Pandemic Unfolding

“Health authorities have been anticipating an influenza pandemic for many years. On June 11, it officially arrived…”. So begins this document from the Association of Public Health Laboratories (APHL). http://www.aphl.org/AboutAPHL/publications/Pages/LMFeatSummer2009.aspx . According to one of their spokesmen, Pete Shult, “..we’ve been off to the races ever since.” “Said Shult, if H1N1 had emerged a year ago, ‘we would have been in a bad place’…The deputy director of the CDC‘s Influenza Division, Dan Jernigan, echoed that thought saying, ‘The timing could not have been any luckier’.”

Lucky? This is the same kind of luck that saw September 11th have trained FEMA personnel on the ground in New York City on September 10th. “In mid-April, just as the H1N1 outbreak was beginning to emerge, the APHL/CDC National Laboratory Training Network (NLTN) hosted two courses for 37 scientists on influenza detection and subtyping using the CDC assay. (Another 42 scientists attended an earlier NLTN training in May 2008)…The first diagnosis of novel H1N1 came as a fluke. A 10-year-old boy with a fever and cough presented at the Naval Health Research Center in San Diego on March 30…the Naval Research Center is one of [only] four sites participating in a clinical trial for another CDC flu test, this one intended for rapid point-of-care use…” The CDC’s Dr. Lindstrom also said, “We were lucky..to be in a position to mobilize and to act so quickly and so effectively.”

As it turns out “the CDC had the only lab in the US –and one of only two or three in the world– capable of making that determination”, the determination being a positive identification of an “unsubtypable”  H1N1 swine flu virus. “That meant public health labs across the country were sending all unsubtypable Influenza A specimens directly to Lindstrom and his colleagues in the CDC Influenza Division. They received thousands in a matter of days”… “On April 15, CDC scientists identified the virus as swine-origin H1N1 –an unusual finding, but certainly not alarming. Just two days later, however, the scientists had in hand a second specimen –from a nine-year-old girl also treated at the Naval Research Center– that proved to harbor an identical virus. That was jarring.”…”It took six days to solve the epidemiologic mystery: on April 23, the CDC identified the novel H1N1 virus –then confirmed in two Texas teenagers as well– as the same bug wreaking havoc across the border in Mexico…The US government declared the outbreak a public health emergency April 26. By April 27, 40 US cases were confirmed.”

But this is where things get sticky. The CDC had the only existing test, equipment, and training program to evaluate whether or not a ‘novel swine flu’ was circulating prior to the outbreak. How good is the test? How good is the equipment? What was the real state of preparedness, communication and training? The article states, “For several years, APHL and partners have been working on a project to equip all state laboratories with multi-directional data exchange capabilities with CDC laboratories and local partners. So far, however,[in this post-first wave] only four state laboratories have the ability to send electronic influenza test results to the CDC and 11 are scheduled to be live by the fall 2009 flu season…”. In fact, the public health labs were not prepared despite the planning and funding underway since 2005. For the most part, they lacked the special test, the rRT-PCR Flu Panel, which had to be adapted for use in ‘novel’ virus detection and they lacked the machine and software made by Applied Biosystems which is the only qualifying and certified equipment available for this ‘complexity’ of gene detection. On top of that, another CDC spokesman, Rubin Donis, would say that swine influenza viruses nearly identical to the pandemic strain had been seen at the CDC since 1998 — “an unusual finding” states this APHL website. How so??

The implications of this document suggest that the pandemic in progress is a large conspiracy in the making begging analysis, unless you believe that skin-of-the-teeth “luck” in marginal readiness to deal with “a virus that waited” is a valid scenario. The many aspects of this new global disaster are harmoniously synchronous. Applied Biosystems, which makes the test, the equipment, and the software to evaluate it is the California-based leader of the Human Genome Project. The controversy of PCR testing is that it is no more accurate or reliable than the previously used antibody tests to diagnose HIV, a theoretically best-case scenario of testing that would be minimally wrong half the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Applied_Biosystems

In short, there is nothing I’d rather do than unravel this story…stay tuned for additions to this article…

BACKGROUND

Avian flu
The first recognized human influenza comes from Italy in 1878 of avian origin, acknowledged as an intestinal agent in bird populations.

Swine flu
In this science publication of 1938, www.jem.org/cgi/reprint/67/5/739.pdf, Rockefeller’s journal, “Elkeles (1) and Shope and Francis (2) demonstrated that swine could be infected experimentally with human influenza virus (3). The disease resulting was extremely mild and was similar clinically and at autopsy to that observed in swine infected with swine influenza virus alone (4). When small amounts of a culture of Hemophilus influenzae suis (5) were administered with the human virus, a more prostrating febrile illness, similar to true swine influenza although never so severe, usually resulted. Furthermore, the disease induced in swine by the human influenza virus could be transmitted only rarely to normal swine by exposure (2), whereas swine influenza is highly contagious (6). Because of this, the opinion was expressed that it seemed unlikely that the current human influenza virus could become established in swine under field conditions…Within the past year, however, two swine herds that have been under study have furnished evidence to indicate that this opinion may have at least partially been wrong…in these two herds, infection with human influenza virus actually occurred under field conditions as they prevail on eastern farms”….
–from Bordentown, May 24, 1937, autopsy findings were those of “hog cholera”

In other words, the bacterium ‘Hemophilus influenzae suis’ was given a human virus (bacteriophage) in 1937 which ‘naturally’ infected swine, producing a serious illness which makes it a certainty that ever since, it’s been possible to easily ‘share’ cross-species influenza incorporating swine-avian-human genes.

ANTIBODIES

Dr. Francis, noted above, is Thomas Francis Jr., mentor, research partner of Jonas Salk, Yale graduate, and by 1941, the dean of the University of Michigan School of Public Health. Francis and Salk recreated the experimental vaccine trials for influenza A done in Australia by Frank Macfarlane Burnet, as commissioned US Army officers. The results of their trials on institutionalized men in late 1942 revealed that “antibody rises can occur in the absence of any clinical evidence of infection” and that “the present data emphasize again that clinical infection does not always evoke measurable changes in concentration of serum antibody”. p.542, http://www.jci.org/articles/view/101633

The HIV situation using antibody (and PCR) tests is written about in this article by Valender Turner, from Australia (latest references given appear as 1992) which reveal that the ‘antibody’ issue is still confused. http://www.virusmyth.com/aids/hiv/vttests.htm and gives the hypothetical statistics for a best-case viral test based on antibodies in which half of the ‘positive’ tests will be wrong with a test rated for 99.9% “specificity”. Turner writes, “there is ample evidence, some of the best in fact comes from the Pasteur Institute, that antibody molecules, even the most pure, the monoclonal antibodies, are not monospecific and cross-react with other, non-immunizing antigens…What all this means is that you’re not necessarily infected with what your antibodies appear to tell you…You don’t see antibodies with labels attached saying what produced them…There is no proof of the HIV antibody tests for HIV infection.”…”I hear some ask, what about the polymerase chain reaction or PCR? For those who don’t know, this is a new and sensitive technique for finding genetic blueprints. Surely this can put us straight about the antibody tests? Not so I’m afraid. To perform the PCR you need to begin with a piece of RNA or DNA which you can say for certain belongs to a [particular] genome. To obtain the [genome] first you need to isolate [a] particle…For a start, at best, the PCR detects single genes and most often, only bits of genes. If your PCR finds two or three genetic fragments out of a possible dozen complete genes is this proof that you have all the genes? The whole genome? No, it is not..”. The track record for HIV detection with PCR, according to Turner’s references, showed that the test “was especially poor when fragments of more than one gene were sought.”

SAN DIEGO
The new pandemic situation saw the “first” US cases occur in two children from San Diego, home of the US Navy, Marines, the Salk and Scripps Institutes, and the University of California with its attendent research partners. The story of polio highlights the importance and centrality of the Salk/Scripps/UCSD complex in covert bioweaponry and today many tens of thousands of patients are routinely treated through its clinical practice (Scripps alone comprises 4 large acute-care hospitals and 13 clinics with 11,000 medical employees). America’s nuclear arsenal was developed with the management of the University of California, its mothership institution at Berkeley.
   The makers of the current swine flu testing apparatus, Applied Biosystems (or Perkin-Elmer Corp.), originally from the San Francisco Bay Area near Berkeley, merged in 2008 with a San Diego area company called Invitrogen. The merged offspring now calls itself “Life Technologies”. http://www.dddmag.com/news-invitrogen-applied-biosystems-merger-update.aspx , http://www.answers.com/topic/invitrogen-corporation, and to further add to the high-powered environment of genomic research in San Diego, Applied Biosystems’ leading light, J. Craig Venter of Human Genome Project fame, has also established the J. Craig Venter Institute in the heart of the SD biotech complex. http://www.reuters.com/article/pressRelease/idUS182641+26-Jun-2008+PRN20080626

U.S. NAVY

The Naval Health Research Center in San Diego “serves as the Navy hub for the US Department of Defense Global Emerging Infectious Disease Surveillance and Response System” or GEIS as it’s called. This page highlights the ongoing research http://www.med.navy.mil/sites/nhrc/geis/Pages/ResearchProjects.aspx and addresses the medical diagnostic capabilities of DoD (without technical detail) however, mentions under ‘lab capabilities’ a full PCR analysis available for influenza A/B subtyping, extended to “onboard” facilities.

The Navy surveillance regarding “US-Mexico Border Population” describes “This collaboration with CDC and San Diego public health gives NHRC access to FRI (febrile respiratory illness) specimens from a population very different than we usually see in terms of age and vaccination status. Since 2003 this program has identified a large number of influenza cases that are rapidly reported to collaborators and border clinics”. Currently the Navy states “Our CDC-BIDS collaborative border FRI surveillance program has resumed a 5 US-Mexico border clinics in San Ysidro, Calexico, Brawley, Tijuana, and Mexicali. The first identified case of influenza A/H1N1v in humans was identified in this population.”

SMITHFIELD FOODS

According to http://m.huffingtonpost.com/blogs/8330/full/ “The problems began in early March when neighbors of the hog CAFO (confined animal feeding operation) became sick with colds and flu that quickly turned into lung infections…”. Reports released into the world-wide media focused on La Gloria, Mexico, the Smithfield Foods hog farm, and identified a Patient Zero as a local 5-yr-old http://www.aztlan.net/swine_flu_origins.htm. Smithfield was getting large media attention for its exploitive operations years earlier when the “coming flu pandemic” was hotting up. Rolling Stone magazine ran this story in 2006, http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12840743/porks_dirty_secret_the_nations_top_hog_producer_is_also_one_of_americas_worst_polluters.

La Gloria residents had a sickening winter that started in the “flu season” window of December 2008. By February, local demands and health authorities were urging Smithfield to clean up their act. The response was a fumigation and vaccination campaign that included the interior of people’s homes –ripe conditions for very severe illness to develop virtually guaranteeing a hotspot for emerging disease– and at the least provoking highly plausible speculation as the source of a new swine flu. Accordingly, the Smithfield hogs were vaccinated too; “special” hybrid hogs on which Smithfield built up its “Virginia Ham” business from a Royal British breeding program (source of the European-Asian swine genes identified as ‘novel’?) procured back in the 1920s.

A look at Smithfield’s Board of Directors and their cross-directorships clearly identifies them as global players.
**Frank S. Royal, MD –president of Sun Trust Banks (partner to Inficorp, tied to First Nat’l of Omaha) and board member of Dominion Resources (energy/nuclear, #19 on the Top 100 polluters list)
**John T. Schweiters –board of Choice Hotels Int’l (subsidiary HCR Manor Care, nursing homes, owned by Carlyle Group) and *Danaher (which just (begun in 2008) bought out the medical instrument division of guess who?? –Applied Biosystems/Life Technologies) http://www.manufacturing.net/News-Danaher-Buys-MDS-Division-For-1-1-Billion-090209.aspx?menuid=38
**Ray A. Goldberg –called the “Father of Agribusiness”, chairs the World Bank Agricultural Development Advisory Panel and promotes ‘agriceuticals’ as the “most important economic event of our lifetime”
**David C. Nelson –portfolio manager, formerly with Credit Suisse, for Altima One World Agriculture Fund
….and the list goes on for this “family-owned” company by the Joseph W. Luter family (#s I, II, III, and the sitting chairman, Joseph W. Luter IV)

*DANAHER (owner of the Applied Biosystems equipment, exclusively used in CDC ‘novel H1N1’ detection) are also:

 “…. principal owners of Colfax, Steven and Mitchell Rales, through their better known enterprise, Danaher Corporation. Steven and Mitchell Rales grew up in a close-knit, entrepreneurial family in Bethesda, Maryland. Their father, Norman, lived a rags-to-riches story, growing up in New York, an orphan who lost the rest of his family in the Holocaust. He made his fortune in real estate in Washington, D.C., and was involved in a myriad of other ventures, buying and selling interests in such businesses as the Texas Rangers baseball team, a Maryland bank, and various home improvement and building materials companies.”

http://www.answers.com/topic/colfax-corporation

Colfax makes special pumps for navy, marine, oil/gas, and nuclear applications, also owns the National Wrecking Company, www.nationalwrecking.com/ which can remove your unwanted skyscraper

 

THE CDC and The First Wave

 

Quote from Dr. Ruben Donis, http://www.virology.ws/2009/05/01/swine-influenza-amexico2009-h1n1-update-2/ regarding over 300 samples sent to the CDC collected from Mexico in the first weeks of the outbreak:

“Conspicuously missing are sequences from Mexican isolates. In a Science Magazine interview, Ruben Donis, Chief of the molecular virology and vaccines branch at CDC, indicated that strains from Mexico and elsewhere are “very, very similar. Many genes are identical. In the eight or nine viruses we’ve sequenced, there is nothing different.” It’s still not clear why these sequences have not been released; clearly the work has been done. In any case, his statement confirms what we have suspected from examining other isolates, that the Mexican strains are not sufficiently different to explain their apparent higher pathogenicity.” 

In this news report, from ABC, http://abcnews.go.com/Health/SwineFlu/story?id=7456439&page=1, (page 6) released on April 29, “Mexico’s first suspected case of the swine flu was detected in the remote farming village of La Gloria where 5-year-old Edgar Hernandez contracted the disease nearly one month ago….But Dr. Nancy Cox of the CDC has said she believes the earliest onset of swine flu in the United States in this current outbreak happened March 28.”

SO FAR IN REVIEW…..

In several months of ‘testing’ samples, there is no further information to indicate another Patient Zero beyond the appearance of the 3 (?) potential “first case” victims of new swine flu, at best erupting simultaneously in more than one location. Every ranking pandemic of the past that the U.S. authorities have paraded in front of us has furnished history with a “first case”. The Spanish Flu of 1918 has one and the 1976 Swine Flu has one too (both Army inductees). AIDS/HIV had its French airline steward. Ignition of a global pandemic, by our ‘credibility standards’ today, would require maintaining the illusion that a highly contagious illness has a definitive Ground Zero in the form of time/place/person and that the authorities have the resources and means to identify and track the spread of that illness from its source. But even this illusion is failing.

Specimens collected from Mexico during April (approx 26,000) showed a positive result for novel H1N1 in 21.2% of the sampled population, broken down by age at this CDC website http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm5821a2.htm. Statistics reveal:
41.9 % of (+) patients were aged 15 years
32.3 %…aged 15-29 years [a 15-yr spread]
23.7 %…aged 30-59 years [a 20-yr spread]
02.1 %…aged 60

Despite the uneveness of this breakdown, in a group of approx. 5000 persons, there is a hint of steady and measureable increase in the presence of the mixed-gene virus as the younger generations are presenting. An explanation for that may be surmized from articles that I posted last month called “Mutation” quoting a document issued by Joshua Lederberg in the 1950s, and “Influenza special”.  My suggestion to readers was to consider the “bacterial population” discussed in the Lederberg document be applied to the human population:
“One would reasonably expect that a gene mutation would require a period of time to work its effects…The forces that determine which genetic types will predominate in [bacterial] cultures are the subject of population dynamics. In diploid sexual organisms, population genetics is complicated by recombination and by the concealment of genetic variation…”. Influenza genes demonstrated the highest “lysogenic” (gene transfer) properties among experimental viruses.
The sponsors of our pandemic are the leaders of the Human Genome Project….now what do you suppose is really going on? 

We’ve had a bacterium (Hemophilus influenzae) carrying a human virus, inserted by Rockefeller payroll scientists in 1937, infecting North American swine and spreading “in the field” and likewise into the human genome since that time. In medical terms, the ‘birth cohort’ of 60-year-olds (born 1949) showed only a 2% rate of “infection”. Neither an antibody or PCR test has real value in verifying “clinical infection”, so its other purpose must simply be to type the general population. As the APHL document reflects, in a pandemic situation the testing of individual samples is abandoned. The First Wave was designed to construct a statistical model –it nearly broke the U.S. public-laboratory system to obtain it but a model was provided nonetheless. As the Second Wave gears up, it appears that vaccination strategy will be based on this model. Reports have already alerted us to the fact that there are “different vaccines for different people”, largely determined by age-group.

Further comment on the recommendation to professionals on the use of the rRT-PCR at this website, http://www.dshs.state.tx.us/swineflu/lab-factsheet-hcp.shtm is that “…should false positive results occur, risks to patients could include a recommendation for quarantine of household or other close contacts, a recommendation for patient isolation…..Negative results do not preclude influenza virus infection and should not be used as the sole basis for treatment or other patient management decisions…A negative rRT-PCR test should not be interpreted as demonstrating that the patient does not have swine influenza virus infection”. 

And finally, to end this article and let the real analysis begin…
Poster, Dean, has added to the comments, “We are entering the second wave out of an expected four…”. I’ll grant you four waves, Dean, but propose that this new phase is the fourth. The original first wave began when Gerald Ford and Nelson Rockefeller, both ‘appointees’ to office, perpetuated the swine flu of 1976 at the behest of their handlers. The second wave was initiated in 1998 as a propaganda campaign, inclusive of SARS and the subsequent spread of H5N1 Bird Flu –complicated. The third wave just passed –a success!…and now, for the fourth –closure.