Some Lessons, and Concerns

Fear of a Swine Flu Epidemic in 1976 Offers Some Lessons, and Concerns, Today

By ANDREW POLLACK
Published: May 8, 2009

With fears of swine flu engulfing the nation in 1976, Janet Kinney got vaccinated to make sure she would be able to take care of her children. Instead, her children ended up taking care of her.

About a week after getting the swine flu shot, she recalled, “I was so weak I couldn’t push down the toaster button.” She spent a month in the hospital, paralyzed from the neck down, before gradually recovering.

With health authorities now gearing up for what could be a huge vaccination campaign against a new strain of swine flu, the experience of 1976 is raising a note of caution.

The feared swine flu epidemic of 1976 never materialized. And several hundred people, including Ms. Kinney, who is now 68 and lives in Gig Harbor, Wash., developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that causes temporary muscle weakness or paralysis. More than 30 of those people died.

Many experts say they do not think a vaccine for the new flu strain, called H1N1, would raise a similar risk for Guillain-Barré. But answering that question is difficult because to this day, no one has figured out why the 1976 vaccine caused the disease, in which the body’s immune system mistakenly attacks the nerves.

Indeed, some researchers still question whether the vaccine did cause Guillain-Barré, particularly since flu vaccines in other years have been linked to little or no risk of the disease.

“It doesn’t make sense that one flu strain would cause Guillain-Barré syndrome where none of the others have,” said Dr. Paul A. Offit, a vaccine expert at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Still, many experts consider the matter settled. The Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences concluded after an extensive review in 2003 that the “evidence favored acceptance of a causal relationship” between the 1976 vaccine and the syndrome. It stopped short, however, of saying the evidence “established” a causal relationship.

“It’s really not all that controversial anymore,” said Dr. Lawrence B. Schonberger, who as a young epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in 1976 gathered the initial evidence that led to the vaccination program being halted that December. Dr. Schonberger, who is still with the agency, found that for people who got vaccinated, the rate of getting a diagnosis of Guillain-Barré in the next six weeks was more than seven times as high as for those who did not get the vaccine.

In all, the vaccination resulted in nearly one extra case of Guillain-Barré for every 100,000 people immunized, which would translate into roughly 450 cases for the 45 million people who got the shot.

Some critics challenged the findings, arguing that some diagnoses were mistaken and that vaccinated people were more likely to self-report having Guillain-Barré than others because it was in the news.

But some studies canvassed health records for all diagnosed cases and had the diagnoses confirmed by experts. One of the leading critics worked on his own study, which confirmed the magnitude of the increased risk.

The more intriguing question is how the vaccine triggered the syndrome. One hypothesis was that the vaccine, rushed into production, was contaminated with Campylobacter, a type of bacterium that does cause Guillain-Barré. The Institute of Medicine said this was unlikely but could not be totally excluded.

A more likely explanation is that something in the vaccine resembled something in the nerve cells. When the body’s immune system mounted an attack on that component of the vaccine, it also then attacked the lookalike in the nerves.

Irving Nachamkin, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, examined some 1976 vaccine that had been saved by a scientist in Texas. In a paper published last year in The Journal of Infectious Diseases, he and colleagues reported that mice given the vaccine made antibodies that reacted with gangliosides, which are components of nerve cells. An antibody attack on gangliosides is part of the disease mechanism of Guillain-Barré.

But when Dr. Nachamkin tested two flu vaccines from other years which were not linked to the syndrome, the mice also made those antibodies. So the mystery remains about what was unique, if anything, about the 1976 vaccine.

In particular, the most important question now would be whether the unique factor was that it was a vaccine against a swine flu rather than a human flu. If so, that could raise concern about a vaccine for the new flu strain, which is made mostly of swine virus.

Dr. Nachamkin plays down such worries. “There’s no evidence to suggest it’s a swine-derived-virus problem,” he said.

Others say there are lessons to be learned even without solving the mystery. One is that any medicine or vaccine given to tens of millions of people is likely to have side effects, so surveillance systems need to be in place.

Another is that risks have to be weighed against benefits. Had there been a swine flu epidemic in 1976, the number of lives saved by a vaccine would have dwarfed the small number of cases of Guillain-Barré. But in 1976, the vaccine was given even though the epidemic did not materialize.

“The math is overwhelmingly in favor of vaccine if there’s an epidemic,” said Dr. Harvey V. Fineberg, the president of the Institute of Medicine and co-author of “The Epidemic That Never Was,” a book about the 1976 episode. “It’s in the absence of disease that this rare effect looms large.”

This time, officials say the decision to make the vaccine will be divorced from the decision to use it. The manufacturing decision is likely in the next couple of weeks and will probably be yes. But the decision on using the vaccine will probably not be made until the fall.

For her part, Ms. Kinney, who says the syndrome left her unable to run down stairs, said she would not take the vaccine if offered. “I’m just not willing to take that chance,” she said.

Would she even need to? One intriguing idea is that if the new flu strain is similar to the 1976 strain, people who got vaccinated then might, possibly, have some protection now.

The C.D.C. says it will eventually study that question. Peter Palese, a flu expert at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said he doubted that would be the case because the two viruses appear quite different.

Still, if it were the case, the oft-maligned 1976 vaccination campaign might end up having done some good after all.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/09/health/09vaccine.html?hp

Officials Are Urged to Heed Lessons of 1976 Flu Outbreak

By Kimberly Kindy
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 9, 2009

In the fall of 1976, dozens of Americans died within 48 hours of receiving a swine flu vaccine. To allay the public fears that threatened to unravel the mass inoculation program, President Gerald Ford rolled up his shirtsleeve and received his shot in front of television cameras.

More than 40 million others followed his lead. But two months later, the campaign was abruptly stopped: More deaths had followed, and hundreds were reporting serious side effects, including paralysis.

Already, medical experts and vaccine watchdog groups are urging the Obama administration to apply the lessons learned 33 years ago. In a public statement last week, former health and human services secretary Mike Leavitt recommended that officials study the federal investigation of the 1976 program. Administration officials said they are keenly aware of the history.

"We're all reviewing the process that took place in 1976 to understand the lessons learned," said Richard E. Besser, acting director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "We may, as a nation, be faced with a similar decision" about how to address a flu pandemic.

If there was a single factor behind the debacle three decades ago, it was the speed of the decision-making, fueled by a political climate in which dissenters were chastised and punished, government records show.


"They moved too quickly. Mistakes were made," said Harvey V. Fineberg, president of the National Academies' Institute of Medicine, who investigated the scandal for the federal government. "People had vivid memories of the 1918 flu epidemic, of young people dropping dead. It colored everything."

Production and field-testing of the vaccine was rushed. Among other problems, the single-shot doses that were produced did not work on children. Vaccine production was shut down by the time the error was caught, and it was too late to produce second doses.

"The first thing we learned is this must be done in a step-by-step fashion. There are points along the way that you need to build in where people can say yes or no" to allow for adjustments, said Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. "In 1976, it was like a choo-choo train."

The atmosphere was vastly different than it is today.

Congressional inquiries at the time and the report Fineberg co-authored, called "The Swine Flu Affair: Decision-Making on a Slippery Disease," found that the process was fast-tracked largely by David J. Sencer, then director of the CDC, who lost his job over the debacle. Fineberg's report described Sencer as a "wily autocrat" who managed, with little evidence that a pandemic would ensue, to steamroll the president into announcing a national campaign.

Sencer had many defenders, and in an interview last week he stood by his decision, saying: "If there had been swine flu, we would have had deaths in the thousands. Given the state of knowledge of influenza at the time, I think we made the right decision."

Records show that Sencer wrote a March 18, 1976, memo -- signed by Assistant Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare Theodore Cooper -- that outlined four possible government responses. The memo recommended one of those responses, a mass inoculation campaign, emphasizing the political fallout if a pandemic struck. "A decision must be made now," the memo said.

The memo, a government official said during the later investigation, was "a gun to our head."

Within two weeks, Sencer had recruited Jonas Salk, acclaimed for his development of the first polio vaccine, who encouraged Ford in a private meeting to endorse Sencer's plan to immunize every American as soon as possible. Hours later, Ford announced the decision to the nation with Salk at his side.

Sencer wrote his memo just weeks after health officials had detected the swine flu strain at Fort Dix, an Army training post in New Jersey. It was largely contained there, and within months -- before the first shot was given -- it was thought by most medical officials to no longer be a pandemic threat.

"It didn't matter," said Richard P. Wenzel, chairman of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University, who identified the strain in some of the first victims in 1976. "The die was cast. This was a different era."

The production of the vaccine was also fast-tracked. And when hundreds of Americans began developing Guillain-Barré syndrome, a neurological disorder that can cause paralysis, experts blamed the speedy development.

Federal health officials say they have been more deliberate in their decision-making this time around.

Robin Robinson, a director at the Department of Health and Human Services who oversees pandemic responses, said that even as officials take steps to develop a swine flu vaccine with sufficient doses for every "man, woman and child," those plans would be dialed back if the pandemic "fizzles out."

But watchdog groups fear a repeat, particularly because laws passed after the terrorist and anthrax attacks of 2001 allow for accelerated production and field tests of a vaccine in an emergency. On April 26, the Obama administration declared the spread of swine flu a public health emergency.

"We don't want them unnecessarily speeding up field tests," said Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the nonprofit National Vaccine Information Center, which frequently criticizes vaccine policy. "There are many reasons to be concerned if they take this path."

Food and Drug Administration spokeswoman Mary Long said it is too early to say whether a vaccine would be developed on an accelerated timetable, "but there is flexibility" to do so, given the public emergency declaration.

Even if the production were not accelerated, Wenzel and others said that decisions about vaccine production, distribution and risks need to be clearly spelled out to the public.

"Talk to Americans like you are sitting with them at the kitchen table," he said. "Disclose the risks."

Warren Cikins, an Alexandria resident who says his life was dramatically altered by the swine flu scare, gives the same advice.

Three weeks after receiving his shot 33 years ago, Cikins suffered his first in a series of autoimmune disorders, temporary blindness in his right eye, which lasted a year. That was followed by chronic back problems, along with colitis, he said.

Cikins, a former county supervisor, said he thinks that his ailments are related to the flu vaccine, although he was never able to prove that.

This time around, 78-year-old Cikins said, the government should disclose the risks of getting vaccinated balanced against those of getting the flu.

"I am angry," he said. "They knew a certain percentage of us would suffer serious repercussions, and they withheld this from us. They need to let people make an informed decision."

The federal government ultimately reached court settlements and paid more than $90 million to hundreds of victims who said the 1976 vaccine caused neurological problems. In its final reckoning, the government counted 25 deaths associated with the shots.

In the medical community, however, there is disagreement about the rate of adverse reactions. Wenzel said neurological disorders showed up at seven times the rate seen with regular flu vaccines.

But Michael Hattwick, a former CDC official who tracked and analyzed the reactions in 1976, said that one in every 100,000 people developed a neurological disorder, a rate that he thinks is similar to what would be seen with other vaccines if they were tracked as carefully.

The potential risks were disclosed in the fine print of a two-page consent form at the time, he said.

"There are a lot of unknowns, but I believe you'd find the same rate with any flu shot," Hattwick said. Still, he said, "people should be told."

Staff writer Ceci Connolly and staff researcher Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I remember this only too well. I got a swine flu shot at the Newman Center on the Edinboro University Campus back in 1976 and got pretty sick for about 24 hours. I was 18 at the time. I went on a date that night and got sick after dinner and had to go home. No matter the guy was a jerk anyway. -Beth

Man Serious Threat to Pig Safety

Farmer may have given swine flu to pigs, Canada says


(CNN) -- More than a week after the swine flu outbreak rattled the world, with cases of infected people popping up from Mexico to South Korea, the new virus strain has shown up in a herd of swine.

The catch, Canadian officials say, is that the animals may have caught the flu from a human.

Canadian officials on Saturday said they have quarantined pigs that tested positive for the virus -- scientifically known as 2009 H1N1 -- at an Alberta farm in what could be the first identified case of pigs infected during the recent outbreak. They said the pigs may have been infected by a Canadian farmer who recently returned from a trip to Mexico, the epicenter of the outbreak that has sickened nearly 660 people.

The farmer "may have exposed swine on the farm to an influenza virus," said Dr. Brian Evans of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency.

"We have determined that the virus H1N1, found in these pigs, is the virus which is being tracked in the human population," he added. Learn about the virus »

Evans and other officials said it is not uncommon for flu viruses to jump from humans to animals, and that it does not pose a risk for consuming pork. The number of pigs infected was not disclosed.

The infected farmer had flu-like symptoms and is recovering, Evans said.

Meanwhile, as the number of confirmed swine flu cases reached 659 worldwide, the World Health Organization said Saturday it had started distributing 2.4 million doses of a common anti-viral drug to 72 nations. So far, 16 countries have confirmed cases of swine flu, the WHO said. Watch latest developments as swine flu sweeps world »

Dr. Michael J. Ryan, the WHO director of its global alert and response team, said the doses of the drug Tamiflu came from a stockpile that was donated by Swiss health-care giant Roche in 2005 and 2006.

Roche, which produces the common anti-viral drug Tamiflu in a statement said it was working with the WHO to prepare for the virus. The drug should be taken within 48 hours of experiencing symptoms, according to the drug's Web site.

Mexico has the most confirmed swine flu cases, with 397 infected people and 16 deaths, the WHO said. Mexican Health Minister Jose Angel Cordova Villalobos reported that the country has confirmed 421 cases and 19 deaths.

Several other countries, including Canada and Italy, had confirmed additional cases that had not yet been added to the WHO's total.

The United States has the second-highest number of confirmed cases, with 161 sickened and one death, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the WHO.

President Barack Obama spoke with Mexican President Felipe Calderon on Saturday afternoon to discuss both countries' "efforts to limit the spread of the 2009 H1N1 flu strain and the importance of close U.S.-Mexican cooperation," the White House said in a statement.

Other than Mexico and the United States, the WHO confirmed cases in 14 other countries: Canada, with 51; the United Kingdom with 15; Spain with 13; Germany with six; New Zealand with four; Israel with three; France, with two; and Austria, China, South Korea, Denmark, the Netherlands, Switzerland and Costa Rica, each have one. See where cases have been confirmed »

Ryan said the WHO was still preparing for a pandemic.

"At this point we have to expect that phase six will be reached," he said, referring to the organization's highest pandemic threat level. "We have to hope that it is not reached." And he noted that a pandemic describes "the geographic spread of the disease, not its severity."

The latest developments come as parts of Asia discovered they were not immune to the spread of the virus.

Hundreds of guests and staff were under quarantine in China on Saturday after health officials determined that a hotel guest had contracted the H1N1 virus.

Nearly 200 hotel guests and 100 staff members were ordered to stay in Metro Park Hotel in Hong Kong for seven days to stop the spread of the H1N1 virus, a government spokesman said.

The quarantine was ordered after a 25-year-old Mexican man stayed in the hotel and became sick, according to the spokesman. It is the first confirmed case of the virus in Hong Kong, local medical officials said.

South Korean officials on Saturday confirmed their first case -- a 51-year-old nun who recently traveled to Mexico for volunteer work.

In the United States, the CDC announced 19 additional cases, in 21 states. Dr. Anne Schuchat, interim deputy director for science and public health for the agency, said 13 people are hospitalized. Go behind the scenes at the CDC »

She said one-third of the U.S. cases were linked to exposure in Mexico; the others were infected in their own communities.

New York has the highest number of confirmed cases, with 50. Texas has 28 and California has 24.

The other states include: South Carolina with 13; Massachusetts with eight; New Jersey with seven; Arizona and Delaware with four each; Illinois and Indiana with three each; Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Michigan and Virginia with two each; and Connecticut, Kentucky, Missouri, Minnesota, Nevada, Ohio and Rhode Island each have one.


New York's health department on Saturday confirmed another dozen cases, bringing its total to 62 -- though the additional cases were not reflected in the CDC's tally.
Connecticut also announced an additional confirmed case, while Iowa and New Mexico and reported their first cases -- though neither were immediately included in the CDC total.

PIG FLU UPDATE: MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT FACTORY FARMS

Mike Davis, Guardian, UK - Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

What caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal "drift" and episodic genomic "shift". But the corporate industrialization of livestock production has broken China's natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on "industrial farm animal production" that underscored the acute danger that "the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission." . . .

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalized industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

Scientific American - New evidence indicates that our agricultural practices are leading directly to the spread of human disease. Much has been made in recent years of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant strain of Staphylococcus bacteria, and for good reason. In 2005, the most recent year for which figures are available, about 95,000 MRSA infections caused the deaths of nearly 19,000 Americans. . . .

Perhaps we should not be surprised. Modern factory farms keep so many animals in such a small space that the animals must be given low doses of antibiotics to shield them from the fetid conditions. The drug-resistant bacteria that emerge have now entered our food supply. The first study to investigate farm-bred MRSA in the U.S. amazingly, the Food and Drug Administration has shown little interest in testing the nation's livestock for this disease recently found that 49 percent of pigs and 45 percent of pig workers in the survey harbored the bacteria. Unfortunately, these infections can spread. According to a report published in Emerging Infectious Diseases, MRSA from animals is now thought to be responsible for more than 20 percent of all human MRSA cases in the Netherlands.

In April 2008 a high-profile commission of scientists, farmers, doctors and veterinarians recommended that the FDA phase out the nontherapeutic use of antibiotics in farm animal production, to "preserve these drugs to treat sick animals, not healthy ones" in the words of former Kansas governor John Carlin, the commission's chair. The FDA agreed and soon announced that it would ban the use of one widespread antibiotic except for strictly delineated medical purposes. But five days before the ban was set to take effect, the agency quietly reversed its position. Although no official reason was given, the opposition of the powerful farm lobby is widely thought to have played a role.

James Ridgeway, Unsilent Generation - One of the unusual things about the current H1N1 virus, compared with the strains that cause our yearly seasonal flu outbreaks, is that it doesn't seem to discriminate on the basis of age. That may change as the pandemic develops, but it may not: The massive 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic is also known for killing across all age groups.

There is, nonetheless, an age angle here, and it has to do with those garden-variety annual influenza outbreaks, and how the medical, political, and media establishments have handled them. Because the great majority of the deaths caused each and every year by these "ordinary" flu viruses –some 36,000 on average in the United States alone, according to the CDC – are of people over 65 years old. Some years it's more, and some years it's fewer: During the 1990s, the number of deaths ranged from 17,000 to 54,000. But every year, tens of thousands of old folk succumb, with little fanfare and minimal media attention, to flu-related deaths.

One major public health initiative has been launched in response to these deaths, and that is to increase the number of older Americans who are vaccinated against the flu each year. The percentage of elders who are vaccinated has grown about four-fold in the last 30 years. But there's just one problem: The vaccine apparently doesn't work very well, if at all. . .

A study published in September 2008 in Britain's most respected medical journal, the Lancet, found no correlation at all between flu vaccination and a reduced risk of illness and death. . . .

Part of the problem, as AMNews notes, is "the nature of influenza vaccine, which aims at a constantly moving target. The viral strains it includes change every year. Circulating viruses shift constantly. And every season is different in regard to severity and spread." But it appears there's another problem with the vaccine, as well, when it comes to older people. Yet another recent study found that old folk might be better protected by a vaccine containing four times the usual dose. As Reuters reported, researchers concluded that "this is likely because their immune systems are not as active as those of younger people". . .

The excellent public health blog Effect Measure had some other ideas on how to protect older people, since the vaccine seems to be proving ineffective. But this would involve shifting the focus of national public health efforts. . .

It makes perfect sense, when you think about it: Young people are more likely to infect their elders than vice versa, and since the vaccine apparently works better on them, why not push them to have it? But frankly, I can't see this working. I can't see young people, who know they aren't likely to die from the flu, going out and getting vaccinated just to protect older folk.

I can't see this, any more than I can see the newspapers running headlines every winter proclaiming: "30,000 Geezers Dead in Seasonal Flu Outbreak," or the president going on TV to say that the government would stop at nothing to protect granny from this dangerous virus. The fact that these things don't happen, I think, is proof that the older we get, the less our lives are worth in this society.

Johann Hari, Independent, UK - A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. . .

To understand how this might happen, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around 20 swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress – so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around 20 other pigs to spread and mutate in – before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off. If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market – where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It had little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.

Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.

Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. . .

As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming.". . .

It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 per cent to 72 per cent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 – and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged. . .

We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience – but now we fear they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories – before they shut down even more human lives.

COULD IT BE FACTORY FARM FLU?

COULD IT BE FACTORY FARM FLU?

F. William Engdahl, Global Research

- What are the symptoms of this purported Swine Flu? That's not at all clear according to virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific. 'So many different things can cause these symptoms. it is a dilemma,' says one doctor interviewed by CNN. 'There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know that a person has the Swine Flu.' It has been noted that most individuals with Swine Flu had an early on set of fever. Also it was common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are symptoms so general as to say nothing.

The US Government's Center for Disease Control in Atlanta states on its official website, 'Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained beyond three people.' Nonetheless they add, 'CDC has determined that this swine influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how easily the virus spreads between people.

How many media that have grabbed on the headline 'suspected case of Swine Flu' in recent days bother to double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic questions? For example, the number of confirmed cases of H1N1 and their location? The number of deaths confirmed to have resulted from H1N1? Dates of both? Number of suspected cases and of suspected deaths related to the Swine Flu disease?

According to Biosurveillance, itself part of Veratect, a US Pentagon and Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico.

They reported, 'Sources characterized the event as a 'strange' outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large amounts of phlegm. Health officials recorded 400 cases that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria, which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of the town's population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources reported that a local official had been seeking health assistance for the town since February.' What they later say is 'strange' is not the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur in Mexico in the period October to February. . .

Then, most revealingly, the aspect of the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they reported, 'Residents believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms.'

Since the dawn of American 'agribusiness,' a project initiated with funding by the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1950's to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient, mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter. Pigs are caged in what are called factory farms, industrial concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of highest priority. The entire operation is vertically integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to supermarket.

Granjas Carroll de Mexico (happens to be such a factory farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own statistics. GCM is a joint venture operation owned 50% by the world's largest pig producing industrial company, Smithfield Foods of Virginia. The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement, and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA, under the Smithfields' family of labels. Most American consumers have no idea where the meat was raised.

Now the story becomes interesting.

The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility. Their local reporter notes, 'Edgar Hernández plays among the dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago - the first known case - has almost brought his country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert. 'I feel great,' the five-year-old boy said. 'But I had a headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay down in bed.''

The reporters add, 'It was confirmed on Monday (April 27 2009-w.e.) that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and 'manure lagoons' at the centre of a global race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu emerged.'

That's quite interesting. They speak of 'La Gloria and its surrounding factory pig farms and 'manure lagoons.'' Presumably the manure lagoons around the LaGloria factory pig farm of Smithfield Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The Smithfield's Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That's a lot. It gives an idea of the volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La Gloria.

Significantly, according to the Times reporters, 'residents of La Gloria have been complaining since March that the odor from Granjas Carroll's pig waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro (danger).' There have been calls to exhume the bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be tested. The state legislature of Veracruz has demanded that Smithfield's Granjas Carroll release documents about its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined to comment on the request, saying that it would 'not respond to rumours.'
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13408

Resources to combat swine flu hysteria

#1. Math.

The greater Mexico City Metropolitan area has a population of 22 million people according to Wikipedia.

Many millions of them live in crushing poverty, poor health and with poor sanitary conditions.

1,000 "cases" (which is higher than the so-far reported number) equals 0.005% of the population. 60 deaths equals 0.0003% of the population.

#2 Deaths?

Of the few deaths, no one has mentioned who these casualties are. Are they elderly or infirm people who could just as easily be killed by the common cold or a slip and fall? It makes a difference.

#3 The long history of government/pharmaceutical industry scams

These guys have tried to institute national flu vaccination programs before. The last time was 1976 (under Gerald Ford). The public recognized the foolishness and danger involved in accepting the government vaccine and rejected it. The much-threatened "pandemic" never happened.

http://www.salon.com/env/feature/2009/04/28/1976_swine_flu/

If you missed yesterday's video on how the US government has been positioning itself to FORCE its population to accept a flu vaccination, I strongly recommend you watch this:



http://www.brasschecktv.com/page/609.html