Friday night Pandemic Watch - Swine Flu coming to you?

[Ben D]

ARG!

[Penguin]

One professor of entomology (insects) told a story on a lecture.
He had been asked to go to China to aid in a insect epidemy on a very large tree plantation. The plantation was a monoculture the size of whole Finland or Sweden. Trees in straight lines for ever, with access roads in between. He said there were no birds there, and no other plants besides the trees. Everything had went fine for 18 years - and then a pest bug arrived from elsewhere with the wind. It started to breed with no competition, and soon started to decimate the whole area, with no natural predators.

When he arrived there to assess the pest damage, there were thousands of them per square meter. He said the car skidded continually on the mass of insects crawling on the ground, in places completely obscuring the ground. Of course there was nothing to be done at that point except replant a mixed species forest after the bugs had totally eradicated the original plantation.

Similar mentality is to be blamed for Indonesian "Mega Rice Project" catastrophy, and most of industrial agriculture and animal farming...

I dont have any other input to this swine flu situation.
Well see, wont we.

[chiggerbit]

Hmmm, lots of interesting little nuggets in this article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/ap ... eak-source

key in search for source of swine flu outbreak

Case confirmed in village in south-eastern Mexico where 60% of residents fell ill
Jo Tuckman in Mexico City and Robert Booth
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009 20.37 BST
Article history


Edgar Hernández Hernández, the four-year-old survivor of swine flu at his home in La Gloria in Mexico's Veracruz state. Photograph: Alexandre Meneghini/AP


A Mexican village whose inhabitants were overwhelmed by an outbreak of respiratory illness starting in February has emerged as a possible source of the swine flu outbreak which has now spread across the world.

The state government of Veracruz in eastern Mexico has confirmed one case of swine flu in the village of La Gloria with the sufferer named locally as a four-year-old boy, Edgar Hernández Hernández. The federal government said tonight that he tested positive for the same strain of the virus which has claimed lives in Mexico.

The boy's case earlier this month came amid an outbreak of respiratory illness in the area in which around 400 people requested medical help. The boy was treated in hospital and survived. But two babies from the same village died during the outbreak. Sufferers complained of symptoms including fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm.

"The symptoms were exactly like the ones they talk about now [with swine flu]," said a local resident. "High fevers, pain in the muscles and the joints, terrible headaches, some vomiting and diarrhoea. The illness came on very quickly and whole families were laid up."

It remained unclear tonight whether the illness was swine flu but the Mexican government appeared to cast doubt on its original diagnosis of the outbreak as a more typical H2N3 flu virus when it revealed that the only sample it sent to North America for swine flu tests came back positive.

"The sample of one of the cases, that of a four-year-old boy, was kept," said federal health minister José Ángel Córdova. "It was among the samples sent [to labs abroad] and that came back confirmed."

The Veracruz state government had previously said the infants died of bacterial pneumonia and said it has no plans to exhume their bodies to find out if the cause of death was swine flu.

Early today the US owner of an industrial pig production facility around 12 miles from La Gloria said it had found no clinical signs or symptoms of swine flu in its herd or Mexican employees. The world's biggest pig meat producer, Virginia-based Smithfield, said it is co-operating with the Mexican authorities' attempts to locate the possible source of the outbreak and will submit samples from its herds at its Granjas Carroll subsidiary to the University of Mexico for tests.

"Based on available recent information, Smithfield has no reason to believe that the virus is in any way connected to its operations in Mexico," it said in a statement. "The company also noted that its joint ventures in Mexico routinely administer influenza virus vaccination to their swine herds and conduct monthly tests for the presence of swine influenza."

The statement came after Mexico's national public health authority, the Mexican social security institute, raised concerns that waste from the Granjas Carrol facility may be responsible for the outbreak of illness, according to local media.

"According to state agents of the Mexican social security institute, the vector of this outbreak are the clouds of flies that come out of the hog barns, and the waste lagoons into which the Mexican-US company spews tons of excrement," reported Mexico City newspaper La Jornada.

Swine flu can be caught through contact with infected animals, but it is unclear if contact with flies or excrement has the same effect.

A La Gloria resident who spoke to the Guardian on condition of anonymity yesterday described how illness swept through the village. "Some people started getting ill in February and an eight-month-old baby died," she said. "After that another baby died on 21 March. Suddenly most of the village got ill. It was weekend and the tiny clinic here was closed. The state health authorities then did send doctors and nurses to look after us, and give us medication. About 60% of the village were ill and we asked them what it was and they said it was a severe and atypical cold. We talked about influenza and they said that was impossible, that influenza had been eradicated from Mexico."

Smithfield, which is led by pork baron Joseph W Luter III, has previously been fined for environmental damage in the US. In October 2000 the supreme court upheld a $12.6m (£8.6m) fine levied by the US environmental protection agency which found that the company had violated its pollution permits in the Pagan River in Virginia which runs towards Chesapeake Bay. The company faced accusations that faecal and other bodily waste from slaughtered pigs had been dumped directly into the river since the 1970s .

The outbreak of respiratory illness in the area of the Granjas Carroll plant was first detected at the beginning of this month by Veratect, a company based in Washington state which monitors the spread of disease and pandemics around the world for corporate clients.

On 6 April it reported local officials had declared a health alert. According to its dispatch: "Sources characterised the event as a 'strange' outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to pneumonia in some paediatric cases. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town's population, approximately 1,800 cases, has been affected."

Local health officials established a health cordon around La Gloria and the monitoring company reported that officials launched a spraying and cleaning operation that targeted the fly suspected to be the disease carrier. "State health officials also implemented a vaccination campaign against influenza, although sources noted physicians ruled out influenza as the cause of the outbreak," it said.

[chiggerbit]

Smithfield's Joseph W Luter III, mentioned above:

http://www.nndb.com/org/944/000172428/

Good Government for America Committee

ORGANIZATION



Location:
Arlington, VA
Name Occupation Birth Death Known for
Frank Carlucci Government 18-Oct-1930 US Secretary of Defense, 1987-89
Michael D. Fraizer Business c. 1958 CEO of Genworth Financial
Ed Gillespie Politician 1-Aug-1962 Chairman of the RNC
William H. Goodwin, Jr. Business 21-Oct-1940 President of CCA Industries
C. Boyden Gray Government 6-Feb-1943 Conservative activist, lobbyist
William J. Haynes II Government 30-Mar-1958 DOD General Counsel, 2001-08
Charles G. Koch Philanthropist 1-Nov-1935 Conservative philanthropist, Koch heir
Chris LaCivita Government c. 1967 Crosslink Strategy Group
Joseph W. Luter III Business 17-Jul-1939 CEO of Smithfield Foods, 1975-2006
G. Gilmer Minor III Business c. 1941 CEO of Owens & Minor, 1984-2005
Bob Perry Business 30-Oct-1932 Perry Homes
Brent Scowcroft Government 19-Mar-1925 National Security Advisor to Ford and GHWB
Robert C. Sledd Business c. 1952 Co-Founder, Performance Food Group
John Snow Government 2-Aug-1939 US Secretary of the Treasury, 2003-06
James E. Ukrop Business c. 1938 Ukrop's Super Markets, Inc.
James Von Ehr Business c. 1950 Nanotech entrepreneur
George Vradenburg Attorney 14-Mar-1943 Strategic Advisor for AOL Time Warner

[chiggerbit]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... ico-health

crisis lays bare the meat industry's monstrous power

The Mexico swine flu outbreak should alert us to a highly globalised industry with global political clout
Comments (83)

Mike Davis
guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 April 2009 14.30 BST
Article history

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.

[stefano]

In the interests of perspective:

In annual influenza epidemics 5-15% of the population are affected with upper respiratory tract infections. Hospitalization and deaths mainly occur in high-risk groups (elderly, chronically ill). Although difficult to assess, these annual epidemics are thought to result in between three and five million cases of severe illness and between 250 000 and 500 000 deaths every year around the world. Most deaths currently associated with influenza in industrialized countries occur among the elderly over 65 years of age. (WHO)

Although I must say I'm a bit worried about what could happen if this flu spreads to areas where a lot of people are HIV positive.

[StarmanSkye]

Just to add--

Among George Noory's C2Cam program guests last night (talking about the swine-flu pandemic as likely part of the long-predicted & anticipated globalist agena re: NWO?), Alex Jones stressed he has recieved numerous e-mails and calls from people in Mexico claiming many, many more outbreak cases of swine-flu disease and fatalities than officially claimed -- which is probably what we can all reasonably suspect if not outright expect. Jones claimed actual disease and death figures are at least double what has been reported, strongly suggesting a concerted effort to minimize public anxiety and fear.

I don't like Jone's brand of reactionary fear-mongring, as he doesn't inspire much if any rigorous, critical thinking -- so its hard for me to have a good sense of how credible he might be on specific facts.

[professorpan]

I work with public health professionals, and was just told (by someone who is most definitely "in the loop") that the Mexican government is going to hold Smithfield accountable, and it should be official news in the next day or so (if not sooner).

The CAFOs (massive, industrial pig farms) have been compared to giant incubators of viruses, and this development is not unexpected. At all. We knew this was going to happen.

Humans are responsible, whether or not it's via greedy and inhumane agribusiness corporations or something more sinister.

[mulebone]

So, why don't they use zeolite in places like Smithfield?

From wiki:

Agriculture

In agriculture, clinoptilolite (a naturally occurring zeolite) is used as a soil treatment. It provides a source of slowly released potassium. If previously loaded with ammonium, the zeolite can serve a similar function in the slow release of nitrogen. Zeolites can also act as water moderators, in which they will adsorb up to 55% of their weight in water and slowly release it under plant demand. This property can prevent root rot and moderate drought cycles.

Animal welfare

In concentrated animal growing facilities, the addition of as little as 1% of a very low sodium clinoptiloite was shown to improve feed conversion, reduce airborne ammonia up to 80%, act as a mycotoxin binder, and improve bone density.[7] It can be used in general odor elimination for all animal odors.

From experience, i know the stench around those industrial hog farms are nearly unbearable. Zeolite seems like a fairly benign solution.

[Col. Quisp]

WFTV news

A Mexican tourist at Disney World is alleged to have been diagnosed with swine flu, but the hospital is denying it even though the TV station got a copy of an email from the CMO confirming the diagnosis. They argue it's not been confirmed by the CDC so they are technically correct with saying no confirmed case of swine flu in Orlando.

BUT if the tourist has the swine flu and was at Disney World, this puppy is gonna be everywhere in a few weeks.

Florida Hospital Denies Swine Flu Case Has Been Confirmed

Posted: 10:41 am EDT April 28, 2009Updated: 2:36 pm EDT April 28, 2009
ORLANDO, Fla. -- Eyewitness News has learned of Orlando's first confirmed case of swine flu, however Florida Hospital is denying the claim, which was made by one of their own officers in an email. According to the chief medical officer for Adventist Health System, which operates Florida Hospital, the case was diagnosed Tuesday morning.

DOCTOR'S EMAIL: Read Email About Case
"A case was diagnosed here in Orlando today on a tourist from Mexico who came to Disney attractions two days ago to visit," CMO Loran Hauck wrote in an email obtained by Eyewitness News (see email).

But during an early Tuesday afternoon press conference called by Florida Hospital in regard to Eyewitness News' report, the hospital denies any confirmed cases exist.

"We understand that sometime in the past 24 hours there was an email sent from a Florida Hospital person to another person trying to educate them about how not to get the flu," Dr. Scott Brady of Florida Hospital said during the press conference (watch press conference). "There have been some reports indicating that there was in fact a case of the flu somewhere in the Disney area, but that has not been confirmed at this time."

WFTV reporter Kathi Belich then asked Brady specifically about the email reporting at least one confirmed swine flu case.

"There have been no confirmed cases of swine flu by the CDC in Central Florida," Brady responded.

Belich then pressed Brady on the email from Hauck.

"I have not talked to the chief medical officer about this," Brady said.

Shortly after the hospital's press conference, the Florida's Health Department held their own.

"At this time we have no confirmed cases here in Florida," Florida Surgeon General Ana M. Viamonte Ros said during theTuesday afternoon press conference.

Viamonte Ros said several samples are being sent to state labs where, if they get a positive test, they are then forwarded to the CDC for confirmation.

"Several tests are being conducted at this time, but there are no confirmed cases at this time" Viamonte Ros said.

No further details have been released, but Eyewitness News is working to learn specifically what days the tourist was at the parks and which park the tourist went to. Details about the tourist, beyond being from Mexico, have not been released.

Eyewitness News contacted the Orange County Health Department late Tuesday morning. They said they were unable to confirm the report.

"There are no confirmed cases in Orange County," said Dr. Kevin Sherin, Orange County health officer.

Sherin also told Eyewitness News he does not know whether local hospitals are able to "subtype" the strain of influenza A they are treating. The Health Department said they are more focused on the bigger picture of public safety and are trying to determine whether any cases are genetically traceable back to Mexico.

Disney told Eyewitness News late Tuesday morning that they have not received any confirmation about a swine flu case involving a guest.

[beeline]

this puppy is gonna be everywhere in a few weeks.

Don't you mean piglet?

[Col. Quisp]

this little piggy went "whee whee whee, all the way home!"

[beeline]

This little piggy went "hack hack hack" all the way to the infirmary!

Tell ya what, I ain't eating no more Smithfield products.

[Truth4Youth]

DEADLINE LIVE EXCLUSIVE: Mexican Swine Flu May
Have Originated at US-Owned Pig Breeding Farm


The recent swine flu outbreak taking place in Mexico may have originated at a US-owned pig-breeding farm by the name of Granjas Carroll (aka Carroll Farms), which is owned, in part by the Smithfield Food Company. Smithfield also promotes the consumption of genetically-altered foods, and even owns certain genetic lines of pork breeding. On April 12 of 2009, before the swine flu outbreak was covered by mainstream media outlets, the Mexican newspaper La Jornada broke a story on how Carroll Farms was polluting the drinking water near the towns of La Gloria and Perote, in Veracruz.

According to La Jornada, Carroll Farms maintains a strong political influence in municipal governments in the area. Recently, group of environmental protesters that blocked a highway near the Carroll Farms facilities was arrested. Among them were Guadalupe Serrano Gaspar, a 66-year-old man who said was arrested by undercover police officers. Local residents from 20 towns nearby in Veracruz and the bordering state of Puebla also oppose what they consider deplorable environmental practices by Carroll Farms. The complaints from local residents range from reports of large quantities of pig excrement in the waterways to the smell of chemicals and feces in several towns.

Veratect, which is company that tracks epidemic outbreaks, has posted a timeline of events that also indicates that the Mexican swine flu outbreak may have started in Veracruz, Mexico near the Carroll Farms facilities. According to the Veratect timeline, more than 400 local residents at La Gloria, Veracruz and other nearby towns reported having strong flu-like symptoms days before the outbreak was reported by the media. Local health authorities in La Gloria and Perote have determined that this "strange" flu-like disease or "new strain of the flu" was spread to the local towns by flies that feed on pig feces. In the town of La Gloria, 60 percent of the 3,000 inhabitants have been infected.

The newspaper La Jornada also reported that local health officials and residents found "clouds of flies" feeding on organic pig waste, carcasses and feces. Reportedly, Carroll Farms has been dumping organic pig waste out in the open, leaving it exposed for the flies to feed.

The swine flu has now been spreading to major cities in Mexico, the US and Canada. In Mexico, over 900 people are dead. Mexico City has begun to close down schools, churches, and libraries. The Mexican government is planning to vaccinate 500,000 people, although it is widely known that there is no vaccine for this latest strain of swine flu because it has not yet been produced.

http://www.gtnradio.com/Swine_One.html

[chiggerbit]

I'm not intending to jump to any conclusions by any means, but the following two quotes from a couple of the above articles are interesting when viewed together:

Smithfield also promotes the consumption of genetically-altered foods, and even owns certain genetic lines of pork breeding

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)