Dear Dr. Jones,

It appears to me that you have performed the first step in a long series of tasks to identify a potential infectious disease problem.  Unfortunately, piecing together the entire puzzle is a difficult process requiring the coordination of multiple disciplines.  I speak from the experience of having worked with exotic infectious diseases in a laboratory setting with BSL-4 type agents as a veterinary (immuno)pathologist in the USA. Take for example the identification of Hantaviruses as the cause of Korean Hemorrhagic fever and Four-Corners disease.  Sorting the specific details to isolate and identify a specific agent became an exercise in epidemiology, marrying the environment with clinical and post mortem findings and the specific situations in which the clinical events occurred.  There are numerous other examples with the Arenaviruses (Lassa, Junin, Macho, Guanarito) of the southern hemisphere, yellow fever, dengue viruses, and lately chikungunya virus as well as Ebolavirus.  For guidelines, see the attached reference by the Institute of Medicine. This should provide you with some of the necessary guidance.

Kind regards,

William C. Hall, VMD, PhD

Dear William,

Many thanks for the interesting article. The political context to disease surveillance is somewhat apposite as the current UK government has a set of policy agenda's for the NHS which rely on a set of assumptions of how healthcare is supposed to behave. My discovery cuts across these assumptions and is therefore seen as a threat to the policy agenda.

I suspect that government agencies feel obliged to deny the existence of these outbreaks in official communications.

I have published two examples of official denial, see:  

http://www.hcaf.biz/2015/PHE_Life_Expectancy.pdf  and 

http://www.hcaf.biz/2013/PHE_BJHCM.pdf

A third example has been submitted with revisions investigating why dementia became the leading cause of death in women in England & Wales in 2013. On this occasion the Office for National Statistics suggested better coding, a suggestion not supported by the actual data.

On this occasional the party political agenda is acting to hinder the necessary research effort to identify the agent.

For the moment, I can only seek to raise awareness. However it did occur to me that a simple first step would be to change the parameters in existing models for disease spread to see which parameters were key to generating the unusual spread and duration behaviour.

Once again, many thanks,

Rod

Hi Rod,

Unfortunately, science is rife with politics.  We have Al Gore.

Bill

Hi Bill,

Point taken :>)

The political animal is indeed a curious sub-species.

Rod

From the articles that you have pointed us to, I have been unable to see where spread of a new infectious agent has been documented.  Unless I have missed something you have used the number of admissions as your proof of a new agent.  However, I did not see where you had looked at cause of admissions or symptoms for presenting.  What did I miss?

Dear Joyce,

My apologies. The potential diagnoses most affected are listed in this book chapter (password to open a printable version in 299174 - quite legitimate as I purchased the right to distribute). The diagnoses further cluster in a series of disease areas where cytomegalovirus (CMV) is known to be most clinically active, hence, nervous system (including deaths in those suffering from Alzheimer's and dementia), respiratory, cardio-vascular, digestive system and appendicitis.

Because this is such a new discovery I have had to be a bit cunning to get papers published and sometimes my titles do not give the full explanation of what is contained in the paper. Shall we say an occupational hazard of being unknown in academic circles.

Please come back if you need further explanation as I have done loads of analysis that has not been published yet, alas only me and a huge discovery trying to publish as fast as is possible for one person.

Cheers

Rod