Vascular woes
Re: "Heart disease now hitting younger Thais", (BP, Sept 17).
One risk factor that is not mentioned in this article is how Covid-19 infection damages the heart. This has been known since very early on in the ongoing pandemic, with numerous studies showing that circulatory conditions like heart attack and stroke are more common after infection, including in younger age groups, because Covid-19 is a vascular disease. Both the British Heart Foundation and the American Heart Association have made the risks of Covid infection very clear.
A paper published in Nature found that one person out of about 22 cases of Covid-19 will develop some type of major cardiovascular event within 12 months of infection. Even children are at risk: another study found that 60% of children who recovered from asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic Covid-19 still exhibit mild subclinical systolic cardiac impairment after follow-up.
Fortunately, public health in Thailand still takes Covid-19 seriously and provides sensible advice to reduce infection risk. We also know that Covid-19 vaccinations decrease the chance of heart damage following infection.
However, access to vaccines remains severely limited in Thailand, including for children, and Novavax, a protein-based vaccine which has been shown to provide better and longer-lasting protection than mRNA vaccines, is not available at all.
The Department of Disease Control should bring in Novavax and paediatric vaccines so that the population can be better protected from the harms of Covid-19, thus lowering the long-term public health burden.
Diane Archer
Flagging falsehood
Re: "ABC pulls plug on Jimmy Kimmel show", (World, Sept 19).
This wire service news article is trying to tell us that a campaign is being waged against free speech in the US.
The opposite is the case: For many years, mainstream media outlets have been flooding the airwaves with diatribes, falsehoods and half-truths, basically telling the public what to think.
The public is fed up with woke indoctrination and one-sided reporting. Your article fails to point out that Kimmel's ratings have been plummeting for years.
Perhaps the Bangkok Post could learn a lesson in objectivity and stop mindlessly printing mainstream media news.
Frank Scimone
Brutal Turkmenistan
Re: "'Raped, jailed, tortured, left to die': the hell of being gay in Turkmenistan", (World, Sept 18).
In excusing their legalised abuse of LGBTQ citizens on the grounds that "homosexual relations are a crime, they (Turkmenistan authorities) said, because they run counter to the 'traditional values' of the Turkmen people", the brutish Turkmenistan government follows a too common pattern of citing "traditional values" as something that must be protected, irrespective of what good ethics requires.
Until even more recently, same-sex marriage was similarly opposed on the grounds that it was against traditional values.
Indeed, even in the US and Rome, some persist in such outdated moral errors.
Morally decent human beings today, however, generally accept that both slavery and the denial of same-sex marriage are indefensibly unethical.
In contrast, when peaceful, open discussion of such inherited traditions is additionally made taboo, or in extreme cases even criminalised, it is certain that any and every tradition in need of such protection from honest, reasoned dialogue is so intrinsically rotten, so indefensibly unjust, as to be unfit for any decent society.
Felix Qui
