Grapelander
Member
A Group of Florida Parents Cultured Their Children’s Masks and Found Dangerous Bacteria
The idea of children, including preschoolers, walking around with bacteria traps on their breathing orifices all day so shocked the conscience that last summer, a bunch of internet parodies were produced illustrating such absurdity. Then, within weeks, most local governments mandated this cruel form of child abuse for an entire year without any study of the side effects. Now a group of parents from the Gainesville, Florida, area have shown that such masks are traps for harmful bacteria that potentially make children much sicker than from COVID — the virus for which the masks were required, but failed to mitigate.The lab used a method called proteomics to extract proteins from the masks and sequence them. The analysis detected the following 11 alarmingly dangerous pathogens on the masks:
- Streptococcus pneumoniae (pneumonia)
- Mycobacterium tuberculosis (tuberculosis)
- Neisseria meningitidis (meningitis, sepsis)
- Acanthamoeba polyphaga (keratitis and granulomatous amebic encephalitis)
- Acinetobacter baumanni (pneumonia, bloodstream infections, meningitis, UTIs — resistant to antibiotics)
- Escherichia coli (food poisoning)
- Borrelia burgdorferi (causes Lyme disease)
- Corynebacterium diphtheriae (diphtheria)
- Legionella pneumophila (Legionnaires’ disease)
- Staphylococcus pyogenes serotype M3 (severe infections — high morbidity rates)
- Staphylococcus aureus (meningitis, sepsis)
For a control, the parents submitted a T-shirt worn by one of the children at school and unworn masks. No pathogens were found on the controls.