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Topic: RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare (Read 1408 times) |
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simul
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virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« on: 2005-10-23 22:09:53 » |
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There have been many epidemics throughout history. And there have been many vectors, from rats, mosquitos, birds and more. But the repeated slaughter of millions of birds in China is a strange phenomenon unique to 21st century global politics.
It occurred to the paranoid part of me that the repeated scares over avian flu could be, possibly, a preparation for biowarfare.
Desensitizing the masses, and preparing a well-known excuse - in case people start dying.
- Erik
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First, read Bruce Sterling's "Distraction", and then read http://electionmethods.org.
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MoEnzyme
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #1 on: 2005-10-23 21:13:29 » |
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If we are going into biowarfare, I want to go in with my eyes open
personally. While I recognize many reasons to feel paranoid about the
current US regime, I don't think this translates into global conspiracy
involving nations that would have no reason to side with US in such a game,
but can thankfully still be counted on to help in averting natural
disasters. pandemic scares are nothing new, and frequently enough even
credible. Not to mention all of the scientific community who have every
reason to distrust the anti-scientific agenda of the Bush administration.
While I can appreciate the causes for speculation, the larger motivations
don't seem to mesh with such a paranoid scenario.
-Jake
> [Original Message]
> From: Erik Aronesty <erik@zoneedit.com>
> To: Church of Virus <virus@lucifer.com>
> Date: 10/23/2005 3:21:26 PM
> Subject: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
>
>
> There have been many epidemics throughout history. And there have been
many vectors, from rats, mosquitos, birds and more. But the repeated
slaughter of millions of birds in China is a strange phenomenon unique to
21st century global politics.
>
> It occurred to the paranoid part of me that the repeated scares over
avian flu could be, possibly, a preparation for biowarfare.
>
> Desensitizing the masses, and preparing a well-known excuse - in case
people start dying.
>
> - Erik
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<http://www.lucifer.com/cgi-bin/virus-l>
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I will fight your gods for food,
Mo Enzyme
(consolidation of handles: Jake Sapiens; memelab; logicnazi; Loki; Every1Hz; and Shadow)
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #2 on: 2005-10-24 02:22:03 » |
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[Blunderov] Agree. WHO has been warning for quite sometime that pandemic
bird flu is very probable.
One of the consequences of global warming is the resurgence of old, and the
emergence of new, diseases. This is as a result of changing habitats and the
new dispositions that species make in response. It provides the bugs with
new niches to fill. I live, for instance, 6000 ft above sea level, but it is
expected that malaria may soon become a serious risk even here. And, as with
many other bugs, it is now a drug resistant variety - so much so that the
old-fashioned quinine remedy has re-emerged as the drug of choice in its
treatment and prevention.
Best Regards.
Jake S
Sent: 24 October 2005 03:13
If we are going into biowarfare, I want to go in with my eyes open
personally. While I recognize many reasons to feel paranoid about the
current US regime, I don't think this translates into global conspiracy
involving nations that would have no reason to side with US in such a game,
but can thankfully still be counted on to help in averting natural
disasters. pandemic scares are nothing new, and frequently enough even
credible. Not to mention all of the scientific community who have every
reason to distrust the anti-scientific agenda of the Bush administration.
While I can appreciate the causes for speculation, the larger motivations
don't seem to mesh with such a paranoid scenario.
-Jake
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #3 on: 2005-10-24 17:00:59 » |
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[Blunderov] Some reassurance from Stratfor.com. Much ado about nothing. So
far.
Best regards.
Special Report: The Bird Flu and You
Stratfor subscribers have been sending us a steady river of requests for our
opinion on the bird flu situation. Although we are not medical experts,
among our sources are those who are. And here is what we have been able to
conclude based on their input and our broader analysis of the bird flu
threat:
Calm down.
Now let us qualify that: Since December 2003, the H5N1 bird flu virus --
which has caused all the ruckus -- has been responsible for the documented
infection of 121 people, 91 one of whom caught the virus in Vietnam. In all
cases where information on the chain of infection has been confirmed, the
virus was transmitted either by repeated close contact with fowl or via the
ingestion of insufficiently cooked chicken products. In not a single case
has human-to-human communicability been confirmed. So long as that remains
the case, there is no bird flu threat to the human population of places such
as Vietnam at large, much less the United States.
The Politics of Genetics
An uncomfortable but undeniable fact is that there are a great many people
and institutions in this world that have a vested interest in feeding the
bird flu scare. Much like the "Y2K" bug that commanded public attention in
1999, bird flu is all you hear about. Comparisons to the 1918 Spanish
influenza have produced death toll projections in excess of 360 million,
evoking images of chaos in the streets.
One does not qualify for funding -- whether for academic research, medical
development or contingency studies -- by postulating about best-case
scenarios. The strategy is to show up front how bad things could get, and to
scare your targeted benefactors into having you study the problem and
manufacture solutions.
This hardly means that these people are evil, greedy or irresponsible
(although, in the case of Y2K or when a health threat shuts down
agricultural trade for years, one really tends to wonder). It simply means
that fear is an effective way to spark interest and action.
Current medical technology lacks the ability to cure -- or even reliably
vaccinate against -- highly mutable viral infections; the best available
medicines can only treat symptoms -- like Roche's Tamiflu, which is becoming
as scarce as the oftentimes legendary red mercury -- or slow a virus'
reproduction rate. Is more research needed? Certainly. But are we on the
brink of a cataclysmic outbreak? Certainly not.
A bird flu pandemic among the human population is broadly in the same
category as a meteor strike. Of course it will happen sooner or later -- and
when it does, watch out! But there is no -- absolutely no -- particular
reason to fear a global flu pandemic this flu season.
This does not mean the laws of nature have changed since 1918; it simply
means there is no way to predict when an animal virus will break into the
human population in any particular year -- or even if it will at all. Yes,
H5N1 does show a propensity to mutate; and, yes, sooner or later another
domesticated animal disease will cross over into the human population (most
common human diseases have such origins). But there is no scientifically
plausible reason to expect such a crossover to be imminent.
But if you are trying to find something to worry about, you should at least
worry about the right thing.
A virus can mutate in any host, and pound for pound, the mutations that are
of most interest to humanity are obviously those that occur within a human
host. That means that each person who catches H5N1 due to a close encounter
of the bird kind in effect becomes a sort of laboratory that could foster a
mutation and that could have characteristics that would allow H5N1 to be
communicable to other humans. Without such a specific mutation, bird flu is
a problem for turkeys, but not for the non-turkey farmers among us.
But we are talking about a grand total of 115 people catching the bug over
the course of the past three years. That does not exactly produce great odds
for a virus -- no matter how genetically mutable -- to evolve successfully
into a human-communicable strain. And bear in mind that the first-ever human
case of H5N1 was not in 2003 but in 1997. There is not anything
fundamentally new in this year's bird flu scare.
A more likely vector, therefore, would be for H5N1 to leap into a species of
animal that bears similarities to human immunology yet lives in quarters
close enough to encourage viral spread -- and lacks the capacity to complete
detailed questionnaires about family health history.
The most likely candidate is the pig. On many farms, birds and pigs
regularly intermingle, allowing for cross-infection, and similar pig-human
biology means that pigs serving in the role as mutation incubator are
statistically more likely than the odd Vietnamese raw-chicken eater to
generate a pandemic virus.
And once the virus mutates into a form that is pig-pig transferable, a human
pandemic is only one short mutation away. Put another way, a bird flu
pandemic among birds is manageable. A bird flu pandemic among pigs is not,
and is nearly guaranteed to become a human pandemic.
Pandemics: Past and Future
What precisely is a pandemic? The short version is that it is an epidemic
that is everywhere. Epidemics affect large numbers of people in a relatively
contained region. Pandemics are in effect the same, but without the
geographic limitations. In 1854 a cholera epidemic struck London. The
European settling of the Americas brought disease pandemics to the Native
Americans that nearly eliminated them as an ethnic classification.
In 1918 the influenza outbreak spread in two waves. The first hit in March,
and was only marginally more dangerous than the flu outbreaks of the
previous six years. But in the trenches of war-torn France, the virus
mutated into a new, more virulent strain that swept back across the world,
ultimately killing anywhere from 20 million to 100 million people. Some one
in four Americans became infected -- nearly all in one horrid month in
October, and some 550,000 -- about 0.5 percent of the total population --
succumbed. Playing that figure forward to today's population, theoretically
1.6 million Americans would die. Suddenly the fear makes a bit more sense,
right?
Wrong.
There are four major differences between the 1918 scenario and any new flu
pandemic development:
First -- and this one could actually make the death toll higher -- is the
virus itself.
No one knows how lethal H5N1 (or any animal pathogen) would be if it adapted
to human hosts. Not knowing that makes it impossible to reliably predict the
as-yet-unmutated virus' mortality rate.
At this point, the mortality rate among infected humans is running right at
about 50 percent, but that hardly means that is what it would look like if
the virus became human-to-human communicable. Remember, the virus needs to
mutate before it is a threat to humanity -- there is no reason to expect it
to mutate just once. Also, in general, the more communicable a disease
becomes the lower its mortality rate tends to be. A virus -- like all life
forms -- has a vested interest in not wiping out its host population.
One of the features that made the 1918 panic so unnerving is the "W" nature
of the mortality curve. For reasons unknown, the virus proved more effective
than most at killing people in the prime of their lives -- those in the 15-
to 44-year-old age brackets. While there is no reason to expect the next
pandemic virus to not have such a feature, similarly there is no reason to
expect the next pandemic virus to share that feature.
Second, 1918 was not exactly a "typical" year.
World War I, while coming to a close, was still raging. The war was unique
in that it was fought largely in trenches, among the least sanitary of human
habitats. Soldiers not only faced degrading health from their "quarters" in
wartime, but even when they were not fighting at the front they were living
in barracks. Such conditions ensured that they were: a) not in the best of
health, and b) constantly exposed to whatever airborne diseases afflicted
the rest of their unit.
As such, the military circumstances and style of the war ensured that
soldiers were not only extraordinarily susceptible to catching the flu, but
also extraordinarily susceptible to dying of it. Over half of U.S. war dead
in World War I -- some 65,000 men -- were the result not of combat but of
the flu pandemic.
And it should be no surprise that in 1918, circulation of military personnel
was the leading vector for infecting civilian populations the world over.
Nevertheless, while the United States is obviously involved in a war in
2005, it is not involved in anything close to trench warfare, and the total
percentage of the U.S. population involved in Iraq and Afghanistan -- 0.005
percent -- is middling compared to the 2.0 percent involvement in World War
I.
Third, health and nutrition levels have radically changed in the past 87
years. Though fears of obesity and insufficient school lunch nutrition are
all the rage in the media, no one would seriously postulate that overall
American health today is in worse shape than it was in 1918. The healthier a
person is going into a sickness, the better his or her chances are of
emerging from it. Sometimes it really is just that simple.
Indeed, a huge consideration in any modern-day pandemic is availability of
and access to medical care. Poorer people tend to live in closer quarters
and are more likely to have occupations (military, services, construction,
etc.) in which they regularly encounter large numbers of people. According
to a 1931 study of the 1918 flu pandemic by the U.S. Public Health Service,
the poor were about 20 percent to 30 percent more likely to contract the
flu, and overall mortality rates of the "well-to-do" were less than half
that of the "poor" and "very poor."
But the fourth factor, which will pull some of the strength out of any new
pandemic, is even more basic than starting health: antibiotics. The 1918
pandemic virus was similar to the more standard influenza virus in that the
majority of those who perished died not from the primary attack of the flu
but from secondary infections -- typically bacteria or fungal -- that
triggered pneumonia. While antibiotics are hardly a silver bullet and they
are useless against viruses, they raise the simple possibility of treatment
for bacterial or fungal illnesses. Penicillin -- the first commercialized
antibiotic -- was not discovered until 1929, 11 years too late to help when
panic gripped the world in 1918.
Send questions or comments on this article to analysis@stratfor.com
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Casey
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #4 on: 2005-10-25 07:19:13 » |
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Quote from: Blunderov on 2005-10-24 02:22:03
[Blunderov] Agree. WHO has been warning for quite sometime that pandemic
bird flu is very probable.
One of the consequences of global warming is the resurgence of old, and the
emergence of new, diseases. This is as a result of changing habitats and the
new dispositions that species make in response. It provides the bugs with
new niches to fill. I live, for instance, 6000 ft above sea level, but it is
expected that malaria may soon become a serious risk even here. And, as with
many other bugs, it is now a drug resistant variety - so much so that the
old-fashioned quinine remedy has re-emerged as the drug of choice in its
treatment and prevention.
Best Regards.
[Casey]
Quinine has re-emerged as the drug of choice? Hmmm.
Time to start drinking gin and tonics on a daily basis. 
Kind regards,
Casey |
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #5 on: 2005-10-25 12:56:53 » |
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[Blunderov] It seems to have worked well for the British Raj. That and
moving to Kashmir in the summer with, of course, plenty of G and T in
reserve - prevention being better than cure. Treacherous place, the tropics.
Chin Chin.
[Casey]
Quinine has re-emerged as the drug of choice? Hmmm.
Time to start drinking gin and tonics on a daily basis.
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Blunderov
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RE: virus: Preparing the world for clandestine biowarfare
« Reply #6 on: 2005-10-25 14:45:31 » |
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[Blunderov]Erik? Seems it may not be a conspiracy but just common or garden
corruption. Kudos for smelling a rat though.
(The decision to order $3.1 billion worth of Tamiflu seems a little
hysterical in the light of the Stratfor.com article that I posted
previously. Maybe some other intelligence was stove-piped into the system
instead. Just a guess.)
Best Regards.
http://www.sploid.com/news/2005/10/what_a_crazy_co.php
Bird Flu Scam: Donald H. Rumsfeld - Former Chairman of Gilead Sciences
Do you get it yet?
Foster City, CA, January 3, 1997 - Gilead Sciences Inc. (Nasdaq: GILD) today
announced that board member Donald H. Rumsfeld will assume the position of
Chairman, effective immediately. Mr. Rumsfeld succeeds Michael L. Riordan,
M.D., who founded Gilead in 1987 and has served as Chairman since 1993. Dr.
Riordan will continue to serve as a director on the board.
"Gilead is fortunate to have had Don Rumsfeld as a stalwart board member
since the company's earliest days, and we are very pleased that he has
accepted the Chairmanship," Dr. Riordan said. "He has played an important
role in helping to build and steer the company. His broad experience in
leadership positions in both industry and government will serve us well as
Gilead continues to build its commercial presence."
What a crazy coincidence! The Rumsfeld, bird flu connection
Rumsfeld used to run drug company that invented bird-flu medicine
Donald Rumsfeld, the guy who runs the Pentagon and its disastrous wars, had
an interesting job before joining the current Bush administration: He was
chairman of Gilead Sciences Inc., the drug company that invented Tamiflu,
the only medicine thought to be effective against the killer bird flu we're
told to expect here in the United States any day now.
Earlier this month, Bush outraged Americans on all (both) sides of the
political spectrum when he announced his intention to have the U.S. military
take over American cities hit by the avian flu. The move would put the
United States under martial law, which is illegal.
Rumsfeld owned significant shares of Gilead at least until 2002, when ethics
rules forced him to sell off $91 million worth of stocks.
The federal government has already put in a $3.1 billion order for Tamiflu.
Posted on October 24, 2005 at 03:48 PM
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