Pro-Hamas Propagandist: Mamdani's Vile 10/7 Remarks

I read this article earlier and, like the over 1,000 people who commented to show their outrage, I was revolted, infuriated -- but not surprised.

Mamdani is no Mayor.  He's nothing more than a Hamas propagandist who daily displays his hatred for Israel and for Jews.

When castigating Joe McCarthy at the Army-McCarthy hearings in 1954, lawyer Joseph M. Welch famously said, after McCarthy smeared one of Welch's young lawyers, ""Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.. Let us not assassinate this lad further, senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?"

Mamdani continues showing his cruelty and recklessness and keeps proving that he has no sense of decency when it comes to Israel, the Jews, and October 7.

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NY Post

Mamdani's tone-deaf Oct. 7 post attacks Israel for 'ongoing genocide,' sparks outrage 

"Mayor Zohran Mamdani was accused of “weaponizing” the third anniversary of Hamas’ devastating Oct. 7 attack on Israel Wednesday, by attacking the Jewish state of committing “war crimes” in an “ongoing genocide.”

"Hizzoner dedicated less than a quarter of his statement to the “unthinkable loss” suffered when “Hamas killed more than 1,100 Israelis and abducted 251 others” on Oct. 7, 2023 — with the vast majority devoted to his ongoing attacks on Israel.

“The suffering did not begin nor end that day. It instead continued through the Israeli government’s devastating, ongoing genocide in Gaza,” he said, decrying the Palestinians killed in response to the Hamas attack being marked Wednesday.

“That suffering has intensified with every Israeli bomb dropped on ambulances waiting outside hospitals, every drone strike targeting a residential building or journalist, and every shipment of food aid turned away at a border crossing.

“Three years later, we must refuse to accept a world in which occupation and apartheid continue, where war crimes are met with impunity, and our federal government continues its complicity with every arms shipment,” said Mamdani.

"The slanted statement by the mayor — already widely criticized for making Jewish New Yorkers feel unsafe with his ongoing attacks on Israel — was quickly met with horror as many accused him of undermining the Oct. 7 terrorist attack.

“What he is trying to do is hijack the only day we have for the victims and survivors. He’s trying to hijack the day to talk about attacking Israel,” Israeli UN Ambassador Danny Danon told The Post, adding “It’s like on 9/11 you talked about victims and al-Qaeda terrorists.”

“It’s basically taking the only day we have for victims and trying to attack Israel with propaganda,” Danon said, before pointing out that Mamdani was set to attend both a vigil marking the attack Wednesday evening, and then host a sit-down with Palestinian New Yorkers.

“He’s dangerous and sophisticated,” the ambassador said of the mayor. “He will go to both ceremonies and try to say he feels for both losses of life.” 

"Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, also accused Mamdani of weaponizing the memory of those killed in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack to push his own agenda and undermine the Jewish community. 

“Not once do you say “Jews,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “On Oct. 7, Hamas-led attackers murdered civilians, committed sexual violence, mutilated bodies and took hostages. 

“You are weaponizing a day meant for mourning the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust to recycle your usual anti-zionist talking points,” he said.

"Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor, accused Mamdani of making a false moral equivalence between Hamas terrorists and Israel. 

“I thought it was unconscionable to draw a moral equivalency between the land dispute between two nations and a terrorist group going in, and murdering innocent, unarmed people, raping women, burning babies, beheading babies,” Blakeman said in a statement. “I don’t see the moral equivalency.”   

Blood is seen splattered in a child’s room following a massive Hamas militant attack in Kibbutz Nir Oz, Israel. AP

"Moshe Spern, President of the United Jewish Teachers group, said that Mamdani’s rhetoric fell in line with his disregard for the Jewish community, as evident by the continued rise in anti-semitic hate crimes in New York City.  

“Libeling Jews and the Jewish state puts Jewish New Yorkers at risk. The mayor’s own hate crimes statistics support this,” he said. 

"Anti-Jewish offenses have jumped by 8% in the last year, with overall hate crimes souring by nearly 16%, according to the NYPD

"Mamdani, in his statement, cited that 74,000 Palestinians—including more than 21,000 children, have been killed in the conflict, with another 1,400 dead since last year’s cease-fire.

"The death toll figures have been provided by the Hamas-run Ministry of Health, which does not differentiate between terrorists and civilians.  

"The ministry only counts deaths recorded in hospitals or official registries, with the UN and humanitarian groups estimating the total death toll is much larger. 

"The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) estimates that at least 300 children have been killed in the past year as clashes continue nearly every day between Israeli troops and Hamas. 

"Israeli officials have repeatedly accused Gaza’s ministry of health of inflating the numbers and maintained that its military avoids heavily populated targets. 

"The IDF previously estimated that its operation in the Gaza Strip killed more than 22,000 Hamas fighters. 

"Menashe Shapiro, an ex-advisor to former Mayor Eric Adams, also slammed Mamdani for using numbers provided by Hamas’ government to reiterate claims of genocide against Israel. 

“It’s incitement and electronic violence against New York’s Jews,” Shapiro said. “Mamdani said the same thing before Israel retaliated; he doesn’t get to hide behind Hamas’ made-up stats to justify his open Jew-hatred.”  

Melanie Phillips on The Third Anniversary of 10/7

Here's Melanie Phillips. I went right to her after reading about Mamdani's vile comments today.  

You have to be a paid Substack subscriber to read the entire column, but this excerpt expresses my own thoughts today and I'm sure the thoughts of most other Jews and Israelis on the third anniversary of the unforgiveably evil Hamas pogrom on Israel that left at least 1,200 souls dead.

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A chilling anniversary

The West’s depraved reaction to the October 7 atrocities and the resulting war spells disaster not for Israel but for itself

Melanie Phillips, Substack, 10-7-26

This is the heartbreaking anniversary of a day of infamy. Three years ago today, the western world stared at the worst depravity of which human beings are capable and decided not to defend civilisation against barbarism.

It wasn’t merely that, on October 7 2023, terrible atrocities were perpetrated upon more than 1450 innocent souls in the State of Israel. On that day, a very great evil was unleashed throughout the west, an evil that three years later threatens to consume it altogether.

The obscenity of the demonstrations and other events taking place today in London and elsewhere to gloat at the slaughter of Jews and demand that the Islamists’ attempt to exterminate Israel must now be completed reflects the obscenity of the reaction to that onslaught throughout the west over the past three years.

On that dreadful day in 2023, some 1200 Israeli Jews, as well as some Israeli Muslim civilians and others who were in southern Israel at that time, were slaughtered by hundreds of Arabs from Gaza led by the storm-troopers of Hamas, all intent upon the destruction of Israel and the extermination of the Jews.

The victims were subjected to ritualistic, fanatical slaughter. They were raped, beheaded, mutilated, tortured and burned alive. Children were murdered in front of their parents. The bodies of Israeli women were raped after they had been killed.

And more than 250 Israelis, including babies and children, were abducted into Gaza, abused by local Gazans and incarcerated for months in the Hamas tunnels where they were tortured, starved and murdered.

According to hostages who survived, not one Gazan civilian they encountered treated them kindly. Not one Gazan civilian informed against their Hamas abductors or helped them escape.

Instead of rising to the support of the Israeli Jews targeted for such genocidal attack, the West turned against them. The atrocities were denied, even though the Hamas terrorists had filmed themselves on their Go-Pro cameras as they went about their infernal business.

On Western streets, posters depicting the babies and children, women and men kidnapped into Gaza were ripped down by western individuals whose faces were contorted with a hideous rage at the very idea that Israeli Jews could ever be victims.

Professing grotesquely to be standing for conscience and compassion, western liberals and their governments declared that Israel, engaged in a desperate war of self-defence against the genocidal war being perpetrated by Hamas and its sponsor Iran, was itself committing genocide and that the Israelis were guilty of war crimes.

Every single part of that libellous and preposterous inversion has been shown to be untrue. While Gazan civilians were killed during the war, along with the Hamas terrorists who were being targeted, the civilian population has continued to increase through babies continuing to be born.

It was Hamas and Iran that perpetrated war crimes by deliberately targeting Israel civilians for mass murder. In stark contrast, Israel went to lengths attempted by no other army in the world to save civilian lives by issuing systematic warnings to evacuate targeted buildings and regularly moving the civilian population out of harm’s way.

Despite the charges so disgracefully levelled by the UN and governments in Britain, Europe, Australia and Canada, there was no famine or starvation in Gaza. Even UN agencies have finally reported lower levels of malnutrition there than in other countries, and lower than they were in Gaza before the war.

Reporters and medical workers said to have been targeted by callous and reckless Israeli troops have steadily been shown to have been members of Hamas or other Islamic terrorist groups. No media outfit has owned up to the wicked thing they have done: systematically misrepresenting the war in Gaza and poisoning the western mind against Israel and the Jews by using “reporters” every one of whom was doing the bidding of Hamas.

Instead of dismissing the genocide libel as a preposterous inversion of reality, the West has actually absorbed it as a cultural meme mindlessly repeated by millions and that drives political discourse.

What has become ever more clear is that October 7 didn’t just spark an astounding repudiation of conscience and reason. It’s not just that so many millions in the West seem to have lost their minds.

More horrifying still is that, over these past three years, we have also witnessed a delirium, an ecstatic excitement throughout the West that Israel and the Jews are finally getting what they deserve.

On October 7 itself, even as Israelis continued to be slaughtered in those Hamas-led attacks and long before the Israelis launched their war in Gaza, the first Muslim-led demonstrations were staged on the streets of western cities.

Those marches and demonstrations that followed over the past three years were not principally protests against Israel, nor were they principally demonstrating support for the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza.

They were fundamentally inspired by an Islamic world delirious at what it thought was solid evidence that Israel was on the way to being destroyed — and that beyond that essential first stage now lay the prospect of destroying the West.

These were triumphalist demonstrations that Islam now ruled the streets of London and other Western cities. Buoyed by the support of Western “progressives” marching alongside them as they called for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews, the Islamists understood that the West was now their principal weapon against the Jewish people. And thus the West was also being suborned into signing its own civilisational death warrant.

With Western Jews under sustained and accelerating physical and verbal attack, with Zionism now being framed as an instrument of reputational death and with Jews and Israel singled out for demonisation, those “progressives” can barely contain their own excitement that at last the Jews are getting what was coming to them.

With Zionism, the self-determination of the Jewish people in their own ancestral homeland, being framed as demonic, antisemitism has been reframed as the attempt by Jews to use the claim of bigotry as a shield for their own misdeeds. What misdeeds, exactly? Well, controlling the world in their own interests and at the expense of everyone else, of course!

So Jews too, along with the Jewish state, have been framed as demonic. And exactly as Jews have experienced down through the generations, the deranged demonisation of Jews has once again been renamed as morality itself.

What we’ve been witnessing from such liberals singling out Israel for treatment they afford to no other nation or people on earth isn’t just racism or bigotry. By wiping the suffering of Israeli Jews out of the picture altogether, liberals who preach tolerance and respect for “the other” are actually in the business of dehumanising those they defame and despise.

The suffering and victimisation of Israeli Jews is literally being torn down from lamp-posts and walls in a frenzy of murderous rage. As they do to those pieces of paper that they claw down and shred, so these liberals would like to be done to the Jews themselves.

We have all been here before, many, many times.

Like ideological fanatics from the French revolution through both communism and Nazism, these frenzied Israel-haters are in effect members of a cult. Their brains have been so badly fried by indoctrination into the belief that their evil cause embodies virtue itself that they are only able to respond to appeals to truth, rationality and conscience by denying truth, rationality and conscience altogether and stamping venomously upon anyone who makes such an appeal.

Israel has emerged from October 7 deeply changed. The trauma it has endured will never be erased. But it has emerged stronger and more resilient than ever. The last illusions about the Palestinian Arabs were stripped away in the Go-Pro images of depraved slaughter and in the hellholes of the Gaza tunnels. It has also understood that to defend itself it can no longer rely on faithless allies.

Israel has rediscovered the deep love it has for itself as a Jewish nation, for the Jewish people and for their magnificent history. A new iron has entered into the already steely Israeli soul. Israel will survive and thrive because, faced with a cult of death, it embraces life.

The same cannot be said of the West. Its own depraved reaction to the October 7 atrocities and the most just of wars that has followed spells disaster not for Israel but for itself.

I explained this reaction in the book I published last year, The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It. In that book, I wrote that you can’t understand the West’s wild and unhinged response to October 7 and the war that has followed unless you understand what the West has been doing to itself for decades.

What follows here is an edited extract from the book’s first chapter. 

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The remainder is for paid subscribers.  But I'm sure you've gotten the general idea by now.

All Throughout History, Lying About The Jews

The Big Lie: Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?

By Howard Jacobson, Tablet Magazine, 10-5-26

"Has there ever been a people more frequently or more preposterously lied about than the Jews?

"I don’t ask that in expectation of sympathy. It’s perversely flattering to excite the sort of malign curiosity that cannot be satisfied by what’s observably true. But there’s also been a heavy price to pay for being a figment of such superstitious fear and loathing that even the presence of Jews isn’t necessary for fear and loathing to take root and flourish. Distant hearsay can be enough.

"That the Elizabethans would go to the theater to scream and spit at Shylock several hundred years after Jews had been expelled from Britain attests to the astonishing staying power of the Jew as idea. As does the persisting fear of tainted Jewish blood in Spain, long after the Inquisition had converted, tortured, expelled, and executed every living Jew it could find. The bacillus of antisemitic mendacity thrives out of time, Jews or no Jews.

"Some lies learn to adapt and linger longer than others. The belief that Jews were responsible for the Black Death by poisoning wells, a charge with which the sardonic Barabas made merry in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta—

As for myself, I walk abroad a-nights,
And kill sick people groaning under walls.
Sometimes I go about and poison wells—

"can still be traced in accusations that Israelis withhold water from Palestinians and contaminate what they do let through. The effigy of Judas Iscariot, the fictitious Jew said to have sold Jesus for a handful of silver, continues to be burned in some Easter festivals in Eastern Europe and Latin America, no matter that the incendiaries don’t always know whom they’re burning. And folklore hasn’t quite given up on the figure of the Wandering Jew, cursed to roam the earth homeless as punishment for taunting Jesus on the way to the crucifixion. Long before academic anti-Zionists began to call for the expulsion of Israelis from Israel, Luther had posited their eternal exile as an expression, sanctioned by God, of their vagabondage of soul. And as for the Jew as companion of the devil, not to say the devil himself, I can personally vouch for the tenacity of that superstition, as more than one of my schoolfellows have asked—in Prestwich, north Manchester, England, 1954—if I would show them what remained of my tail.

"Regarding the Blood Libel, the malicious medieval defamation that told of Jews kidnapping and killing Gentile children for their blood, either to add zest to matzah or to replenish the blood of male Jews who menstruated profusely as a consequence of circumcision—another fantasy, too lurid and deranged to be simply called a falsehood—it too has resurfaced in recent years, determining the way the deaths of Palestinian children in the latest Gaza war have been presented as the result of Israel Defense Forces soldiers killing little ones “for sport” and laughing as they do so. No footage of such vile behavior exists, of course. I myself was widely misreported as arguing, in a piece in the [London] Observer a couple of years ago, that the press should cover up all word of such deaths. In fact, I argued for no such thing, nor would the left-leaning Observer have printed the piece had its staff thought that was my meaning. My target was the narrative strategy of the BBC and other news outlets, in which nine stories out of 10 led with the latest death count of Palestinian children—too cruel had they been even a quarter true, but which time and again proved unverifiable. The BBC reported first and ascertained second. But neither belated correction nor half-hearted apology did anything to alter the conviction that Israel’s first aim was the murder of Gazan children.

"How one tells a story is the story, and this story looked too like the old one for comfort. To argue against the framing of this narrative or the excited bloodthirstiness of the reporting was not to call for censorship of the truth. But that’s how I was reported. Enter a web of lies as ancient and entangled as this one, and whoever doesn’t repeat the mantra of the child-murdering Jews must be a liar or an accomplice to the lying.

"The charge of genocide leveled at Israel, a charge that invariably comes with the pseudo-authoritative definite article—the genocide, to muffle dissent and to rejig the hierarchy of genocides in favor of Israel’s victims—could be said to be the biggest lie of all. It does not diminish the horror of the flattening of Gaza one wit, or make light of the tragic loss of Palestinian lives, to insist that a genocide, let alone the genocide, has not occurred, even if lawyers with a vested interest in proving Israel guilty of something terrible redefine the word genocide to include normal conduct according to the laws of war.

"Yet words do matter. If the Nazis’ attempt to destroy the Jews necessitated the invention of the word genocide, it was because no existing word adequately described the scope of their ambition. What was envisaged at last as a Final Solution intended nothing less than the destruction of an entire people—not just the Jews of Germany, but also wherever a Jew could be found, and not just Jews in person, but also their property, their religion, their history, their philosophy and art, the very idea and principle of Jew, its spiritual no less than its physical being, until not a trace or memory of them should remain. Has so complete an annihilation of all that constitutes a people and their peoplehood ever been imagined let alone attempted before?

"If a word to encapsulate this crazed and pitiless ambition did not yet exist, that is all the more reason to respect its specificity and rarity. Employ it to describe a war, even a savage war, and we lose the wherewithal to differentiate. It might not be saying much, but Israel does not scour the world to find Palestinians to kill. Whatever conclusion to the fighting Israel hopes for, no one in their right mind can truly believe it seeks a destruction of the Palestinian people, their history, their art, their thought, their spiritual being, with the express intention of making them vanish from the minds of men. We who believe in the grandeur of Israel’s earliest ambitions and cannot imagine a world safe for Jews without it wish we could say more; wish we could support the country’s actions at every turn; wish that time and endless war and tiredness had not tarnished so much and turned one-time devotees into doubters. But disappointment doesn’t excuse falsehood. There are degrees of wrong, and the job of language is to distinguish, not confound.

“Genocide is the icing on the cake,” an actor friend of mine told me recently. He had family members who had cheered on the Oct. 7 massacre. They welcomed, at whatever cost to Palestinian life, what they knew would come next. Let Israel do its very worst. The prize at the end of all the killing would be the final proof that the Jews were no longer worthy of the world’s pity. The genocide! Abracadabra—the world would be released from the guilt of having set the stage for and been complicit in monstrous crimes against the Jews, culminating in the Holocaust, by showing the Jews themselves to be the true criminals, with the Palestinians taking their place as innocent victims! The entire world is thereby granted a get-out-of-jail-free card, Hamas terrorists included, to be paid for in Jewish blood.

"In truth, to aficionados of the new, revisionist colonial history of Israel, Jews haven’t been the good guys for a long time. If the genocide is the icing on the cake of lies, the cake itself is Zionism, that fragile hope for liberation, rescue, and reaffirmation that had lived long in the breasts of Jews over time and across the world and which, when realized, against all odds, seemed nothing short of a miracle.

"That hope has since been ruthlessly and cynically disfigured by its enemies to the point where the very word itself hisses with sinister intent. Bad luck for Zionism that the word begins with a Z, a letter suggestive of the same unfathomable necromantic malice that medieval Jews brought to the killing of Gentile children.

"It has, of course, taken more than a Z to make Zionism the hated thing it is today for millions of people who have, and want to have, no understanding of its meaning, its ambitions, its history. Of all attempts to vandalize an ideal—allowing that ideals have a way of maiming themselves over time—few can have been so dishonest or, sad to say, so successful. Dishonest, above all, because most of those who have made the discrediting of Zionism and Zionists their life’s work are historians who cannot fail to know how much more vexed and varied the story always was, how very different from one another in their ambitions and philosophy the first Zionists were. That historians sin against their own profession is a matter for them, their consciences, and the institutions they discredit.

"The damage their persistent falsehoods and omissions do is less easily put aside. Paint Zionists as foreign invaders, and it’s plain sailing thereafter to remove them from civilized society, deplatform them, censor them, and at last silence them. Ignore the reality that the majority of Israelis trace at least some of their direct ancestry to the countries of the Middle East, including Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Iraq, and Iran, where they lived for centuries and millennia and which are all now effectively Judenrein—while millions of Arabs today live as Israeli citizens with full legal and civil rights. The goal of this academic campaign is clearly not to combat genocide and ethnic cleansing, but rather to rid the world of Zionists, and to rid the world of supporters of Zionism, too. For what we are witnessing is a purge not only of the guilty, but also of those guilty by their shared history, guilty by hearsay, guilty—remembering the foetor judaicus—by virtue of foul smell.

"And it isn’t as though the false reading of Zionism’s history requires expert skills to unearth. The settler-colonialist smear gives its own game away to anyone who has spent 10 minutes in the company of an academic postcolonialist and heard the hackneyed accusation drop from his lips as slogans such as “Enemies from within” and “Card-carrying communists” once littered the speeches of McCarthyites. But only ask how a people can colonize their own aboriginal homeland, or in the name of which European colonial power bruised refugees effected a takeover of someone else’s country, and you are an apologist for genocide.

"I recently came across a passionate anti-Zionist recruiting Einstein and Stefan Zweig to his cause, as though Jews who were to the slightest degree equivocal about Zionism in its early days would surely think as any extremist thinks about it today. In fact, though Einstein had his doubts, he changed his mind as the world changed in front of his eyes and went so far, in letters to his family, as to declare himself, happily, a Zionist. As for Zweig’s early opposition from the safety of Vienna, one cannot imagine many hate-marchers sharing his love for the Diaspora Jew, buzzing brashly about the world, a citizen of everywhere. Zweig’s is a tragic story of a gifted Jew imagining himself proof against Jew-hating in whatever form, having to run from his bright, beloved Vienna, fleeing the Nazis who banned and burned his books, and ending up taking his life in Rio de Janeiro, an exile from everywhere, a victim of that fanciful Diaspora that kept many from embracing Zionism and some wishing at the last that they had better understood what Zionism was for.

"It’s not in any spirit of I told you so that I write the above words. No Jew was obliged to embrace Zionism. And it can hardly be said to have solved for all Jews the problem of existence in a hostile world. But the witness of such Jews as Einstein and Zweig cannot be adduced as evidence of Zionism’s monolithic evil. What they show, rather, is that Zionism was never an undifferentiated mass of ill intent with only theft and conquest on its mind. It was an idea, a longing, a necessity to some, and a wild fancy to others, and it probably never struck two Jews or sympathetic non-Jews the same way. To argue otherwise is bad faith and twisted history and, like all political falsehoods, serves no purpose but to awaken an old abhorrence.

"The great lie that all Jews, except for those who noisily forswear Jewishness, think and act as one Jew has fueled the pogroms and inquisitions of the past. We fancied we’d seen the last of it, but here it is again: a universally resonating slander that aims at nothing less than the wholesale vilification of a people, and the denial of their right to either live separately as a nation or live peacefully among other nations. They are hell-bent—the liars and defamers—on resurrecting the concept of genocide, but ask yourself why genocide is once again on their minds."

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Howard Jacobson is a novelist and critic in London. He is the author of, among other titles, J (shortlisted for the 2014 Booker Prize), Shylock Is My Name, Pussy, Live a Little, and The Finkler Question, which won the 2010 Man Booker Prize. His most recent novel, Howl, was published in 2026.

Your Local Epidemiologist-The Dose, 10-6-26

Plague in Russia? Plus flu, common cold, a new opioid, and good news

The Dose (October 6)

Katelyn Jetelina

7 hours ago

 

The plague in Russia? Wouldn’t be so scary if there wasn’t a new book about this exact scenario. And that it’s in Russia (our political adversary, which is currently at war with NATO). And that we just survived a pandemic. There’s been enough chatter about this that we tackle it head-on.

Also, sick season is definitely here early: flu is increasing, and the common cold is surging. And another synthetic opioid may be spreading in our drug supplies.

Here’s what’s going on in the world of health and, most importantly, what it means for you.

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Disease “weather” report

 

Flu continues to increase

Flu is still low nationally but is increasing in almost every state (purple on the map below). This is true for many metrics, including test positivity rate, emergency department visits, and even (if you squint closely) hospitalizations, which are ticking up.

It’s so weird how early this flu season is, but as I said last week, flu is doing what it does best: being unpredictable.

 

Trends in flu emergency department visits from the previous week. Source: CDC.

The strain that is driving this flu wave right now is H1N1pdm09. H1N1 is in the flu vaccine, which is great news! But the circulating strain has a mutation that has drifted slightly from the vaccine. Early lab data suggest the mutation is most often found among teens and young adults, people whose first flu exposure was the 2009 H1N1 pandemic strain. This means the vaccine may not be as effective in young people.

BUT the flu vaccine is still very important. In that same study, the vaccine boosted antibodies against every current strain, including the mutated ones. Every year, multiple flu strains circulate, and the vaccine will likely protect kiddos from other strains!

What this means for you: It’s time to get your flu vaccine for optimal protection.

The other culprit: Common cold

 

Most other viruses are still at bay or decreasing (like Covid-19), with one exception: the common cold. It’s surging right now (gray line below), with 32% of physician tests coming back positive for rhinovirus/enterovirus, the main viruses behind colds. This is higher than any rate since 2019 (last season on record on the CDC website). A fall rise is expected, but this one is big.

 

Weekly percentage of tests positive for respiratory viruses. Source: CDC; Annotated by Your Local Epidemiologist.

What this means for you: If you’re sick right now, it’s most likely the common cold or may be the flu. This means a lot of runny noses, sore throats, and feeling crummy. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do for a cold, other than sleep, lots of water, and staying home while you’re sick.

Cychlorphine has entered the scene

 

Cychlorphine is an ultra-potent synthetic opioid that’s getting a lot of attention after several high-profile cases. According to the Center for Forensic Science Research & Education (CSFRE), test tube data estimates it to be up to 10 times stronger than fentanyl. It belongs to a different chemical family called orphines.

At least 24 states have now identified cyclorphine-related overdoses or deaths. One Tennessee county alone has reported 50 deaths.

We don’t know how widespread it really is in the drug supply. That’s partly because our surveillance system for substance use is fragmented and lagged. Toxicology reports take weeks, and it often takes months for the data to show up in official reports. And it doesn’t really happen unless someone dies. Fentanyl test strips don’t detect cychlorphine.

What this means for you: Opioid deaths are still a big deal in the U.S. Narcan still works. Call 911 and give a dose if you see an overdose. If there’s no response after two to three minutes, give another, and keep going, since cychlorphine may take several.

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Spotlight: Plague in Russia

Last week, the Moscow Times (a non-state-controlled news organization) reported that a 28-year-old civilian anti-plague lab worker in Siberia died on October 1 after being exposed to the plague. Nearly 200 of her contacts are quarantined. Beyond that, the story gets very murky. Independent verification is not readily available in Russia, and there are all sorts of conflicts of interest here. 

Plague? Like the Black Death? Kind of. Plague is a rare but serious disease caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, the same bacterium behind the Black Death in the 1300s. It lives in wild rodents and their fleas. Thankfully, it's much less of a problem today because of improved hygiene and living conditions. There are three forms: bubonic (the most common, which causes painful swollen lymph nodes), septicemic (in the bloodstream), and pneumonic (in the lungs). Pneumonic plague is the most dangerous and the only form that spreads person to person.

If early accounts are correct, this story is about the pneumonic plague. It’s concerning, as any lab accident/leak is, but the risk of this becoming a Covid-19 pandemic is very, very low for a few reasons:

1. Pneumonic plague is not traditionally efficient at spreading. While it does spread person to person through respiratory droplets, in previous outbreaks, one infected person typically infected one to three other people. Transmission occurs in close, sustained, face-to-face contact (like household caregiving, crowded sleeping quarters, or unprotected clinical workers). This isn’t like measles, which can linger in the air for hours and hours.

2. We have antibiotics. They work really well. In fact, a few cases of pneumonic plague pop up randomly in the U.S. The last case was in July 2025 in Arizona after a man was exposed to sick cats. Forty-six of his contacts received antibiotic prophylaxis, and none became sick. Outbreaks with person-to-person spread still happen in places where plague is endemic, like Madagascar. In 2021 in Madagascar, for example, 22 cases were confirmed, and eight people died. But antibiotics stopped the outbreak.

3. The response seems very rapid. Nearly 200 of the deceased Russian woman’s contacts were in quarantine and under close medical monitoring. Some reports say five hospitals are also under quarantine.

4. This didn’t happen in a crowded megacity. The institute is in a small town, not Moscow, which means less contact between people and less potential for spread.

Two things would raise concern, and many biosecurity analysts and epidemiologists will be trying to wade through the noise (and political chatter) to ensure these aren’t happening:

1. More cases. There isn’t reported spread yet. The good news is that the pneumonic plague has a short incubation period (usually one to four days), which means that if it does spread, it will happen this week. We don’t have to wait weeks and weeks as we did with hantavirus, for example. We probably can’t rely on the country reporting it, though, so epidemiologists will be watching other metrics like hospitalizations.

2. If the pathogen she died from was altered. This bacterium occurs naturally in wildlife in parts of Russia. Russia also has a long history of plague research and public health institutes that study and monitor it. So the fact that someone was working with plague is not, by itself, a cause for concern. But Russia has engaged in biologic weapons development and the possibility of modifying infectious diseases to make them more transmissible or resistant to common antibiotics is real. Experts are keeping a close eye on a range of possibilities here.

All of this underscores something so important: Biosecurity and public health are essential infrastructure investments, not “nice to haves.” And this is why. Without them, we won’t have rapid responses, resources for immediate action, or early detection. It’s that simple.

What this means for you: There are still many unknowns, but for now, this is an interesting situation that epidemiologists and biosecurity experts will continue to follow. The risk of a pandemic is very, very low. We know plague very well. We have treatments.

I will be back if anything changes.

A big thanks to Dr. Claire Dillavou—epidemiologist, biosecurity expert, and friend—who jumped on this with me over the weekend.

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Good news

• Teen suicide risk is at its lowest point in a decade. According to CDC data, 14% of high school students seriously considered suicide in 2025, compared to 20% in 2023. It also decreased among LGBTQ+ students (from 41% to 30%).

• Nobel Prize awarded for creating a way to turn brain cells on and off using light. The technique, called optogenetics, lets researchers see exactly which brain circuits control things like movement, mood, and memory. This can help explain what goes wrong in conditions like Parkinson’s, depression, epilepsy, and some kinds of blindness. Treatments for patients are still in the early stages, but the discovery is already speeding up research into new ways to treat the brain.

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Question grab bag

Re: Health equity piece. That was great! But isn’t that image of the people on the boxes with a fence outdated?

Thanks for raising this, and you’re right. Like many others, we were familiar with this graphic because it’s so widely used in equity vs. equality conversations. But thanks to readers who have pointed out its real limitations, we now understand we should leave it in the past. It frames advantage as an inborn trait like height rather than the result of social structures. It leaves women out and treats the fence as a given, so equity becomes handing out boxes instead of removing the barriers themselves. Since learning more, we’ve replaced it in the post. These visualizations better reflect how equity relates to many kinds of people and issues.

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Bottom line

Get your flu vaccine early. If you’re sniffly, it’s probably the cold. The Russia story is worth watching as something interesting (not a top 10 worry in my mind today). As always, we will be back with more updates if/when they arise.

Love, YLE

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Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) is a team of experts, from physicians to immunologists to epidemiologists to nutritionists, working together with one goal: to “translate” ever-evolving public health science so people are well-equipped to make evidence-based decisions. The YLE suite of newsletters reaches over 475,000 people across more than 132 countries. This newsletter is free to everyone, thanks to the generous support of fellow YLE community members.

Jew-Hatred: Now The Politician's Best Friend

Brendan O'Neill has a great way with words, and I wish he could write about our hateful officials!

Blatant antisemitism like this used to be a death knell for politicians and for workers. Nobody dared speak this brazenly and so openly about Jews without losing their jobs and reputations, and being ostracized. 

Now, they are being celebrated. 

If the Democrat Socialists actually get elected, they will become America's openly anti-Jewish party. You can see they are well on their way already.

What next? The West's version of the Wannsee Conference? 

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The Green Party is now an openly anti-Jewish party. 

The Greens’ adoption of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ policy confirms they are a party of bourgeois bigots.

by Brendan O'Neill, Spiked Chief Political Writer, 10-4-26

‘Tell me what you accuse the Jews of [and] I’ll tell you what you are guilty of’, said the great Soviet writer Vasily Grossman. Today, that grim, eternal truth was starkly illustrated by the Green Party’s passing of a motion saying ‘Zionism is Racism’. To throw around the word ‘racism’ even as you single out Jewish sovereignty as uniquely demonic, to pose as an enemy of bigotry even as you dream of the erasure of the world’s only Jewish state, takes moral duplicity to sickening new heights. In their snivelling whisperings about ‘racism’, these scumbags reveal their own.

"It was at their conference in Brighton that the Green Party of England and Wales voted in favour of the ‘Zionism is Racism’ screed. The motion expressly defines the Greens as an ‘anti-Zionist party’. It says Zionism is a species of racial hatred, and will henceforth be ‘treated as any other form of racism’. Most obnoxiously of all, it commits the Greens to campaigning for the scrubbing of the Jewish nation from the face of the Earth. It calls for ‘the establishment of a single democratic Palestinian State in all of historic Palestine, with Jerusalem as its capital’. So no more Jewish homeland. No more tiny patch of land, a poxy 263 by 71 miles, for the Jews to call their own. All of it would disappear. Imagine accusing others of being ‘genocidal’ even as you agitate for the total dismantling of the ancestral kingdom of the Jews.

"Anyone who thinks this is ‘just about Israel’, that the Islamo-left’s demented hatred for the Jewish nation has no impact on the Jews of the West, needs to pay closer attention. One of the most chilling events in Brighton today was the enthusiastic voting down of an amendment that would have offered protection to Jewish Greens who attend Zionist synagogues. Designed to ‘safeguard Jewish membership’, the amendment warned against ‘indirect discrimination’ against ‘practising Jews’ on the basis of the ‘synagogues, community centres or denominational groups’ they are aligned with. It was smashed, defeated by 1,026 to 648 votes.

"Think about this. Really think about it. A mainstream party, and a supposedly progressive one, has just voted against an amendment that would protect its own Jewish members from discrimination on the grounds of the religious institutions they attend. I cannot remember anything like this in my lifetime: a party effectively greenlighting the harassment of Jews who commit the ‘sin’ of attending synagogues that believe in the right of Jews to nationhood. It is stunning. It’s a moral crisis. Not since the BNP has a party so openly committed itself to hostility towards certain Jews.

"The historic gravity of today’s events cannot be overstated. We now have a party in Britain wholly devoted to the moral annihilation of Jewish sovereignty. A party committed to the abolition of Israel. A party content to hang a target sign around the necks of its own Jewish members who continue to patronise institutions that believe in the continued existence of a Jewish State. If the Tories overnight devoted themselves to the removal from the Earth of the state of Pakistan, and the moral isolation of every pesky Pakistani in Britain who likes that nation, it would be leading the news. Every progressive would cry ‘racism’, and rightly so. Will they do likewise here? Don’t hold your breath – you’ll die.

"I’ll say it, though. I’ll say that if Jewish nationhood makes you vomit, if the right to self-determination of the Jews keeps you awake at night, then you are a bigot. You might consider yourself woke and good, but your frothing animus for Jewish nationhood betrays the blackness of your soul. For that’s all Zionism is: the belief that the Jews, like every other people, have an inalienable right to build and flourish in the land of their forebears. That the same people who tilt their heads in bourgeois indulgence of every native claim to territory then puke into their matcha when the Jews say ‘What about us?’ tells you everything you need to know. It is impossible to explain these double standards without using the word ‘anti-Semitism’. Go on, try.

"Cowardice mingles with the bigotry. Behold Zack Polanski, the Green Party leader. He swerved the ‘Zionism is Racism’ vote by choosing instead to campaign in Holborn and St Pancras, where he’s standing in the by-election. What a yellow-bellied toad. What a barrel-scraping coward. For all his bourgeois Israelophobia, he knows that this motion – and in particular its rank, racist refusal to offer protection to Green Jews who attend Zionist synagogues – is ‘problematic’. Yet rather than confront the black mould of Jew-state-phobia that sickens his party, he runs off to London. A spineless worm.

"Other Green luminaries spoke out against the motion, including former leaders Caroline Lucas and Adrian Ramsay. Good for them. They’ll leave the party now, right? To stay in a party devoted to the demolition of the Jewish nation and the criminalisation of Jewish sovereignty is to make yourself complicit in such ideological barbarism. Everyone in the Greens is now tainted by the pox of an Israelophobia that aspires to nothing less than the physical removal of Israel from the map. I was never a fan of Lucas or the eco-pieties she promoted, yet even I don’t want to see people like her devoured by the insatiable beast of bourgeois Israel-hate. Decent Greens need to get out while they can.

"That the Greens voted to obliterate Israel and demonise Zionism on the 90th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street is so, so telling. Who will now deny that anti-Zionism has replaced anti-Semitism as the chief ideological means of persecuting Jews? Ninety years ago, fascist filth saw the Jews as the moral corrupters of European society, as an Octopus-like entity strangling our way of life. Today, ‘progressives’ view the Jewish state in the same way: as a uniquely pox-like ‘entity’ that kills children, ails the West, and wields disproportionate influence over our slack-jawed governments. Humanists should condemn the Green Party motion as fulsomely as they would have done Mosley’s Blackshirt march down Cable St

"Back to Grossman: what you say about them is far truer of you. It’s not Zionism that is racism – it’s anti-Zionism. It’s wrong to ‘equate anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism’, says the Greens’ neo-Mosleyite policy. They protest way too much. If you spend your every waking hour demonising Jewish sovereignty, and dreaming of the annihilation of the Jewish State, and calling the Jewish homeland a genocidal, child-killing machine, then you have a problem with Jews. It’s that simple. The Green Party of England and Wales has a problem with Jews. Avoid these bigoted shits like your life depends on it."

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.

Dr Ruth Report 10-4-26

Here's another amazingly information-filled newsletter by Dr Ruth Ann Crystal. She always includes such helpful information, including the wastewater tracker that lets you get information for your own zip code. 

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Dr. Ruth Report, 10/4/26

Flu arrives to Pacific states; COVID wave seen in US, England, and Europe; Neuro-Long COVID and HHV-7; a 5th Pennsylvania measles death; Plague lab accident in Siberia; and much more.

Ruth Ann Crystal MD

11 hours ago

Respiratory Illnesses

The CDC notes that Rhinovirus/Enterovirus (RV/EV) and Group A strep are increasing nationally. Flu A is starting to increase especially in the Pacific states (see below).

Ryan McCormick MD has made a new hyperlocal tracker for Influenza A and for COVID- you can put in your zip code and the tracker will give you information closest to you.

Regional wastewater levels for COVID, RSV, Flu A, Flu B per Wastewater SCAN:

COVID levels in the Northeast may reflect hot spots in Millbury, MA and Dover, NH, but most likely this curve will be recalibrated in the next few days and will appear less steep.

Flu

According to the CDC, Influenza A test positivity is increasing significantly in HHS Region 9 which covers California, Nevada, Arizona and Hawaii, as well as Pacific Islands such as Guam, American Samoa, N. Mariana Islands, Marshall Islands, and Palau. In California, test positivity for Influenza is moderate and is high in the Bay Area according to CDPH. Remember to get your Flu shot soon!

COVID

The PMC19 dashboard should update tomorrow, but as of today, it predicts that 1 in 92 people in the United States is currently infected with COVID equaling about 532,000 new infections each day. Levels of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater are extremely high in SW Orange County, FL (Orlando) and in Millbury, MA according to WastewaterSCAN.

Mike Hoerger noted in a recent tweet, “There is a lot of uninformed armchair ‘analysis’ that waves of [COVID] infection “keep getting smaller” when the area under the curve (AUC) is actually staying about the same (less tall but wider, similar number of infections).”

The CDC noted this week on their website, “CDC competitively awarded a new wastewater testing contract to Verily Health, Inc. (Verily) on September 28, 2026. There will be a brief gap in wastewater data affecting ~200 sites as sampling, testing, and reporting are restarted.”

 

Internationally, COVID testing and wastewater show increases in COVID in England and European countries such as France, Netherlands, Austria, and Switzerland.

Acute COVID infections, General COVID info

ACE2-like Catalytic Activity in Anti-SARS-CoV-2 Spike Protein Monoclonal Antibodies | Pathogens 9/4/26

• Researchers from UVA screened for and discovered four anti-spike antibodies that were catalytic and acted like ACE2 enzymes. They noted that this “supports the hypothesis that antibodies induced by SARS-CoV-2 infection could help mediate the pathogenesis of COVID-19 and Long COVID, and, more generally, the hypothesis that catalytic antibodies induced by infectious agents can contribute to disease pathogenesis.”

Pregnancy

Maternal vaccination against COVID-19, influenza, pertussis, and respiratory syncytial virus: a scoping review | npj Vaccines 9/29/26

• In a scoping review of 635 publications, Austrian scientists found robust evidence supporting the effectiveness, safety, and immune benefits of vaccinating pregnant people against COVID, influenza, and pertussis. They noted that data on maternal RSV vaccination is more limited and warrants further investigation before firm conclusions can be drawn.

Pediatrics

Co-Designing an Online Narrative-Based Intervention for Breathing and Psychological Wellbeing for Adolescents With Post-COVID Syndrome | Clinical Child Psychology & Psychiatry 9/28/26

• UK researchers worked with 7 teens to co-design a telehealth group for adolescents with Long COVID. “Young people directly influenced the content, structure, and delivery of the programme, helping to identify what was useful and what changes were needed. The final intervention consists of an online group session and supporting resources that were shaped by participants feedback. This co-designed intervention aims to help young people manage symptoms more confidently, improve their relationship with their bodies and breathing, and reduce feelings of isolation.”

Vaccines

Invivyd Announces Positive Topline Results from LIBERTY Phase 3 Study | Invivyd Press Release 9/29/26

• Invivyd reports that in a 210 person Phase 3 trial, its COVID antibody VYD2311 caused fewer adverse events than the Pfizer mRNA COVID vaccine (56.5% vs 91.4% over six days) and did not blunt vaccine neutralizing titers. This is a company press release with preliminary data regarding safety and antibody levels. Efficacy data against COVID infection are still pending and will be presented later.

Long COVID

SARS-CoV-2-specific monoclonal antibody AER002 in Long COVID: an exploratory randomized phase 2a mechanistic trial | Nature 9/30/26

• UCSF scientists enrolled 36 participants with Long COVID in a randomized trial testing long acting SARS-CoV-2 monoclonal antibody AER002 and found it did not produce meaningful improvement in overall symptoms or biomarkers. In a post-hoc analysis, participants with a lower baseline SARS-CoV-2 antibody level and higher drug exposure were more likely to perceive treatment benefit. Interestingly, exploratory imaging conducted after treatment revealed decreased T cell activation in the brain, spinal cord, and salivary tissue, pointing toward a possible biological mechanism worth investigating in larger trials.

Factors associated with persistent post-COVID-19 condition and functional limitation four years after SARS-CoV-2 infection | Nature Scientific Reports 10/1/26

• Hannover Medical School in Germany followed 992 people with Long COVID and found that 77.4% continued to meet diagnostic criteria for Long COVID four years after their initial COVID infection. Of note, >95% of participants had a mild COVID infection initially and did not require hospitalization.

Former OpenAI Exec Fidji Simo’s $20 Million Plan To Solve Her Chronic Disease And Others | Forbes, 10/1/26

• ChronicleBio, cofounded by tech executive Fidji Simo, who herself lives with postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS), is deploying $20 million alongside artificial intelligence and large scale biological datasets to identify potential treatments for POTS, Long COVID, and other poorly understood chronic illnesses. The company’s approach centers on mining deep biological data to uncover therapeutic targets that have eluded conventional research methods.

Characterizing Host Inflammatory Bioprofiles in People With Postacute Sequelae SARS‐CoV‐2 Infection (PASC) | J of Immunology Research 9/29/26

• Irish researchers measured 57 blood biomarkers mapping eight biological pathways in 356 people with Long COVID and found six inflammatory clusters that symptom-based groupings missed. One small cluster (19 people), marked by tissue damage, clotting, and axonal injury markers, had higher odds of cardiac and respiratory symptoms. The study lacked a non-PASC control group.

No detectable differences in peripheral blood immune profiles between patients with prolonged severe long COVID and convalescent controls | Nature 9/29/26

• Erasmus MC researchers compared 52 people with severe Long COVID who were sick for a median of three years to 52 recovered controls. Immune cell counts, monocyte gene expression, serum cytokines, and interferon signatures in the blood did not differ. The authors suggest disease processes may be tissue-specific and therefore not seen in the blood.

🧠 High Frequency of HHV-7 Reactivation in Neurological and Neuropsychiatric Long COVID: A Retrospective Observational Study | Viruses 9/20/26

• RED Laboratories in Belgium tested 30 people with neurological Long COVID and found that 77% were PCR positive for Human Herpesvirus 7 (HHV-7), versus 29% in a pre-COVID historical cohort. HHV-7-positive patients often reported neuropsychiatric symptoms, and in one patient followed longitudinally over time, viral load tracked with symptom severity. Latent herpesvirus reactivation may contribute to neurological Long COVID, but this study is hypothesis-generating and does not establish causation.

🧠 Microtesla magnetic therapy for cognitive impairment in long COVID: a randomized pilot study | Brain Communications 9/28/26

• A randomized pilot study of 30 adults with Long COVID cognitive impairment tested an at home, transcranial Microtesla Magnetic Therapy (MMT) device. Home MMT was feasible, safe, and well tolerated. Active treatment showed some gains over sham in verbal learning, executive function, and emotional well being, but larger trials are needed.

🧠 Neurocognitive Indices of Long COVID: Dysregulated Engagement of Inhibitory Control and Oscillatory Slowing | NeuroSci 9/28/26

• A small EEG study compared 18 young, previously healthy adults with Long COVID (mild, non-hospitalized infection, about 6 months out) to 20 pre-pandemic controls. Task performance was normal, but the Long COVID group showed weaker frontal theta activity during inhibition and error processing, plus slower resting alpha rhythms that persisted after adjusting for anxiety and depression. EEG slowing tracked with attention problems, poor sleep, and headaches.

🧠 Neurological Manifestations of Long COVID: Current Evidence, Emerging Concepts, and Future Perspectives | 9/15/26 J of Clinical Medicine

• “This narrative review [from Croatia] provides a critical synthesis of current literature regarding the clinical presentations, potential mechanisms, and biomarkers associated with neurological involvement in Long COVID. Reflecting the high heterogeneity of the available evidence, it is important to note that no neurological biomarker or disease-modifying therapy has yet been clinically validated.”

🧠 Autoantibody landscapes in Long COVID with neurological symptoms show heterogeneity without a shared disease signature | JCI Insight 9/29/26

• Researchers tested spinal fluid from 31 people with neurological Long COVID, and blood from 29 others with cognitive symptoms from a different cohort, for a shared pattern of autoantibodies against brain tissue. They found no common pattern. Each person’s results differed, and computer models could not tell the patients from controls. Small sample sizes and heterogeneity of samples from different cohorts mean some patients may still be affected.

🫁 Risk factors of post-COVID-19 symptoms, a cross-sectional study in patients with asthma and chronic obstructive lung disease | npj Primary Care Respiratory Medicine 9/29/26

• In a Swedish study of 2,328 adults with asthma or COPD, 59% of the 494 with confirmed COVID infection reported Long COVID symptoms lasting over three months (55% asthma, 70% COPD). Severe acute infection, obesity, chronic pain, and anxiety or depression stood out as risk factors. Data were self-reported and cross-sectional.

Measles

CDC Measles Update

• As of October 1, 2026, 3,887 confirmed measles cases were reported in the United States in 2026. This week, a fifth measles death was reported in Pennsylvania, but the CDC site incorrectly reports “2*” deaths from measles.

Pennsylvania Department of Health Measles Dashboard:

• As of October 2, Pennsylvania notes 977 confirmed measles cases with 102 new measles cases in the last 7 days. Less than 1% of cases were fully vaccinated. There have been 195 hospitalizations related to measles in Pennsylvania and 5 deaths.

Measles outbreaks could leave thousands vulnerable to infectious diseases for years | CIDRAP 10/2/26

• “The measles virus hijacks the immune system, using specialized memory cells to make copies of itself before blowing them up”, [Dr. Michael] Mina said. By deleting the body’s memory of earlier infections, measles causes a condition called “immune amnesia.”...Immune amnesia “happens in 100% of measles-infected individuals to some degree,” Mina said.

Johns Hopkins US Measles Tracker

Measles cases in the last 2 weeks:

Mumps

San Diego State football team dealing with mumps outbreak | ESPN 10/1/26

• Public health officials confirmed a mumps outbreak on the San Diego State football team, with 14 cases noted so far. Mumps can cause painful testicular swelling and sometimes infertility in young men. Two doses of the MMR vaccine protect against measles, mumps, and rubella.

The Plague (!)

Nearly 200 People Under Observation After Irkutsk Lab Worker Dies From Plague | The Moscow Times 10/2/26

• The Moscow Times states that a 28 year old woman working in a lab in Siberia has died from pneumonic plague after breaking a test tube containing plague at an “anti-plague institute”. 197 people with whom she came in contact have been put in isolation.

Plague Fact Sheet from the WHO 9/29/26

Plague has three clinical forms, all caused by the bacterium Y. pestis.

• Bubonic plague, the most common, follows an infected flea bite and causes painful swollen lymph nodes (”buboes”) that can become pus-filled sores. It rarely spreads between people but can progress to the lungs or bloodstream.

• Pneumonic plague, the most virulent, attacks the lungs, incubates in as little as 24 hours, and spreads person to person through respiratory particles. It can be fatal, but recovery is likely if treated within 24 hours of symptom onset.

• Septicaemic plague occurs when the bacteria multiply in the blood, can develop from either other form, and causes organ failure, tissue damage, and bleeding under the skin. It is fatal if untreated.

Plague has “a case-fatality ratio of 30% to 100% if left untreated. The pneumonic and septicaemic forms are invariably fatal unless treated early.”

Ebola in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)

According to the DR Congo Health Ministry of 9/29/26:

• 8,224 confirmed Ebola cases

• 851 patients in isolation/hospitalization

• 2,121 recovered

• 3,982 Ebola deaths

• Case fatality rate: 48.4%

• Contact tracing: 78.7%

Other news

The ‘missed disease’ that affects 190 million: endometriosis drug shows early promise | Nature 10/1/26

• Washington State University researchers developed a modified form of niclosamide engineered to seek out the macrophages that drive endometriosis progression, reducing both pain responses and lesion size in a mouse model. Endometriosis affects 190 million people worldwide, and this targeted approach represents a potential non-hormonal treatment avenue but human studies are needed.

Original study:

2‐Deoxyglucose Dendrimer‐Enabled Niclosamide Delivery to FRβ‐Expressing Macrophages Alleviates Endometriosis Progression and Associated Hyperalgesia | Advanced Healthcare Materials 8/30/26

• Washington State researchers attached a tiny branched carrier (folic acid-targeted dendrimer) to an anti-parasite drug called niclosamide to target FRβ-positive macrophages that drive endometriosis. In mice, one intraperitoneal dose of this non-hormonal medication shrank endometriosis lesions and eased pain. The treatment has not yet been tested in humans.

@ScienceMagazine 10/1/26

“Historically, medical research has relied heavily on male participants, with findings often generalized to women and children. If women’s health is discussed at all, it’s largely framed around reproduction. This special issue of Science highlights the research that is seeking to close the critical gaps in Women’s Health. Learn more: https://scim.ag/4hy8ACT “

Reframing menopause and menopause hormone therapy as opportunities for healthy aging | Science 10/1/26

• This article in Science reframes menopause and menopause hormone therapy as opportunities for healthy aging. It moves the conversation beyond symptom relief alone and toward long term health in midlife and beyond, making the case that this life stage deserves a more proactive, prevention minded approach.

Microbiome signatures linked to cancer and treatment adverse events in a real-world cohort | Cell 9/29/26

• Mayo Clinic researchers profiled the gut microbiomes of 1,364 patients with cancer and 287 healthy controls. Most microbiome changes were shared across cancers and largely tracked with comorbidities, not individual tumor types. Early onset cancers had distinct signatures, and low levels of Anaerostipes hadrus predicted 5FU induced diarrhea but not carboplatin diarrhea.

 

Cranial bone marrow–derived monocytes promote neuroinflammation in chronic traumatic brain injury | Science Translational Medicine 9/30/26

• Researchers from China have found that “Cranial Bone Marrow (CBM)-originated inflammatory monocytes/macrophages (Mo/Macs) may serve as key inflammatory drivers of chronic traumatic brain injury (cTBI) and further show that fenofibrate represents a potential therapeutic strategy for cTBI treatment in older adults.”

Peripheral CXCR3 blockade mitigates T cell infiltration and neurodegeneration in a mouse model of tauopathy | Neuron 9/28/26

“These findings identify CXCR3-dependent chemotaxis as a critical signaling pathway for subtypes of T cells linked to tau-mediated neurodegeneration and highlight CXCR3 blockade as a potential disease-modifying therapeutic strategy for tauopathies.”

Cervical lymphadenectomy impairs brain lymphatic clearance and synaptic proteostasis | Neuron 9/29/26

• Removing neck lymph nodes is linked to cognitive impairment in patients as brain health depends on lymphatic drainage to clear waste. In rodents, cervical lymphadenectomy (neck lymph node removal) impairs brain lymphatic drainage, and causes redox stress and protein microaggregation. The molecular and structural features are distinct from Alzheimer’s disease.

Global burden of cancer attributable to infections in 2024: a worldwide incidence analysis | Lancet Oncology Oct 2026

• An estimated 2.3 million new cancers in 2024, about 12% of the global total, were attributable to infections. H. pylori (760,000) and HPV (750,000) led the list, and 77% of cases were in low and middle income countries. EBV now ranks fourth, strengthening the case for an EBV vaccine and for scaling up proven prevention tools.

‘We Didn’t Set Out to Make a Show for Animals!’ The Netflix Seal Cartoon That’s a Huge Hit With Pets | Guardian 9/22/26

• Sealook, a South Korean animated series about a colony of seals, has become an unlikely favorite among dogs and cats. Its high contrast colors sit in the visual range pets can actually see, and clips of cats and dogs glued to the screen have gone viral on social media.

Photograph: Rich Pelley

I will be taking next week off from the newsletter. Have a great 2 weeks!

Take care,

Ruth Ann Crystal MD