NHS to launch 'real-time surveillance system' to prevent future pandemics A public-private partnership in the UK is constructing what the government said is "the world's first real-time surveillance system" to track and prevent future pandemics. The program, which will involve the government and NHS working with technology from genome sequencing firm Oxford Nanopore, aims to identify respiratory …
The public-private partnership in this case appears to be NHS collects the data at public expense, gives the data for free to the private side so they can say "Ooo an outbreak! Looks like you need to buy these drugs from us that we developed with the data you gave us!"
Who came up with this idea, Wes Streeting?
In this case it involves a British company making some sequencers, this seems like a fairly sensible partnership.
The UK government supporting a company making a new form of sequencer seems to make a lot of sense. Much of today's genomic work is done using technology invented in the UK (Solexa) which got sold off and now an American company is making loads from it...
And how exactly would they prevent them? We don't have anything in the arsenal to actually make that happen.
We absolutely do.
We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation. Also, you can lower the time a disease spreads using isolation of individuals or populations.
We also have a number of antibiotics and anti-virals that might be effective against future pathogens. We have the technology to rapidly "screen" all approved drugs against pathogens (obviously clinical trials would then be needed to check they work in the real world).
It's not clever med-tech we need, it's clever people. Interesting that in situations where there's a nutter with a gun wandering around a shopping centre people don't need telling twice to stop shopping and run for cover but when there's a disease that could kill them just as dead then they find any excuse under the sun for their human right to go shopping not to be taken away from them.
Masks haven't been shown to work - see Cochrane for the best evidence that they don't seem to do very much with viruses.
You can't simply magic up "good ventilation" everywhere. And it would need to be everywhere pretty much to be effective enough.
Isolation (you mean lockdown?) didn't actually work last time, not sure why you think it would work next time.
Anti-virals? You are kidding with me now, right?
Take a look at This substack for a nice long series explaining that whole fiasco.
And antibiotics? So, you're talking about a bacterial pandemic? I guess that one might work.
The arsenal still looks pretty bare from where I'm standing.
Yeah, sorry. I read the originals when it wasn't. There's plenty more on the site if you are interested.
In summary, these two old codgers (Oxford Professor) are pretty sceptical about the latest "Wonder drugs" and also the massive stockpiliing of anti-virals, which proved ineffective.
For example the "Influenza" vaccines articles
I tend to trust these guys more than the pharma companies, because :-
1) They are too old to be cancelled.
2) They don't seem to be benefitting financially from saying what they do.
3) They seem far smarter than me.
4) They say it like it is.
But what I don't understand is that I never read anything like this in mainstream media, which is probably why they are dying out.
And even though I'm not old enough to be offered a 'flu vaccine, I don't think I'll be taking one even when I am. (assuming I make it that far)
Flu vaccines are hit or miss. Every time my wife and I get a flu vaccine we're on our backs and sicker than dogs within 24 hours, and we're feeling it coming on within an hour of the shot. We tried five different times, same results every time. The doctors always say we must have caught a strain the vaccine didn't cover, like it was our fault or something. If we don't get the flu shot, if we get sick at all it's just a mild case. On the other hand, I have relatives who get the shot every year and say they don't get sick unless they don't get the shot.
I'd suggest trying it, and if you get sick don't get them anymore.
"We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation...."
All true but significant numbers of the population are more likely to believe a post written by who the fuck knows regarding masks, vaccines, social distancing, drugs, severity, etc. than anything recommended by what they would call "so-called experts". All the good stuff in your post can be wiped out simply by the non-compliance of a significant number of fuckwit idiots who believe that disease control measures are simply a trick by the government to mind-control them.
Society is turning into the schoolyard where the clever kids get shouted down and bullied by the bigger idiots.
"disease control measures are simply a trick by the government to mind-control them."
Perhaps it's more like disease control measures are simply being seen to be doing something. Masks are something, right? Therefore we must panic and make everyone wear masks. Same thing with lockdowns.
It's not that it's a "trick by the government", it's just they are pretty inept and time and again panic into doing the wrong thing because it's politically expedient. Also most people in government are shit at maths (particularly statistics) and shit at science. They don't know the difference between relative risk and absolute risk. At all. And they don't take the time to educate themselves. And I guess Wes Streeting is probably just as shite as Matt Hancock.
"We know you can prevent respiratory infections with masks and good ventilation...." this statement is just utter bullshit. Can you site anything which proves this? We don't know this at all.
The ratio of up/downvote here has restored my faith in humanity.
That is my faith that most people are just NPCs or sheep and believe everything that is fed to them by mainstream media.
Either that or there's just a bunch of bots on here?
https://www.cochrane.org/CD006207/ARI_do-physical-measures-such-hand-washing-or-wearing-masks-stop-or-slow-down-spread-respiratory-viruses
My observations for more than 50 years (I'm old now) suggest that continuous vaccination every year works 99% ... in the last 50 years I've only had flu once and never an COVID issues at all although I don't normally wear medical masks (only funny images to make everyone laugh) and have worked with people who've had flu and COVID every year. I've been vaccinated for everything ever since I was 10 years old ... it pissed me off back then but my mother kept doing it to me (she was a nurse).
A lot of medical research will help the world, the medical industry is full of doctors, nurses and researchers who are working to make everyone recover and get better. I trust them even when very rarely I see them make (always minor) errors ... the icon is for them!
The "medical industry" is full of pharma companies who just want to keep you sick enough to keep profiting from you.
Doctors, nurses and researchers do their best in spite of the massive levels of corruption from pharma. And whistle blowing doesn't end well. Covid uncovered this for me, whereas I just suspected it before that. Pharma are just like oil companies or arms dealers, they will do whatever they can get away with to make the most profit and if that involves injuring or killing people then so-be-it as long as they can get away with it and not get caught.
They got caught with opiods. But still profited nicely.
And the pharma companies want to make all drugs illegal so that they can make a lot more money. I remember being told as a kid in the 50's that seeing opioids in a garden meant that that I could only look at them (very nice big poppies) because in those days everyone was just trying to help people with pain.
Later in school I was told that smoking (rolling our own with hash occasionally) was only naughty at school so we should only do it at home - but that was a British world without drug additions everywhere and I assume virtually no drug criminals anywhere, I never saw any. But these days all the drug companies (with everything illegal) are all filthy rich as a result of so much being illegal (until you pay the companies for prescriptions).
I'm deeply disappointed by the knee-jerk negativity of the earlier comments. This is a major success story for British science. Fast DNA sequencing of clinical samples from patients during the pandemic allowed the UK to track mutations in the COVID-19 virus as new strains emerged, and that fed into the public health response, as well as enabling more effective versions of the vaccines to be developed within months, rather than years.
Even before the pandemic, rapid DNA sequencing of clinical samples in NHS hospitals, combined with techniques developed in British universities and research institutes, allowed doctors to more effectively control the spread of outbreaks of MRSA and other nasty bacteria in hospitals.
So instead of doing down some excellent British science which will benefit all of us, let's celebrate it.
It's not so much disbelief in the technology, it's the hyping to impossibility that's the issue.
"Real-time" for instance. Nothing will be done until a patient presents, which means either they have to collapse and get taken to A&E or they have to get a GP appointment. Neither is real-time, Then, unless the test, is run on the spot the sample has to go to the lab. In the hospital it can go fairly quickly but the GP probably has a once-a-day collection.
Then "surveillance". That means very widespread usage. Is there going to be a Nanopore system at every hospital and GP I don't think that's going to happen. Actually, when "surveillance" was mentioned I thought it might be a monitoring of viral DNA in sewage which is surveillance but you then have the problem of identifying the DNA as pathogenic.
Then there's the belief that, having detected a potential pandemic causing virus (an that's a long step from finding new virus strains) that a suitable treatment or vaccine can be whistled up in short order. Remember that, even with the urgency of the pandemic allowing for protocols to be telescoped, the clinical trials for the A-Z vaccine took some months.
There's also the problem that NHS has shown a somewhat cavalier approach to data handling and in particular will remain tainted with the Register readership as long as it has dealing with Palantir because of the latter's reputation. Trust is the issue here and once lost it's not easy to rebuild so anything which involves handling of data on a large scale is going to be regarded with utmost suspicion. That's deeply unfortunate but we are where we are and that's where successive government initiatives have put us.
The idea is fine. It's just that (a) we get it presented with nonsense hype and (b) the NHS and, indeed, the related industries have a trust problem.
I doubt anything will quiet the anti-pharma voices until Darwin reaps them. OTOH the NHS trust problem is one which needs to be recognised and it is entirely of its own making. Taking my own local hospital Trust for instance:
1. They take next of kin contact numbers and then use them as contact for the patient instead. That one has now been resolved.
2. Instead of sending appointment letters or emailing them (I presume email was considered too insecure) they signed up with some 3rd party to hold the appointment details and them send out phishing style emails to get patients to register with the 3rd party to log on to read their communications:
2.1 They now have given PPI information to a 3rd party without even seeking the data subject's consent
2.2 If email was too insecure to communicate the appointment why was it used to communicate the instructions to set up the account?
2,3 They are training patients to be phished with the added implication that whoever is responsible is already trained. The response was that because there are posters up about this in the hospital patients would know what it was about; the fact that until the patient has received the appointment invitation and visited the hospital they wouldn't know was overlooked.
3. They have engaged another 3rd party to enable patients (even ex-patients of a few years ex-dom) to see their records online and sent out phishing style emails to invite (ex-)patients to ...OK, you know the rest.
Having received complaints about the two phishing style emails they then sent out an email relating to the patient-records thing saying more or less what they should have said in the first place so maybe the phishing style emails issue has been resolved. What's not clear about that arrangement is whether they'd already transferred the patient records to that 3rd party or would only do so after the patient set up the account. My guess is that they'd already sent them.
I have no doubt that all this was well intended. It's just lack of understanding of the need for or knowledge of how to do these things properly that erodes trust.
> Trust is the issue here and once lost it's not easy to rebuild so anything which involves handling of data on a large scale is going to be regarded with utmost suspicion. That's deeply unfortunate but we are where we are and that's where successive government initiatives have put us.
Not easy to rebuild trust? I'd say that it can never be rebuilt - to quote a well-known phrase “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results", well it's insanity to trust the Health Service to handle personal data appropriately and in compliance with the law (and also not to change the law to fit their wishes).
If you've ever worked in a diagnostic healthcare setting, you'll be aware of the difficult path that you have to tread between privacy and having the data you need to carry out your analyses and diagnoses.
Not having correct and full data is as much of a nightmare for us as the privacy issues are to data people. (I've worked both sides as a medical technologist who shifted to data services)
The solution is to have properly thought out arrangements in place rather than what appears to be a combination of ad-hocery and various 3rd party companies selling services, all of which involve them in having access to patient personal data and everyone pointing the finger at everyone else when something goes wrong (e.g. an account elsewhere on elReg of someone who couldn't get a record erased).
> e.g. an account elsewhere on elReg of someone who couldn't get a record erased
That would be me.
In my case it isn't "everyone pointing the finger at everyone else when something goes wrong", it's all the organisations failing to fundamentally comply (or indeed wanting to comply) with data protection law for 11+ years and the organisations playing games (to try and hide evidence of their non-compliant activities) when responding to FOI Requests.
Which is why I can never trust any Health Service related organisation ever again - they've shown they are ignorant and/or non-compliant with the law, that they will repeatedly lie and change their "story" to try and hide their law-breaking, and that their attempts to eventually come into compliance with the law are ineffective as they are incompetent and seem unable to read plain English (they belated implement documents such as Data Sharing Agreements and Data Processing Agreements that do not contain information the GDPR defines as mandatory in such documents, they perform DPIAs after the fact).
Probably because the infrastructure that was put in place for Covid mass monitoring of the population, had its funding removed and will thus have been dismantled or fallen into disuse.
So whilst this is nice, it does seem they will be starting from scratch rather than building on existing infrastructure, so can expect it to not be in place when the next pandemic arrives…
Will this be as reliable and trustworthy as PCR tests?
You know the ones the inventor and Nobel prize winner said should never be used for medical diagnosis because if abused could find anything in anything including inactive fragments. You know by turning up the sensitivity to the level used during that recent respiratory plandemic.
You know the ones the inventor and Nobel prize winner said should never be used for medical diagnosis because if abused could find anything in anything including inactive fragments.
That need not be a problem, ie finding inactive fragments would still show a patient had been exposed to.. something, so that something is circulating. Maybe. I'm curious how it'll actuall screen. So having been in hospital recently I filled a bunch of vacutainers. Those went off to pathology so they could be analysed, with different blood samples being fed into different machines to get the results the clinicians wanted.
But one challenge seems to be with the screening process, ie if blood is being screened for possible toxins, those need specific tests. AFAIK it isn't possible (yet) to screen for every possible toxin, and if it would be the same for this screening. If it can sequence everything floating around in a sample, and compare the results against every known sequence in a database. Or to complicate life, how fuzzy it could match, so there would be known Covid sequences, but no exact match to any new mutations floating around that haven't got a reference sequence. I'm guessing it should be possible to identify Covid-like sequences and flag the results as a possible new mutation.
If it gets widely used, it should be valuable to epidemeologists, but also has huge privacy concerns as it's essentially building a DNA database.
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