Tetanus, gangrene, botulism…

And other cheery things.

Oh come on. Halloween is coming, I’m just getting into the swing of it here.

I saw a tweet roll by on Twitter saying you can ‘develop’ tetanus even if fully vaccinated and I had one of those Pedant Moments.

You don’t ‘develop’ tetanus. You develop cancers or autoimmune diseases or rheumatism or arthritis. You don’t ‘develop’ tetanus. You catch it.

Not from other people. Usually you get it from an infected wound which can be external or internal. You see, those diseases, tetanus, botulism and gangrene are all caused by species within the bacterial genus Clostridium. They are all anaerobic, which means they live without oxygen and are often killed by it. None of them infect you in the traditional sense because they cannot live in oxygenated tissue.

They can live in your lower gut where oxygen is so low as to need very expensive equipment to detect it, and most of them are common soil bacteria. They are really lousy pathogens, they can’t spread easily between people and they kill their hosts way too often. Like cholera (Vibrio cholerae), they are bacterial species in the wrong place and just making a mess.

Okay. So let’s take gangrene (Clostridium welchii). It cannot infect living tissue because of the oxygen. It grows in dead tissue around a wound. It produces toxins that kill the living flesh surrounding that wound. Then it can grow in that dead tissue. You get this, you are effectively being eaten alive and being killed a little bit at a time. Nibble nibble.

Botulism (Clostridium botulinum) does not infect at all. Not even in dead tissue. It grows in food, famously in pates where the dense nature of the liver paste gives them a nice anaerobic environment. Also in canned food or in jars – which is why jars have those ‘button lids’. If the button can be pressed, either the jar has been opened or something in there is alive and producing gas. Neither is good. Always check. Swollen cans, jars with pressable lids, yoghourts with hard, convex lids… don’t risk it. These things are not expensive enough to take the chance. It’s not just botulism, there are many others.

You don’t get infected with botulism. The bacterium produces fifteen different neurotoxins in food and they are not all killed by heat. Basically, it poisons your food. The actual bacterium could pass through you without doing much of anything, it’s already produced the nasties in your lunch.

This is what made me cringe when listening to ‘training’ of new staff in Local Shop. ‘Food poisoning and food borne disease are pretty much the same thing’. No. They are entirely different things. Botulism is food poisoning. It grows in the food and you eat poisoned food. No infection. Salmonella is food borne disease. You eat contaminated food and it grows in you. Infection. But then, I wasn’t being paid enough to intervene and I’d just have seen blank stares anyway so I let it go.

So… tetanus (Clostridium tetani). There is a vaccine for this one and it’s a good one. It doesn’t last a lifetime, you need a booster but that’s about once every ten years. The vaccine is not aimed at the bacterium, it’s aimed at the toxins it produces because like other bacteria in this genus, it’s not in living tissue. The bacterium might well appear in your bloodstream but it’s really not very active in there.The toxins it produces in the dead flesh in the wound it’s infected are what is killing you.

No vaccine is 100% perfect. There will always be a few people it doesn’t work in and a few who will get sick from it. I’m lucky in that I have never been sick from a vaccine, but it does happen.

With something like tetanus though, it’s extremely nasty and often fatal so I’d say the risk of catching it is far, far greater than the risk from the vaccine. I definitely took the chance that the vaccine would work for me over the chance of getting the disease. I live on a farm, I don’t farm it but during harvest and ploughing there is a lot of soil dust around. I’m also digging and mowing and trimming all summer. Tetanus is a big risk here. So, if it ever turns out the vaccine didn’t work for me I really haven’t lost anything by taking it – and if it does, the gain is enormous.

So far I have never experienced tetanus. Could be the vaccine, could be luck, I have no way to tell. It’s like the old joke about the guy on a train in England throwing paper balls out of the window to keep elephants off the tracks. There are no elephants, therefore it works. I have never had tetanus, so does that mean the vaccine works? No idea, but I’m happy to have not had tetanus. And no bad reaction to the vaccine or boosters.

This is not to detract from those who have been sick after vaccines or who have had serious reactions to them. I’m just saying I’ve been lucky in that regard. I fully understand that others have not been so lucky.

There are many other species in this genus. Clostridium butyricum lives in your gut and it helps in starch digestion by getting into the starch grains, producing gas and exploding them like popcorn. So other bacteria can get to them. Never got around to publishing that, it’s in a PhD student’s thesis but she had way more than enough publications to pass anyway. That’s a useful one, they aren’t all evil.

Then there is Clostridium difficile. This is a properly evil bastard. It will destroy your guts when you are at your lowest ebb and it will kill you. It is also one of the few that can spread fairly easily, especially in places like hospital wards where people are already sick and stuck in the same room for a long time.

There is no vaccine, it lives in your gut and produces toxins that tear your intestines apart. Treating it involves antibiotics that are 50/50 going to kill it or kill you first. Last resort antibiotics like metronidazole or vancomycin. There is another way but the NHS didn’t want it and I’m not allowed to make it public. Meh. If I ever catch this, I have the Stuff in the fridge.

Vaccines against this genus are pretty much limited to tetanus, and that vaccine does not make you immune to the bacterium because your immune system won’t see it – and can easily deal with the actual bacterium because if it does get into blood, it’s already struggling. It’s growing in wounds composed of dead tissue. The vaccine generates antibodies against the toxins it produces. The effect lasts about a decade, then you need a booster. Seriously, look up what tetanus can do to you after a simple gardening accident and tell me you wouldn’t risk the vaccine!

A vaccine against botulism is unlikely. You’d have to derive antibodies to all its array of toxins. A vaccine against the bacterium is futile, it doesn’t infect you. Likewise with gangrene – the tissue it’s growing in is the dead stuff around a wound. It’s producing toxins that act locally so by the time the immune system gets to see those toxins, the tissue affected has died and so have the local immune cells.

If you don’t consume too much of botulinum’s toxins, there is a chance your immune system can mop them all up before they kill you – but trust me, you’re not going to be totally asymptomatic. You might be lucky enough to get to somewhere that can provide an antitoxin treatment too.

With gangrene, there is nothing your immune system or medicine can do. The affected tissue is dead and it’s spreading. The only thing to do is to cut off the affected area before it reaches some important organs. You’re going to lose parts of yourself if you want to survive this one.

Will there ever be a gangrene vaccine? No. Once it gets into the already-dead bits around a wound, you are, basically, fucked. It does not matter if you have antibodies to the toxins, the toxins are localised so you can only fight with what you have in that region, and that region is dying fast. Tetanus toxins are systemic so your whole immune system is involved, all over your body. Gangrene toxins are like fighting a war in a narrow valley, only the few on the front line can fight, the rest are just hanging around with nothing to do.

I bet it won’t stop the mRNA lot trying though. They’ll come up with the bright idea, as they have with covid, that if your own body cells express the toxins then your immune system will get to know them and be ready. Once more, they will overlook the small matter that the immune system doesn’t just attack the toxins, it attacks the cells producing them. It won’t stop gangrene. It will accelerate it even before you get it.

Hopefully someone in one of the companies has had one of those ‘Hang on a minute…’ moments and they’ll leave it alone. I’m not confident. The pharmers are all about money, not health. If they can mug you into buying the vaccine – and still keep indemnity from any damage it causes – they will make it and convince the idiots in government to mandate it. Or better yet, add it to your food so you can’t refuse – because you don’t even know you took it.

Never happen? It is already happening with covid vaccines. Once that vaccine passport is in place, there is no limit to what can be mandated and added to it. No limit at all. If one of the mandated vaccines kills you, well, too bad. They still have your money and that’s really all these companies care about.

Don’t forget there is also a depopulation agenda at play here. Oh you can hide away and pretend it’s tinfoil hattery if you like, but it’s been very openly stated over and over again. By the same people who want to inject you. To ‘protect’ you.

If you still believe governments won’t deliberately kill their own people, I’d suggest you study the likes of Chairman Mao, Pol Pot, Stalin etc. Hitler was small fry compared to these guys. And no, they are not in the ‘distant past’. Check the dates they were active.

Ah, but they are not western governments. Our side are more civilised. Like the internment camps for Japanese people in America during WWII. Like the biological experiments performed on unknowing subjects in America and the UK. Like the covid camps in use in Australia and now being constructed all over the west. Get this into your head – people are all the same. No matter what colour, what creed, what culture, deep down we are all the same. The Nazis were not a special case.

Even Churchill, the man who guided the UK to victory in WWII. The UK had captured a German enigma coding machine and found out that Germany was about to bomb Coventry. They didn’t warn Coventry because that would let the Germans know they could crack the code. Coventry was sacrificed as a move in a chess game.

Governments are dispassionate chess players when it comes to their people. They don’t care if the pawns get wiped off the board if it leads to what their end goal is. Yes, it’s just like a chess game except… you’re not playing it.

You’re a piece on the board.