8 Kasım 2009 Pazar
4 Kasım 2009 Çarşamba
İyi bir karar için iyi düşünmek...
Yazan Dr. Russell Blaylock – http://www.russellblaylockmd.com/
Bu bahar Meksika’da 4910 Meksikalıyı etkileyen ve 85 ölüme neden olan bir domuz gribi salgını yaşandı. ABD’ye yayılana kadar virüs sadece hafif grip etkisi gösteriyordu.
Uçak seyahatleri ve sağlık personelinin Meksika’dan gelen yolcularda yeterli kontrolleri yapmamasının sonucu olarak virüs dünyaya yayıldı. İnanılmaz yüksek rakamlarda ölüme sebep olacağı tahminlerine rağmen bu virüs hafif etki yapan bir hastalığın ötesine gitmemiştir ki her yıl bu şekilde grip salgınlarının yaşandığını biliyoruz.
Dünyada 70893 domuz gribi vakasından sadece 311’i ölümle sonuçlanmıştır. ABD’de 27717 vakadan 127’si ölümle sonuçlanmıştır. Her ölüm bir trajedidir ama bu kadar düşük bir ölüm oranı devleti ayağa kaldıracak bir eylem için yeterli olmamalıdır.
Medya ile Hastalık Kontrol Merkezlerinin anlattıklarına bakıldığında her yıl 36000 kişi gripten ölüyormuş. Bunun doğru olmadığını biliyoruz artık. Bu durumda dünya çapında 300 küsür ölümden bahsediyoruz aslında.
Bu virüs virüs uzmanlarını şaşırtmaya devam ediyor. Nature dergisinin 30 Nisan 2009 sayısında bir virüs uzmanı şöyle demiş “bu virüsün bu kadar çok geni nasıl topladığını bilmiyoruz” Virüs ayrıntılı bir şekilde incelendiğinde içinde 1918 yılından H1N1 virüsü, kuş gribi ve Avrasyadan iki yeni H3N2 virüs bulunmuş. Bu domuz gribinin genetik olarak tasarlanmış olduğu konusunda tartışmalar sürmektedir.
Doğal olarak aşı üreticileri ilk aşıyı yaratmak için bir yarışa girdiler. Bu yarışta en başta Baxter İlaç Firması ve Novartis geliyor Novartis en son skandala neden olmuş olan Chiron Aşı Şirketini satın almıştı. Bu şirketlerin her ikisi de pandemik aşısı yapmak üzere Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ile anlaşma yapmıştır.
Baxter’in ürettiği Celvapan aşısı çok hızla onay almıştır. Afrikalı Yeşil Maymunların kültür edilmiş hücrelerinden yapılmış yeni bir vero hücre teknolojisi ile üretilmiştir. Aynı hayvan hücresi aralarında HIV olmak üzere birkaç aşı kirleten virüs içermektedir.
Baxter şirketi iki ölümcül skandalla çalkalanmıştı. İlki 2006 yılında hemofili komponentlerine HIV virüsü bulaştığında ve içinde çocukların da bulunduğu on binlerce insana uygulandığında yaşanmıştı. Virüsün bulaştığı ortaya çıktıktan sonra bile Baxter HIV virüsü bulaşmış aşıyı piyasaya sürmeye devam etmişti.
İkinici olay yakın geçmişte yaşanmıştı. Baxter içinde kuş gribi de olan mevsimsel grip aşısını piyasaya sürmüştü. Bu aşı 18 ülkede gerçek bir pandemik yaratırdı. Allahtan Çekoslovakyada dikkatli laboratuar çalışanları bu ölümcül kombinasyonu dünyaya salınmadan yakalamıştı.
Bu iki ölümcül hataya rağmen Dünya Sağlık Örgütü pandemik aşısı üretiminde Baxter İlaç şirketi ile çalışmaya devam etmektedir.
Novartis, ikinci şirketin de Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ile anlaşması vardır. Novartisin aşısı bitmek üzere olduğundan onların seçileceği düşünülüyor. Korkunç olan ise bu pandemik aşılarının içinde bağışıklılık adjuvanları yer almaktadır. Bu adjuvanların römatoid artrit, ms ve lupus gibi otoimün hastalıklara neden olabiliyor.
Bu adjuvanın uygulandığı hayvan deneylerinde adjuvanın ölümcül olduğu görülmüştür. 14 kobay üzerinde uygulanan çalışmada özel adjuvan enjekte edildiğinde sadece bir hayvan hayatta kalmıştır. Tekrar bir deneyde aynı sonuç alınmıştır.
Peki bu ölümcül madde nedir? Adı Squalene ve bu bir tip yağdır. Ölümcül Anthrax aşısının üreticileri Chiron şirketi MF-59 adını verdikleri bir adjuvan üretiyor. Bu adjuvanda squalene bulunmaktadır. Yapılan bazı araştırmalar squalene’in enjekte edildiğinde yukarıda adı geçen otoimün hastalıklara neden olabileceğini gösteriyor.
MF-59 adjuvanı bir çok aşıda kullanılmıştır. Bu aşılar, aralarında tetanoz ve difteri olmak üzere, ters etkiler gösterdiği bilinen aşılar arasında yer almaktadır.
Bu adjuvan üzerinde yapılmış bazı deneyleri inceledim ve ilginç bir şeye rastladım. İnsan denekler üzerinde uygulanmış birkaç deneyde MF-59 çok güvenilir bir adjuvan olarak belirtilmişti. Ancak bu deneylerin kim tarafından yapıldığını incelediğimde karşıma artık tek bir şirket olmuş olan Novartis İlaç Şirketi ve Chiron İlaç şirketinin çıkması beni şaşırtmadı. Tüm deneyler ‘saygın’ dergilerde yayınlanmıştı. Tabii ki hiç şaşırmadım ki bağımsız bir çok laboratuar ve araştırma merkezi tarafından yapılan bağımsız deneylerde MF-59 ile otoimün hastalıklar arasında güçlü bir bağ olduğu görülmüştür.
Aşılarda Squalene ile Körfez Savaşı sendromu arasında güçlü bir bağ olduğu görülmüştür.Veteran İlişkileri Sektreteri Anthony Principi Ağustos 1991’de 1990 ile 1991 arasında anthrax aşısı yapılmış olan askerlerde ALS hastalığına yakalanma riskinin %200 arttığını açıklamıştır. Bu askerlerde ayrıca yaşam sürecini kısaltan ve yaşam şartlarını zorlaştıran polyarterit nodosa, MS, lupus, transvers myelitis (omurgada ödeme neden olan nörolojik bir hastalık) endokarditis, optik neuritis ve körlük ile bir tür böbrek hastalığı gibi hastalıkların sayısının arttığı gözlemlenmiş.
MF-59’un ana maddesi olan squalene hiperimün tepkisi ve otoimün tepkisi oluşturabildiğinden beyindeki bağışıklılık hücrelerinin uzun süre aktive edilmesi riskini taşımaktadır. Bu tür uzun süreli aktivasyonların MS, Alzheimer, Parkinson, ALS ve muhtemelen aşı ile ilişkili olarak Ensefalit gibi hastalıklarla bağlantılı olduğu görülmüştür. Aşı ile olduğu gibi sistematik bağışıklılık sisteminin aktivasyonunda aynı zamanda beyindeki microglia aktive ediliyor ve bu beyindeki enflamasyon uzun süre devam edebiliyor.
Bu aşıları tavsiye eden doktorlar dahil olmak üzere bir çok insanın bilmediği ise ilaç şirketleri tarafından yapılan deneylerde hastalar aşıdan sonra sadece bir ya da iki hafta takip ediliyor ama bu tür reaksiyonlar bazen aylar ve yıllar sonra ortaya çıkabiliyor.
Bu Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ve hükümet teşviği ile başlatılmış pandemikte aşı üreticilerinin milyarlar kazanacağı belli. Novartis, yeni pandemik aşısının üreticisi fakir ülkelere bedava aşı verilmeyeceğini herkesi ödemesi gerektiğin açıkladı.
Şunu bilin ki bir kere bu aşı size enjekte edildiğinde kendinizi geleneksel tıp yoluyla koruma ihtimaliniz kalmamıştır. Hayat boyu sizi sakatlayacak bir hastalık ve erken ölüm demektir.
Grip virüsünden kendinizi korumanın çok daha güvenli yolları vardır. Yüksek D3 vitamini ve seçilmiş bağışıklılık destekleyici ürünler kullanmak ve iyi beslenmek bunun başlıca yollarıdır.
© 2009 Newsmax. Tüm Hakları Saklıdır.
Dr. Brad : )
Dr. Bradley Nelson
Author of "The Emotion Code"
info@TheEmotionCode.com
Bu bahar Meksika’da 4910 Meksikalıyı etkileyen ve 85 ölüme neden olan bir domuz gribi salgını yaşandı. ABD’ye yayılana kadar virüs sadece hafif grip etkisi gösteriyordu.
Uçak seyahatleri ve sağlık personelinin Meksika’dan gelen yolcularda yeterli kontrolleri yapmamasının sonucu olarak virüs dünyaya yayıldı. İnanılmaz yüksek rakamlarda ölüme sebep olacağı tahminlerine rağmen bu virüs hafif etki yapan bir hastalığın ötesine gitmemiştir ki her yıl bu şekilde grip salgınlarının yaşandığını biliyoruz.
Dünyada 70893 domuz gribi vakasından sadece 311’i ölümle sonuçlanmıştır. ABD’de 27717 vakadan 127’si ölümle sonuçlanmıştır. Her ölüm bir trajedidir ama bu kadar düşük bir ölüm oranı devleti ayağa kaldıracak bir eylem için yeterli olmamalıdır.
Medya ile Hastalık Kontrol Merkezlerinin anlattıklarına bakıldığında her yıl 36000 kişi gripten ölüyormuş. Bunun doğru olmadığını biliyoruz artık. Bu durumda dünya çapında 300 küsür ölümden bahsediyoruz aslında.
Bu virüs virüs uzmanlarını şaşırtmaya devam ediyor. Nature dergisinin 30 Nisan 2009 sayısında bir virüs uzmanı şöyle demiş “bu virüsün bu kadar çok geni nasıl topladığını bilmiyoruz” Virüs ayrıntılı bir şekilde incelendiğinde içinde 1918 yılından H1N1 virüsü, kuş gribi ve Avrasyadan iki yeni H3N2 virüs bulunmuş. Bu domuz gribinin genetik olarak tasarlanmış olduğu konusunda tartışmalar sürmektedir.
Doğal olarak aşı üreticileri ilk aşıyı yaratmak için bir yarışa girdiler. Bu yarışta en başta Baxter İlaç Firması ve Novartis geliyor Novartis en son skandala neden olmuş olan Chiron Aşı Şirketini satın almıştı. Bu şirketlerin her ikisi de pandemik aşısı yapmak üzere Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ile anlaşma yapmıştır.
Baxter’in ürettiği Celvapan aşısı çok hızla onay almıştır. Afrikalı Yeşil Maymunların kültür edilmiş hücrelerinden yapılmış yeni bir vero hücre teknolojisi ile üretilmiştir. Aynı hayvan hücresi aralarında HIV olmak üzere birkaç aşı kirleten virüs içermektedir.
Baxter şirketi iki ölümcül skandalla çalkalanmıştı. İlki 2006 yılında hemofili komponentlerine HIV virüsü bulaştığında ve içinde çocukların da bulunduğu on binlerce insana uygulandığında yaşanmıştı. Virüsün bulaştığı ortaya çıktıktan sonra bile Baxter HIV virüsü bulaşmış aşıyı piyasaya sürmeye devam etmişti.
İkinici olay yakın geçmişte yaşanmıştı. Baxter içinde kuş gribi de olan mevsimsel grip aşısını piyasaya sürmüştü. Bu aşı 18 ülkede gerçek bir pandemik yaratırdı. Allahtan Çekoslovakyada dikkatli laboratuar çalışanları bu ölümcül kombinasyonu dünyaya salınmadan yakalamıştı.
Bu iki ölümcül hataya rağmen Dünya Sağlık Örgütü pandemik aşısı üretiminde Baxter İlaç şirketi ile çalışmaya devam etmektedir.
Novartis, ikinci şirketin de Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ile anlaşması vardır. Novartisin aşısı bitmek üzere olduğundan onların seçileceği düşünülüyor. Korkunç olan ise bu pandemik aşılarının içinde bağışıklılık adjuvanları yer almaktadır. Bu adjuvanların römatoid artrit, ms ve lupus gibi otoimün hastalıklara neden olabiliyor.
Bu adjuvanın uygulandığı hayvan deneylerinde adjuvanın ölümcül olduğu görülmüştür. 14 kobay üzerinde uygulanan çalışmada özel adjuvan enjekte edildiğinde sadece bir hayvan hayatta kalmıştır. Tekrar bir deneyde aynı sonuç alınmıştır.
Peki bu ölümcül madde nedir? Adı Squalene ve bu bir tip yağdır. Ölümcül Anthrax aşısının üreticileri Chiron şirketi MF-59 adını verdikleri bir adjuvan üretiyor. Bu adjuvanda squalene bulunmaktadır. Yapılan bazı araştırmalar squalene’in enjekte edildiğinde yukarıda adı geçen otoimün hastalıklara neden olabileceğini gösteriyor.
MF-59 adjuvanı bir çok aşıda kullanılmıştır. Bu aşılar, aralarında tetanoz ve difteri olmak üzere, ters etkiler gösterdiği bilinen aşılar arasında yer almaktadır.
Bu adjuvan üzerinde yapılmış bazı deneyleri inceledim ve ilginç bir şeye rastladım. İnsan denekler üzerinde uygulanmış birkaç deneyde MF-59 çok güvenilir bir adjuvan olarak belirtilmişti. Ancak bu deneylerin kim tarafından yapıldığını incelediğimde karşıma artık tek bir şirket olmuş olan Novartis İlaç Şirketi ve Chiron İlaç şirketinin çıkması beni şaşırtmadı. Tüm deneyler ‘saygın’ dergilerde yayınlanmıştı. Tabii ki hiç şaşırmadım ki bağımsız bir çok laboratuar ve araştırma merkezi tarafından yapılan bağımsız deneylerde MF-59 ile otoimün hastalıklar arasında güçlü bir bağ olduğu görülmüştür.
Aşılarda Squalene ile Körfez Savaşı sendromu arasında güçlü bir bağ olduğu görülmüştür.Veteran İlişkileri Sektreteri Anthony Principi Ağustos 1991’de 1990 ile 1991 arasında anthrax aşısı yapılmış olan askerlerde ALS hastalığına yakalanma riskinin %200 arttığını açıklamıştır. Bu askerlerde ayrıca yaşam sürecini kısaltan ve yaşam şartlarını zorlaştıran polyarterit nodosa, MS, lupus, transvers myelitis (omurgada ödeme neden olan nörolojik bir hastalık) endokarditis, optik neuritis ve körlük ile bir tür böbrek hastalığı gibi hastalıkların sayısının arttığı gözlemlenmiş.
MF-59’un ana maddesi olan squalene hiperimün tepkisi ve otoimün tepkisi oluşturabildiğinden beyindeki bağışıklılık hücrelerinin uzun süre aktive edilmesi riskini taşımaktadır. Bu tür uzun süreli aktivasyonların MS, Alzheimer, Parkinson, ALS ve muhtemelen aşı ile ilişkili olarak Ensefalit gibi hastalıklarla bağlantılı olduğu görülmüştür. Aşı ile olduğu gibi sistematik bağışıklılık sisteminin aktivasyonunda aynı zamanda beyindeki microglia aktive ediliyor ve bu beyindeki enflamasyon uzun süre devam edebiliyor.
Bu aşıları tavsiye eden doktorlar dahil olmak üzere bir çok insanın bilmediği ise ilaç şirketleri tarafından yapılan deneylerde hastalar aşıdan sonra sadece bir ya da iki hafta takip ediliyor ama bu tür reaksiyonlar bazen aylar ve yıllar sonra ortaya çıkabiliyor.
Bu Dünya Sağlık Örgütü ve hükümet teşviği ile başlatılmış pandemikte aşı üreticilerinin milyarlar kazanacağı belli. Novartis, yeni pandemik aşısının üreticisi fakir ülkelere bedava aşı verilmeyeceğini herkesi ödemesi gerektiğin açıkladı.
Şunu bilin ki bir kere bu aşı size enjekte edildiğinde kendinizi geleneksel tıp yoluyla koruma ihtimaliniz kalmamıştır. Hayat boyu sizi sakatlayacak bir hastalık ve erken ölüm demektir.
Grip virüsünden kendinizi korumanın çok daha güvenli yolları vardır. Yüksek D3 vitamini ve seçilmiş bağışıklılık destekleyici ürünler kullanmak ve iyi beslenmek bunun başlıca yollarıdır.
© 2009 Newsmax. Tüm Hakları Saklıdır.
Dr. Brad : )
Dr. Bradley Nelson
Author of "The Emotion Code"
info@TheEmotionCode.com
27 Ekim 2009 Salı
DOMUZ GRİBİ PAZARLANIYOR (KOYUN CAN DERDİNDE,KASAP MAL DERDİNDE)
Güngör Uras
Milliyet, 27 Ekim Salı 2009
Domuz gribi korkusu var. Şu kriz döneminde belli kesimler de kamunun kaynaklarını ve halkın parasını sömürme arayışına girdi. Şimdilik 500 milyon TL’lik aşı ithal edildi. Bu aşı kampanyasının Sağlık Bakanlığı’na maliyeti şimdilik 1 milyar TL. Bakanlık bütçesinin yüzde 10’u aşı kampanyalarında harcanacak.
Dezenfekte, koruyucu maske, bağışıklık sistemlerini güçlendirmek için yapılan harcamalar yepyeni ve kârlı bir pazar ortaya çıkarıyor.
Bu konuda halkın kafası karıştı. Saf ve bakir bir Anadolu çocuğu olarak benim de kafam karıştı. Ben işin tıp yönüyle değil, ekonomik yönüyle ilgileniyorum. Geliniz görünüz ki, ekonomik yönü tetikleyen de gribin tıp yönü. Dr. Sualp Tansan, “Bu konuyu en iyi Ankara Üniversitesi Halk Sağlığı Anabilim Dalı öğretim üyesi Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur bilir” dedi.
Normal gripten korkun
Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur’un domuz gribi konusunda bugüne kadar yaptığı açıklamaları, yazdıklarını internetten okudum. Sonra Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur’u aradım. Ayşe Hanım Teyze’min merakını giderebilmem için bana anlattıklarını özetliyorum:
- Doktor Bey, “Ayşe Teyze’nize söyleyiniz ki“ dedi, “Normal grip mikrobu, domuz gribi mikrobundan 7-10 kat daha öldürücüdür.”
- Domuz gribi, domuzdan insana bulaştığında öldürücüdür. Fakat şimdilerde ortalıkta dolaşan mikrop, insandan insana bulaşan mikroptur. Gerçek anlamda “domuz gribi virüsü” değildir, gücü zayıftır. Günümüzde görülen domuz gribi hafif seyreden bir hastalıktır. Kuş gribi, İspanyol gribi, mevsimsel grip gibi öldürücü değildir.
- Gripten korunmak için hijyen şartlarına dikkat etmek, gıdaya dikkat etmek, sağlığa dikkat etmek, vücudu güçlü tutmak önemlidir.
- Grip olmaları halinde büyük sarsıntı geçirecek kişiler (risk grubundakiler) normal grip aşısı olurlarsa iyi yaparlar. Bu aşı eczanelerde 18-20 TL’ye satılmaktadır.
- Bağışıklık sistemini güçlendirici ilaçlar konusunda da dikkatli olmak gerekir. Bunların da satışı insanlar korkutularak yapılıyor.
- Grip mikrobu (virüsü) insan vücudu dışında 2-4 saat yaşayabilir. Bu nedenle okulları dezenfekte etmek, bir hafta kapamak gibi abartılı tedbirlerin domuz gribiyle ilgisi yoktur.
- Okulları kapatmak gribi sona erdiremez. Önemli olan gribe yakalanan çocukların okula gönderilmemesi, okula gönderilenlerin ise sınıfa alınmamasıdır.
Aşı zararlı olabilir
Prof. Akdur uyarıyor: “Bu gribin ölümcüllüğü artacak. Ondan dolayı aşı gerekli” diyorlar. Böyle bir şeyin olabilmesi için bilinen virüsün değişikliğe uğraması gerekir. O zaman da ithal edilen ve eski virüse göre hazırlanan aşı zaten işe yaramayacak. Domuz gribi bahanesiyle aşı pazarlaması yapılıyor. Fırsat bu fırsat, herkes halka bir şeyler satmaya çalışıyor. Bu aşılar milyonlara yapıldığında zararları, beklenen faydadan çok fazla olabilir.”
Öğrendiklerimi Ayşe Hanım Teyze’me aktardım. Başını salladı. “Her zaman olduğu gibi kurtlar piyasaya çıkmış durumda. Koyun can derdinde, kasap mal derdinde” dedi.
Milliyet, 27 Ekim Salı 2009
Domuz gribi korkusu var. Şu kriz döneminde belli kesimler de kamunun kaynaklarını ve halkın parasını sömürme arayışına girdi. Şimdilik 500 milyon TL’lik aşı ithal edildi. Bu aşı kampanyasının Sağlık Bakanlığı’na maliyeti şimdilik 1 milyar TL. Bakanlık bütçesinin yüzde 10’u aşı kampanyalarında harcanacak.
Dezenfekte, koruyucu maske, bağışıklık sistemlerini güçlendirmek için yapılan harcamalar yepyeni ve kârlı bir pazar ortaya çıkarıyor.
Bu konuda halkın kafası karıştı. Saf ve bakir bir Anadolu çocuğu olarak benim de kafam karıştı. Ben işin tıp yönüyle değil, ekonomik yönüyle ilgileniyorum. Geliniz görünüz ki, ekonomik yönü tetikleyen de gribin tıp yönü. Dr. Sualp Tansan, “Bu konuyu en iyi Ankara Üniversitesi Halk Sağlığı Anabilim Dalı öğretim üyesi Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur bilir” dedi.
Normal gripten korkun
Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur’un domuz gribi konusunda bugüne kadar yaptığı açıklamaları, yazdıklarını internetten okudum. Sonra Prof. Dr. Recep Akdur’u aradım. Ayşe Hanım Teyze’min merakını giderebilmem için bana anlattıklarını özetliyorum:
- Doktor Bey, “Ayşe Teyze’nize söyleyiniz ki“ dedi, “Normal grip mikrobu, domuz gribi mikrobundan 7-10 kat daha öldürücüdür.”
- Domuz gribi, domuzdan insana bulaştığında öldürücüdür. Fakat şimdilerde ortalıkta dolaşan mikrop, insandan insana bulaşan mikroptur. Gerçek anlamda “domuz gribi virüsü” değildir, gücü zayıftır. Günümüzde görülen domuz gribi hafif seyreden bir hastalıktır. Kuş gribi, İspanyol gribi, mevsimsel grip gibi öldürücü değildir.
- Gripten korunmak için hijyen şartlarına dikkat etmek, gıdaya dikkat etmek, sağlığa dikkat etmek, vücudu güçlü tutmak önemlidir.
- Grip olmaları halinde büyük sarsıntı geçirecek kişiler (risk grubundakiler) normal grip aşısı olurlarsa iyi yaparlar. Bu aşı eczanelerde 18-20 TL’ye satılmaktadır.
- Bağışıklık sistemini güçlendirici ilaçlar konusunda da dikkatli olmak gerekir. Bunların da satışı insanlar korkutularak yapılıyor.
- Grip mikrobu (virüsü) insan vücudu dışında 2-4 saat yaşayabilir. Bu nedenle okulları dezenfekte etmek, bir hafta kapamak gibi abartılı tedbirlerin domuz gribiyle ilgisi yoktur.
- Okulları kapatmak gribi sona erdiremez. Önemli olan gribe yakalanan çocukların okula gönderilmemesi, okula gönderilenlerin ise sınıfa alınmamasıdır.
Aşı zararlı olabilir
Prof. Akdur uyarıyor: “Bu gribin ölümcüllüğü artacak. Ondan dolayı aşı gerekli” diyorlar. Böyle bir şeyin olabilmesi için bilinen virüsün değişikliğe uğraması gerekir. O zaman da ithal edilen ve eski virüse göre hazırlanan aşı zaten işe yaramayacak. Domuz gribi bahanesiyle aşı pazarlaması yapılıyor. Fırsat bu fırsat, herkes halka bir şeyler satmaya çalışıyor. Bu aşılar milyonlara yapıldığında zararları, beklenen faydadan çok fazla olabilir.”
Öğrendiklerimi Ayşe Hanım Teyze’me aktardım. Başını salladı. “Her zaman olduğu gibi kurtlar piyasaya çıkmış durumda. Koyun can derdinde, kasap mal derdinde” dedi.
23 Ekim 2009 Cuma
Alternatif ve basit çözümler
Aşağıda okuyacağınız önlemler Dr.Vinay Goyal tarafından herkesin yararlanabilmesi için yayınlanmıştır.
http://www.livewellamerica.org/blog/?p=478
Dr.Vinay Goyal: Yoğun bakım ve Tiroit uzmanıdır. MBBS, DRM, DNB.
20 yıldan fazla klinik tecrübesi vardır.
Hinduja Hastanesi, Bombay hastanesi, Saife Hastanesi, Tata Memorial hastanesi gibi önemli kurumlarda görev yapmıştır.
Şu anda Malad’da, Riddhiviayak Cardiac and Critical center’da Nükleer ilaç departmanı ve tiroit klinikleri şefi olarak görev yapmaktadır. Mikrobun vücuda giriş noktaları yalnızca burun delikleri, ağız ve boğaz yoluyla olmaktadır.
Çok bulaşıcı bir yapıya sahip olmasından dolayı her türlü önleme karşı H1N1 virüsüyle temas etmekten kaçınmak veya korunmak imkânsızdır. H1N1 virüsüyle temas etmek virüsün vücutta çoğalması kadar önemli değildir.
Sağlığınız yerinde ve H1N1 hastalık belirtileri göstermiyorken virüsün vücutta üremesini, belirtilerin daha da şiddetlenmesini ve ikincil enfeksiyonların gelişmesini önlemek için dikkatimizi N95 veya tamiflu gibi ilaçları stoklamaya vermek yerine çoğu bildirgelerde bahsedilmeyen bazı çok basit önlemleri uygulayabiliriz.
1. Ellerin sıklıkla yıkanması ( Bütün bildirgelerde bahsedilmiştir)
2. “Hands-off-the- face” “Ellerinizle yüzünüze dokunmayın” yaklaşımı. Yemek, banyo ve yara bakımı gibi zorunluluklar dışında yüzünüzün herhangi bir yerine dokunmaktan kaçınınız.
3. Ilık tuzlu suyla günde iki kere gargara yapınız( tuza güvenmiyorsanız listerin kullanınız). H1N1 ‘in boğaz ve burun boşluklarında çoğalıp enfeksiyona sebep olarak karakteristik belirtileri göstermesi için 2 -3 güne ihtiyacı vardır. Sağlıklı bir kişinin ılık, tuzlu suyla gargara yapmasının etkisi hastalığa yakalanmış olan bir kişinin tamiflu kullanması ile aynıdır. Bu basit ucuz fakat güçlü önleyici yöntemi küçümsemeyiniz.
4. Yukarıdaki 3. önleme benzer olarak; Burnunuzun içini en az günde bir kere ılık tuzlu suyla temizleyiniz. *Günde bir kere burnunuzu sümkürün ve sonra ılık tuzlu suya batırılmış pamuk tamponlarla silerek temizleyiniz. Bu yolla burnunuzda bulunak virüs sayısını etkili bir şekilde azaltmış olursunuz.
5. Narenciye suları gibi C vitamin bakımından zengin olan yiyecekler kullanarak doğal bağışıklığınızı güçlendiriniz. Eğer ilave olarak C vitamin kullanmak zorunda iseniz emilimi artırmak için mutlaka Çinko ile birlikte alınız.
6. Bitkisel çaylar, çay, kahve gibi sıcak veya ılık içeceklerden içebildiğiniz kadar çok içiniz. * Sıcak içecekler içmek gargara yapmakla aynı etkiye sahiptir fakat ters yöne doğru. Sıcak içecekler virüsleri yaşamaları mümkün olmayan ortama sahip olan mideye doğru yıkayarak
götürürler. H1 N1 virüsü mide’de çoğalamaz, herhangi bir zarar veremez ve hayatiyetını devam ettiremez.
Sağlıklı günler dileğiyle.
Dr.Vinay Goyal
http://www.livewellamerica.org/blog/?p=478
Dr.Vinay Goyal: Yoğun bakım ve Tiroit uzmanıdır. MBBS, DRM, DNB.
20 yıldan fazla klinik tecrübesi vardır.
Hinduja Hastanesi, Bombay hastanesi, Saife Hastanesi, Tata Memorial hastanesi gibi önemli kurumlarda görev yapmıştır.
Şu anda Malad’da, Riddhiviayak Cardiac and Critical center’da Nükleer ilaç departmanı ve tiroit klinikleri şefi olarak görev yapmaktadır. Mikrobun vücuda giriş noktaları yalnızca burun delikleri, ağız ve boğaz yoluyla olmaktadır.
Çok bulaşıcı bir yapıya sahip olmasından dolayı her türlü önleme karşı H1N1 virüsüyle temas etmekten kaçınmak veya korunmak imkânsızdır. H1N1 virüsüyle temas etmek virüsün vücutta çoğalması kadar önemli değildir.
Sağlığınız yerinde ve H1N1 hastalık belirtileri göstermiyorken virüsün vücutta üremesini, belirtilerin daha da şiddetlenmesini ve ikincil enfeksiyonların gelişmesini önlemek için dikkatimizi N95 veya tamiflu gibi ilaçları stoklamaya vermek yerine çoğu bildirgelerde bahsedilmeyen bazı çok basit önlemleri uygulayabiliriz.
1. Ellerin sıklıkla yıkanması ( Bütün bildirgelerde bahsedilmiştir)
2. “Hands-off-the- face” “Ellerinizle yüzünüze dokunmayın” yaklaşımı. Yemek, banyo ve yara bakımı gibi zorunluluklar dışında yüzünüzün herhangi bir yerine dokunmaktan kaçınınız.
3. Ilık tuzlu suyla günde iki kere gargara yapınız( tuza güvenmiyorsanız listerin kullanınız). H1N1 ‘in boğaz ve burun boşluklarında çoğalıp enfeksiyona sebep olarak karakteristik belirtileri göstermesi için 2 -3 güne ihtiyacı vardır. Sağlıklı bir kişinin ılık, tuzlu suyla gargara yapmasının etkisi hastalığa yakalanmış olan bir kişinin tamiflu kullanması ile aynıdır. Bu basit ucuz fakat güçlü önleyici yöntemi küçümsemeyiniz.
4. Yukarıdaki 3. önleme benzer olarak; Burnunuzun içini en az günde bir kere ılık tuzlu suyla temizleyiniz. *Günde bir kere burnunuzu sümkürün ve sonra ılık tuzlu suya batırılmış pamuk tamponlarla silerek temizleyiniz. Bu yolla burnunuzda bulunak virüs sayısını etkili bir şekilde azaltmış olursunuz.
5. Narenciye suları gibi C vitamin bakımından zengin olan yiyecekler kullanarak doğal bağışıklığınızı güçlendiriniz. Eğer ilave olarak C vitamin kullanmak zorunda iseniz emilimi artırmak için mutlaka Çinko ile birlikte alınız.
6. Bitkisel çaylar, çay, kahve gibi sıcak veya ılık içeceklerden içebildiğiniz kadar çok içiniz. * Sıcak içecekler içmek gargara yapmakla aynı etkiye sahiptir fakat ters yöne doğru. Sıcak içecekler virüsleri yaşamaları mümkün olmayan ortama sahip olan mideye doğru yıkayarak
götürürler. H1 N1 virüsü mide’de çoğalamaz, herhangi bir zarar veremez ve hayatiyetını devam ettiremez.
Sağlıklı günler dileğiyle.
Dr.Vinay Goyal
27 Eylül 2009 Pazar
27 Mayıs 2009 Çarşamba
As a result of human error?
By Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett
May 13 (Bloomberg) — The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error.
Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG’s Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus’s origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint.
“One of the simplest explanations is that it’s a laboratory escape,” Gibbs said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. “But there are lots of others.”
The World Health Organization received the study last weekend and is reviewing it, Keiji Fukuda, the agency’s assistant director-general of health security and environment, said in an interview May 11. Gibbs, who has studied germ evolution for four decades, is one of the first scientists to analyze the genetic makeup of the virus that was identified three weeks ago in Mexico and threatens to touch off the first flu pandemic since 1968.
A virus that resulted from lab experimentation or vaccine production may indicate a greater need for security, Fukuda said. By pinpointing the source of the virus, scientists also may better understand the microbe’s potential for spreading and causing illness, Gibbs said.
Possible Mistake
“The sooner we get to grips with where it’s come from, the safer things might become,” Gibbs said by phone from Canberra yesterday. “It could be a mistake” that occurred at a vaccine production facility or the virus could have jumped from a pig to another mammal or a bird before reaching humans, he said.
Gibbs and two colleagues analyzed the publicly available sequences of hundreds of amino acids coded by each of the flu virus’s eight genes. He said he aims to submit his three-page paper today for publication in a medical journal.
“You really want a very sober assessment” of the science behind the claim, Fukuda said May 11 at the WHO’s Geneva headquarters.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta has received the report and has decided there is no evidence to support Gibbs’s conclusion, said Nancy Cox, director of the agency’s influenza division. She said since researchers don’t have samples of swine flu viruses from South America and Africa, where the new strain may have evolved, those regions can’t be ruled out as natural sources for the new flu.
No Evidence
“We are interested in the origins of this new influenza virus,” Cox said. “But contrary to what the author has found, when we do the comparisons that are most relevant, there is no evidence that this virus was derived by passage in eggs.”
The WHO’s collaborative influenza research centers, which includes the CDC, and sites in Memphis, Melbourne, London and Tokyo, were asked by the international health agency to review the study over the weekend, Fukuda said. The request was extended to scientists at the Food and Agriculture Organization in Rome, the World Organization for Animal Health in Paris, as well as the WHO’s influenza network, he said.
“My guess is that the picture should be a lot clearer over the next few days,” Fukuda said. “We have asked a lot of people to look at this.”
Virus Expert
Gibbs wrote or co-authored more than 250 scientific publications on viruses during his 39-year career at the Australian National University in Canberra, according to biographical information on the university’s Web site.
Swine flu has infected 5,251 people in 30 countries so far, killing 61, according to WHO data. Scientists are trying to determine whether the virus will mutate and become more deadly if it spreads to the Southern Hemisphere and back. Flu pandemics occur when a strain of the disease to which few people have immunity evolves and spreads.
Gibbs said his analysis supports research by scientists including Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, who found the new strain is the product of two distinct lineages of influenza that have circulated among swine in North America and Europe for more than a decade.
In addition, Gibbs said his research found the rate of genetic mutation in the new virus was about three times faster than that of the most closely related viruses found in pigs, suggesting it evolved outside of swine.
Gene Evolution
“Whatever speeded up the evolution of these genes happened at least seven or eight years ago, so one wonders, why hasn’t it been found?” Gibbs said today.
Some scientists have speculated that the 1977 Russian flu, the most recent global outbreak, began when a virus escaped from a laboratory.
Identifying the source of new flu viruses is difficult without finding the exact strain in an animal or bird “reservoir,” said Jennifer McKimm-Breschkin, a virologist at the Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization in Melbourne.
“If you can’t find an exact match, the best you can do is compare sequences,” she said. “Similarities may give an indication of a possible source, but this remains theoretical.”
The World Organization for Animal Health, which represents chief veterinary officers from 174 countries, received the Gibbs paper and is working with the WHO on an assessment, said Maria Zampaglione, a spokeswoman.
Genetic Patterns
The WHO wants to know whether any evidence that the virus may have been developed in a laboratory can be corroborated and whether there are other explanations for its particular genetic patterns, according to Fukuda.
“These things have to be dealt with straight on,” he said. “If someone makes a hypothesis, then you test it and you let scientific process take its course.”
Gibbs said he has no evidence that the swine-derived virus was a deliberate, man-made product.
“I don’t think it could be a malignant thing,” he said. “It’s much more likely that some random thing has put these two viruses together.”
Gibbs, who spent most of his academic career studying plant viruses, said his major contribution to the study of influenza occurred in 1975, while collaborating with scientists Graeme Laver and Robert Webster in research that led to the development of the anti-flu medicines Tamiflu and Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline Plc.
Bird Poo
“We were out on one of the Barrier Reef islands, off Australia, catching birds for the flu in them, and I happened to be the guy who caught the best,” Gibbs said. The bird he got “yielded the poo from which was isolated the influenza isolate strain from which all the work on Tamiflu and Relenza started.”
Gibbs, who says he studies the evolution of flu viruses as a “retirement hobby,” expects his research to be challenged by other scientists.
“This is how science progresses,” he said. “Somebody comes up with a wild idea, and then they all pounce on it and kick you to death, and then you start off on another silly idea.”
4 Mayıs 2009 Pazartesi
Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms Part II:
WHO takes a page from a Michael Crichton Novel
By F. William Engdahl* 4 May 2009
As the late great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, ‘this just gets absurder and absurder.’ The international agencies supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood ‘B’ grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel. The global panic over outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are in the business of peddling so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs—Roche, SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us normal folks.
The own releases of the WHO in Geneva and the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the central coordinating agencies in this production, are worth careful study. On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City. The report described in detail a school in New York City where, ‘As of April 28, approximately half (45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection had been confirmed among students and staff members.’ The CDC called these cases all ‘genetically similar to viruses subsequently isolated from patients in Mexico.’ We are not told in scientific terms what ‘genetically similar to’ means, but it sure sounds ominous.
At that point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in the United States. Forty five of the 109 came from this New York School. The TV news channels were flooded with panic messages of the uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu.
On April 29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, upgraded their Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below full global Pandemic Alert.
According to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the virus being spread from human-to-human in at least two countries in one WHO region. Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterised by increased and sustained transmission in the general population. In her announcement of the upgrade, Dr Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added comment that was predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media: ‘After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.’ Note the WHO Director-General had not declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in a speech in Geneva in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident observation that ‘during a pandemic’ all humanity is under threat.’
A press release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated, ‘On May 3, CDC is scheduled to complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the continental United States. These supplies and medicines will help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun the process of developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu virus.’ The pandemic response apparatus was going into high gear.
The 45 New York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were ‘confirmed cases of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV) infection,’ ninety-five percent of whom reported to the health authorities symptoms that included ‘fever plus cough and/or sore throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness (ILI).’
OK. Better to be cautious when dealing with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat? Fever? Aren’t these pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC apparently. The 45 kids were immediately added to the growing ‘confirmed cases’ statistics, fuelling emergency responses, statements by the President of the United States, economic catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried up overnight, and worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at least a new version of the 1918 Spanish Flu plague.
The CDC hastened to add the note, ‘symptoms in these patients appear to be similar to those of seasonal influenza.’ For those bothering to read through three detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the end that, ‘on April 27, 37 patients (84%) reported that their symptoms were stable or improving, three (7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of symptoms. Only one reported having been hospitalized for syncope and released after overnight observation.’ The CDC adds, ‘To date, this school-based outbreak is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United States.’
In addition to the 109 ‘confirmed cases’ reported in the United States, including one death of a Mexican boy in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29, ‘a total of 57 confirmed cases had been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By country, the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26); Canada (13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and New Zealand (three each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).’ Is this another case of ‘Chicken Little’ crying the sky is falling?
A revealing name change
Now, not only are the alleged victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black Death showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO also announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events. By May 1 the WHO, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced the name Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational biology at Columbia University, six of the eight genetic segments are purely swine flu and the other two segments are bird and human, but have lived in swine for the past decade.
We instead are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That’s a catchy name.
The name change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US pig industry to drop the Swine Flu label as it was apparently cutting into pork sales. The largest US and world pig producer, Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly among those lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish. But name change or not, the swine production process of Smithfield Foods and other industrialized Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation—bears closer scrutiny.
As I detailed in Part I, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths and illness first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico, where local residents had for weeks prior to the official announcement been protesting the dangers of the huge Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village. Children and adults alike were reported having a rash of symptoms in the vicinity of the vast pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest industrialized pig meat producer. It also has one of the most egregious health and safety records.
Pig feces and other niceties
Feces is the Latin term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product of human or animal digestion. Pigs are world champion waste producers. An average pig produces some three times in weight the amount of fecal matter that an adult person does. As GRAIN, an agricultural organization reports, ‘the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.’ The pig fecal waste product is at the center of the problem, something the CDC name change conveniently tends to obscure.
As the GRAIN study notes, because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close together, they are ideal breeding grounds for toxins and virulent pathogens. In 2003 Science magazine warned that swine flu was ‘on a new evolutionary ‘fast track’ due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations.’ It’s the same story with bird flu, where huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with tens of thousands of chickens breed toxic waste galore.
Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has an impressive track record of violations of health and safety including water safety laws. In the USA, the world’s largest pig CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to local reports the town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale of fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel CAFO emits locally.
As Jeff Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem calculated, ‘the best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’
Tietz adds, ‘So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.’
The problem, he and other critics of CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig waste, but waste combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic chemicals used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to maximize ‘efficiency.’
Tietz notes, ‘A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.’
The degrees of concentration in the Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat concentrations have little to do with traditional hog farming. In facilities now spread around the world, Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around.
As Tietz notes, ‘Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.’
He continues on the toxic CAFO conditions: ‘They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush sprite-like through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.’
Jeff Tietz is not the only one who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield Foods CAFO pig waste problem. The United States Government Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has repeatedly fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local water supply with discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and elsewhere across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA, for waste generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat processing operations. There was little convincing evidence the fines changed their practice of waste disposal in any significant way.
Smithfield Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where environmental regulations are presumably less strict, including Romania, Poland, and of course, rural Mexico. Several years ago the Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was focus of major accusations by local and Government health officials. Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. ‘Our doctors have not had access to the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections,’ stated Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in Romania. ‘Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection.’ It later emerged that Smithfield had been covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian CAFO farms.
The Drug Cartel comes in
Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.
On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’
On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’
That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).
With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.
Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic. In a fantasy section titled ‘Sometime in the future…’ the WHO wrote four years ago,
Rumours of an outbreak of unusually severe respiratory illness in two vil-
lages in a remote province reach the ministry of health in one of the World
Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Member States. A team is dispatched to
the province and learns that the outbreak started about a month earlier.
The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the previous month. All
age groups have been affected. Twenty patients are currently in the pro-
vincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia and acute
respiratory failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas is increased, and new
cases are identified throughout the province. Respiratory specimens col-
lected from several patients are tested at the national laboratory and are
found to be positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further
subtyped. The isolates are sent to the WHO Reference Centre for Influ-
enza for further characterization, where they are characterized as influ-
enza A(H6N1), a subtype never isolated from humans before. Gene
sequencing studies further indicate that most of the viral genes are from a
bird influenza virus, with the remaining genes derived from a human strain.
If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.
That 2004 WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the handbook for what has unfolded since late April in the US Mexico and beyond. It leads to serious question whether the world is being submitted to a giant psychological warfare game aimed at inducing them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a danger that does not actually exist as claimed.
With the reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present and little sign of the feared repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu or worse as officials were warning only days earlier, it is well beyond time to launch a full-scale worldwide health inquiry into the toxic conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm concentrations, and to end the official coverup of what has become a colossal health danger.
* F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca), and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), is due to be released later this month. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
By F. William Engdahl* 4 May 2009
As the late great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, ‘this just gets absurder and absurder.’ The international agencies supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood ‘B’ grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel. The global panic over outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are in the business of peddling so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs—Roche, SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us normal folks.
The own releases of the WHO in Geneva and the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the central coordinating agencies in this production, are worth careful study. On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City. The report described in detail a school in New York City where, ‘As of April 28, approximately half (45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection had been confirmed among students and staff members.’ The CDC called these cases all ‘genetically similar to viruses subsequently isolated from patients in Mexico.’ We are not told in scientific terms what ‘genetically similar to’ means, but it sure sounds ominous.
At that point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in the United States. Forty five of the 109 came from this New York School. The TV news channels were flooded with panic messages of the uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu.
On April 29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, upgraded their Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below full global Pandemic Alert.
According to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the virus being spread from human-to-human in at least two countries in one WHO region. Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterised by increased and sustained transmission in the general population. In her announcement of the upgrade, Dr Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added comment that was predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media: ‘After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.’ Note the WHO Director-General had not declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in a speech in Geneva in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident observation that ‘during a pandemic’ all humanity is under threat.’
A press release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated, ‘On May 3, CDC is scheduled to complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the continental United States. These supplies and medicines will help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun the process of developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu virus.’ The pandemic response apparatus was going into high gear.
The 45 New York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were ‘confirmed cases of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV) infection,’ ninety-five percent of whom reported to the health authorities symptoms that included ‘fever plus cough and/or sore throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness (ILI).’
OK. Better to be cautious when dealing with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat? Fever? Aren’t these pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC apparently. The 45 kids were immediately added to the growing ‘confirmed cases’ statistics, fuelling emergency responses, statements by the President of the United States, economic catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried up overnight, and worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at least a new version of the 1918 Spanish Flu plague.
The CDC hastened to add the note, ‘symptoms in these patients appear to be similar to those of seasonal influenza.’ For those bothering to read through three detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the end that, ‘on April 27, 37 patients (84%) reported that their symptoms were stable or improving, three (7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of symptoms. Only one reported having been hospitalized for syncope and released after overnight observation.’ The CDC adds, ‘To date, this school-based outbreak is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United States.’
In addition to the 109 ‘confirmed cases’ reported in the United States, including one death of a Mexican boy in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29, ‘a total of 57 confirmed cases had been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By country, the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26); Canada (13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and New Zealand (three each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).’ Is this another case of ‘Chicken Little’ crying the sky is falling?
A revealing name change
Now, not only are the alleged victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black Death showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO also announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events. By May 1 the WHO, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced the name Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational biology at Columbia University, six of the eight genetic segments are purely swine flu and the other two segments are bird and human, but have lived in swine for the past decade.
We instead are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That’s a catchy name.
The name change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US pig industry to drop the Swine Flu label as it was apparently cutting into pork sales. The largest US and world pig producer, Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly among those lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish. But name change or not, the swine production process of Smithfield Foods and other industrialized Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation—bears closer scrutiny.
As I detailed in Part I, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths and illness first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico, where local residents had for weeks prior to the official announcement been protesting the dangers of the huge Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village. Children and adults alike were reported having a rash of symptoms in the vicinity of the vast pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest industrialized pig meat producer. It also has one of the most egregious health and safety records.
Pig feces and other niceties
Feces is the Latin term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product of human or animal digestion. Pigs are world champion waste producers. An average pig produces some three times in weight the amount of fecal matter that an adult person does. As GRAIN, an agricultural organization reports, ‘the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.’ The pig fecal waste product is at the center of the problem, something the CDC name change conveniently tends to obscure.
As the GRAIN study notes, because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close together, they are ideal breeding grounds for toxins and virulent pathogens. In 2003 Science magazine warned that swine flu was ‘on a new evolutionary ‘fast track’ due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations.’ It’s the same story with bird flu, where huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with tens of thousands of chickens breed toxic waste galore.
Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has an impressive track record of violations of health and safety including water safety laws. In the USA, the world’s largest pig CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to local reports the town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale of fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel CAFO emits locally.
As Jeff Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem calculated, ‘the best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’
Tietz adds, ‘So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.’
The problem, he and other critics of CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig waste, but waste combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic chemicals used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to maximize ‘efficiency.’
Tietz notes, ‘A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.’
The degrees of concentration in the Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat concentrations have little to do with traditional hog farming. In facilities now spread around the world, Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around.
As Tietz notes, ‘Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.’
He continues on the toxic CAFO conditions: ‘They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush sprite-like through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.’
Jeff Tietz is not the only one who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield Foods CAFO pig waste problem. The United States Government Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has repeatedly fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local water supply with discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and elsewhere across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA, for waste generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat processing operations. There was little convincing evidence the fines changed their practice of waste disposal in any significant way.
Smithfield Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where environmental regulations are presumably less strict, including Romania, Poland, and of course, rural Mexico. Several years ago the Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was focus of major accusations by local and Government health officials. Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. ‘Our doctors have not had access to the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections,’ stated Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in Romania. ‘Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection.’ It later emerged that Smithfield had been covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian CAFO farms.
The Drug Cartel comes in
Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.
On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’
On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’
That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).
With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain.
Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic. In a fantasy section titled ‘Sometime in the future…’ the WHO wrote four years ago,
Rumours of an outbreak of unusually severe respiratory illness in two vil-
lages in a remote province reach the ministry of health in one of the World
Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Member States. A team is dispatched to
the province and learns that the outbreak started about a month earlier.
The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the previous month. All
age groups have been affected. Twenty patients are currently in the pro-
vincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia and acute
respiratory failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas is increased, and new
cases are identified throughout the province. Respiratory specimens col-
lected from several patients are tested at the national laboratory and are
found to be positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further
subtyped. The isolates are sent to the WHO Reference Centre for Influ-
enza for further characterization, where they are characterized as influ-
enza A(H6N1), a subtype never isolated from humans before. Gene
sequencing studies further indicate that most of the viral genes are from a
bird influenza virus, with the remaining genes derived from a human strain.
If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation.
That 2004 WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the handbook for what has unfolded since late April in the US Mexico and beyond. It leads to serious question whether the world is being submitted to a giant psychological warfare game aimed at inducing them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a danger that does not actually exist as claimed.
With the reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present and little sign of the feared repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu or worse as officials were warning only days earlier, it is well beyond time to launch a full-scale worldwide health inquiry into the toxic conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm concentrations, and to end the official coverup of what has become a colossal health danger.
* F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca), and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), is due to be released later this month. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
29 Nisan 2009 Çarşamba
Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms
By F. William Engdahl* 29 April 2009
If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths.
One website, revealingly named Swine Flu Vaccine, reports the alarming news, ‘One out of every five residents of Mexico's most populous city wore masks to protect themselves against the virus as Mexico City seems to be the epicenter of the outbreak. As many as 103 deaths have been attributed to the swine flu so far with many more feared to be on the horizon. The health department of Mexico said an additional 1,614 reported cases have been documented.’ We are told that the H1N1 ‘shares genetic material from human, avian and swine influenza viruses.’
Airports around the world have installed passenger temperature scans to identify anyone with above normal body temperature as possible suspect for swine flu. Travel to Mexico has collapsed. Sales of flu vaccines, above all Tamiflu from Roche Inc., have exploded in days. People have stopped buying pork fearing certain death. The World Health Organization has declared a ‘a public health emergency of international concern,’ defined by them as ‘an occurrence or imminent threat of illness or health conditions caused by bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or highly fatal infectious agents or toxins that pose serious risk to a significant number of people.’
What are the symptoms of this purported Swine Flu? That’s not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. ‘So many different things can cause these symptoms. it is a dilemma,’ says one doctor interviewed by CNN. ‘There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the Swine Flu.’ It has been noted that most individuals with Swine Flu had an early on set of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.
The US Government’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta states on its official website, ‘Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.’ Nonetheless they add, ‘CDC has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how easily the virus spreads between people.’
How many media that have grabbed on the headline ‘suspected case of Swine Flu’ in recent days bother to double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic questions? For example, the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 and their location? The number of deaths confirmed to have resulted from H1N1? Dates of both? Number of suspected cases and of suspected deaths related to the Swine Flu disease?
Some known facts
According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.
They reported, ‘Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.’ What they later say is ‘strange’ is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur in Mexico in the period October to February.
The report went on to note, ‘Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were "isolated" and "not related" to each other.’
Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, ‘Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’
Since the dawn of American ‘agribusiness,’ a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950’s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called Factory Farms, industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.
Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia. The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfields’ family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised.
Now the story becomes interesting.
Manure Lagoons and other playing fields
The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility. Their local reporter notes, ‘Edgar Hernández plays among the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago — the first known case — has almost brought his country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert. ‘I feel great,’ the five-year-old boy said. ‘But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.’’
The reporters add, ‘It was confirmed on Monday (April 27 2009-w.e.) that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged.’
That’s quite interesting. They speak of ‘La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons.’’ Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot. It gives an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria.
Significantly, according to the Times reporters, ‘residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger).’ There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would ‘not respond to rumours.’
A research compilation by Ed Harris reported, ‘According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’ That would imply that the entire Swine Flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield Foods.
The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s Granjos Carroll for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production.
Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable with the sudden attention. The company, which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in the United States 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act. Perhaps they are in a remote tiny Mexican rural area enjoying a relatively lax regulatory climate where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any Clean Water Act.
Factory Farms as toxic concentrations
At the very least the driving force for giant industrial agribusiness outsourcing of facilities to third world sites such as Veracruz, Mexico has more to do with further cost reduction and lack of health and safety scrutiny than it does with improving the health and safety quality of the food end product. It has been widely documented and subject of US Congressional reports that large-scale indoor animal production facilities such as that of Granjos Carroll are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens.
A recent report by the US Pew Foundation in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health notes, ‘the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed from the extensive system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn. That change has happened primarily out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the
environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves.
The Pew study notes, ‘The diversified, independent, family-owned farms of 40 years ago
that produced a variety of crops and a few animals are disappearing as an economic entity, replaced by much larger, and often highly leveraged, farm factories. The animals that many of these farms produce are owned by the meat packing companies from the time they are born
or hatched right through their arrival at the processing plant and from there to market.’
The study emphasizes that application of ‘untreated animal waste on cropland can contribute to excessive nutrient loading, contaminate surface waters, and stimulate bacteria and algal
growth and subsequent reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface waters.’
That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the vaccine, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.
Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms.
Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic) sales of Tamiflu as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu related have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue ‘buy’ recommendations for the company. ‘Gimme me a shot Doc, I don’t care what it is…I don’ wanna die…’
Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush Administration skilfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud. With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.
Now it remains to be seen if the Obama Administration will use the scare around so-called Swine Flu to repeat the same scenario, this time with ‘flying pigs’ instead of flying birds. Already Mexican authorities have reported that the number of deaths confirmed from so-called Swine Flu is 7 not the 150 or more bandied in the media and that most other suspected cases were ordinary flu or influenza.
(To be continued)
*F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca.) and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out end of May. He may be contacted through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
If we are to believe what our trusted international media report, the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labelled, or more popularly, Swine Flu. As the story goes, the outbreak of the deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps 150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond. The only thing wrong with this story is that it is largely based on lies, hype and coverup of possible real causes of Mexican deaths.
One website, revealingly named Swine Flu Vaccine, reports the alarming news, ‘One out of every five residents of Mexico's most populous city wore masks to protect themselves against the virus as Mexico City seems to be the epicenter of the outbreak. As many as 103 deaths have been attributed to the swine flu so far with many more feared to be on the horizon. The health department of Mexico said an additional 1,614 reported cases have been documented.’ We are told that the H1N1 ‘shares genetic material from human, avian and swine influenza viruses.’
Airports around the world have installed passenger temperature scans to identify anyone with above normal body temperature as possible suspect for swine flu. Travel to Mexico has collapsed. Sales of flu vaccines, above all Tamiflu from Roche Inc., have exploded in days. People have stopped buying pork fearing certain death. The World Health Organization has declared a ‘a public health emergency of international concern,’ defined by them as ‘an occurrence or imminent threat of illness or health conditions caused by bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or highly fatal infectious agents or toxins that pose serious risk to a significant number of people.’
What are the symptoms of this purported Swine Flu? That’s not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. ‘So many different things can cause these symptoms. it is a dilemma,’ says one doctor interviewed by CNN. ‘There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the Swine Flu.’ It has been noted that most individuals with Swine Flu had an early on set of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.
The US Government’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta states on its official website, ‘Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.’ Nonetheless they add, ‘CDC has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how easily the virus spreads between people.’
How many media that have grabbed on the headline ‘suspected case of Swine Flu’ in recent days bother to double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic questions? For example, the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 and their location? The number of deaths confirmed to have resulted from H1N1? Dates of both? Number of suspected cases and of suspected deaths related to the Swine Flu disease?
Some known facts
According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.
They reported, ‘Sources characterized the event as a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.’ What they later say is ‘strange’ is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur in Mexico in the period October to February.
The report went on to note, ‘Residents claimed that three pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they stated the three fatal cases were "isolated" and "not related" to each other.’
Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, ‘Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’
Since the dawn of American ‘agribusiness,’ a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950’s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called Factory Farms, industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.
Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia. The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfields’ family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised.
Now the story becomes interesting.
Manure Lagoons and other playing fields
The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility. Their local reporter notes, ‘Edgar Hernández plays among the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago — the first known case — has almost brought his country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert. ‘I feel great,’ the five-year-old boy said. ‘But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.’’
The reporters add, ‘It was confirmed on Monday (April 27 2009-w.e.) that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged.’
That’s quite interesting. They speak of ‘La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons.’’ Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot. It gives an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria.
Significantly, according to the Times reporters, ‘residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odour from Granjas Carroll’s pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger).’ There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would ‘not respond to rumours.’
A research compilation by Ed Harris reported, ‘According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.’ That would imply that the entire Swine Flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield Foods.
The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s Granjos Carroll for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production.
Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable with the sudden attention. The company, which supplies the McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in the United States 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act. Perhaps they are in a remote tiny Mexican rural area enjoying a relatively lax regulatory climate where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any Clean Water Act.
Factory Farms as toxic concentrations
At the very least the driving force for giant industrial agribusiness outsourcing of facilities to third world sites such as Veracruz, Mexico has more to do with further cost reduction and lack of health and safety scrutiny than it does with improving the health and safety quality of the food end product. It has been widely documented and subject of US Congressional reports that large-scale indoor animal production facilities such as that of Granjos Carroll are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens.
A recent report by the US Pew Foundation in cooperation with the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health notes, ‘the method of producing food animals in the United States has changed from the extensive system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn. That change has happened primarily out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the
environment and a negative impact on public health, rural communities, and the health and well-being of the animals themselves.
The Pew study notes, ‘The diversified, independent, family-owned farms of 40 years ago
that produced a variety of crops and a few animals are disappearing as an economic entity, replaced by much larger, and often highly leveraged, farm factories. The animals that many of these farms produce are owned by the meat packing companies from the time they are born
or hatched right through their arrival at the processing plant and from there to market.’
The study emphasizes that application of ‘untreated animal waste on cropland can contribute to excessive nutrient loading, contaminate surface waters, and stimulate bacteria and algal
growth and subsequent reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations in surface waters.’
That is where the real investigation ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz. The media spread of panic-mongering reports of every person in the world who happens to contract ‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from conducive to a rational scientific investigation..
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1. Scare stories filled world media. Then, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the vaccine, Oseltamivir sold under the name, Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001, Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company, Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss pharma giant, Roche. Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose Roche sold. When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell would have indicated something to hide.’ That agonizing decision won him reported added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in weeks.
Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms.
Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu Panic) sales of Tamiflu as well as any and every possible drug marketed as flu related have exploded. Wall Street firms have rushed to issue ‘buy’ recommendations for the company. ‘Gimme me a shot Doc, I don’t care what it is…I don’ wanna die…’
Panic and fear of death was used by the Bush Administration skilfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud. With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world. Instead of a serious investigation into the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the Bush Administration and WHO blamed ‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions. Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.
Now it remains to be seen if the Obama Administration will use the scare around so-called Swine Flu to repeat the same scenario, this time with ‘flying pigs’ instead of flying birds. Already Mexican authorities have reported that the number of deaths confirmed from so-called Swine Flu is 7 not the 150 or more bandied in the media and that most other suspected cases were ordinary flu or influenza.
(To be continued)
*F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca.) and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His new book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out end of May. He may be contacted through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net.
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