Wednesday, October 26, 2005

A little perspective on the avian flu panic

Some reasons not to bow down before the government as our saviour. See also my post of 24th.

Okay, by now we have all about had our fill of hearing about the impending “bird flu pandemic” that is going to destroy half the population if we don’t jump into line for vaccinations and allow our civil liberties to be entirely ignored (instead of just mostly, as has been the case for years now) as “martial law” is imposed around us. I am in no sense of the word an expert on this subject, although I’ve been writing news blurbs on this and related matters for several weeks now. But in the process I’ve encountered enough ambiguity on the topic to make me at least skeptical about the warnings and the pending proscriptions.....

* Thus far, the evidence of human-to-human transmission of the “avian flu” virus is both sparse and anecdotal. The vast majority of reports can be traced to chicken-farmers, regularly inhaling the infected air around their diseased flocks, and/or contracting the virus directly from handling the chickens. The few exceptions may not even be the same ailment, as it turns out. Meanwhile, the continued reports of “bird flu sightings” in other countries besides Southeast Asia turn out to be BIRDS showing some sortr of disease, not HUMANS diagnosed with the specific H5N1 virus that has everyone so concerned. In short, as one story (Human bird flu: “science fiction”) puts it, the whole thing (like so many anxieties) may be just another “debt that may never come due.”

* Meanwhile, the reports that keep circulating in the news are doing very little to clarify the fact that the outbreaks being reported around the world are in birds, not humans. When you see a headlline like the one in today’s papers, “Bird Flu Arrives In England,” take note of the fact that it is about a parrot, which was quarantined alongside birds of other species that already had the H5N1 virus. We already know this thing is deadly to birds, of a variety of species; we still have no reported cases of a human being, taken completely away from the infected birds, passing the disease to another human being, who had not already been exposed to a diseased bird!

* There is as yet no “vaccine” developed for the human strain – and there cannot be, at least until a “human strain” is detected, extracted, experimented on and then diluted, so a vaccine can be prepared from allegedly weakened and/or denatured cultures. (Meanwhile, CDC labs around the country are doing experiments to recreate the KNOWN deadly virus of the 1918 Spanish Influenza, with some misguided idea that they might be able to create a vaccine from that pathogen that would combat this one, while pharmaceutical companies seek a shield against potential lawsuits. We should be far more concerned about that full-strength disease being released, accidentally or otherwise, in the wake of the present hysteria.)

* Meanwhile, the history of influenza epidemics may hold more warnings about “vaccination programs” than about successful cures. The very concept of vaccination still requires that the first step be a virulent killer virus, from with you then make a denatured or weakened version. And if that particular killer virus does not exist, you have to create it! Does that really make sense in this case?

* There is also at least one theory that the problem behind nearly all systemic illness is the indiscriminate taking of aspirin to hold down a fever. The fever is treated as part of the illness, when it is in fact the body’s defense mechanism to fight it; if you suppress the fever at the wrong stage of recovery, all you do is allow a virus to propagate in peace, and then it comes back in fuller force. There’s even a rather long webpage that outlines the effects of widespread use of aspirin (for fever reduction) explaining how and why the 1918 Flu was so devastating, and how we might avoid a repeat, simply by letting the fever perform its proper role in healing.

More here

***************************

For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

Comments? Email me here. If there are no recent posts here, the mirror site may be more up to date. My Home Page is here or here.

***************************

No comments: