Hirudotherapy

This is in part due to climate change messing up the balance of the dry and rainy seasons. The floods have a ripple effect and are also causing landslides and other disasters.

People have died, and will continue to do so. Here are some news Articles: The Guardian RFI The Sun Nigeria PM News Nigeria Here are some charities you can donate to to help: Nigeria: The Borgen Project Ghana: NADMO Côte d'ivoire: Disaster Relief

Togo and Benin are also severely affected. Please consider donating if you’re able or helping spread the word. I have a slightly longer post on my blog that I'll be updating if anyone needs more information.

This Giving Tuesday, help Mutual Aid Disaster Relief refill its resources so our network can continue meeting the many disasters around us with care and dignified support. Our aim is to raise $50,000 this season and every donation large or small helps get us closer. In the last year, we’ve supported responses to numerous climate disasters: Tropical Storm Chantal in North Carolina; flash floods in Texas Hill Country, Kentucky, and West Virginia; multiple fires, typhons, and floods and an earthquake in the Philippines; the Los Angeles fire; Hurricane Erick in Oaxaca; Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica; and ongoing recovery from Hurricanes Helene and Milton. But the climate isn’t stabilizing anytime soon and our bank accounts are low. Your donations allow us to continue supporting recovery and prepare for the next disaster, big or small. If you’d like to donate but don’t have cash yourself, we encourage you to get creative. Sharing what our network is doing with your community is a powerful way to show what our values can look like in practice. Here are a few ideas:

Collect donations by hosting a cookout, raffle/auction, garage sale, music event, or skillshare;

Pass the hat at church or your book club;

Share our fundraising posts on social media;

Call or send an email to your friends and family.

We're deeply grateful to everyone who has entrusted MADR to make good on our values and commitments. Your past support has meant thousands of people were fed, sheltered, fought alongside, and supported with dignity in some of the most intense crises of their lives. Your ongoing support will give communities across our network the needed resources to continue practicing mutual aid and collective empowerment at such crucial times as this. Make a donation here.

This means:

If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,

If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,

A recent study underlines the dangers of these worsening highs. It estimates that a single day of extreme heat causes approximately 3,400 excess deaths nationally in India. A five-day heatwave is linked to nearly 30,000 extra deaths, according to the paper published in the Frontiers in Environmental Health journal last month. These heatwaves are becoming more frequent, longer and more intense as climate change – driven by the burning of fossil fuels – pushes global temperatures higher. The past 11 years, from 2015 to 2025, were the hottest on record, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). [...]

I need treatment costs for this month. Please donate, and if I die, please don’t forget my little siblings.

apparently, cats' kidneys tend to be the thing that takes them down, something about their bodies being unable to self-clean their kidneys, and the vaccine is supposed revitalize the body's ability to do just that. It would be very VERY fucking cool to have cats suddenly reaching 30 years of age be the normal thing.

dude cracked the case about WHY kidneys fail, across the board as far as i can tell. turns out there's a specific molecule whose job it is to attach to waste and signal macrophages to come eat it. it remains inactive in cats for some reason, but the molecule is still there. basically what he's done is found the switch to activate them. this will be profound not only for our domestic babies, but for big cats too - especially cheetahs!

although his research was focused on cats, it's already being used to develop drugs for humans too!

on top of that, since these molecules are tags for waste, this could also dramatically lower the rate of fatty liver disease, liver cancer, urinary crystals, rheumatoid arthritis, and even some neurological cases! like, they're hoping it may have an impact on parkinson's and alzheimers, but it DOES have an impact on stroke recovery. like. holy shit.

furthermore, he's insisting that the feline drug be affordable if and when it rolls out onto the market. he wants this to be something anyone can get for their cat!! idk how much sway he'll have over the human drug, but hopefully enough that it, too, won't be that expensive.

annnnnd in his research that he's still doing for the human side of things, he's found a potential link between this molecule and estrogen. in the 20,000 samples he's tested, women between ages 10 and 29 had the highest amount of this molecule present in their blood (a higher amount means Something Fucky is going on, essentially. There's a higher amount of waste the body is trying to clean out) but it drops down to be almost equal amongst men and women after menopause. it hasn't been looked into yet, but fuck, just the fact it's noted and known and probably WILL be looked into soon??? imagine if this is what leads to figuring out all the various ways the ovaries and uterus fucks with people and how to fix it. or even like, maybe there's something about estrogen that makes it work better. who knows! but it's rad the link is there to be researched :D

As for the study itself, the 360 day follow up on stage 3 kidney failure kitties showed that the control had a survival rate of about 20%, while the test group had a survival rate of 80%

“According to Simberg, the flowers represent people’s souls, the skeletons are aids to Death, and the Garden of Death is a purgatory of sorts for souls waiting for entrance into heaven. This artwork invites the viewer to consider the afterlife, to take comfort in his or her own passing, and to not fear what happens after the body fails to function.”

“It depicts Simberg’s thoughts on afterlife, which is not run by angels but skeletons who take care of the heavenly garden with a gentle hand, while waiting for more “gardeners” to arrive. It is derived from the medieval belief that the dead sleep in a blooming garden.”

she's a waxwork by 18th century italian artist Ercole Lelli, now housed in the Palazzo Poggi

i have no idea why, but she's just utterly enrapturing to me

it's weirdly difficult to find good-quality pictures of this specific waxwork

Also bonus: a study of face muscles, wax sculpture from the same museum