Cryptosporidium in the UK

by David Archibald

4 September 2024

 

Last month this article contained this graphic of the monthly incidence of cryptosporidium in NSW for the last 14 years:

 

 

At the time we wondered if the 2024 peak was due to a sudden statewide outbreak of poor hygiene or due to immune systems having been whacked by covid. Cryptosporidium is a HIV-defining illness, as there were outbreaks of it amongst the HIV-infected during the 1980s. The implication of the HIV association is that cryptosporidium is characteristic of immune systems weakened by a persistent viral infection.

Now appears another interesting graph of cryptosporidium incidence, this time in the UK:

 

 

The author of the graph noted small peaks in June or July of each year followed by progressively larger peaks in November or December, denoted purple and red respectively. And posed the question: what will be the size of the red peak for 2024, now only three months away? In an attempt to solve that question, first find the relationship between the numbers:

 

 

First solve for green. The ratio of red to purple is going up at the rate of 1.01 per annum so will be 4.55 in 2024. Apply that to the 2024 purple peak of 2,048 and derive 9,318. An exponential increase is common in pandemics.

From what is happening in the UK we can be highly confident that the 2024 peak in cryptosporidium in NSW was due to the impact of covid on immune systems, and that we have only seen the beginning.

How bad can it get? This bad. From that paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association:

Findings revealed that long COVID pathology during childhood is distinct compared to adults and between children and adolescents. Symptoms were observed to take 10% longer (556 versus 506 days) to manifest in adolescent than in children.

So long covid can take an average of one and a half years for symptoms to emerge! But how many? Further from that paper:

Of the 898 children (751 infected, 147 uninfected) and 4,478 adolescents included in the study, 45% and 33% of infected and uninfected children, and 39% and 27% of adolescents were observed to have at least one persistent long COVID symptom.

Which is alarming, because long covid means viral persistence. And viral persistence means death, because, unlike some other persistent viruses such as dengue fever and Epstein-Barr, and completely like HIV, covid virions attack the CD4 cells of the immune system. Covid goes one better in also attacking CD8 cells, which HIV doesn’t.

Now bear in mind that the above results don’t quite gel with some other studies. It was initially thought that children didn’t get covid because they didn’t show any symptoms at the time of infection. Then after children started reporting long covid symptoms peaking eight to twelve weeks after infection, it was realised that this was due to children having more robust immune systems than adults, so they presented as asymptomatic on initial infection.

From all of that, some one third to one half of the population or more will die from covid. How long will that take? In HIV the asymptomatic latent phase was typically eight to ten years long, with death averaging 12 years after the initial infection. It looks like covid will be much the same. The increase of cryptosporidium incidence suggests that things are happening on schedule.

Our civilisation is going through a very dark phase. Parents will bury their children. In 1988, Prince Philip said that he wanted to reincarnated as a deadly virus to solve the problem of overpopulation. His wish has come true and his spirit lives on in too many of us. Prince Philip likely knew a number of the perpetrators personally.

There is a solution and it is the same solution that solved HIV as a deadly problem: a viral load test followed by a daily dose of viral inhibitors. There are at least half a dozen makers of HIV viral load tests and these could easily be repurposed for covid. And it is likely that the same molecules that cured HIV as a problem, tenofovir disoproxil fumarate and emtricitabine, are effective against covid. It wouldn’t cost much to find out. There are plenty of other molecules that are begging to be tested for their anti-covid efficacy.

There is a federal election coming within the next 12 months and this is the optimum time to have resources applied to this problem. The system is not self-correcting. It needs an external stimulus to get to the right result.

 

David Archibald is the author of The Anticancer Garden in Australia and American Gripen: The Solution to the F-35 Nightmare.