Friday night Pandemic Watch - Swine Flu coming to you?

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Postby Cosmic Cowbell » Wed Apr 29, 2009 4:48 pm

stickdog99 wrote:
Cosmic Cowbell wrote:
Col. Quisp wrote:Let's not panic!


Umm...can I have your Tamiflu please, since you won't be needing it.

Seriously...call me "cautiously pessimistic" if you'd like.


But you are "cautiously optimistic" that Rummy's Elixir can cure whatever might ail you?


"The dramatic rise of oseltamivir [Tamiflu] resistance in the H1N1 serotype in the 2007/2008 season and the fixing of H274Y in the 2008/2009 season has raised concerns regarding individuals at risk for seasonal influenza, as well as development of similar resistance in the H5N1 serotype [bird flu]. "

Not as much as I used to be.... :shock:
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 5:51 pm

Cosmic Cowbell wrote:
Percival wrote:As I said, a money maker:


I'll tell you Percival, in this case, I only pray you are dead nuts on...


Hey, me too, and its usually the other way around, I am usually hoping I am wrong about things I say regarding politics and world events.

I dont think we should be reckless and take it too lightly but I have been around the block so many times that I am just about numb to the media hyperbole that changes every news cycle, its always something but its never anything.
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 6:33 pm

Headline on CNN right now "Flu Pandemic Imminent HUMANITY UNDER THREAT"

WTF?
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 29, 2009 6:46 pm

Percival wrote:Headline on CNN right now "Flu Pandemic Imminent HUMANITY UNDER THREAT"


Image

Where will it all end?
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Postby Jeff » Wed Apr 29, 2009 6:47 pm

I'm not getting my panic on just yet, but neither am I going to say this is all down to our crackheaded media's fear harvesting.

The 1918 pandemic began as a relatively mild wave of infection in the Spring. In the Fall it became much more virulent. So I think the reasonable cause for concern here is, as usual, the unknown. It hasn't been seen before, it isn't contained and we can't fight it, so what's it gonna do next?
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:02 pm

Jeff wrote: It hasn't been seen before, it isn't contained and we can't fight it, so what's it gonna do next?


But surely the first question has to be: How dangerous is it really? I'm wondering how much this "swine flu" virus really differs, in its genetic structure and its virulence, from the innumerable other flu mutations that turn up every year.
Mexico is poor, and that's where nearly all the dead are, so far (150 or seven, depending on which source you believe.) No accident. Simple diarrhoea kills millions in poor countries every year. There have probably been more deaths from car accidents in the USA in this last year than will ever be claimed by this virus.

But who knows. This is all so fucked up. Anything is equally believable or unbelievable: Meanwhile, the "financial crisis" is forgotten, at least temporarily. That's what we get for tolerating governments that lie to us incessantly. (It's also what we get for tolerating, and in fact requiring, factory farms.)
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:19 pm

MacCruiskeen wrote:
Percival wrote:Headline on CNN right now "Flu Pandemic Imminent HUMANITY UNDER THREAT"


Image

Where will it all end?


Must be a keyword hijacking to get people to go to CNN instead of RI forum. :lol:
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:24 pm

Jeff wrote:I'm not getting my panic on just yet, but neither am I going to say this is all down to our crackheaded media's fear harvesting.

The 1918 pandemic began as a relatively mild wave of infection in the Spring. In the Fall it became much more virulent. So I think the reasonable cause for concern here is, as usual, the unknown. It hasn't been seen before, it isn't contained and we can't fight it, so what's it gonna do next?



Good point but the world was a compltely different place in 1918 but still your point is valid. I dont think we should dismiss the possibility of a pandemic out of hand but we went through this with SARS not long ago and I do recall it being a pretty serious thread according to the media and nothing really came of it.

The flu is the flu, some people are going to die from it but generally you just get sick for a week and feel like shit. I dont think this is that much different but I dont know much about the 1918 pandemic so I cant imagine how bad it can really get.

For this interested, wiki 1918 flu info:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1918_flu_pandemic
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Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:34 pm

From the BBC:

How dangerous is it?

Symptoms of swine flu in humans appear to be similar to those produced by standard, seasonal flu.

These include fever, cough, sore throat, body aches, chills and fatigue.

It is worth remembering that seasonal flu often poses a serious threat to public health: each year it kills 250,000 - 500,000 around the world. (i.e. around 1,000 every day - MacC.)

So far, most cases of swine flu around the world appear to be mild, albeit with diarrhoea more common than is found with seasonal flu
. (Diarrhoea kills only the poor - MacC.)

But lives have been lost in Mexico, and a single death - of a Mexican child - has been confirmed in the US.

...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8021958.stm
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Postby StarmanSkye » Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:49 pm

Man, it was only a month ago that pharma company Baxter was discovered having combined live avian flu H5N1 with highly-infectious seasonal flu virus H3N2, something which is extremely dangerous and apparently because of safety procedure operational protocols CAN'T happen even accidently, and sent the samples to sub-contractors in 18 countries. It was only discovered when a Czech company recieving the samples innoculated lab ferrets as a safety test found the ferrets inexplicably died. Since then, this issue seems to have dissapeared off the mainstream news cycle, despite tuff questions being asked in Eorope over HOW this 'accident' could have happened -- and provoking far more serious questions about whether this 'accident' was deliberate.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbIEC0-v ... re=related

http://worldgenocidewatch.blogspot.com/ ... axter.html

--excerpt--
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor writes in Vaccines as Biological Weapons? Live Avian Flu Virus Placed in Baxter Vaccine Materials Sent to 18 Countries :

Deerfield, Illinois-based pharmaceutical company Baxter International Inc. has just been caught shipping live avian flu viruses mixed with vaccine material to medical distributors in 18 countries. The “mistake” (if you can call it that, see below…) was discovered by the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada. The World Health Organization was alerted and panic spread throughout the vaccine community as health experts asked the obvious question: How could this have happened?
……..
Or, put another way, Baxter is acting a whole lot like a biological terrorism organization these days, sending deadly viral samples around the world. If you mail an envelope full of anthrax to your Senator, you get arrested as a terrorist. So why is Baxter — which mailed samples of a far more deadly viral strain to labs around the world — getting away with saying, essentially, “Oops?”But there’s a bigger question in all this: How could this company have accidentally mixed LIVE avian flu viruses (both H5N1 and H3N2, the human form) in this vaccine material?

Was the viral contamination intentional?
The shocking answer is that this couldn’t have been an accident. Why? Because Baxter International adheres to something called BSL3(Biosafety Level 3) - a set of laboratory safety protocols that prevent the cross-contamination of materials. As explained on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosaf…):

“Laboratory personnel have specific training in handling pathogenic and potentially lethal agents, and are supervised by competent scientists who are experienced in working with these agents. This is considered a neutral or warm zone. All procedures involving the manipulation of infectious materials are conducted within biological safety cabinets or other physical containment devices, or by personnel wearing appropriate personal protective clothing and equipment. The laboratory has special engineering and design features.”


It is bad enough that governments all over the world have been warning about the likely pandemic flu. Now we find out we cannot trust Big Pharma to handle such bio-hazardous material in a safe manner.
Who knows whether it was intentional? But I sure would like to know what really happened? And I sure would like to see the people responsible fired!
--end--


It occured to me also, that in this present media-driven news-cycle, the economic crisis has been pushed waaay-back out of public notice, driving questions of culpability and the system being scammed by financial entities away from our attention. What's the sub-text here -- our inherant helplessness before implacable forces and events we can't control, so we NEED the government to 'protect us'?

<roll eyes>
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Postby chiggerbit » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:04 pm

Possibility of cases in SE Iowa. How long does it usually take for epidemics to usually run their course? Newsperson just said there was also a likelihood of the flu in Missouri, too.

http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/swine-flu-042909-WEB
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:04 pm

Along those same lines:
http://www.naturalnews.com/026159.html

NaturalNews) Last week, when what is now called a "swine flu" was first reported to be infecting and killing some people in Mexico, health officials noted it was a strain of flu never before seen. In fact, it is technically incorrect to call this simply a "swine" flu. Analyses showed it's a mixture of swine, human and avian viruses, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Moreover, it is genetically different from the fully human H1N1 seasonal influenza virus that has been circulating globally for the past few years. Bottom line: the new flu virus contains DNA from avian, swine viruses (including elements from European and Asian viruses) and human viruses.

So did this curious mixture just develop naturally, out of the blue? Is it the result of inhumane farming practices, as the Humane Society of the United States (http://www.hsus.org/) has suggested, that exposes immune-compromised pigs to all sorts of animal and human feces?

Well, maybe. But let's go back and look at the facts to see if any other scenario could be possible.

First of all, there's the troublesome detail that the virus has elements that come from multiple continents. Then there's the fact that true swine flu is only rarely transmissible to humans -- this flu is spreading human-to-human, most likely because it contains DNA from human flu.

Could someone have deliberately mixed these viruses together? Is that possible? Absolutely.

Was this virus mixing being done artificially in the lab, or had it already been done? Yes.

Who was blending potentially viruses in labs? Were those horrible generic boogie men known to Americans far and wide as "terrorists" doing it? There's no proof of bioterrorism at work here yet. However, there is evidence the United States government has been working on concocting new flu virus blends.

So could the hysteria-provoking, new swine flu have escaped from a lab? Or was it deliberately released as some kind of test? When these kinds of questions are asked, the knee-jerk reaction of the mainstream media (MSM) is to giggle and talk about "conspiracy theories" and to joke about wearing tinfoil hats.

But here's the potential smoking gun, the facts that suggest a potential source of the pandemic could be CDC labs. And at the very least, this possibility deserves thoughtful examination and research.

The University of Minnesota Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy (CIDRAP) is hardly a place most Americans have heard about and, apparently, the Center's web site has news the MSM isn't familiar with, either. But information they published years ago has now taken on an urgent importance. CIDRAP, along with the Canadian newspaper Canadian Press (CP), revealed back in 2004 that the CDC was launching experiments designed to mix the H5N1 (avian) virus and human flu viruses. The goal was to find out how likely it was such a "reassortant" virus would emerge and just how dangerous it might be. Of course, it's logical to wonder if they also worked with the addition of a swine flu virus, too.

Here's some background from the five-year-old report by the University of Minnesota research center: "One of the worst fears of infectious disease experts is that the H5N1 avian influenza virus now circulating in parts of Asia will combine with a human-adapted flu virus to create a deadly new flu virus that could spread around the world. That could happen, scientists predict, if someone who is already infected with an ordinary flu virus contracts the avian virus at the same time. The avian virus has already caused at least 48 confirmed human illness cases in Asia, of which 35 have been fatal. The virus has shown little ability to spread from person to person, but the fear is that a hybrid could combine the killing power of the avian virus with the transmissibility of human flu viruses. Now, rather than waiting to see if nature spawns such a hybrid, US scientists are planning to try to breed one themselves -- in the name of preparedness."

And CDC officials actually confirmed the government had plans for the research. The CIDRAP News folks did a great job covering this important issue, which was apparently mostly ignored by the MSM back in 2004, and CIDRAP News wrote to the CDC for information. This e-mail produced an answer from CDC spokesman David Daigle who admitted the CDC was working on the project in two ways. "One is to infect cells in a laboratory tissue culture with H5N1 and human flu viruses at the same time and then watch to see if they mix. For the human virus, investigators will use A (H3N2), the strain that has caused most human flu cases in recent years," the CIDRAP story stated. This co-infection approach was described as slow and labor-intensive. However, it was a way to produce a new virus that appeared to be closer to what develops in nature.

There was another, faster way CDC scientists could create the mix, too. Called reverse genetics, it involves piecing together a new virus with genes from the H5N1 and H3N2 viruses. Reverse genetics had already been used successfully to create H5N1 candidate vaccines in several laboratories, the CDC's Daigle wrote. "Any viable viruses that emerge from these processes will be seeded into animals that are considered good models for testing how flu viruses behave in humans... The aim will be to observe whether the animals get sick and whether infected animals can infect others," he revealed in his e-mail.

What's more, the CP reported the CDC had already made hybrid viruses with H5N1 samples isolated from patients in Hong Kong in 1997, when there was the first outbreak of that virus, dubbed the "Hong Kong flu". It is not clear if the results of that research were ever published. Back in 2004, Dr. Nancy Cox, then head of the CDC's influenza branch, would tell the CP only: "Some gene combinations could be produced and others could not."

The CP's report noted that the World Health Organization (WHO) had been "pleading" for laboratories to do this blending-of-viruses research. The reason? If successful, these flu mixes would back up WHO's warnings about the possibility of a flu pandemic. In fact, Klaus Stohr, head of the WHO's global flu program at the time, told the CP that if the experiments were successful in producing highly transmissible and pathogenic viruses, the agency would be even more worried -- but if labs couldn't create these mixed flu viruses, then the agency might have to ratchet down its level of concern.

The 2004 CIDRAP News report addressed the obvious risks of manufacturing viruses in labs that, if released, could potentially spark a pandemic. However, the CDC's Daigle assured the Minnesota research group the virus melding would be done in a biosafety level 3 (BSL-3) laboratory. "We recognize that there is concern by some over this type of work. This concern may be heightened by reports of recent lab exposures in other lab facilities," he told CIDRAP. "But CDC has an incredible record in lab safety and is taking very strict precautions."

Five years later, we must ask more questions. Were those safety measures enough? Was the CDC creating or testing any of these virus mixes in or near Mexico? What other potentially deadly virus combinations has the US government created? Don't US citizens, as taxpayers who funded these experiments, have a right to know? And for all the residents of planet earth faced with a potentially deadly global epidemic, isn't it time for the truth?

For more information:
"New flu is a genetic mix", http://www.reuters.com/article/dome...

"CDC to mix avian, flu viruses", http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/co...

"CDC to conduct avian flu pandemic experiements", http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNe...
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:06 pm

chiggerbit wrote:Possibility of cases in SE Iowa. How long does it usually take for epidemics to usually run their course? Newsperson just said there was also a likelihood of the flu in Missouri, too.

http://www.thehawkeye.com/Story/swine-flu-042909-WEB


Good question lets just hope it doesnt die down before it completely wipes out Washington DC.
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Postby Percival » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:11 pm

OBAMA on CNN right now, Presidental news confernece and one of the first questions asked was:

Because of the swine flu outbreak is it now time to completely close the US/Mexico borders?

Obama didnt really answer the questions directly just sort of danced around it and said the government is going to take everything for us.
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Postby chiggerbit » Wed Apr 29, 2009 8:36 pm

It's too late. It was too late as soon as those people came back from their Cancun vacations. And now we have (probably) illegal immigrants spreading the virus, too. It's apparent that transmission is easy and swift. Other than that, who knows with regards to virulence. This may turn out to be just another flu. Heck, someday you may be glad that you caught it when you did. :shock:
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