__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence
[QUOTE=Evang.Benincasa;745122][SIZE="5"]Swine Flu [SIZE="5"]Rages, and Only Ten Deaths World Wide!?!?!
6.77 billion in our earth's population and only ten people dead?
Are we really that bored?
Does the media really effect us like Pavlov's dog?
Are we so chicken little in our mind sets about the world we live in?
Can the government manipulate us that easily through fear to get our minds of more pressing issues?
We are being taken for a ride.
In Jesus name
Brother Benincasa
[url]www.OnTimeJournal.com
Not sure where your source of information is from but more than 10 died in Mexico alone.
__________________
Happy moments, PRAISE GOD.
Difficult moments, SEEK GOD.
Quiet moments, WORSHIP GOD.
Painful moments, TRUST GOD.
Every moment, THANK GOD.
Not sure where your source of information is from but more than 10 died in Mexico alone.
WHO is only reporting 16 confirmed deaths in Mexico, 1 in the US, with no other countries reporting any deaths.
Mexico has 397 confirmed cases (this is today's update I'm reading...).
__________________
You become free from who you have become, by becoming who you were meant to be. ~Mark from another forum I post on
God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ. ~Romans 3:24 from The Message
__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence
That's 397 total confirmed cases of this strain of the flu. Resulting in only 16 confirmed deaths.
__________________
You become free from who you have become, by becoming who you were meant to be. ~Mark from another forum I post on
God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we're in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ. ~Romans 3:24 from The Message
__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence
Critical Alert: The Swine Flu Pandemic – Fact or Fiction?
By Dr. Mercola
American health officials declared a public health emergency as cases of swine flu were confirmed in the U.S. Health officials across the world fear this could be the leading edge of a global pandemic emerging from Mexico, where seven people are confirmed dead as a result of the new virus.
On Monday April 27th, the World Health Organization (WHO) raised its pandemic alert level to four on its six-level threat scale,1 which means they've determined that the virus is capable of human-to-human transmission. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already traveling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu.
The number of fatalities, and suspected and confirmed cases across the world change depending on the source, so your best bet -- if you want the latest numbers -- is to use Google Maps' Swine Flu Tracker.
Several nations have imposed travel bans, or made plans to quarantine air travelers2 that present symptoms of the swine flu, such as:
Fever of more than 100
Coughing
Runny nose and/or sore throat
Joint aches
Severe headache
Vomiting and/or diarrhea
Lethargy
Lack of appetite
Top global flu experts are trying to predict how dangerous the new swine flu strain will be, as it became clear that they had little information about Mexico's outbreak. It is as yet unclear how many cases occurred in the month or so before the outbreak was detected. It's also unknown whether the virus was mutating to be more lethal, or less.
Much Fear Mongering Being Promoted
I suspect you have likely been alarmed by the media's coverage of the swine flu scare. It has a noticeable subplot - preparing you for draconian measures to combat a future pandemic as well as forcing you to accept the idea of mandatory vaccinations.
On April 27, Time magazine published an article which discusses how dozens died and hundreds were injured from vaccines as a result of the 1976 swine flu fiasco, when the Ford administration attempted to use the infection of soldiers at Fort Dix as a pretext for a mass vaccination of the entire country.
Despite acknowledging that the 1976 farce was an example of “how not to handle a flu outbreak”, the article still introduces the notion that officials “may soon have to consider whether to institute draconian measures to combat the disease”.
WHO and CDC Pandemic Preparedness Seriously Broken
The pandemic warning system has failed as it simply doesn't exist, even in North America and Europe. To improve the system, massive new investments in surveillance, scientific and regulatory infrastructure, basic public health, and global access to common sense interventions like vitamin D optimization are required.
According to the Washington Post, the CDC did not learn about the outbreak until six days after Mexico had begun to impose emergency measures. There should be no excuses. The paradox of this swine flu panic is that, while totally unexpected, it was accurately predicted. Six years ago, Science dedicated a major story to evidence that "after years of stability, the North American swine flu virus has jumped onto an evolutionary fasttrack".
However, maybe this is precisely what public health authorities desire.
This is NOT the First Swine Flu Panic
My guess is that you can expect to see a lot of panic over this issue in the near future. But the key is to remain calm -- this isn't the first time the public has been warned about swine flu. The last time was in 1976, right before I entered medical school and I remember it very clearly. It resulted in the massive swine flu vaccine campaign.
Do you happen to recall the result of this massive campaign?
Within a few months, claims totaling $1.3 billion had been filed by victims who had suffered paralysis from the vaccine. The vaccine was also blamed for 25 deaths.
However, several hundred people developed crippling Guillain-Barré Syndrome after they were injected with the swine flu vaccine. Even healthy 20-year-olds ended up as paraplegics.
And the swine flu pandemic itself? It never materialized.
__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence
More People Died From the Swine Flu Vaccine than Swine Flu!
It is very difficult to forecast a pandemic, and a rash response can be extremely damaging.
As of Monday April 27, the worldwide total number of confirmed cases was 82, according to WHO, which included 40 cases in the U.S., confirmed by the Centers for Disease Control. But does that truly warrant the feverish news headlines?
To put things into perspective, malaria kills 3,000 people EVERY DAY, and it's considered "a health problem"... But of course, there are no fancy vaccines for malaria that can rake in billions of dollars in a short amount of time.
One Australian news source,3 for example, states that even a mild swine flu epidemic could lead to the deaths of 1.4 million people and would reduce economic growth by nearly $5 trillion dollars.
Give me a break, if this doesn't sound like the outlandish cries of the pandemic bird-flu I don't know what does. Do you remember when President Bush said two million Americans would die as a result of the bird flu?
In 2005, in 2006, 2007, and again in 2008, those fears were exposed as little more than a cruel hoax, designed to instill fear, and line the pocketbooks of various individuals and industry. I became so convinced by the evidence AGAINST the possibility of a bird flu pandemic that I wrote a New York Times bestselling book, The Bird Flu Hoax, all about the massive fraud involved with the epidemic that never happened..
What is the Swine Flu?
Regular swine flu is a contagious respiratory disease, caused by a type-A influenza virus that affects pigs. The current strain, A(H1N1), is a new variation of an H1N1 virus -- which causes seasonal flu outbreaks in humans -- that also contains genetic material of bird and pig versions of the flu.
Interestingly enough, this version has never before been seen in neither human nor animal, which I will discuss a bit later.
This does sound bad. But not so fast. There are a few reasons to not rush to conclusions that this is the deadly pandemic we've been told would occur in the near future (as if anyone could predict it without having some sort of inside knowledge).
Why a True Bird- or Swine Flu Pandemic is HIGHLY Unlikely
While in my opinion it is highly likely factory farming is responsible for producing this viral strain, I believe there is still no cause for concern.
You may not know this, but all H1N1 flu's are descendants of the 1918 pandemic strain. The reason why the flu shot may or may not work, however, from year to year, is due to mutations. Therefore, there's no vaccine available for this current hybrid flu strain, and naturally, this is feeding the fear that millions of people will die before a vaccine can be made.
However, let me remind you of one very important fact here.
Just a couple of months ago, scientists concluded that the 1918 flu pandemic that killed between 50-100 million people worldwide in a matter of 18 months -- which all these worst case scenarios are built upon -- was NOT due to the flu itself!4
Instead, they discovered the real culprit was strep infections.
People with influenza often get what is known as a "superinfection" with a bacterial agent. In 1918 it appears to have been Streptococcus pneumoniae.
Since strep is much easier to treat than the flu using modern medicine, a new pandemic would likely be much less dire than it was in the early 20th century, the researchers concluded.
Others, such as evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald,5 claim that a pandemic of this sort simply cannot happen, because in order for it to occur, the world has to change. Not the virus itself, but the world.
In a previous interview for Esquire magazine, in which he discusses the possibility of a bird flu pandemic, he states:
"They think that if a virus mutates, it's an evolutionary event. Well, the virus is mutating because that is what viruses and other pathogens do. But evolution is not just random mutation. It is random mutation coupled with natural selection; it is a battle for competitive advantage among different strains generated by random mutation.
For bird flu to evolve into a human pandemic, the strain that finds a home in humanity has to be a strain that is both highly virulent and highly transmissible. Deadliness has to translate somehow into popularity; H5N1 has to find a way to kill or immobilize its human hosts, and still find other hosts to infect. Usually that doesn't happen."
Ewald goes on to explain that evolution in general is all about trade-offs, and in the evolution of infections the trade-off is between virulence and transmissibility.
What this means is that in order for a "bird flu" or "swine flu" to turn into a human pandemic, it has to find an environment that favors both deadly virulence and ease of transmission.
People living in squalor on the Western Front at the end of World War I generated such an environment, from which the epidemic of 1918 could arise.
Likewise, crowded chicken farms, slaughterhouses, and jam-packed markets of eastern Asia provide another such environment, and that environment gave rise to the bird flu -- a pathogen that both kills and spreads, in birds, but not in humans.
__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence
"We know that H5N1 is well adapted to birds. We also know that it has a hard time becoming a virus that can move from person to person. It has a hard time without our doing anything. But we can make it harder. We can make sure it has no human population in which to evolve transmissibility. There is no need to rely on the mass extermination of chickens. There is no need to stockpile vaccines for everyone.
By vaccinating just the people most at risk -- the people who work with chickens and the caregivers -- we can prevent it from becoming transmissible among humans. Then it doesn't matter what it does in chickens."
Please remember that, despite the fantastic headlines and projections of MILLIONS of deaths, the H5N1 bird flu virus killed a mere 257 people worldwide since late 2003. As unfortunate as those deaths are, 257 deaths worldwide from any disease, over the course of five years, simply does not constitute an emergency worthy of much attention, let alone fear!
Honestly, your risk of being killed by a lightning strike in the last five years was about 2,300 percent higher than your risk of contracting and dying from the bird flu. I'm not kidding! In just one year (2004), more than 1,170 people died from lighting strikes, worldwide.
So please, as the numbers of confirmed swine flu cases are released, keep a level head and don't let fear run away with your brains.
So is the Swine Flu Getting More or Less Dangerous?
On Sunday, April 26, The Independent reported that more than 1,000 people had contracted the swine flu virus in Mexico, but by the afternoon that same day, Mexican President Calderon declared that more than two-thirds of the 1,300 thought to have contracted the disease had been given a clean bill of health and sent home.
Additionally, the number of actual confirmed cases appears to be far lower than reported in many media outlets, leading me to believe that many reporters are interchanging the terms "suspected cases" and "confirmed cases."
Interestingly Mexico is the ONLY country in the world where someone has actually died from this disease.Mexico has reported 152 fatalities in flu-like cases in recent days, seven of which have been confirmed as swine flu. Another 19 patients have been confirmed as having swine flu but surviving. About 2,000 people have been hospitalized with symptoms.
By contrast, the United States has had 64 confirmed cases, five hospitalizations and no deaths from US Citizens. On April 29th CNN reported the first swine fatality in the US, however this was actually a child from Mexico that died in Texas.
According to the World Health Organization's Epidemic and Pandemic Alert and Response site; as of April 27, there are:
64 laboratory confirmed cases in U.S. -- 0 deaths (reported by CDC as of April 29)
26 confirmed cases in Mexico -- 7 deaths
6 confirmed cases in Canada -- 0 deaths
1 confirmed case in Spain -- 0 deaths
Additionally, nearly all suspected new cases have been reported as mild.
Personally, I am highly skeptical. It simply doesn't add up to a real pandemic.
But it does raise serious questions about where this brand new, never before seen virus came from, especially since it cannot be contracted from eating pork products, and has never before been seen in pigs, and contains traits from the bird flu -- and which, so far, only seems to respond to Tamiflu. Are we just that lucky, or... what?
Your Fear Will Make Some People VERY Rich in Today's Crumbling Economy
According to the Associated Press at least one financial analyst estimates up to $388 million worth of Tamiflu sales in the near future10 -- and that's without a pandemic outbreak.
More than half a dozen pharmaceutical companies, including Gilead Sciences Inc., Roche, GlaxoSmithKline and other companies with a stake in flu treatments and detection, have seen a rise in their shares in a matter of days, and will likely see revenue boosts if the swine flu outbreak continues to spread.
As soon as Homeland Security declared a health emergency, 25 percent -- about 12 million doses -- of Tamiflu and Relenza treatment courses were released from the nation's stockpile. However, beware that the declaration also allows unapproved tests and drugs to be administered to children. Many health- and government officials are more than willing to take that chance with your life, and the life of your child. But are you?
__________________ "all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
~Declaration of Independence