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Ah, I see you beat me to an answer here! lol
Plague: A New Thriller of the Coming Pandemic
The best-selling author of Outbreak has an exclusive tale for FP about a catastrophe of global proportions. And by the way, it's not fiction.
BY ROBIN COOK | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009
Sometimes fiction can do more to change public opinion than nonfiction. It took Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, to awaken the public to the dangers of sausage and the meat-packing industry in general. Another example, if I can be so presumptuous, is my 1977 novel Coma, which opened readers' eyes to the dubious side of the medical profession after years of misleadingly warm and fuzzy treatment of doctors and hospitals in novels, movies, and TV series. Today, there is a crying need for a new such socially conscious novel to shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don't mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading illness, I'm worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague.
Everyone has heard of plague and knows it means a sudden outbreak of a virulent disease. But it also has a very common, very specific association in the public mind: It's synonymous with the Black Death, the scourge caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that swept through Europe (as well as much of the rest of the world) from 1348 to 1350. Viewing this monumental and even Malthusian event from the vantage point of nearly seven centuries later, one cringes at having to contemplate the horror, the excruciating pain, and the terror its victims had to suffer. Knowing the pain involved with a tiny boil, it is almost impossible to imagine what it was like being deathly ill with most of one's lymph nodes swelling to the point of becoming visible, blackened lumps with their interiors necrotizing and liquefying -- and all of that happening without analgesics and certainly without antibiotics. If David Letterman presented a top-10 list of the worst possible ways to leave this world, dying of the plague in the 14th century would have to be at the top.
And the horror of the Black Death went far beyond individual physical pain. Given the speed with which the illness spread through cities, it must have caused ultimate anxiety and panic as the wildfire disease left rotting, infective corpses, oozing putrefaction, piled in the streets. Urban society was unable to cope and, in many places, essentially collapsed due to the number of victims (some cities lost 90 percent of their residents). Adding to the chaos, war between two of the era's more significant powers -- England and France -- raged fitfully on and off after 1337. Commerce stagnated, especially in regard to food, causing famine. And perhaps cruelest of all, paroxysms of gruesome mass murders erupted as minorities were scapegoated. All in all, the Black Death had to have been hell on Earth, especially because no one -- not the doctors, not the priests, and not the scientists of the age -- had even the slightest idea of what was causing the calamity, how it was spread, or how it could be treated.
With such associations, a medical thriller titled Plague would certainly get people's attention, especially because it wouldn't be a historical novel that could be dismissed as "that was then; this is now." Instead, it would be a novel of a horrendous contemporary event: a new Black Death. Of course, this plague won't be a revisit of Y. pestis; we won't see black buboes and excruciatingly painful suffering. But death is death, and in the plague I speak of there will be a lot of it, possibly equal in scale to the Black Death, but unfolding even faster. If that is the case, there will be a degree of worldwide societal chaos that taxes the imagination. And this is no far-fetched fiction. Despite all we know about biological science and despite all the wizardly powers of modern medicine, with its vast pharmacopeia and its array of sophisticated devices, this new plague might well happen. I say this not just as an author of medical thrillers, but as a medical doctor with four decades of experience in surgery, infectious disease, and emergency medicine.
Before I reveal the infectious agent of this putative coming plague, I would like to refer the reader to my 17th book, Contagion, published in 1995. A cautionary tale about the hazards of bioterrorism, the story involves a microbiology technician who is bent on starting an epidemic but who has to learn on the job, so to speak, about the critical importance of both virulence and transmissibility. He starts with Y. pestis, but his intended plague quickly fizzles with only a few victims because the necessary perpetrators of the scourge, rats and their disease-transmitting fleas, are not available. Undeterred, he finally comes to recognize that for a really scary epidemic to occur, it needs three things: the availability of a self-sustaining reservoir (usually an animal as an asymptomatic carrier), easy human-to-human transmissibility, and impressive virulence. By the end of the book he finds his agent: the influenza A subspecies H1N1 that caused the 1918-1919 Spanish flu, which he obtains from digging up in Alaska the frozen corpse of a victim of that dreadful pandemic.
Influenza A is perfect not only for my villain in Contagion but also as the infectious agent in Plague. It has a normal reservoir in the guts of birds, spreads via aerosols (the easiest and most efficient method of disease transmission), and can be amazingly virulent. By some estimates, as many people died from the Spanish flu as from the Black Death. Contemporary anecdotes of the Spanish flu describe asymptomatic people boarding the subway in Brooklyn and being dead by Manhattan. Such a death is hardly the torture of bubonic plague, but singularly impressive for its rapidity nonetheless. With today's medical knowledge, such an event would be explained as a "cytokine storm," in which the stricken individual's immune system reacts against the invading virus with such ferocity and such inflammation in the victim's lungs that death results from drowning in one's own secretions.
I personally developed great respect for influenza as a 17-year-old when I contracted the avian H2N2 subspecies during the 1957 Asian flu pandemic -- along with most everyone else at my high school. I suffered through an unpleasant illness that forever gave me a keen appreciation of the benign-sounding term "general malaise." My respect for influenza was further reinforced by the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic, caused by H3N2. At the time, I was a surgical resident, confronting seriously ill patients in the intensive care unit struggling to breathe. So when a new and highly virulent subspecies of influenza, designated avian H5N1 flu, appeared in Southeast Asia in 2006 and quickly began to spread globally, I felt compelled to do something for myself and my family. Despite this new subspecies's low human-to-human transmissibility, I stocked my isolated ski cottage with Tamiflu, antibiotics, ibuprofen, and N95 face masks. In the back of my mind was Isaac Newton's flight to the countryside from plague-infested London in 1665.
All this begs the question: Could an influenza pandemic as bad as the one that struck in 1918 occur again? In our current state of world complacency and unpreparedness, I'd have to say absolutely yes, which is why my supplies are still in my ski cottage.
In fact, such an outbreak could be worse than the Spanish flu, even with the antiviral drugs we now have, the antibiotics that are today available for secondary infections, and the modern equipment in our intensive care units. For though medical science has learned a lot about viruses in general and influenza in particular since the World War I era, there is a long way to go. What we do know is that viruses are highly evolutionarily developed, quintessential parasites. To reproduce, they end up stealthily slipping inside and then hijacking the biomolecular machinery of other life forms, such as bacteria or mammalian cells, as they don't have this machinery themselves. The problem, of course, is that the invaded entity is often killed in the process; for us humans, an attack from the influenza virus means that the cells lining our respiratory tract begin to die, as it is these cells that are selectively chosen. The flu is primarily a respiratory disease.
The fact that viruses such as influenza do their dirty work within cells is what makes treating them so much more difficult than treating bacterial diseases such as bubonic plague, which, in contrast, does most of its dirty work outside cells. In some respects the situation is akin to the difficulties of dealing with cancer in that killing infected cells can put normal cells in jeopardy, too. Modern medicine does have some antivirals in its armamentarium, but the highly evolved, wily viruses are quick to mount resistance. What it comes down to is that the best way to deal with influenza is to prevent it.
All of which brings us back to Plague, the book. And when it comes to the story line, current events are certainly lending a hand. With the Northern Hemisphere flu season beginning, today's pandemic of H1N1 swine flu has justifiably received a lot of coverage because the organism has spread around the globe in a matter of months. But no matter how impressive its human-to-human transmissibility, this strain simply cannot be the influenza A subspecies for our novel. It's just not hold-on-to-your-hat virulent enough. Although this disease has killed a few people, even a few seemingly healthy people, for the most part it causes a relatively mild illness, perhaps even milder than the normal yearly flu, which also kills its share of people.
But that is not the case with another flu subspecies that originally appeared in 2006 and which is now slowly spreading from Southeast Asia, particularly in its normal reservoir of aquatic birds. This is the subspecies designated HPAI A(H5N1), standing for "highly pathogenic avian influenza A of subtype H5N1," or avian flu for short. Luckily it has very low transmissibility -- which it makes up for with knock-your-socks-off lethality. A truly scary percentage, about 60 percent, of those humans unlucky enough to have contracted the illness over the last three years have quickly died.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. Is there a chance these two subspecies could hook up and help each other? The answer is definitely yes, and that is the worry because one of influenza A's most disturbing characteristics is its ability to indulge in recombination of its 11 genes, which are arranged on its eight pieces of RNA. This produces what is called genetic shift -- in other words, transfer of entire genes or gene combinations, and hence traits. It will become key to our plot.
The actual Plague story might start with a farmer in China's Guangdong province -- call him Wang Lung -- who takes some produce to Hong Kong in early September 2009, where we know H1N1 is already having a field day (the city reported 514 new cases of the disease in one 24-hour period this September). Let's have Wang indulge in some social activity after he is finished with his business. During this activity he inhales aerosolized H1N1 and contracts the illness. Back home, still mostly asymptomatic yet massively contagious, he hand-feeds his pet duck, which is already harboring H5N1. The duck adds the H1N1 to its gut, and then the bird is returned to its cage, which is suspended over Wang's bevy of pigs. Such an arrangement is frequent in Asia not only to save space but also to wrest as much caloric value out of the duck's feed as possible by making the bird's poop mix with the pigs' slop.
For the influenza A virus, things couldn't be better; pigs are its favorite brewing cauldrons. The avian H5N1 and the human-adapted swine H1N1 can enter pig cells simultaneously by the availability of separate pig epithelial cell receptors. And of course, this is what happens in Plague, giving the two viruses the opportunity to recombine with each other. During the millions or billions of replications of the virus inside the pigs, either the H5N1 gives its virulence to H1N1, or H1N1 gives its transmissibility to H5N1. Either way, a genetically shifted subspecies emerges, and the entire world faces something similar to what Europe faced in 1346 when the first Y. pestis-infected rat jumped ship in Crimea.
At that point, the story moves quickly as the deadly new agent races around the planet, thumbing its nose at all vain attempts to stop or contain it. Governments and individuals will do desperate things, some rational and others not so, like deploying the military to try to close borders or using firearms to keep possibly infected strangers at bay. Hospitals will be overwhelmed at first and later forced to lock their doors. To avoid interpersonal contact, people will hole up in their homes, causing government offices, schools, and businesses to close. Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic. Riot police in biohazard suits (if there are even enough to go around) will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine. This won't just be the case in failing states like Somalia and Yemen, but also in successful ones like France and the United States.
But it will all be useless, and the fallout won't be pretty. Normal travel and commerce will slow to a crawl or, in some areas, stop altogether. Some island countries will fare better than continents, but it will be temporary at best. Food distribution will be interrupted, and something akin to famine will ensue in certain parts of the world. Services of all sorts will fall off, including police protection, and marauding gangs and black-marketeers will materialize in a kind of hopeless, Darfurian Wild West. This will bring out the worst in humanity. Neighbor will turn against neighbor, fighting over newly scarce resources or simply out of fear and resentment. Old prejudices will rise to the surface, as minority groups -- be they Jews, black Africans, Shiites, Hispanics, gays, or others -- are blamed for bringing the plague into healthy communities. Long-simmering tensions between old rivals -- Pakistanis and Indians, for example, or Iraqis and Iranians -- will break out into new wars. Fanaticism, especially apocalyptic strains of the major religions, will reign. Plague will be a worldwide infectious holocaust.
The astute reader, however, will by now recognize that there is a slight problem with this story: the ending. A good cautionary novel, like any novel, only needs three things: a good beginning to pull in the reader, a good middle to keep the reader interested, and finally a good ending. And for a cautionary novel, a good ending is one that, after the readers have been scared to death by the beginning and middle, reassures them that they are not about to be victimized by a similar calamity -- provided, of course, that certain appropriate steps are taken.
Unfortunately, in the very likely coming plague of influenza A, I don't see the possibility of any particularly reassuring ending. There is certainly not going to be a Hollywood-style conclusion like the sudden appearance of a handsome couple that had been secretly toiling away in an isolated laboratory studying viruses and developing a cure while the rest of the world partied on in a false sense of security. There will be no Dustin Hoffman swooping in to save the day, as he did in the movie adaptation of my novel Outbreak. What I actually see is this modern Black Death, which could very well be 2009 H5N1/H1N1, obliviously raging around the world, acting as the Grim Reaper for countless folks, and then petering out on its own accord like the real Black Death and the real Spanish flu.
Perhaps the answer is to make Plague as long as War and Peace so that the reader will welcome any ending. But, kidding aside, I'd hope that Plague would be a super-best-seller, outselling even Dan Brown, James Patterson, and novels about vampires, for it might only be this novel's success and, worse, its plausibility that would terrify and hence shock people out of their complacency about influenza A, a complacency made worse by false alarms such as the 1976 Fort Dix swine flu episode and the 2006 avian flu scare. Both fizzled without becoming pandemics, but journalists did not follow up their "sky is falling" blitz with explanations of why the pandemics failed to materialize yet had been very real threats.
Such complacency can be dangerous, and that is the case with influenza A. What the world needs -- and considering the current swine H1N1 pandemic, it needed it yesterday -- is a real plan for rapid expansion of its ability to produce vaccines against influenza A, so that output at any given time can be quickly ramped up to meet the sudden need associated with the appearance of a truly dangerous, new subspecies like our might-be novelistic killer H5N1/H1N1. Governments in both the developed and developing world must take on the job, as this is a worldwide threat. Although vaccines are a 20th-century technology, they remain the most powerful weapons we have for the very real 21st-century threat of influenza A. That is not to say that basic viral research should not also be encouraged and strongly subsidized. The more we know about these mysterious entities the better, as there surely will be far more efficacious small-molecule antivirals in the future as well as antiviral biologics, which might even have more promise in the long run.
Now that I have written this article and gotten myself terrified all over again, I'd better do two things. One is to head up to my ski cottage and make sure all the supplies are in order as they might be needed soon, and second, I'd better get working on Plague. Time is short. Like everyone else in the world, my family and I are going to be in dire need of a rapidly produced, effective vaccine when influenza A gets its ducks in a row, so to speak, and combines transmissibility with virulence.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/15/plague_a_new_thriller_of_the_coming_pandemic
Plague: A New Thriller of the Coming Pandemic
The best-selling author of Outbreak has an exclusive tale for FP about a catastrophe of global proportions. And by the way, it's not fiction.
BY ROBIN COOK | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2009
Sometimes fiction can do more to change public opinion than nonfiction. It took Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel, The Jungle, to awaken the public to the dangers of sausage and the meat-packing industry in general. Another example, if I can be so presumptuous, is my 1977 novel Coma, which opened readers' eyes to the dubious side of the medical profession after years of misleadingly warm and fuzzy treatment of doctors and hospitals in novels, movies, and TV series. Today, there is a crying need for a new such socially conscious novel to shake up the complacent public about the high risk of an imminent, serious pandemic. And I don't mean the much-publicized swine flu. While the world media has obsessed, and rightfully so, about this fast-spreading illness, I'm worried about the next crisis, something much deadlier and much more catastrophic, indeed the kind of crisis most people wrongly believe could not happen in this day and age. If I were the author, this urgently needed novel would have to be called Plague.
Everyone has heard of plague and knows it means a sudden outbreak of a virulent disease. But it also has a very common, very specific association in the public mind: It's synonymous with the Black Death, the scourge caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis that swept through Europe (as well as much of the rest of the world) from 1348 to 1350. Viewing this monumental and even Malthusian event from the vantage point of nearly seven centuries later, one cringes at having to contemplate the horror, the excruciating pain, and the terror its victims had to suffer. Knowing the pain involved with a tiny boil, it is almost impossible to imagine what it was like being deathly ill with most of one's lymph nodes swelling to the point of becoming visible, blackened lumps with their interiors necrotizing and liquefying -- and all of that happening without analgesics and certainly without antibiotics. If David Letterman presented a top-10 list of the worst possible ways to leave this world, dying of the plague in the 14th century would have to be at the top.
And the horror of the Black Death went far beyond individual physical pain. Given the speed with which the illness spread through cities, it must have caused ultimate anxiety and panic as the wildfire disease left rotting, infective corpses, oozing putrefaction, piled in the streets. Urban society was unable to cope and, in many places, essentially collapsed due to the number of victims (some cities lost 90 percent of their residents). Adding to the chaos, war between two of the era's more significant powers -- England and France -- raged fitfully on and off after 1337. Commerce stagnated, especially in regard to food, causing famine. And perhaps cruelest of all, paroxysms of gruesome mass murders erupted as minorities were scapegoated. All in all, the Black Death had to have been hell on Earth, especially because no one -- not the doctors, not the priests, and not the scientists of the age -- had even the slightest idea of what was causing the calamity, how it was spread, or how it could be treated.
With such associations, a medical thriller titled Plague would certainly get people's attention, especially because it wouldn't be a historical novel that could be dismissed as "that was then; this is now." Instead, it would be a novel of a horrendous contemporary event: a new Black Death. Of course, this plague won't be a revisit of Y. pestis; we won't see black buboes and excruciatingly painful suffering. But death is death, and in the plague I speak of there will be a lot of it, possibly equal in scale to the Black Death, but unfolding even faster. If that is the case, there will be a degree of worldwide societal chaos that taxes the imagination. And this is no far-fetched fiction. Despite all we know about biological science and despite all the wizardly powers of modern medicine, with its vast pharmacopeia and its array of sophisticated devices, this new plague might well happen. I say this not just as an author of medical thrillers, but as a medical doctor with four decades of experience in surgery, infectious disease, and emergency medicine.
Before I reveal the infectious agent of this putative coming plague, I would like to refer the reader to my 17th book, Contagion, published in 1995. A cautionary tale about the hazards of bioterrorism, the story involves a microbiology technician who is bent on starting an epidemic but who has to learn on the job, so to speak, about the critical importance of both virulence and transmissibility. He starts with Y. pestis, but his intended plague quickly fizzles with only a few victims because the necessary perpetrators of the scourge, rats and their disease-transmitting fleas, are not available. Undeterred, he finally comes to recognize that for a really scary epidemic to occur, it needs three things: the availability of a self-sustaining reservoir (usually an animal as an asymptomatic carrier), easy human-to-human transmissibility, and impressive virulence. By the end of the book he finds his agent: the influenza A subspecies H1N1 that caused the 1918-1919 Spanish flu, which he obtains from digging up in Alaska the frozen corpse of a victim of that dreadful pandemic.
Influenza A is perfect not only for my villain in Contagion but also as the infectious agent in Plague. It has a normal reservoir in the guts of birds, spreads via aerosols (the easiest and most efficient method of disease transmission), and can be amazingly virulent. By some estimates, as many people died from the Spanish flu as from the Black Death. Contemporary anecdotes of the Spanish flu describe asymptomatic people boarding the subway in Brooklyn and being dead by Manhattan. Such a death is hardly the torture of bubonic plague, but singularly impressive for its rapidity nonetheless. With today's medical knowledge, such an event would be explained as a "cytokine storm," in which the stricken individual's immune system reacts against the invading virus with such ferocity and such inflammation in the victim's lungs that death results from drowning in one's own secretions.
I personally developed great respect for influenza as a 17-year-old when I contracted the avian H2N2 subspecies during the 1957 Asian flu pandemic -- along with most everyone else at my high school. I suffered through an unpleasant illness that forever gave me a keen appreciation of the benign-sounding term "general malaise." My respect for influenza was further reinforced by the 1968 Hong Kong flu pandemic, caused by H3N2. At the time, I was a surgical resident, confronting seriously ill patients in the intensive care unit struggling to breathe. So when a new and highly virulent subspecies of influenza, designated avian H5N1 flu, appeared in Southeast Asia in 2006 and quickly began to spread globally, I felt compelled to do something for myself and my family. Despite this new subspecies's low human-to-human transmissibility, I stocked my isolated ski cottage with Tamiflu, antibiotics, ibuprofen, and N95 face masks. In the back of my mind was Isaac Newton's flight to the countryside from plague-infested London in 1665.
All this begs the question: Could an influenza pandemic as bad as the one that struck in 1918 occur again? In our current state of world complacency and unpreparedness, I'd have to say absolutely yes, which is why my supplies are still in my ski cottage.
In fact, such an outbreak could be worse than the Spanish flu, even with the antiviral drugs we now have, the antibiotics that are today available for secondary infections, and the modern equipment in our intensive care units. For though medical science has learned a lot about viruses in general and influenza in particular since the World War I era, there is a long way to go. What we do know is that viruses are highly evolutionarily developed, quintessential parasites. To reproduce, they end up stealthily slipping inside and then hijacking the biomolecular machinery of other life forms, such as bacteria or mammalian cells, as they don't have this machinery themselves. The problem, of course, is that the invaded entity is often killed in the process; for us humans, an attack from the influenza virus means that the cells lining our respiratory tract begin to die, as it is these cells that are selectively chosen. The flu is primarily a respiratory disease.
The fact that viruses such as influenza do their dirty work within cells is what makes treating them so much more difficult than treating bacterial diseases such as bubonic plague, which, in contrast, does most of its dirty work outside cells. In some respects the situation is akin to the difficulties of dealing with cancer in that killing infected cells can put normal cells in jeopardy, too. Modern medicine does have some antivirals in its armamentarium, but the highly evolved, wily viruses are quick to mount resistance. What it comes down to is that the best way to deal with influenza is to prevent it.
All of which brings us back to Plague, the book. And when it comes to the story line, current events are certainly lending a hand. With the Northern Hemisphere flu season beginning, today's pandemic of H1N1 swine flu has justifiably received a lot of coverage because the organism has spread around the globe in a matter of months. But no matter how impressive its human-to-human transmissibility, this strain simply cannot be the influenza A subspecies for our novel. It's just not hold-on-to-your-hat virulent enough. Although this disease has killed a few people, even a few seemingly healthy people, for the most part it causes a relatively mild illness, perhaps even milder than the normal yearly flu, which also kills its share of people.
But that is not the case with another flu subspecies that originally appeared in 2006 and which is now slowly spreading from Southeast Asia, particularly in its normal reservoir of aquatic birds. This is the subspecies designated HPAI A(H5N1), standing for "highly pathogenic avian influenza A of subtype H5N1," or avian flu for short. Luckily it has very low transmissibility -- which it makes up for with knock-your-socks-off lethality. A truly scary percentage, about 60 percent, of those humans unlucky enough to have contracted the illness over the last three years have quickly died.
You don't have to be a rocket scientist to see the problem. Is there a chance these two subspecies could hook up and help each other? The answer is definitely yes, and that is the worry because one of influenza A's most disturbing characteristics is its ability to indulge in recombination of its 11 genes, which are arranged on its eight pieces of RNA. This produces what is called genetic shift -- in other words, transfer of entire genes or gene combinations, and hence traits. It will become key to our plot.
The actual Plague story might start with a farmer in China's Guangdong province -- call him Wang Lung -- who takes some produce to Hong Kong in early September 2009, where we know H1N1 is already having a field day (the city reported 514 new cases of the disease in one 24-hour period this September). Let's have Wang indulge in some social activity after he is finished with his business. During this activity he inhales aerosolized H1N1 and contracts the illness. Back home, still mostly asymptomatic yet massively contagious, he hand-feeds his pet duck, which is already harboring H5N1. The duck adds the H1N1 to its gut, and then the bird is returned to its cage, which is suspended over Wang's bevy of pigs. Such an arrangement is frequent in Asia not only to save space but also to wrest as much caloric value out of the duck's feed as possible by making the bird's poop mix with the pigs' slop.
For the influenza A virus, things couldn't be better; pigs are its favorite brewing cauldrons. The avian H5N1 and the human-adapted swine H1N1 can enter pig cells simultaneously by the availability of separate pig epithelial cell receptors. And of course, this is what happens in Plague, giving the two viruses the opportunity to recombine with each other. During the millions or billions of replications of the virus inside the pigs, either the H5N1 gives its virulence to H1N1, or H1N1 gives its transmissibility to H5N1. Either way, a genetically shifted subspecies emerges, and the entire world faces something similar to what Europe faced in 1346 when the first Y. pestis-infected rat jumped ship in Crimea.
At that point, the story moves quickly as the deadly new agent races around the planet, thumbing its nose at all vain attempts to stop or contain it. Governments and individuals will do desperate things, some rational and others not so, like deploying the military to try to close borders or using firearms to keep possibly infected strangers at bay. Hospitals will be overwhelmed at first and later forced to lock their doors. To avoid interpersonal contact, people will hole up in their homes, causing government offices, schools, and businesses to close. Many public officials will be forced to quarantine themselves from a diseased population and retreat to undisclosed locations, which will only fuel the public panic. Riot police in biohazard suits (if there are even enough to go around) will increasingly be called upon to beat back waves of sick, scared, and helpless civilians, desperate for food, water, and medicine. This won't just be the case in failing states like Somalia and Yemen, but also in successful ones like France and the United States.
But it will all be useless, and the fallout won't be pretty. Normal travel and commerce will slow to a crawl or, in some areas, stop altogether. Some island countries will fare better than continents, but it will be temporary at best. Food distribution will be interrupted, and something akin to famine will ensue in certain parts of the world. Services of all sorts will fall off, including police protection, and marauding gangs and black-marketeers will materialize in a kind of hopeless, Darfurian Wild West. This will bring out the worst in humanity. Neighbor will turn against neighbor, fighting over newly scarce resources or simply out of fear and resentment. Old prejudices will rise to the surface, as minority groups -- be they Jews, black Africans, Shiites, Hispanics, gays, or others -- are blamed for bringing the plague into healthy communities. Long-simmering tensions between old rivals -- Pakistanis and Indians, for example, or Iraqis and Iranians -- will break out into new wars. Fanaticism, especially apocalyptic strains of the major religions, will reign. Plague will be a worldwide infectious holocaust.
The astute reader, however, will by now recognize that there is a slight problem with this story: the ending. A good cautionary novel, like any novel, only needs three things: a good beginning to pull in the reader, a good middle to keep the reader interested, and finally a good ending. And for a cautionary novel, a good ending is one that, after the readers have been scared to death by the beginning and middle, reassures them that they are not about to be victimized by a similar calamity -- provided, of course, that certain appropriate steps are taken.
Unfortunately, in the very likely coming plague of influenza A, I don't see the possibility of any particularly reassuring ending. There is certainly not going to be a Hollywood-style conclusion like the sudden appearance of a handsome couple that had been secretly toiling away in an isolated laboratory studying viruses and developing a cure while the rest of the world partied on in a false sense of security. There will be no Dustin Hoffman swooping in to save the day, as he did in the movie adaptation of my novel Outbreak. What I actually see is this modern Black Death, which could very well be 2009 H5N1/H1N1, obliviously raging around the world, acting as the Grim Reaper for countless folks, and then petering out on its own accord like the real Black Death and the real Spanish flu.
Perhaps the answer is to make Plague as long as War and Peace so that the reader will welcome any ending. But, kidding aside, I'd hope that Plague would be a super-best-seller, outselling even Dan Brown, James Patterson, and novels about vampires, for it might only be this novel's success and, worse, its plausibility that would terrify and hence shock people out of their complacency about influenza A, a complacency made worse by false alarms such as the 1976 Fort Dix swine flu episode and the 2006 avian flu scare. Both fizzled without becoming pandemics, but journalists did not follow up their "sky is falling" blitz with explanations of why the pandemics failed to materialize yet had been very real threats.
Such complacency can be dangerous, and that is the case with influenza A. What the world needs -- and considering the current swine H1N1 pandemic, it needed it yesterday -- is a real plan for rapid expansion of its ability to produce vaccines against influenza A, so that output at any given time can be quickly ramped up to meet the sudden need associated with the appearance of a truly dangerous, new subspecies like our might-be novelistic killer H5N1/H1N1. Governments in both the developed and developing world must take on the job, as this is a worldwide threat. Although vaccines are a 20th-century technology, they remain the most powerful weapons we have for the very real 21st-century threat of influenza A. That is not to say that basic viral research should not also be encouraged and strongly subsidized. The more we know about these mysterious entities the better, as there surely will be far more efficacious small-molecule antivirals in the future as well as antiviral biologics, which might even have more promise in the long run.
Now that I have written this article and gotten myself terrified all over again, I'd better do two things. One is to head up to my ski cottage and make sure all the supplies are in order as they might be needed soon, and second, I'd better get working on Plague. Time is short. Like everyone else in the world, my family and I are going to be in dire need of a rapidly produced, effective vaccine when influenza A gets its ducks in a row, so to speak, and combines transmissibility with virulence.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/15/plague_a_new_thriller_of_the_coming_pandemic
Hard Lessons From Oil Industry May Help Address Burgeoning Groundwater Crisis
Declining groundwater in Mississippi has prompted a $1 billion lawsuit against Memphis.
by Staff Writers
Corvallis OR (SPX) Nov 03, 2009
Although declining streamflows and half-full reservoirs have gotten most of the attention in water conflicts around the United States, some of the worst battles of the next century may be over groundwater, experts say - a critical resource often taken for granted until it begins to run out.
Aquifers are being depleted much faster than they are being replenished in many places, wells are drying up, massive lawsuits are already erupting and the problems have barely begun. Aquifers that took thousands of years to fill are being drained in decades, placing both agricultural and urban uses in peril. Groundwater that supplies drinking water for half the world's population is now in jeopardy.
A new analysis by researchers at Oregon State University outlines the scope of this problem, but also points out that some tools may be available to help address it, in part by borrowing heavily from lessons learned the hard way by the oil industry.
"It's been said that groundwater is the oil of this century," said Todd Jarvis, associate director of the Institute for Water and Watersheds at OSU.
"Part of the issue is it's running out, meaning we're now facing 'peak water' just the way the U.S. encountered 'peak oil' production in the 1970s. But there are also some techniques developed by the oil industry to help manage this crisis, and we could learn a lot from them."
Jarvis just presented an outline of some of these concepts, called "unitization," at a professional conference in Kyoto, Japan, and will also explore them in upcoming conference in Stevenson, Wash., and Xi'an, China.
Other aspects of the issue have been analyzed in a new documentary film on the special problems facing the Umatilla Basin of eastern Oregon, a classic case of declining groundwater problems.
The problems are anything but simple, Jarvis said, and are just now starting to get the attention needed.
"In the northern half of Oregon from Pendleton to the Willamette Valley, an aquifer that took 20,000 years to fill is going down fast," Jarvis said.
"Some places near Hermiston have seen water levels drop as much as 500 feet in the past 50-60 years, one of the largest and fastest declines in the world.
"I know of a well in Utah that lost its original capacity after a couple years," he said.
"In Idaho people drawing groundwater are being ordered to work with other holders of stream water rights as the streams begin to dwindle. Mississippi has filed a $1-billion lawsuit against the City of Memphis because of declining groundwater. You're seeing land subsiding from Houston to the Imperial Valley of California. This issue is real and getting worse."
In the process, Jarvis said, underground aquifers can be irrevocably damaged - not unlike what happened to oil reservoirs when that industry pumped them too rapidly. Tiny fractures in rock that can store water sometimes collapse when it's rapidly withdrawn, and then even if the aquifer had water to recharge it, there's no place for it to go.
"The unitization concept the oil industry developed is built around people unifying their rights and their goals, and working cooperatively to make a resource last as long as possible and not damaging it," Jarvis said. "That's similar to what we could do with groundwater, although it takes foresight and cooperation."
Water laws, Jarvis said, are often part of the problem instead of the solution. A "rule of capture" that dates to Roman times often gives people the right to pump and use anything beneath their land, whether it's oil or water.
That's somewhat addressed by the "first in time, first in right" concept that forms the basis of most water law in the West, but proving that someone's well many miles away interferes with your aquifer or stream flow is often difficult or impossible. And there are 14 million wells just in the United States, tapping aquifers that routinely cross state and even national boundaries.
Regardless of what else takes place, Jarvis said, groundwater users must embrace one concept the oil industry learned years ago - the "race to the pump" serves no one's best interest, whether the concern is depleted resources, rising costs of pumping or damaged aquifers.
One possible way out of the conundrum, experts say, is maximizing the economic value of the water and using it for its highest value purpose. But even that will take new perspectives and levels of cooperation that have not often been evident in these disputes. Government mandates may be necessary if some of the "unitization" concepts are to be implemented. Existing boundaries may need to be blurred, and ways to share the value of the remaining water identified.
"Like we did with peak oil, everyone knows were running out, and yet we're just now getting more commitment to alternative energy sources," Jarvis said. "Soon we'll be facing peak water, the only thing to really argue over is the date when that happens. So we will need new solutions, one way or the other."
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Hard_Lessons_From_Oil_Industry_May_Help_Address_Burgeoning_Groundwater_Crisis_999.html
Hard Lessons From Oil Industry May Help Address Burgeoning Groundwater Crisis
Declining groundwater in Mississippi has prompted a $1 billion lawsuit against Memphis.
by Staff Writers
Corvallis OR (SPX) Nov 03, 2009
Although declining streamflows and half-full reservoirs have gotten most of the attention in water conflicts around the United States, some of the worst battles of the next century may be over groundwater, experts say - a critical resource often taken for granted until it begins to run out.
Aquifers are being depleted much faster than they are being replenished in many places, wells are drying up, massive lawsuits are already erupting and the problems have barely begun. Aquifers that took thousands of years to fill are being drained in decades, placing both agricultural and urban uses in peril. Groundwater that supplies drinking water for half the world's population is now in jeopardy.
A new analysis by researchers at Oregon State University outlines the scope of this problem, but also points out that some tools may be available to help address it, in part by borrowing heavily from lessons learned the hard way by the oil industry.
"It's been said that groundwater is the oil of this century," said Todd Jarvis, associate director of the Institute for Water and Watersheds at OSU.
"Part of the issue is it's running out, meaning we're now facing 'peak water' just the way the U.S. encountered 'peak oil' production in the 1970s. But there are also some techniques developed by the oil industry to help manage this crisis, and we could learn a lot from them."
Jarvis just presented an outline of some of these concepts, called "unitization," at a professional conference in Kyoto, Japan, and will also explore them in upcoming conference in Stevenson, Wash., and Xi'an, China.
Other aspects of the issue have been analyzed in a new documentary film on the special problems facing the Umatilla Basin of eastern Oregon, a classic case of declining groundwater problems.
The problems are anything but simple, Jarvis said, and are just now starting to get the attention needed.
"In the northern half of Oregon from Pendleton to the Willamette Valley, an aquifer that took 20,000 years to fill is going down fast," Jarvis said.
"Some places near Hermiston have seen water levels drop as much as 500 feet in the past 50-60 years, one of the largest and fastest declines in the world.
"I know of a well in Utah that lost its original capacity after a couple years," he said.
"In Idaho people drawing groundwater are being ordered to work with other holders of stream water rights as the streams begin to dwindle. Mississippi has filed a $1-billion lawsuit against the City of Memphis because of declining groundwater. You're seeing land subsiding from Houston to the Imperial Valley of California. This issue is real and getting worse."
In the process, Jarvis said, underground aquifers can be irrevocably damaged - not unlike what happened to oil reservoirs when that industry pumped them too rapidly. Tiny fractures in rock that can store water sometimes collapse when it's rapidly withdrawn, and then even if the aquifer had water to recharge it, there's no place for it to go.
"The unitization concept the oil industry developed is built around people unifying their rights and their goals, and working cooperatively to make a resource last as long as possible and not damaging it," Jarvis said. "That's similar to what we could do with groundwater, although it takes foresight and cooperation."
Water laws, Jarvis said, are often part of the problem instead of the solution. A "rule of capture" that dates to Roman times often gives people the right to pump and use anything beneath their land, whether it's oil or water.
That's somewhat addressed by the "first in time, first in right" concept that forms the basis of most water law in the West, but proving that someone's well many miles away interferes with your aquifer or stream flow is often difficult or impossible. And there are 14 million wells just in the United States, tapping aquifers that routinely cross state and even national boundaries.
Regardless of what else takes place, Jarvis said, groundwater users must embrace one concept the oil industry learned years ago - the "race to the pump" serves no one's best interest, whether the concern is depleted resources, rising costs of pumping or damaged aquifers.
One possible way out of the conundrum, experts say, is maximizing the economic value of the water and using it for its highest value purpose. But even that will take new perspectives and levels of cooperation that have not often been evident in these disputes. Government mandates may be necessary if some of the "unitization" concepts are to be implemented. Existing boundaries may need to be blurred, and ways to share the value of the remaining water identified.
"Like we did with peak oil, everyone knows were running out, and yet we're just now getting more commitment to alternative energy sources," Jarvis said. "Soon we'll be facing peak water, the only thing to really argue over is the date when that happens. So we will need new solutions, one way or the other."
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Hard_Lessons_From_Oil_Industry_May_Help_Address_Burgeoning_Groundwater_Crisis_999.html
Catholic Last Rites
A bus on a busy street struck a Catholic man.
He was lying near death on the sidewalk as a crowd gathered.
"A priest. Somebody get me a priest!" the man gasped.
Long seconds dragged on but no one stepped out of the crowd.
A policeman checked the crowd and finally yelled, "A PRIEST, PLEASE! Isn't there a priest in this crowd to give this man his last rites?"
Finally, out of the crowd stepped a little old Jewish man in his 80s.
"Mr. Policeman," said the man, "I'm not a priest. I'm not even a Christian. But for 50 years now, I'm living behind the Catholic Church on Second Avenue , and every night I'm overhearing their services. I can recall a lot of it, and maybe I can be of some comfort to this poor man."
The policeman agreed, and cleared the crowd so the man could get through to where the injured man lay.
The old Jewish man knelt down, leaned over the man and said in a solemn voice:
B-4 .... I-19 ... N-38 ... G-54 ... O-72
Spanish Flu : Born Again Bioweapon?
{This is sort-of OT, but then again if everyone is sick, all systems will stop, and then....}
October 2, 2009
George Ure
The hardest daily decisions in most newsrooms is deciding which story to 'lead' with. In television, that would usually be the story with their the catchiest images to would hold people over through breaks while in print it's a combination of exclusivity, insight, quality of writing, and the bent of the publication (news, glitz, business, sports, etc.).
Since the focus here in on long wave economics - and how they come creeping through to form a control layer over much of human behavior - you'd think the decision to lead with something like the Sunday Financial Times article by ace economist/realist Nouriel Roubini where he explains the "Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust" would be a simple call to make; that's definitely 'above the fold, page one material.
But, around here, decision-making is never so cut and dried. Life has become incredibly complicated since mid 2001 when I started writing about a 'predictive linguistics project run by Cliff High at www.halfpasthuman.com - although at the time, there was not HPH and Cliff was much more reclusive. Here lately, the linguistics have - since last spring - been pointing to an October 25/26 turn date which would lead to a period of extremely high building tensions from that 'turn date' until two or three weeks later, by which time we should all be able to look back over our shoulders and say "Damn! That's what a turn date's all about..."
The hints are sketchy - but that's the nature of the technology. The event is supposed to be something on the order of 85% economic and 15% other and it arises from the GlobalPop portion of the modelspace, which means whatever it is, it should be more or less planet-wide and not just some series of events that puts the fear of God into some fraudsters and greedsters down on Wall Street (or in Washington, where they also seem drawn in sizeable numbers).
today, my bet - subject to change at whim - is that the 'swine' flu story will be "IT" in retrospect. Not only did president Obama issue the national state of emergency right on schedule, but there has been steadily building concern around the topic such the by the end of the week, the shutting down of most of Europe comes into view as a 'nonzero' possibility and with that would come the fulfillment of economic impacts.
Moreover, the whole 'swine flu' story is developing almost along two tracks in the public mind: One track follows the 'offishul' (sic) version which is that the 'swine' flu just arose ad hoc in a swine population in Mexico and spread to the USA and elsewhere. The second track notes that the evidence is thin on the swine part and that the dispersal and now coming of the killer version/bleeding lungs part of 'swine flu' to eastern Europe seems mighty awful suspiciously like a low-grade bio-war between East and West. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - this story will be incubating for another week or possibly longer.
The BIG story this morning, economic in nature, is that "Swine Flu Grips Ukraine". It's in the Wall Street Journal, after all, so it must have something to do with economics, right?
And indeed it does: Ukraine is something of a bread basket area to Russia populated by smart, hard-working people. Since independence in late summer 1991, Ukraine has been evolving into the 29th largest economy in the world on a mix of agriculture, aerospace, and manufacturing while being a critical chunk of real estate to the Russians since goods like natural gas from Russia to Europe through its borders.
As of this weekend, 53 people have died of swine flu, some by what's described as bleeding lungs which hark back to the 1918 Spanish Flu and cytokine storming where the body's defensive mechanisms got crazy and attack the host body itself.
Responding to the situation, the government is closing down schools, some businesses, banning large gatherings, and is trying to buy another 700,000 doses of Tamiflu from Roche. A stock to watch?
The thing we probably should watch over the next few days is how the neighboring countries fare. Already Hungary's health minister says the "Ukraine flu epidemic to create emergency in Hungary" as it may also do in Romanian, Moldova, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and anyone pulling into port from he Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.
Now we go into deep background mode on this with an email I received from a particularly well informed reader who expects this will be one for the history books that should be watched closely:
"This story may be the most important of our lifetimes. I'm a retired Ph.D. biochemist FYI. I conjecture that much of the coming troubles the web bot project speaks of may well arise from this new flu variant. I note that the first cases appeared a few days ago, just the length of the incubation period from October 25th.
OK, a Mossad microbiologist warned two months ago that a new deadly flu bug was going to be released into Ukraine in two months. He got the place right, the bug right, and the time right.
The sequence of all 8 pieces of RNA in the virus that caused the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 is public knowledge. A long dead Inuit woman buried in the permafrost was dug up and the virus taken from her body a couple of years ago and the RNA pieces were sequenced. Quite simple to synthesize these 8 pieces with widely available commercial machines and reagents. Then transfect mammalian cells with the RNA genes to obtain the intact, fully functional, virus. Another quite well known technology. Then grow all you want in fertilized chicken eggs or a mammalian immortal cell line. More quite well known technologies.
What scares the sh*t out of me is that the bleeding in the lungs is exactly what killed a lot of folks in the 1918-19 pandemic. See the great book "The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history? ." People would literally fall dead walking across the street. The bleeding out of the lungs was most likely the result of a "cytokine storm" that so increased the vascular permeability in the air sacks that blood filled the lungs. The reason why the mortality in the 1918-1919 pandemic was concentrated in the 18-25 yo cohort was that they had the most active immune systems.
Now I've NO conjecture as to who may have let this loose or why. But I do know that the technology is widespread to replicate the 1918-1919 virus that killed 2-4 million Americans and about 50 million world wide. And folks only traveled by ship in 1918. And there is NO vaccine for this flu type.
Hopefully we will know in a couple of weeks the sequences of the 8 RNA pieces in the Ukraine virus. I'll bet the farm that it is a replicant of the "Spanish Flu." If so, the odds are totally infinitesimal that this was NOT a deliberate bioweapon release.
I note that long haul truckers will simply go home and park their rigs if this flu reaches the USA. And exactly what reason do we have to suppose that it will be confined to Ukraine? The average city has 3 days of food. Connect the dots... please...............
A credit is due here. the word "replicant" is from the great sci-fi movie "Blade Runner."
All of this is puts us on the scale of impact somewhere in the middle between inconvenient to bad on one end of the scale to horrific and Biblical at the far end. But the linguistics seem to be pointing to the most terrible of all yet to come with temporal hints around the time of the Whistler Olympics (late February to mid March) for another round of dispersal.
The nonzero probabilities keep adding up and at some point, even the most skeptical human has to reach the point of non-coincidence and conclude what's for now only a possibility: Namely that the factions of the PowersThatBe are at war with one-another and we - humans down here at the worker bee level - are the unwilling cannon fodder for the coming year or longer.
Spanish Flu : Born Again Bioweapon?
October 2, 2009
George Ure
The hardest daily decisions in most newsrooms is deciding which story to 'lead' with. In television, that would usually be the story with their the catchiest images to would hold people over through breaks while in print it's a combination of exclusivity, insight, quality of writing, and the bent of the publication (news, glitz, business, sports, etc.).
Since the focus here in on long wave economics - and how they come creeping through to form a control layer over much of human behavior - you'd think the decision to lead with something like the Sunday Financial Times article by ace economist/realist Nouriel Roubini where he explains the "Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust" would be a simple call to make; that's definitely 'above the fold, page one material.
But, around here, decision-making is never so cut and dried. Life has become incredibly complicated since mid 2001 when I started writing about a 'predictive linguistics project run by Cliff High at www.halfpasthuman.com - although at the time, there was not HPH and Cliff was much more reclusive. Here lately, the linguistics have - since last spring - been pointing to an October 25/26 turn date which would lead to a period of extremely high building tensions from that 'turn date' until two or three weeks later, by which time we should all be able to look back over our shoulders and say "Damn! That's what a turn date's all about..."
The hints are sketchy - but that's the nature of the technology. The event is supposed to be something on the order of 85% economic and 15% other and it arises from the GlobalPop portion of the modelspace, which means whatever it is, it should be more or less planet-wide and not just some series of events that puts the fear of God into some fraudsters and greedsters down on Wall Street (or in Washington, where they also seem drawn in sizeable numbers).
today, my bet - subject to change at whim - is that the 'swine' flu story will be "IT" in retrospect. Not only did president Obama issue the national state of emergency right on schedule, but there has been steadily building concern around the topic such the by the end of the week, the shutting down of most of Europe comes into view as a 'nonzero' possibility and with that would come the fulfillment of economic impacts.
Moreover, the whole 'swine flu' story is developing almost along two tracks in the public mind: One track follows the 'offishul' (sic) version which is that the 'swine' flu just arose ad hoc in a swine population in Mexico and spread to the USA and elsewhere. The second track notes that the evidence is thin on the swine part and that the dispersal and now coming of the killer version/bleeding lungs part of 'swine flu' to eastern Europe seems mighty awful suspiciously like a low-grade bio-war between East and West. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - this story will be incubating for another week or possibly longer.
The BIG story this morning, economic in nature, is that "Swine Flu Grips Ukraine". It's in the Wall Street Journal, after all, so it must have something to do with economics, right?
And indeed it does: Ukraine is something of a bread basket area to Russia populated by smart, hard-working people. Since independence in late summer 1991, Ukraine has been evolving into the 29th largest economy in the world on a mix of agriculture, aerospace, and manufacturing while being a critical chunk of real estate to the Russians since goods like natural gas from Russia to Europe through its borders.
As of this weekend, 53 people have died of swine flu, some by what's described as bleeding lungs which hark back to the 1918 Spanish Flu and cytokine storming where the body's defensive mechanisms got crazy and attack the host body itself.
Responding to the situation, the government is closing down schools, some businesses, banning large gatherings, and is trying to buy another 700,000 doses of Tamiflu from Roche. A stock to watch?
The thing we probably should watch over the next few days is how the neighboring countries fare. Already Hungary's health minister says the "Ukraine flu epidemic to create emergency in Hungary" as it may also do in Romanian, Moldova, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and anyone pulling into port from he Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.
Now we go into deep background mode on this with an email I received from a particularly well informed reader who expects this will be one for the history books that should be watched closely:
"This story may be the most important of our lifetimes. I'm a retired Ph.D. biochemist FYI. I conjecture that much of the coming troubles the web bot project speaks of may well arise from this new flu variant. I note that the first cases appeared a few days ago, just the length of the incubation period from October 25th.
OK, a Mossad microbiologist warned two months ago that a new deadly flu bug was going to be released into Ukraine in two months. He got the place right, the bug right, and the time right.
The sequence of all 8 pieces of RNA in the virus that caused the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 is public knowledge. A long dead Inuit woman buried in the permafrost was dug up and the virus taken from her body a couple of years ago and the RNA pieces were sequenced. Quite simple to synthesize these 8 pieces with widely available commercial machines and reagents. Then transfect mammalian cells with the RNA genes to obtain the intact, fully functional, virus. Another quite well known technology. Then grow all you want in fertilized chicken eggs or a mammalian immortal cell line. More quite well known technologies.
What scares the sh*t out of me is that the bleeding in the lungs is exactly what killed a lot of folks in the 1918-19 pandemic. See the great book "The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history? ." People would literally fall dead walking across the street. The bleeding out of the lungs was most likely the result of a "cytokine storm" that so increased the vascular permeability in the air sacks that blood filled the lungs. The reason why the mortality in the 1918-1919 pandemic was concentrated in the 18-25 yo cohort was that they had the most active immune systems.
Now I've NO conjecture as to who may have let this loose or why. But I do know that the technology is widespread to replicate the 1918-1919 virus that killed 2-4 million Americans and about 50 million world wide. And folks only traveled by ship in 1918. And there is NO vaccine for this flu type.
Hopefully we will know in a couple of weeks the sequences of the 8 RNA pieces in the Ukraine virus. I'll bet the farm that it is a replicant of the "Spanish Flu." If so, the odds are totally infinitesimal that this was NOT a deliberate bioweapon release.
I note that long haul truckers will simply go home and park their rigs if this flu reaches the USA. And exactly what reason do we have to suppose that it will be confined to Ukraine? The average city has 3 days of food. Connect the dots... please...............
A credit is due here. the word "replicant" is from the great sci-fi movie "Blade Runner."
All of this is puts us on the scale of impact somewhere in the middle between inconvenient to bad on one end of the scale to horrific and Biblical at the far end. But the linguistics seem to be pointing to the most terrible of all yet to come with temporal hints around the time of the Whistler Olympics (late February to mid March) for another round of dispersal.
The nonzero probabilities keep adding up and at some point, even the most skeptical human has to reach the point of non-coincidence and conclude what's for now only a possibility: Namely that the factions of the PowersThatBe are at war with one-another and we - humans down here at the worker bee level - are the unwilling cannon fodder for the coming year or longer.
Spanish Flu : Born Again Bioweapon?
October 2, 2009
George Ure
The hardest daily decisions in most newsrooms is deciding which story to 'lead' with. In television, that would usually be the story with their the catchiest images to would hold people over through breaks while in print it's a combination of exclusivity, insight, quality of writing, and the bent of the publication (news, glitz, business, sports, etc.).
Since the focus here in on long wave economics - and how they come creeping through to form a control layer over much of human behavior - you'd think the decision to lead with something like the Sunday Financial Times article by ace economist/realist Nouriel Roubini where he explains the "Mother of all carry trades faces an inevitable bust" would be a simple call to make; that's definitely 'above the fold, page one material.
But, around here, decision-making is never so cut and dried. Life has become incredibly complicated since mid 2001 when I started writing about a 'predictive linguistics project run by Cliff High at www.halfpasthuman.com - although at the time, there was not HPH and Cliff was much more reclusive. Here lately, the linguistics have - since last spring - been pointing to an October 25/26 turn date which would lead to a period of extremely high building tensions from that 'turn date' until two or three weeks later, by which time we should all be able to look back over our shoulders and say "Damn! That's what a turn date's all about..."
The hints are sketchy - but that's the nature of the technology. The event is supposed to be something on the order of 85% economic and 15% other and it arises from the GlobalPop portion of the modelspace, which means whatever it is, it should be more or less planet-wide and not just some series of events that puts the fear of God into some fraudsters and greedsters down on Wall Street (or in Washington, where they also seem drawn in sizeable numbers).
today, my bet - subject to change at whim - is that the 'swine' flu story will be "IT" in retrospect. Not only did president Obama issue the national state of emergency right on schedule, but there has been steadily building concern around the topic such the by the end of the week, the shutting down of most of Europe comes into view as a 'nonzero' possibility and with that would come the fulfillment of economic impacts.
Moreover, the whole 'swine flu' story is developing almost along two tracks in the public mind: One track follows the 'offishul' (sic) version which is that the 'swine' flu just arose ad hoc in a swine population in Mexico and spread to the USA and elsewhere. The second track notes that the evidence is thin on the swine part and that the dispersal and now coming of the killer version/bleeding lungs part of 'swine flu' to eastern Europe seems mighty awful suspiciously like a low-grade bio-war between East and West. But let's not get ahead of ourselves - this story will be incubating for another week or possibly longer.
The BIG story this morning, economic in nature, is that "Swine Flu Grips Ukraine". It's in the Wall Street Journal, after all, so it must have something to do with economics, right?
And indeed it does: Ukraine is something of a bread basket area to Russia populated by smart, hard-working people. Since independence in late summer 1991, Ukraine has been evolving into the 29th largest economy in the world on a mix of agriculture, aerospace, and manufacturing while being a critical chunk of real estate to the Russians since goods like natural gas from Russia to Europe through its borders.
As of this weekend, 53 people have died of swine flu, some by what's described as bleeding lungs which hark back to the 1918 Spanish Flu and cytokine storming where the body's defensive mechanisms got crazy and attack the host body itself.
Responding to the situation, the government is closing down schools, some businesses, banning large gatherings, and is trying to buy another 700,000 doses of Tamiflu from Roche. A stock to watch?
The thing we probably should watch over the next few days is how the neighboring countries fare. Already Hungary's health minister says the "Ukraine flu epidemic to create emergency in Hungary" as it may also do in Romanian, Moldova, Slovakia, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and anyone pulling into port from he Black Sea or the Sea of Azov.
Now we go into deep background mode on this with an email I received from a particularly well informed reader who expects this will be one for the history books that should be watched closely:
"This story may be the most important of our lifetimes. I'm a retired Ph.D. biochemist FYI. I conjecture that much of the coming troubles the web bot project speaks of may well arise from this new flu variant. I note that the first cases appeared a few days ago, just the length of the incubation period from October 25th.
OK, a Mossad microbiologist warned two months ago that a new deadly flu bug was going to be released into Ukraine in two months. He got the place right, the bug right, and the time right.
The sequence of all 8 pieces of RNA in the virus that caused the "Spanish flu" pandemic of 1918-1919 is public knowledge. A long dead Inuit woman buried in the permafrost was dug up and the virus taken from her body a couple of years ago and the RNA pieces were sequenced. Quite simple to synthesize these 8 pieces with widely available commercial machines and reagents. Then transfect mammalian cells with the RNA genes to obtain the intact, fully functional, virus. Another quite well known technology. Then grow all you want in fertilized chicken eggs or a mammalian immortal cell line. More quite well known technologies.
What scares the sh*t out of me is that the bleeding in the lungs is exactly what killed a lot of folks in the 1918-19 pandemic. See the great book "The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history? ." People would literally fall dead walking across the street. The bleeding out of the lungs was most likely the result of a "cytokine storm" that so increased the vascular permeability in the air sacks that blood filled the lungs. The reason why the mortality in the 1918-1919 pandemic was concentrated in the 18-25 yo cohort was that they had the most active immune systems.
Now I've NO conjecture as to who may have let this loose or why. But I do know that the technology is widespread to replicate the 1918-1919 virus that killed 2-4 million Americans and about 50 million world wide. And folks only traveled by ship in 1918. And there is NO vaccine for this flu type.
Hopefully we will know in a couple of weeks the sequences of the 8 RNA pieces in the Ukraine virus. I'll bet the farm that it is a replicant of the "Spanish Flu." If so, the odds are totally infinitesimal that this was NOT a deliberate bioweapon release.
I note that long haul truckers will simply go home and park their rigs if this flu reaches the USA. And exactly what reason do we have to suppose that it will be confined to Ukraine? The average city has 3 days of food. Connect the dots... please...............
A credit is due here. the word "replicant" is from the great sci-fi movie "Blade Runner."
All of this is puts us on the scale of impact somewhere in the middle between inconvenient to bad on one end of the scale to horrific and Biblical at the far end. But the linguistics seem to be pointing to the most terrible of all yet to come with temporal hints around the time of the Whistler Olympics (late February to mid March) for another round of dispersal.
The nonzero probabilities keep adding up and at some point, even the most skeptical human has to reach the point of non-coincidence and conclude what's for now only a possibility: Namely that the factions of the PowersThatBe are at war with one-another and we - humans down here at the worker bee level - are the unwilling cannon fodder for the coming year or longer.
Losing our Food Freedom
October 31, 2009
by Sheila Velazquez
Dissident Voice
Food Security Now is circulating a petition to be presented to President Obama. I have signed and passed it on to growers and supporters of organic and sustainably grown food. If you want control of our food supply in the hands of corporate agricultural, stop here. If you want our food supply to become safer and more secure, read on and sign the petition.
Dear President Obama,
We urge you to withdraw the nomination of Islam Siddiqui as Chief Agriculture Negotiator and to reconsider your support of Roger Beachy as director of the new National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). Siddiqui is CropLife’s current vice president of science and regulatory affairs, and until last month, Beachy was the head of Monsanto’s de facto nonprofit research arm. As two textbook cases of the “revolving door” between industry and the agencies meant to keep watch, Siddiqui and Beachy’s industry ties demonstrate that both men are too beholden to corporate agriculture to serve the public interest.
Appointing Siddiqui to this critical post within the U.S. Trade Representative’s office sends a clear signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. plans to continue down the worn and failed path of chemical-intensive industrial agriculture by pushing pesticides, inappropriate biotechnologies and unfair trade arrangements on nations that do not want and can least afford them. Siddiqui’s professional record is revealing on several points:
* Siddiqui was a paid lobbyist for 3 years for Croplife America, which represents the chemical pesticide and ag biotechnology interests. Members include Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta.
* CropLife America’s regional partner had notoriously “shuddered” at Michelle Obama’s organic White House garden for failing to use chemical pesticides and launched a letter petition drive, urging the First Lady to consider using insecticides and herbicides in her garden.
* CropLife America has consistently lobbied the U.S government to weaken and thwart international treaties governing the use and export of toxic chemicals such as PCBs, DDT and dioxins.
* Siddiqui’s past service at the USDA included overseeing the initial development of national organic food standards that would have allowed GMOs and toxic sludge to be labeled “organic”— until over 230,000 consumers forced their revision.
As the global food crisis deepens and we head into the Doha round of trade talks at the WTO, the U.S. needs a lead negotiator who understands that the current configuration of trade agreements works neither for farmers nor for the world’s hungry. All eyes are on the U.S. to demonstrate international leadership in this arena by withdrawing support for an industrial model of agriculture that imperils both people and the planet, by undermining food security and worsening climate change.
In his capacity as director of NIFA, Roger Beachy will be in charge of the nation’s agricultural research agenda and purse strings for the next six years. Given Beachy’s previous career running the Danforth Plant Science Center, a nonprofit closely linked to and funded by Monsanto, we believe that billions more in government funding will be funneled into genetic engineering and chemical pesticide research. Meanwhile the real solutions to our growing agricultural problems, provided by sustainable and organic agriculture research, will suffer from a lack of federal funding and attention.
Despite 20 years of research and 13 years of commercialization, agricultural biotechnology—of the kind aggressively promoted and marketed by CropLife— has failed to deliver on any of its promises of higher yields for U.S. farmers, “enhanced nutrition” or drought-resistance for developing country farmers. What Monsanto’s research agenda has yielded is skyrocketing herbicide use, resistant “super-weeds”, rising debt for farmers, polluted waterways, threats to the health of farmworkers and rural communities, and unparalleled corporate consolidation in the agrochemical and seed industries. The top 10 agribusinesses control 89% of the agrochemicals market, 66% of the modern biotech market and 67% of the global seed market.
With farmers here and abroad struggling to respond to water scarcity and increasingly volatile growing conditions, we need a resilient and restorative model of agriculture that adapts to and mitigates these effects of climate change. In the most comprehensive analysis of global agriculture to date, the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD), states unequivocally that “business as usual is not an option.” We need a model of agriculture that regenerates soil health, sequesters carbon, feeds communities, and puts profits back in the hands of farmers and rural communities. Industrial agriculture—and Roger Beachy, Islam Siddiqui and CropLife in particular—favor none of these solutions.
While we appreciate your Administration’s recent gestures in support of local food systems, we fear these initiatives will not fulfill their potential unless the monopolistic power and political influence of the agricultural input industry is directly confronted. We therefore respectfully ask you to withdraw your appointments of Siddiqui and Beachy, and replace them with candidates who have a sustainable vision for U.S. agriculture and trade.
As parents, farmers, advocates, scientists and people who eat food, we remember your promise on the campaign trail: “We’ll tell ConAgra that it’s not the Department of Agribusiness. It’s the Department of Agriculture. We’re going to put the people’s interests ahead of the special interests.” We, the undersigned, are writing to hold you to that promise.
Has Baxter International released a biological weapon?
Posted By admin On November 1, 2009
David Rothscum Reports
November 1, 2009
(Lots of hypertext worth reading at the link)
http://theflucase.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1534%3Ahas-baxter-international-released-a-biological-weapon&catid=41%3Ahighlighted-news&Itemid=105?=en
Evidence appears to suggest that Baxter International is responsible for a new deadly outbreak of viral pneumonia in Ukraine.
In February of 2009 Bloomberg reported that Baxter “accidentally” send vaccine material containing both live Avian bird flu and seasonal influenza to multiple laboratories worldwide. A laboratory decided to test the vaccine on it’s ferrets, but the ferrets all unexpectedly died. It must be noted that Baxter has made a “mistake” like this before. Blood products produced by Baxter once containd HIV. Thousands of haemophiliacs died due to this, and many went on to infect their spouses.
Later in the year, a bizarre story emerged on the internet. The Huffington Post reported on a a man named Joseph Moshe who was arrested after a hours long standoff with the police because he had supposedly made threats against the White House. The man was able to withstand multiple rounds of tear gas.
However, the internet community was very skeptical of the true reasons behidn this man’s arrest. Comments on the Huffington Post website immediately began pouring in about an unreported side to this story, namely that Joseph Moshe was a Mossad Agent specialized in biological warfare who called into a radio show to warn people about a biological weapn that was being made by Baxter international that would be spread through vaccine and would cause a plague upon it’s release.
Although anyone can make a doomsday claim and we should never believe anyone (and it must be said that the Truth movement handled this well, the message was spread without being proclaimed as gospel) the amazing part about Moshe’s claim was the location where Moshe said the biological weapon was being produced.
Moshe claimed that Baxter’s laboratory in the Ukraine out of all places was creating this biological weapon. All of this came out in the beginning of August, which is more than 2 months before the situation that is currently unfolding. For Moshe to correctly name the country where a new epidemic would be unleashed, requires either inside information, or an incredible coincidence as anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics can confirm for himself.
Let us assume for a moment that every person on our planet has an equal chance of giving rise to a new lethal epidemic due to a virus that mutates as it spreads through his body. The Ukraine has 46 million inhabitants. The current estimated global population is about 6.7 billion. This means that if a new epidemic were to arise, the chance of this epidemic starting in the Ukraine would be 0.69%. However, it appears that this virus is a form of flu. This makes the odds of being right when guessing that a deadly flu is going to break out in the Ukraine even smaller. The reason for this is that back in early August the vast majority of influenza infections were found in different countries than the Ukraine. In fact, on 30 Oktober, Earthtimes reported that Ukraine had officially reported only two cases of swine flu, and no deaths, until last Friday. This deadly epidemic appears to have arrived out of nowhere in the Ukraine.
Moshe’s biomed profile appears to confirm his position as a microbiologist. Furthermore, this page with Baxter’s contact information for it’s Ukraine office confirms that Baxter has a presence in the Ukraine.
It must also be noted that massive numbers of microbiologists have been dying bizarre deaths. This case of what appears to be a brave man who sacrificed it all to bring us this message may explain why so many microbiologists have been murdered. The fact that this man managed to predict an outbreak of highly lethal influenza in a place where we would least expect it, 2 months before it a actually occured, lends credence to his claim that Baxter International is responsible for the outbreak and shows that top microbiologists can pose a problem to the people responsible for this ongoing disaster.
This is a developing story, expect to see possible updates on David Rothscum Reports as more information on what is happening in Ukraine becomes available.
Update 1: For the purpose of keeping information from disappearing, I am going to mirror most information I can find on here.
Comments on the Huffington post website on an article about Moshe’s arrest documenting his claim that the Influenza virus in a vaccine manufactured by Baxter in Ukraine replicates RNA from the 1918 flu and is meant as a bioweapon:
Update 2: The Ukrainian government wants to impose travel restrictions on people across the nation to stop the virus from spreading.
Update 3: According to the Huffington post comments I cited above, Dr. Moshe claimed that the virus used replicated RNA of the 1918 Spanish flu. Symptoms of the 1919 Flu include victims being drenched in blood:
American were familiar with the flu; it sent you to bed, made you miserable for 3 or 4 days with fever, muscle aches, and congestion, then left you shaky for about a week. It made millions sick, yet killed only the oldest, youngest, and most feeble.
The 1918 influenza was not the flu Americans were familiar with. It was a horror that turned victims bluish-black then drowned them with their own body fluids. the death toll was highest in the ages 15 to 40, those in the peak of health. The victims would be fine one minute and the next incapacitated, fever-racked, and delirious. Temperatures rose to 104-106 degrees, skin turned blue, purple, or deep brown from lack of oxygen. Massive pneumonia attacked the lungs, filling them with fluid; blood gushed from the nose. Death was quick, savage, and terrifying.
Compare this to reports that are coming out from Ukraine:
Five persons have died from the flue in Lviv, four men and one woman, says emergency hospital chief doctor Myron Borysevych.
Two of the dead patients were in the 22-35 age group, with 2 others over 60. He diagnosed the disease as viral pneumonia.
(…)
Viral tests can last from one to two weeks. They are complicated and not done in Lviv. The course of the disease was very quick. The symptoms included very high temperature and short-wind cough.
(…)
All the six dead young people had symptoms of severe hemmorhagic pneumonia. The disease starts slowly, with temperature rising to 37.2 – 37.3 degrees, slight cough and pain in joints. Nasal catarrh developed at the end of the second or third day. Autopsy revealed that the lungs were soaked with blood, the oblast chief specialist said.
Original article
You know what's really sick? When you listen to or read some of these reports about the next wave of flu being more deadly, a few of them almost sound gleeful about it.
Like, gee, oh goody, we'll have lots of news then. Massive loss of life, hospitals flooded with patients, etc.
Sick b*astards all of them.
So far, of all the responses I've gotten to the question of taking the vaccine or not. Not one person has answered in the affirmative.
Flu shot hype gets ridiculous: Can it cure bad breath, too?
.
Dear NaturalNews readers,
http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Podcasts.html
Flu vaccine propaganda has reached a level of absurdity that can only make you laugh. Now, they're claiming that when preganant women receive flu shots, their babies have higher birth weights and premature birth is prevented! Why not just claim the flu shot eliminates wrinkles and bad breath, too?
Read more in today's story about the absurdity of flu shot hype:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027365_flu_shot_clinical_trials_shots.html
Flu shot hype gets ridiculous: Can it cure bad breath, too?
.
Dear NaturalNews readers,
http://www.naturalnews.com/Index-Podcasts.html
Flu vaccine propaganda has reached a level of absurdity that can only make you laugh. Now, they're claiming that when preganant women receive flu shots, their babies have higher birth weights and premature birth is prevented! Why not just claim the flu shot eliminates wrinkles and bad breath, too?
Read more in today's story about the absurdity of flu shot hype:
http://www.naturalnews.com/027365_flu_shot_clinical_trials_shots.html
Wow, that's quite a few cases of flu. My friend's daughter's class only had 4 kids in it the other day. Are they sick or scared?
Ah, good plan. I'll add your No to the tally. No takers so far.
So far no one wants the shot. I'll keep the tally going though.
Thanks, I'll record that and let everyone know the final tally.
Also, so far I haven't had one person tell me that they are getting the shot.
I'd love to survey the readers of this board and others to see how many Will get the new vaccine and how many Won't.
I myself, Won't.
Sorry for the OT here, but I'm really very curious about this.
I'd love to survey the readers of this board and others to see how many Will get the new vaccine and how many Won't.
I myself, Won't.
Sorry for the OT here, but I'm really very curious about this.
I'd love to survey the readers of this board and others to see how many Will get the new vaccine and how many Won't.
I myself, Won't.
I'd love to survey the readers of this board and others to see how many Will get the new vaccine and how many Won't.
I myself, Won't.
After seeing all kinds of articles and stories like this, I have to really wonder about their accuracy. It truly smells like propaganda to me. Anyone?
Swine flu cheaters getting vaccinated
Some healthy adults who aren't in high-risk groups receiving shots
Hundreds of people wait for swine flu vaccination shot in the City of Industry, Calif., Oct 26, 2009.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33548575/ns/health-cold_and_flu/
CDC: Deadliest week for swine flu in children
Oct. 30: At least 19 children died from complications from the H1N1 virus over the last week. Dr. Nancy Snyderman talks with infectious diseases expert Dr. William Schaffner.
Swine flu videos
Swine flu still afflicting the young
Oct. 30: The CDC released worrisome numbers on swine flu and children, as the government continues to regret the shortage of vaccine. NBC’s Robert Bazell reports.
CDC: Deadliest week for swine flu in children
Tamiflu shortage forces some to be creative
Taxis called in after ambulances overwhelmed
Swine flu fears grow with vaccine shortage
updated 12:38 p.m. ET, Fri., Oct . 30, 2009
LOS ANGELES - It was bound to happen: Some people who aren't at high risk for swine flu complications got the much-in-demand vaccine.
Sometimes they were healthy adults or senior citizens instead of kids, pregnant women and people with health problems.
Before Los Angeles County health officials stepped up screening at their flu clinics, Natalie Thompson sailed through the long line and got the vaccine along with her 8-year-old son, even though she's not in one of the priority groups.
"If I can get it, I'm not gonna say no," said Thompson, 35, of Hollywood Hills.
Another mom, Katy Radparvar, didn't say no either.
"Our doctor doesn't have it yet," said the 41-year-old woman who was vaccinated along with her three children at a public health vaccination site in suburban Encino last week.
Public health officials don't want to be vaccine police. Many don't turn anyone away who wants the vaccine, though some locations are tougher than others.
"For many this is a frustrating process and we really sympathize with those who show up at a clinic and can't get vaccinated," said Los Angeles County public health director Dr. Jonathan Fielding.
Across the country, thousands have waited in line and many have been turned away, as manufacturers have trickled out the slow-to-produce vaccine. Things are improving, and now about 25 million doses are available, the government says.
Aware of scant supplies up front, Santa Barbara County clinics administered their 4,400 shots to pregnant women only. San Diego County is only immunizing those on the priority list, but is taking the word of residents.
Nevada is using the honor system with vaccinations offered on a first-come, first-served basis to those who identify themselves as at-risk for the H1N1 virus.
"We really are hoping people go on the honor system and let us immunize people in the priority groups," Southern Nevada Health District spokeswoman Stephanie Bethel said. "I think, for the most part, it's working."
In Oregon, Portland metro area officials say pregnant women and children are moved to the front of the lines and inoculated before the general public.
"We assertively asked those who were not in the priority group to move to the end of the line, so when we ran out of vaccine, those people who were left were those who were not at risk," said health officer Dr. Gary Oxman. "And people have responded well to it."
The vaccine shortfall prompted Wisconsin state health officials this week to remind local health agencies "to strongly encourage" announcements about the limited vaccine supply and the focus on vaccinating high-risk groups first.
Robert M. Pestronk, executive director of the National Association of County and City Health Officials, said local health departments are doing the best they can under challenging conditions.
"Despite those best efforts, it doesn't surprise me that people who are not in high priority groups are appearing at clinics for vaccination," he said. "It's difficult to restrict vaccine simply to the priority groups."
One of the doctors who helped draw up guidelines for vaccine priority groups also isn't surprised at how things are unfolding.
The government's vaccine advisory panel "did not expect vaccine police to be set up around the country," said Dr. William Schaffner, a flu specialist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, who is on the panel.
If vaccine demand is low in some locations, it makes sense for non-priority groups to get it instead of wasting the supply.
"I don't consider it a problem," said Schaffner. "I consider it more of a problem if vaccine is left unused."
That's what happened in the 2004-05 flu season when there was a shortage of seasonal flu vaccine. Many older healthy people refused to get the shot so that those who had health problems would have access to vaccine.
"One of the things that was learned was to be careful about turning people away because we might end up with a lot of vaccine at the end of the year," said Dr. Anne Schuchat of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention But right now, there aren't many vaccine leftovers to be found. Every morning, Anne Jenkins of Shreveport, La., makes a round of calls to ask doctors and health clinics if they have the injectable swine flu vaccine. She is 23 weeks pregnant.
After seeing four elderly women requesting swine flu vaccine — to no avail — at a local military treatment facility she thought to herself, "you're not on the list."
Though local officials tell Jenkins the vaccine won't be available until mid-November, she's ready to compete for her dose when it arrives.
"You feel the animal instinct come out," she said.
If people would just open their minds a little more, the truth is plain for everyone to see and hear.
So many are afraid to rock their own world that they just ignore it all and hope for it to go away.
More and more are willing to listen though, so improvement and truth move forward all the time.
WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing
[10:28 PM
WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing
http://www.fightbackh1n1.com/2009/08/who-memos-1972-explains-how-to-turn.html
{Video also at link}
Two key memorandums from WHO, discovered by Patrick Jordan, prove WHO has intentionally created the three-shot killer vaccine that people in the USA and other countries could soon be forced to take.
1972 WHO Bulletin 47, No 2 Memordanda #1 and #2 Virus-associated immunopathology:
Animal models and implications for human disease * technically outline the ability to create biological weapons in the form of vaccines that:
1) First totally disable the Immune System.
2) Load every cell of the Victim’s body up with Infection.
3) Switch the Immune System on causing the host to kill themselves in a Cytokine Storm.
One, Two, Three, Dead.
These WHO Memorandas describe the three-stage impact of the three "shots" many people will be forced to take this fall to allegedly treat a virus that WHO also helped create and release.
This is a crucial piece of evidence of WHO's long-term genocidal intentions that could stand in any court of law because these memorandums give the best and fullest explanation WHO's and affiliated labs (such as the CDC) current activities, such as their patenting of the most lethal bird flu viruses, their sending that virus to Baxter's subsidiary in Austria, which weaponised it and sent out 72 kilos to 16 labs in four countries almost triggering a global pandemic.
For every crime, there needs to be motive, an indication that it was deliberate, planned. The WHO memorandums provide the evidence of just that deliberate, long-term planning to kill people by weakening their immune system by use of the first vaccine, injecting a live virus into their body by a second, and creating a cytokine storm using squalene in a third.
Download the WHO Memoranda on:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/tocrender.fcgi?iid=169484
Scroll down until you find:
Memoranda
Virus-associated immunopathology : animal models and implications for human disease:
1. Effects of viruses on the immune system, immune-complex diseases, and antibody-mediated immunologic injury
Bull World Health Organ. 1972; 47(2): 257?264.
PMCID: PMC2480894
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2480894&blobtype=pdf
Virus-associated immunopathology: animal models and implications for human disease:
2. Cell-mediated immunity, autoimmune diseases, genetics, and implications for clinical research
Bull World Health Organ. 1972; 47(2): 265?274
PMCID: PMC2480896
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2480896&blobtype=pdf
If you find any difficulty please download it from our Download Section : Here
WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing
[10:28 PM | 0 comments ]
WHO memos 1972 explains how to turn vaccines into a means of killing
http://www.fightbackh1n1.com/2009/08/who-memos-1972-explains-how-to-turn.html
{Video also at link}
Two key memorandums from WHO, discovered by Patrick Jordan, prove WHO has intentionally created the three-shot killer vaccine that people in the USA and other countries could soon be forced to take.
1972 WHO Bulletin 47, No 2 Memordanda #1 and #2 Virus-associated immunopathology:
Animal models and implications for human disease * technically outline the ability to create biological weapons in the form of vaccines that:
1) First totally disable the Immune System.
2) Load every cell of the Victim’s body up with Infection.
3) Switch the Immune System on causing the host to kill themselves in a Cytokine Storm.
One, Two, Three, Dead.
These WHO Memorandas describe the three-stage impact of the three "shots" many people will be forced to take this fall to allegedly treat a virus that WHO also helped create and release.
This is a crucial piece of evidence of WHO's long-term genocidal intentions that could stand in any court of law because these memorandums give the best and fullest explanation WHO's and affiliated labs (such as the CDC) current activities, such as their patenting of the most lethal bird flu viruses, their sending that virus to Baxter's subsidiary in Austria, which weaponised it and sent out 72 kilos to 16 labs in four countries almost triggering a global pandemic.
For every crime, there needs to be motive, an indication that it was deliberate, planned. The WHO memorandums provide the evidence of just that deliberate, long-term planning to kill people by weakening their immune system by use of the first vaccine, injecting a live virus into their body by a second, and creating a cytokine storm using squalene in a third.
Download the WHO Memoranda on:
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/tocrender.fcgi?iid=169484
Scroll down until you find:
Memoranda
Virus-associated immunopathology : animal models and implications for human disease:
1. Effects of viruses on the immune system, immune-complex diseases, and antibody-mediated immunologic injury
Bull World Health Organ. 1972; 47(2): 257?264.
PMCID: PMC2480894
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2480894&blobtype=pdf
Virus-associated immunopathology: animal models and implications for human disease:
2. Cell-mediated immunity, autoimmune diseases, genetics, and implications for clinical research
Bull World Health Organ. 1972; 47(2): 265?274
PMCID: PMC2480896
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=2480896&blobtype=pdf
If you find any difficulty please download it from our Download Section : Here
Now that was pretty cool. Made me wish the kids were younger so I would have a good reception after making it for Halloween.
I live without cash – and I manage just fine
Armed with a caravan, solar laptop and toothpaste made from washed-up cuttlefish bones, Mark Boyle gave up using cash
Mark Boyle outside his off-grid caravan. Photograph: Mark Boyle
In six years of studying economics, not once did I hear the word "ecology". So if it hadn't have been for the chance purchase of a video called Gandhi in the final term of my degree, I'd probably have ended up earning a fine living in a very respectable job persuading Indian farmers to go GM, or something useful like that. The little chap in the loincloth taught me one huge lesson – to be the change I wanted to see in the world. Trouble was, I had no idea back then what that change was.
After managing a couple of organic food companies made me realise that even "ethical business" would never be quite enough, an afternoon's philosophising with a mate changed everything. We were looking at the world's issues – environmental destruction, sweatshops, factory farms, wars over resources – and wondering which of them we should dedicate our lives to. But I realised that I was looking at the world in the same way a western medical practitioner looks at a patient, seeing symptoms and wondering how to firefight them, without any thought for their root cause. So I decided instead to become a social homeopath, a pro-activist, and to investigate the root cause of these symptoms.
One of the critical causes of those symptoms is the fact we no longer have to see the direct repercussions our purchases have on the people, environment and animals they affect. The degrees of separation between the consumer and the consumed have increased so much that we're completely unaware of the levels of destruction and suffering embodied in the stuff we buy. The tool that has enabled this separation is money.
If we grew our own food, we wouldn't waste a third of it as we do today. If we made our own tables and chairs, we wouldn't throw them out the moment we changed the interior decor. If we had to clean our own drinking water, we probably wouldn't contaminate it.
So to be the change I wanted to see in the world, it unfortunately meant I was going to have to give up cash, which I initially decided to do for a year. I got myself a caravan, parked it up on an organic farm where I was volunteering and kitted it out to be off-grid. Cooking would now be outside – rain or shine – on a rocket stove; mobile and laptop would be run off solar; I'd use wood I either coppiced or scavenged to heat my humble abode, and a compost loo for humanure.
Food was the next essential. There are four legs to the food-for-free table: foraging wild food, growing your own, bartering, and using waste grub, of which there is loads. On my first day, I fed 150 people a three-course meal with waste and foraged food. Most of the year, though, I ate my own crops.
To get around, I had a bike and trailer, and the 34-mile commute to the city doubled up as my gym subscription. For loo roll I'd relieve the local newsagents of its papers (I once wiped my arse with a story about myself); it's not double-quilted, but I quickly got used to it. For toothpaste I used washed-up cuttlefish bone with wild fennel seeds, an oddity for a vegan.
What have I learned? That friendship, not money, is real security. That most western poverty is of the spiritual kind. That independence is really interdependence. And that if you don't own a plasma screen TV, people think you're an extremist.
People often ask me what I miss about my old world of lucre and business. Stress. Traffic jams. Bank statements. Utility bills.
Well, there was the odd pint of organic ale with my mates down the local.
• Mark Boyle is the founder of The Freeconomy Community
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2009/oct/28/live-without-money
I know, very scary isn't it?
It would be nice if we could just 'fix' the destroyed farms in one season wouldn't it? Sigh.
There are lots of people across the country using the same methods as Joel, they just never seem to make the news. That's a shame because it would be wonderful inspiration for others and also just might provoke more thought about what we are doing to produce food and the toxic effects of commercial growing.
Why can't we ever see a story like that on TV or in the news instead of week long coverage of Michael Jackson? What a waste of time and energy. But they do have an agenda, and our health and best interests are not on their lists.
Yeah, what he said! I think he pretty much got it all together there in a nutshell. Soil depletion is one of those insidious things that creep up on you, and then it's just plain too late to change it in time to make the land productive again. Horrible.
No, You're Reading That Right
79.9 percent rate targets credit-challenged
By BOB HANSEN
Updated 11:02 AM PDT, Thu, Oct 15, 2009
Bob Hansen Gordon Hageman couldn’t believe the credit card offer he got in the mail.
"My first thought, it was a mistake," Hageman said.
The wine distributor called the number on the offer, gave them the offer code and verified his information. Sure enough, it was right: the pre-approved credit card came with a 79.9 percent APR.
Yes, 79.9 percent.
The offer is for a Premier card from First Premier Bank, which is based in South Dakota. On its Web site, First Premier says it is the country's 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards. The site also says it "focuses on individuals who have less than perfect credit but are actually still creditworthy."
"I think they’re trying to take advantage of me," said Hageman.
Ya think?
Hageman acknowleged that his credit isn't perfect, but he said it's about average. He said the pre-approved offer didn’t mention the actual interest rate on the card -- for that, he had to read the enclosed fine-print disclosure.
"I think you’re beginning to border on deception there," San Diego State marketing professor Michael Belch said.
Belch said the card is offering a bad deal to people who are desperate.
"They're just finding different ways to gouge the consumer," Belch said.
The California Attorney General's office said there's nothing it can do about the cards since they are issued out of state and out of its jurisdiction.
A spokesman with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said interest rate limits on bank cards are set by the individual state and not on a federal level. According to information on the South Dakota Legislative Web site, there is "no maximum or usury restriction." In other words, the individual bank can set its own interest rate limits.
Several calls made to First Premier for a comment were not returned.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/around-town/shopping/No-Youre-Reading-That-Right-64173667.html
No, You're Reading That Right
79.9 percent rate targets credit-challenged
By BOB HANSEN
Updated 11:02 AM PDT, Thu, Oct 15, 2009
Bob Hansen Gordon Hageman couldn’t believe the credit card offer he got in the mail.
"My first thought, it was a mistake," Hageman said.
The wine distributor called the number on the offer, gave them the offer code and verified his information. Sure enough, it was right: the pre-approved credit card came with a 79.9 percent APR.
Yes, 79.9 percent.
The offer is for a Premier card from First Premier Bank, which is based in South Dakota. On its Web site, First Premier says it is the country's 10th largest issuer of Visa and MasterCard credit cards. The site also says it "focuses on individuals who have less than perfect credit but are actually still creditworthy."
"I think they’re trying to take advantage of me," said Hageman.
Ya think?
Hageman acknowleged that his credit isn't perfect, but he said it's about average. He said the pre-approved offer didn’t mention the actual interest rate on the card -- for that, he had to read the enclosed fine-print disclosure.
"I think you’re beginning to border on deception there," San Diego State marketing professor Michael Belch said.
Belch said the card is offering a bad deal to people who are desperate.
"They're just finding different ways to gouge the consumer," Belch said.
The California Attorney General's office said there's nothing it can do about the cards since they are issued out of state and out of its jurisdiction.
A spokesman with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) said interest rate limits on bank cards are set by the individual state and not on a federal level. According to information on the South Dakota Legislative Web site, there is "no maximum or usury restriction." In other words, the individual bank can set its own interest rate limits.
Several calls made to First Premier for a comment were not returned.
http://www.nbcsandiego.com/around-town/shopping/No-Youre-Reading-That-Right-64173667.html
Food will never be so cheap again
Biofuel refineries in the US have set fresh records for grain use every month since May. Almost a third of the US corn harvest will be diverted into ethanol for motors this year, or 12pc of the global crop.
By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Published: 7:53PM GMT 25 Oct 2009
Wheat prices have tumbled 70pc since 2008 but demand is not going to go away
The world's grain stocks have dropped from four to 2.6 months cover since 2000, despite two bumper harvests in North America. China's inventories are at a 30-year low. Asian rice stocks are near danger level.
Yet farm commodities have largely missed out on Bernanke's reflation rally in metals, oil, and everything else. Dylan Grice from Société Générale sees "bargain basement" prices.
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The end of the era of cheap British food is in sight, forcing us to eat GM and not organic food, report warnsWheat has crashed 70pc from early 2008. Corn has halved. The "Ags" have mostly drifted sideways over the last six months. This divergence within the commodity family is untenable, given the bio-ethanol linkage to oil.
For investors wishing to rotate out of overstretched rallies – Wall Street's Transport index and the Russell 2000 broke down last week – this is a rare chance to buy cheap into a story that will dominate the rest of our lives.
Barack Obama has not reversed the Bush policy on biofuels, despite food riots in a string of poor countries last year and calls for a moratorium. The subsidy of 45 cents per gallon remains.
The motive is strategic. America is weaning itself off imported energy at breakneck speed. It will not again be held hostage by oil demagogues, or humiliated by states that cannot feed themselves. Those Beijing students who laughed at US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner may not enjoy the last laugh. The US is the agricultural superpower. Foes will discover why that matters.
The world population is adding "another Britain" every year. This will continue until mid-century. By then we will have an extra 2.4bn mouths to feed.
China and Southeast Asia are switching to animal-protein diets as they grow wealthy, as the Koreans did before them. It takes roughly 3-5kgs of animal feed from grains to produce 1kg of meat.
A report by Standard Chartered, The End of Cheap Food, said North Africa and the Middle East have already hit the buffers. The region imports 71pc of its rice and 58pc of its corn. It lacks water to boost output. The population is growing fast. It will have to import, and cross fingers.
The UN says global farm yields must rise 77pc, which means redoubling Norman Borlaug's "green revolution". It will not be easy. China's trend growth in crops yields has slipped from 3.1pc a year in the early 1960s to 0.9pc over the last decade
"We've all heard the stark anecdotes: precious topsoil weakened by over-farming, dust clouds darkening the Asian skies, parched land becoming desert and rivers running dry," said Mr Grice.
Since 2000, China has lost nearly 1,400 square miles each year to desert. Urban sprawl is paving over fertile land in the East. Water supply from Himalayan glaciers is ebbing. The Yellow River has been reduced to "an agonising trickle". It no longer reaches the sea for 200 days a year.
Farmers are draining the aquifers. Environmentalist Ma Jun says in China's Water Crisis that they are drilling as deep as 1,000 metres into non-replenishable reserves. The grain region of the Hai River Basin relies on groundwater for 70pc of irrigation.
China's water troubles are not unique. North India lives off Himalayan snows as well. Nor can we take fertiliser supply for granted any longer since "peak phosphates" threatens.
One can be Malthusian about this. Grizzled commodity guru Jim Rogers certainly is. "The world is going to have a period when we cannot get food at any price, in some parts." He advises youth to opt for a farm degree rather than an MBA, if they want to make serious money.
Mr Grice remains an optimist, believing that human ingenuity will rescue us. You can trade the "Ag" rally by investing in exchange traded funds (ETFs), but this amounts to speculation on food. There are ancient taboos against this practice.
Or you can invest in the bio-tech, fertiliser, and land services companies that will both make money and help to solve the problem. Monsanto, Syngenta, and Potash are popular, but trade at high price to book values. Golden Agri-Resources, Yara, Agrium, and Bunge are at better multiples.
Kingsmill Bond at Moscow's Troika Dialog suggests the Baltic company Trigon Agri as a way to play the catch-up story in the Eurasian steppe. He likes sunflower processor Kernel, grain group Razgulay, and fertiliser firm Uralkali.
Strictly speaking, the world has enough land to feed everybody. The Soviet Union farmed 240m hectares in Khrushchev's era. The same territory now farms 207m hectares. Troika says crop yields could be doubled in Russia, and tripled in the Ukraine using modern know-how. Africa's farms could come alive with land registers, allowing villagers to use property as collateral for credit.
None of this can be done with a flick of the fingers. What seems certain is that the terms of trade between country and city will revert to the norms of the Middle Ages. Landowners will be barons again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/6432538/Food-will-never-be-so-cheap-again.html
First Daughter’s Receive H1N1 Vaccine
October 27, 2009
A spokeswoman for the First Lady's office says Sasha & Malia Obama received their H1N1 vaccines last week after the immunizations were made available to Washington, D.C. school children. The White House physician applied for and received the vaccines through the DC Department of Health, "using the same process as every other vaccination site in the District."
The President and the First Lady have not received the H1N1 vaccine, says the spokeswoman in a statement, "and they will wait until the needs of the priority groups identified by the CDC ... have been met.'
The Centers for Disease Control identifies those priority groups as children and young people up to the age of 24, pregnant women, health care workers, and older people who have, "health conditions associated with higher risk of medical complications from influenza."
All four of the Obama's have received the seasonal flu vaccine.
Ah, who's agenda will finally win out? Lies will pile up on all sides until(hopefully) the truth will be indisputable.
The inmates are running the asylum all over the world. With that in mind, what chance will we have to find the elusive kernal of truth in the huge pile of BS? With misdirection the norm now, it gets harder every day.
State Lifts Limit on Mercury Preservative in Swine-Flu Shots
Thimerosal has been eliminated from most vaccines in the U.S., but it will be added to the bulk of the swine-flu vaccine being produced
{Sure, be careful not to eat too much tuna while you are pregnant because of the harmful mercury levels, but be sure to get in line really fast for this vaccine. Ugh.}
September 25, 2009
By Sandi Doughton
Seattle Times science reporter
In preparation for swine-flu vaccinations next month, Washington's Health Department on Thursday temporarily suspended a rule that limits the amount of a mercury preservative in vaccines given to pregnant women and children under the age of 3.
Photo: A nurse fills syringes with influenza virus vaccine before the start of a drive-thru flu shot clinic October 2, 2009 in Napa, California. The County of Napa Public Health Department held the one of eight scheduled drive-thru flu shot clinics where seasonal flu shots will be given for free to anyone who attends in an effort to vaccinate as many people in Napa County as possible before the start of the flu season. (Justin Sullivan/Getty)
The preservative, thimerosal, has never been linked to any health problems, said Secretary of Health Mary Selecky. But a vocal minority believes the compound could be linked to autism. The state Legislature adopted the limit in 2006.
Thimerosal has been eliminated from most vaccines in the United States, but it will be added to the bulk of the swine-flu vaccine being produced to stem a pandemic that health officials estimate could sicken more than a third of the state's residents.
Pregnant women and young children are considered at high risk for swine flu, and lifting the mercury limits will give them quicker access to the vaccine, Selecky said.
"It's vital that everyone in a high-risk group has the choice to be vaccinated when swine-flu vaccine becomes available," she said.
About 15 percent of the vaccine supply will be mercury-free, but people may have to wait longer for it to become available.
U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said Thursday that 6 million to 7 million doses of the vaccine will be available the first week in October, mainly in the form of a nasal spray called FluMist.
About 40 million flu shots should be ready by the middle of October, with an additional 10 million to 20 million doses rolling off the assembly lines every week after that for a total of 250 million doses.
"We will have enough vaccine to immunize every American who wants to be immunized," Sebelius said in a briefing. "But it won't all be available at the same time."
The vaccine itself will be free, Sebelius said, but health-care providers can charge to administer it.
Thimerosal will be added to the vaccine because it is being produced in vials that contain enough medication for 10 shots. The mercury compound kills bacteria, lowering the risk that the drug will be contaminated by needles used to withdraw separate doses.
"Every time you introduce a needle, you run a risk of introducing a potential contaminant," said Dr. Tony Marfin, state epidemiologist for infectious disease.
Mercury-free vaccine will be produced in single-dose vials. Nasal sprays do not contain mercury but are not recommended for children under the age of 2 and pregnant women, because they contain live, weakened virus.
An analysis published Thursday also found that the nasal spray is less effective than shots in adults under 50.
Selecky said the law limiting the mercury preservative will be suspended for six months and applies only to the swine-flu vaccines.
Once common in vaccines, thimerosal has been largely phased out in most wealthy nations. Children's vaccines in the United States are almost exclusively mercury-free, single-dose injections.
However, numerous studies have found no link between thimerosal and disorders in children.
Early results with the new vaccine against swine flu, technically known as H1N1, show it quickly induces a strong immune response, and most people over the age of 10 will require only a single dose.
The rate of side effects also appears to be low. Out of nearly 44,000 people inoculated in China, 14 "adverse events" have been reported, all very mild, said Dr. Marie-Paule Kieny, director of the World Health Organization's (WHO) Initiative for Vaccine Research.
WHO and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will carefully monitor side effects, she said.
After 1976's mass vaccination against a different swine-flu strain, about 500 people developed a neurological disorder called Guillain-Barre Syndrome (GBS), and some died.
Scientists still haven't figured out why, but there has never again been a connection between flu vaccine and GBS, Marfin said.
Americans are often blasé about flu, with less than half of people — including health-care workers — bothering to get annual shots.
One reason may be that flu shots are not as effective as many other vaccines, offering about 60 to 70 percent protection against the seasonal virus. That's largely because scientists have to guess which strains will be circulating each year.
With swine flu, they know exactly which strain is involved, said Dr. Anne Schuchat, chief health officer for the CDC's H1N1 response. "We would expect the vaccine to be very effective against the disease we are seeing."
But will it be ready in time?
"Right now we're in a race with the virus and the vaccine," she said.
Flu usually peaks in Washington in February and March, but the new swine-flu strain is already hitting the region. Both Washington State University and the University of Washington have reported outbreaks, and absenteeism exceeds 10 percent at some local schools.
The state is working with clinics, doctors, hospitals and others to set up inoculation programs — and bracing for crowds.
"We are expecting high interest," Selecky said.
Sandi Doughton: 206-464-2491 or sdoughton@seattletimes.com
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/health/2009938638_vaccine25m.html
Doctors May 'Fire' Parents Who Don't Vaccinate Children
Some Parents Fear Vaccines Cause Autism, but Doctors Fear Disease Outbreaks, Too
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/AutismNews/doctors-drop-parents-vaccinate/story?id=8894999
{Lots of related information at link. Why you would vaccinate your children like 40 times is beyond me, but hey...}
By LAUREN COX of ABC News and EMILY WALKER of MedPage Today
Oct. 23, 2009
226 comments
When Cathlene Echan walked into her pediatrician's office two weeks after giving birth, she was nervous about discussing her recent decision not to vaccinate her second baby.
The Echan family of Orange County, Calif., has had trouble finding a pediatrician after they decided to not vaccinate their children. Cathlene Echan decided to stop vaccinations after her son Josiah, inset, was diagnosed with autism.
(Courtesy Cathlene Echan)But Echan, of Orange County, Calif., did not expect to be asked to leave.
"The doctor said it was too much of a liability to have us as patients," said Echan, a 28-year-old stay at home mom. Echan's oldest child, Josiah, now 5, had just been diagnosed with autism around the same time her second son Torren, now 2, was born.
Echan said she did research and read articles online about autism, she talked with other parents and then came to the pediatrician's office with doubts about vaccines.
"I hadn't come to a conclusion at that point when I saw the doctor, but I was so nervous because they're brothers, and I thought there could be a predisposition for it," said Echan. "As a mom, I can't knowingly do something to my second child when I believe it played a role in causing my older child's neurological disorder.
She was very nice at first, but when I asked her to give him [Torren] a checkup, she said, 'you need to leave,'" said Echan.
Echan's situation is a growing problem for parents and pediatricians alike. Despite adamant statements from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the U.S. Centers of Disease Control that vaccines have no link to autism, an anti-vaccination movement is growing online, from parent to parent, and through activist celebrities, such as actress Jenny McCarthy.
Now, more and more doctors are feeling compelled to say "no" back to these parents. The issue was raised Wednesday at the annual American Academy of Pediatrics meeting in Washington, D.C.
Dr. Gary Marshall, a presenter at the meeting, said there are some cases when it's ethical and legal to refuse to continue to see, or treat, a child.
"In the middle of treatment, you can't just say, I'm done," Marshall, of the University of Louisville School of Medicine, said during a session that addressed parental concerns about vaccinations and how pediatricians can respond.
Why Doctors Fear for Unvaccinated Children
"But if it becomes obvious that you and the family will never see eye-to-eye on a specific issue, there's no reason not to 'fire' them, providing you follow the steps necessary to avoid charges of abandonment," Marshall explained in the meeting. "Those include providing written notice that you will no longer treat their children and giving them a set time frame -- at least 30 days -- to find another physician."
Dr. Mary Fallat, chair of the Committee of Bioethics of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said doctors should try hard to work with parents, if they refuse to vaccinate, by providing information and trying to come to an agreement about a vaccination schedule.
"If that doesn't work, and the pediatrician feels really strongly that they cannot care for the child -- which is not the norm -- then they need to find another pediatrician who can take care of that child," said Fallat.
In some cases, Fallat said, doctors may feel an ethical concern about families who don't vaccinate their children.
"Ethically, that is a real concern on the part of the pediatrician because there are some diseases that are really disabling," she said. "If a pediatrician says, 'OK, I agree, it's OK for you not to immunize your children' and they do come down with some of these diseases then… it makes the doctor feel like he's partly to blame."
Yet, while in theory, doctors should find another physician who will treat an unvaccinated child, in the real world, it can put families in a difficult spot.
After Echan left her first pediatrician, she said she could not find another doctor who would take her family, once she told them she was unwilling to vaccinate her children.
"I don't know what happened to my older one, I just know that he has autism and he wasn't born with it," said Echan. "So I don't know what to do then, I'm scared."
Dr. Steven Abelowitz, director of the Coastal Kids clinic where Echan was first turned away, says the process of dealing with parents who don't want to be vaccinated is evolving.
When Doctors Fear Consequences of Unvaccinated Children
Abelowitz didn't see Echan, nor could he speak to what happened that day. However, he said he does try to work with families who fear there's a link between vaccines and autism.
"Four or five years ago, it really was a rare instance that someone wouldn't want to do vaccines," said Abelowitz, who is an adjunct professor at the University of California Los Angeles and University of Southern California.
Now we deal with vaccine concerns 10-20 times a day," he said.
Abelowitz says his office tries to provide as much information as possible on the risks and benefits of vaccines, and Coastal Kids even works with families to spread out the vaccination schedule over a longer period of time.
"The big, big change came after Jenny McCarthy came on TV," said Abelowitz. "Knowing now how many people fear it, we really want to try to work with parents."
However, Abelowitz said he does have concerns about keeping unvaccinated children in a practice, especially if the children aren't vaccinated against whooping cough, or pertussis, which can be fatal in young children and is still found in the United States.
Abelowitz also says he worries about babies coming into his office having contact with older children whose parents have refused to allow vaccinations.
"We also have to be responsible to the kids in the waiting room ... my biggest fear is [for] these young babies who are under the age of 2 months who are not vaccinated."
In the end, Echan took her children to see a naturopath -- a person who studied holistic medicine but does not have a legal license to practice medicine in most states.
"I love doctors; I'm not opposed to doctors. I just haven't needed them yet," said Echan. "I know that there are pediatricians out there who will take children who aren't vaccinated."
Australia Faces Famine, Expert Warns
If you get a major collapse in food supply in an area like the north China plains or the Indo-Gangetic plains, there will be hundreds of millions of refugees cut lose so we could easily see 20 or 30 million refugees arrive in Australia over a couple of years. —Professor Julian Cribb, Science communicator, Univ. of Technology Sydney
October 24, 2009
Sarah Collerton
ABC
Experts say greatest threat to the world is food production on land and in the water.
A food production expert says Australia may face a massive famine if governments fail to address an impending global food shortage.
Photo: Experts say greatest threat to the world is food production on land and in the water. (ABC: Amanda Collins)
A conference of food productivity experts in Sydney this week heard the greatest threat to the world is not climate change, but food production on land and in the water.
Science communicator Julian Cribb, an adjunct professor at the University of Technology Sydney, made a keynote address at the seminar saying there is expected to be about 9.2 billion people in the world in 2050, barring wars or major accidents.
But Professor Cribb says that population will create an alarming problem - there simply will not be enough food to go round.
"Basically what the world has not noticed is that hunger has been sneaking up on us for quite a while," he told ABC News Online.
"Population is growing and demand for food is rising.
"Governments have had it so good for so long - the world has had plenty of food - they have become complacent and ignorant.
"Climate change is going to get worse and worse, but the food problems are going to be in the next two to three decades.
"I'm warning now because it takes about a generation to develop new technologies and get them out broadscale. We need to take action now about these things."
Treasury head Ken Henry this week said that Australia's population growth is the biggest challenge to Commonwealth and state governments since Federation.
Professor Cribb agrees it will cause problems, and says governments must not forget future famine goes hand in hand with population growth.
"They have grossly underestimated the potential for population growth in Australia," he said.
"If you get a major collapse in food supply in an area like the north China plains or the Indo-Gangetic plains, there will be hundreds of millions of refugees cut lose so we could easily see 20 or 30 million refugees arrive in Australia over a couple of years.
"That's going to completely alter any plans we might have for a managed population growth.
"This is quite a dangerous situation. We may be OK for food, but if others are not, we will cop the backwash."
He says a range of issues have sparked current food production problems.
"Apart from the obvious things going on in the world food markets, there's a colossal shortage of water emerging because cities worldwide are pinching the farmers' water," he said.
"There's land degradation that's proceeded unabated for about 30 or 40 years now. We're losing land at the rate of 1 per cent of the world's farmland every year.
"We're running into energy shortages, we're running into shortages of fertilisers, and on top of that you've got climate change. All of these things are making the agricultural environment much less certain."
Professor Cribb says governments should be doing a range of things now to fix the problem.
"They need to focus on recycling water and nutrients, putting more science into agriculture to get farmers better technology, stopping cities from stealing farmers' land and water, paying farmers a better price so that they don't destroy the environment that produces the food and opening up free trade in agriculture," he said.
"We really need to get on to this. Australia is as much to blame as any other country for neglecting its agricultural science. Let's face it, this is what keeps the people fed.
"So if you neglect that, you neglect the first and most important thing for any country."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/10/24/2723137.htm?section=justin