https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-58045787

https://archive.is/56P80

Sky News Australia barred for week by YouTube over Covid misinformation

YouTube has barred Sky News Australia from uploading new content for a week, saying it had breached rules on spreading Covid-19 misinformation.

It issued a "strike" under its three-strike policy, the last of which means permanent removal.

YouTube did not point to specific items but said it opposed material that "could cause real-world harm".

The TV channel's digital editor said the decision was a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely.

Sky News Australia is owned by a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp and has 1.85 million YouTube subscribers. The ban could affect its revenue stream from Google.

A YouTube statement said it had "clear and established Covid-19 medical misinformation policies based on local and global health authority guidance".

A spokesperson told the Guardian it "did not allow content that denies the existence of Covid-19" or which encouraged people "to use hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin to treat or prevent the virus". Neither has been proven to be effective against Covid.

The videos in question "did not provide sufficient countervailing context", the spokesperson said.

Sky News Australia said it had found old videos that did not comply with YouTube's policies and took its "commitment to meeting editorial and community expectations seriously".

But it denied any of its hosts had ever denied the existence of Covid-19.

Millions of Australians are currently in lockdown to prevent the spread of the contagious Delta variant, while fewer than 15% of the population are fully vaccinated.

Comments by veteran Sky presenter Alan Jones have triggered debate in Australia.

In one 12 July broadcast with MP Craig Kelly, both men claimed Delta was not as dangerous as the original and vaccines would not help.

The Sky News website issued an apology.

Sydney radio host Ray Hadley said Jones's performances had "allowed conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxers... to gain support from a minority who think the virus is nothing more than a dose of flu".

Australia's Daily Telegraph last week ended the column Jones wrote for it.

In an article on the Sky News Australia website, digital editor Jack Houghton said that if conversation about Australia's Covid-19 policies were stifled "our political leaders will be free to act with immunity, without justification and lacking any sufficient scrutiny from the public".

YouTube has issued dozens of bans over the past two years, several over Covid but most for hate speech.

>>78528

https://www.skynews.com.au/business/media/youtubes-sky-news-australia-suspension-disturbing-assault-on-freedom-of-thought/news-story/cc2ce1cad0dd5ec9693e2192759eab8b

YouTube’s Sky News Australia suspension ‘disturbing’ assault on freedom of thought

Digital Editor Jack Houghton argues YouTube’s decision to suspend Sky News Australia is a disturbing attack on the ability to think freely.

The freedom to engage in debate and challenge conventional thinking and wisdoms were not always accepted as human rights.

Philosophically the notion has existed for millennia with the most modern interpretations gaining their foothold in Greek debating chambers.

It has changed shape frequently and even been snuffed out by leaders of more totalitarian persuasions.

If a society was lucky, it returned. If not, poverty, starvation and horror tended to follow.

Holodomor, Auschwitz and Mao, are just three historical examples.

So important is your right to communicate freely, without interference, that it was declared a human right in 1948.

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers,” Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights reads.

This human right to be free to share your opinions through “any media”, whether it be criticisms of government policy, or disputing conventional thinking, is nearly absolute.

But it is also fickle.

And – if we allow it – easily snuffed out like many leaders have done before.

Sky News Australia has been temporarily suspended from posting on the Google-owned platform YouTube for publishing opinion content the tech giant disagrees with.

Among the videos deemed unpalatable for societal consumption were debates around whether masks were effective and whether lockdowns were justified when considering their adverse health outcomes.

The stance taken by some commentators at this network was that masks are not effective in containing outbreaks, particularly when mandated outside in the fresh air. Some also took issue with the frequency and mechanisms of locking down Australians.

Other commentators vehemently disagreed, and their views were also published.

The science is certainly not clear on either of these two points.

For example, at the beginning of the pandemic the World Health Organisation discouraged the use of lockdowns to treat small outbreaks and instead argued they should be used to ease the burden of hospitalisations on health systems running out of beds.

This is certainly not how Australia is handling the situation.

And on the issue of masks, I wonder when America’s chief COVID-19 advisor Anthony Fauci will be banned from YouTube?

He did, after all, declare in October that masks are not needed outside: “there’s no reason to be walking around with a mask”.

>>78530

And in since leaked emails dating back to the start of the pandemic he also wrote the following:

"Masks are really for infected people to prevent them from spreading infection to people who are not infected rather than protecting uninfected people from acquiring infection.

"The typical mask you buy in the drug store is not really effective in keeping out virus, which is small enough to pass through material. It might, however, provide some slight benefit in keep out gross droplets if someone coughs or sneezes on you.

"I do not recommend that you wear a mask, particularly since you are going to a very low risk location."

I make these points not to suggest Fauci had some nefarious motive in making these comments, only to highlight that in a pandemic the flow of information changes rapidly.

In the case of Sky News Australia’s now removed content, most of it dates back to the same year Fauci made those comments.

But YouTube is looking at the debates and discussions through the lens of contemporary health advice.

Another issue is that YouTube’s approach to policing debate around COVID-19 policies appears arbitrarily focused against conservative voices.

I am yet to be informed of President Joe Biden’s YouTube and Facebook ban after uttering this false sentence: “You’re not going to get COVID if you have these vaccinations.”

YouTube or Facebook have also not banned commercial media outlets which falsely claim Sky News Australia Presenters, such as Alan Jones have an anti-vaccination stance.

So insulting, erroneous and lazy are these stories that none of these outlets have published the fact that Jones has both encouraged people to get the AstraZeneca vaccines and taken it himself.

The man has seven blood clots on his lungs and still, he took the vaccine and encouraged others to do so.

Sky News Australia commentators have all encouraged vaccines because they know it is a path out of lockdown.

Meanwhile Queensland’s Chief Health Officer Jeanette Young has actively campaigned against people under the age of 40 getting AstraZeneca, completely at odds with World Health Organisation’s advice.

No ban for the Queensland Labor government and no ban for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation which published the comments or Channel 7 which put them on YouTube.

It is hard not to look at some of these tech giant censorship decisions as being based on one factor, the political persuasion of the person making the comments.

There is also a broader issue with the mechanisms of fact-checking COVID-19 discussions.

>>78529

"Hail Google"

"Hail ministery of truth"

"Yes, 2+2 is 5. You were right and I was wrong. I am so sorry. Wait, it's now 6? I'm so sorry, I was wrong again 2+2 is 6."

>>78533

Read this slashdot comment.

It's incredible.

https://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=19454593&cid=61645317

What their overall policies are is completely irrelevant. Sky News heavily promoted not only on their own site but also their You Tube channels video by shock-jock Alan Jones claiming incorrectly that the Delta strain is not a concern and even less of a problem than the seasonal flu. He compared these numbers from hospitalisations cherry picking hospital data from countries that have heavily vaccinated their populations between the outbreak of the Alpha / Beta strain and the Gamma strain. Sky News also ran this front and centre right in the week where Australian media was pushing a vaccine drive saying the opposite: Delta is dangerous and highly infectious.He then suggested to the public that the government officials should be sacked for saying Delta was dangerous.Even American's Politifact decided to weigh in on this Australian specific story.

That is vaccine misinformation.

They also "interviewed" Craig Kelly (an MP who needs to be shot in the face with a bucket of shit and then fired from his job) to give him a moment to say that unvaccinated people were less likely to be hospitalised than vaccinated people again misconstruing UK data. This lie was so egregious that international news agencies corrected the record in case someone locally saw this brain dead piece of Australian wisdom. Sky News Australia then backed this lie with "data" (actually just a dataless blog) from The Daily Expose, which is like The Daily Mail crossed with Breitbart, crossed with nutjobs who want to watch everyone die.

That is fucking dangerous vaccine misinformation.

I don't give a fuck what some company's stance is on anything. Publish those as "facts", call everyone else "mainstream liars", and you even if you're the fucking pope you deserve to be purged off Youtube.

Reference, and to be clear: This is me pointing to why Sky News just got blocked (just because Youtube won't say, doesn't mean they can't say) https://www.abc.net.au/mediawa... [abc.net.au] Search "Sky News". If you can't find the exact story including actual video clips I'll give you a hint: The title is "Dangerous and misleading".

so naturally there has ended up a strange multi pronged attack to silence them.

I just wonder which "Youtube expert" shared that conspiracy theory with you. Was it The Daily Expose? You know what? I support this multi-pronged approach of silencing this bullshit, and I also hope Slashdot moderators step in and undo whoever gave you a +1 interesting mod for your factually incorrect post.

Another one of these 4-6%?

>>78536

FDA: Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee October 22, 2020 Meeting Presentation

https://www.fda.gov/media/143557/download

Page17

Anyone got any info on curing Amyloidosis?

>>78550

Oh it seems the patient has monoclonal gammopathies, with added AL-Amyloidosis.

No insulin injections ever.

Tumor markers really high, but the "MD"s couldn't actually find cancer.

>>78551

Only link I could find on qresear.ch

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjh.16906

A case series of Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance and COVID-19

Monoclonal Gammopathy of Undetermined Significance (MGUS) is a pre-malignant clonal plasma cell disorder, with 25–30% life-long risk of progression to multiple myeloma (MM).1 It is usually asymptomatic, but infrequently associated with several serious conditions, such as neuropathies, glomerulonephritis and acquired angioedema.2 Moreover, a higher risk of infection and deep venous thrombosis has been reported in patients with MGUS.3, 4

In recent studies of SARS-CoV-2 infection (COVID-19) in cancer, a higher fatality rate was found,5 especially in haematologic malignancies.6 While not an overt haematologic malignancy, MGUS falls within the spectrum of plasma cell dyscrasias, and has the potential to disrupt immunity and coagulation.3, 4 Therefore, MGUS could affect the course and outcome of COVID-19; however, such association remains unknown.

We describe seven patients diagnosed with MGUS who tested positive for COVID-19 from 18 March through 8 April, 2020, at Montefiore Health System, that was the epicentre of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Bronx, New York (Table I). All cases were positive by real-time reverse-transcriptase polymerase chain reaction of nasopharyngeal swabs.

>>78551

*Light chain amyloidosis

>>78551

>>78553

https://www.news-medical.net/news/20200310/Study-identifies-a-mutation-that-triggers-deadly-amyloidosis.aspx

Study identifies a mutation that triggers deadly amyloidosis

March 2020

Bone marrow plasma cells produce antibodies. These comprise two long and two short protein chains. The pathological proliferation of plasma cells can lead to an overproduction of the short chains. These associate to fibrils and deposit in organs. The result is fatal organ failure. A research team from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) and Heidelberg University has now identified the mutation behind the disease in a patient.

Antibodies are vital for the survival of human beings. They typically consist of two longer and thus heavier amino acid chains and two lighter ones. In rare cases, the plasma cells multiply excessively, flooding the body with light antibody chains.

In people suffering from light chain amyloidosis (AL amyloidosis), these light chains are deposited as extremely fine fibers, so-called amyloid fibrils, in tissue or in organs. The disease is often recognized only after the deposits already compromise the function of organs. In many cases AL amyloidosis is fatal.

To date, little was known about the exact cause of this amyloidosis. Depending on the organ affected, the symptoms vary considerably. Furthermore, each patient produces different types of antibodies. The disease is thus difficult to diagnose at an early stage."

Johannes Buchner, professor of biotechnology, Technical University of Munich

A mutation triggers the deadly disease

Using various analytical and database-supported methods, the team of scientists succeeded in identifying eleven mutations caused by the disease in the antibodies of a patient with advanced AL amyloidosis.

Further investigations showed that exactly one mutation was responsible for the destabilization and formation of the disease-causing amyloid fibrils. This mutation causes the unstable light chain to lose its structure after breaking into fragments, which then form the deadly amyloid fibrils.

"Our study shows that mutations that lead to unstable light chains are an important factor in the occurrence of amyloidosis," says Pamina Kazman, who carried out the majority of the measurements. "In the long term, we hope that these and other studies will lead to new, earlier diagnostic methods and possibly even new treatment options."

The research was funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). The protein structures were determined at the synchrotron radiation sources of the Paul Scherrer Institute in Villigen (Switzerland) and the European synchrotron radiation source in Grenoble (France).

Source:

Technical University of Munich (TUM)

Journal reference:

Kazman, P., et al. (2020) Fatal amyloid formation in a patient’s antibody light chain is caused by a single point mutation. eLife. doi.org/10.7554/eLife.52300.

>>78554

https://cdn.mdedge.com/files/s3fs-public/Document/September-2017/CT093060311.pdf

Systemic Amyloidosis: Unusual Presentation Mistaken for a Recurrent Scabies Infection

We report the case of a 63-year-old woman with a history of undifferentiated connective-tissue disease, polyarthritis, and bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome who presented with generalized pruritus and erythematous and excoriated papules on the trunk and extremities. Empiric scabies treatment was unsuccessful.

Patch testing and T-cell receptor gene rearrangement studies were unremarkable.

The patient was found to have mild interstitial lung disease and hypogammaglobulinemia.

Eventually a diagnosis of primary systemic amyloidosis was made after she developed frank lingual hypertrophy despite normal initial serum protein electrophoresis and negative abdominal fat pad aspiration. Diagnosis was confirmed with lingual biopsy.

This case demonstrates an unusual presentation of primary systemic amyloidosis consisting of arthritis and intense debilitating pruritus without primary skin lesions for a full year prior to diagnosis of multiple myeloma.

The patient responded to treatment with chemotherapy and corticosteroids.

Conclusion

In our patient, the diagnosis of AL amyloidosis was demonstrated by positive ? light chains on tongue biopsy, elevated serum free ? light chains, and ?-restricted bone marrow plasmacytosis, which manifested as pruritus, macroglossia, polyarthritis, and bilateral carpal tunnel syndrome.

Our case is unusual for the confluence of autoimmune features (ie, polyarthritis, sarcoidosislike lung disease), hypogammaglobulinemia, primary AL amyloidosis, and multiple myeloma that initially was difficult to detect. It is imperative for physicians to revisit the diagnosis if treatment fails, even if the patient is on the treatment regimen that should improve the condition at hand.

>>78555

BV/BO: please fix the post for me

>>78553

>>78551

Human amyloidosis, still intractable but becoming curable: The essential role of pathological diagnosis in the selection of type‐specific therapeutics

January 2020

Abstract

The molecular pathogenesis of human amyloidosis has been elucidated greatly during the last 20 years. Based on the understanding of the molecular mechanisms of amyloid fibril formation and deposition, various kinds of new drugs and therapeutics have been emerging to improve the prognosis of amyloidosis and even cure this disease. In this review article, we first summarize the pathogenesis and state‐of‐the‐art therapeutics of representative types of systemic human amyloidosis, that is, immunoglobulin light chain‐related, transthyretin‐related, amyloid A‐associated and β2‐microglobulin‐related amyloidosis. Next, we describe the essential roles of pathological diagnosis, especially the typing diagnosis of amyloidosis to appropriately guide type‐specific therapies of amyloidosis patients. Finally, we introduce the activities of the government‐funded group for surveys and research of amyloidosis in Japan, especially the nation‐wide pathology consultation system of amyloidosis, which started in April 2018. The nation‐wide improvement of the typing diagnosis of amyloidosis is essential for the appropriate treatment and care of amyloidosis patients in Japan.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31961039/

>>78551

>>78553

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41408-021-00483-7

Immunoglobulin light chain amyloidosis diagnosis and treatment algorithm 2021

Abstract

Immunoglobulin light chain amyloidosis (AL) commonly presents with nephrotic range proteinuria, heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, nondiabetic peripheral neuropathy, unexplained hepatomegaly or diarrhea, and should be considered in patients presenting with these symptoms. More importantly, patients being monitored for smoldering multiple myeloma and a monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS) are at risk for developing AL amyloidosis. MGUS and myeloma patients that have atypical features, including unexplained weight loss; lower extremity edema, early satiety, and dyspnea on exertion should be considered at risk for light chain amyloidosis. Overlooking the diagnosis of light chain amyloidosis leading to therapy delay is common, and it represents an error of diagnostic consideration. Herein we provide a review of established and investigational treatments for patients with AL amyloidosis and provide algorithms for workup and management of these patients.

Conclusion

Physician alertness and suspicion to the possibility of amyloidosis is a critical first step in diagnosing AL amyloidosis. This would allow earlier diagnosis, with less organ dysfunction, a setting in which treatments are likely to be most efficacious. Those diagnosed with advanced cardiac disease are unlikely to benefit from therapy and have a high mortality in the first few months of diagnosis. Once AL amyloidosis is suspected, the diagnosis can usually be made noninvasively, and organ biopsy is not generally required. Mass spectroscopic analysis should be standard for all newly diagnosed patients with amyloidosis to ensure correct classification of the protein subunit, and where unavailable immunohistochemical techniques may be utilized. All patients with light chain amyloidosis need cardiac biomarkers, free light chain measurements, and a bone marrow, with a thorough cardiac evaluation. The treatment of choice remains chemotherapy directed at the plasma cell clone producing the amyloidogenic light chain. In select cases stem cell transplantation may be considered, however only a minority of patients are eligible for this treatment and with the availability of newer agents that achieve deep responses, the utility of stem cell transplantation is likely to be questioned moving forward. For patients that are not transplant eligible but able to tolerate therapy, the standard of care would be combination therapy with daratumumab, bortezomib, cyclophosphamide, and dexamethasone based on the recent FDA approval of this combination for AL amyloidosis. Where daratumumab is unavailable, bortezomib-based regimens are preferred. For very frail patients, all oral therapy with melphalan and dexamethasone is appropriate. Second-line therapy can include immunomodulatory-based therapies, and other agents used in multiple myeloma, although data with use of these agents in this setting are sparse. If daratumumab has not been used upfront, we recommend using this agent at relapse with data showing very high response rates in this setting. Anti-amyloid antibodies are likely to have a potential role in the future management of these patients.