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The Path of a Pandemic

How one virus spread from pigs and birds to humans around the globe. And why microbes like the H1N1 flu have become a growing threat.

 
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Around Thanksgiving 2005 a teenage boy helped his brother-in-law butcher 31 pigs at a local Wisconsin slaughterhouse, and a week later the 17-year-old pinned down another pig while it was gutted. In the lead-up to the holidays the boy's family bought a chicken and kept the animal in their home, out of the harsh Sheboygan autumn. On Dec. 7, the teenager came down with the flu, suffering an illness that lasted three days. He visited a local clinic, then fully recovered, and nobody else in his family took ill.       

This incident would hardly seem worth mentioning except that the influenza virus that infected the Wisconsin lad was unlike any previously seen. It appeared to be a mosaic of a wild-bird form of flu, a human type and a strain found in pigs.

It was an H1N1 swine influenza. Largely ignored at the time, the Wisconsin virus was a step along the evolutionary tree, leading to a virus that four years later would stun the world.

Flash-forward to April 2009, and young Édgar Enrique Hernández in faraway La Gloria, Mexico, suffers a bout of flu, found to be caused by a similar mosaic of swine/bird/human flu, also H1N1. And thousands of miles away in Cairo, the Egyptian government decides pigs are the source of disease, and orders 300,000 animals in the predominantly Muslim (therefore not pork-consuming) society slaughtered.

Each of these three incidents is related to the unfolding influenza crisis. It is the manner of human beings to seek blame during times of fear. Fingers are now pointing, either at the entire pig species Sus domestica, or at the nation of Mexico. Such exercises in blame are not only scientifically ill founded, ut are likely to prompt government actions that, at the very least, are useless and, at worst, harmful for efforts to control a pandemic.

We live in a globalized world, filled with shared microbial threats that arise in one place, are amplified somewhere else through human activities that aid and abet the germs, and then traverse vast geographic terrains in days, even hours—again, thanks to human activities and movements. If there is blame to be meted out, it should be directed at the species Homo sapiens and the manifest ways in which we are reshaping the world ecology, offering germs like the influenza virus extraordinary new opportunities to evolve, mutate and spread.

Back in 2005, the Wisconsin Division of Public Health hunted for sick pigs in Sheboygan County, but the animals the teenager had helped slaughter came from multiple farms across the area, and every farmer claimed his herd was healthy. The Wisconsin authorities forwarded blood samples from the infected teenager and his family to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. The CDC scientists discovered that the H1N1 virus had pieces of its RNA genetic material that matched a human flu first seen in New Caledonia in 1999, two swine types that had been circulating in Asia and Wisconsin for several years and an unknown avian-flu virus.

In 2006 the American Association of Swine Veterinarians reported that humans were passing their H1N1 viruses to pigs, causing widespread illness in swine herds, especially in the American Midwest. A year later at a county fair in Ohio an outbreak occurred, sickening many of the pigs, but not their human handlers. The cause was a type of H1N1 that was a close match to the Wisconsin strain, and may have been spread from human to pig.

Last year researchers from Iowa State University in Ames warned that pigs located in industrial-scale farms were being subjected to influenza infections from farm poultry, wild birds and their human handlers. Writing in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, Eileen Thacker and Bruce Janke said, "As a result of the constantly changing genetic makeup of individual influenza viruses in pigs, the U.S. swine industry is continually scrambling to respond to the influenza viruses circulating within individual production systems."

Something was changing. Pigs notoriously eat just about anything thrown their way, and rub up against each other frequently, readily passing infections within herds. Their stomachs are remarkably tolerant environs for microbes, which since ancient times have caused illness in humans who dined on raw or undercooked pork. Investigation of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which is now estimated to have killed up to 100 million people worldwide in 18 months, revealed that the viral culprit was a type H1N1 human flu that had infected pigs, and then circulated back to humans.

At the viral level, influenza is an awfully sloppy microbe that is in a constant state of mutation and evolution. Its genetic material is in the form of RNA (not DNA, as in humans), loosely collected into chromosomes. When a virus infects a cell, its chromosomes essentially fall apart into a mess, which is copied to make more viruses that then enter the bloodstream to spread throughout the body. Along the way in this copying process any other genetic material that may be lying about the cell is also stuffed into the thousands of viral copies that are made. If the virus happens to be reproducing this way inside a human cell, it picks up Homo sapiensgenetic material; from a chicken cell it absorbs avian genes; and from a pig cell it garners swine RNA. The jackpot events in influenza evolution occur when two different types of flu viruses happen to get into an animal cell at the same time, swapping entire chromosomes to create "reassorted" viruses.

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Member Comments

  • Posted By: BOFORCE @ 08/04/2009 6:36:56 AM

    In the 1990s the UNO's World Health Organization launched a campaign to vaccinate millions of women in Nicaragua, Mexico and the Philippines between the ages of 15 and 45, allegedly against Tentanus. The vaccine was not given to men or boys!
    It was revealed by a Catholic organisation that the Tetanus vaccine contained human Chorionic Gonadotrophin or hCG, a natural hormone which when combined with a tetanus toxoid carrier stimulated antibodies rendering a woman incapable of maintaining a pregnancy. None of the women vaccinated were told.It later came out that the Rockefeller Foundation along with the Rockefeller Population Council , the World Bank and the United States National Institutes of Health had been involved. In addition, the Government of Norway, the host to the Svalbard Doomsday Seed Vault , donated $41 million to develop the special abortive Tetanus vaccine.
    The WHO now recomended that pharmaceutical companies make swine flu vaccine.The U.S. government has already increased the availability of flu-fighting medicines and authorized $1 billion for developing a new swine flu vaccine. There is big money in this and big opportunities to promote the WHO to be the health ministry of the New World order UN-government! The Council on Foreign Relations 12 June 2009: "What now kicks in is a greater sense of urgency for the pharmaceutical industry," says CFR Senior Fellow for Global Health Laurie Garrett
    "Now that pandemic has been declared, more and more countries will guarantee that they will purchase vaccine if it is available, and WHO and World Bank will guarantee to purchase for the poorest countries in the world."
    The Irish Times 13 June 2009: It would cost about 80 million Euros to purchase a vaccine against the swine flu.
    It had long been predicted that the WHO would declare the swine flu to be a level-six pandemic!!

  • Posted By: BOFORCE @ 08/04/2009 6:36:20 AM

    Swine flu vaccine contains squalene oil as an adjuvant.Squaline contributed to the cascade of reactions called Gulf War syndrome. GIs developed arthritis, fibromyalgia, lymphadenopathy, rashes, photosensitive rashes, malar rashes, chronic fatigue, chronic headaches, abnormal body hair loss, non-healing skin lesions, aphthous ulcers, dizziness, weakness, memory loss, seizures, mood changes, neuropsychiatric problems, anti-thyroid effects, anaemia, elevated ESR (erythrocyte sedimentation rate), systemic lupus erythematosus, multiple sclerosis, deadly Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Raynaud's phenomenon with paroxysms of lack of blood in fingers and toes in fingers and toes, Sjorgren's syndrome with blurred vision, chronic diarrhea, night sweats and low-grade fever.
    Dangerous side effects of flu vaccinations due to vaccine adjuvant squalene:
    Imunologist Dr. Pamela Asa first recognized autoimmune diseases showing up in GIs that mirrored those in lab animals injected with oil formulated squalene adjuvants.
    Squalene adjuvants are a key ingredient in a whole new generation of vaccines intended for mass immunization around the globe. Squalene is not just a molecule found in a knee or elbow - it is found throughout the nervous system and the brain.When injected in the body, the immune system attacks it as an enemy to be eliminated. Eating and digesting squalene isn't a problem. But injecting it galvanize(s) the immune system into attacking it, which can produce self-destructive cross reactions against the same molecule in the places where it occurs naturally in the body - and where it is critical to the health of the nervous system.Once self-destruction begins, it doesn't stop as the body keeps making the molecule that the immune system is trained to attack and destroy.
    Squalene is a kind of trigger for (a) real biological weapon, what Soviet researchers called a biological time bomb.
    Now the WHO hype is aimed at provoking mass hysteria over a non existing threat to humanity: Swine flu, a much milder A flu than seasonal flu. Such politically created hoax will probably be associated with mandatory mass vaccinations for no medical reason but for the enormous profits of the New World order corporations and their scientists - as well as for global/political reasons.
    The vaccine carries a risk of very serious complications. Firstly we remember the Bayer´s contaminations of products for hemophiliacs with AIDS virus and this year Baxter´s contamination of seasonal flu vaccine with deadly bird flu virus.
    However, there is also a very serious problem with the adjuvant of the vaccine: the oil squalene, which is said to have caused the Gulf Syndrome.
    Is there a connection to the illuminist and self-conceited world elite´s depopulation programme in their bid for their own luciferian godhood?

  • Posted By: BOFORCE @ 08/04/2009 6:14:51 AM

    The best protection against any flu...finely chop a clove of a garlic clove and leave it for 5 to 10 minutes in the air for the formation of allicin and then swallow it with water......do this ritual once every day after meal.........don't go for swine flu vaccination....that is Kissinger/Bilderberger/Illuminatis wolrd depopulation programme......RRMEMBER THE SWINE FLU VACCINE WILL EITHER SLOWLY KILL YOU OR MAKE YOUR CHIILDERN IMPOTENT....To control the world economic recessions the f*u*c*k*iing illuminatis want to depopulate the world....Aids virus..Bird flu virus and Swine flu virus are all created in the labs and purposely unleashed.....DON'T GO FOR SWINE FLU VACCINATION....ans this is not a CONSPIRACY THEORY......The poof ....soon you will be forced to mendatory vaccination.

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