Friday night Pandemic Watch - Swine Flu coming to you?

[monster]

CDC confirms swine flu in Fair Oaks student

Published: Monday, Apr. 27, 2009 - 11:57 am
Last Modified: Monday, Apr. 27, 2009 - 1:26 pm

A seventh-grader from a private school in Fair Oaks has tested positive for swine flu, Sacramento County public health officials confirmed this morning.

The sample from the St. Mels School student was tested at the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and came back positive, making it the first confirmed sample in Northern California, county Public Health Officer Dr. Glennah Trochet stated in a news release.

Link

[Jeff]

The World Health Organization raised its pandemic alert level to Phase 4 on Monday

5.6 earthquake in Central Mexico ("I'm scared," said Sarai Luna Pajas, a 22-year-old social services worker standing outside her office building moments after it hit. "We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening — the economic crisis, the illnesses and now this — it feels like the Apocalypse.")

Swine Flu = Emerging Market Opportunity? (Amid the swine flu outbreak hitting Mexican companies, Bill Stone of PNC Wealth Management told CNBC that this might be a great opportunity for investors to enter into the emerging markets.)

[posting tulpa]

Swine Flu = Emerging Market Opportunity? (Amid the swine flu outbreak hitting Mexican companies, Bill Stone of PNC Wealth Management told CNBC that this might be a great opportunity for investors to enter into the emerging markets.)

saw a similar spin of this on a Tamiflu article/add today. Apparently they're salivating at the thought of a pandemic.


SLAD- I heard on the Alex "the sky is falling" Jones show today that the guy (Mexican museum curator) who shook Obama's hand died a WEEK later from a HEART ATTACK, as opposed to the next day from Swine Flu. Just thought I'd mention it.

They also mentioned something I hadn't known (to be true?)- Aspartame is the waste biproduct of toxin-fed E. Coli? Gross.

[mulebone]

It's a designer virus bio-engineered for Mexicans. In light of threats to the US, extremists on the Right might very easily benefit from this. Getting that border control they want, for example! could this be the long-feared bioweapon engineered for a certain genotype? We need another, convenient, explanation, and quick.

Would solve the illegal immigrant problem, wouldn't it? I mean, how bad would this have to get before the bulk of Americans started supporting "shoot on sight" orders for anyone seen crossing the border?
Fear is a wonderful pacifier. Tends to send even the most finely tuned moral compass spiraling into askew land.

[hanshan]

Remember your 12 Monkeys kids!

If you recall, in the movie, it starts small and does that doubling thing. By the time you get to 4X or 6X the gestation period, you have several million infected.

What gets me is the same type of military exercise is/was going on at the beginning of the outbreak as was going on during the 9/11 event. (In that it was a military exercise, of the type, of the evolving problem. )

In other words they are creating a REAL problem to try to see if they can fix it. Or use the 'only an exercise' excuse to put a cap on it if it gets out of hand.
Like: 'Hey boys, good thing the military was running an exercise and nipped this one in the bud. We need more money to run more exercises like this so we will be ready for the 'big one' (that we create ourselves, he he!)

(Sorry if it got a bit confusing.)

If you want to get really PARANOID READ THIS:

we lost 40 micro-biologists in less than 4 years, all under suspicious circumstances, and during this time someone discovered that they were all working for the government, or government contractors, on projects related to bio-terrorism, flu pandemics, or anthrax. Obviously they weren’t trying to find a cure for anything, or there would be no need to silence them.

Then it was discovered that our government was involved in strange experiments that involve exhuming bodies of people that were killed by the 1918 Spanish flu, and genetically engineered flu viruses, all the while the media is preparing the public with stories of bird flu wiping out thousands of chickens (acid test?) and even a few people here and there.

full link here via Jolly Roger:

http://jollyrogerrevolution.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-you-sell-crack-join-gang-or-rob-mob.html

bumping this

[polytron]

It's a designer virus bio-engineered for Mexicans. In light of threats to the US, extremists on the Right might very easily benefit from this. Getting that border control they want, for example! could this be the long-feared bioweapon engineered for a certain genotype? We need another, convenient, explanation, and quick.

geogeo, this is a damn good theory, but it's still early. we'll have to see if the right-wing-border-fencers benefit from this before we can be sure. i've listened to the alex jones broadcast today, and i think it dovetails with your theory. jones has completely focused on this swine-flu issue, and he would periodically interject that our government has left the borders "wide open." i thought that some of the show was informative, but it eventually devolved into fear-mongering. especially when he was interviewing a guy named steve quayle. i hope we won't see wingnuts shooting random people at the border, but it's easy to see how that could happen.

[polytron]

5.6 earthquake in Central Mexico ("I'm scared," said Sarai Luna Pajas, a 22-year-old social services worker standing outside her office building moments after it hit. "We Mexicans are not used to living with so much fear, but all that is happening — the economic crisis, the illnesses and now this — it feels like the Apocalypse.")[/i])

this is a haunting quote. it reminds me of how vulnerable people become when they are bombarded with fear. and it makes me thankful that it's not happening to me, at least not yet. thanks to all who are posting info and articles. i'm going to keep following this thread, but i'm not scared yet.

[seemslikeadream]

http://www.urbansurvival.com/week.htm
lots of links there


Sick People = Sick Markets

We're officially in a public health emergency now, says acting HHS Secretary Charles Johnson:

"As a consequence of confirmed cases of Swine Influenza A (swH1N1) in California, Texas, Kansas, and New York, on this date and after consultation with public health officials as necessary, I, Charles E. Johnson, Acting Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pursuant to the authority vested in me under section 319 of the Public Health Service Act, 42 U.S.C. § 247d, do hereby determine that a public health emergency exists nationwide involving Swine Influenza A that affects or has significant potential to affect national security."

Despite trying to take some time off, our friends with the predictive linguistics project have been just tripping over all the temporal markers that have been showing up over the past couple of weeks. Besides the appearance of 10XCSN this weekend, that I explained to Peoplenomics subscribers, our 'masked people/revolution pending' marker is here as this note from chief time monk Cliff explains:

"...regular readers of the ALTA reports will recall a forecast made in 2008 about [changes in fashion] which would bring about [environmental reasons] for people to go about [masked] in their daily routine. This temporal marker is intimately associated with a stream of following forecasts that lead up to the [active] phase of the [revolution] at the global level.

Please note that this may be manifesting (beginning) *now* as the news reports from Mexico city are for people to be wearing *ANY* form of [respiratory mask] as protection against the developing outbreak of 'flu'.

We still expect that other environmental factors such as [volcano ash] later in the summer will prolong the trend. However it seems now that the first impetus for the mass behavior change into [masked fashion] will be the [disease] sub sets.

Hmmmm.....designer 'anti flu masks' anyone?

Also just a note that Fungi Perfecti sells Reishi mushroom in powdered form. This is not to be taken daily or anything, but it will seriously boost (temporarily) the immune system. So if exposed, or just before predictable exposure. But bear in mind that this is a fungal product and as such may not agree with all body types.

Thanks. Further updates over the next months as warranted. "

My own sense of things is that this episode of flu-ishness, although serious enough to have US authorities now calling it a 'public health emergency' and actions are beginning worldwide may just be a prequel to the sequel: The biggest data bulge seems to be September, or so, which either means the swine flu will be a slowly evolving outbreak or there will be another something along, or the model's timing is off. Taker your pick and throw a dart, but do so after you've picked up some bleach, masks, gloves and chicken soup, vitamins C & D and visted the www.pandemicflu.gov web site.



. The problem is, however, that once the genie is out of the bottle, it's hard to put it back in. While this begins to fulfill more of the trend toward "restrictions on travel" that have been almost a fixture of modelspace since the 2006 reports of bird flu.



While it may see extreme (now) of us to be talking about flu/masking/somehow playing into a global revolution meme, remember the government's own web site cautions about both the economic and social consequences of the flu. Since our emphasis around here is buckeroo's, let's start with what this does to the global economy:

A Potential Influenza Pandemic: Possible Macroeconomic Effects and Policy Issues The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) assessment of possible economic effects of an avian flu pandemic concludes that a pandemic involving a highly virulent flu strain (such as the one that caused the pandemic in 1918) could produce a short-run impact on the worldwide economy similar in depth and duration to that of an average postwar recession in the United States.

May 22, 2006 Update (PDF) (128KB)

December 8, 2005 Report (PDF) (311KB)

The Economic Impact of Pandemic Influenza in the United States: Priorities for Intervention (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) A 1999 article that estimates the possible effects of the next influenza pandemic in the United States and analyzes the economic impact of vaccine-based interventions. (September - October 1999)

The Global Economic and Financial Impact of an Avian Flu Pandemic and the Role of the IMF (PDF - 229 KB) (International Monetary Fund) Provides a preliminary assessment of the risks and potential impact to the global economy and financial system. Includes summary of the common elements of business continuity planning in the financial sector for pandemic risks. (Feb. 28, 2006)

Avian Flu Economic Impact (The World Bank) Read about the global economic impact an influenza pandemic will have.



All of which makes interesting reading, but as I explained to subscribers this weekend, I expect that most economists of the conventional sort will be wrong because the reports I've read take a very limited view of rippling flu impacts. In other words, there's an assumption that a pandemic impact might be in the range of 6%, or so, and that's on the high side.



I respectfully disagree. If you want to hold a long term easy to figure estimate, take whatever the sickness rate and the fatality rate, multiply times two and you've got the GDP deflator. So, for example, if 50% of the people in America were to get flu'ed, and the mortality rate were to be 10%, then the national mortality rate would be 5% and the GDP impact 10%...if you follow the logic there.



On the other hand, if 100% of people got the flu, and 10% died, then you'd have a 20% GDP impact (or larger) since you'd subtract 10% of the your workers (this strain hits healthy young adults, you know) and then you'd have 10% less consumers, and tons of estate sales on eBay driving down prices on top of all the other problems.



Not to quibble, but an impact of 1-2 times the mortality rate in a given country seems like a starting point to me.

---

One salient ponder is this note about the economic differences between the 1918 flu and what's going on now...

"Finance: there were no credit cards or personal checking accounts, which meant far more frequent visits to the bank. In 1918, there was almost exclusively a cash economy. Closure of banks might be explained as a response to a pandemic, but it could have been perceived that the closure meant the bank did not have funds."

I have to suspiciously wonder if the PowersThatBe might have a little something up their sleeve with regard to how money is managed in the world: Could a flu pandemic be used as an excuse to rid the world of "dirty money" (e.g. cash) and set us all in a grand central computer system where infinitely expandable digidollars could be inflated forever?



On the other hand, I can make a pretty good argument that silver has some serious antibacterial and antiviral properties, so yeah, I have noted that silver was back over $13 an ounce when I looked this morning. Whether it's a coincidence that I hold some July $20 silver commodity options and some September $25's I'll just leave to your imagination. But just keep your eyes open for mentions of silver...

---

I won't go on and on about this except to say that the flu exposes the weak underbelly of globalism and all that remains to be seen is how restrictions on travel will play out and whether North America will find itself isolated by the rest of the world to any meaningful degree. The EU is already saying "stay home."



With people in the US now being told by some doctors to wear masks, I can sense some interesting change in marketing of some products. Marketing of N-95 or better dust/surgical masks just got really easy. But on the flip side, be thankful you don't have to sell video surveillance cameras with facial recognition software for a living - that just got a lot tougher

[SonicG]

Mike Davis' take (Hardcore socialist or lefty gatekeeper??)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ico-health

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.

Stealing the limelight from our officially appointed assassin, H5N1, this porcine virus is a threat of unknown magnitude. It seems less lethal than Sars in 2003, but as an influenza it may be more durable than Sars. Given that domesticated seasonal type-A influenzas kill as many one million people a year, even a modest increment of virulence, especially if combined with high incidence, could produce carnage equivalent to a major war.

Meanwhile, one of its first victims has been the consoling faith, long preached by the World Health Organisation, that pandemics can be contained by the rapid responses of medical bureaucracies, independent of the quality of local public health. Since the initial H5N1 deaths in Hong Kong in 1997, the WHO, with the support of most national health services, has promoted a strategy focused on the identification and isolation of a pandemic strain within its local radius of outbreak, followed by a thorough dousing of the population with antivirals and (if available) vaccine.

An army of sceptics has contested this viral counter-insurgency approach, pointing out that microbes can now fly around the world (quite literally in the case of avian flu) faster than WHO or local officials can react to the original outbreak. They also pointed to the primitive, often non-existent surveillance of the interface between human and animal diseases. But the mythology of bold, preemptive (and cheap) intervention against avian flu has been invaluable to the cause of rich countries, like the US and UK, who prefer to invest in their own biological Maginot lines rather than dramatically increasing aid to epidemic frontlines overseas, as well as to big pharma, which has battled developing-world demands for the generic, public manufacture of critical antivirals like Roche's Tamiflu.

The swine flu may prove that the WHO/Centres for Disease Control version of pandemic preparedness – without massive new investment in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to lifeline drugs – belongs to the same class of Ponzified risk management as Madoff securities. It is not so much that the pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and the EU.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Mexico lacks both capacity and political will to monitor livestock diseases, but the situation is hardly better north of the border, where surveillance is a failed patchwork of state jurisdictions, and corporate livestock producers treat health regulations with the same contempt with which they deal with workers and animals. Similarly, a decade of urgent warnings by scientists has failed to ensure the transfer of sophisticated viral assay technology to the countries in the direct path of likely pandemics. Mexico has world-famous disease experts, but it had to send swabs to a Winnipeg lab in order to ID the strain's genome. Almost a week was lost as a consequence.

But no one was less alert than the disease controllers in Atlanta. According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack".

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO's failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.
---------------
See original article for links and comments.

[mentalgongfu2]

No fear, quarantine plans eerily reminiscent of Camus' "La Peste" have been established by bureaucrats and adopted by local Boards of Health and county and state governments across America to deal with a situation such as the one now unfolding, which, like terrorism, is always presented as "not a matter of if, but when."

http://www.pandemicflu.gov/plan/states/iowa.html

[Col. Quisp]

OMG this is it. I didn't wanna believe it. It is spreading really far and fast. We're at Level 4 in the 6-level pandemic scale. Once they declare Level 5, there's no more time to prepare.

Check out this map of reported and suspected cases from recombinomics.com:

MAP

looks like more cases than are being officially reported....hmmmmm

isn't it funny that it hasn't hit Asia yet? odd.

[slow_dazzle]

The virus doesn't need to kill off masses of people to do us in folks. The global economy is so damned fragile, any additional problems could be seriously bad news. The markets are already getting twitchy as news of the virus gets out.

There is information on the economic effects of the various risk levels here:

LINK

Governments are going to have to walk a fine line, between containing any pandemic and not causing panic in the markets. And it's not only the markets that are an issue. Food supply could be interrupted, transport networks might take a hit, tourism will suffer etc etc. You guys know the likely implications.

I'm not sure what to think; whether it's hype, a die off tactic or something totally natural. But the possible fallout is quite frightening if infections spread, in light of the fact that the global economy is up shit creek.

You guys might want to make sure you have enough supplies of food and so on at home, in case there is a major spread of the virus. If there isn't, you can always use the stuff at a later date. It might seem a tad OTT but if there is a pandemic, and some items become difficult to obtain, or it's unsafe to mix with people, you'll be glad you can stay at home for a few weeks.

Information on preparing here:

LINK

Comprehensive information on flu pandemics here:

LINK

Best to all.

[Nordic]

This whole thing is such bullshit. Somebody's doing some serious wagging of the dog here.

Tonight on our local news they had this urgent "story" where they went and interviewed a girl who --- GASP!!! -- had actually HAD THE FLU.

She was just some teenage girl out in her driveway and they were asking here, breathlessly, "how do you feel now?"

And she said "better."

She was FINE. Some teenage girl with a fucking cold.

This is one of the weirdest things I've ever seen.

[smiths]

.
i agree Nordic,
i hope i am not proven wrong by events but i think is a massive fuss about nothing,

having said that, the potential for industrial animal farming incubating things like this is really worrying and another reason why we need to change the way we get food

[lightningBugout]

It creeps me out to see people I respect saying they think
"this" is a big hysterical media paranoia event.

Erase all traces of [nwo / depopulation / fema is luciferian / now, actually, even the WHO is an instrument of genocide according to Alex Jones ], and you're left with a number of culprits, each one playing out epidemiologically just as it has been expected to for decades now: factory-farming and superbugs, globalization and air-travel and pandemics, other bugs unlocked from their relative environmental stasis as a result of neo-imperialist logging / deforestation in the Congo et al.

something is finally happening that epidemiologists have been predicting for decades. if its not this one, it will be another.

that seems to be just a simple fact, no?