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Post by fattydash on Jul 6, 2011 23:01:39 GMT -4
I was hoping someone would bring that up ka9q. So this would be one thing considered, along with many others. And in space, with the astronauts out of reach, there is no good way to tell what they have. But a fever in Borman would argue more for infection. So one would take his temperature regularly. This would be one way to tell Space Adaptation from infectious enteritis, not fool proof , but a start. Was this done, serial temperature measurements, repeated temperature measuremnts,? NO.
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Post by gillianren on Jul 6, 2011 23:04:55 GMT -4
Think about AIDS, back in 1980. No one knew what was going on. we assumed it to be related to an infectious agent and behaved accordingly. Well, no. Here, you're showing that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the AIDS epidemic, either. For starters, in 1980, essentially no one knew there was one. At least in the United States, the epidemic is dated to 1981. What's more, many precautions weren't taken which ought to have been, because other priorities took the fore. (Politics and money, mostly.) Certain people in the medical profession did make that assumption and did behave accordingly, but to be blunt, that only had so much scientific merit. Assuming anything is unscientific.
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Post by gillianren on Jul 6, 2011 23:05:22 GMT -4
Oh, and one other thing--did they even have a thermometer in the capsule?
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Post by fattydash on Jul 6, 2011 23:19:49 GMT -4
They did bring a thermometer. It would to be honest have appeared all the more fake to me if they did not have one.
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Post by fattydash on Jul 6, 2011 23:22:30 GMT -4
I have done HIV disease/AIDS work here in San Francisco since 1984. I am well known for my level of expertise with regard to the care of patients with HIV disease. I received a commendation form the mayor's office once upon a time back in 1994 for my work in this field.
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Post by Count Zero on Jul 6, 2011 23:45:52 GMT -4
Think about AIDS, back in 1980. No one knew what was going on. we assumed it to be related to an infectious agent and behaved accordingly. Well, no. Here, you're showing that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to the AIDS epidemic, either. For starters, in 1980, essentially no one knew there was one. At least in the United States, the epidemic is dated to 1981. What's more, many precautions weren't taken which ought to have been, because other priorities took the fore. (Politics and money, mostly.) Certain people in the medical profession did make that assumption and did behave accordingly, but to be blunt, that only had so much scientific merit. Assuming anything is unscientific. More to the point, the initial identification of "GRID" took months. The Apollo 8 & 13 astronauts were back on Earth in less than a week. In Borman's case, the "patient" was already feeling better when the report reached Earth. Haise didn't get sick until just a day or two before landing, and there was nothing that could be done for him until then.
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Post by gillianren on Jul 7, 2011 0:07:58 GMT -4
I have done HIV disease/AIDS work here in San Francisco since 1984. I am well known for my level of expertise with regard to the care of patients with HIV disease. I received a commendation form the mayor's office once upon a time back in 1994 for my work in this field. Then you know that AIDS wasn't identified until 1981 and wasn't called that for several years even beyond that and aren't just making crap up. No, I don't believe that.
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Post by ka9q on Jul 7, 2011 0:26:07 GMT -4
I don't know what kind of doctor 'fattydash' is but he sure doesn't sound much like my own family practice doctor. When I report an unusual problem in the past tense, he'll note it in my chart. If he's reasonably sure what it was, he'll tell me. If not, he might list some possibilities if I press him.
If one or more is a "red flag" of some sort, he'll say so. Otherwise he'll simply shrug and say "Well, it's just one of those things. Let me know if it happens again". But he won't order up a whole bunch of elaborate tests for various infectious diseases, especially since, if it really was an infectious disease, it's already long gone.
And unlike the Apollo flight surgeons, he could do all those things quite easily. I'm sitting right in front of him. He can physically examine me, draw blood, order X-rays, whatever.
I'm not a doctor, yet even I understand the concept of a risk/benefit tradeoff. So did the Apollo mission managers, including their flight surgeons. As the records document, they took full advantage of their opportunity to examine the astronauts after every mission -- including Apollo 8. The eventual consensus of the medical experts regarding Frank Borman's illness is that he was the first American astronaut to suffer from space adaptation syndrome, an opinion that seems to have been cemented by further experience with other astronauts. That Borman himself might disagree with that diagnosis should be viewed in light of his acute awareness that a bout of 'stomach flu' or an acute reaction to a Seconal tablet would be far less likely to get him thrown off flight status than a predisposition to getting sick simply from being in space. That's not something that an extraordinarily driven person competing hard for one of the very few opportunities to fly in space would want to admit.
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Post by fattydash on Jul 7, 2011 0:48:52 GMT -4
There were cases of HIV related problems well before 1980, though the disease was not labeled as such. By the way, that was the point I made in the thread, from an epidemiologic perspective, HIV disease looked more and more infection based as time went on and we acted accordingly, well before the responsible agent was identified as a retrovirus that was transmitted sexually, through blood transfusions, or by needle injection/IVDA.
When I was an intern in 1984, we took all kinds of precautions with patients having HIV disease that we do not employ now. Matter of fact, those precautions seem very silly now. Back then however, it did make sense.
This is way off topic, but since this was brought up by a forum member here who seems to feel my experience with this particular medical problem has something to do with my credibility, I offer the few lines above.
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Post by fattydash on Jul 7, 2011 0:51:36 GMT -4
kaq9, the diarrhea in the cabin was always a present tense issue for the astronauts. Assuming that did happen, the diarrhea episodes, then to some greater or lesser degree, potentially infected fecal contents were on everything for the balance of the trip. Regardless of what Borman did or did not say. Also, I will mention now, there would also be concern on the part of physicians for the possibility of the astronauts acquiring a serious pneumonia under these peculiar circumstances and an air filter would not be fully protective against this, especially early on, but also for the balance of the trip, perhaps to a lesser degree, assuming the filter was biologically effective.
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Post by ka9q on Jul 7, 2011 1:03:11 GMT -4
Haise didn't get sick until just a day or two before landing, and there was nothing that could be done for him until then. I assume you're talking about Haise's urinary tract infection. It was most likely caused by dehydration from the tight rationing of drinking water and a misunderstanding with the ground about urine dumps. I recently read the new book "The Trench" by several of the Flight Dynamics, Retrofire and Guidance controllers who worked on Apollo. One (I forget who, offhand) admits to having sent that request to suspend urine dumps. It was only his intention that the crew suspend them for a short time to improve his tracking data, but somehow the order never got lifted so the crew had to store it for the rest of the mission! As the saying goes, "You just can't make this stuff up!" This is exactly the kind of real-world mistake that you'd expect in something as complex as an Apollo mission, and which (along with the mountains of direct evidence) erase any doubt that the missions were perfectly real.
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Post by fattydash on Jul 7, 2011 1:11:58 GMT -4
ka9q. Space Adaptation Syndrome is not what Chaikin wrote in his highly regarded book, "A Man on the Moon". Based on the information Chaikin reviewed, he indicated the doctors thought it was viral gastroenteritis. Which source is correct? What did the doctors really know if anything? Why is there no consistent presentation of this problem, what happened, what was the cause , what was done? If they were so concerned about forward contaminatiion in the case of Apollo 11 and the other landing missions, how did Borman's illness impact NASA's views on what should be done in this regard? After the Borman episode, why even sterilize a cabin with regard to forward contamination concerns? Wouldn't that be futile?
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Post by fattydash on Jul 7, 2011 1:13:08 GMT -4
Dehydration does not cause a urinary tract infection. The 2 problems may well be related in certain situations, but dehydration per say does not put bugs in one's bladder.
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Post by ka9q on Jul 7, 2011 1:30:25 GMT -4
(regarding the unpleasantness in the Apollo 8 cabin) That may well be true, but it still does not explain either why the mission was a hoax, or why it should have been aborted before reaching the moon.
An abort of a lunar mission was not an easy or quick thing to pull off, especially on Apollo 8 without a lunar module to provide additional (or backup) propulsion. Direct aborts were problematical beyond a very short time after TLI as it was generally both quicker and safer to go all the way around the moon. This was exactly the case during Apollo 13 despite having the extra propulsion capability of the lunar module.
So the decision to continue Apollo 8 made perfect sense given that Borman had already recovered and neither of the other two astronauts were ill - as you'd expect them to be if his illness was either a highly contagious norovirus or food poisoning. (The latter was extremely unlikely as food irradiation was standard procedure.)
The Apollo flight surgeons were not exactly known for having "Go Fever" either. Indeed, they were famously conservative. Their decision to pull Ken Mattingly off Apollo 13 only a few days before launch was roundly criticized. Their insistence that the Apollo 16 crew drink potassium-fortified orange juice (after cardiac arrhythmias afflicted both the commander and LMP on Apollo 15) led to some very candid open-mike comments from John Young about highly objectionable side effects that landed him (and NASA) in hot water with the Florida Orange Growers' Association. And so on.
Each Apollo lunar mission consisted of a series of "plateaus" or decision points where the crew and spacecraft were in a relatively stable situation and the crew and Houston could take the time to make a careful, informed decision whether to continue the mission. These included earth parking orbit and the go/no-go decision for TLI; the 3-day coast to the moon and the decision to enter lunar orbit; the decision to move the CDR and LMP into the LM and separate from the CSM; the decision to enter the descent orbit; and of course the decision to begin powered descent. For Apollo 8, TLI had already been performed and they had nearly 3 days to decide whether to enter lunar orbit or to fly a free-return trajectory.
If you listen to the people who actually lived this stuff, you'll quickly learn that experience was a great teacher. One of the most important mottos of both the crews and the controllers, learned through many simulations and actual missions, was "If you don't know what to do, do nothing".
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Post by fattydash on Jul 7, 2011 1:39:32 GMT -4
What does a norovirus have to do with any of this?
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