Free Republic

Yes, especially when jails and prisons are releasing inmates early.Law-abiding citizens want the right to buy a gun, especially in the midst of a pandemic. Police have stopped responding to many 911 calls, and massive numbers of inmates are being released early from prison. If shortages become more severe or if lots of police fall ill, chaos may very will ensue. People would rather be safe than sorry. If the police can’t be there to provide protection, people are far safer if they have a gun when confronted by a criminal. That is particularly true for the most vulnerable citizens,...

The sanctity of life remains more relevant than ever in these moments. Here’s how we can continue to proclaim it and put it into practice with courage and compassion. So this is how it ends. Cancellations, social distancing, and the Great Toilet Paper Shortage. Dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.With no Madness to distract us from the madness, with mass media fanning the flames of freak-out and social media throwing gasoline on them, what’s a Christian to do? Shall we hunker in those bunkers once built beneath basements for weathering nuclear winter, or scamper to their more recent manifestation,...

The current coronavirus disease, Covid-19, has been called a once-in-a-century pandemic. But it may also be a once-in-a-century evidence fiasco. At a time when everyone needs better information, from disease modelers and governments to people quarantined or just social distancing, we lack reliable evidence on how many people have been infected with SARS-CoV-2 or who continue to become infected. Better information is needed to guide decisions and actions of monumental significance and to monitor their impact. The data collected so far on how many people are infected and how the epidemic is evolving are utterly unreliable. Given the limited testing...

The lack of data is not necessary. It is a matter of prioritizing data collection, being willing to share data, and then doing the right kind of analytical modelling. Only a week ago, President Trump announced a ban on European flights to reduce the spread of coronavirus. In the seven days that followed, the media have been reporting garden-variety statistics and decision-making based on infographics rather than reliable and nationally representative data. It is time for accurate, unbiased data to redo the math.So, what data has been reported in the past seven days and what do we know? HereÂ’s...

While some of the earliest pandemics faded by wiping out parts of the population, medical and public health initiatives were able to halt the spread of other diseases.As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease. And new overseas trading routes spread the novel infections far and wide, creating the first global pandemics. Here’s how five of the world’s worst pandemics finally ended. 1. Plague of Justinian—No One Left to Die Three of the deadliest...

Over the last year, the Obama administration has aggressively pushed a $433-million plan to buy an experimental smallpox drug, despite uncertainty over whether it is needed or will work. Senior officials have taken unusual steps to secure the contract for New York-based Siga Technologies Inc., whose controlling shareholder is billionaire Ronald O. Perelman, one of the world's richest men and a longtime Democratic Party donor.

Since the coronavirus came on the horizon, media figures have been stoking panic, leading to mass shortages of basic health supplies, business travel cancellations, and market drops, all while the confirmed disease number hiked yesterday to around 0.000002 percent of the U.S. population.So far, U.S. cases of the basic seasonal flu outnumber coronavirus cases by a factor of 45,000 (using federal stats for this year’s flu and real-time tracking of coronavirus confirmations). The flu season has even been especially bad this year, with between 20,000 and 52,000 deaths, compared to 29 so far from coronavirus.According to infectious disease expert...

The U.S. government is taking wise measures to reduce the spread of the coronavirus. But, as the saying goes, we should pray like it all depends on God and prepare like it all depends on us. When I was in school studying infectious disease epidemiology, none of the cool kids worked on flu. We all wanted to chase Ebola, HIV/AIDS, drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, and other exotic killer bugs.Everyday, ho-hum killers like influenza, pneumonia, and other respiratory illnesses were just too mundane for globetrotting adventurers like us. Who wants to spend her life hand-sanitizing and finger-wagging about vaccines when you could...

Gene sequencing, from which scientists can gather hereditary data of organisms, has revealed that the Black Death, often referred to as The Plague, which reduced the world’s total population by about 100 million, originated from China over 2000 years ago, scientists from several countries wrote in the medical journal Nature Genetics. Genome sequencing has allowed the researchers to reconstruct plague pandemics from the Black Death to the late 1800s.Black Death and The Plague – the plague is an infectious disease caused by a bacterium called Yersinia pestis. The Black Death is one huge plague event (pandemic) in history. The Black...

Measles has killed nearly three times as many people as Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo, figures show. Around 6,000 patients have died from measles since the start of 2019, with cases reported in every corner of the African country. More than a quarter of a million people have been infected in that time, with the World Health Organisation describing it as the 'world's worst outbreak'. Despite the growing death-toll, the DRC's simultaneous Ebola outbreak has gained far more international attention. The outbreak of the virus has killed at least 2,231 people since the first case was reported in...

The specifics of how the person contracted the plague have not been revealed Three other people 250 miles (400km) away have been diagnosed this month Two have the bubonic plague while two have the more lethal pneumonic strain One man was treated for the bubonic plague after he ate a wild rabbit, while the first two patients were diagnosed with the more fatal and contagious pneumonic strain.

Blue lips. Blackened skin. Blood leaking from noses and mouths. Coughing fits so intense they ripped muscles. Crippling headaches and body pains that felt like torture. These were the symptoms of a disease that was first recorded in Haskell County, Kansas, one hundred years ago this week, in January 1918. From Kansas the illness spread quickly: not only throughout the U.S. but across the world. Eventually (if misleadingly) it became known as Spanish flu. And while its effects on the body were awful, the mortality rate was truly terrifying. During a pandemic that lasted two years from its outbreak in...

New research using ancient DNA has revealed that plague has been endemic in human populations for more than twice as long as previously thought, and that the ancestral plague would have been predominantly spread by human-to-human contact -- until genetic mutations allowed Yersinia pestis (Y. pestis), the bacteria that causes plague, to survive in the gut of fleas. These mutations, which may have occurred near the turn of the 1st millennium BC, gave rise to the bubonic form of plague that spreads at terrifying speed through flea -- and consequently rat -- carriers. The bubonic plague caused the pandemics that...

Some risk factors for osteoporosis such as being older and female or having a family history of the condition cannot be avoided. But others can, like smoking cigarettes, consuming alcohol, taking certain medications, or being exposed to environmental pollutants. But until now researchers haven't gained a firm picture of how these exposures link up with bone loss. A new study led by researchers from Penn's School of Veterinary Medicine reveals a mechanism by which these factors and osteoporosis may be linked. Damage to mitochondria—key cellular organelles and energy generators—leads to a surge in the creation of cells called osteoclasts, which...

Archaeologists discover palace with archaic inscriptions built during the Mycenaean period 'Archaeologists in Greece have discovered the ruins of an ancient palace with important archaic inscriptions dating back to the Mycenaean age, the culture ministry said Tuesday. The palace, likely built around the 17th-16th centuries BC, had around 10 rooms and was discovered near Sparta in southern Greece. At the site, archaeologists found objects of worship, clay figurines, a cup adorned with a bull’s head, swords and fragments of murals.'

There's no question that today's modern culture is very different from that of ancient Rome, but certain human realities remain consistent across time. The challenges of illness and injury were as prevalent in the Roman Empire as they are in today's society, and the concern with medicine and health is something modern people have in common with ancient Romans. BAS Director of Educational Programs Sarah Yeomans's doctoral research is concerned with Roman medical technology, medical cult and the impact of plague on Roman society. Recently, she gave a lecture on these subjects at the prestigious Explorers Club in New York...

An ancient concoction for eye infections seems to really work. The potion, which contains cattle bile, kills the "superbug" methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus or MRSA, researchers at Britain's University of Nottingham report. In fact, it worked better than the current gold standard for MRSA infections of the flesh, the antibiotic vancomycin, an expert at Texas Tech University found. Now researchers are working to see just what's in the salve that kills germs so effectively. It started with a joint project by two wildly different departments at the University of Nottingham. Dr. Christina Lee, an Anglo-Saxon expert in the School of English,...

Eating like a caveman meant chowing down on woolly rhinos and sheep in Belgium, but munching on mushrooms, pine nuts and moss in Spain. It all depended on where they lived, new research shows. Scientists got a sneak peek into the kitchen of three Neanderthals by scraping off the plaque stuck on their teeth and examining the DNA. What they found smashes a common public misconception that the caveman diet was mostly meat. They also found hints that one sickly teen used primitive versions of penicillin and aspirin to help ease his pain. The dental plaque provides a lifelong record...

Australian researchers have used current hepatitis B virus (HBV) genome sequences to deduce ancient human population movements into Australia, adding weight to the theory that the mainland Aboriginal population separated from other early humans at least 59 thousand years ago and possibly entered the country near the Tiwi Islands... Chronic HBV infection is endemic in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and is an important cause of morbidity and mortality due to liver disease and liver cancer. As part of caring for patients with hepatitis B infections in the CHARM study, the research team collected HBV samples from people...

Cortney wrote about the sudden passing of Bre Payton, who was a regular fixture on Fox News and a staff writer for The Federalist. She was only 26. According to reports, she succumbed to the flu (H1N1) and possibly meningitis. Her friend Morgan Murtaugh found her unresponsive last Thursday in San Diego; Payton was in California guest hosting a show on One America News Network.I only met Bre a couple of times, but she was always a class act, very kind, and respected by many. She was talented, smart, and the Federalist was lucky to have her. She was prolific...