Is This The Long Awaited Pandemic?

[David Guyatt]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8034991.stm

US navy halts aid vessel over flu
The US navy is postponing an aid mission to the South Pacific after a sailor on the vessel scheduled to take the trip developed swine flu.

Nearly 50 others sailors on the California-based USS Dubuque also showed symptoms of the new H1N1 virus.

A US Navy spokesman said officials would be looking at other alternatives to meet the mission's objectives.

Earlier, a woman from Texas become the first US resident believed to have died from swine flu.

The woman - from Cameron County, close to the US border with Mexico - died earlier this week, the Texas Department of State Health Services (DSHS) said.

CONFIRMED CASES
Mexico: 101 suspected deaths - 29 confirmed; 840 confirmed cases
US: Two deaths, 403 confirmed cases
Canada: 140 confirmed cases
Spain: 57 confirmed cases
UK: 27 confirmed cases
But in a statement it added that she had been suffering "chronic underlying health conditions".

Lt Cmdr John Daniels said the navy was using "using prudent judgment" in cancelling the deployment of the USS Dubuque.

The amphibious transport vessel normally carries more than 400 crew and about 900 Marines.

It had been due to depart in early June for Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Tonga, Kiribati and the Marshall Islands as part of America's Pacific Partnership humanitarian programme.

Lt Daniels said the mission would still go ahead at some point but the USS Dubuque would no longer be part of it.

Navy Lt Sean Robertson said ill crew members had been treated with anti-viral medication and the remaining crew had been given prophylaxis.

'Catching up'

The unnamed woman who died in Texas was in her 30s and had recently given birth, reported Associated Press news agency.

Leonel Lopez, Cameron County epidemiologist said the flu itself was "very benign" but had exacerbated her underlying medical problems.

The woman becomes the second confirmed person to have died from swine flu outside Mexico. A Mexican toddler died of the virus in the US in April.

There are 61 confirmed cases of H1N1 flu reported in Texas, said the DSHS.

The World Health Organization (WHO) said earlier that 1,490 swine flu cases had been verified in 21 countries.

After Mexico, the US has seen the greatest number of laboratory-confirmed infections, at 403.

US Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius acknowledged that the virus would continue to spread in the United States and elsewhere in the world, and more deaths would follow.

The WHO has urged nations to remain vigilant in spite of the apparently relatively mild nature of swine flu, saying a global pandemic remains a threat.

It points out that the number of infections has continued to grow worldwide.

[Magda Hassan]

http://www.russiatoday.com/Top_News/2009...-made.html

Wayne Madsen, an American investigative journalist, who claims that swine flu strains have been engineered in two universities in the US and Canada, says they've been deliberately designed to resist vaccines.

Wayne Madsen also says that his so-called “nightmare scenario”, in which swine flu could mutate with bird flu, has been suppressed by the World Health Organisation for political reasons.
“These would increase sales for new vaccines manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry,” Madsen said.

[Peter Lemkin]

There were reports on the BBC that over 1 million Americans have contracted the disease, which has a low death rate...but I wonder what esle it can do 'silently'......

[Jan Klimkowski]

100,000 swine flu cases a day in the UK by the end of August, so the authorities aren't going to bother counting....

As Corporal Jones in Dad's Army would say: "Don't panic!"

UK swine flu can no longer be contained

Government moves to 'treatment phase' as health secretary says infection rate could reach 100,000 a day by end of August

David Batty and Severin Carrell guardian.co.uk, Thursday 2 July 2009 15.40 BST Article history

Swine flu is spreading so rapidly across Britain that there could be 100,000 new cases a day by the end of next month, the health secretary, Andy Burnham, said today.

The UK would immediately move to the "treatment phase" of its plan to combat swine flu, meaning doctors would no longer test for the H1N1 virus and urge anyone with symptoms to stay at home, Burnham told the House of Commons.

The first swine flu vaccine would be made available from August, with 60m doses available by the end of the year, he added.

"We have reached the next stage in management of the disease," Burnham said. "The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. We will move to this treatment phase across the UK with immediate effect."

The move does not mean the H1N1 virus, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation last month, is becoming more deadly, just that it can no longer be contained.

Burnham said there was a "considerable rise" in swine flu cases last week.

"We have always known it would be impossible to contain the virus indefinitely and at some point we would need to move away from containment to treatment.

"Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August.

"The pressure on the system is such that it is the right time to take this step. Scientists can expect to see rapid rises in the number of cases."

Burnham added that the public should be reassured by the steps being taken to tackle the virus. He said: "We are the only country in the world to be able to offer anti-virals to everyone as well as those at greater risk."

The government's chief medical officer, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, said the production of a vaccine was "at an advanced stage" and denied that the outbreak was out of control.

Speaking at a special briefing at the Department of Health, he said: "We are continuing to take a very firm grip on this situation. We have a big stockpile of anti-virals, the biggest probably in the world. We have vaccine at an advance stage of production."

Donaldson added that despite its rapid spread, the virus outbreak was "following a predictable path".

The Health Protection Agency said a further 458 patients in England had been confirmed with swine flu, while the figure for the UK as a whole rose to 7,447.

Efforts to trace people who had been in contact with swine flu cases would now stop and schools no longer needed to close when hit by the virus, unless particular circumstances made it necessary.

The government has said that not everybody with swine flu would receive anti-viral drugs, which may be reserved for at-risk groups.

The daily collation of swine flu cases would also end because it was proving time-consuming. Instead, "more general" estimates of numbers would be given. Other affected countries already update their swine flu numbers less frequently, such as weekly or every other day.

The Scottish health secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, announced a similar shift in swine flu policy at a simultaneous briefing in Edinburgh.

She said: "We've always said it would be impossible to limit the spread of what is a contagious virus indefinitely.

"We've always said that, when it did start to spread more widely within communities, we would require to make a judgment about when to shift efforts from intense containment to treatment, or mitigation."

Sturgeon, who is also the deputy first minister of Scotland, said "high-risk" groups such as children under five, pregnant women and the elderly would get priority access to medication.

Scotland's chief medical officer, Harry Burns, said the country could expect to have a tenth of the UK cases of swine flu. He predicted there would be about 10,000 new cases a day in Scotland by August.

He said: "It could be a bit less, it could be a bit more. It also presupposes that there isn't a downturn, if it continues to rise at this rate, and it's doubling approximately every week, you can do the sums yourself."

However, Scottish health officials said the swine flu infection rate may have already peaked, as the number of new cases in three hotspots in the greater Glasgow area appears to be in decline.

After infection rates peaked at 111 confirmed cases on 25 June, with Scotland experiencing the first two swine flu deaths in Europe, the rate has remained steady at about 60 new cases a day over the last week.

The rapid spread in two of the major hotspots – Dunoon in Argyll and Paisley south of Glasgow – now appears to have stopped and cases have begun to decline sharply.

The official statistics on the virus were likely to underestimate the true scale of infection in the UK because now only a sample of patients in the hotspots had a diagnosis of swine flu confirmed by lab tests. Many people were thought to have such mild symptoms that they were not bothering to contact their doctors while others were being treated in surgeries without being regarded as suspected swine flu cases.

In swine flu hotspots such as London, the West Midlands and parts of Scotland diagnosis of the virus was already being done by doctors rather than laboratory testing, and tracing the contacts of people with swine flu and the use of preventative anti-viral drugs had stopped. Anti-viral drugs were still being offered to all people with symptoms.

Although a bout of swine flu was currently causing less serious illness than traditional seasonal flu, three people with other serious health conditions in the UK have died after catching the virus and there are concerns it could mutate into a more virulent form.

The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has warned that there may be tens of thousands of cases each week this autumn, because the virus is more likely to thrive in a colder climate.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul...ine-flu-uk

[Peter Lemkin]

Scary reading....http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14543

[Dawn Meredith]

Scary reading....http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14543

Peter: These articles are all over facebook. Very scary indeed. I have noticed that many are from this same source "global research". What do we know about them?

I have seen studies also that the vaccine is killing many and yes many articles that it will be FORCED on us via the military. Yet many are just "yawn"....I cannot IMAGINE what it will take to wake people up. I guess when relatives ARE dragged off to FEMA camps...of course then it will be far too late. Seems like it already is. Terrifying times.

And that is why I DO watch tv at bedtime...need to calm down via movies and the like. (Helps a lot with insomnia)

Dawn

[Magda Hassan]

Scary reading....http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?c...&aid=14543

Peter: These articles are all over facebook. Very scary indeed. I have noticed that many are from this same source "global research". What do we know about them?

I have seen studies also that the vaccine is killing many and yes many articles that it will be FORCED on us via the military. Yet many are just "yawn"....I cannot IMAGINE what it will take to wake people up. I guess when relatives ARE dragged off to FEMA camps...of course then it will be far too late. Seems like it already is. Terrifying times.

And that is why I DO watch tv at bedtime...need to calm down via movies and the like. (Helps a lot with insomnia)

Dawn

Global Reseach is a very good site set up by Michel Chossudovsky in Canada. He is a political economist if I recall and has done a lot of work into globalization. Check out his site. There is tons of really informative articles and writers and researchers there http://www.globalresearch.ca/
Definitely a gold mine with some very rich seams.

[Peter Presland]

Dawn

I will corroborate Magda's post on Global Research. The site is among my top half a dozen or so for solid analysis of geo-political issues and one of very few that I make a financial contribution to. There are so many good authors contributing that its probably unfair - and unbalancing - to single out a couple, but Michael Chussodovsky (Site owner) and Rick Rozoff on NATO and the US Military spring readilly to mind. MC's 'America's War on Terrorism' and 'The Globalization of Poverty & The New World Order' are seminal works on their subjects IMHO. The site has no advertising (other than for its contributors books) which is a BIG bonus.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Thirded.

Prof Chossudovsky has undertaken much important and ground-breaking research into the destruction of the former Yugoslavia by NATO and proxies.

The quality of work on Global Research is generally very good, although we all need to use our critical faculties on everything we read or view.

The linked article is by Michel Chossudovsky himself, and contains much sourced material. It makes the extreme case for swine flu being a trojan horse to enable the ruling elites to retain power.

In my judgement, the article deserves to be read carefully and critically. It also deserves to be borne in mind as the "swine flu pandemic" develops over the coming weeks and months.

[Ed Jewett]

Need that fourth for whist?

I've been reading the Global Research web site for a long time now because, for the most part, it covers issues and says things in a way that mainstream media in American won't. It often "covers" articles that are found on non-mainstream web sites, and looks under the rocks where many will not peer.

"[T]he extreme case for swine flu being a trojan horse to enable the ruling elites to retain power" has been and is being made in many places. Given what I know of strategy, I look at the swine flu thing as being simply another "arrow in the quiver" of a range of tools that have been developed by the military/intel under-world, along with other bio-warfare, disinformation, COINTELPRO, cyberwarfare, the injection of economic chaos, Continuity of Government plans, massive surveillance, neuro-biological and psycho-pharmacological weaponry, the old MK-Ultra-type tools, advancing attacks on civil liberties and the Constitution, and some I haven't named or thought of, and some they haven't developed yet or which are still in the pipeline. Based on what can be ascertained in their use of simulations as well as drills and exercises, and the availability of sophisticated tools for them, even they don't know which tactic they will yet use at any given time.

But the swine flu as a trojan horse is a real possibility because they can do it, they have done it, and all the precursor set-ups (legislation, media conditioning, false flag covers, computer tools, simulations and drills, legal justifications) are in development, are underway, or are in place.

Now if three out of every four Americans are backing the "audit the Fed" legislation drafted by one of the most recognizable Libertarians in the country (whose followers have been "labeled" by some underlings in the government at the "fusion centers" as domestic terrorists, they might not need any swine flu hanky-panky to cement their control. Meanwhile, though, some of the ruling elite make a huge buck off the fact that they have applied a Hegelian dialectic and forced the "state" to buy and deliver the injectables we paid for. Even if the vaccine is perfectly safe and does not carry any side-effect producing baddies (or worse), they've already sent the trojan horse through the gate. (And we keep moving the big gated doors and marveling at the gift of that nice bug horse ...)