The signs of uneducated deadly ineptitude:


Dominic Cummings’ ‘misogynistic’ messages seen by Covid inquiry, George Osborne says
wrote:

Former chancellor says WhatsApp messages between Boris Johnson and key advisers are ‘staggering’...

... The inquiry has already heard derogatory language used between Johnson’s advisers...

... Osborne suggested that worse language could emerge next week. He said: “I think we’re going to get some pretty astonishing and frankly shocking WhatsApp messages and the like being published from that Johnson period.”

He said the messages would show “just what a complete nightmare it was for many people working in 10 Downing Street and who worked at the top of government at the time, and potentially some things that are going to cause some real problems for individuals who were in charge at the time.”...

... Boris Johnson had told the inquiry he had been unable to access messages between 31 January and 7 June 2020, despite the phone being in action until the following spring.

And Rishi Sunak has failed to hand over his WhatsApp messages from the time, claiming he did not have access to the messages...

... And consequently, how many people died needlessly?

Consequences...


Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Consequences:


‘Misleading’ A&E figures in England hiding poor performance
wrote:

NHS bosses are using misleading figures to hide dangerously poor performance by A&E units in England against the four-hour treatment target, emergency department doctors claim.

Some A&Es treat and admit, transfer or discharge as few as one in three patients within four hours, although the NHS constitution says they should deal with 95% of arrivals within that timeframe.

How well or poorly A&Es are doing in meeting the 95% target is not in the public domain because the data that NHS England publishes is for NHS trusts overall, not individual hospitals.

That means official figures are an aggregate of performance at sometimes two A&Es run by the same trust or include data for any walk-in centres, minor injuries units or urgent treatment centres that a trust also operates...

... “The current data is misleading,” Dr Adrian Boyle, the college’s president, told the Guardian. “It’s a good example of a lack of transparency and also of performance incentives. Being open about the long delays in some A&Es would shine a light in some [deadly] dark places.”...

Gaming the numbers and...

... patient care be damned.


Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Thursday I got the latest covid booster and feel it is no better than the previous 6 covid vaxes I have had. I have not become magnetic much less metalic.

---

Consequences:

Covid death figures put on Barnard Castle ahead of inquiry
wrote:

Covid death statistics have been projected onto Barnard Castle before Dominic Cummings' makes his appearance at the Covid-19 inquiry.

Grieving families gathered to hold a vigil for lost loved ones while the bleak figures were illuminated on the castle walls.

Campaign groups 38 Degrees and Covid Bereaved Families for Justice lit up the walls with the message "231,332 Covid deaths - is that clear enough to read?".

They hope to send a message that the British public has not forgotten the scale of the tragedy caused by the pandemic...

... "Dominic Cummings’ day trip to Barnard Castle has become symbolic of the contempt these pandemic victims were treated with by people at the very top of Government. "Neither bereaved families, nor the British public, can move on, until we’re confident lessons have been learned and justice served...

Deadly numbers.


Are you a number?

Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Boris is now being put in the same box as delusional Donny.

Quietly, on the other side of the world, new revelations about the Covid pandemic have been unearthed. And they are staggering.

It won’t have received all that much attention back in Australia, but this week there were some rather troubling revelations about the British government and its near-Fawlty Towers level of incompetence during the Covid pandemic.

The United Kingdom suffered 230,000 deaths from Covid, more than 10 times Australia’s toll, and is currently holding an inquiry to examine and critique its response. As such, we’ve been learning more about Boris Johnson’s vacillating, often negligent handling of the virus.

Some lowlights: when Mr Johnson suggested Covid was “just nature’s way of dealing with old people”; when he said “I no longer buy all this NHS overwhelmed stuff” (referring to the country’s very much overwhelmed health system, which he was supposed to be running); and when his staff concluded “he doesn’t think it’s a big deal” and “his focus is elsewhere”.

Some of those quotes come from text messages sent by Mr Johnson’s top political adviser, Dominic Cummings, and others from the contemporaneous diaries of Britain’s flummoxed chief health adviser, Sir Patrick Vallance......

Those bats are coming for us again it seems.

Prominent scientists have sounded the alarm on a potential ‘catastrophic’ new pandemic that could ravage the world in the near future.

Prominent scientists have sounded the alarm on the potential emergence of a deadly global pandemic that could ravage the world and be far more disastrous than Covid-19.

There are an estimated 1.6 million viruses circulating within animal and bird populations worldwide, and more than half of these possess the capability to infect humans.

A significant proportion of these viruses have already been actively doing so daily.

Amid the ongoing battle with the Covid-19 pandemic, which continues to persist with rising cases, public health experts are now shifting their focus towards anticipating and preparing for the next potential global health crisis.

Among the multitude of pathogens that have the potential to mutate and wreak havoc on human populations, scientists have identified the paramyxovirus group as a significant threat, describing it as “simmering in the background.”

The paramyxovirus group comprises a staggering 75 distinct viruses, including infamous diseases such as measles, mumps, and respiratory tract infections.

This group has garnered even greater attention as it was recently added to the US’ National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ watch list of pandemic pathogens.

Of particular concern within this group is the Nipah virus, which experts have singled out.

The Nipah virus is notorious for causing fatal encephalitis, and it boasts a mortality rate ranging from 40 per cent to an alarming 75 per cent, a stark contrast to the comparatively lower 1 per cent mortality rate associated with Covid-19 patients......

There is the 'game' of Politics:


Boris Johnson wanted to be injected with Covid on TV...
wrote:

Boris Johnson "wanted to be injected with Covid-19 on television" to calm public fears, an ex-aide has said...

... He also confirmed his former boss had said letting "the bodies pile high" was preferable to another lockdown.

The remark was made in September 2020 but first reported in April 2021...

... He admitted the taskforce was not asked about the Eat Out To Help Out scheme introduced by Mr Sunak in summer 2020. The scheme gave diners up to 50% of their bill off and was aimed at bolstering the hospitality industry, however some scientists have argued it helped the virus spread...

That is all too deadly reminiscent of:

John Gummer: Beef eater
wrote:

1990: John Gummer with Cordelia munching burgers for the press

Probably the most derided politician to emerge out of the BSE scandal, John Gummer will always be remembered for making great public show of feeding his four-year-old daughter Cordelia a hamburger in the midst of the "mad cow" disease scare...

Daughter of Gummer family friend dies from vCJD
wrote:

The daughter of a friend of the former agriculture minister John Gummer - who controversially tried to allay safety fears over British beef by feeding his own child a burger in front of the national media - has died from the human form of mad cow disease.

Elizabeth Smith, 23...

And then there is the real world with real people.

There are consequences.


Stay safe folks?
Martin

---

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Consequences:


More illness among young affecting work ability
wrote:

... The Health Foundation analysis found 12% of people in work - 3.7 million - had a "work-limiting" condition.

That is up from 8.5% a decade ago - a rise of 1.4 million.

Working young people have experienced a particularly sharp rise - and are now as likely to report ill-health affecting their work as a middle-aged person a decade ago.

More than 10% of those aged 16 to 34 in work cited poor health as an issue...

Incredible!

And debilitating... For incredible numbers!


Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Is it because more young people are ill, or is it that more illnesses are known about and that they are published in the media more than before.

It took doctors at least 15 years to diagnose my eldest's autism, simply because it wasn't a well known condition in the eighty's. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_autism

The are Consequences:


NHS England gives key role in handling patient data to US spy tech firm Palantir
wrote:

The NHS is to hand a key role in handling patient data and share of a £480m contract to the US spy technology firm Palantir this week...

... [NHS England] is preparing to make an announcement on Tuesday that is likely to spark fierce debate about the safety of patient data, public trust in the NHS and Palantir’s suitability...

A third in UK missed work in 2022 due to delays accessing NHS care
wrote:

One in three people have missed work in the last year because of delays in accessing NHS care...

... long waiting times and the NHS’s record waiting list were damaging the economy by leaving people too sick to work...

... Overall 36% of respondents had missed at least some work because of difficulty getting care. Young adults were worst affected. More than half (54%) of 18- to 34-year-olds have been forced to miss work while they pursued or waited for care...

... Office for National Statistics (ONS) figures show that about 2.5m people in the UK are economically inactive because they are sick – 400,000 more than before Covid hit.

“It’s outrageous that so many patients have been left to suffer as a result of this Conservative government’s neglect,”...

Incredibly unhealthy all round!

Stay well folks?
Martin

---

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Nothing learnt here?

We get to suffer the same deadly fiasco again?...


What does the Covid inquiry really tell us? If another pandemic arrived tomorrow, nothing would be better
wrote:

... a fresh chapter in the Covid inquiry – and another public servant having their diary read back to them in a public forum that looks like the world’s most under-embellished anxiety dream...

... reveal a man deeply worried about everything: public health, prime ministerial “flip-flopping”; scientists being used as “human shields”; “bonkers” cabinet WhatsApp messages in which Boris Johnson is “obsessed with older people accepting their fate”. He seems to keep a relatively cool head and his “brain-dump” doesn’t sound self-serving or hysterical...

... But you nevertheless can’t help but mourn the road not taken. The only really sensible response to that grim period – particularly for scientists who are all over cause and effect, facts, evidence and whatnot, and faced with a prime minister who floated “whisky and a revolver” as a plausible public health solution – would have been to stage a coup. And none of them did. So, sure, that is a shame, but beyond it...

... The really depressing thing about this inquiry is the absolute certainty that, if a fresh pandemic arrived tomorrow, nothing would be any better, and many things would be worse ... The NHS would be in more desperate straits, the pandemic preparedness that the austerians wound down would not have been restored, and Downing Street would still be full of petty, inadequate, callous politicians...

... nothing has changed. In other words, I’m not wishing for a slower inquiry; I’m wishing for a faster general election.

... Except... Are ANY of our politicians any better or in any way more competent and capable?

Stay healthy?...
Martin

---

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And just part of the ongoing consequences:


Jeremy Hunt will say the NHS is treating fewer patients with more money. Whose fault is that, chancellor?
wrote:

Winter is coming, as it always does, and the NHS creaks and groans. The chancellor will not tomorrow hand over the £1bn it needs to cover the cost of strikes, though NHS debts mount while almost 7.8 million people in England suffer on waiting lists...

... A spate of alarming reports all say the same thing: NHS productivity has fallen since the pandemic, with more money and more staff treating fewer hospital patients...

... yet it treats fewer hospital patients than pre-Covid. Forget asking for more.

But it’s not that simple. Everyone wants value for money, but measuring the productivity of services is notoriously difficult. What gets measured is what’s easy, but often not what’s actually happening or what matters most. If you double the size of school classes, teachers are twice as “productive”. Halve the number of nurses on a ward, and they double their “productivity”...

... Patients in 10,000 new beds in “virtual wards”, intensively treated at home under hospital supervision, don’t appear in these productivity numbers.

These thoughtful reports suggest numerous reasons for falling hospital through-put. There are fewer beds than before. Covid-19 isn’t over, with more than 2,700 beds in England currently occupied by Covid patients. Since the pandemic, infection control has been far more rigorous, taking more space, work and time. The non-arrival of Boris Johnson’s promised “oven-ready” plan for social care has contributed to a situation in which more than 13,000 hospital beds (out of a total of about 100,000 beds in England) are filled with those who are medically fit for discharge. The president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has called hospitals “lobster traps”: easy for the frail to get into, hard to get out of...

... Harder to measure is the exhaustion and the change in experience levels of NHS staff. Many who gave their all during Covid burned out and left ... Sickness absence is higher. Those once willing to work extra hours – paid or often unpaid – are reluctant: the government’s political attempt to weaponise pay demands caused damaging strikes that always leave a workforce disheartened...

... Now add in the shocking cuts to spending ... Forget the phantom 40 new hospitals, most of which are unlikely to be built...

... Expect the government to turn the blame on to the NHS and its staff...

Stay healthy?!...
Martin

---

See new freedom: Mageia Linux
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Sadly, all too true and ongoing Consequences:


People who stuck by UK Covid rules have worst mental health, says survey
wrote:

Trauma of pandemic having lasting impact on people’s mental health three years on...

... Those who followed the restrictions most closely when the pandemic hit are the most likely to be suffering from stress, anxiety and depression...

... people with “communal” personalities – who are more caring, sensitive and aware of others’ needs – adhered the most rigorously with the lockdown protocols that Boris Johnson and senior medics and scientists recommended...

... some people found it hard to make the transition from receiving regular exhortations about following public health advice during the pandemic to no advice when lockdown ended. “Throughout the pandemic messaging campaigns were designed to ensure people continued to follow the rules. But there was no messaging campaign as we came out of the pandemic to help everyone safely transition back to normality. “Without this, certain personality types have retained infection prevention behaviour and anxiety that undermines their mental wellbeing,”...

... “The fear, loss and trauma created by the pandemic are having a lasting impact on many people’s mental health. For some, this may have been exacerbated by the loss of social solidarity from seeing others not complying with the same restrictions,”...

... the widespread damage Covid did to mental health in Britain is the main reason demand for NHS psychological and psychiatric services has soared...

All whilst Boris Johnson laughed and guffawed through his multiple Christmas parties!

Is that any way to run a political party?...

Stay healthy??
Martin

---

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Deadly Consequences:


Scientific adviser tells Covid inquiry she distrusted Treasury’s ability to handle data
wrote:

Prof Dame Angela McLean also said she had to ‘paper over the cracks’ and mediate between civil servants and academics

The UK’s chief scientific adviser has said part of her job during the pandemic was to “paper over the cracks” when issues arose between academics and civil servants on several occasions, the Covid inquiry has learned...

... most of the time academics advising the government would speak “pointedly” on issues, but civil servants spoke in “weirdly emollient” ways at meetings...

... “I was in contact with people saying: ‘I’m sorry, that was upsetting for you. They didn’t mean to be rude to you personally. What they were talking about was your work,”...

... The professor said the “best collaborators will listen and ask why” conclusions were made at certain times in order to get to the truth. But she recalled civil servants standing up in meetings and immediately saying they agreed with everything that had been said, which left her thinking: “Well, you [the civil servant] can’t have been listening.”...

... Academics had created a simple “toy model” that kept things as “simple as possible” to teach policymakers about how infectious diseases work.

But the Treasury had changed the model, the inquiry heard, and did not make its own modelling transparent [understandable]...

... Asked if the incidence of outbreaks and problems within care homes was something that was a “foreseeable issue from the outset of the pandemic”, she replied: “Yes.”...

What we learned from Patrick Vallance at the Covid inquiry
wrote:

... Scientists worried about ‘Eat out to help out’ ... the plan “completely reversed” earlier advice to reduce mixing between households, and that it would clearly have increased infection levels...

... Vallance said with heartfelt understatement, “difficult at times” to get the then prime minister to fully absorb concepts central to Covid...

... he [Boris Johnson] had the habit of pretending to misunderstand things to test out whether an alternative could be true...

... Vallance recalled being on a group call with scientific advisers from various countries, when one said their leader could not understand exponential curves, “and the entire phone call burst into laughter because it was true in every country”...

... Johnson had been “influenced a lot by the press”...

... Johnson said he would rather “let the bodies pile high” than impose a new lockdown...

People died unnecessarily.

And we are all still paying the costs...


Stay healthy?
Martin

---

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One to watch?

NewBug-23??


China: WHO seeks data on 'pneumonia clusters' in children
wrote:

... "clusters of undiagnosed pneumonia" reportedly spreading among children in the north of the country.

Reports by non-state media say paediatric hospitals in parts of China are overwhelmed with sick children.

Chinese authorities have attributed a spike in flu-like illnesses this winter to the lifting of Covid measures...

... it is unusual to announce the request for more information publicly. In general, this has previously been done through private channels between the WHO and health officials in a country. The UN agency is no doubt mindful that people might be more jumpy about viruses reported in China with the not so distant memory of Covid-19. The WHO is also trying to be more transparent in the aftermath of the pandemic...

... at present there was too little information to make a definitive diagnosis of what was causing the infections. He added: "Overall, this does not sound to me like an epidemic due to a novel [new] virus. If it was, I would expect to see many more infections in adults. The few infections reported in adults suggest existing immunity from a prior exposure."

The WHO says it is unclear if the reported pneumonia outbreak and overall increase in respiratory infections reported by Beijing are linked ... It has urged people in China to take basic precautions like getting vaccinated, wearing masks and hand-washing.

For the northern hemisphere, it is that time of year...

Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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And again the Chinese health system is found lacking as they battle this latest outbreak of theirs.

Chinese Hospitals Overloaded in Echoes of COVID as Pneumonia Rampages.

...The Tianjin Children's Hospital, located in a major port city near Beijing, reported on November 18 a single-day record of 13,171 young patients across its outpatient and emergency departments, according to a local newspaper.

Beijing Jingdu Children's Hospital was also feeling the strain, with its 300 beds at 90 percent capacity due outpatient volumes, Chinese news agency Caixin reported Thursday.

Long queues, both inside and outside hospitals, illustrated the the overwhelming demand for medical attention. Videos reportedly showing winding lines at Tianjin Children's Hospital as well as Shenyang Children's Hospital, in northeastern Liaoning province, circulated on social media, reflecting the severity of the situation.....

I wonder how much worse that their air pollution is making this outbreak.

For anyone so afflicted, and also for those so far unaffected:


Sabine Hossenfelder - Long COVID: All you need to know


That includes an awful lot of people.

Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Covid:

And the Experts and Scientists are most cruelly scapegoated:


How inquiry is exposing deep flaws in Covid decision-making
wrote:

With each passing week of the Covid inquiry, it is clear there were deep flaws in the way decisions were made and information provided during the pandemic.

And it was both politicians and scientists making mistakes...

... Experts advising government had underestimated how fast the virus was spreading and overestimated the extent to which it could be controlled. Sir Patrick Vallance, who was the government's chief scientific adviser in the pandemic, admitted as much...

He said the scientists had been "wrong" to think they could apply measures such as restrictions on socialising short of a lockdown with precision to produce a manageable wave of Covid over the summer...

... But it was not just that misstep at the start, the breadth of expertise advising ministers also appears questionable.

England's chief medical officer Prof Sir Chris Whitty told the inquiry he was more cautious about imposing restrictions than others on Sage, the government's scientific advisory body, because of the indirect harms they cause to mental health, deprivation, education and wellbeing (although he agreed once the experts had realised how far Covid had spread there was little other option than to lockdown). Sir Patrick also recognised this difference in view, pointing out it was natural as Sir Chris had responsibility for the wider health of the population...

... difficult to see how "balanced judgements" could be made...

... And three years on, those harms are all too clear. Rising rates of mental health problems in the young, record-high hospital waiting lists and continued attendance problems at school...

... meeting papers were pored over by the media and commentators when they were published and [were] used to suggest scientists were calling for action when in reality Sage was only providing information for ministers to make decisions...

... If ministers decided not to act, and as 2020 progressed the devolved nations started to make different choices, they were accused of not "following the science". Sir Chris told the inquiry that phrase ended up becoming a "millstone around our necks". There were "no good choices"...

... The flipside of this is that other parts of government came to resent the scientists. Rishi Sunak, diary entries from Sir Patrick suggest, remarked in one meeting it was about "handling the scientists, not the virus". The Treasury ended up doing its own thing. Nowhere is that clearer than in the decision by Mr Sunak, who was then the chancellor, to introduce the Eat Out to Help Out campaign...

... Sir Jonathan said he first heard about it from a TV report and went on to say the scheme "didn't feel very sensible to me"...

... Never, despite repeated attempts, he said, would ministers define what was acceptable ... In the end, she said, the scientists came up with their own objective focused on where the country was in terms of the peak in hospital admissions from the first wave...

... The lack of joined-up thinking was unhelpful ... it led to the country "bunny hopping" around, in the words of Sir Chris, between opening up and slamming on the brakes...

... And there is no mention of the clear ministerial incompetence and the clear signs of that incompetence with their descent into verbal and written abuse amongst each other, and their random inconsistent incoherent decisions that were contradicted on a near daily basis that caused inevitable confusion and dismay throughout the country. People died needlessly.

Not mentioned is how the scientists were left trying to educate, meeting by meeting, and repeatedly re-educating meeting by meeting, details that the ministers willfully chose to simplistically ignore. Ya cannae cherry pick the science like political sweeties! ALL of the science counts.

We really do need a meaningful competency test for our politicians. They are too deadly dangerous otherwise.


Stay healthy?
Martin

---

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Meanwhile, back in the real world and real consequences:


The infectious disease forecast for Thanksgiving is looking dicey
wrote:

Respiratory virus season is in full swing as people ready for family gatherings.

As Americans prepare for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, respiratory viruses are ramping up, creating hazardous infectious conditions for mass travel and multi-generational family gatherings.

Flu is on the rise in most of the country...

... this year's season is not quite as early as last year's remarkable season, which kicked off in the beginning of October. This could signal that flu is shifting back toward its pre-pandemic cycle.

As for the pandemic virus, which continues to circulate, the US remains in a relative lull. But the latest CDC data shows COVID activity is picking up in two regions: region 5 (Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio, and Wisconsin) and region 7 (Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska). The two regions are seeing sharp inclines in the number of emergency department patients with diagnosed COVID-19...

... health officials urge the standard precautions to prevent spreading or catching viruses, including being up to date on seasonal flu and COVID-19 vaccines. For older adults, there's also an RSV vaccine.

In an interview on Monday, CDC Director Mandy Cohen summed it up with: "Wash your hands. Stay home if you're sick. Masks do work, so wearing a mask if you're around a lot of other people. And don't forget ventilation—open a window," she said...

Measles rises globally amid vaccination crash...
wrote:

... While measles transmission plummeted during the emergency phase of the pandemic—like many other viruses—it is now rebounding amid the lower vaccination coverage. Between 2021 and 2022, estimated measles cases increased 18 percent, from 7,802,000 to 9,232,300. The number of countries experiencing large or disruptive outbreaks jumped from 22 to 37 in that time, a 68 percent increase. And estimated deaths rose 43 percent, from 95,000 to 136,200...

... Though the US is seeing slipping vaccination rates due to hesitancy and misinformation, the largest, most significant drops in vaccination coverage are in low-income countries, which have shown no recovery from the pandemic backslide...

"... Measles is called the inequity virus for good reason. It is the disease that will find and attack those who aren't protected,"...

Heed the good healthy advice/recommendations?

... Or is that not possible in the perversity of the supposed freedoms lovin' yet contrarian southern USA states?


Stay healthy folks!
Martin

---

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Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
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What's the next pathogen to cross over from animal to human?
UK detects first human case of swine flu strain similar to one circulating in pigs

UK’s health agency said they have detected the first human case of a swine flu strain similar to one that has been circulating in pigs.

The individual, whose identity has not been revealed, experienced respiratory symptoms following which the test reports confirmed that he was afflicted with the variant of the H1N2 virus, called A(H1N2)v.

"This is the first time we have detected this virus in humans in the UK, though it is very similar to viruses that have been detected in pigs," said the agency's incident director Meera Chand.
...
"We are working rapidly to trace close contacts and reduce any potential spread."

However, since then the person has been fully recovered, the agency said in a statement.

50 cases registered worldwide since 2005
Although 50 cases have been registered worldwide since 2005, this is the first time it has been detected in the United Kingdom.

It has not previously been detected in humans in the country, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) said.
...
The person is reportedly not known to have worked with pigs. The authorities are still trying to figure out the source of the infection.

"We are working rapidly to trace close contacts and reduce any potential spread," Meera Chand, UKHSA director, said.