US, UK munitions ‘cause birth defects in Iraq’

[Source]

Iraqi women wait with their sick children at a Baghdad hospital.(AFP Photo / Karim Sahib)

US and UK weapons ammunition were linked to heart defects, brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs, according to a recent study. The report revealed a shocking rise in birth defects in Iraqi children conceived after the US invasion.

Titled ‘Metal Contamination and the Epidemic of Congenital Birth Defects in Iraqi Cities,’ the study was published by the Bulletin of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. It revealed a connection between military activity in the country and increased numbers of birth defects and miscarriages.

The report, which can be found here, also contains graphic images of Iraqi children born with birth defects. (The images were not published on RT due to their disturbing content.) It documents 56 families in Fallujah, which was invaded by US troops in 2004, and examines births in Basrah in southern Iraq, which was attacked by British forces in 2003.

The study concluded that US and UK ammunition is responsible for high rates of miscarriages, toxic levels of lead and mercury contamination and spiraling numbers of birth defects, which ranged from congenital heart defects to brain dysfunctions and malformed limbs.

Fallujah, around 40 miles west of Baghdad, was at the epicenter of these various health risks. The city was first invaded by US Marines in the spring of 2004, and then again 7 months later. Some of the heaviest artillery in the US arsenal was deployed during the attack, including phosphorus shells.

A round lights up the night-sky before a U.S. bombardment over the Iraqi city of Falluja at the beginning, November 8, 2004.(Reuters / Eliana Aponte)

Shocking findings

Between 2007 and 2010 in Fallujah, more than half of all babies surveyed were born with birth defects. Before the war, this figure was around one in 10. Also, over 45 percent of all pregnancies surveyed ended in miscarriage in 2005 and 2006, compared to only 10 percent before the invasion.

In Basrah’s Maternity Hospital, more than 20 babies out of 1,000 were born with defects in 2003, 17 times higher than the figure recorded in the previous decade.

Overall, the study found that the number of babies in the region born with birth defects increased by more than 60 percent (37 out of every 1,000 are now born with defects) in the past seven years. This rise was linked to an increased exposure to metals released by the bombs and bullets used over the past decade.

Hair samples of the population of Fallujah revealed levels of lead in children with birth defects five times higher than in other children, and mercury levels six times higher. Basrah children with birth defects had three times more lead in their teeth than children living in areas not struck by the artillery.

The intense fighting in Iraq led by the US and UK is not the only thing that harmed children in cities like Fallujah and Basrah – a new study revealed a shocking rise in birth defects in children conceived after the invasion. (AFP Photo / Odd Andersen)

The study found a “footprint of metal in the population,” Mozhgan Savabieasfahani, one of the lead authors of the report said. Savabieasfahani is an environmental toxicologist at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health.

“In utero exposure to pollutants can drastically change the outcome of an otherwise normal pregnancy. The metal levels we see in the Fallujah children with birth defects clearly indicates that metals were involved in manifestation of birth defects in these children,” she said.

The study’s preliminary findings, released in 2010, led to an in-depth inquiry on Fallujah by the World Health Organization (WHO), the results of which will be released next month. The inquiry is expected to show an increase in birth defects following the Iraq War.

According to the WHO, a pregnant woman can be exposed to lead or mercury through the air, water and soil. The woman can then pass the exposure to her unborn child through her bones, and high levels of toxins can damage kidneys and brains, and cause blindness, seizures, muteness, lack of coordination and even death.

US and UK ‘unaware’ of rise in birth defects

US Defense Department responded to the report by claiming that there are no official reports indicating a connection between military action and birth defects in Iraq.

“We are not aware of any official reports indicating an increase in birth defects in Al Basrah or Fallujah that may be related to exposure to the metals contained in munitions used by the US or coalition partners,” a US Defense Department spokesperson told the Independent. “We always take very seriously public health concerns about any population now living in a combat theatre. Unexploded ordnance, including improvised explosive devises, are a recognized hazard.”

An UK government spokesperson also said there was no “reliable scientific or medical evidence to confirm a link between conventional ammunition and birth defects in Basrah. All ammunition used by UK armed forces falls within international humanitarian law and is consistent with the Geneva Convention.”

 

Big pharma takes aim at deadly counterfeits

 

By Katie McQue [Source]

GATEWAY TO AFRICA | In Africa the cost of all medications, including generic drugs, exceeds the means of most and many people are faced with a grim choice: purchase counterfeit medications, ingredients unknown, or go without treatment.

With 30% of the total available pharmaceuticals in Uganda believed to be counterfeit, the country, like many others, is struggling to keep control of a business that is both deadly and lucrative.

“A lot of deaths occur. But nobody reports these and nobody is going to investigate,” said Suraj Ali, a partner at the Ugandan legal firm Muwema & Mugerwa.

The situation in Uganda is typical in much of sub-Saharan Africa, and the reasons are economic. In regions of high prevalence of poverty the cost of all medications, including generic drugs, exceeds the means of most. Few people have medical insurance, and they are faced with a grim choice: purchase counterfeit medications – ingredients unknown – or simply go without treatment.

The big pharmaceutical firms are worried. “When you visit a market in Tanzania, you see that they are being sold everywhere,” Ed Wheatley, AstraZeneca’s investigations director for the region, said at June’s Visiongain Pharmaceutical Anti-Counterfeiting conference, in which representatives from major drug makers gathered to deliberate the problem.

This big problem is also a big business – it is widely estimated that counterfeit drugs have an annual turnover of US$75 billion worldwide, with a profit margin of about 70%. This means that the global share of counterfeit medications is 10% of the pharmaceutical market. Around the world 200,000 people die annually due to counterfeits.

Most of the fakes hail from factories in China, India and Pakistan, and counterfeiters are more concerned with matching the packaging than the ingredients of the original. Criminals steal hospital vials with branded labels, print their own hologrammed boxes – even buy tablet-making presses on eBay.

The World Health Organisation estimates that 32.1% of these drugs do not contain any active ingredients; 20.2% have incorrect quantities of active ingredients; 21.4% include wrong ingredients and 8.5% have high levels of impurities or contaminates.

The loss of sales and reputation is significant, as users of the fake drugs may still associate their illness with the genuine article. In some countries, drug makers can also be liable for harm caused by fakes.

In Germany, for example, a company can be called to account if it can be proven that it did not utilise all the possibilities provided by state-of-the-art technology to prevent counterfeiting. In most US states, any part of the manufacturing and sales chain can be liable for damages to the consumer arising from faults in a product’s construction, manufacturing or labelling.

Given this risk it is understandable why pharmaceutical companies are keen to intervene in the African counterfeit market. Some assist local governments with on-the-ground intelligence, leading to raids and prosecutions. This assistance is necessary in countries where awareness is low, resources devoted to the problem are scarce and corruption is high.

“There is a lot of corruption,” Ali said. “A lot of the magistrates are underpaid and they get bribed.

“We have a national drug authority that is supposed to prevent counterfeiting, but it is underfunded,” he added. “There are very few inspectors; they don’t have the equipment to check drugs properly… Things find their way into the country – the borders are very porous.”

 

Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon

Matt Hatter:
http://www.theflucase.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=700%3Amicrobiologist-alleges-baxter-qswine-fluq-vaccine-is-a-bioweapon&Itemid=64

Joseph Moshe (MOSSAD Microbiologist): “Swine flu vaccine is bioweapon”

 

Friday, August 21, 2009

Today, the MSM are not talking about this case any more. Yesterday, they wanted us to believe that Joseph Moshe was a nutcase and a terrorist, arrested for threatening to bomb the White House. Interesting detail about his arrest (the “Westwood standoff”) was that he seemed to be immune to the 5 cans of tear gas and 5 gallons of law-enforcement grade pepper spray they pumped into his face. He very calmly remained in his car, as the video footage of his arrest shows.

Professor Moshe had called into a live radio show by Dr. A. True Ott, broadcast on Republic Broadcasting claiming to be a microbiologist who wanted to supply evidence to a States Attorney regarding tainted H1N1 Swine flu vaccines being produced by Baxter BioPharma Solutions. He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bioweapon disguised as a vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death.

Sources tell us that Bar-Joseph Moshe made no threat against the President or the White House. He did not mention any bomb or attack. He then proceeded to inform the White House he intended to go public with this information. When he noticed men in suits in front of his house and feared that the FBI was about to detain him, he packed some belongings into his car and, him being a dual Israeli citizen, tried to reach the Israeli consulate located in close proximity to the federal building where the standoff took place. The FBI and the bomb squad prevented him from reaching it. Who is this man? His profile on biomedexperts.com says he is a plant disease expert with many publications on his name involving the genetic manipulation of virii. Photographic evidence that Moshe is who he says he is can be found here.

Joseph Moshe was soon after his arrest sent or let go to Israel. Nothing has been heard from him since. The Secret Service was not the agency involved in the surveillance of Moshe at his home in California. This was done by the FBI, who had orders to detain or arrest him. Mounted on top of a large black vehicle used in his arrest was a microwave weapon that possibly damaged the electronics in Moshe’s car as well as any communication devices he had which might have been used to contact the media or others who could help him.

Moshe did not suffer the same effects of the gas and pepper spray that others would have because he had built up an immunity to such weapons as a by-product of his Mossad training. Moshe was not handcuffed because he was not placed under arrest.

Does this sound like an insane conspiracy theory? Sure it does. Due to the scarcity and anonimity of the sources we would dismiss it as exactly that, if it weren’t for some uncomfortable facts: Baxter Pharmaceutical has been caught, red-handed, in spreading a live, genetically engineered H5N1 Bird flu vaccine as a lethal biological weapon all over the world, destined to be used for human vaccinations. This happened just a few months ago. And only luck prevented a global catastrophe of epic proportions.

Baxter International Inc. had mixed live, genetically engineered avian flue viruses in vaccine material shipped to 18 countries. Only by sheer luck, a Czech laboratory decided to test the vaccine on a dozen ferrets, which all died in days. The World Health Organization was notified and catastrophe was averted. This was clearly a deliberate act on Baxter’s part, because they adhere to BS3, bio-safety level three. Baxter admitted a “mistake”. Such monumental screwups are totally impossible at that level. Many safety systems would have needed to be sabotaged, many key personell would have needed to be bribed. It simply can’t be done without direction from the inside. They did not send out the wrong vial – they produced dozens of gallons of biological-weapon agent (genetically engineered live H5N1 / Bird flu virus), then sent it out as a “vaccine”.

Baxter knew full well that their vaccine was lethal, because the year before they had tested it on a few hundred homeless Polish people – dozens died as a result.

Where’s the meat? Well – Baxter is now being sued for the deliberate, repeated contamination of vaccines with biological weapons designed – by them – to mass-murder people. Here is the complaint (PDF). By some kook nutcase? Not likely – Jane Burgermeister is an experienced, respected journalist. She is not the only one suing Baxter for planning and executing a plan for global genocide: Other are filing complaints as well. Read a well-researched complaint here (PDF).

Motive? The latter complaint alludes to it. Have you heard of the Georgia Guidestones? An enormous monument loaded with Masonic symbolism costing millions of dollars, it has been erected by unknown, powerful elites (multimillionaires with the clout to erect monuments wherever they please, obviously) around 30 years ago. It gives an “alternative ten commandments”, of which the first is the extermination of six and a half billion people from the face of the Earth. Half a billion will remain. This is the number of people the planet can sustain indefinitely, so that the descendents of the Rothschilds and Rockefellers can live in peace and affluence indefinitely. Slaves are needed to produce that luxury, but 500 million will do just fine. But how does one go about killing off most of the world?

“Vaccinating” the planet with a bioweapon with near-100% mortality would do the trick. Baxter would provide both the bioweapon as well as the vaccine against it to “civilized” Western peoples. Result: We can plunder Africa, we have no more competition from SE Asia, the oil is for our taking and only Western and perhaps Chinese sheeple remain.

Rockefeller said this in 1994 at a U.N. dinner: “We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis, and the nations will accept the New World Order.” PNAC said something similar right before 9/11.

 

More and more people in Ternopil, Kalush, Lutsk and other cities are inclined to believe that the epidemic in Ukraine – mass disease pneumonic plague.

Interesting in light of Malcolm Casadaban the scientist who recently died studying fleas:

Illinois Scientist’s Death Possibly Caused by Plague Bacteria
…
City health officials and the University of Chicago Medical Center today began the precautionary measures of offering antibiotics to the family, friends and co-workers of a geneticist who died last week from exposure to a plague-related bacterium.
…
Infectious disease experts couldn’t completely rule out the possibility that the federally approved weakened strain of Yersenia pestis Malcolm J. Casadaban was researching at the University of Chicago had somehow become dangerous.
…
Casadaban, 60, was working with a strain of Yersenia pestis that, stripped of its harmful components, has been used as a vaccine against the plague since the late 1960s.
…
But largely because nobody else exposed to the bacterium or to Casadaban has developed plague symptoms, it seems more likely there was something about the professor’s health or genetic makeup that made him susceptible, officials said today.
…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis
Human Y. pestis infection takes three main forms: pneumonic, septicemic, and the notorious bubonic plagues.[1] All three forms have been responsible for high mortality rates in epidemics throughout human history, including the Black Death (a bubonic plague) that accounted for the death of at least one-third of the European population in 1347 to 1353.
…
Univ of Chicago is building a Rickett’s lab…. Why? See Robert traub… Ticks and fleas! MARU YARU Plum Island…. Also note Richard Shope (head of Biowarfare Deitrick in the 50’s…
Also note the the Japanese in WWII were heavy into ticks and fleas for biowarfare (Unit 731)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
…
http://www.htrl.uchicago.edu/faqabout.htm

What is the Ricketts Laboratory?
The Ricketts Laboratory will be a highly secure and safe infectious disease research facility, built and operated by the University of Chicago, funded by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease (NIAID), and sited on land owned by the U.S. Department of Energy at Argonne National Laboratory, southwest of Chicago. NIAID is one of the National Institutes of Health. The lab will cost approximately $31 million to build and will be approximately 35,000 square feet, consisting of office space, Biosafety Level 2 (BSL-2) and Biosafety Level 3 (BSL-3) laboratories, vivarium for work with small animals.
…
http://www.htrl.uchicago.edu/news.htm#18
Current Status of the HTRL 10/22/08

Processes are almost complete to get the building fully commissioned. This will be followed by review and registration of the laboratory by the CDC. Once the CDC approval is obtained researchers and administrators will move into the new space, as early as the 1st quarter of 2009.
…

http://molbio.bsd.uchicago.edu/Faculty_and_Research/01_Faculty_Alphabetically.php?faculty_id=32
Malcolm Casadaban
Education:
M.I.T., B.S. Biology, 1971, Harvard University, Ph.D Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, 1976 Stanford University, Postdoc, Molecular Genetics
…

Notice that Casadaban was NOT a “Ricketts” specialist or Plague expert per se . Yet in the new “Ricketts Lab” he is doing something with bubonic plague?

Maybe what infected him was not the “federally approved weakened strain of Yersenia pestis” but an altered version he/they was working on?

Avian Flu Vaccine Ingredients: Formaldehyde To Save You From What??A Flu?

 

After the World Health Organization [WHO] declared a Level 6 “pandemic” on June 11, the US government has mandated that all Americans over the age of six months be vaccinated.

Although WHO cannot technically interfere with the internal laws of the US, they can and already have put enormous pressure on our government (and, thereby, our own laws) to require all citizens to get these toxic vaccine shots. There are to be no exceptions to this new illegal US ruling. Further, WHO is not even tracking the actual number of laboratory confirmed cases of H1N1.

So, how can it be called a “pandemic”? This year’s flu is mild…

There has been a tremendous rush (called “fast-tracked”) to get these vaccines on the market. The tests they have done were only a few days to a few weeks long. This is totally insufficient time to determine any realistic, long-term, and potentially hazardous immune responses.

Nothing has been done in any responsible manner.

There is absolutely no Precautionary Principle (first do no harm) in place. What we have, first and foremost, are both out-of-control greed and scare tactics. These are directed to uninformed citizens, while the international pharmaceutical companies will make billions of dollars, with the very real potential of enormous harm to millions of victims is looming ever closer.

We all are their experimental lab rats. There is no concern about harming or killing anyone, because the companies (GlaxoSmithKline, Baxter, and Novartis, and others) have been indemnified by the government, so that there is absolutely no recourse for any deaths or injuries these vaccines may cause. Why would they do that, if these vaccines were safe?

What secret and criminal plans were done behind closed doors to hatch this real X-Files plot?

From investigative reports by Jane Burgermeister, Dr. A. True Ott, and Canadian doctor Ghislaine Lanctôt (author of “The Medical Mafia”), it appears that there is criminal collusion between officials in the US government, WHO/UN, and the pharmaceutical corporations.(1)

In a call yesterday to a friend who is a doctor in California, she told me ominously:

“60% of Americans could die from these vaccines.”

Is this what lies ahead for us in the next few months?

12,000 children ages 3-12, will be guinea pigs for these flu vaccines. It is unethical and unconscionable. To possibly rig the results, the children will be getting injections of different vaccines than will be delivered to the rest of the population this Fall. Is this the cesspool that is hijacking our country? Do we all go­lost in our daily routines, refusing to wake to the grave consequences that face us!- merrily down a path leading to such Orwellian destruction?

Here are some historical reminders of past flu epidemics. They were all contrived and created in some hidden laboratory.

The vaccine used in the mandated 1976 supposed swine flu “epidemic” caused the deaths of 2,000 people before it was removed; and 4,000 filed injury law suits. Before that, it was the Salk polio vaccine, also fast-tracked with $9-million of tax-payer money, to inoculate 57-million Americans before it was even proved to be safe to use. And it wasn’t. African green monkey kidney tissue was used to grow the polio virus; and it proved to have long-term and deadly effects.

In 1955, the “British Medical Journal warned against the used of the Salk polio vaccine.”(2)

The warning, and there were others as well, was ignored. Before genetic engineering opened a Pandora’s Box, this vaccine “was an uncontrolled experiment in interspecies viral transmission.”(3)

Long-term, but not known then (in the financial rush to get this vaccine produced), the use of this monkey’s tissue was to be the cause of cancers detected much later. This cancer-causing monkey virus, known as SV40 (still debated in some medical circles) is documented in “The Virus and the Vaccine: The true story of a cancer-causing monkey virus, contaminated Polio Vaccine, and the millions of Americans Exposed.”(4)

There are countless stories of vaccinations causing death, seizures, and other permanent injuries. Over many years, Robert F. Kennedy’s has waged a valiant campaign about the dangers of vaccines. His article about what he calls “Deadly Immunity” has been re-printed just this past week.(5)

It is yet another reminder of a path continuously trodden by rapacious multi-national corporations, and always with grave consequences that the public bears. Manufacturing vaccines has now become a multi-billion dollar investment by international pharmaceutical corporations. With this enormous investment, there is total lack of precaution. Money trumps safety every time.

Now, we are talking about millions of people getting vaccinated without any safety data or long-term studies.

We are the guinea pigs. AGAIN and AGAIN.

Who benefits from all this? Follow the money trail…

Novartis will receive from the US HHS [Health and Human Services] $346-million for antigen and $348.8-million for adjuvant. They also have orders from 30 other countries. Baxter has orders from five countries for 80-million doses, but has not received FDA approval. GlaxoSmithKline has received $250-million to supply the US with various “pandemic products.”

This is not small change; and more vaccine purchases are planned. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins, in their new article (see below), report that the total US vaccine figure for these orders amounts to $7 billion. From where is this money supposed come, when the United States is actually bankrupt (yet printing worthless fiat dollars)?

In a lengthy article posted on July 27, the distinguished British geneticist and biophysicist Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and biologist Prof. Joe Cummins have written that,

“Vaccines themselves can be dangerous, especially live, attenuated viral vaccines or the new recombinant nucleic acid vaccines, they have the potential to generate virulent viruses by recombination and the recombinant nucleic acids could cause autoimmune diseases. A further major source of toxicity in the case of the flu vaccines are the adjuvants, substances added in order to boost the immunogenicity of the vaccines. There is a large literature on the toxicities of adjuvants.

Most flu vaccines contain dangerous levels of mercury in the form of thimerosal, a deadly preservative 50 times more toxic than the mercury itself. At high enough doses, it can cause long-term immune, sensory, neurological, motor, behavioral dysfunctions. Also associated with mercury poisoning are autism, attention deficit disorder, multiple sclerosis, and speech and language deficiencies.

The Institute of Medicine has warned that infants, children, and pregnant women should not be injected with thimerosal, yet the majority of flu shots contain 25 micrograms of it.”(6)

It should be noted that Dr. Mae-Wan Ho is the Director of the prestigious London non-profit organization, the Institute of Science in Society [ISIS].

She has written several important books and, for more than a decade, also has been writing about the dangers of genetically engineered organisms long before anyone was writing about these issues in the US. This ISIS article is absolutely essential reading for anyone who wants additional and unbiased background information on the questionable safety of these flu vaccines.

In order to be well informed, there also are other important questions that we all must ask every public official.

What vaccines are actually going to be used? There are numerous websites that list ingredients for all the pharmaceutical companies involved in this multi-million dollar so-called “pandemic.” Far too many of the ingredients listed are highly toxic. Some vaccines are not recommended at all for children.

How many injections are going to be forced on children (some reports say four!) and adults? If this goes forward in the Fall, using schools as medical clinics, how will parents know what is in these vaccines? Given the governmental immunity for the pharmaceutical companies, what recourse does anyone have for serious immune damage or death from these vaccines?

These extremely dangerous vaccines are classified as bioweapons by the US government’s own definition.

NOTE: Adjuvants are added to all vaccines to make dispersal faster and easier in the body (but not more safely). It affects the “action of the drug’s active ingredient.” It also then requires less adjuvant, so the product then can be expanded to cover many more vaccinations with less vaccine. This also means a faster production of vaccines, and more money for the drug companies with less production output of vaccine.

However, the trial tests this month on children will not contain a squalene adjuvant, even though it is an ingredient in all three of the vaccines listed below. According to Jane Burgermeister’s July 29 report, these three companies “will conduct their own trials under secret contract with Health and Human Services.”(1, see her website)

Why are they secret, when our lives are all at such risk?

Again, there is a long history of rigged trials [the outcome always favoring the company, and rarely emphasizing the serious health risks and toxicity], especially when conducted by the same company that will produce a drug.

The following is an incomplete (but significant) list of vaccine ingredients:

GlaxoSmithKline Plc based in London

Vaccine Ingredients

Aluminum adjuvant: an aluminum-containing compound. It releases the antigen [an active substance that is capable of generating an enhanced immune response from the body, and then reacting with the products from that response], causing strong, enhanced antibody response ­ what Dr. Mercola calls a “turbo charge” to the body’s immune system. It has been linked to Gulf War Syndrome that has caused tremendous permanent damage to thousands of military.(7) Aluminum is a known cause of cognitive dysfunction.

AS03: The company’s proprietary squalene adjuvant. (See: squalene below)

Daronrix: Glaxo’s H5N1 bird flu vaccine.

Disodium phosphate: a white powder, water-soluble salt. It is used as an anti-caking additive in powdered products. This inorganic chemical is also used as a fungicide and microbiocide.

Formaldehyde: a known carcinogen and reproductive or developmental toxicant. Interestingly, according to PANNA, in 2007, California used 30,328 pounds of this carcinogen, as a microbiocide [a drug or other agent that can kill microbes] on the top 50 crops grown in the state.(8)

Octoxynol 10: (Also known as Triton X-100) A detergent, emulsifier, wetting and defoaming agent. [Octoxynol-9 is a spermatocide.] It can alter metabolic activity, damage membranes, and cause a rapid decline in cell function.

Polysorbate 80: Also known as Tween 80. It is used as an emulsifier in cosmetics, and is one of the ingredients in Gardasil, the cervical cancer vaccine that is being mandated/promoted for teen-age girls. This ingredient is known to cause infertility, grand mal convulsions, spontaneous abortions, and life-threatening anaphylactic shock. So far, 28 Gardasil deaths have been reported.

Sodium Chloride: Refined table salt. Salt is a naturally occurring complex mineral that balances the water inside and outside our cells. Refined salt, sodium chloride, is chemically treated and contains many other hidden chemicals that destroy natural salt’s healing abilities. The body can get most of its daily requirement by eating a well-balanced, organic diet -eliminating processed foods. A good source is untreated, natural sea salt.

Squalene: A natural oil found in sharks (mostly found in their livers) and humans. The American Journal of Pathology (2000) reported that rats injected with squalene triggered “chronic, immune-mediated joint-specific inflammation,” ­i.e., rheumatoid arthritis. How will this affect people who already have an immune inflammation, or will it cause untold new cases (lupus, chronic fatigue)? Squalene is being added to all new vaccines. It is linked to the thousands of military who have contracted “Gulf War Syndrome” and have suffered irreparable auto-immune damage, including lupis, multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia, and rheumatoid arthritis.(9)

Thimersol: (MERCURY). Put in all multiple doses of vaccines. Any amount of mercury is highly toxic. There is no safe level. This is has been repeatedly linked to the increasing rates of autism, multiple sclerosis, and ADD.(10)

Vitamin E: This anti-oxidant vitamin helps protect the body’s red blood cell functions, and helps to oxygenate our tissues. The best sources are from organic, cold-pressed vegetable oils, such as wheat germ, sunflower seeds, and safflower. Vitamin E from corn or soybean oil now often comes from genetically engineered sources.

Baxter International Based in Chicago. Called “Celvapan” or its common name – pandemic influenza vaccine [H5N1]

Vaccine Ingredients

NOTE: Adverse reactions include: headaches, dizziness, vertigo, nasopharyngitis, chills, fatigue, malaise, injection site pain. There is “no data on Celvapan vaccination dose and schedule for subjects under 18 years of age” and for subjects who are immuno-supressed.

African Green Monkey: Cultured cells are taken from this species of monkey through a process called “vero cell technology.” This species of monkey (and the tissue derived from it) have been implicated in transmitting several viruses, including HIV and polio.

Baxter has,

“applied for a patent on a process using this type of cell culture to produce quantities of infecting virus, which are harvested, inactivated with formaldehyde and ultra violet light, and then detergent. Baxter has produced H5N1 [bird flu] whole virus vaccine in a Vero cell line derived from the kidney of an African green monkey.”(11)

According to Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Cummins,

“details of the production of this vaccine have not yet been released to the public.”

Whole virus (H5N1) influenza vaccine, vero-celled derived. (See above.)

Trometamol: Also known as Tris (or Tris buffer) or THAM. An organic compound used as a buffer. May be harmful if inhaled. Avoid contact with eyes, skin, and clothing. Long-term effects: no data. Ecological information: no data.(12)

Sodium chloride, Polysorbate 80, and water [what kind? tap? fluoridated? chlorinated?] for injection.

Novartis International AG Based in Basel, Switzerland

Vaccine Ingredients

NOTE: Adverse reactions include: headaches, sweating, joint pain, fever malaise, shivering, and pain at injection site.

Called “Focetria” or its common name: pandemic influenza vaccine. Licensed May 8, 2007.

Virus: The company is using a proprietary cell line. [Unknown is whether they are using dog or green monkey tissue.] By using this process, instead of growing the virus strain in chicken eggs, it,

“has cut weeks off the time required to begin vaccine production [to be done at its cell-based facility in Germany.”(13)

According to the European Assessment Report (May 2007),

“Focetria should not be given to patients who have an anaphylactic reaction (severe reaction) to an of the components of the vaccine, or to any substances found at trace levels in the vaccine, such as egg, chicken protein, kanamycin, or neomycin sulphate (two antibiotics), formaldehyde, cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB, a disinfectant used to sterilize utensils and instruments) and Polysorbate 80.”

The CTAB Material Safety Data Sheet notes that its,

“chemical, physical, and toxicological properties have not been thoroughly investigated” but it “is irritating to mucous membranes and upper respiratory tract.”(14)

PANNA also lists this as an herbicide and microbiocide.

Squalene: see above.

MF59: A proprietary oil-based adjuvant that and contains (according to Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Cummins’s ISIS article, already cited) Tween 80, Span85, and squalene.

The authors also note that MF59 has “substantially higher local reactogenicity and systemic toxicity than alum.” This adjuvant is part of a new generation of potent vaccine enhancers. In their book, “New Generation Vaccines” authors Levine, Kaper, Rappuoli, and Good note that “The precise mechanisms of action of most adjuvants still remain only partially understood.”(15)

Animal rat studies using oil-based adjuvants have demonstrated severe reactions to them, including paralysis, crippling, auto-immune disorders, and severe arthritis, and immune system impact. The FDA has yet to approved this for used in any vaccine, according to Jane Burgermeister’s July 29 online report (previously cited).

Span85: Patented by the now defunct Chiron (bought by Novartis). Its chemical name is Sorbitan Trioleate. It is an oily liquid used in medicine, textiles, cosmetics, and paints as an emulsifier, anti-rust agent, and thickener. [Some factories in China specialize only in manufacturing Tween 80 and Span 85.]

According to the Pesticide Action Network North America [PANNA], this chemical is used as a pesticide. It is also used as an adjuvant and is “toxic to humans, including carcinogenicity, reproductive and developmental toxicity, neurotoxicity, and acute toxicity.”(16)

UPDATE 1:

For those in mainstream: The International Swine Flu Conference will be held in Washington, D.C., Aug. 19-20, 2009.

Further information is at: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/159085.php and http://www.New-Fields.com/isfc.

UPDATE 2:

In a July 23 report, the National Vaccine information Center (NVIC) is calling on all public officials,

“to provide evidence that it is necessary to given experimental swine flu vaccines to children in schools and that strong mechanisms for vaccine safety screening, recording, monitoring reporting, and vaccine injury compensation are in place.”

At present none of these are. NVIC, founded in 1982, has been committed to being a vaccine watchdog, and questions the need to turn schools into medical clinic this fall.” Further information is at: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/158586.php and http://www.nvic.org//NVIC-Vaccine-News/July-2009/Swine-Flu-Vaccine-Should-Not-Be-Given-to-Children.aspx

The deliberate rush and fast-track to get these untested vaccines ready in millions of doses, precludes any real sense of precaution and safety. There is no concern about how much very real damage, permanent debility, and death will be caused by them.

On June 11, 2009, the World Health Organization [WHO] raised its pandemic level from 5 to 6 -the highest level. In the ensuing six weeks, there has been the most frantic pace by all the pharmaceutical companies to get millions of untested and unsafe vaccines to market, after all, they will be making enormous amounts of money.

Then, just a few days ago, Dr. Keijo Fukuda, WHO’s flu chief, warned about the potential dangers of these different kinds of vaccines, saying:

“There are certain areas where you simply do not try to make any economies. One of the things which cannot be compromised is the safety of the vaccines.” (17)

Safety? This statement is a bit tardy in coming.

At this point, can anyone at the WHO be believed? Trusted? Why was this not the very first thing WHO addressed in May and June, before they rushed to declare a Level 6 “pandemic” (without proof)?

In another unconscionable rush, on July 23, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was reported,

“likely to approve 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) vaccines before trial data can prove their safety and effectiveness against the virus.” (18)

Again, where are any ethics, real safety, caution, or precautionary principle in place? It appears that there is continuing evidence from numerous sources (not just these in this article) repeatedly showing evidences of planned harm to all of us.

The issue of dangerous and deadly pharmaceutical vaccines rushed to market is not an issue that has been created in isolation. Rather, it is part of a whole, and unethical, and completely corrupted system, that is wrecking our country. We are being deliberately assaulted by one crisis after another, precisely as Naomi Klein has written in her brilliant book, “The Shock Doctrine.”

The looting and destruction of our country has been done, bit by bit, over many decades by selected elite insiders, while we (and our parents, too) were basking in a glow that had nothing to do with what was really happening behind the scenes in secret meetings of presidents, Congress, the Judiciary, and other high officials, along with corporate executives.

Now, however, this financial looting as well as the destruction of our Constitutional laws has accelerated enormously over the last nine years. It is all part of the elite’s NWO-plan to wreck our country, destroy what remains, and have those in charge do it right in front of our own eyes. This is the unmitigated hubris of the criminals in charge. Here we are at the brink of a pharmaceutical-military take-over.

Our own government is complicit in this!

Are we still so comatose and/or so heavily poisoned -from ten years of Chemtrail aerosols and the massive pollution from 100,000 mostly untested chemicals that surround our every move- that we do not see or understand what is happening? If these deadly vaccines don’t kill us, then ten years of our entire population being assaulted daily from these highly toxic aerosols and chemicals has already immensely weakened our immune systems.

It is the proverbial one-two punch.

We Americans have not known real chaos on our soil since the Civil War ­ that was 148 years ago. This is not within our own human memory. It belongs to our great-great-grandparent’s era. The 1960’s and Watts Riots were tragic, but they did not engulf the entire United(?) States. Now, with all the illegal laws passed (but not even read) by a complicit Congress -no longer working “for us,” but, truly against us- we face a tremendous, epic crisis.

Moreover, the deliberately created, but non-existent scare-tactic diversion “pandemic” really is a mask for the bankruptcy and on-going theft of our tax-payer dollars. No accountability to the Federal Reserve, while they steal trillions of our dollars. No accountability to the pharmaceutical companies for the real potential of irreparable harm or death from untested and dangerous vaccines.

Do we get the connection?

Stealing our own tax-payer trillions of dollars, the Federal Reserve is not accountable to anyone, while the country goes down the drain, due to the chaos they have deliberately created. The pharmaceutical companies are indemnified, while they manufacture highly toxic, untested drugs. The government officials approve of this. No one is held accountable.

Nonetheless, WE, THE CITIZENS, are put in mortal fear about this non-existent but contrived “pandemic.” This is criminal.

There is a long and dirty history of pharmaceutical companies manufacturing dangerous, often poorly tested drugs. Repeatedly, we have been the guinea pigs for one dangerous drug after another, while the drug companies took in millions of dollars.

It’s a sordid history ­ everything from thalidomide, to DES [diethylstilbestrol, a synthetic estrogen hormone], to Vioxx. Problems were covered up. Test results were falsified. Reports conveniently disappeared. Conflicts of interest are frequent. Scientists were paid off.

There continues a revolving-door policy where employees of drug companies leave their jobs, only to be employed by government agencies. More recently, we now have a vast commercialization of medicine and drugs with all the radio and TV ads. For decade after decade, we have been expendable for enormous corporate profits. Our well being, our safety are never part of the corporate equation. Their bottom line is always profit. All of us continue to be expendable for that.

Think about that, as 12,000 of our [I write “our” in a collective sense, as we are all responsible to one another] young children are going to be given an untested vaccine(s?) this month. Our young and innocent children are going to be the latest guinea pigs. This vaccine is not even the same one that will be forced on the rest of us this Fall.

Does any of this sound ethical? Does it sound criminal?

The massive governmental corruption we see all around us is perhaps even worse than in the ancient Roman days of Caligula.

WHERE ARE OUR RIGHTS?

There are also basic human rights that are deliberately and completely ignored. Where is our right to choose? Where are our supposed legal and Constitutional rights? We have the right to live in peace, without being deliberately harmed or provoked, by the threat of Martial Law.

There has been an illegal and unlawful build-up of troops and military exercises (the latest just this past week), on our own soil that is a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. In the next few months, we are about to face our own American soldiers who have killed and maimed indiscriminately in Iraq and Afghanistan. These soldiers will now probably be deployed to accompany FEMA to come door-to-door into our homes to force us to take these poisonous injections.

Can you envision what that means?

Our own military is being ordered to possibly attack us in our homes [what else can it be called?] for more lies!

Jim Kirwan’s latest online essay is so right on! He sees clearly how damaged the returning soldiers are! (19)

These are US troops who, in all probability, have been given toxic vaccines [as they had been during the Gulf War] and mind-altering drugs, so they are doped and hardened to the reality of harming or killing us. This is what Professor Michel Chossudovsky calls the “militarization of health.” (20)

We have the basic and universal right not to be deliberately harmed by our own government, or used as unwilling laboratory subjects for completely untested and dangerous vaccines. It is inhuman and in total contravention of all international laws to deliberately cause grave harm or death to citizens. This is what the Nazis did.

The United States is now a rogue country that ignores basic universal human rights. Massive greed and collusion-to-cause-untold-grave-harm have taken its place. Where our own innocent, young children are used as test subjects, where our government puts us all in harm’s way, where we are threatened with internment in FEMA concentration camps, if we refuse to be compliant and be injected with poisons, while nothing of basic humanity remains from any public official.

A democratic country honors and upholds its own laws and those of the international community. It does not attack, unprovoked, other countries. A democratic country holds its citizens in esteem and protects them: their lives and “promotes the general welfare.”

A democratic society has officials who honor their oaths of office.

A truly democratic society respects the individual, supports education, and encourages peaceful domestic growth. Its legislative branch is open and honest, and does not collude to harm its citizens. Children grow up content and secure. They become well-educated citizens (not shoppers). The country thrives and can set an example for others. Peace reigns. Neighbors live in tranquility. The Common Good is held in high regard. Laws are upheld. Justice pervades. Truth is sacred.

Whatever lies are being promulgated by a corporate-controlled and compliant media, there is no real investigative journalism left. There is no search for the truth. What we have now every day is Orwellian Doublespeak, while the entire population of the United States is at grave risk of enormous physical harm.

This is not the country in which I grew up. Now, there is a complete lack of any moral direction or ethical boundaries.

The government has broken its social and legal contracts with its own citizens. A government that can put all of its citizens deliberately in harm’s way, is unfit. We are living in a police state, just the façade remains, while the great majority of Americans do not realize what tremendous destruction is right before us.

A military state places all its financial and governmental power on killing and massive harm. This is what our violent country has done. In the last nine years, it has illegally attacked three countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan and has given military assistance to Israel to attack the civilian citizens of Gaza with depleted uranium bombs… this, too, is illegal under international law).

Violence is epidemic throughout our society. Children kill their peers; and our prison population (the largest of an Western country) is a tragedy. The movies are replete with one violent film after another. When violence and killing take priority in society [our budget and prison population], this is where we find ourselves as a bankrupt country.

The bankruptcy goes far deeper than just the financial aspects. It goes to the core of our lost values. If many of us still believe in ethics, truth, and honorable behavior, those running the country do not exemplify our own personal values. The disconnect is tremendous.

At the same time, all our social services are trashed.

No money for education.

No money for elder care.

No money for almost 50-million Americans who have no medical coverage.

No money for the entire health and well-being of our citizenry (except for the rich).

It is a complete disgrace.

Yet, elite corporate power is destroying our economy. Businesses are being gobbled up by larger ones (even if they are bankrupt), while millions are out of work. Banks are told not to lend to their customers who are trying desperately to hold on to their homes.(21)

There is no money for crumbling bridges and disastrous, pot-holed roads across the entire country. I speak from personal experience, as I drove back and forth across the United States last year. Toll roads have increased as have the toll fees; but the roads are wrecked. There is hardly any money for the massive amount of real infrastructure repairs needed. In our financially bankrupt country, there is always fiat money for killing. There is no money for any social services ­the very backbone of a healthy society. Our entire economic structure is a planned wreckage!

The US has billions of tax-payer dollars for every kind of weapon, and bomb, and illegal DU bombs, and hi-tech military drones or sophisticated stealth weaponry, but our social services are completely cut to the bone. This is not a healthy society. It is a poorly educated and very sick one: and it shows from 40-million obese people to epidemics of cancers, and massive multiple immune illnesses.

Our tax-payer trillions of dollars have been deliberately stolen from us to pay salaries of bankrupt CEOs, trillions have gone into some deep hole and are unaccounted for; and yet, the Federal Reserve (a private bankster cabal) refuses to answer any questions, as to where our money has gone. It is fraud. They are above the law. This is highway theft of unimaginable proportions. It is criminal.

But, again, there is no accountability.

The irreparable damage done to hundreds of thousands of soldiers who have returned from killing innocent civilians, under both bushes, is staggering. They are maimed for life. They are unstable killers. They are damaged by squalene containing vaccines (Gulf War Syndrome) that they are given. These are the soldiers who return to either do more harm here, or are hospitalized or mutilated for the rest of their lives.

Jim Kirwan writes of the tragic wrecked lives of these soldiers. This is what happens when warfare is glorified and violence is culturally epidemic.

Once upon a time, at the end of another war (WWII), the United States was hailed and admired [if we leave aside all the political and historical lies that Americans were fed then]. We were industrious, we were far more well educated. We stood for ethical values and doing the right thing [at least most Americans believed that, even if secret dealings were already under way to destroy our country from within].

Now, our ratings have plummeted: politicians work for secret groups and corporations. The very core is so rotted; but mostly still unknown to the average American.

This is where we are right now. We have had our liberties stolen from us. We have had our democratic institutions stolen from us, by those in charge. We are at the brink of even the loss of our very own lives ­ all under the guise of protecting us from a non-existent “pandemic.” Genetically engineer the flu in some bioweapons lab, and the create debilitating and deathly vaccines that will do further harm to everyone.

Chief Seattle can still remind us “what we do to ourselves, we do to the web of life.”

The system – “health” (sic), politics, economics – is all rigged to do us extreme harm. The government is broken, and completely disassociated from the social construct upon which our nation was originally founded. Much of it now is being run into the ground by elements with criminal ties and intent. They have created this “pandemic” that is the set-up governmental pretext and smokescreen for the actual financial destruction of our country.

It is another colossal “false flag” scenario that will engulf us all with disastrous results.

Think of all the lies we have been repeatedly told and the ramifications that have resulted from this created 8-year deception ­ all surrounding the “official version” of the tragedy of September 11, 2001. We, the people, continue to be expendable not just for corporate profits but also for a political agenda created to harm us in the extreme.

Do we want death by injection? Is this what we want for our children and grandchildren?

LINKS

Pandemic Flu Online: http://www.PandemicFluOnline.com

World Association for Vaccine Education: http://www.novaccine.com/

Vaccine Rights: www. vaccinerights.com

Injunction Sought to Stop Forced Swine Flu Vaccination Juggernaught: http://educateyourself.org/vcd/forcedvaccinationinjuctionsought22jul09.shtml

Global Research Swine Flu Center: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?contenxt=newsHighlights&newsid=46

World Genocide Watch: http://www.worldgenocidewatch.blogspot.com

NOTES

A. True Ott, Ph.D., ND. “Startling New Evidence That The ‘Swine Flu’ Pandemic Is Man-Made.”

July 26, 2009: http://www.rense.com/general86/manmd.htm; and Jane Burgermeister’s website has a complete dossier of all her reports, as well as daily updates with her on-going investigation: http://www.birdflu666.wordpress.com.

For Dr. Lanctôt, see: Kurt Nimmo. “Canadian Doctor: H1N1 Vaccination: A Eugenics Weapon for ‘Massive & Targeted Reduction of the World Population.'”

July 10, 2009: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?=va&aid=14312

Eleanor McBean. “The Poisoned Needle.”

Interspecies viral transmission: http://www.sunnewsonline.com/webpages/features/goodhealth/2009/jan/20/goodhealth-20-01-2009-002.htm

Azoma Chikwe. “Polio vaccine dangers revealed.” See: Note above, #3; and Tam Dang-Tan et al. “Polio vaccines, Simian Virus 40, and human cancer: the epidemiological evidence for a causal association.” Oncogene. (2004) Vol. 23: 6535-6540.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Deadly Immunity.” July 23, 2009: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?=va&aid=14510

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe Cummins. “Fast-tracked Swine Flu Vaccine under Fire.” Institute of Science in Society. London. http://www.i-sis.org/fastTrackSwineFluVaccineUnderFire.php

Petrik MS, Wong MC, Tabata RC, Garry RF, Shaw CA (2007). “Aluminum adjuvant linked to gulf war illness induces motor neuron death in mice”. Neuromolecular Med 9 (1): 83-100. PMID 17114826.

Also, see: Gary Matsumoto. “Vaccine A: The Covert Government Experiment That’s Killing Our Soldiers and Why GI’s Ae only the First Victims of This Vaccine.” NY: Basic Books.

Toxicity of Formaldehyde: See: http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_ChemUse.jsp?Rec_Id=PC40254

See: http://ajp.amjpathol.org/cgi/content/abstract/156/6/2057.

Also see Dr. Mercola’s article on this vaccine at: http://blogs.mercola.com/sites/vitalvotes/archive/2009/07/17/Squalene-The-Swine-Flu-Vaccines-Dirty-Little-Secret-Exposed.aspx;

and Paul Joseph Watson. “Government Swine Flu Advisor on Vaccine Payroll.” July 27, 2009: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index?phpcontext-va&aid=14550

See Robert F. Kennedy’s 2005 article, just republished at: http://www.globalresearch.ca/indexphp?context=va&aid=14510; and Dr. Mae-Wan Ho’s ISIS article already cited, NOTE #6.

Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, ISIS already cited, NOTE #6. Baxter filed for a “Swine flu patent in August 2008, a year before any flu outbreak. See: Lori Price. “Big Pharma: Baxter Files Swine Flu Vaccine Patent a Year Ahead of Outbreak. July 18, 2009: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index?phpcontext-va&aid=14430

See: bsd.leica-microsystems.com/pdfs/msds/ebv-k_msds.pdf. Interestingly, it is a prohibited substance for racing horses.

See: http://www.asianracing.nu/vb/archive/index.php/t-547.html

Novartis Hopeful of H1N1 Flu Vaccine by Autumn.” http://www.natap.org/2009/newsUpdates/061609_03.htm

CTAB: http://www.google.com/search?q=focetria%20toxic%20side%20effects&spell=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en;

PANNA: http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_Chemical.jsp?Rec_Id=PC35058 and http://www.fastiddna.com/documents/MSDSFoodDNAKitCTAB.aspx

MF59: Myron Max Levine, James B. Kaper, Rino Rappuoli, and Michael F. Good. “New Generation Vaccines.” 2004. p. 260.

Span85/Sorbitan Trioleate. PANNA Pesticide Data Base ­ Chemicals: http://www.pesticideinfo.org/Detail_Chemical.jsp?Rec_Id=PC34453

WHO changes its mind: Mark Prigg. “Vaccine from swine flu may be unsafe warns WHO.” London Evening Standard. July 27, 2009: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23724398-details/Vaccine+for+swine+flu+may+be+unsafe+warns+WHO/article.do

[NEW 18. Emily P. Walker. “FDA Likely to Approve H1N1 Vaccine In Advance of Data.”

July 23, 2009: http://www.medpagetoday.com/PrimaryCare/Vaccines/15230; and “Evidence of Harm Has Been Linked To Various Vaccines Challenging Prevailing Public Recommendations.”

May 28, 2009: /www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/151681.php]

Jim Kirwan. “Legacy of the Bush Brigades.”

July 31, 2009: http://www.rense.com/general86/legacy.htm; and also: “State of the Union.”

August 1, 2009: http://www.rense.com/general86/stateuu.htm

Michel Chossudovsky. “Martial Law and the Militarization of Public Health. The Worldwide H1N1 Flu Vaccination Program.”

July 26, 2009: http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=14543

Banks: Dennis Kucinich. “The Federal Reserve is paying banks NOT to make loans to struggling Americans.”

Youtube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gkf8VG3HL_8

source

 

VACCINE-AUTISM link suppressed by Big Pharma, FDA, CDC – From LoadsOf RedPills

 

FROM LOADS OF RED PILLS. Please Visit The Original Blog
I recently posted an article about how 52 officials from FDA, CDC, WHO and big pharma experts met in secret to hide the results of a dramatic study exposing that since 1991, the estimated number of CASES OF AUTISM HAD INCREASED FIFTEEN-FOLD, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children DUE TO MERCURY IN THE VACCINES. They couldn’t care less about hurting your kids, and worked together to suppress the article exposing them, so I am reposting it here in full.

Please read this article, it is APPALLING, they are just a big mafia, and send it to as many people as you can.

I gave this link towards the article on Rolling Stones, but it has ‘mysteriously disappeared’ without a trace. They have been caught red-handed because I usually save those articles on my disk, fully aware of their tactics. So, here is a copy of the full article, with my comments in brackets. They can try to delete this post behind my back, I will repost it again and again, because I also back-up my posts.

Read the following article and learn how they couldn’t care less about human life, but only big pharma profits. FDA, CDC have been working together for a century to increase big pharma profits.

PARENTS, you MUST read this to understand what they are up to! They work for big pharma, not you. Your kids are their property. They want to turn them into their lifelong customers. You are there to raise and feed them, and pay for their drugs until they are able to do it themselves. Go ahead, read the article, and prove me wrong.

The article starts here …

Deadly Immunity / Rolling stones

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. investigates the government cover-up of a mercury/autism scandal

ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR. Posted Jun 20, 2005 12:00 AM

In June 2000, a group of top government scientists and health officials gathered for a meeting at the isolated Simpsonwood conference center in Norcross, Georgia. Convened by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the meeting was held at this Methodist retreat center, nestled in wooded farmland next to the Chattahoochee River, to ensure complete secrecy. The agency had issued no public announcement of the session — only private invitations to fifty-two attendees. There were high-level officials from the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration, the top vaccine specialist from the World Health Organization in Geneva and representatives of every major vaccine manufacturer, including GlaxoSmithKline, Merck, Wyeth and Aventis Pasteur. All of the scientific data under discussion, CDC officials repeatedly reminded the participants, was strictly “embargoed.” There would be no making photocopies of documents, no taking papers with them when they left [that’s how those who you ‘trust’ to protect you conspire against you].

The federal officials and industry representatives had assembled to discuss a disturbing new study that raised alarming questions about the safety of a host of common childhood vaccines administered to infants and young children. According to a CDC epidemiologist named Tom Verstraeten, who had analyzed the agency’s massive database containing the medical records of 100,000 children, a mercury-based preservative in the vaccines — thimerosal — appeared to be responsible for a dramatic increase in autism and a host of other neurological disorders among children. “I was actually stunned by what I saw,” Verstraeten told those assembled at Simpsonwood, citing the staggering number of earlier studies that indicate a link between thimerosal and speech delays, attention-deficit disorder, hyperactivity and autism. Since 1991, when the CDC and the FDA had recommended that three additional vaccines laced with the preservative be given to extremely young infants — in one case, within hours of birth — the estimated number of cases of autism had increased fifteen-fold, from one in every 2,500 children to one in 166 children.

Even for scientists and doctors accustomed to confronting issues of life and death, the findings were frightening. “You can play with this all you want,” Dr. Bill Weil, a consultant for the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the group. The results “are statistically significant.” Dr. Richard Johnston, an immunologist and pediatrician from the University of Colorado whose grandson had been born early on the morning of the meeting’s first day, was even more alarmed. “My gut feeling?” he said. “Forgive this personal comment — I do not want my grandson to get a thimerosal-containing vaccine until we know better what is going on” [oh yeah, but please do not warn the other parents, they deserve to see their kid turned into a vegetable because of your actions].

But instead of taking immediate steps to alert the public and rid the vaccine supply of thimerosal, the officials and executives at Simpsonwood spent most of the next two days discussing how to cover up the damaging data. According to transcripts obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, many at the meeting were concerned about how the damaging revelations about thimerosal would affect the vaccine industry’s bottom line. “We are in a bad position from the standpoint of defending any lawsuits,” said Dr. Robert Brent, a pediatrician at the Alfred I. duPont Hospital for Children in Delaware. “This will be a resource to our very busy plaintiff attorneys in this country.” Dr. Bob Chen, head of vaccine safety for the CDC, expressed relief that “given the sensitivity of the information, we have been able to keep it out of the hands of, let’s say, less responsible hands.” Dr. John Clements, vaccines advisor at the World Health Organization, declared that “perhaps this study should not have been done at all.” [this tells all you need to know about the criminality of the WHO, whose sole purpose is to expand big pharma profits and reduce the population by harming kids as much as they can]. He added that “the research results have to be handled,” [sir, research results are PUBLISHED, that’s how science moves forward, you are a criminal] warning that the study “will be taken by others and will be used in other ways beyond the control of this group.”

In fact, the government has proved to be far more adept at handling the damage than at protecting children’s health. The CDC paid the Institute of Medicine to conduct a new study to whitewash the risks of thimerosal, ordering researchers to “rule out” the chemical’s link to autism [that’s how big pharma does science these days, they order people to come up with the results they want, it has nothing to do with safey or healing people]. It withheld Verstraeten’s findings, even though they had been slated for immediate publication, and told other scientists that his original data had been “lost” and could not be replicated. And to thwart the Freedom of Information Act, it handed its giant database of vaccine records over to a private company, declaring it off-limits to researchers. By the time Verstraeten finally published his study in 2003, he had gone to work for GlaxoSmithKline and reworked his data to bury the link between thimerosal and autism.

Vaccine manufacturers had already begun to phase thimerosal out of injections given to American infants — but they continued to sell off their mercury-based supplies of vaccines until last year. The CDC and FDA gave them a hand, buying up the tainted vaccines for export to developing countries and allowing drug companies to continue using the preservative in some American vaccines — including several pediatric flu shots as well as tetanus boosters routinely given to eleven-year-olds.

The drug companies are also getting help from powerful lawmakers in Washington. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who has received $873,000 in contributions from the pharmaceutical industry, has been working to immunize vaccine makers from liability in 4,200 lawsuits that have been filed by the parents of injured children. On five separate occasions, Frist has tried to seal all of the government’s vaccine-related documents — including the Simpsonwood transcripts — and shield Eli Lilly, the developer of thimerosal, from subpoenas. In 2002, the day after Frist quietly slipped a rider known as the “Eli Lilly Protection Act” into a homeland security bill, the company contributed $10,000 to his campaign and bought 5,000 copies of his book on bioterrorism. The measure was repealed by Congress in 2003 — but earlier this year, Frist slipped another provision into an anti-terrorism bill that would deny compensation to children suffering from vaccine-related brain disorders. “The lawsuits are of such magnitude that they could put vaccine producers out of business and limit our capacity to deal with a biological attack by terrorists,” says Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to Frist [terrorism again, the perfect excuse to do anything they want under that banner…yeah, let’s be afraid of bearded cavemen !].

Even many conservatives are shocked by the government’s effort to cover up the dangers of thimerosal. Rep. Dan Burton, a Republican from Indiana, oversaw a three-year investigation of thimerosal after his grandson was diagnosed with autism. “Thimerosal used as a preservative in vaccines is directly related to the autism epidemic,” his House Government Reform Committee concluded in its final report. “This epidemic in all probability may have been prevented or curtailed had the FDA not been asleep at the switch regarding a lack of safety data regarding injected thimerosal, a known neurotoxin.” The FDA and other public-health agencies failed to act, the committee added, out of “institutional malfeasance for self protection” and “misplaced protectionism of the pharmaceutical industry.”

The story of how government health agencies colluded with Big Pharma to hide the risks of thimerosal from the public is a chilling case study of institutional arrogance, power and greed. I was drawn into the controversy only reluctantly. As an attorney and environmentalist who has spent years working on issues of mercury toxicity, I frequently met mothers of autistic children who were absolutely convinced that their kids had been injured by vaccines. Privately, I was skeptical.

I doubted that autism could be blamed on a single source, and I certainly understood the government’s need to reassure parents that vaccinations are safe; the eradication of deadly childhood diseases depends on it. I tended to agree with skeptics like Rep. Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, who criticized his colleagues on the House Government Reform Committee for leaping to conclusions about autism and vaccinations. “Why should we scare people about immunization,” Waxman pointed out at one hearing, “until we know the facts?”

It was only after reading the Simpsonwood transcripts, studying the leading scientific research and talking with many of the nation’s pre-eminent authorities on mercury that I became convinced that the link between thimerosal and the epidemic of childhood neurological disorders is real. Five of my own children are members of the Thimerosal Generation — those born between 1989 and 2003 — who received heavy doses of mercury from vaccines. “The elementary grades are overwhelmed with children who have symptoms of neurological or immune-system damage,” Patti White, a school nurse, told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. “Vaccines are supposed to be making us healthier; however, in twenty-five years of nursing I have never seen so many damaged, sick kids. Something very, very wrong is happening to our children.” [that’s good for big pharma, those will be lifelong customers]

More than 500,000 kids currently suffer from autism, and pediatricians diagnose more than 40,000 new cases every year. The disease was unknown until 1943, when it was identified and diagnosed among eleven children born in the months after thimerosal was first added to baby vaccines in 1931.

Some skeptics dispute that the rise in autism is caused by thimerosal-tainted vaccinations. They argue that the increase is a result of better diagnosis — a theory that seems questionable at best, given that most of the new cases of autism are clustered within a single generation of children. “If the epidemic is truly an artifact of poor diagnosis,” scoffs Dr. Boyd Haley, one of the world’s authorities on mercury toxicity, “then where are all the twenty-year-old autistics?” Other researchers point out that Americans are exposed to a greater cumulative “load” of mercury than ever before, from contaminated fish to dental fillings, and suggest that thimerosal in vaccines may be only part of a much larger problem. It’s a concern that certainly deserves far more attention than it has received — but it overlooks the fact that the mercury concentrations in vaccines dwarf other sources of exposure to our children.

What is most striking is the lengths to which many of the leading detectives have gone to ignore — and cover up — the evidence against thimerosal. From the very beginning, the scientific case against the mercury additive has been overwhelming. The preservative, which is used to stem fungi and bacterial growth in vaccines, contains ethylmercury, a potent neurotoxin. Truckloads of studies have shown that mercury tends to accumulate in the brains of primates and other animals after they are injected with vaccines — and that the developing brains of infants are particularly susceptible. In 1977, a Russian study found that adults exposed to much lower concentrations of ethylmercury than those given to American children still suffered brain damage years later. Russia banned thimerosal from children’s vaccines twenty years ago, and Denmark, Austria, Japan, Great Britain and all the Scandinavian countries have since followed suit.

“You couldn’t even construct a study that shows thimerosal is safe,” says Haley, who heads the chemistry department at the University of Kentucky. “It’s just too darn toxic. If you inject thimerosal into an animal, its brain will sicken. If you apply it to living tissue, the cells die. If you put it in a petri dish, the culture dies. Knowing these things, it would be shocking if one could inject it into an infant without causing damage.”

Internal documents reveal that Eli Lilly, which first developed thimerosal, knew from the start that its product could cause damage — and even death — in both animals and humans. In 1930, the company tested thimerosal by administering it to twenty-two patients with terminal meningitis, all of whom died within weeks of being injected — a fact Lilly didn’t bother to report in its study declaring thimerosal safe. In 1935, researchers at another vaccine manufacturer, Pittman-Moore, warned Lilly that its claims about thimerosal’s safety “did not check with ours.” Half the dogs Pittman injected with thimerosal-based vaccines became sick, leading researchers there to declare the preservative “unsatisfactory as a serum intended for use on dogs.”

In the decades that followed, the evidence against thimerosal continued to mount. During the Second World War, when the Department of Defense used the preservative in vaccines on soldiers, it required Lilly to label it “poison.” In 1967, a study in Applied Microbiology found that thimerosal killed mice when added to injected vaccines. Four years later, Lilly’s own studies discerned that thimerosal was “toxic to tissue cells” in concentrations as low as one part per million — 100 times weaker than the concentration in a typical vaccine. Even so, the company continued to promote thimerosal as “nontoxic” and also incorporated it into topical disinfectants. In 1977, ten babies at a Toronto hospital died when an antiseptic preserved with thimerosal was dabbed onto their umbilical cords.

In 1982, the FDA proposed a ban on over-the-counter products that contained thimerosal, and in 1991 the agency considered banning it from animal vaccines. But tragically, that same year, the CDC recommended that infants be injected with a series of mercury-laced vaccines. Newborns would be vaccinated for hepatitis B within twenty-four hours of birth, and two-month-old infants would be immunized for haemophilus influenzae B and diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis.

The drug industry knew the additional vaccines posed a danger. The same year that the CDC approved the new vaccines, Dr. Maurice Hilleman, one of the fathers of Merck’s vaccine programs, warned the company that six-month-olds who were administered the shots would suffer dangerous exposure to mercury. He recommended that thimerosal be discontinued, “especially when used on infants and children,” noting that the industry knew of nontoxic alternatives. “The best way to go,” he added, “is to switch to dispensing the actual vaccines without adding preservatives.”

For Merck and other drug companies, however, the obstacle was money. Thimerosal enables the pharmaceutical industry to package vaccines in vials that contain multiple doses, which require additional protection because they are more easily contaminated by multiple needle entries. The larger vials cost half as much to produce as smaller, single-dose vials, making it cheaper for international agencies to distribute them to impoverished regions at risk of epidemics. Faced with this “cost consideration,” Merck ignored Hilleman’s warnings, and government officials continued to push more and more thimerosal-based vaccines for children. Before 1989, American preschoolers received eleven vaccinations — for polio, diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis and measles-mumps-rubella. A decade later, thanks to federal recommendations, children were receiving a total of twenty-two immunizations by the time they reached first grade.

As the number of vaccines increased, the rate of autism among children exploded. During the 1990s, 40 million children were injected with thimerosal-based vaccines, receiving unprecedented levels of mercury during a period critical for brain development. Despite the well-documented dangers of thimerosal, it appears that no one bothered to add up the cumulative dose of mercury that children would receive from the mandated vaccines. “What took the FDA so long to do the calculations?” Peter Patriarca, director of viral products for the agency, asked in an e-mail to the CDC in 1999. “Why didn’t CDC and the advisory bodies do these calculations when they rapidly expanded the childhood immunization schedule?”

But by that time, the damage was done. At two months, when the infant brain is still at a critical stage of development, infants routinely received three inoculations that contained a total of 62.5 micrograms of ethylmercury — a level 99 times greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury, a related neurotoxin. Although the vaccine industry insists that ethylmercury poses little danger because it breaks down rapidly and is removed by the body, several studies — including one published in April by the National Institute of Health — suggest that ethylmercury is actually MORE toxic to developing brains and stays in the brain longer than methylmercury [in other words, they chose the most toxic of the two, and still brag about its inocuity].

Officials responsible for childhood immunizations insist that the additional vaccines were necessary to protect infants from disease and that thimerosal is still essential in developing nations, which, they often claim, cannot afford the single-dose vials that don’t require a preservative. Dr. Paul Offit, one of CDC’s top vaccine advisers, told me, “I think if we really have an influenza pandemic — and certainly we will in the next twenty years, because we always do — there’s no way on God’s earth that we immunize 280 million people with single-dose vials. There has to be multidose vials.”

But while public-health officials may have been well-intentioned, many of those on the CDC advisory committee who backed the additional vaccines had close ties to the industry. Dr. Sam Katz, the committee’s chair, was a paid consultant for most of the major vaccine makers and was part of a team that developed the measles vaccine and brought it to licensure in 1963. Dr. Neal Halsey, another committee member, worked as a researcher for the vaccine companies and received honoraria from Abbott Labs for his research on the hepatitis B vaccine.

Indeed, in the tight circle of scientists who work on vaccines, such conflicts of interest are common. Rep. Burton says that the CDC “routinely allows scientists with blatant conflicts of interest to serve on intellectual advisory committees that make recommendations on new vaccines,” even though they have “interests in the products and companies for which they are supposed to be providing unbiased oversight.” The House Government Reform Committee discovered that four of the eight CDC advisers who approved guidelines for a rotavirus vaccine “had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.”

Offit, who shares a patent on one of the vaccines, acknowledged to me that he “would make money” if his vote eventually leads to a marketable product. But he dismissed my suggestion that a scientist’s direct financial stake in CDC approval might bias his judgment. “It provides no conflict for me,” he insists. “I have simply been informed by the process, not corrupted by it. When I sat around that table, my sole intent was trying to make recommendations that best benefited the children in this country. It’s offensive to say that physicians and public-health people are in the pocket of industry and thus are making decisions that they know are unsafe for children. It’s just not the way it works.”

Other vaccine scientists and regulators gave me similar assurances. Like Offit, they view themselves as enlightened guardians of children’s health, proud of their “partnerships” with pharmaceutical companies, immune to the seductions of personal profit, besieged by irrational activists whose anti-vaccine campaigns are endangering children’s health. They are often resentful of questioning. “Science,” says Offit, “is best left to scientists” [when you hide studies exposing the dangers of thimerosal, you are not a scientist anymore, but a freaking criminal who deserves life sentence. Offit goes as far as saying that vaccines are ‘so safe, that you could inject 1,000 into a kid].

Still, some government officials were alarmed by the apparent conflicts of interest [they faked to be alarmed because this has been going on for a century, and it is only getting worse]. In his e-mail to CDC administrators in 1999, Paul Patriarca of the FDA blasted federal regulators for failing to adequately scrutinize the danger posed by the added baby vaccines. “I’m not sure there will be an easy way out of the potential perception that the FDA, CDC and immunization-policy bodies may have been asleep at the switch re: thimerosal until now,” Patriarca wrote. The close ties between regulatory officials and the pharmaceutical industry, he added, “will also raise questions about various advisory bodies regarding aggressive recommendations for use” of thimerosal in child vaccines.

[what about making it unlawful to have ties to big pharma when you are in a committee for a start?]

If federal regulators and government scientists failed to grasp the potential risks of thimerosal over the years, no one could claim ignorance after the secret meeting at Simpsonwood. But rather than conduct more studies to test the link to autism and other forms of brain damage, the CDC placed politics over science [why do ‘more’ studies, only ONE study is enough when it exposes a danger]. The agency turned its database on childhood vaccines — which had been developed largely at taxpayer expense — over to a private agency, America’s Health Insurance Plans, ensuring that it could not be used for additional research [when people do things like that, it is a proof that what they are hiding is true, otherwise they wouldn’t bother – they are pure criminals]. It also instructed the Institute of Medicine, an advisory organization that is part of the National Academy of Sciences, to produce a study debunking the link between thimerosal and brain disorders. The CDC “wants us to declare, well, that these things are pretty safe” [as Offit said, it’s better to leave science to scientists … who are paid by big pharma]. Dr. Marie McCormick, who chaired the IOM’s Immunization Safety Review Committee, told her fellow researchers when they first met in January 2001. “We are not ever going to come down that [autism] is a true side effect” of thimerosal exposure. According to transcripts of the meeting, the committee’s chief staffer, Kathleen Stratton, predicted that the IOM would conclude that the evidence was “inadequate to accept or reject a causal relation” between thimerosal and autism. That, she added, was the result “Walt wants” — a reference to Dr. Walter Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program for the CDC.

[See, this is a GIGANTIC error of logic because ONE study proving something is harmful destroys a trillion studies who can’t put the evidence to light, but they do it all the time, and the gullible public doesn’t see the trick.]

For those who had devoted their lives to promoting vaccination, the revelations about thimerosal threatened to undermine everything they had worked for [which means they had worked towards harming people, and they wanted it to keep it like that]. “We’ve got a dragon by the tail here,” said Dr. Michael Kaback, another committee member. “The more negative that [our] presentation is, the less likely people are to use vaccination, immunization — and we know what the results of that will be. We are kind of caught in a trap. How we work our way out of the trap, I think is the charge.”

Even in public, federal officials made it clear that their primary goal in studying thimerosal was to dispel doubts about vaccines [in science, we call that ‘bias’ and unscientific because you are not trying to find the truth, just to look away from it]. “Four current studies are taking place to rule out the proposed link between autism and thimerosal,” [in other words, they make studies ‘knowing’ the results in advance, which is only possible when you have decided to lie, it’s a show] Dr. Gordon Douglas, then-director of strategic planning for vaccine research at the National Institutes of Health, assured a Princeton University gathering in May 2001. “In order to undo the harmful effects of research claiming to link the [measles] vaccine to an elevated risk of autism [you cannot ‘undo’ the fact that mercury causes autism, they are just trying to confuse people with results from studies who search where there is nothing to find], we need to conduct and publicize additional studies to assure parents of safety” [no, you don’t, the study mentioned at the beginning of this article is the ‘black swan’ of vaccination, it’s game over for vaccine defenders because the link has been exposed]. Douglas formerly served as president of vaccinations for Merck, where he ignored warnings about thimerosal’s risks.

In May of last year, the Institute of Medicine issued its final report. Its conclusion: There is no proven link between autism and thimerosal in vaccines. Rather than reviewing the large body of literature describing the toxicity of thimerosal, the report relied on four disastrously flawed epidemiological studies examining European countries, where children received much smaller doses of thimerosal than American kids [as I said, by not looking on purpose where the danger is, you won’t find it, it is utterly non scientific]. It also cited a new version of the Verstraeten study, published in the journal Pediatrics, that had been reworked to reduce the link between thimerosal and autism [this is outright criminal … someone bring the electric chair]. The new study included children too young to have been diagnosed with autism and overlooked others who showed signs of the disease [no respect for humanity …]. The IOM declared the case closed and — in a startling position for a scientific body — recommended that no further research be conducted.

The report may have satisfied the CDC, but it convinced no one. Rep. David Weldon, a Republican physician from Florida who serves on the House Government Reform Committee, attacked the Institute of Medicine, saying it relied on a handful of studies that were “fatally flawed” by “poor design” and failed to represent “all the available scientific and medical research.” CDC officials are not interested in an honest search for the truth, Weldon told me, because “an association between vaccines and autism would force them to admit that their policies irreparably damaged thousands of children. Who would want to make that conclusion about themselves?” [well, true scientists for a start …]

Under pressure from Congress and parents, the Institute of Medicine convened another panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program. In February, the new panel, composed of different scientists, criticized the way the VSD had been used in the Verstraeten study, and urged the CDC to make its vaccine database available to the public.

So far, though, only two scientists have managed to gain access. Dr. Mark Geier, president of the Genetics Center of America, and his son, David, spent a year battling to obtain the medical records from the CDC. Since August 2002, when members of Congress pressured the agency to turn over the data, the Geiers have completed six studies that demonstrate a powerful correlation between thimerosal and neurological damage in children. One study, which compares the cumulative dose of mercury received by children born between 1981 and 1985 with those born between 1990 and 1996, found a “very significant relationship” between autism and vaccines. Another study of educational performance found that kids who received higher doses of thimerosal in vaccines were nearly three times as likely to be diagnosed with autism and more than three times as likely to suffer from speech disorders and mental retardation. Another soon-to-be published study shows that autism rates are in decline following the recent elimination of thimerosal from most vaccines.

As the federal government worked to prevent scientists from studying vaccines, others have stepped in to study the link to autism. In April, reporter Dan Olmsted of UPI undertook one of the more interesting studies himself. Searching for children who had not been exposed to mercury in vaccines — the kind of population that scientists typically use as a “control” in experiments — Olmsted scoured the Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, who refuse to immunize their infants. Given the national rate of autism, Olmsted calculated that there should be 130 autistics among the Amish. He found only four. One had been exposed to high levels of mercury from a power plant. The other three — including one child adopted from outside the Amish community — had received their vaccines.

At the state level, many officials have also conducted in-depth reviews of thimerosal. While the Institute of Medicine was busy whitewashing the risks, the Iowa legislature was carefully combing through all of the available scientific and biological data. “After three years of review, I became convinced there was sufficient credible research to show a link between mercury and the increased incidences in autism,” says state Sen. Ken Veenstra, a Republican who oversaw the investigation. “The fact that Iowa’s 700 percent increase in autism began in the 1990s, right after more and more vaccines were added to the children’s vaccine schedules, is solid evidence alone.” Last year, Iowa became the first state to ban mercury in vaccines, followed by California. Similar bans are now under consideration in thirty-two other states.

But instead of following suit, the FDA continues to allow manufacturers to include thimerosal in scores of over-the-counter medications as well as steroids and injected collagen. Even more alarming, the government continues to ship vaccines preserved with thimerosal to developing countries — some of which are now experiencing a sudden explosion in autism rates. In China, where the disease was virtually unknown prior to the introduction of thimerosal by U.S. drug manufacturers in 1999, news reports indicate that there are now more than 1.8 million autistics. Although reliable numbers are hard to come by, autistic disorders also appear to be soaring in India, Argentina, Nicaragua and other developing countries that are now using thimerosal-laced vaccines. The World Health Organization [another criminal organization started by Rockefeller] continues to insist thimerosal is safe, but it promises to keep the possibility that it is linked to neurological disorders “under review” [yeah, and in the meantime, let’s keep using African and developing nations as lab rats and also keep their depopulation agenda on track].

I devoted time to study this issue because I believe that this is a moral crisis that must be addressed. If, as the evidence suggests, our public-health authorities knowingly allowed the pharmaceutical industry to poison an entire generation of American children, [ON PURPOSE = ELECTRIC CHAIR] their actions arguably constitute one of the biggest scandals in the annals of American medicine. “The CDC is guilty of incompetence and gross negligence,” says Mark Blaxill, vice president of Safe Minds, a nonprofit organization concerned about the role of mercury in medicines. “The damage caused by vaccine exposure is massive. It’s bigger than asbestos, bigger than tobacco, bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

It’s hard to calculate the damage to our country — and to the international efforts to eradicate epidemic diseases — if Third World nations come to believe that America’s most heralded foreign-aid initiative is poisoning their children. It’s not difficult to predict how this scenario will be interpreted by America’s enemies abroad. The scientists and researchers — many of them sincere, even idealistic — who are participating in efforts to hide the science on thimerosal claim that they are trying to advance the lofty goal of protecting children in developing nations from disease pandemics [who wants a protection like that]. They are badly misguided. Their failure to come clean on thimerosal will come back horribly to haunt our country and the world’s poorest populations.

NOTE: This story has been updated to correct several inaccuracies in the original, published version. As originally reported, American preschoolers received only three vaccinations before 1989, but the article failed to note that they were innoculated a total of eleven times with those vaccines, including boosters. The article also mis-stated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms – an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury [oh yeah, I am feeling better for those kids now, because you know you can trust that daily exposure limit after all we have seen, you can be confident it has been developed with the kids interest in mind]. Finally, because of an editing error, the article mis-stated the contents of the rotavirus vaccine approved by the CDC. It did not contain thimerosal. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

[you can feel the hand here of big pharma criminal lawyers who would protect any misdemeanor and crime to make money – shame on them – they are probably responsible for the disappearance of this article from the website]

An earlier version of this story stated that the Institute of Medicine convened a second panel to review the work of the Immunization Safety Review Committee that had found no evidence of a link between thimerosal and autism. In fact, the IOM convened the second panel to address continuing concerns about the Vaccine Safety Datalink Data Sharing program, including those raised by critics of the IOM’s earlier work. But the panel was not charged with reviewing the committee’s findings. The story also inadvertently omitted a word and transposed two sentences in a quote by Dr. John Clements, and incorrectly stated that Dr. Sam Katz held a patent with Merck on the measles vaccine. In fact, Dr. Katz was part of a team that developed the vaccine and brought it to licensure, but he never held the patent. Salon and Rolling Stone regret the errors.

CLARIFICATION: After publication of this story, Salon and Rolling Stone corrected an error that mis-stated the level of ethylmercury received by infants injected with all their shots by the age of six months. It was 187 micrograms, an amount forty percent, not 187 times, greater than the EPA’s limit for daily exposure to methylmercury. At the time of the correction, we were aware that the comparison itself was flawed, but as journalists we considered it more appropriate to state the correct figure rather than replace it with another number entirely.

Since that earlier correction, however, it has become clear from responses to the article that the forty-percent number, while accurate, is misleading. It measures the total mercury load an infant received from vaccines during the first six months, calculates the daily average received based on average body weight, and then compares that number to the EPA daily limit. But infants did not receive the vaccines as a ?daily average? ? they received massive doses on a single day, through multiple shots. As the story states, these single-day doses exceeded the EPA limit by as much as 99 times. Based on the misunderstanding, and to avoid further confusion, we have amended the story to eliminate the forty-percent figure.

Correction: The story misattributed a quote to Andy Olson, former legislative counsel to Senator Bill Frist. The comment was made by Dean Rosen, health policy adviser to the senator. Rolling Stone and Salon.com regret the error.Loads Of Red Pills

WHO and Big Pharma Collaborate to Create Gonorrhea Epidemic

 

The United Nations (UN), through the World Health Organization (WHO) is decrying about a drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea. This virus is such a threat, according to WHO, that without preventative measures, millions of people will die.

Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted infection that leads various forms of sterilization through pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirths and rendering males and females completely infertile.

This virus is most prevalent in under – developed nations such as Africa, India and parts of Asia. The Centers of Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has concluded more than 700,000 cases are reported annually worldwide.

Industrialized countries like Britain, Australia and France are reporting this same drug-resistant strain of gonorrhea.

Dr. Gail Bolan, director of the STD Division of the CDC said: “We certainly are worried about importation of resistance. It’s time to take these trends seriously.”

WHO has just released their Global Vaccine Action Plan (GVAP), which pushes governments worldwide with the power of the UN to back them to coerce the increase of global vaccinations through strategic programs.

The details of GVAP include delivery of vaccines between 2011 – 2020 with aims to administer these immunizations to under developed nations like Africa and India. The initiative will attempt to exceed the UN’s Millennium Development Goal (MDG) that “immunization . . . should be recognized as a core component of the human right to health”, the plan says. The plan’s mission is to “extend, by 2020 and beyond, the full benefit of immunization to all people.”

In a 2011 study , Japanese scientists discovered a “superbug” strain of gonorrhea that displayed resistance to all antibiotics known to mainstream medicine. The researchers warned that this virus is quickly becoming a global health threat.

Since this study, WHO has identified this virus’ presence in some of the major central banking countries, such as Australia, France, Norway, Sweden and Britain. While cephalosporin antibiotics are a “last resort” used to treat the virus, even this medical treatment is proving useless.

Manjula Lusti-Narasimhan, member of the department of reproductive health and research at WHO, spoke at a briefing in Geneva, said that an estimated 106 million people are infected annually. “Gonorrhoea is becoming a major public health challenge. The organism is what we term a superbug – it has developed resistance to virtually every class of antibiotics that exists. If gonococcal infections become untreatable, the health implications are significant.”

WHO is calling for the focus to be turned toward “alternative treatments” for gonorrhea; such as new experimental vaccinations as a preventative measure.

Scientists at the Rockefeller University , led by Dr. Emil C. Gotschlich, have demonstrated that a protein of the bacterial cell’s outer membrane plays a vital role in the seduction. The protein, which seems to become incorporated in membranes of the human cells and forms pores in their surfaces, has been named porin.

Researchers at Stanford University Medical School , a globalist controlled college, announced that their potential gonorrhea vaccine had successfully prevented the gonorrhea bacteria from infecting human cells.

Gary Schoolnik, lead researcher, explains that “the key ingredient in the vaccine is a protein fragment that appears to provide protection against gonorrhea- causing bacteria. Our vaccine appears to work by preventing gonococcal bacteria from using pili, or specialized tiny hairlike appendages, to latch onto cells lining the urogenital tract. The pili enable the bacteria to adhere to cells, the first step in infection.”

In 1984, the US government issued a patent for a gonorrhea vaccine, in lieu of the technology being created. This vaccine’s potentials mirror the actualities Stanford now claims they have discovered.

The suggestion is that this strain simply mutated from genetic blueprints in nature, and as the overuse of antibiotics increases, their effectiveness decreases. Experts then explain that the only method that can be used against the disease is precautionary.

GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Abbott have come forth, willing to produce a new immunization for WHO.

Lusti-Narasimhan claims that although WHO has no idea about the extent of the gonorrhea threat, they are assuming this is the “tip of the iceberg” to justify their lack of verifiable data. “Without adequate surveillance we won’t know the extent of resistance…and without research into new antimicrobial agents there could soon be no effective treatment for patients.”

Francis Ndowa, former lead specialist for sexually transmitted infections at WHO, asserts that gonorrhea has been left to become a super-strain that does not have the same symptoms of traditional gonorrhea. Ndowa says: “the organism has readjusted itself to provide fewer symptoms so that it can survive longer. It’s an amazing interaction between man and pathogen.”

Experts for WHO claim that to reduce the strain’s ability to become even “greater” a new pharmaceutical drug must be created that treat, not only gonorrhea, but also combine two or more antibiotics within the one vaccination.

WHO is completely focused on early detection, which justifies the need for another global vaccination.Source

 

Threat of Mercury Poisoning Rises With Gold Mining Boom

 

One rainy evening in the gold mining city of Segovia in northeastern Colombia, José Leonardo Atehortua was working late at the refinery — or entable — where miners bring their ores to be processed. Atehortua entered the cramped, concrete room and began his labor — roasting balls of amalgam composed of equal parts gold and mercury, an ancient process used to separate one of the world’s most valuable elements from one of the most toxic.

The next thing Atehortua remembers it was morning. He wanted to rise to his feet, to say something, but when he tried to speak saliva poured uncontrollably over his lips and down his chin. He had tunnel vision. He was unable to move his eyes. His limbs were stiff as a plank. He was lying on a cot in the entable surrounded by men saying “José está azogado” — Jose is mercuried.

The mercury poisoning of Atehortua reflects a growing threat in Colombia and other parts of the world as small-scale gold mining expands in response to rising gold prices. Gold and mercury are interdependent commodities. When the price of gold increases — as it has since 2002 — so does mercury pollution. The source of this pollution is a little known but widely practiced variety of small-scale gold mining, found throughout rural districts of the developing world.

To separate precious gold from common stones, small-scale miners cart their ore to town, where it is mixed with mercury in cylindrical mills filled

An estimated 15 to 20 million gold prospectors are now active in more than 60 countries.

with steel balls that grind the ore into a fine flour. Mercury and gold bind as one, until, sundered by fire, the more volatile mercury is vaporized from the elemental union. The result, in backwater towns like Segovia, can be the exposure of large numbers of people to high levels of mercury vapor, which, in extreme cases like Atehortua’s, can lead to life-threatening mercury poisoning.

The small-scale mining sector, much of it illegal and unregulated, is expanding worldwide faster than at anytime in history and, with it, the health threats posed by mercury. This global gold rush began in Brazil in the late 1970s, before sweeping every mineralized country in South America, Asia, and Africa, with an estimated 15 to 20 million prospectors now active in more than 60 countries.

Today’s small-scale mining industry is motivated less by adventure than survival. Poverty-driven miners rely on inexpensive, outdated, polluting technologies and chemicals — chief among them mercury — with heavy costs for human health and the environment.

Nowhere is this problem of mercury contamination more urgent than in Colombia. Gold mining is Colombia’s fastest growing industry, with 200,000 small-scale miners producing more than 50 percent of the country’s gold. This growth has turned Colombia into the world’s leading per-capita emitter of mercury, especially in states such as Antioquia, where Segovia is located.

Ground-level concentrations of mercury gas in gold-processing hamlets like Segovia are so high, experts fear the outbreak of an environmental health crisis worse than any caused by mercury since Minamata, Japan, where releases of mercury from a factory in the mid-20th century killed more than 1,700 people. Last year, scientists working for the United Nations Global Mercury Project recorded levels of mercury gas in Segovia’s center — near public schools and crowded markets — 1,000 times higher than World Health Organization limits.

As Atehortua was being transported to a local clinic, he recalled how nausea and headache had punished him with such intensity the previous night that he had stopped his work to lie down. Unable to be treated at the clinic, Atehortua was sent to the state capital, Medellín, where his blood could be filtered with activated carbon. There the doctors told him to dictate a will. “You are going to die,” they said.

(Atehortua later told his story to Kris Lane, a professor of Latin American history at the College of William & Mary, who interviewed Atehortua in 2008 and 2009 as part of his research for his book on Colombian mining, The Colour of Paradise. Lane relayed Atehortua’s story to me.)

In the ensuing weeks, Atehortua’s molars fell out; he was besieged by ringing in his ears, loss of hearing and appetite, impaired vision and

Segovia and four nearby cities release as much as 100 tons of mercury each year into the air and soil.

balance, and damaged kidneys — ailments common to acute mercury vapor intoxication. But somehow kidney dialysis worked, and, slowly, movement returned to his arms and legs. Four months later, Atehortua returned to the entable, famous among Segovia’s miners as the azogado who had miraculously recovered from paralysis.

“Unfortunately, people in Segovia say about José Atehortua, ‘Too bad for him, but great story,’ rather than ‘Watch out or this could happen to you,’” says Lane.

It is unclear what made the night of Atehortua’s poisoning different from other nights. One theory is that the unusually late shift occurred in the entable just as the air temperature was dropping and the day’s accumulated mercury vapor was precipitating from the ceiling. What is clear is the attack on Atehortua’s nervous system ought to have sounded alarms about an imminent threat to the urban residents of Antioquia’s mining regions.

“There is no other case in the world like this where an urban population of 150,000 people is exposed to such high levels of mercury vapor,” says Marcello Veiga, a professor of geochemistry and mining engineering at the University of British Columbia and former director of the United Nations Global Mercury Project. “The entables must move from the cities.”

Ordinarily, gold processing occurs in rural districts or industrial zones, away from densely-populated areas. But in Colombia, where security forces are preoccupied battling violence from all directions, the risks of working in the bush are too extreme to operate unprotected. (While I was there last fall, bandits robbed and murdered four brothers at their mine.) So gold refiners seek the security of city centers. In Segovia and four nearby cities, an estimated 350 entables release 50 to 100 metric tons of mercury each year into the air and soil of northeast Antioquia.

Yet cases where mercury-afflicted miners return to work in heavily contaminated areas remain common because of the Colombian Health Ministry’s practice of testing urine rather than blood; only blood tests can gauge how much mercury may have reached a person’s brain. “When the level of mercury in urine is normal,” Veiga says, “the patient can return to the same polluted work environment, without any evaluation of how much mercury has accumulated in the brain.”

Meanwhile, evidence is accumulating that more chronic varieties of the acute symptoms endured by Atehortua are affecting the most vulnerable segment of the population. In neurological tests administered to 196 children in Segovia, aged 7 to 13, 96 percent failed at least one measure of intoxication, whose indicators include attention, memory, language, and executive functions. These data are included in a UN health report, published in January, which describes the mercury situation in Antioquia as “dramatic.”

“It is no exaggeration,” the report concludes, “that in Segovia and Remedios” — the towns are adjacent — “the proportion of the population exposed to a high risk of mercury intoxication approaches 100 percent.”

After the birth of industrial-scale mining in the late 19th century, small-scale mining receded to the corners of crumbling, impoverished states, offering a refuge for the global poor — “drought-driven work” — during periods of privation and crop failure. Unlike industrial mining operations, small-scale mines never abandoned mercury. Cheap, abundant, and easy to use, mercury used in gold mining causes 30 percent of global mercury pollution, eclipsing all sources except mercury gas emitted from coal-fired power plants. But because of a widespread perception that small-scale mining was no longer a global force, serious efforts to document these toxic emissions only began in the last decade.

In Colombia, two modest technical adjustments — adding mercury after, rather than during, the grinding of ores, and capturing its vapor in ovens — could eliminate nearly all mercury emissions from entables. But most miners and processors lack the resources to change, while the country’s culture of conflict means there are no easy solutions.

Operating entables inside municipal limits has been illegal in Colombia since 1995, when a federal decree gave mayors a ten-year window to relocate refineries. Ten years turned into 15. The federal government pointed to the state agencies, the state to the mayors, the mayors to the miners, all to no effect. The mayors did not want to lose their votes. They also did not want to lose their lives.

At a September meeting of 55 public officials in Medellin, Miguel Enrigue Franco Menco, the mayor of Nechí — another gold mining town in Antioquia — issued a sober lament of his state’s mercury crisis. “Responsibility falls on the mayors,” he said. “But behind the gold market

‘The proportion of the population exposed to a high risk of mercury intoxication approaches 100 percent,’ said the UN.

there is violence threatening us, and public officials are turning a blind eye to this problem. We have fear.”

The mayor of Nechí was countered, swiftly and unsentimentally, by a vow from the region’s attorney general, Fanny Enriquez, to imprison any mayor who failed to move the entables. “Comply with the law!” she cried into a microphone, drowning protests from miners and mayors.

During my recent trip to Colombia, I had planned to tour entables in Segovia, but protests over the arrival of a Canadian mining company made that journey impossible. Trade union leaders were persuading miners that UN efforts to curb mercury emissions were part of a foreign conspiracy to expropriate their mines under environmental pretense.

I went instead to the town of Amalfi, visiting a small mine with modest quarters for sleeping six, a privy, and a kitchen. Under a tin roof were eight ball-mills, lined up next to each other near an opening in the rock face just wide enough for a cart the size of a small sled to be wheeled down into the darkness.

The mine starts as a sharply sloping tunnel descending 50 or 60 meters, before leveling off into the first large opening where dynamite had blasted a space big enough to stand upright. From here the miners had followed quartz veins, expanding underground into a disorienting series of tunnels that dip another 50 meters, leaving you fatigued from ducking beneath low clearings and squeezing between narrow walls.

Carted up from the mine below, the ores are run through a sluice to strain and separate large from small rocks, then combined with mercury in the ball-mills where they are ground for five or six hours. After that, the floured concentrate is panned in a wide-lipped cedar bowl, until what’s left is the gold and mercury amalgam, ready to be burned.

“Of course we know miners who are mercuried,” said Cesar Zapata, the mine’s operator. “We want to change. The problem is we don’t know how, and we don’t have means. And we don’t have means because we are not legal.”

Many miners are aware of the danger posed by mercury. One common practice to keep from inhaling mercury vapor is for miners to hold a large leaf over the roasting amalgam. “The problem,” said Oseas García Rivera, who directs a mercury pollution project administered jointly by the government and UN, “is they take that leaf and go like this” — he pretended

Development experts view environmental needs as inseparable from questions of poverty and property.

to throw something into the forest — “so the mercury ends up in the environment anyway.”

Garcia is among an increasingly vocal wing of development practitioners who view environmental needs as inseparable from questions of poverty and property. Only when miners have access to credit and capital, the thinking goes, can they invest sustainably in pollution controls. And without formal mining claims, small-scale gold miners in Colombia and elsewhere have no collateral against which they can borrow.

But mobilizing governments to recognize mineral rights in the small-scale mining economy is a struggle, especially when foreign companies wield influence through investment in large-scale resource extraction.

Among small-scale miners, the perception is they are engaged in a game that is rigged against them. “The companies arrive and the laws are immediately changed to help them, while we have to wait ten years to get titles,” says Roberto Lema Castro, president of a national miners association called Fenamicol.

Such problems present a vexing paradox: Acute environmental health crises such as urban mercury emissions demand immediate intervention, yet sustainable solutions lie in healing deeper social and political afflictions.

“We have too many problems to expect one big solution,” García Rivera says. “But what we can hope for is to get a group of entables, five or ten, to try a different way, and use mercury as an excuse, a tool, to create a progressive process.”Source

 

Vaccines' Genocide

 

Are Vaccines Causing More Disease Than They are Curing?

By Alan Cantwell Jr., M.D.

Vaccines help keep us safe from infectious diseases. Smallpox and polio epidemics have been wiped out by mass vaccine programs. People rush to get flu shots every autumn, and kids are bombarded with a barrage of 22 required vaccinations before the age of six. Even pets need their shots. The manufacture of vaccines is a giant industry and what you pay for – inoculations and doctor visits – is big business for pediatricians, family practitioners and veterinarians. So why are more and more people worried about vaccines, especially the ones for kids?

Vaccine-induced Illness

Barbara Loe Fisher, president of the National Vaccine Information Centre, a consumer’s group based in Virginia, USA, claims vaccines are responsible for the increasing numbers of children and adults who suffer from immune system and neurologic disorders, hyperactivity, learning disabilities, asthma, chronic fatigue syndrome, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and seizure disorders. She calls for studies to monitor the long-term effects of mass vaccination and Fisher wants physicians to be absolutely sure these vaccines are safe and not harming people.

No one can deny the dangers of vaccines. The measles, mumps, rubella (German measles) and polio vaccines, all contain live but weakened viruses. Although health officials tell you that polio has been wiped out in the US since 1979, they often fail to mention that all recorded cases of polio since that time are actually caused by the polio vaccine.

Vaccine investigator Neil Z. Miller questions whether we still need the polio vaccine when it causes every new case of polio in the USA. Before mass vaccinations programs began fifty years ago, Miller insists we didn’t have cancer in epidemic numbers, that autoimmune ailments were barely known, and childhood autism did not exist.

Vaccine Contamination

There is also the problem of contamination that has always plagued vaccine makers. During World War II a yellow fever vaccine manufactured with human blood serum was unknowingly contaminated with hepatitis virus and given to the military. As a result, more than 50,000 cases of serum hepatitis broke out among American troops injected with the vaccine.

In the 1960s it was discovered that polio vaccines manufactured in monkey kidney tissue between 1955 and 1963 were contaminated with a monkey virus (Simian Virus, number 40). Although this virus causes cancer in experimental animals, health authorities insist it does not cause problems in humans. But evidence of SV40 genetic material has been popping up in human cancers and normal tissue. Researchers are now connecting SV40-contaminated polio vaccines to an increasing number of rare cancers of the lung (mesothelioma) and bone marrow (multiple myeloma). In a 1999 report, SV40 DNA was detected in tissue samples from four children born after 1982. Three were kidney transplant patients, and a fourth had a kidney tumour. Could SV40 be passed on from parents to their children? No one knows for sure.

Covert Vaccine Experiments

Using kids as guinea pigs in potentially harmful vaccine experiments is every parents’ worst nightmare. This actually happened in 1989-1991 when Kaiser Permanente of Southern California and the US Centres for Disease Control (CDC) jointly conducted a measles vaccine experiment. Without proper parental disclosure, the Yugoslavian-made “high titre” Edmonston-Zagreb measles vaccine was tested on 1,500 poor, primarily black and Latino, inner city children in Los Angeles. Highly recommended by the World Health Organisation (WHO), the high-potency experimental vaccine was previously injected into infants in Mexico, Haiti, and Africa. It was discontinued in these countries when it was discovered that the children were dying in large numbers.

Unbelievably, the measles vaccine caused long-term suppression of the children’s immune system for six months up to three years. As a result, the immunodepressed children died from other diseases in greater numbers than children who had never received the vaccine. Tragically, African girl babies in the experiment were given twice the dose of boys, and therefore suffered a higher death rate. The WHO pulled the vaccine off the market in 1992.

Ironically, the E-Z measles vaccine tested by Kaiser on minority babies was supposed to increase immunity in younger infants. Instead, the vaccine produced the opposite effect. A Los Angeles Times editorial (June 20, 1996) assured readers that “none of the 1,500 was injured by the unlicensed vaccine” and called upon the CDC to ensure that experiments like the E-Z measles vaccine could never occur again.

One wonders how many secret vaccine experiments are conducted by health authorities that never come to the attention of the public. During the two-year measles experiment I was employed by Kaiser and I never knew anything about it until I read the report in The Times five years later, in 1996.

In the poor inner cities across the United States the number of asthma cases is exploding and health officials don’t know why. According to the CDC, 5000 asthma deaths occur annually; and it is estimated that 17.3 million people (4.8 million are children) suffer from the disease, up from 6.7 million in 1980. Asthma usually begins before age 6, and blacks are two to three times more likely to die from asthma than whites. In the Bronx and Harlem sections of New York City, the hospitalisation rate for asthma is 21 times higher than in the more affluent areas of the city.

Could the sharp rise in asthma in poor children be connected with immunosuppression caused by a barrage of vaccines, as well as a lack of quality medical care and insurance, poor diet, and environmental factors? The possible connection of immunosuppressive vaccines to diseases like asthma has never been raised by health officials.

With vaccine experiments frequently performed in Africa and now on black Americans, no wonder one out of every four African-Americans believes AIDS was developed as a genocide program by the US government to exterminate the black population.

But vaccine experiments in the 1990s have not been limited to blacks. Millions of female Mexicans, Nicaraguans and Filipinos have been duped into taking tetanus vaccines, some of which contained a female hormone that could cause miscarriage and sterilisation. In 1995, a Catholic human rights organisation called Human Life International accused the WHO of promoting a Canadian-made tetanus vaccine laced with a pregnancy hormone called human choriogonadotropic hormone (HCG).

Suspicions were aroused when the tetanus vaccine was prescribed in the unusual dose of five multiple injections over a three month period, and recommended only to women of reproductive age. When an unusual number of women experienced vaginal bleeding and miscarriages after the shots, a hormone additive was uncovered as the cause.

Apparently the WHO has been developing and testing anti-fertility vaccines for over two decades. Women receiving the laced tetanus shot not only developed antibodies to tetanus, but they also developed dangerous antibodies to the pregnancy hormone as well. Without this HCG hormone the growth of the fetus is impaired. Consequently, the laced vaccine served as a covert contraceptive device. Commissioned to analyse the vaccine, the Philippines Medical Association found that 20 percent of the WHO tetanus vaccines were contaminated with the hormone. Not surprisingly, the WHO has denied all accusations as “completely false and without basis,” and the major media have never reported on the controversy. For further details on this issue, consult the Human Life International website (www.hli.org).

Newly approved vaccines may also pose serious risks. In October 1999 a vaccine against “rotavirus” infection (which causes most cases of childhood diarrhea) was pulled off the market. One year after the RotaShield vaccine was inoculated into over a million infants, it was found to increase the risk of bowel obstruction. Almost 100 cases of bowel obstruction were reported to the government, and twenty infants developed bowel obstructions within one or two weeks after receiving the vaccine.

Vaccine Manufacture and Associated Dangers

Although the public has heard about side effects of vaccines, most people are clueless about the manufacture of vaccines. Few people know that viruses used in vaccine production need to be grown on animal parts like monkey kidneys, or in chicken embryos, or in human and fetal “cell lines.” Harvesting viruses in human cell-lines can be perilous because some human cell lines are derived from cancer cells.

In AIDS & The Doctors of Death I wrote about the development of the first human “HeLa” cell line – an “immortal” cell line used extensively in cancer and vaccine research for decades. Henrietta Lacks was a young black woman from Baltimore who died from a highly malignant cervical cancer in 1951. Small pieces of her tumour were donated to a laboratory specialising in tissue cell culture. In those days most attempts to grow human cells outside the body failed. But for some unknown reason Henrietta’s cancer cells grew vigorously and became known as the first successful human tissue cell line in history – the now famous HeLa cell line commemorating the legendary HEnrietta LAcks.

Henrietta’s cells were kept alive by feeding them a witches’ brew of beef embryo extract (the ground-up remains of a three-week-old, unborn cattle embryo); fresh chicken plasma obtained from the blood of a live chicken heart; and blood from human placentas (the placenta is the sac that nurtures the developing fetus and contains powerful hormones).

It is now suspected that a sexually-transmitted papilloma virus is the cause of cervical cancer. And it is anybody’s guess how many other chicken, cattle, and human viruses are incorporated into the HeLa cell line, but none of this possible viral contamination seems to bother scientists who have extensively used the cells in cancer research. What laboratory scientists did eventually discover was that HeLa cells proved so hardy that they frequently contaminated other tissue cell lines used in cancer and cancer virus research.

In the late 1960s when widespread HeLa cell contamination problems were uncovered, scientists were shocked and embarrassed to learn that millions of dollars worth of published cancer experiments were ruined. “Liver cells” and “monkey cells” that were used in cancer experiments turned out to be Henrietta’s cancer cells in disguise. Benign cells that supposedly “spontaneously transformed” into malignant cells were found to be cells contaminated with cancerous HeLa cells.

The serious problem of HeLa cell contamination in cancer and vaccine research is revealed in Michael Gold’s A Conspiracy of Cells: One Woman’s Immortal Legacy and the Medical Scandal It Caused. Even Jonas Salk, who developed the legendary Salk polio vaccine, was fooled when HeLa cells contaminated his animal cell lines. He admitted this years later in 1978 before a stunned audience of cell biologists and vaccine makers. In experiments performed in the late 1950s on dying cancer patients, Salk tried injecting them with a cell line of monkey heart tissue – the same cell line he used to harvest polio virus for his famous vaccine. He hoped the monkey cell injections would stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. However, when abscesses developed at the site of injections, Salk began to suspect that he might be injecting HeLa cells rather than monkey cells, and he stopped the experiment.

Mark Nelson-Rees, a HeLa cell expert and one of the 1978 conference attendees, offered to test Salk’s line if it was still available. Salk graciously agreed and the monkey cells indeed proved to be HeLa cells which had invaded and taken over the monkey cell line. According to author Gold, Salk thought there were adequate ways to separate viruses from the tissue cell lines they were harvested in, so that it really didn’t matter what kind of cells were used. Even if vaccines weren’t filtered, and even if whole cancer cells were injected directly into a human, Salk believed they would be rejected by the body and cause no harm. In those days doctors didn’t much believe in cancer-causing viruses. Nowadays, no researcher would dare try injecting cancer cells into a human being. But in the 1950s Salk had done it accidentally. He had injected HeLa cells into a few dozen patients and it hadn’t bothered him a bit.

Is There a Vaccine Contamination
Connection to AIDS?

Most people assume vaccines are “sterile” and germ free. But sterilising a vaccine can destroy the necessary immunising protein that makes it work. Thus, contaminating viruses or viral “particles” can sometime survive the vaccine process.

Animal viruses are also contained in fetal calf serum, a blood product commonly used as a laboratory nutrient to feed various tissue cell cultures. Vaccine contamination by fetal calf serum and its possible relationship to HIV was the subject of a letter by J. Grote, published in the Journal of the Royal (London) Society of Medicine in October 1988. Bovine visna virus (which looks similar to HIV) is a known contaminant of fetal calf serum used in vaccine production and virus-like particles have been detected in vaccines certified for clinical use. Grote warns that “It seems absolutely vital that all vaccines are screened for HIV prior to use, and that bovine visna virus is further investigated as to its relationship to HIV and its possible role in progression towards AIDS.”

Could virus-contaminated vaccines lie at the root of AIDS? A few researchers, including myself, believe HIV was “introduced” into gays during the experimental hepatitis B vaccine trials when thousands of homosexuals were injected in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and New York, during the years 1978-1981.

The AIDS epidemic first erupted in gays living in those cities in 1981. In 1980, one year before, already 20% of the gays inoculated in Manhattan with the experimental vaccine were already HIV-positive. This was several years before definite AIDS cases were diagnosed in Africa. In the early 1970s the hepatitis B vaccine was developed in chimpanzees, now wildly accepted as the animal from which HIV supposedly evolved.

Hepatitis B vaccine was developed to protect people from the sexual spread of the hepatitis B virus. Now the government recommends that all newborn babies be given the vaccine [this is also the case in Australia]. Such recommendations do not make sense to many parents. And people are still fearful of the hepatitis B vaccine because of its original connection to gay men and AIDS. The original experimental vaccine was made from the pooled blood serum of hepatitis-infected homosexuals and, as mentioned, serum-based vaccines cannot be sterilised.

Another theory of AIDS is that HIV originated from polio vaccines contaminated with chimp and monkey viruses, and administered to Africans in the late 1950s. In The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS, published in 1999, Edward Hooper details how polio vaccine was made using monkey (and possibly chimp) kidneys and how the ancestor virus of HIV could have jumped species (via the vaccine) to produce the outbreak of AIDS in Africa. Hooper’s well-researched book greatly expands the polio vaccine theory of AIDS first reported by Tom Curtis in Rolling Stone magazine in 1992, and The River is a must-read for anyone interested in the possible man-made origin of AIDS.

Other researchers think it more likely that the various WHO-sponsored vaccine programs (particularly the smallpox program) in Africa in the 1970s are responsible for unleashing AIDS in Africa in the 1980s. Hooper, who has worked as a United Nations official, has discounted the research pointing to AIDS as a man-made disease, as proposed by Dr. Leonard Horowitz in Emerging Viruses, and in my two books AIDS & The Doctors of Death: An Inquiry into the Origin of the AIDS Epidemic and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS Genocide Plot.

Horowitz and I both suspect contaminated smallpox vaccines as the source of HIV in Africa. Certainly the smallpox (vaccinia-cowpox) virus is an excellent virus to use for the genetic engineering of new, multipurpose vaccines. By splicing into the DNA genes of the vaccinia virus, scientists can add on parts of disease-producing viruses like influenza, hepatitis, and other viruses. The safety of this technique has not been fully evaluated, prompting one vaccine maker at a Vaccinia Virus Workshop in 1984 to ask if this could lead to another form of AIDS.

Vaccine Connection to Gulf War Illness and Huntsville Mystery Illness

The cause of Gulf War Illness (GWI) is unknown. For years this debilitating illness (which now affects one-half of the Gulf War vets) has been ignored by Pentagon officials who claim the disease does not exist and that vets are simply reacting to stress. GWI is also thought to be contagious. Vets insist their disease has been passed on to spouses, other family members, and even pets.

Some people suspect multiple vaccines, particularly the experimental anthrax vaccine, are implicated in the disease. Currently, soldiers who refuse to take the mandatory anthrax vaccine are being court-martialled and dismissed from the service.

Researchers Dr. Garth Nicolson and his wife Nancy have found a tiny bacterial microbe (a “mycoplasma”) in the blood of nearly half the ill vets with GWI. Amazingly, this infectious agent has a piece of HIV (the AIDS virus) attached to it. This microbe could never have occurred naturally. On the contrary, the composition of the microbe suggests a man-made and genetically-engineered biological warfare agent.

Garth Nicolson’s scientific credentials are impeccable. For 16 years he was a professor of medicine at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Centre in Houston, as well as professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Texas Medical School, also in Houston. Nancy Nicolson, a molecular biophysicist, was on the faculty at Baylor College of Medicine.

Six months after returning home from the Gulf War, the Nicolson’s daughter contracted GWI. Her mother Nancy had contracted a similar illness in 1987 when she was working with Mycoplasma incognitus in infectious disease research. Finally suspecting that this research had biowarfare implications, Nancy Nicolson became a whistle-blower and angered officials. As a result, she believes she was deliberately infected with the mycoplasma. After partial paralysis and a long illness, she finally regained her health with the antibiotic Doxycycline.

The Nicolson’s discovery of a similar mycoplasma (but without the attachment of HIV) in a mysterious illness that erupted in the Huntsville, Texas area among prison guards and their families has all the drama of a ‘Movie of the Week’. Although the Huntsville disease broke out in the late 1980s (shortly before the Gulf War), it has many of the same signs and symptoms of GWI. Many locals are convinced the sometimes deadly disease originally spread from prisoners incarcerated in several large prisons around Huntsville.

In experiments conducted during the 1970s and 80s, the prisoners were inoculated with flu vaccines containing genetically engineered viruses and mycoplasma. It is suspected that vaccines were being covertly developed and deployed as biological warfare weapons. Nobel prize winner James Watson, world famous for his discovery of the molecular structure of DNA and a leading researcher of the still ongoing Human Genome Project, was involved in these prison experiments. The guards are convinced the Huntsville mystery illness is intimately connected to these experiments, jointly conducted by the Medical School and the military. Like GWI, health officials deny the disease exists.

The Nicolsons continue to developed antibiotic treatments, which have helped some vets. But they have paid a heavy price for their controversial research and unprecedented discoveries. Garth Nicolson was forced to resign from M.D. Anderson in 1996. His career and reputation destroyed, the Nicolsons have since moved to California and head The Institute for Molecular Medicine in Huntington Beach.

Dangerous Animal and Human Cell Lines
in Vaccine Manufacture

In an effort to quell concerns about the safety of vaccines, scientists are finally taking another look at the “non-infectious” particles of bird-cancer viruses (avian leukosis virus) in the mumps/measles/rubella vaccines routinely given to kids. Could this be the reason the US Federal Drug Administration held a meeting in September, 1999, to reconsider using human tumour cell lines (like HeLa) rather than monkey kidneys and chicken embryos which are no longer guaranteed 100% safe?

Writing in Science, Gretchen Vogel admits public trust in vaccines is a bit shaky. In Wales anti-vaccine parents are holding “measles parties” to infect their children with the disease rather than vaccinate them. She cites the danger of using immortal cell lines for live vaccine production because cancer genes or other hazardous factors might be transferred to people receiving vaccines. But manufacturers also realise vaccine critics are becoming more wary of vaccines made in animal and bird tissue. And vaccine makers want to use immortal cell lines to grow their viruses because obviously viruses can’t grow on their own.

The big question everyone seems to avoid is: Can vaccines cause cancer? There is certainly evidence connecting contaminated vaccines to AIDS. And HIV is a cancer-causing virus. Robert Gallo, the co-discoverer of HIV in 1984, has clearly stated AIDS is an epidemic of cancer.

Animal and avian viruses can contaminate vaccines and have all been studied as cancer-causing agents. And cancer and vaccine research would be much more difficult without the use of cell lines, some of which are derived from cancer.

Vaccines and Public Paranoia

Is the fear of vaccines justified? It is clear that vaccines can be dangerous. The contamination of vaccines is a reality, and vaccine experiments can be hazardous to one’s health. AIDS, unknown two decades ago, is now an increasing worldwide epidemic with millions of death predicted for the next decade. Could vaccines contaminated with cancer-causing and immunosuppressive viruses unleash new plagues in the New Millennium? If so, the new plagues may be far worse than the diseases we eradicated by vaccine programs in the twentieth century.

References

“Anti-diarrheal vaccine for babies recalled,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1999.

Butel JS, Arrington AS, Wong C, et al.: Molecular evidence of simian virus 40 infections in children. J Infect Dis 180:884-887, 1999.

Cantwell A: AIDS & the Doctors of Death. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1988.

Cantwell A: Queer Blood. Aries Rising Press, Los Angeles, 1993.

Gold M: A Conspiracy of Cells. State University of New York Press, Albany, 1986.

Hooper E: The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS. Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1999.

Horowitz L: Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola. Tetrahedron, Inc, Rockport, MA, 1996.

Jaroff Leon: “Vaccine Jitters,” TIME, September 13, 1999.

Likoudis P: “Gulf war illness probe to advance with new study,” The Wanderer, January 21, 1999.

“Measles, government and trust ” (Editorial), Los Angeles Times, June 20, 1996.

Miller NZ: Immunization: Theory vs Reality. New Atlantean Press, Santa Fe, 1996.

Miller NZ: Immunizations: The People Speak! New Atlantean Press, Santa Fe, 1996.

Quinnan GV: Vaccinia Viruses as Vectors for Vaccine Antigens. Elsevier, New York, 1985.

Stolberg SG: “Poor fight baffling surge in asthma,” New York Times, October 18, 1999.
Source

 

WHO swine flu advisors had links to drug companies

 

The World Health Organisation has come under fire for its handling of the recent global influenza pandemic.

A joint investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has revealed that key scientists advising the WHO on pandemic influenza had financial links to the drug companies which stood to profit from the organisation’s decisions.

But, despite strict internal rules on conflicts of interest, the WHO did not declare these links. As a result, in part, of the WHO guidelines, billions were spent on antivirals, many of which now lie unused and nearing expiry.

The Bureau’s findings came as a Council of Europe report criticised the WHO for “grave shortcomings” in the “transparency of its decision-making processes” during the recent influenza pandemic, risking a “disastrous plummet in public confidence” when the next pandemic strikes.

Paul Flynn, MP and author of the report, raised concerns about the influence wielded by pharmaceutical companies over the WHO: an organisation designed to be independent.

“The role of the WHO is supreme,” he told the Bureau. “They’re the ones who declare the pandemic…all the countries in the world are listening to them and following their advice. If that advice is tainted by commercial needs, that advice is of no value.”

Pandemic preparations

In 2004, the WHO issued guidelines to countries on preparing for a major influenza pandemic. They predicted that the next pandemic would “be associated with a high death toll”, and urged nations to stockpile antivirals to treat the disease.

These antivirals were Tamiflu, produced by Roche, and Relenza, made by GlaxoSmithKline.

The guidelines were distributed throughout the world and prompted mass sales of the drugs: since 2004 orders of Tamiflu topped ten billion dollars, while sales of Relenza reached two billion dollars.

Sales peaked during last year’s swine flu outbreak, with over $2.7 billion being spent on Tamiflu alone.

Commercially influenced decisions?

The Bureau and BMJ can reveal that the three key scientists advising the WHO for their 2004 guidelines had, at that time, clear financial links to Roche and GlaxoSmithKline.

Despite risks of commercial influence, the scientists were engaged by the world health organisation to provide authority for the recommendations outlined in the guidelines.

In addition, the WHO did not declare any conflicts of interest.

Professors Frederick Hayden, Arnold Monto, and Karl Nicholson, who prepared the annexes for the guidelines, had been paid consultants and speakers for the companies.

Professor Hayden, a respected US virologist, produced a section on the benefits of antiviral drugs and the need for global stockpiles. But Hayden was receiving funds from Roche until late 2004.

In a press conference last year, he revealed: “I actually was an investigator and at one time a paid consultant for Roche and some other companies also including GSK and others that were involved in antiviral and drug or vaccine development.”

Professor Karl Nicholson, based at the University of Leicester, produced a section describing the potential dangers of pandemic flu.

In a 2003 academic paper, Nicholson declared previous funding from Roche and GSK. He had received consultancy and speaking fees, in addition to research funding, from both companies.

The third advisor, Professor Arnold Monto, of the University of Michigan, produced the section of the guidelines that discussed the need for, and difficulties in, producing vaccines.

But in 2004, the same year that the guidelines were produced, Monto declared a “professional relationship” with Roche.

WHO response

The WHO told the Bureau that a declaration of interest statement relating to its 2004 antiviral and vaccine guidelines had been taken.

Greg Hartl, WHO spokesman, emphasized that the WHO had procedures to ensure “robustness” of its guidelines, and that the organisation has a “personal commitment to transparency”.

But Director General Margaret Chan’s office has refused to release any details of the 2004 declarations that they say were taken. Hartl gave the explanation that: “We have to balance…the privacy of the individual versus the robustness of the guidelines.”

Critics were unconvinced. Sir Iain Chalmers, editor of the James Lind Initiative and medical expert, said:

“If I don’t understand what competing interests might have influenced the way that they came out, then it’s of no interest to me at all that Margaret Chan knows what they are. I need to know as the customer for her products. And her products are guidelines.”

Reporter: Dr Deborah Cohen (British Medical Journal). Producer: Phillip Carter. Editor: Andy Kemp, Researcher: Emma Slater, additional research: Adele Waters. Directed and filmed by Chris Woods. Executive Producer: Iain Overton

 

Asia Inhales While the West Bans the Deadly Carcinogen Asbestos

 

In parts of Asia, carrying 500 grams of one white powder can draw a death sentence, but importing 1,000 tons of another lethal white dust is both legal and profitable. Asbestos, a known carcinogen banned in much of the world, is a common and dangerous building block in much of Asia’s development and construction boom. This other white powder causes 100,000 occupational deaths per year, according to Medical News Today.

While images of kids with heroin-loaded needles stuck in their arms spark public outrage, clouds of asbestos fibers in factories and on construction sites often draw official shrugs and denials. Illicit drug use does not rank among the top ten causes of death in young adults, according to a 2009 global study of adolescent health by the Murdoch Children’s Research Center in Melbourne in 2009. But in some Asian nations including China, asbestos is in the top ten causes of occupational disease in laborers, some of whom were exposed as working children. The numbers are generally thought to be higher since much of Asia’s data rely on a highly mobile workforce with high a turnover rate.

Like a sleeping grizzly bear, asbestos can be deadly when disturbed, and all along the mining, manufacturing, installation, cutting, and deconstruction processes, the mineral is turned into air-borne fibers that lodge in the lungs and cause fatal respiratory diseases, including mesothelioma.

Across much of Asia, white asbestos, also known as chrysotile, is widely used to make asbestos-cement construction material such as roofing tiles, wall panels, and expansion joints, as a fire proofer, and in brake linings and gaskets in large vehicles. As part of the process of development, people are trading bug-filled, flammable grass roofs for asbestos cement tiles and walls.

A few years ago at a state-owned roof tile factory in Vietnam young male workers clad only in shorts carried bags labeled “Asbestos-Kazakhstan.” The air was thick with white dust huffing up like steam from lava. Visiting occupational health and safety experts held their breath as long as they could; some smothered their faces in dust masks. The workers did not have that luxury. Their only protection was handkerchiefs tied bandit-style over their mouths and noses as they climbed the sides of the hoppers.

“I know it’s dangerous,” said the manager spreading his hands and shrugging, “but it’s also cheap, and people only want to buy cheap tiles.”

Drugs or Dust

“It’s just a PR campaign when they say that asbestos can kill,” Uralasbest’s Viktor Ivanov told AFP in 2007, when he headed the Chrysotile Association, an industry group based in the Russian town of Asbest. The website for Uralasbest, the Ural Asbestos Mining & Ore Dressing Company, calls the company the world’s “oldest and largest manufacturer and supplier of chrysotile.” In 2005 the Russian firm produced about a quarter of the world’s chrysotile asbestos and exported it to 35 countries (pdf): 53 percent outside the Commonwealth of Independent States (to China, Egypt, Indonesia, Pakistan, Thailand, etc.), and 13 percent within the CIS nations that had been part of the former Soviet Union (Armenia, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine, etc.).

Very little of the product ends up in the West. More than 60 countries have partially or completely banned asbestos, including the United States, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The EU nations and others have completely banned both brown amphibole and white chrysotile asbestos, and the International Agency for Research on Cancer has classified all types as a human carcinogen. Although some studies have found that chrysotile’s small fiber size makes it less virulent than brown amphibole, the WHO is unequivocal: “no threshold has been established for the carcinogenic risk of chrysotile.”

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But asbestos merchants, disputing World Health Organization (WHO) data and overwhelming scientific evidence, claim that chrysotile is safe. Uralabest’s website decries “the wave of anti-asbestos psychose [sic] [that] was spread over Western Europe.” “Today’s asbestos industry is totally harmless,” Tatiana Kochetova of the Asbest-based Institute for Asbestos Projects told the Russian Journal. “There hasn’t been one case of asbestos caused disease here for many years. Locally produced asbestos does not cause any harm.”

Researchers Jock McCulloch and Geoffrey Tweedale document that the rates of malignancies dropped in Asbest only after the introduction of dust control technologies (and the dispersal of ill workers). Those same safety measures that, in any case, mitigate rather than eliminate risk are largely lacking in the countries to which Russian asbestos is exported. (McCulloch J and Tweedale G 2008 Defending the Indefensible: The Global asbestos Industry and its Fight for Survival. OUP.)

Russia’s Exports

Uralabest’s product comes from Asbest, a classic monogorod, or single-industry town in Bazhenouskoye in north of Kazakhstan, along the eastern slope of the Ural ridge. The open-pit mine covers 90 sq. km. and stretches 11.5 km long, 1.8 km wide and almost 300 meters deep. There, some 10,000 workers turn out more than 500,000 tons of chrysotile asbestos annually.

In 2009, Uralasbest was forecasting production of 450,000 tons, “a significant portion of the world market,” and its FY 2006 revenues were $192 million, according to Rye, Man & Gor Securities (pdf). Russia produced 925,000 tons of asbestos in 2008, according to the US Geological Survey, almost half the estimated world production of about 2 million tons a year, and worth $900 million.

Once a state-owned corporation, Uralasbest is now privatized. More than half of Uralasbest share capital is owned through a Russian regional bank (Urals Bank for Reconstruction and Development). Stroyexport, another Russian company, owns 14 percent, and two South Africa-registered companies — Petrov & Co and Mavrol Management — own 21percent. The top managers control about 30 percent of the company (pdf). In 2007 Uralasbest entered into a joint venture with Swiss Minmet Financing Company to recover magnesium from its asbestos mine tailings. This move was meant as a hedge against the global decline in construction.

Perhaps more threatening to Uralabest’s economic future than recession is the growing awareness that asbestos is toxic, and alternatives are available. In 2000, citing Canada’s high level support for its industry as a model, Russian asbestos industry officials sought Vladimir Putin’s assistance in countering “asbestphobia.”

Russian corporations also looked to Canada’s — and Kazakh’s — marketing efforts in newly rich Asian nations. That strategy has produced rich results according to the World Asbestos Reports, and the WHO confirms that some countries have reduced restrictions and increased production and use of chrysotile.

India Imports

In 2008 India – along with Pakistan, Canada, Russia – rejected the banning of chrysotile asbestos mandated under the Rotterdam Convention on Prior Informed Consent (PIC). PIC lists chemicals that require exchange of information on health hazards prior to trade. India, which imported 360,000 tons of asbestos in 2006, claimed that evidence of chrysotile’s lethality was not conclusive, and that it was awaiting the results of a major health study before joining the convention, according to Madhumitta Dutta of the Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI).

However, “India failed to inform the international community … that the [health] study was funded in part by the asbestos industry,” charged Dutta. “Still worse, the study was kept under wraps, and is not accessible to public health specialists or labor groups.”

Gopal Krishna, a consultant on clean industry and also of BANI, condemned his country’s rejection of PIC. “There is a political consensus in India to promote asbestos at any human cost,” he wrote in India Together in 2006.

Underlying that consensus are the close links between the asbestos industry and some prominent Indian politicians. “With asbestos firms being owned by politicians or the state itself, the government seems to be following a classic ostrich policy,” Krishna wrote. “The reality is that the country’s most powerful parliamentarians bless the asbestos industry.”

They include Buddhadev Bhattacharya, the chief minister of Bengal’s Communist government, who gave Utkal Asbestos Ltd. an Environment Excellence Award which it used in its advertising. Rebranding itself in 2006, the company dropped the word asbestos from its name. Now called UAL Industries Ltd., it is a major producer of fiber cement corrugated sheets and accessories under the brand Konark, and its website boasts that it “has left no stone unturned to achieve its motive of becoming the leading player in Eastern India.”

Visaka Industries’ chairman, G. Vivekanand, is the son of G. Venkataswamy, a member of Parliament, deputy leader of the Indian Congress Parliamentary Party, and a former Union Textile Minister. Vivekanand put out a fact sheet claiming that chrysotile is safe, and blamed Western media coverage of past events for generating unfounded fear.

Indian media reported that Congress Party chief Sonia Gandhi encouraged Visaka industries to set up in her constituency Rae Bareli, and saw the plants as a way to boost employment and electability. The plans were fast tracked, breaking records for passage through the Departments of Environment and Forests. Visaka annually produces 600,000 tons of asbestos sheets, mostly used in roofing. One of its main marketing targets is India’s rural population, 80 to 85 percent of which now live under thatched roofs, the company website notes.

In October 2009 Visaka Industries announced it is setting up a 100,000-ton capacity asbestos cement sheet plant at Sambalpur in Orissa at an estimated cost of $8.6 million “to meet the rural demand.” It is also ramping up the capacity of its Pune plant from 65,000 to 100,000 tons per annum, according Vivekanand.

In 2007 an Indian news channel showed workers hand-mixing asbestos into rice, while a voice-over intoned that chrysotile is safe enough to use as a husking agent. The rice was later sold as premium basmati.

Dying to Work

“I have seen young men suffering from the cancers caused by this material [asbestos],” says a guard at an asbestos cement sheet factory in Guangdong, China. “The bosses don’t care, and the government intimidates us [who are] working for safety. They say we are sabotaging China’s development. Sometimes I get very frightened and cannot sleep thinking I will be arrested. I may get the disease, as the air is full of dust. I hope that someone would help me if that happened. I can’t quit. Where would I go? I have no skills and jobs are hard to find.”

This worker’s story is echoed throughout the Asia. In China alone, the official incidence of industrial lung diseases is around 100,000 per year. Experts familiar with Beijing’s official statistics would multiply that figure by three or four to get close to the real toll.

Harvard University and the World Health Organization report that occupational injuries and disease already surpass infectious disease as the major causes of death in the developing world and threaten to undermine any economic or moral imperatives gained by trade. More people die per day of workplace illness throughout the world than are killed by global terrorist attacks, wars, drugs, or by the various pandemics (such as avian and swine flu) that attract huge institutional funding, according to Sanjiv Pandita, director of the Hong Kong based Asia Monitor Resource Center.

If you consider that 100,000 per year die of asbestos alone, it is not hard to extrapolate that figure to match Pandita’s assertion. Meanwhile, the systematic erosion of trade union power and labor standards by globalization has exacerbated the problem and undermined opposition/occupational justice.

Working for Safety

Workers and activists around Asia are not convinced by industry reassurances and are getting organized. At a September 2009 meeting in Phnom Penh of the Asian Network for the Rights of Accident Victims (ANROAV),120 activists and Asian-based academics from 16 countries heard stories of frustration and harassment. Delegates charged that globalization has led to “state sponsored pimping”– governments selling workers’ bodies and lives in return for investment.

The importance of the issue, and frustration from waiting for governments and employers to act are evidenced by steadily increasing attendance at ANROAV’s annual meetings over its ten years’ existence. “While lots of money is made by CSR [corporate social responsibility] consultants, we see little change in the death rates” said Hong Chee, a Hong Kong delegate.

Mandy Hawes, an American occupational health and safety advocate, reminded delegates that occupational standards may be legal but not safe. “We should bring environmental and occupational standards into line,” she said.

Opposition to asbestos is growing and is fueled around the world by a flood of compensation demands. Claimants, dragging desperately on oxygen, have pleaded before TV cameras for compensation and an end to asbestos use.

A regional coordinating group was set up earlier in 2009 at a meeting in Bangkok. A-Ban is seeking an Asia-wide asbestos ban. It has its work cut out. As the anti-asbestos activists know all too well, bans on international trade in asbestos have been barely disturbed the industry. Like Uralasbest, companies have merely shifted their marketing focus to developing countries where environmental and workplace standards are more lax. China now absorbs 54 percent of global production, says Ye-Yong Choi of BANKO, the Korean movement that recently achieved a ban on asbestos.

He recommends a global campaign in which activists “move much more strategically and collectively. …I have felt we are too gentle in some way whilst our enemy, the asbestos industry, moves very collectively and aggressively.”

Anatomy of Asbestos

Despite industry and government denials, evidence of chrysotile’s harm was clear in lung X-rays showing unmistakable white patches indicating the inevitably deadly progression of mesothelioma–a cancer directly linked to asbestos exposure. Etched into the medical data on the corner of each film was the word “chrysotile,” the supposedly safe form of the mineral.

The X-rays belonged to Dr. Domyung Paek, chest disease specialist and epidemiologist from the University of Seoul, Korea. His collection of medical transparencies showed that work-and environment-related chest disease leaves a distinctive radiological calling card that is easy to differentiate from tuberculosis and other lung diseases.

All the victims in Paek’s X-rays were Asian workers, belying the myth propagated by some Asian labor officials that asbestosis and mesothelioma are “Western” diseases. Paek predicted that Asian nations would see tsunamis of asbestos-related diseases, marked by the gasping deaths of the pale, drawn – and often young – victims. His view is supported by Japanese researcher Ken Takahashi, who on reviewing historical and global trends, found that marked rises in incidence and prevalence inevitably preceded national bans.

Studies cited by McCulloch and Tweedale have found asbestos disease in young Russian and Kazakh workers with less than three years exposure. Victims usually die a year after diagnosis. Expensive drugs such as Alimpta and Platinol can lengthen a patient’s life by up to six months, but are well beyond the capacity of Asian workers. Palliative care, a tall order in most poor countries, is the best they can hope for.

The pain of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related diseases can be agonizing and requires the other white powder — morphine — to provide relief. Ironically many of the countries where asbestos disease is rife, such as India, have a shortfall in the supply of legal scheduled opiates.

Around Asia

But there is no shortfall in asbestos. In addition to the raw mineral imported from Russia and other countries, Europeans keep sending old ships to India and Bangladesh to be broken up. Bangladesh needs the steel, but along with it comes tons of old friable asbestos including the more dangerous brown variety.

China, in addition to its role as major importer, also exports asbestos. The sourcing website Alibaba.com lists at least ten Chinese companies, some with ISO 9001 certification, that sell asbestos products. Tsyuyoshi Kawakami of the U.N.’s International Labor Organization’s Bangkok office found Chinese asbestos in Lao cement factories on the outskirts of Vientiane. The Lao government, currently enjoying a resources boom, is thinking of exploiting its lodes of asbestos, according to a Lao NGO worker.

There are some bright spots. Thailand, until recently one of the region’s major users (brake linings, gaskets, and roofing tiles), has reduced both importation and production of asbestos-containing goods.

Other Asian countries are beginning to rethink asbestos use. Joint research done by BANKO and Indonesian’s own fledgling anti-asbestos organization IBAN in 2009, documented asbestos on the windowsills of schools and homes surrounding two asbestos cement works in Cibinong (West Java).

Cambodia, too, is starting to recognize that its burgeoning construction industry may bring the hazardous materials along for the ride. Dr. Leng Tong, director of Occupational Health and Safety in Cambodia’s Ministry for Labor and Vocational Training told the ANROAV delegates that “Cambodia strongly commits … to eliminate asbestos from the workplaces in the region.”

“If he is serious,” Choi of BANKO commented, “it would not only gain Cambodia a huge amount of prestige in the world, but also provide a wonderful example to neighboring countries.”Source