Posted on 05/04/2009 6:39:00 AM PDT by AngieGal
The World Health Organization is likely to raise its alert for the H1N1 swine flu outbreak to the highest level and declare a pandemic, its director indicated in an interview published on Monday.
"Level six does not mean, in any way, that we are facing the end of the world. It is important to make this clear because (otherwise) when we announce level six it will cause an unnecessary panic," Reuters reported WHO Director General Margaret Chan told Spanish newspaper El Pais.
"Flu viruses are very unpredictable, very deceptive... We should not be overconfident. One must not give H1N1 the opportunity to mix with other viruses. That is why we are on alert," she reportedly told the newspaper.
Chan warned against over-confidence following a stabilization in the number of new cases of H1N1 because the southern hemisphere was about to enter winter, when flu cases naturally spike.
"We have to be very careful. No one can predict what is going to happen when countries in the south have flu peaks and this new one arrives — which it is going to do, without a doubt."
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Ramp it up. No one is paying attention now. We need a crisis to focus our willingness to let go of our freedoms.
How much tax money is this one going to cost us?
What the hell? Regular flu is 40,000 times more deadly than this stuff.
It's the flu, folks, not the plague
Dr. Peter Duesberg several years ago on the endless hysteria created around a myriad of "impending" flu pandemics that never materialized:
"The reason why the Flu was so successful in 1918 was primarily the “terrain”, namely the millions of immuno-deficient hosts and hostesses starved and stressed by 4 years of war.
Secondarily, one can speculate that the 1918 flu strain may also have been a “new” recombinant to the 1918 population and thus more successful than a more established seasonal strain may have been. As I found in 1968, flu, unlike practically all other animal viruses, has multiple RNA segments, equivalent to multiple chromosomes and thus can readily form new recombinants - the reason why we have seasonal flus, but have measles, mumps, polio, pox etc. only once in a lifetime.
Thirdly, the odds that the Centers for Disease Control alias World Health Organization ever predicts an epidemic prior to its arrival are not good: They have predicted in past several years numerous epidemics or “pandemics” such as the flu, the hanta-virus, anthrax, the rotavirus, the Ebola virus, the West Nile virus, “mad cow” epidemic, the Sars-virus epidemic, an epi-pandemic of “random, eg. heterosexual non-drug user-AIDS” - but none of these ever materialized (see, Inventing the AIDS Virus, Regnery publishing, Washington DC, 1996). The last one that came close to an epidemic was polio in the 1950s and that was not predicted by American public health scientists.
Fourth, the currently hyped prospective Flu pandemic has long missed its chances. It has been hyped almost daily in the San Francisco Chronicle since November. But all that happened was a dead chicken in Nigeria, a hamster in Germany, two sick (dead?) kids in Turkey, a euthanized swan in Sweden, several dead or euthanized chicken in Iraq (Yes Iraq!!) etc. That is not the pattern of a potential killer microbe. All “new” killer viral or microbial epidemics of the past have spread exponentially within weeks to months and then declined exponentially owing to the induction of immunity or death of susceptible hosts - take Albert Camus’ “Plague” as a classical example.
The current Flu propaganda is thus a mix of ignorance and and self-interest and an exploitation of general ignorance by the CDC, WHO, the vaccine, pill and test-kit manufacturers of our universities and pharma companies, and of our “science” journalists, who need to fill their daily columns - and must sell their aging vaccine stocks before they decompose and their Tamiflu pills before the summer. But despite hyping in dozens of microbial Godots - no Godot has come since polio. People are just too well nourished these days, and thus have optimally maintained immune systems, for microbes to attack more than just the fringes of the ever growing human herd. That in fact is their historical share. The 150 million+ Flu pandemics are hype for fund raising by the ever more costly science/health armies in search for real enemies. Their success is based on the invisible monsters of the microbial epidemics of the (earlier) times, when nutrition lacked vitamins, proteins and sanitation or was lacking all together - and on the never failing microbial and viral horror phantasies of our science writers, politicians and Hollywood producers.
Regards, Peter."
silly you..don’t you know money doesn’t matter when a full blown catastrophe has been declared..crank up the presses, print those benjamins../s (but barely)
It's been running its course in Mexico, and the number of deaths there is currently unimpressive for a country of over 100 million people.
Margaret Chan is quickly becoming the Chicken Little of WHO.
What is going on while we are being inundated with the flu crisis news?
What is Congress new laws passing?
Anyone keeping a record of this?
Yawn... I suppose the WHO now realizes how useless it really is. Asian bird flu, SARS, West Nile Virus, now Mexican pig flu... all of these were supposed to kill off every last human if we were to believe the WHO.
Fixed it.
What is going on while we are being inundated with the flu crisis news?
What is new laws is Congress passing?
Anyone keeping a record of this?
I don't recall so much hype over so little. It makes me wonder whether it's an Obama grab for power or whether there's something bigger going on that they're not saying.
Almost there...:) I hear the $20 Million for palestinians passed...?
I have the same wonder, except I am worried because the whole world is proably not in on it for nothing? Bailout...or what?
It’s an official definition. It does not have to do with death rates...
Phase 5 is characterized by human-to-human spread of the virus into at least two countries in one WHO region. While most countries will not be affected at this stage, the declaration of Phase 5 is a strong signal that a pandemic is imminent and that the time to finalize the organization, communication, and implementation of the planned mitigation measures is short.
Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterized by community level outbreaks in at least one other country in a different WHO region in addition to the criteria defined in Phase 5. Designation of this phase will indicate that a global pandemic is under way.
I suspect there is more to the story than we are being told
Pandemic is not defined by mortality, but by morbidity.
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