Swine Flu Briefing at Science Gallery

by VeganHermit Tue Apr 28, 2009 18:00

Mixing large numbers of animals in horrible conditions with low paid ill equipped humans and cutting corners to increase profits then indiscriminately pumping them full of antibiotics to keep the birds alive where otherwise they'd be dead. These factors inevitably led to amplification of bird flu (despite all the MSM coverage showing men in suits harassing poor vietnamese farmers living with a few chickens in the house, it came out later that the pattern followed the transportation routes of intensely farmed birds. Go figure)
http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/feb2006/2006-02-27-01.asp
http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/heal....html
(this is just a SOFT text link for information. There are plenty of really sickening videos about factory farming of pigs and poultry on youtube if you have a strong stomach. I suggest you look at a few of them at least once if you want to understand the true ugliness behind factory farming )

These factors also amplified swine flu (have you SEEN the awful conditions they usually intensively farm pigs in??!!).
http://www.farmsanctuary.org/issues/factoryfarming/pork/
(again just a SOFT info link)

Now the three antibiotically amplified Flu varieties have mixed and produced a perfect storm. I hope the future of factory farming is discussed because it is at the root of all this. Alas, it's all too profitable and the lobbying groups are too strong. Fat chance. Instead let's let thousands of people die for corporate profits. Same goes for the airline industry. Let them all die as we continue flights to mexico and other disease filled places with only lip service to checking out passengers returning or heading out. Insanity!

Big business thinks "it's a great excuse to regulate small farmers, squeeze them out and increase corporate profits." Politicians think "the fear generated lets us slip in oppressive legislation to control the population which we otherwise would have a tough time passing. more power for us." or "great!! this will take the heat off while we give away billions of taxpayers money to our banking pals"

Mad world!

Enjoy your cheap tortured factory farmed pork sausages and tasteless antibiotic laced factory farmed chicken and your cheap flight to mexico. (Bring tissues!)
Hope the succulent rashers, take away mcdonalds chicken nuggets and cheap tequila are worth it all.

Spanish flu II , abject poverty and police state here we come. It seems as a species, we're just too stupid, greedy selfish and unthinking to learn from history

But You CAN do something, in fact, every time you go shopping by reading labels and not buying factory farmed crap. Buy local organically farmed animal produce.You're helping the animals, helping the local economy, and helping the health of yourself and your family. Oh, and stop needlessly travelling around the world on cheap flights carelessly sharing any strains of bacteria and viruses you harbour with the indigenous populations and their strains with your own population. THINK.!! You can't trust our incompetent corrupt government to bother dealing with anything that doesn't benefit themselves or their friends in some way.

by pat c Tue Apr 28, 2009 18:14

Mike davis uncovers the real story and reveals how and why the WHO were caught napping. Full story at link.

The Mexican swine flu, a genetic chimera probably conceived in the faecal mire of an industrial pigsty, suddenly threatens to give the whole world a fever. The initial outbreaks across North America reveal an infection already travelling at higher velocity than did the last official pandemic strain, the 1968 Hong Kong flu...

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.

by Blacbloc Tue Apr 28, 2009 18:35

Interesting questions from one doctor here:

http://www.promedmail.org/pls/otn/f?p=2400:1001:2333977...77243

by VeganHermit Tue Apr 28, 2009 19:09

Ok, to clarify, the antibiotics don't actually affect the viruses directly I agree. They only affect bacteria strains (e coli, strep etc). It's the very intensive farming conditions and depressed immune responses of the pigs which make such rapid virological amplifications and mutations possible. But many of these weakened pig vectors that make such easy targets for such viruses would be dead if not for antibiotics, which are much cheaper than creating good conditions for the animals.

The problems caused in human health due to overuse of a quite limited range of available antibiotics and the inevitable creation of nasty resistant bacteria strains is a seperate one to some extent and somewhat less worrisome than a flu virus. Apologies for conflating the two issues in a confusing manner. Lost the run of myself a bit. The froth got all over the keyboard.

by VeganHermit Tue Apr 28, 2009 20:05

Good link about flu epidemics here. Mainly bird flu but has background on 1918, discussion about tamilflu etc . Worth a look. some sobering scary stuff!
http://209.85.229.132/search?q=cache:5r085nr4Hm0J:birdf...gl=uk

It won't get us before summer it seems but will probably resurge in autumn. Then we're all fucked!

So I guess it won't be the big meteor hit, earths magnetic shift, shutdown of the atlantic thermohaline, global warming, black holes or stranglets from the LHC, or the terrorists after all eh folks? Just a bug we caught because we liked eating pigs arses. How apt!

by The Living Dead. Wed Apr 29, 2009 12:47

"Just a bug we caught because we liked eating pigs arses."

Eating pigs doesn't cause the disease in humans.

(Maybe it does indirectly by the fact that we farm pigs in the first place though.)

Someone breathed in the virus from pigs originally and set the Evolutionary ball rolling for a new virus.

This new virus is a mixture of original pig and human virus.

The virus is a true "Living Dead" entity. It is a string of RNA that has to break into its host's RNA and/or DNA mechanisms to reproduce itself.

The very first (and still unknown) "life form" on Earth probably resembled a virus, a chemical "Thing" that scavaged chemicals out of its environment to make a copy of itself.

Your remotest ancestor may have looked a bit like this perhaps:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RNA

The Swine Virus is now very much a human virus.

by VeganHermit Wed Apr 29, 2009 17:59

"blah blah....liked eating pigs arses"

Ok to clarify further:
Since we like eating pigs arse so much, we created a huge profitable demand and this demand coupled with aforementioned corporate greed and human stupidity
( have you ever WATCHED those "denny" adverts! ) and a complete callous disregard for the welfare of other intelligent creatures (pigs leave most dogs in the shade in the brain dept ) meant we farmed huge numbers of them squashed together in squalid conditions, kept alive by antibiotics in a very small space on the cheap, which just happens to be an ideal breeding / mutation playground for viruses, hence the problem(s).
Pity, probably because it is sooooo profitable, we choose to totally ignore the fact that pigs are so close to humans biologically that we can even use their organs.Also the science that tells us (repeatedly!) that we can contract some of their nasty amplified viruses. "Nah. Lets keep factory farming them for money. fuck the science." we say. Then we build millions of these nightmarish biological amplifiers worldwide. "what could possibly go wrong" we say. "organically farmed pigs are too expensive" we say.

I wonder what the total medical costs to deal with this latest virus, prions, foot and mouth, and H5N1, and the next one that comes along will be. But then I guess those costs are just EXTERNALITIES eh folks? Hmm...Maybe that organically farmed pork does not seem quite so expensive now does it?

I never said you get flu from eating pigs arse. Although you could catch a nasty parasite this way if you don't cook it properly!

one possible hypothesis:
The swine virus developed through being circulated in one of these biological pig amplifiers, possibly mixing with bird flu variants when underpaid poor mexican workers (or their relations / spouses / kids ) maybe had to moonlight at the poultry plant and then came in contact with the pigs. (either that or piggies came in contact with some bird faeces or the corpse of an infected bird vector who in turn had come in contact with the virus from a poultry farm "amplifier"). Human workers would also have to come to work with flu occasionally. Sick days aren't tolerated as much by US corporations operating for the cheap labour and lax labour laws in mexico. Given the level of government enforcement at these places ( often almost non existent ) and eviscerated laws relating to factory farms (they generally have pretty effective lobby groups and media handling!), It was only a matter of time before all three variants got together in one of the many such awful biological amplifiers (possibly the suspected smithfield foods plant), partyed together and eventually hopped back to some poorly paid and unsuspecting worker, et voila!

A proper vegan diet avoids many problems like this one, also mad cow and foot 'n' mouth etc etc.
It also takes a fraction of the land used to produce 1kg of animal protein to produce 1kg of vegetable protein.
And if you've ever seen the terrible conditions that exist in most factory pig farming operations, or ever visited a slaughterhouse (you really should!!) it's definitely by far the most ethically sound option.

so anyway, thats kinda why it's all rather apt that we go out this way rather than being squished into a singularity in the noble pursuit of knowledge. Because that's not really who we are is it folks?. Face it, we're more the sociopathic apathetic fianna fail voting slavering pig arse eaters aren't we?. So thats what should bring about our end, if there is such a thing as karma in the universe. And unfortunately it's really beginning to look like there is between the banks and this.

If this flu becomes a true pandemic on the scale of 1918 then the nature of modern global transport coupled with much larger more densely populated cities means the resulting fatalities could run into a billion or more worldwide. This kind of horror does not bear thinking about. There's a few personal accounts of 1918 etc in the link I posted. It's pretty grim reading.

I guess those looney vegan protesters out in the rain complaining about cruelty and factory farming don't seem quite so silly now do they? ok maybe a little but it turns out they had a really good point didn't they? Hopefully It's not too late to heed it.

by loonie vegan protestor Fri May 01, 2009 00:38

Honestly, to me it is. Something has to kill us off in the end (as a species I mean). Maybe we'll last as long as the sun does, but I'd willingly die of bird/swine/cow/cat flu if only I could hang on long enough to crack up at the demise of my own species before I went!

I'll die anyway and wouldn't it be great to see how humanity ended? I love when a new flu scare comes out. It fascinates me that the entire world is so absolutely thick it can't put 2 and 2 together and realise that factory farming is a bad idea. From BSE on it just gets better and better...

What a glorious slap in the face for our arrogant species to be beaten by a single cell organism!!!! It's almost Shakesperean! I just hope the end comes in my lifetime as I want to witness it and I'm sure the rest of the planet will get along just fine without us.

by VeganHermit Fri May 01, 2009 05:55

Just a bit of RNA with :
A coating of neuraminidase (N1) to help cut through mucous defences and hide from the body's "cell suicide" mechanism (interferon / PKR) once inside the cell,
then some hemagglutinin (H1) to bind to our "sugar coated" cells and trick the cells into letting it inside.

It's not even a complete cell.

Needless to say, in the face of an impending pandemic (it's at stage 5 on a 6 point scale!), our stupid ass government has not acted promptly. All the 100 people who were on the flight with the suspected case from mexico have not been quarantined. Routine Flights continue to mexico (estimated 1000 Irish people in mexico at any given time. Obviously for reasons far more important than wide scale deaths in a pandemic!!!). People are expected to read the notices at airports, take them seriously, self diagnose, then present themselves at their local clinic if they feel poorly. Having sneezed on who knows how many people, gone to air conditioned workplaces or attended overcrowded lectures then taken the luas or bus a few times.

Dog help us!! We deserve everything we get for our total blanket stupidity in the face of this

read my link. Its informative and worrying

oh...and to "loony vegan protester", don't read the chapter on spanish flu 1918. For you it's probably just porn!! ;-)

isn't it pretty?

by The Living Dead. Fri May 01, 2009 07:46

It sure is pretty.
That is what out earliest ancestor looked like.
Looks a bit like my Grandma on my father's side.

Incidentally.
Humanity will not be wiped out by bug-eyed monsters from outer space.
We will probably be wiped out by viruses which are so small they are microscopic even by the standards of a bacterium.

by Bug Eyed Monster Fri May 01, 2009 09:59

"Humanity will not be wiped out by bug-eyed monsters from outer space."

Perhaps.

The great cosmologist and mathematician Fred Hoyle championed the theory that viruses brought life to the earth on comets.
He reasoned that the mind-boggling complexity of even the simplest virus could not have evolved so quickly on the early earth that life was present only a few hundred million years after the molten crust of the earth solidified. (It is not an accepted theory.)

Transpermia Theory:

http://tinwiki.org/wiki/Panspermia

Quote:

"Sir Fred Hoyle FRS ( 24 June 1915 – 20 August 2001) and Nalin Chandra Wickramasinghe (b. 20th January 1939 have been the more prominent advocates of the theory in recent years. Wickramasinghe and Hoyle suggest that Earth is routinely receiving astrobiological material. Moreover , they have theorized that the upper atmosphere would present material samples for analysis. Part of their understanding of Panspermia is that Earth is also subject to extraterrestrial germs and virii. They offer evidence that flu epidemics correlate with the 11 year cycle of solar activity."