Tag: Swine Flu

UK swine flu can no longer be contained

Government moves to ‘treatment phase’ as health secretary says infection rate could reach 100,000 a day by end of August

Swine flu is spreading so rapidly across Britain that there could be 100,000 new cases a day by the end of next month, the health secretary, Andy Burnham, said today.

The UK would immediately move to the “treatment phase” of its plan to combat swine flu, meaning doctors would no longer test for the H1N1 virus and urge anyone with symptoms to stay at home, Burnham told the House of Commons.

The first swine flu vaccine would be made available from August, with 60m doses available by the end of the year, he added.

“We have reached the next stage in management of the disease,” Burnham said. “The national focus will be on treating the increasing numbers affected by swine flu. We will move to this treatment phase across the UK with immediate effect.”

The move does not mean the H1N1 virus, which was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organisation last month, is becoming more deadly, just that it can no longer be contained.

Burnham said there was a “considerable rise” in swine flu cases last week.

“We have always known it would be impossible to contain the virus indefinitely and at some point we would need to move away from containment to treatment.

“Cases are doubling every week and on this trend we could see over 100,000 cases per day by the end of August.

“The pressure on the system is such that it is the right time to take this step. Scientists can expect to see rapid rises in the number of cases.”

Burnham added that the public should be reassured by the steps being taken to tackle the virus. He said: “We are the only country in the world to be able to offer anti-virals to everyone as well as those at greater risk.”

The government’s chief medical officer, Professor Sir Liam Donaldson, said the production of a vaccine was “at an advanced stage” and denied that the outbreak was out of control.

Speaking at a special briefing at the Department of Health, he said: “We are continuing to take a very firm grip on this situation. We have a big stockpile of anti-virals, the biggest probably in the world. We have vaccine at an advance stage of production.”

Donaldson added that despite its rapid spread, the virus outbreak was “following a predictable path”.

The Health Protection Agency said a further 458 patients in England had been confirmed with swine flu, while the figure for the UK as a whole rose to 7,447.

Efforts to trace people who had been in contact with swine flu cases would now stop and schools no longer needed to close when hit by the virus, unless particular circumstances made it necessary.

The government has said that not everybody with swine flu would receive anti-viral drugs, which may be reserved for at-risk groups.

The daily collation of swine flu cases would also end because it was proving time-consuming. Instead, “more general” estimates of numbers would be given. Other affected countries already update their swine flu numbers less frequently, such as weekly or every other day.

The Scottish health secretary, Nicola Sturgeon, announced a similar shift in swine flu policy at a simultaneous briefing in Edinburgh.

She said: “We’ve always said it would be impossible to limit the spread of what is a contagious virus indefinitely.

“We’ve always said that, when it did start to spread more widely within communities, we would require to make a judgment about when to shift efforts from intense containment to treatment, or mitigation.”

Sturgeon, who is also the deputy first minister of Scotland, said “high-risk” groups such as children under five, pregnant women and the elderly would get priority access to medication.

Scotland’s chief medical officer, Harry Burns, said the country could expect to have a tenth of the UK cases of swine flu. He predicted there would be about 10,000 new cases a day in Scotland by August.

He said: “It could be a bit less, it could be a bit more. It also presupposes that there isn’t a downturn, if it continues to rise at this rate, and it’s doubling approximately every week, you can do the sums yourself.”

However, Scottish health officials said the swine flu infection rate may have already peaked, as the number of new cases in three hotspots in the greater Glasgow area appears to be in decline.

After infection rates peaked at 111 confirmed cases on 25 June, with Scotland experiencing the first two swine flu deaths in Europe, the rate has remained steady at about 60 new cases a day over the last week.

The rapid spread in two of the major hotspots – Dunoon in Argyll and Paisley south of Glasgow – now appears to have stopped and cases have begun to decline sharply.

The official statistics on the virus were likely to underestimate the true scale of infection in the UK because now only a sample of patients in the hotspots had a diagnosis of swine flu confirmed by lab tests. Many people were thought to have such mild symptoms that they were not bothering to contact their doctors while others were being treated in surgeries without being regarded as suspected swine flu cases.

In swine flu hotspots such as London, the West Midlands and parts of Scotland diagnosis of the virus was already being done by doctors rather than laboratory testing, and tracing the contacts of people with swine flu and the use of preventative anti-viral drugs had stopped. Anti-viral drugs were still being offered to all people with symptoms.

Although a bout of swine flu was currently causing less serious illness than traditional seasonal flu, three people with other serious health conditions in the UK have died after catching the virus and there are concerns it could mutate into a more virulent form.

The chief medical officer, Sir Liam Donaldson, has warned that there may be tens of thousands of cases each week this autumn, because the virus is more likely to thrive in a colder climate.

Guardian

July 3, 2009
Swine Flu as Biological Warfare Weapon?

Swine Flu as Biological Warfare Weapon?

Do you think that the H1N1 strain of swine flu is likely to be a CREATED weapon of mass infection? Consider the logistics involved in order for this virus to have combined itself the way it has. From an article on NAtural News….

(NaturalNews) Perhaps due to the genetic makeup of the fast-spreading H1N1 strain of influenza — which includes genetic elements from bird flu, swine flu and human flu spanning three continents — there is considerable speculation that the origins of this virus are man-made……..

Is there any hard evidence of laboratory origins?

As of this moment, I have not personally seen any conclusive evidence of laboratory origins for this H1N1 swine flu. I am open to the possibility that new evidence may emerge in this direction, however, and I am suspicious of the genetic makeup of the virus as one possible indicator of its origins.

I am not a medical specialist in the area of infectious disease, but I have studied microbiology, genetics and a considerable amount of material on pandemics. What seems suspicious to me is the hybrid origin of the viral fragments found in H1N1 influenza. According to reports in the mainstream media (which has no reason to lie about this particular detail), this strain of influenza contains viral code fragments from:

• Human influenza
• Bird Flu from North America
• Swine flu from Europe
• Swine flu from Asia

This is rather astonishing to realize, because for this to have been a natural combination of viral fragments, it means an infected bird from North America would have had to infect pigs in Europe, then be re-infected by those some pigs with an unlikely cross-species mutation that allowed the bird to carry it again, then that bird would have had to fly to Asia and infected pigs there, and those Asian pigs then mutated the virus once again (while preserving the European swine and bird flu elements) to become human transmittable, and then a human would have had to catch that virus from the Asian pigs — in Mexico! — and spread it to others. (This isn’t the only explanation of how it could have happened, but it is one scenario that gives you an idea of the complexity of such a thing happening).

A news report on the alternative media website “InfoWars” says the following…

During the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) Summit in Montebello, Canada in 2005, the “three amigos” (Bush, Harper and Calderon) released “North American Plan for Avian and Pandemic Influenza,” described as a “collaborative North American approach that recognizes that controlling the spread of avian influenza or a novel strain of human influenza, with minimal economic disruption, is in the best interest of all three countries.” The plan outlines how “Canada, Mexico and the United States intend to work together to prepare for and manage avian and pandemic influenza.”….

On Monday, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stoked the fear of a global flu pandemic. He said the Mexican flu outbreak is the “first test” of the “pandemic preparedness work undertaken by the international community over the past three years.” Ban Ki-moon said if “we are indeed facing a pandemic, we need to demonstrate global solidarity. In our interconnected world, no nation can deal with threats of such dimension on its own.”

For Ki-moon and the global elite, “global solidarity” in “our interconnected world” translates into yet another push for world government. Ki-moon’s dire warning falls on the heels of the G20 summit where plans were announced for implementing the creation of a new global currency to replace the U.S. dollar’s role as the world reserve currency. British Prime Minister Gordon Brown and others repeatedly called for “global governance” and a “New World Order.”

If this is your first introduction to the idea that our governements could be so devious, take a deep breath, and just consider that all is NEVER what it seems. Granted InfoWars reporting tends to be a little on the outside of extreme sometimes, but I do believe that there is a distinct probability that away from the option of one world government control (and all that) … that this is just a simple biological warfare weapons test. Well not all that simple, however, it is a fairly well known fact that governments the world over are testing out new strains of viruses and bacterium.

I am also going to encourage you to compare how this virus is behaving when held up to typical flu pandemics.

If you don’t think that governments would intentionally spray or test anything on humans then think again. You really need to watch this YouTube video on ChemTrails – It may not convince you but it should get you thinking. OK I know only wierdos talk about chem trails but this is a news story with real laboratory confirmed testing of what falls. It’s a very short clip worth watching.

What do you think? Have you considered the possibility that certain world governments are using Mexico (and the world) as their own personal petri dish for the swine flu?

July 3, 2009
Did leak from a laboratory cause swine flu pandemic?

Same strain of influenza was released by accident three decades ago

By Steve Connor, Science Editor 30 June 2009

It has swept across the world killing at least 300 people and infecting thousands more. Yet the swine flu pandemic might not have happened had it not been for the accidental release of the same strain of influenza virus from a research laboratory in the late 1970s, according to a new study.

Scientists investigating the genetic make-up of flu viruses have concluded there is a high probability that the H1N1 strain of influenza “A” behind the current pandemic might never have been re-introduced into the human population were it not for an accidental leak from a laboratory working on the same strain in 1977.

Yesterday, the Department of Health announced a further surge in the number of cases in Britain with another 1,604 confirmed over the weekend, and the death of a girl in Birmingham with underlying medical complications; the third death in Britain from swine flu-related problems.

Almost 6,000 Britons have now been infected with the influenza “A” (H1N1) strain of swine flu. But two medical researchers believe that this strain of the virus had been extinct in the human population for more than 20 years until it was unwittingly reintroduced by scientists working in a research lab somewhere in the world, leading to a pandemic in 1977 that began in Russia and China.

“Careful study of the genetic origin of the [1977] virus showed that it was closely related to a 1950 strain, but dissimilar to influenza ‘A’ (H1N1) strains from both 1947 and 1957. This finding suggested that the 1977 outbreak strain had been preserved since 1950. The re-emergence was probably an accidental release from a laboratory source,” according to the study published in The New England Journal of Medicine.

Shanta Zimmer and Donald Burke from the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania said that influenza “A” (H1N1) disappeared completely from humans after a pandemic of another strain of flu in 1957. H1N1 was not detected in annual surveillance until an outbreak of H1N1 swine flu in January 1976 at a US Army base in Fort Dix, New Jersey.

This outbreak affected 230 military personnel, killing one person, but it was successfully contained and was almost certainly caused by the direct transmission of swine flu from pigs. Nevertheless, the global anxiety caused by the Fort Dix outbreak led to a surge in research into H1N1 around the world, with experiments on frozen samples of the virus stored in labs since the 1950s, Dr Zimmer said.

“I would imagine that most labs researching into influenza would have had the 1950s strain. We cannot actually pinpoint which lab had it or accidentally released it, but the re-emergence of H1N1 in 1977 made it potentially a man-made pandemic,” she said.

“It’s a reminder that we need to be continually vigilant in terms of laboratory procedures. The identical virus in the current pandemic would not have occurred because a component of it comes from the H1N1 strain of 1977 – but it doesn’t mean to say that we wouldn’t have had another one causing a pandemic,” she added.

One of the most likely routes for the release of the 1950s virus is that laboratory workers became infected accidentally and then infected families and friends, Dr Zimmer explained. After the 1977 pandemic, the H1N1 strain of flu re-appeared annually as seasonal flu but this year it underwent a radical genetic change to become another pandemic strain.

Professor John Oxford of the Royal London Hospital said that the accidental release of the 1950s strain of H1N1 in 1977 is entirely plausible, but it may have been a good thing as it would have given many older people alive today some measure of immunity to the current pandemic. “We can look upon it now as a stroke of good luck,” he said.

The Independent

June 30, 2009