Authorities downplaying the number of those infected with avian flu

WMR has learned from an informed source in the virus research community that little-known U.S. Navy medical groups, known as Naval Medical Research Unit Number 2, headquartered in Jakarta, Indonesia, and Naval Medical Research Group Number 3, headquartered in Cairo, are carrying out research on the artificially-created A/H1N1 human-swine-avian hybrid virus. WMR has also learned that the number of avian flu cases in Indonesia and Egypt are being downplayed by health officials and the international corporate media.

WMR has also learned that the NAMRUs in Jakarta and Cairo have only used local employees to collect avian flu samples from the general population and they are not permitted to conduct research within the laboratories. We have also learned that cases of infections in both Egypt and Indonesia are on the rise but the news is being censored by the Egyptian and Indonesian governments.

During the avian flu outbreak in Indonesia in 2006, the activities of NAMRU 2 were questioned by Indonesian lawmakers. NAMRU personnel have the diplomatic authority to travel anywhere in Indonesia to conduct medical investigations and collect samples. In 2008, Indonesian Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari paid a surprise facility to the unit in Jakarta. NAMRU 2's operations were suspended temporarily but this past February the Indonesian House of Representatives authorized the renewed operations of NAMRU 2. However, there are suspicions that NAMRU is involved in the obscure area of medical intelligence gathering or "MEDINT" and that much of this intelligence ends up in U.S. biological warfare laboratories in the United States, including Fort Detrick, Maryland.

NAMRU 2 was also accused by Indonesian authorities of taking avian flu and other disease samples from Indonesia and using them to produce vaccines without any compensation or sharing agreement with Indonesia.

NAMRU 2 began in Guam during World War II as a joint operation between the Navy and the Rockefeller Institute. NAMRU 2 then moved to Taipei, Manila, and eventually, Jakarta. NAMRU 2 has detachment units in Laos, Singapore, Thailand, and Cambodia.

WMR has learned the same situation now exists with NAMRU 3 in Egypt. NAMRU 3 is collecting all the avian flu samples in Egypt. NAMRU 3 has a sophisticated laboratory but only Americans work on the research. Egyptians are only authorized to collect samples that are then delivered to a window at NAMRU 3. The same situation is said to exist at NAMRU 2 in Jakarta.

NAMRU 3 has existed in Cairo since World War II. Even during the break in U.S.-Egyptian diplomatic relations after the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, NAMRU 3 remained operational.

On May 13, 2009, WMR reported, "scientists are predicting that the molecular clock of the A/H1N1 virus, coupled with modern transportation, means that almost all the countries of the world will experience an A/H1N1 outbreak within the next few months." According to recent reports, the prediction of scientists about the spread of the A/H1N1 appears to be correct. The virus has now spread to Greece, Slovakia, Estonia, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Russia, Venezuela, the remote Canadian Arctic territory of Nunavut, Alaska, Romania, Bolivia, Cyprus, Hungary, Uruguay, Taiwan, Paraguay, Honduras, Iceland, Wales, and Ireland.

Flying Pigs and the WHO - Tamiflu and Factory Farms part II

Flying Pigs and the WHO Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms Part II: by F. William Engdahl

Global Research, May 4, 2009

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WHO takes a page from a Michael Crichton Novel As the late great American poet Yogi Berra might have put it, ‘this just gets absurder and absurder.’ The international agencies supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors of a Hollywood ‘B’ grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel. The global panic over outbreak of a new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are in the business of peddling so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs—Roche, SmithKlineGlaxo and Novavax most prominently. The losers are the rest of us normal folks. The own releases of the WHO in Geneva and the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the central coordinating agencies in this production, are worth careful study. On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City. The report described in detail a school in New York City where, ‘As of April 28, approximately half (45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection had been confirmed among students and staff members.’ The CDC called these cases all ‘genetically similar to viruses subsequently isolated from patients in Mexico.’1 We are not told in scientific terms what ‘genetically similar to’ means, but it sure sounds ominous. At that point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in the United States. Forty five of the 109 came from this New York School. The TV news channels were flooded with panic messages of the uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu. On April 29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret Chan, upgraded their Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below full global Pandemic Alert. According to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the virus being spread from human-to-human in at least two countries in one WHO region. Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterised by increased and sustained transmission in the general population. In her announcement of the upgrade, Dr Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added comment that was predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media: ‘After all it really is all of humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.’2 Note the WHO Director-General had not declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in a speech in Geneva in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident observation that ‘during a pandemic’ all humanity is under threat.’ A press release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated, ‘On May 3, CDC is scheduled to complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the continental United States. These supplies and medicines will help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun the process of developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu virus.’3 The pandemic response apparatus was going into high gear. The 45 New York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were ‘confirmed cases of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV) infection,’ ninety-five percent of whom reported to the health authorities symptoms that included ‘fever plus cough and/or sore throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness (ILI).’ OK. Better to be cautious when dealing with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat? Fever? Aren’t these pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC apparently. The 45 kids were immediately added to the growing ‘confirmed cases’ statistics, fuelling emergency responses, statements by the President of the United States, economic catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried up overnight, and worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at least a new version of the 1918 Spanish Flu plague. The CDC hastened to add the note, ‘symptoms in these patients appear to be similar to those of seasonal influenza.’ For those bothering to read through three detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the end that, ‘on April 27, 37 patients (84%) reported that their symptoms were stable or improving, three (7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of symptoms. Only one reported having been hospitalized for syncope and released after overnight observation.’ The CDC adds, ‘To date, this school-based outbreak is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United States.’ 4 In addition to the 109 ‘confirmed cases’ reported in the United States, including one death of a Mexican boy in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29, ‘a total of 57 confirmed cases had been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By country, the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26); Canada (13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and New Zealand (three each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).’5 Is this another case of ‘Chicken Little’ crying the sky is falling? A revealing name change Now, not only are the alleged victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black Death showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO also announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events. By May 1 the WHO, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced the name Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational biology at Columbia University, six of the eight genetic segments are purely swine flu and the other two segments are bird and human, but have lived in swine for the past decade.6 We instead are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That’s a catchy name. The name change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US pig industry to drop the Swine Flu label as it was apparently cutting into pork sales. The largest US and world pig producer, Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly among those lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish. But name change or not, the swine production process of Smithfield Foods and other industrialized Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs—Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation—bears closer scrutiny. As I detailed in Part I, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths and illness first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State, Mexico, where local residents had for weeks prior to the official announcement been protesting the dangers of the huge Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village. Children and adults alike were reported having a rash of symptoms in the vicinity of the vast pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the world’s largest industrialized pig meat producer. It also has one of the most egregious health and safety records. Pig feces and other niceties Feces is the Latin term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product of human or animal digestion. Pigs are world champion waste producers. An average pig produces some three times in weight the amount of fecal matter that an adult person does. As GRAIN, an agricultural organization reports, ‘the rise of large-scale factory farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of influenza.’7 The pig fecal waste product is at the center of the problem, something the CDC name change conveniently tends to obscure. As the GRAIN study notes, because concentrated animal feeding operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close together, they are ideal breeding grounds for toxins and virulent pathogens. In 2003 Science magazine warned that swine flu was ‘on a new evolutionary ‘fast track’ due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread use of vaccines in these operations.’8 It’s the same story with bird flu, where huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with tens of thousands of chickens breed toxic waste galore. Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has an impressive track record of violations of health and safety including water safety laws. In the USA, the world’s largest pig CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to local reports the town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale of fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel CAFO emits locally. As Jeff Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem calculated, ‘the best estimates put Smithfield's total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses, that is not a containable amount.’9 Tietz adds, ‘So prodigious is its fecal waste, however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city governments do -- even if it came marginally close to that standard -- it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river systems. Although the company proclaims a culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.’10 The problem, he and other critics of CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig waste, but waste combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic chemicals used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to maximize ‘efficiency.’ Tietz notes, ‘A lot of pig shit is one thing; a lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's efficiency. The company produces 6 billion pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing, unprecedented concentrations.’11 The degrees of concentration in the Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat concentrations have little to do with traditional hog farming. In facilities now spread around the world, Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in cages so small they cannot turn around. As Tietz notes, ‘Forty fully grown 250-pound male hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh air or earth. The floors are slatted to allow excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths, piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries, broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn pigs -- anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes that drain the pits. The pipes remain closed until enough sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out into a large holding pond.’12 He continues on the toxic CAFO conditions: ‘They become susceptible to infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or fungi, once established in one pig, will rush sprite-like through the whole population. Accordingly, factory pigs are infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -- oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin -- diseases would likely kill them. Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse under its own power. As long as the pig remains ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.’ 13 Jeff Tietz is not the only one who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield Foods CAFO pig waste problem. The United States Government Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has repeatedly fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local water supply with discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and elsewhere across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined $12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -- the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the EPA, for waste generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat processing operations.14 There was little convincing evidence the fines changed their practice of waste disposal in any significant way. Smithfield Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where environmental regulations are presumably less strict, including Romania, Poland, and of course, rural Mexico. Several years ago the Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was focus of major accusations by local and Government health officials. Smithfield refused to let local authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for days at the farms. ‘Our doctors have not had access to the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections,’ stated Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in Romania. ‘Every time they tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them three days before each inspection.’ It later emerged that Smithfield had been covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its Romanian CAFO farms.15 The Drug Cartel comes in Rather than order a full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu. On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study allegedly showing, ‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’ The genetically-manipulated vaccine of Novavax, the company claimed, ‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza strains.’16 On April 24, the WHO issued a press release stating that ‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been sensitive to oseltamivir…’ Osteltamivir is the technical name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year of age. The FDA statement added it had decided, ‘to authorize the use of unapproved or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of approved or cleared medical products following a determination and declaration of emergency.’17 That suggests that the US Government has or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir). With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza. The entire drama of the past weeks is reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda Strain. Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004, amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu, when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy scenario. In a UN agency normally given to issuing dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004 report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with Swine Flu panic. In a fantasy section titled ‘Sometime in the future…’ the WHO wrote four years ago, Rumours of an outbreak of unusually severe respiratory illness in two vil- lages in a remote province reach the ministry of health in one of the World Health Organization’s (WHO’s) Member States. A team is dispatched to the province and learns that the outbreak started about a month earlier. The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the previous month. All age groups have been affected. Twenty patients are currently in the pro- vincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia and acute respiratory failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas is increased, and new cases are identified throughout the province. Respiratory specimens col- lected from several patients are tested at the national laboratory and are found to be positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further subtyped. The isolates are sent to the WHO Reference Centre for Influ- enza for further characterization, where they are characterized as influ- enza A(H6N1), a subtype never isolated from humans before. Gene sequencing studies further indicate that most of the viral genes are from a bird influenza virus, with the remaining genes derived from a human strain.18 If one changed the name from Influenza A (H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current situation. That 2004 WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the handbook for what has unfolded since late April in the US Mexico and beyond. It leads to serious question whether the world is being submitted to a giant psychological warfare game aimed at inducing them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a danger that does not actually exist as claimed. With the reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present and little sign of the feared repeat of the 1918 Spanish Flu or worse as officials were warning only days earlier, it is well beyond time to launch a full-scale worldwide health inquiry into the toxic conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm concentrations, and to end the official coverup of what has become a colossal health danger. F. William Engdahl is author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of Genetic Manipulation (www.globalresearch.ca), and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (Pluto Press). His latest book, Full Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order (Third Millennium Press), is due to be released later this month. He may be reached via his website, www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. Notes: 1 Centers for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City, April 2009, April 30, 2009. Accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0430a1.htm. 2 Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, quoted in Murray Wardrop, Swine flu All of humanity under threat WHO warns, Daily Telegraph, London, April 30, 2009. 3 CDC, H1N1 (Swine Flu), accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/. 4Centers for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City… Op. Cit. 5 Ibid. 6 Seth Borenstein, Swine flu name change? Flu genes spell pig, AP, May 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.physorg.com/news160371024.html. 7 GRAIN, A food system that kills: Swine flu is meat industry’s latest plague, April 2009, accessed in http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=48. 8 Bernice Wuethrich, Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu, Science, Vol. 299, 2003. 9 Jeff Tietz, Pork’s Dirty Secret: America’s Top Hog Producer is also one of America’s Worst Polluters, Rolling Stone, December 14, 2006. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid. 14 EPA, UNITED STATES SUES SMITHFIELD FOODS FOR POLLUTING VIRGINIA WATERWAYS, Press Release, December 16, 1996. 15 Mirel Bran, Swine Plague: Romania Criticizes American Group’s Attitude, Le Monde, 15 August 2007, translated by Leslie Thatcher, cited in GRAIN Op Cit.. 16 Tricia J. Richardson, NOVAVAX Announces Publication of a Preclinical Study Demonstrating that a Virus-like Particle Vaccine Provided Protection Against Highly Pathogenic H1N1 and H5N1 Influenza Strains, April 14, 2009, Rockville, Md. Press Release. 17 FDA News, FDA Authorizes Emergency Use of Influenza Medicines, Diagnostic Test in Response to Swine Flu Outbreak in Humans, April 27, 2009. 18 WHO, WHO checklist for influenza pandemic preparedness planning, November 2004, accessed in http://209.85.129.132/search?q=cache:XuupgF1uNAIJ:www.who.int/csr/resources/publications/influenza/FluCheck6web.pdf+who+influenza+pandemic+preparedness+checklist&cd=1&hl=de&ct=clnk&gl=de&client=firefox-a.

Global Research Articles by F. William Engdahl

Unreported or Underreported Real Pandemics, Not Fake Ones Like Avian and Swine Flu

by Stephen Lendman

Global Research, May 4, 2009

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In his April 29 Global Research.ca article, F. William Engdahl discussed "Flying Pigs, Tamiflu and Factory Farms" and shed light on the current swine flu hysteria - hyped by the same folks who engineered the 2006 (H5N1) Avian Flu scare that had more bark than bite. But it proved hugely profitable for drug makers like Roche and Gilead Sciences, the company Donald Rumsfeld led as chairman from 1997 - 2001 and remains a major shareholder. Although he won't discuss his "private finances," he's likely benefitting handsomely from the current panic. Earlier Avian Flu reports were like the following: -- numerous ones from public health journalists saying governments are "thoroughly unprepared" for a pandemic flu outbreak; as a result, it could lead to potential "societal breakdown, chaos, and panic;" -- Robert Madelin, the EU's health and consumer protection department director-general, cited scientists' predictions of a potential two - seven million death toll worldwide, then saying: "It's when and not if;" -- the World Bank estimating that an Avian Flu (H5N1) outbreak could kill up to 70 million worldwide and cause $2 trillion in economic losses; and -- a scary July 2006 consumeraffairs.com report citing information like the above and more, then concluding: "There have so far been no known cases of H5N1 (Avian Flu) in the US." When all was said and done, the global tempest was no more than a teapot maximum few hundred deaths, but, according to Engdahl, a Pentagon-initiated biowarfare project threatens something far graver. In an August 2008 article titled "The Pentagon's alarming project: Avian Flu Biowar Vaccine," he cited "alarming evidence" of a cooperative pharmaceutical industry-Pentagon effort to genetically weaponize the H5N1 virus, then unleash a "selective pandemic through the process of mandatory vaccination(s) with an alleged vaccine" offered as protection. If today's Swine Flu scare is for this purpose, indeed it is worrisome, but that remains to be seen. What's known is what Engdahl reported in his April 29 article: that "In October 2005 the Pentagon ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against what it called Avian Flu, H5N1 (and) budgeted more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug Oseltamivir, sold under the name Tamiflu. (At the time, George Bush asked) Congress to appropriate another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks." This drug "is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy side effects" that potentially can kill. Nonetheless, during the current panic, its sales have skyrocketed, and that alone worries some enough to wonder what's more dangerous - the flu or the combination of the FDA approving potentially deadly drugs like Tamiflu, the dominant media hyping a non-existant threat, public health organizations terrifying people with heightened alerts, and government officials like Department of Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano saying: "We are proceeding as if we are preparatory to a full pandemic" even though: -- no evidence suggests one; -- flu epidemics are extremely rare, certainly global ones with the potential to kill millions; -- influenza (flu) is a common viral illness; -- it exists in numerous strains; -- most remain infectious for about a week and produce symptoms including fever, coughing, nausea and at times vomiting - annoying but rarely life-threatening; and -- simple good health practices are more effective than dangerous drugs, including frequent hand washing, use of disinfectants and detergents, and abstaining from high-risk foods like all GMO ones as well as beef, poultry, and pork - raised under unsanitary conditions on factory farms that "are notorious breeding grounds for toxic pathogens." That said, major unreported or underreported pandemics abound, real ones. None, however, make headlines or arouse public or media concern. Below are some. Wars, Massacres, Genocide, and Violence Wars indeed are reported but not their toll, human or otherwise. In the past century alone, scores of millions died and even greater numbers of survivors suffered horrendously. Currently, and in recent years alone, wars and conflicts continue globally, including in Iraq, Afghanistan, Occupied Palestine, Pakistan, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Kashmir, Haiti, Ivory Coast, Southern Nigeria, Colombia, and elsewhere plus the mounting "war on terrorism" toll that's totally blacked out in news reports. Gideon Polya edits the Body Count web site, and in 2007 published a book titled: "Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950." As a biological scientist, he calls it "a carefully researched (country by country)" estimate totaling about 1.3 billion needless human deaths, including 140,000 under-five American infants in the last seven years alone according to UN demographic data. Globally 16 million avoidable deaths occur annually, including 10 million under age-five ones. Polya states: "There is no public discussion of the actual human cost of First World policies" that are the chief cause of global carnage in all forms, including wars, other conflicts, massacres and genocide, starvation and famine, disease, as well as preventable poverty and neglect. He adds: "An apocalyptic quartet of violence, deprivation, disease and LYING (including suppressing the truth) is responsible for the continuing carnage. Polya defines avoidable mortality as "the difference between the actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently governed country with the same demographics." His main source was UN Population Division data for "essentially every country in the world since 1950 - (for) population, death rate, birth rate, population breakdown, (and) under-5 infant mortality rate." As violent occupiers, offending countries include: -- Britain responsible for 727 million deaths in dozens of countries, including Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Iraq; -- France responsible for 142 million deaths in many countries, including Algeria, Vietnam, Haiti, and Ivory Coast; -- the US responsible for 82 million deaths in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Haiti, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere; and -- Israel responsible for 24 million deaths in Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt. Polya calls the occupations of Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq (among others) genocide as defined under Article 2 of the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that states: "In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: (a) Killing members of the group; (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group." Post-1967, Palestine sustained 300,000 avoidable deaths. Post-1990, Iraq had about four million, up to half that number since March 2003, and since 2001, Afghanistan suffered three to seven million. These tolls mount daily, yet are virtually blacked out in news reports. Numerous other pandemics abound as well, mostly below the radar. Preventable Deadly Chronic Diseases They're numerous and include heart disease, cancer, malaria, tuberculosis, diabetes, chronic respiratory diseases, HIV/AIDS, stroke, and many others, the result of major risk factors like obesity, high blood pressure, smoking, poor diet, stress, lack of exercise, poverty, deprivation, and inadequate, unavailable, and/or poor quality public health. In two October 2005 articles titled "The neglected epidemic of chronic disease" and "Preventing chronic diseases: how may lives can we save," The (UK-based) Lancet (medical journal) stated that many of them often "remain marginal to the mainstream of global action on health," yet they "represent a huge proportion of human illness" and deaths. In 2005, around 35 million people died from heart disease, cancer, stroke, lower respiratory infections, and numerous other illnesses for lack of prevention, control, or effective effort to treat them. Annually, over a half million women die unnecessarily in childbirth, and for every death another 20 suffer injury, infection or disease for lack of available, affordable quality care - affecting about 10 million women in total. As a result, one million children are left motherless each year and become 10 times more likely to die within two years of their mothers' death. The great majority of maternal deaths would be preventable if a working health system were available to save lives. A 2005 World Health Report cited almost 11 million deaths among children under five from largely avoidable causes, including four million babies who don't survive their first month of life. Why aren't world governments addressing this and acting to save lives! Why don't the major media explain it! Including all chronic diseases, a mere 2% annual death reduction "would avert 36 million deaths by 2015" or the equivalent of about "500 million years of life over the 10" year span from 2006 - 2015, mostly in low and middle income countries, and under half will be for people younger than 70 years. By 2015, The Lancet projects around 64 million deaths categorized under three major groupings: -- communicable, maternal, perinatal, and nutritional; -- chronic, non-communicable; and -- injuries. In 2005, chronic diseases accounted for 72% of the global total for the older-30 aged population. The Lancet concluded that "the serious consequences of chronic diseases and their (preventable) risk factors are not recognised by the international health community," at least in terms of financial commitment or concern. Further, although high-risk behavior (smoking, poor diet, etc.) takes its toll, low-income countries experience a larger problem, especially for the population segment without easy access to good lifestyle choices, including the availability of quality health care. An "insidious myth" is that these conditions aren't preventable because people bring them on themselves. "The reality could hardly be more different" with numerous factors playing a part, including environmental and economic pressures that take a huge toll on human health. Differences between high and low income countries are marked and show the successful effects of intervention. From 1970 - 2000, around 14 million heart disease deaths were averted in America alone. Overall, a relatively small number of "modifiable risks" account for more than half of all chronic disease deaths. Reducing them would have a dramatic effect through: -- individual interventions; -- population-based ones; and -- macroeconomic ones with enough desire and fiscal allocations to do it. The combination of all three are needed for chronic disease prevention and control plus one more - widespread dominant media promotion the same way it spreads fear by hyping scams like Avian and Swine Flu. The Lancet also stated: "Our vision for the future extends beyond measuring risk behavior and counting the dead, and instead encourages all sectors of society (including the media) to contribute effective ways of reducing health risks and promoting longer, healthier lives." It's for those sectors to get on with the task instead of acting counterproductively, pursuing profits at the expense of human health, and ignoring the global pandemic of preventable illnesses and diseases. Other global pandemics include: -- 1.3 billion people live on less than $1 dollar a day, including over 500 million existing in "absolute poverty" according to the World Bank; another three billion survive on about $2 a day; poverty this extreme kills; -- starvation and famine kill about 15 million children annually; -- according to the World Health Organization (WHO), one-third of the world population is ill-fed and another one-third is starving; malnutrition affects one in twelve people, including 160 million children under age five; in America, one-sixth of the elderly population is ill-fed, and one out of eight children under 12 endures daily hunger; -- global hunger, starvation and famine persist in spite of a plentiful world food supply; -- five million annual smoking-related deaths occur; -- two million annual alcohol-related deaths; -- about one million annual suicides; -- 400,000 annual auto and truck accident deaths; -- 200,000 annual illicit drug-related deaths; two - three times that number die from legal drugs; -- about 30,000 annual US gun-related deaths; -- unknown annual tens of thousands of deaths from pollution, food and water contamination, nuclear radiation exposure, and domestic violence, especially to women, children and the elderly; and -- according to the World Health Organization: "The world's biggest killer and the greatest cause of ill health and suffering across the globe is listed almost at the end of the International Classification of Diseases (code Z59.5) -- extreme poverty." These are real preventable pandemics, not fake ones like Swine Flu being hyped for profit, to spread fear, and divert public attention from real problems like the above-listed ones, the deepening global economic holocaust, the systematic looting of national wealth, and the steady path America is on to becoming a militarized banana republic police state. Stephen Lendman is a Research Associate of the Center for Research on Globalization. He lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to The Global Research News Hour on RepublicBroadcasting.org Monday - Friday at 10AM US Central time for cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on world and national issues. All programs are archived for easy listening. http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13461

Stephen Lendman is a frequent contributor to Global Research. Global Research Articles by Stephen Lendman