At the McCullough Report, we will stay ahead of the information curve on emerging infectious disease threats. This time, it’s another contagious respiratory illness from China.

From Courageous Discourse Substack John Leake: “U.S. government agencies are fond of talking about “Pandemic Preparedness,” yet they are strangely silent about a mysterious pneumonia that is affecting large numbers of children in two regions of northern China that are about 500 miles apart — Beijing and in Liaoning Province, including Dalian which is located at the southernmost tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, with the Yellow Sea in the east and the Bohai Sea in the west. This situation reminds me of the conspicuous fact that the U.S. Consulate General office in Wuhan — which is presumably full of spooks — apparently reported NOTHING about the mysterious pneumonia that started circulating in that city in the autumn of 2019.

On Tuesday, November 21, ProMED — the largest publicly-available surveillance system conducting global reporting of infectious disease outbreaks — published a report on these clusters of pneumonia cases in Beijing and Liaoning.

With the outbreak of pneumonia in China, children’s hospitals in Beijing, Liaoning and other places were overwhelmed with sick children, and schools and classes were on the verge of suspension. Parents questioned whether the authorities were covering up the epidemic.

In the early morning, Beijing Children’s Hospital was still overcrowded with parents and children whose children had pneumonia and came to seek treatment. Mr. [W], a Beijing citizen: “Many, many are hospitalized. They don’t cough and have no symptoms. They just have a high temperature (fever) and many develop pulmonary nodules.”

The situation in Liaoning Province is also serious. The lobby of Dalian Children’s Hospital is full of sick children receiving intravenous drips. There are also queues of patients at the traditional Chinese medicine hospitals and the central hospitals. A staff member of Dalian Central Hospital said: “Patients have to wait in line for 2 hours, and we are all in the emergency department and there are no general outpatient clinics.”

Some school classes have even been canceled completely. Not only are all students sick, but teachers are also infected with pneumonia. …

ProMED was the first surveillance system that reported the mysterious pneumonia circulating in Wuhan. Chinese health agencies are claiming that the illness is NOT caused by a novel pathogen, but by a group of known pathogens such as mycoplasma pneumoniae, RSV, adenovirus and influenza.

Of these, mycoplasma pneumonia — a common bacterial infection — has received special attention in China in recent years. As Bloomberg reported today:

China has the world’s highest incidence of mycoplasma pneumoniae that’s resistant to a class of antibiotics called macrolides. Up to 60% to 70% of adult cases and up to 80% of cases in kids don’t respond to Zithromax and similar drugs, Yin Yudong, an infectious diseases doctor at Beijing Chaoyang Hospital, the nation’s top respiratory disease center, told Beijing News earlier this month.

Fluoroquinolones seem to work when Macrolides don’t. This is consistent with a case study that Dr. McCullough identified yesterday—a man who recently became extremely ill with pneumonia after visiting northern China, but quickly responded to levofloxaxin, a fluoroquinolone antibiotic.

Yesterday I found a host of academic medical literature, published by Chinese researchers since 2021, about virulent, Macrolide-Resistant Mycoplasma pneumoniae. Especially noteworthy is a 2021 paper titled Infection strategies of mycoplasmas: Unraveling the panoply of virulence factors.

A fascinating feature of the mycoplasma bacteria is its ability to produce an exotoxin called Community-acquired respiratory distress syndrome toxin or CARDS TX. To quote from the above paper:

The discovery of CARDS TX of M. pneumoniae challenged the previously held belief that mycoplasmas are devoid of exotoxins. CARDS TX was originally a membrane-associated, surfactant protein A (SP-A)-binding, ADP-ribosylating, and vacuolating toxin identified by Kannan and Baseman when studying the pathogenic factors that may be responsible for respiratory epithelial cell damage by M. pneumoniae. CARDS TX potentially could manipulated in a lab Gain of Function to become more virulent. Yes, we are talking about another potential pandemic with a modified pathogen to be more infectious and damaging. So far, I’ve seen no advisories issued by the U.S. State Department or CDC on the Chinese Pneumonia.”

The Courageous Discourse Substack and The McCullough Report on America Out Loud will be monitoring the situation in China closely, trying to ascertain as quickly as possible what is causing the pneumonia. This week’s show will start out with an update on the Chinese mycoplasma pneumonia outbreak and then will feature a program hosted by Joni Lamb and Dough Weiss of Daystar with Dr. Tess Lawrie from the World Council for Health, and Dr. McCullough shot in the DayStar studios in Bedford, Texas. 

Let’s get real. Let’s get loud on America Out Loud Talk Radio. This is the McCullough Report!

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