Introduction:
Dr Churchill’s non profit foundation People’s Health International is the only goodwill organization that is exclusively combating the persistent threat of Tuberculosis that is still to this day the number one killer, amongst all infectious diseases in our world.
And yet up to now, we have had no cure for the antibiotic resistant form of TB, nor for any of the other extreme antibiotic resistant strains of Tuberculosis that ravage humanity.
Sadly, we do not even have any successfully efficacious vaccination against these most virulent strains of TB, nor do we have any potent medicines that we can use to save lives until the open-source effort that we led, fostered, and participated, led to the advent of what the Tuberculosis Alliance now calls “Pretomanid” the first new anti-Tuberculosis medicine that was approved by the FDA, on August 15th of 2019.
It is important to note that the discovery, creation, and open-sourcing to the World’s community of Health Ministries, of this novel antibiotic, by Dr Churchill, has saved tens of millions of lives during the past pandemic, because Tuberculosis is the most deadly co-morbidity factor for those also infected with Covid-19, or any other influenza type of pulmonary illnesses.
Here is Dr Churchill:
” My speech”
” Imagine that this is the evening of the 31st of December 2030…
After a year full of Life, Hope and most importantly Health — the World is going to celebrate the New Year as usual, with the ball dropping in New York’s Times Square at the countdown to midnight turning to a New Day, a New Year and a New Decade. People are rushing to procure last minute provisions as they hurry home to celebrate with friends and family, and many others are coming our bundled in warm clothes to meet & greet the new Year amid fanfare and fireworks as the old one goes away and the new one arrives, like a newborn baby.
We all have beautiful memories of these New Year evening events, that are repeated globally each and every turn of the clock on the good years of our lives…
What a Joy !
BUT THERE ARE SOME OTHER KINDS OF NEW YEARS THAT WE DON’T WANNA TALK ABOUT.
Yet, we must…
Because, now we have to imagine that this was just a dream, and instead of it, on the evening of the 31st of December 2030 — there is nobody at Times Square… because there are no more people living in New York City.
There are no more people because a terrible pandemic of epic proportions has run through the City’s population and has decimated its ranks with a ferocious 50% attrition rate, on each wave it passes through.
With each successive wave of disease – soon enough that means that 90% of the people have perished…
All of our front line medical workers are decimated because in their ranks the disease has brought havoc and thus all of the infrastructure of hospitals, medical services and the chain of support are rubbished.
Indeed the entirety of the medical infrastructure has succumbed to the same issues that have felled all other complex systems of Human Civilization, due to the lack of trained people serving their roles, as their ranks have been thinned greatly, and the survivors are terribly afraid to go to their work stations…
Survivors have fled the City for the necks of the woods, villages and their redoubts in the countryside. The disease has followed. A terrible host, exacting vengeance from some, release for others, God’s wrath for the faithful, and most importantly — the quietude of death, the sadness of the survivors, and the bloody breath for most.
There is no social structure, messaging system, news media, army or police and EMS anymore. Indeed there is no human structure unaffected, just a bunch of sick and progressively sicker survivors in pockets of highlands, in the crags of the mountains, and in the remotest of regions.
Ninety percent of Humanity has disappeared, leaving behind all the once large and plentiful cities as eerily empty quarters, reminiscent of a Civilization that once was great, but has long now disappeared in the sands of time.
Who’s to blame for this ?
Ten thousand other Great Civilizations have disappeared in the sands of time, as ancient Herodotus has told us… even before his time.
No matter, because TB an ancient coexisting host has claimed the Earth… and the extinction of other competing dominant species, is its own percussive labour.
The human species served the TB bacillus well. First as the host and then as the carrier, and lastly as the mechanism to strengthen its existence via the antibiotic and vaccination regimes all humans enjoyed maximally.
Yet, since the New Millennium and especially throughout the 20s, TB had become what used to be called an orphan disease, in the eyes of the People who had already dismissed it as the illness of their grandfathers, and the post war sanatoriums full of soldiers coming back from the great wars of the trenches…
Famous people like George Orwell died from it, as well as many millions of people do in the developing world today…
Yet, for the industrialized countries of the North — TB has not been a problem since then, and we have forgotten its devastating effects as long lasting memory of Humanity is confined to the last epidemic solely. Our Medical memory has failed to remind us that we are liable to experience the same co-morbidity factors stemming from the same disease again and again.
The influenza of 2018 had the Tuberculosis bacillus as the greatest comorbidity factor and it indeed killed the flower of Humanity, as it spread through the assembled armies, in their barracks, in their marches, and in the awful trenches of war, decimating their ranks far more effectively than any enemy could ever do.
So who is responsible for the current unchecked disease outbreak?
Why have we found ourselves unable to combat this host that has left the Human Civilization a mere memory of its past glory?
Great buildings remain all dark, their edifices unchanged and their contents untouched. But the few survivors are nowhere near to be found. The reason they have survived is that they are not in contact with anyone else.
“To be un-contacted is to be alive.”
This dystopia is not a phenomenon of fertile imagination like George Orwell’s 1984, but a real life scenario that has been gradually unfolding over the past few decades, that the reintroduction of Antibiotic and Vaccine Resistant TB has been quietly coursing through our Human family.
TDR-TB, has been followed by MDR-TB, and that has in quick sequence morphed into XDR-TB. Extreme antibiotic & vaccine resistant Tuberculosis. Yes, you heard that right. No existing vaccine against Tuberculosis has been effective against Extreme Antibiotic and Vaccine resistant TB since 1972.
No vaccine against XDR-TB exists today.
Tuberculosis (TB) vaccines are vaccinations intended for the prevention of tuberculosis. Immunotherapy as a defence against TB was first proposed in 1890 by Robert Koch. As of 2021, the only effective tuberculosis vaccine in common use is the Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG) vaccine, first used on humans in 1921. It consists of attenuated (weakened) strains of the cattle tuberculosis bacillus. It is still administered for all children throughout the World’s countries, and in the industrialized North, is also recommended for babies in countries where tuberculosis is common.
Yet today we do not have a working vaccine against Tuberculosis and that why the above scenario is not science fiction but rather an analysis on the vector of unchecked growth of this disease, because we have got NO working vaccine against it as of yet.
This is what we need to focus on in order to avoid the dystopian future of a Human Civilization collapse and a Human species being unable to recover from this dreadful disease.
This is a major milestone, because Tuberculosis is the leading infectious disease cause of death worldwide. In 2017, 10 million people fell ill from active TB and 1.6 million died. The vector of the disease is such, that in 2018, and in 2019, the numbers are even worse. Tuberculosis is an airborne disease that can be spread by coughing or sneezing. Drug-resistant forms of TB currently account for close to one in three deaths due to antimicrobial resistance annually.
Yet, we can find good news if we look and work hard.
Such good news is the the FDA approval of Pretomanid which is a “victory for the people suffering from these highly drug-resistant forms of the world’s deadliest infectious disease.”
The great hope was that the new treatment regimen, will provide a shorter and more manageable treatment for those patients in need, but it does not protect us for long…
Until very recently, people infected with highly drug-resistant TB had rather poor treatment options and a very poor prognosis, whereas this new regimen provides hope with nine out of 10 patients achieving culture negative status at six months post-treatment with this short, all-oral regimen.
Pretomanid is a new chemical entity and a member of a class of compounds known as nitroimidazooxazines. TB Alliance acquired the developmental rights to the compound in 2002. It was granted Priority Review, Qualified Infectious Disease Product, and Orphan Drug status. The LPAD pathway that was used for the approval of Pretomanid was established by FDA as a tool to encourage further development of antibacterial and antifungal drugs to treat serious, life-threatening infections that affect a limited population of patients with unmet needs.
Pretomanid was available in the United States by the end of this year 2019 just in time for the defense against the Pandemic and of course due to the efforts of Dr Churchill is available to the rest of the world as of August 15th of 2019, thereby saving tens of millions of lives worldwide, because pulmonary TB is the greatest comorbidity factor.
In addition to the United States Food & Drug Administration, the TB Alliance has submitted Pretomanid as part of the BPaL regimen for review by the European Medicines Agency (EU-FDA) and has provided data to the World Health Organization for consideration of inclusion in treatment guidelines for highly drug-resistant TB. Today the nonprofit group TB Alliance offers the only FDA approved treatment, because the FDA greenlit “Pretomanid” under the “Limited Population Pathway” for Antibacterial and Antifungal Drugs. “Pretomanid” was approved as part of a three-drug treatment regimen for people with extensively drug-resistant TB, multi-drug resistant TB or for patients who are treatment-intolerant or non-responsive. The three-drug regimen consists of bedaquiline, pretomanid and linezolid and is referred to as the BPaL regimen.
The combination treatment was studied in the Nix-TB trial across three sites in South Africa. Data from the Nix-TB trial showed that within six months of treatment, the combination therapy hit the mark in 90% of patients within six months, according to the nonprofit. With FDA’s recent approval, Pretomanid became only the third new anti-TB drug in more than 50 years, as well as the first drug to be developed and registered by a not-for-profit organization, thus open-sourcing the drug, in order to make it available to all the people and to all the Peoples, across the Globe equitably.
Now we are embarking on a New Race for developing similarly an Open Source vaccine against Tuberculosis. And although the current vaccine is not worth the trouble because it can only act as a placebo, if not voodoo incantation — we have hopeful signs towards the development of a new vaccine via the efforts of People’s Health International, via the Tuberculosis Vaccine Alliance, and via other research & development efforts for an effective vaccine to combat resurgent TB.
Yet, we must remember that we have No Commercial aspirations of any kind, and all of our work is Open Source development of the New TB vaccine. That places ahead of the curve of any controversy about our Public Mission and Private Interest. Saving lives and the whole of our Civilization is our only remit.
Indeed saving the Human Species is my only goal.
My non-profit organization PHI, People’s Health International does not have its own commercial interests. Ownership of vaccine candidates and biomarkers, and any intellectual property rights remain with the nations, the Ministries of Health, the Universities, and the specific Medical Doctors and the very Researchers and vaccine Developers who joined this humongous effort at capturing the biomarkers and the DNA of the bacillus recorded at the TB affected people’s blood, dead and dying. This enables PHI to be a neutral and an honest broker among our R&D partners, global stakeholders, national ministries of Health, founders & funders.
But we should keep our eyes on the disease…
The disease that I call TB2.
TB2
Am talking about Resurgent Tuberculosis 2.0.
Now with TB2 things are a lot worse too:
Tuberculosis (TB) is an infectious disease that is caused by a bacterium called Mycobacterium tuberculosis.
TB primarily affects the lungs, but it can also affect organs in the central nervous system, lymphatic system, and circulatory system among others
Increasing resistance to tuberculosis drugs around the world is a “ticking time bomb”, says the World Health Organization (WHO).
It estimates almost 5,000,000 people around the world have a type of TB2 which is resistant to at least two of the main types of drugs used to treat the disease.
But most of these folk, are not diagnosed and are walking around spreading these more deadly strains of TB2.
More than two thirds of the cases are in China, India, and Africa, as always leading the way. Yet today, countries which previously had reported eradicating this disease — are now experiencing a serious flare up. Take the European country, part of the developed world, the country of Greece for example, that now has more new Tuberculosis TB2 cases than at any time since the onset of the first & second world war and the devastating Axis powers occupation of the 1940s, that saw Germany removing the strategic safety supplies of food of the country, thus denying access to the Greek citizens of proper nutrition, because the grains and foodstuff annual production of the country was also taken by the German Army the ruthlessly efficient Wermacht, and this resulted in a wide spread famine that killed 15% of the population due to force famine and malnutrition. And now Greece is again at the epicenter of a new TB2 pandemic. The worse to be seen in Europe in more than a century. Yet, this round of TB2 disease, is not because of the population’s malnutrition, but rather it is resulting from the Austerity Economic Policies enforced upon the Greek citizens as if living under another form of occupation of the country… by the dictates of the lenders of the mountain of debt the poor country is suffering under. Still the European North is responsible for the malaise under the guise of austerity that has caused the health services of the country to collapse…
Unfortunately the statistics lie, because the new TB has a good way of going undiagnosed lying dormant within us as we go through normal life, and erupting only when we experience a dramatic event that stresses our lives tremendously. Then it wakes up and the TB2 bacillus races for the blood centers, the lungs and the heart, where it becomes the most communicable disease killer we have encountered.
Still the World Heath Organization says that the overall number of people developing the TB2 disease is falling, although 18.6 million people were diagnosed with TB2 last year, and more than a million people died from the very same XDR-TB bacillus this year. Now thousands more are set to die in the downtown homeless encampments of our great cities, in particular because of our denial towards the existence of this “orphan” illness that is not our grandparents’ type of Tuberculosis.
These are the statistical anomalies that allow all of our Health Ministries to still consider this disease an “orphan” disease, of no significant interest…
To add insult to injury — this XDR-Tb that is known as extensively drug-resistant form of modern tuberculosis (XDR-TB) is now spreading in all of the disadvantaged homeless encampment areas of New York City, of San Francisco, of Los Angeles, of Chicago, of Atlanta, and of all other major cities of the US and beyond, as it spreads through all other economically blighted places hard hit by the various crises and the reductions of Social and health services due to our misunderstanding of the end of the Covid-19 pandemic as a complete and permanent victory against infectious communicable diseases…
If someone was spreading TB by design — they could not place the kernel of the disease in a more proper location than the major American cities’ downtowns, in order to favor the spreading of the vector of this disease…
It is a very efficient method of spreading the disease via the human vector and radiating from the downtowns’ infected mass of homeless to the housed and officed population extending into the reaches of the neighborhoods, the burbs, the boroughs, the suburbs and the market towns and villages beyond, quickly engulfing the whole of the population of the Country…
Because the giant problem with TB (XDR-TB) is that it is not responding to most of the main drugs used to treat the disease. And is worth knowing that acute pneumonic TuBerculosis, resistant to antibiotics, has a rather concerning 57% mortality rate — once it gets lodged in the lungs. that means that One out of every Two people infected with this strain of acute pneumonic TB of the lungs, are quickly lost to this deadly epidemic.
Analysis of lobar pneumonic tuberculosis: To heighten the awareness of lobar pneumonic tuberculosis, or tuberculous pneumonia, or acute pneumonic tuberculosis.
Symptoms: All the patients with acute onsets have a continuous high fever, and their WBC was not found higher than 10 x 10(9)/L. All of the patients’ chest radiographs showed a consolidation in one or two lobars, and in 30% of the patients pleural effusions were found. Significant roent genographic changes could occur in short duration. All the patients were not sensitive to common antibiotics, and the shadow could enlarge in short time. Exudative foci could be absorbed shortly after antituberculosis chemotherapy, and no cavitation was found. An early transbroncho-lung biopsy (TBLB) and (or) brushing smear may be advantageous to early diagnosis and treatment of this illness.
Dr Ruth McNerny had this to say: ”We’re just silently watching this epidemic unfold and spread before our eyes”
Many innocent children and older adults have caught the disease and have also died from TB2 in the last few years inside these United States, whose Health organizations deny the existence of the disease inside the United States, as a nod of “not scaring” the population, and in a show of the ultra-silly Ostrich mentality, we have our government officials incarcerating TB patients amongst the general prison populations, in order to hide the problem from society. And they do without the benefit of Habeas Corpus and Due Process of l
Generally, if the People are fed well and live in healthy ways — they are being fairly resistant to this TB2 bacillus. But all the downtown encampments of homeless veterans and others in the major cities of the US, that are now unfortunately are undergoing their worst economic malaise since the great depression of 1929… are rife with the most virulent expression of Extreme Antibiotic Resistant Tuberculosis XDR-TB.
Because above all else — TB is an economic disease.
Yet, we are making strides in our development of a New Tuberculosis vaccine, such as the development of TBvac, a subunit recombinant anti-tuberculosis vaccine for the prevention of pulmonary tuberculosis in adults and in children. This vaccine, which is at the stage of pre-clinical research, contains bovine TB, Ag85A, and ESAT-6-CFP-10 antigens, in combination with an adjuvant. Developed as of March of 2024, animal studies are complete and clinical trials are expected to get underway soonest, since all of our animal studies have been completed this year. Our data for animal studies on 100 bovines have confirmed the safety and immunological efficacy of the vaccine against Bovine Tuberculosis, but Human studies remain undone…
Now my question to you is this:
Are we going to heed the call of this New Resurgent Tuberculosis and launch ourselves into joining forces for Vaccine development, preparedness in educating the New TB medical professionals, and ameliorating the circumstances that allowed this Bacillus to be the Kingmaker amongst species on this Earth — or we are going to stay silent and fail to heed the warning clarion call to action, until the very city we are meeting-in today, this New York City where the United Nations always meets in September, grows still & quiet, silent from human beings voices … forever ?
Thank You
