[QUOTE=Xyzzy;566148][URL]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-55050012[/URL][/QUOTE]
Very nice reading, well written article, and not much ads, thanks for sharing it. We knew about Haffkine (and shared the article with the "biological/medical" two thirds of the family :w00t:) but didn't know the whole story. Reading that article, we have a sentiment of "deja vu". In our youth a person we knew developed a treatment for lupus, which could completely cure it. We heard stories about kicking the immune system, told at gatherings, at the time when the medical world still believed that lupus is a skin disease that only affects your face, making butterflies on your nose. Of course, for us, at the time, those were only stories, for us they sounded like gurus telling you to heal your spirit first, then the body will heal itself. He was not a doctor, but a zoologist, for which the "medical elite" and the communist government oppressed him. He tried to leave the country to chase his ideas in a place where he could make money with them, and where the people would be more open minded, but he was caught and oppressed even more. He died poor, taking the cure with him. Today, people know that lupus is an immunity-related disease, but a cure we don't have yet.
We still own a very thick medicine book at home in Ro, which was describing "all known diseases" in the '70s, explained for laymen, kinda medical "compendium", or like "medicine for dummies" or so, we were quite young when reading that book, it was full of many interesting things, and it is written there that [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymphatic_filariasis"]elephantiasis[/URL] is a genetic disease (it was mainly affecting some local population, somewhere around the world, in places we didn't hear about, and neither dreamed at the time that we will spend half of our life around such place, and it had something to do with the "genitals"). It marked us a lot, due to the picture of the woman with the huge, bulky, disgraceful leg, and the man with huge scrotum, and we still can visualize the whole text passage, after 40 years. We didn't believe the genetic story, somehow we developed this idea in our head that such disease must be caused by a virus or a bacteria. For some reason, we always believed that all diseases are caused by little things called microbes. We still believe that.
About the same time, a bit earlier, we were very small and living with grandparents at a farm, in the middle of the Făgăraș mountains, where the communist "collectivization" never reached. Grandparents owned land, plum orchards, horses. We loved horses, and we loved doing lots of stupid things all young boys do, like continuously skinning off their knees and elbows, or trying unsuccessfully every day to break their necks, etc. There was not much of a hospital around, but our grandmother had a "magical" ointment which she always applied on our cuts, wounds and scratches (a painful process which always resulted in arguments and fighting, but without success, grandma was a "tough nut to crack"), and we always healed "magically" in days. When we grew older we found out the "magic" of the potion. It didn't have anything unusual in it, it had all the ingredients normal antibiotic or antibacterial ointments have, except the quantities were in larger doses. The ointment was for horses (when they get scratches from the harness), and she was buying it from the local veterinary pharmacy.
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