Only 3 In 10 Americans Were Aware US Had Troops In Syria Prior To Deadly Attack

 by Kyle Anzalone via The Libertarian Institute,

A recent poll of Americans found that only 30% were aware that US troops were deployed to Syria before three US soldiers were killed just across the border in Jordan. The results of the survey show Americans are generally unaware of the attacks against US forces in Syria and the reason for the deployment.

Defense Priorities commissioned YouGov to poll Americans from January 8-15 about the deployment of 900 US troops in Syria. Three in ten Americans responded that they were aware US troops were deployed to Syria. The three US soldiers killed at Tower 22 in Jordan were supporting the US base in southern Syria. 

US troops in Iraq and Syria have come under attack over 160 times from Shia militias that operate in the region. The YouGov poll found only a quarter of Americans were aware of the attacks that left scores of US soldiers injured. 

The Shia militias say they are targeting American soldiers occupying Iraq and Syria with drones, rockets, and missiles because of US support for the ongoing genocide Israel is conducting in Gaza.

The poll found that a majority of Americans are concerned about a larger war breaking out in the region because of the US troops’ presence. 

The outcome may be playing out. In response to the death of three members of the Georgia National Guard in Jordan, President Joe Biden ordered a massive bombing operation in Iraq and Syria. The White House will not rule out hitting targets inside Iran and has pledged future strikes. 

Poll finding: Opposition to maintaining a presence in Syria grows if U.S. troops there were to be killed.

President Biden has refused to reverse his unconditional support for Israel even as his approval rating has dipped. An NBC News poll released on Sunday found the President’s approval rating at the lowest of his term, 37%.

Weighing on his approval is likely the war in Gaza. Only 29% of Americans approve of the way Biden has handled US support for the Israeli onslaught. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/only-3-10-americans-were-aware-us-had-troops-syria-prior-deadly-attack

1-In-5 Deaths In The US Caused By Heart Disease

 Even though new cancer cases in the U.S. are projected to cross the two-million mark for the first time ever in 2024, heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Apart from afflictions related to these diseases, Statista's Florian Zandt reports that the CDC says Covid-19 claimed the third-highest number of lives in 2021.

While there is more recent data, 2021 is currently the latest year with full, final data on mortality in the country.

Other prevalent causes of death in the U.S. include accidents, strokes and respiratory diseases, which were responsible for 64.7, 41.1. and 34.7 deaths per 100,000 of the population, respectively.

Alzheimer's disease, which might become more significant in aging societies over the next couple of decades, ranked seventh with 31 deaths per 100,000 population and a share of 3.4 percent in overall deaths registered by the CDC.

In total, around 3.5 million deaths were registered in the United States in 2021, up by 80,000 compared to 2020.

This increase in number of deaths comes on the heels of a drop in life expectancy in the country. According to CDC data, life expectancy at birth in 2021 dropped by 0.6 years for women and 0.7 years for men year-over-year.

https://www.zerohedge.com/medical/1-5-deaths-us-caused-heart-disease

Plans for Spin-Off, Merger of Berry’s Health, Hygiene & Specialties Global Nonwovens Films with Glatfelter

 Combination creates a large-scale global franchise with an industry-leading solution set serving attractive, growing specialty materials markets

Establishes leading positions in the high value-added categories within the specialty materials industry, served by differentiated innovation capabilities

Transaction values the combined company at $3.6 billion on an enterprise value basis, with pro forma revenue of ~$3.6 billion and Adj. EBITDA (1) of ~$455 million

Berry and Glatfelter shareholders to own 90% and 10% of the combined company, respectively. Berry to receive an approximate net $1 billion cash distribution at closing

Enhances earnings power with secular rebound and expected cost synergies of at least $50 million by year three

Tax-efficient Reverse Morris Trust transaction allows for full shareholder participation in upside of combined company

Accelerates strategic repositioning of Berry to a pure-play provider of innovative, sustainable global packaging solutions

Improves Glatfelter’s leverage profile to increase shareholder value – transaction pro forma net leverage (2) of 4x

Meaningfully accelerates Glatfelter’s strategy to further optimize product portfolio and strengthen strategic innovation and sustainability offerings

Significant step in the optimization of Berry’s portfolio and the culmination of a comprehensive review to drive value creation for Berry shareholders

Berry and Glatfelter to Host Joint Investor Conference Call, Wednesday February 7, 2024 at 8:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time

Berry and Glatfelter management will together discuss the transaction on a joint conference call/webcast scheduled for today at 8:30 a.m. ET. This call is expected to last approximately 30 minutes. A copy of this release along with the investor presentation can be found on Glatfelter’s investor website at www.glatfelter.com.

This will be followed by a separate conference call to discuss Berry’s fiscal first quarter 2024 financial results at 10:00 a.m. ET today. Both calls will be webcast live at the Company’s website at https://ir.berryglobal.com/financials. A new, simplified event registration and access provides two ways to access the call. A replay of the webcast will be available via the same link on our website approximately two hours after the completion of the call.

By Telephone
Participants may register for the transaction announcement call here now or any time up to and during the time of the call, and will immediately receive the dial-in number and a unique pin to access the call. While you may register at any time up to and during the time of the call, you are encouraged to join the call 10 minutes prior to the start of the event.

Via the Internet
The transaction-related conference call and accompanying webcast slides will also be broadcast live over the internet. To access the event, click on the following link: https://ir.berryglobal.com/financials. A replay of the webcast will be available via the same link on our website approximately two hours after the completion of the call.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240206043927/en/

Infectious Amyloid, Infectious Alzheimer's?

 By Derek Lowe

This new paper is getting a lot of press, and you can understand why. The authors report what seem to be Alzheimer's disease cases that were brought on by exposure to the brain proteins of other human patients. But I have to say that I'm not surprised, and here's why. This sort of iatrogenic mechanism that had previously been seen in things like Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD). That one has been established as a prion-based disease, brought on by misfolded proteins that in turn catalyze the irreversible misfolding of wild-type proteins in turn (this is the same mechanism as BSE, "mad cow disease", and several other related ones in large mammals). 

Before getting into more of the mechanistic details, the key feature of this report needs to be highlighted: how exactly did the patients involved get exposed to other people's brain proteins to start with? That goes back several decades to when one main source of pituitary growth hormone was extraction from human cadavers, and the purification methods available at the time allowed other brain-derived proteins to be injected along with this hormone. It is already well established that this (along with some tissue-graft examples) led to numerous cases of CJD, and examination of these showed that there were particular peaks of risk. For example, French patients who received such growth hormone between December 1983 and July 1985 were at substantially greater risk, suggesting a combination of sourcing and purification deficiencies in that time frame. CJD takes years to develop, but by this point there are basically no cases left to find via this route, fortunately.

Now, there are many "amyloidosis" diseases in humans that occur in different tissues, and a common feature is the deposition of insoluble protein aggregates. There's a particular sort of corrugated protein structure that is susceptible to this sort of self-assembly, and the prion disease like CJD fall into this class as well. As the world knows, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease is the presence of such amyloid aggegates in the brain, generally a 42-amino-acid piece ("beta-amyloid") cut out of the middle of the larger APP (amyloid precursor protein). The "amyloid hypothesis" for Alzheimer's has always made a lot of sense, not least because of the rare patients with APP mutations who develop more beta-amyloid at younger ages and who show Alzheimer's-like pathology right along with it. I went into some of this history here, when it emerged that some later beta-amyloid work was reported not to be reproducible - I tried to make it clear that while this was a bad thing, the nonreproducible work is not by itself what made so many people think that beta-amyloid was the cause of Alzheimer's. This had been the leading hypothesis for decades, and for many good reasons.

The idea that misfolded beta-amyloid might be a prion-like disease has also been around for a long time, because it makes a lot of sense. Indeed, histopathology of patients who died from transmitted CJD has already shown (in several studies) the presence of aggregated beta-amyloid protein, with the implication that this could have been transmitted as well. There have been also reports for over ten years that injection of human Alzheimer's brain proteins into mice leads to AD-like pathology in mouse brains. In 2018, the same authors of this new paper showed that archived samples of toxic cadaveric growth hormone did indeed contain substantial amounts of soluble beta-amyloid, and that injected thse into mice caused such pathology as well. Putting these and other lines of evidence together, this newest paper fits a puzzle piece right where you'd expect one to go. It shows that some of the growth-hormone-treated patients did indeed go on to develop Alzheimer's, as feared.

How do we know that this wasn't just "regular" Alzheimer's? Because the transmitted form of the disease is pathologically and phenotypically distinct from the regular disease. That's what you'd expect: even with a classic prion disease like CJD, the form of the disease that comes on via inborn protein mutations is different from that seen via transmission (cadaveric growth hormone, tissue graft, etc.) These patients showed development of symptoms and pathology at a younger age than usual for Alzheimer's, as well. The authors have tried to rule out all other likely causes (none of the APP mutations, no earlier head traumas or other such factors, etc.), and they make a solid case that these half-dozen patients did indeed contract a brain amyloidosis from their childhood treatment with cadaveric growth factor.

But does this mean that "regular" Alzheimer's is an infectious disease? It doesn't - for one thing, what was seen in these cases was (as just noted) histopathologically and phenotypically distinct (as the authors of the new paper explain in detail). It certainly does add evidence that amyloid pathology spreads through an individual brain in a prion-like fashion, but we've had a lot of evidence pointing that way before this. All sorts of infectious-disease-driven hypotheses for Alzheimer's have been proposed over the years (such as underlying viral or bacterial causes), but unfortunately none of these have stood up to testing so far. (I say "unfortunately" because that would be a route that we could almost certainly do something about!)

Infection through prion-like-protein exposure is probably the least likely of all such routes. The evidence from all the other prion diseases is that they are actually rather difficult to catch (which is a damned good thing, because there's absolutely nothing that can be done as yet to treat them). A disease like Alzheimer's, affecting millions and millions of people around the world, is a very poor candidate for that route of transmission. On the other hand, if there were some widespread virus whose decades-later consequences led to Alzheimer's in susceptible individuals, you could make the case much better (the association of multiple sclerosis with Epstein-Barr virus comes to mind). But no one has been able to nail anything like that down, or not yet.

So this new paper does not come as a major shock. It helps complete the story about transmissible protein pathology from injections of contaminated brain proteins, but we don't do that any more, thank God. It fits in perfectly with existing work on the behavior of amyloid proteins in humans and animal models as well. But it is not the explanation for the Alzheimer's cases that we see around us. 

https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/infectious-amyloid-infectious-alzheimer-s

Lawsuit expands with new allegations against Boeing, Alaska Airlines

 An attorney representing a group of passengers on Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 that suffered a depressurization after a door plug panel blew off a Boeing 737 Max 9 midflight has expanded the lawsuit with new allegations about the incident.

Mark Lindquist, an attorney representing 22 passengers who were on Flight 1282 when the emergency occurred in a lawsuit against Alaska Airlines and Boeing, said the newly amended lawsuit includes a new allegation that passengers on a prior flight of the aircraft heard a whistling sound.

The updated lawsuit says "there was a whistling sound coming from the vicinity of the door plug on a previous flight of the subject plane. Passengers apparently noticed the whistling sound and brought it to the attention of flight attendants who reportedly informed the pilot or first officer."

It alleges that no known further action was taken "After the pilot checked cockpit instruments, which purportedly read normal."

The expanded lawsuit also cites the preliminary report released by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Tuesday, which found the cockpit door was designed to blow out in a depressurization situation and that pilots and crew weren’t informed of this design feature.

"The resulting shock, noise, and communication difficulties contributed to a lack of proper communication between the flight crew and passengers, thereby intensifying confusion and stress," according to the lawsuit.

Ticker	Security	Last	Change	Change %
BA	THE BOEING CO.	211.94	+3.42	+1.64%
ALK	ALASKA AIR GROUP INC.	35.61	-0.38	-1.06%

The lawsuit includes allegations of emotional and physical injuries, including severe stress, anxiety, trauma and hearing damage. More passengers were added to the lawsuit in the amended filing.

Alaska Airlines and Boeing declined to comment on the pending litigation. 

The door plug blowout and depressurization incident occurred on Jan. 5, when Flight 1282 was climbing after takeoff from Oregon’s Portland International Airport en route to Ontario, California. At about 16,000 feet, the door plug panel – which covers an emergency exit that’s deactivated on planes with lower passenger capacity layouts – blew out, causing the cabin to depressurize.

Some passengers’ items were blown out of the airliner due to the depressurization and empty seats near the hole in the fuselage sustained damage. The plane safely returned to Portland for an emergency landing and no serious injuries were reported.

The Alaska Airlines N704AL Boeing 737 MAX 9 aircraft is parked at Portland International Airport in Oregon on Jan. 8 after its door plug panel blew off during the Jan. 5 flight. (Mathieu Lewis-Rolland / Getty Images)

After the incident, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) grounded 737 Max 9s for further inspections that the regulator carried out with the two U.S. carriers that operate the variant, Alaska and United Airlines.

In late January, Boeing and the FAA finalized inspection protocols that had to be completed prior to the planes returning to service.

The FAA said Monday that 78 of 79 United Alaska Airlines Max 9 planes have been inspected and returned to service. At that time, 57 of 65 Alaska Airlines Max 9 planes had been returned to service, though the airline indicated that inspections were expected to be completed on all of its Max 9 planes – except for the one involved in the emergency – by Tuesday.

https://www.foxbusiness.com/markets/lawsuit-expands-new-allegations-against-boeing-alaska-over-737-max-9-panel-blowout

Number of State Psychiatric Hospital Beds Hits Historic Low

 Published online on January 24, Prevention Over Punishment: Finding the Right Balance of Civil and Forensic State Psychiatric Hospital Beds recommends that state and local governments work together to open additional state psychiatric hospital beds for civil and forensic patients with SMI.

To obtain data about the availability of state psychiatric hospital beds, TAC surveyed state officials from April to August 2023. Official responses were provided by 41 states and the District of Columbia.

Information for the remaining states was gathered from state websites, media articles, preexisting reports, hospital admission staff, or personal contacts living in those states.

The median occupancy rate for state-run hospitals in the new report was 90%, well above the 85% level investigators say usually signals a bed shortage. Overall, 73% of states reported occupancy rates above that level, with 11 states operating at 95% capacity.

The proportion of state psychiatric beds occupied by forensic patients has increased by 12% since 2016, largely driven by the growing number of individuals awaiting a competency determination to stand trial. Before they occupy these beds, however, people with SMI can languish in jail for months or even years, waiting for a bed to open.

About 15% of all state hospital beds and 31% of forensic beds across 34 states were occupied by individuals who had been found not guilty of a crime by reasons of insanity.

"The prioritization of admission of forensic patients has effectively created a system where someone must be arrested to access a state hospital bed," report coauthor Lisa Dailey, TAC executive director, told Medscape Medical News. "But there are not enough beds for forensic patients either; thousands of inmates are waiting in jail on any given day for a bed to open up."

There are several factors contributing to the scarcity of beds, including an existing hospital staffing shortage made worse by the COVID-19 pandemic and a lack of appropriate discharge facilities.

Report authors offered a number of recommendations to federal, state, and local officials to increase the availability of state-run psychiatric hospital beds, including infrastructure changes involving recruiting and retaining staff for state hospitals and funding new discharge or step-down facilities so that patients have a place to recover when they leave the hospital.

Policy changes could also help, the report noted. Policymakers should consider "dismiss and transfer" procedures to address the backlog of nearly 6000 people with SMI waiting for a state hospital bed to achieve competency to stand trial. With "dismiss and transfer," criminal charges are dismissed or suspended while an application for civil commitment is filed in the probate court. Once a civil commitment order has been issued, the individual is released to an outpatient commitment program for treatment.

"States must strive for prevention over punishment," the report concluded.

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/number-state-psychiatric-hospital-beds-hits-historic-low-2024a10002nx

'RNA Vaccines: Risk for Heavy Menstrual Bleeding Clarified'

 Cases of menstrual disorders, particularly unusually heavy menstrual bleeding, have been reported following RNA vaccination against COVID-19.

In France, this safety signal has been confirmed and added to the product characteristics summaries and vaccine leaflets for mRNA vaccines in October 2022. However, few studies have accurately measured this risk to date.

To address this gap in research, the French scientific interest group in the epidemiology of health products, ANSM-Cnam EPI-PHARE, conducted a study to assess the risk for heavy menstrual bleeding requiring hospitalization after COVID-19 vaccination in France.

"This study provides new evidence supporting the existence of an increased risk for heavy menstrual bleeding following COVID-19 vaccination with mRNA vaccines," wrote the authors.

Study Details

The study included all women aged 15-50 years who were diagnosed with heavy menstrual bleeding in the hospital between May 12, 2021, and August 31, 2022. Participants were identified in the National Health Data System, and the study population totaled 4610 women.

Each participant was randomly matched with as many as 30 women who had not been hospitalized for abnormal genital bleeding and had similar characteristics in terms of age, department of residence, social deprivation index of the commune of residence, and contraceptive method.

Women who had a recent pregnancy, hysterectomy, or coagulation disorder within the specified time frames were excluded.

At the time of the study, 71% of cases and 70% of controls had received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Among vaccinated participants, 68% and 66%, respectively, received a vaccination dose (first or second dose). An mRNA vaccine (Comirnaty or Spikevax) was the last vaccine for 99.8% of the population.

Increased Risk 

Compared with control women, those hospitalized for heavy menstrual bleeding were more likely to have received their last dose of mRNA vaccine (Comirnaty or Spikevax) in the previous 1-3 months. This association was observed for vaccination doses (odds ratio [OR], 1.20), indicating a 20% increased risk, but it was not found for booster doses (OR, 1.07).

This association was particularly notable for women residing in socially disadvantaged communities (OR, 1.28) and women not using hormonal contraception (OR, 1.28).

The risk did not appear to be increased beyond 3 months after vaccination. Researchers noted that the increased risk may have occurred earlier, considering the likely interval between initial symptoms and hospitalization.

Assuming a causal relationship, the estimated number of cases attributable to vaccination was 8 cases per million vaccinated women, totaling 103 cases among all women aged 15-50 years who were vaccinated in France between May 12, 2021, and August 31, 2022.

As of the study date and in the 3 years before the study, none of the authors had any conflicts of interest with pharmaceutical companies. 

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/rna-vaccines-risk-heavy-menstrual-bleeding-clarified-2024a10002og