In this latest video from Dr. Seheult of Medcram, he discusses the World Economic Forum meeting that occurred in Switzerland where world leaders met to discuss the threat of a hypothetical “Disease X” pandemic. The discussion was stemming from a possible future pandemic that could be up to 20 times more deadly than what we went through. Potential culprits include COVID-19, Ebola virus, Zika virus, Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. The group states that they are trying to build readiness to tackle the next pandemic and work out how to prevent the collapse of national healthcare infrastructure as was seen in many countries and 2020 and has now become a critical objective for the World Health Organization.
The purpose of this video is to discuss what we as individuals can do to become prepared for any potential infection and pandemic that may come up in the future. An article from the Washington Post discusses whether America would allow itself to be shut down again as it was with COVID-19. It is noted by Dr.Wachter a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco who feels that opposition to emergency measures will emerge on day one of any new pandemic and will create tension and a level of pushback against any public-health mandates to do anything.
However, we also come across instances where public mandates were not supported and physical distancing was not utilized where the healthcare system being overrun, began to ration health care as there is not enough medical supplies to meet the demand. Dr. Seheult recalls during the pandemic of not only having a shortage of medical supplies but also having a shortage of nurses and staff as well. There was a dialysis crisis during the pandemic due to lack of staffing.
Issues that he identifies we will be doing within the next pandemic include lockdowns which may not be as complete or as long, possible hoarding of anticipated health products for personal use or resale, supply chain may be disrupted both domestically and internationally, many healthcare personnel may not be available again may be due either to the illness or being contagious or even dead, and the impact on law enforcement at the hospital, looting, personal freedoms.
Ideally we should have access to standard care medicine but these may not always be available officially in times of the pandemic. So it is good to be aware of interventions that are not dependent on a supply chain, diagnosis or test, on a pharmacist dispensing it and not able to be hoarded, something that is widely available and inexpensive and is effective against the number of infectious agents. Medcram believes in the Swiss cheese model where you have multiple layers of different things that together can combine for a more healthy immune system.
Sunlight
The first thing is sunlight and we are not just referring to vitamin D alone. Sunlight and its effect on the body involves a lot more than vitamin D. Dr. Seheult shows a graph of influenza deaths occurring per week in the United States and what is of interest is that when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky during winter, is when there is the highest peak of influenza deaths going from years 2013 to 2020.
This is not just specific to influenza as graphs have shown that chronic lower respiratory diseases fluctuate with sunlight. An article in Scientific Reports noted that COVID-19 surge dates in Europe correlated to latitudes and not to temperature and humidity and pointed to vitamin D as a contributing factor. In BJD there is an article that looked at UVA radiation that showed that the higher latitude you were in a country of the USA, England, and Italy, the higher the mortality rate was. The study had nothing to do with vitamin D and implied that sun exposure itself provided an effect that was independent of vitamin D pathway. The reason for this is based on what is actually happening at the ACE2 receptor. Angiotensin II is converted by the ACE2 enzyme to Angiotensin-1,7 which helps decrease reactive oxygen species. In COVID-19, the virus shuts down the ACE2 enzyme allowing Angiotensin II to increase which causes an increase in reactive oxygen species which can cause a lot of inflammation and damage to the body. What appears to stop and decrease reactive oxygen species is melatonin and melatonin is increased from near infrared radiation from the sun.
There was a paper that was published in a randomized controlled trial using an LED light jacket to produce near infrared radiation. The study found that those that wore the jacket had four days less of hospitalization. It is important to note that in order to get near infrared radiation you do not need to have direct exposure to the sun. Most blue, green and red materials have a very high near-infrared reflectance. It is enough to stay under a shade tree to get exposure. Near infrared light has a final pathway in improving melatonin levels in the mitochondria which can work with decreasing reactive oxygen species and decreasing inflammation in the body.
The concept of using sunlight to cure illness is not a new one and has been used for hundreds of years prior to the invention of antibiotics. It should be noted that sunlight is not only useful in COVID-19 but also across different viruses. There is an article from Harvard Kennedy school regarding sunlight and protection against influenza. In their discussion, they found that sunlight strongly protects against influenza.
So in addition to standard of care, the use of sunlight would be beneficial in a pandemic as it’s not dependent on a supply chain or diagnosis or test, it can’t be hoarded and it’s widely available and free. There is more information from Medcram’s videos Light as Medicine and Infrared light neutralizes spike toxicity.
Hydrotherapy
Another intervention is hydrotherapy. This is encouraging a healthy and innate immune response. Your immune system consists of the physical barriers including your skin and mucosa and then your remaining part of the immune system which is the innate and adaptive immune systems. The innate immune system typically gets weaker with age and the adaptive immune system tends to get stronger with age. The adaptive immune system is the part of the immune system where antigens are presented to it and it makes antibodies to them. This is essentially what vaccines use to get an effective response. The innate immune system however can recognize foreign bodies without actually having seen them before. That’s what is very important to keep that strong because as that weakens over time you may not get as quick of an immune response as you need. The innate immune system relies on interferon which is extremely powerful in overcoming infections. Interferon is usually the barrier that most viruses want to neutralize in order to create a greater infection. A paper by Nancy R. Gough showed that studies of SARS and MERS suggested interferon response is delayed. She states, “compared with coronaviruses that cause mild disease and with milder cases of these two coronaviruses versus those that can cause severe disease, the patients with severe SARS or MERS had higher viral loads and delayed interferon responses. Thus, it could be that the patients most susceptible to severe disease are those that cannot mount an effective early antiviral immune response. Interferon is the cornerstone for getting rid of viruses in the body.”
SARS-CoV-2 has a gene called Mac1 that is specifically there to antagonize the body’s ability to use interferon to get rid of it. This was seen in the study from Microbiology. Scientists did experiments as was seen in New England Journal of Medicine article with early treatment with pegylated interferon lambda for Covid 19. It found that regardless of vaccination status there was a 50% reduction with pegylated interferon lambda for hospitalization or ED visits. The problem though is that you would need a supply chain to provide this pegylated interferon lambda. So what can you do as an alternative to enhance interferon? Per this article by Downing, induction of hyperthermia at 39°C in human volunteers by immersion in warm water rapidly altered the subpopulations in the peripheral blood and produced as much as 10 fold more interferon than cells at a basal core temperature. How do you induce hyperthermia? This can be done with a hot bath, hot water and towels, sauna or hot tub. Here is a link to how to perform hydrotherapy.
So hydrotherapy in addition to standard of care is not dependent on a supply chain or a diagnosis or test and is widely available and inexpensive. Also in addition to standard care there is nutrition, exercise, sleep and fresh air.
LINKS / REFERENCES:
World leaders to meet to discuss threat of hypothetical ‘Disease X’ pandemic in Davos (Independent) | https://www.independent.co.uk/news/wo…
American shut down in response to covid. Would we ever do it again? (Washington Post) | https://www.washingtonpost.com/health…
The Nephrology Nursing Shortage: Insights From a Pandemic (AJKD) | https://www.ajkd.org/article/S0272-63…
Debunking the False Claim That COVID Death Counts Are Inflated (Scientific American) | https://www.scientificamerican.com/ar…
Autumn COVID‐19 surge dates in Europe correlated to latitudes, not to temperature‐humidity, pointing to vitamin D as contributing factor (Scientific Reports) | https://www.nature.com/articles/s4159…
DermatologyUltraviolet A radiation and COVID-19 deaths in the USA with replication studies in England and Italy (BJD) | https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/e…
A geographical approach to the development of hypotheses relating to Covid-19 death rates (Melatonin Research) | https://www.melatonin-research.net/in…
Severe Glutathione Deficiency, Oxidative Stress and Oxidant Damage in Adults Hospitalized with COVID-19: Implications for GlyNAC (Glycine and N-Acetylcysteine) Supplementation (Antioxidants) | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35052…
Cardiopulmonary and hematological effects of infrared LED photobiomodulation in the treatment of SARS-COV2 (Journal of Photochemistry & Photobiology) | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/arti…
Melatonin and the Optics of the Human Body (Melatonin Research) | https://www.melatonin-research.net/in…
Sanatoria (Museum of Health Care at Kingston) | https://www.museumofhealthcare.ca/exp…
Sunlight and Protection Against Influenza (Economics and human biology) | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33340…
Interferon Responses Could Explain Susceptibility to Severe COVID-19 (Medium) | / interferon-responses-could-explain-suscept…
Impaired type I interferon activity and inflammatory responses in severe COVID-19 patients (Science) | https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/s…
SARS-CoV-2 Mac1 is required for IFN antagonism and efficient virus replication in cell culture and in mice (PNAS) | https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas…
Early Treatment with Pegylated Interferon Lambda for Covid-19 (NEJM) | https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056…
Hyperthermia in humans enhances interferon-gamma synthesis and alters the peripheral lymphocyte population (Journal of interferon research) | https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3132509/
Life & Health | https://documents.adventistarchives.o…