sound like a (d) man.
prob a combination of all of a-d above.
The continuation of online lectures will be good for University finances, and as usual bad for the low income worker.
No students using lecture rooms, toilets, etc, will mean less cleaning staff required. No electricity or heating costs. Less stuff gets broken.
But also vending machines are used less and other loss of income on campus based shops. I guess if Costa has a franchise there, they still have to pay their rent, so less minimum wage or student jobs.
Just like sandwich/coffee/all kind of service shops in central London who do not benefit from office workers anymore.
When Jaeger closed down, my friend was surprised that a chain like that did not survive, and I said, one does not need a Jaeger suit to work from home.
Regarding the entire shambolic and totally contrived narrative over “green” energy and the supposed need for “net zero”, the following highly informative information comes from the customer web site of a leading UK energy supplier – Scottish Power. This is their explanation of the reasons for the situation now facing UK households.
Given gas can be used to generate electricity, the wholesale cost of electricity has also increased significantly.
Although this rise in wholesale costs is not UK specific, this country is especially vulnerable because it’s one of the biggest users of natural gas in Europe. That’s because most homes here rely on gas central heating. The UK also has less storage capacity than some other European countries.
So to summarise, there are three key reasons for the impending massive increase in UK domestic energy prices:
1) We are experiencing colder temperatures – so much for “Global Warming”
2) So called “renewable” energy sources
areunreliable,don’t F***ing work!3) The largest CO2 producer in the word is burning even more fossil fuel there by cancelling out any “carbon reduction” made by the UK, thus rendering the entire “green agenda” total bollox, even if you believed in it (which I do not).
These underlying factors are made even worse but the UK’s total failure to provide proper energy storage and supply infrastructure. Perhaps some of the billions given away to fake lockdown loan applicants or squandered on pointless, useless, Chinese PPE might have been better spent on our energy infrastructure.
Mr and Mrs NutNut of No 10 are utter morons for continuing to push their totally pointless and highly destructive green agenda. Unless, of course, there is a different underlying objective – like further controlling people’s lives and livelihoods. Perish the thought!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10476167/UK-set-bin-3-5million-Pfizer-vaccine-doses-despite-shelf-life-extended.html
The bin is the best place for the rubbish.
Police Bodyguard Of Trudeau Resigns Due To Utter Tyranny
https://www.bitchute.com/video/VslCOTL8j39g/