Discovering the World With Sy Montgomery

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t Interview

On Friday, 16 October 2009, I interviewed Sy Montgomery over the phone.

Leslie Thatcher: In the review Truthout published of many of your books I
describe what I believe you write about. I'd very much like to hear your own
sense of why you write and what you write about.

Sy Montgomery: I write about the relationship between people and
the rest of animate creation and I write about it because I think
things have gone askew. [At this point, Ms. Montgomery excused herself
to remove a tick from her dog Sally.] I try to offer a different model
of how to love and honor the rest of the animate world. My books offer
a few different models:

Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas offered a totally different
model of how scientists could interact with their subjects,
of how they could use emotions and intuition as tools of inquiry. They
revolutionized ethology.

When I went to India and talked with people who live with tigers, they
worship the tiger even though 300 people there are being eaten
every year. They have an intimate understanding that we need predators
in the world to make it whole.

LT: Again, when you go to the Amazon and people tell you the crazy stories
about dolphins who can seduce us and dance with us and take us away to
another world, there is a truth there that we have lost. That truth is the
transformative power of relationships with the dolphins.

No matter where I go, I'm being blessed by that Buddhist promise: When the
student is ready the teacher appears. Teachers are always appearing for me.
Our job is to recognize the teacher whether it has
two legs, fours legs, eight legs or none - quite a few snakes have
taught me a great deal over the years. My job as a writer is to understand
what the truth is - whether it's in another language or in another kind of
truth-telling than the one we're accustomed to.

LT: Would you talk about how you came to write "Walking with the Great Apes"
and the conditions under which you did the research for it?

Before I could read, I was seeing pictures of Jane Goodall holding her hand
out to a wild chimpanzee on the cover of National Geographic, and as a
preliterate being I thought this was the way it should be: Animals are our
teachers and our healers and I wanted this to be a kind of homage to these
women who had shown us that truth. I had discovered
in my preproposal research that the three had all wanted a book like
the one I intended to be written.

To do it, in just the way that they learned from the apes, I got to walk in
my heroines' footsteps and got to visit all their research
sites. My first major expedition for this book was to visit Borneo at
Birute's site. You cannot imagine the difficulties of research in the
jungles of Borneo. The film melts inside the camera. Your tape recorder
swells so you can't play the tapes back. At the end of the day, you're
plucking fat, black leeches out of your bra. There were not even any
pathways cut through the forest when Birute first went out there with
her then husband.

One of the problems is that there are all these formerly captive orangutans
who think it's great fun to spy on humans and wait until you leave your
stuff where they can drink your shampoo or eat your soap. Once, this female
orangutan unzipped my little shift dress - they understand zippers perfectly
- and lifted it off my head and put it
over her own head. I think it looked quite a bit cuter on her, really. One
logistical problem occurred when an orangutan ate my taped inter-
view with Birute. The orangutan knows you really want your stuff back
and thinks it's a hilarious joke that you keep hoping until the last vestige
of the tape they are chewing disappears that somehow you'll be able to
retrieve it. Since then, I take extremely extensive notes and make sure I
have backup.

This was my first book and the original publisher, who had signed
on halfway through the project stopped doing trade books, and I only
had a small advance. The thing is when you love something this much,
you find the money you need. You find a way. You hitchhike; you sleep
in airports.

Yes, I got dengue fever in Borneo and strep I had to be
hospitalized for in Thailand. But with time, you forget all that and
only remember the adventure.

LT: I heard NPR's recent story on the Interoceanic Highway South
just after completing "Journey of the Pink Dolphins," much of which
takes place in the Peruvian Amazon, and felt devastated. Would you talk
about your work in the Peruvian Amazon and the implications of the highway
for the people and the fauna you have worked to protect there?

The Interoceanic Highway is an unmitigated disaster. Roads are absolutely
the worst, not only for ecosystems, but also for the local peoples among
whom roads spread disease, prostitution and other forms
of exploitation. While there are exceptions, many of the people who
live there don't want the highway. Even in Hancock, New Hampshire, whenever
they even straighten a local road, we see an increase in accidents and road
kill. At the Rainforest Conservation Fund [a non-
profit in the Peruvian Amazon to which Montgomery has contributed, including
her service as a Board member], we're strengthening
protections for our reserves to give the people there the tools to protect
their own area. A lot of the people who live there would be mortified should
big, Japanese fleets come and fish out their entire
food supply and then go back to Japan and make a fortune, leaving the
riverinos high and dry. Right now, they don't know how to defend themselves
against that and one thing RCF can do is provide those
tools.

LT: I found the relationship you developed with Girindra Nath
Mridha of Sundarbans to be one of the most moving of the many rich
human relationships woven through your work. Could you talk about how
you met and the connection you shared and also let us know whether you
have had any news of him since you wrote the new afterward for "Spell
of the Tiger"

I haven't heard from him and it absolutely kills me. I continue to write and
I'm still in touch with one of the translators I worked with. Jamespur, the
town he lived in, was totally flattened in one of the cyclones. It's
possible his house was swept away with every paper in it. If he's alive, I
know he'd do everything possible to get in touch with me, unless he's lost
everything including my address. When I went back with National Geographic,
they had all the photographs I had sent
framed - which would have been a very expensive thing to do there - in their
house and he showed me all my letters, which he kept in a special box.

India is an emerging power and people may be running around with
cell phones in Calcutta, but in Jamespur and the surrounding villages, there
are no telephones. I've tried to get one of my translators to go out and
look for him, but that's a big thing to ask.

LT: Girindra's letters were like light from a star.

I pray to God that he's somewhere. We're about the same age, 51,
and people in Sundarbans are lucky to live to be 51. There's not a day
I don't think about him.

LT: Or about Christopher Hogwood, I expect?

I feel Christopher is with me and I'm not one of those people who communes
with spirits, but it's just so obvious he's running my life:
He resurrected my books from the dead; he bought my husband a sports
car.

I'm serious. Howard's book about Christopher had nothing to do with my book.
An agent called him about an article he had written for a defunct magazine
about Christopher and wanted to know whether Howard would be interested in
writing a children's book. Howard had never done anything like that, but it
intrigued him and so he wrote the book. He pressed "Send" to send it to the
agent - they didn't even have a contract - and when he came back to the
computer, it was sold and he
went onto eBay and bought a Miata.

LT: This pig is looking after us.

Imagine it, he's now loose in the universe. He's not stuck in a pig body any
more, so people write me from Portugal and all over; it's been translated so
extensively: Portuguese, Italian, Dutch (and now the book is fixing to be
translated into Chinese) and I have heard from readers
in Brazil, Australia, Italy, Holland....; people who love pigs, people who
never thought about pigs before. There's a large print edition, so
I get letters from blind people. He's brought me so much love.

It's so easy to feel alone and strange and, yet, I feel buoyed up
by this great community all around us. We're all doing this work of Tikkun
of restoring. It's great time to be alive to be able to justify all the
oxygen I've been sucking up all this time.

LT: Over the last not quite 20 years, you have visited forests and jungles
of Tanzania, Rwanda, Borneo, the Amazon, Papua New Guinea, Sundarbans
straddling India and Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand
and French Guiana, not to mention the woods surrounding your New
England home - to name only the ones I can remember. You have spent
time with officials, indigenous people and foreign scientists in these
places and observed both destruction and preservation. Are you willing
to make any generalizations about what practices and/or attitudes
further the preservation of the nonhuman world?

What's screwing things up is greed. People think it's poverty, but it's not;
it's greed. I think greed is a little easier to get a handle
on than poverty. Greed is what causes poverty. Everybody likes to blame
deforestation on poor people. But as you read in "Search for the Golden Moon
Bear," moon bears are going extinct because rich people want their organs
for elixirs. Because rich people will pay a great deal of money for their
body parts to eat.

The bush trade prospers because people want to eat delicacies and will pay
to do so. You can't just blame the local people: They'll eat insects. It's
greed that makes everyone rush out and kill everything in sight.

I think it's wrong to blame everything on poor people. They're not what's
eating away at the natural world.

LT: At the end of "The Good Good Pig," you write apropos of the choice to
raise a pig as a beloved pet who lived a long good life: "we need not 'be
practical' all the time. We can choose a new way. We have the power to
transform a story of sorrow into a story of healing. We can choose life over
death. We can let love lead us home."

Your life and your books model those choices very powerfully: Do
you also have concrete suggestions you'd be willing to share about how
others may begin making those new choices?

At the end of all of my books, I offer a whole list of organizations that
are working to preserve the natural world. People can contribute time or
money to those organizations or others involved in preservation of the
natural world.

We can change our diets slightly or dramatically. The main cause of
greenhouse gas emissions is not transportation, but meat production.

We can limit our family size. As a way to stop gnawing away at the universe,
deciding to put fewer rich Westerners on the planet is a
great choice.

The other day, I was reading a woman's magazine while waiting to
get a haircut and there was a story about this woman who was diagnosed with
MS and was totally freaking out about it. Her friend told her she needed to
give 29 gifts in 29 days. It's so easy to give a gift: to volunteer time, to
tell someone else about something they can do. We
can give a gift to the earth every time we eat a meal or make a decision to
buy or not to buy something. You're always making a choice. Because there
are now so many of us on the planet, even our tiny choices affect one
another. It's so easy to make good, generous, life-affirming choices in
everyday things.

If you can't be the next Jane Goodall, volunteer, write a check, choose not
to have octuplets or not to fry up that bacon. Help a child learn to read.
There's a whole lot that's possible.

It's easy to get compassion overload and to feel overwhelmed, and
the only antidote to that is to turn around and do something, even just that
one small thing in a way that will open the world up to new possibilities.
We get sucked into thinking that things "have" to be a certain way. So many
people just assume you can't just not send your
own pig to slaughter. You don't "have" to do anything. You can do anything
you want. We fail to apprehend what is within our control.
Many people ask me why I don't have a cell phone because they assume
you have to have a cell phone. Some people really do need to have one, but I
don't. A key component in cell phone manufacture is the mineral coltan,
which is mined in chimp and gorilla habitat.

People may expect you to have four kids, eat meat, turn your pig
into bacon, but you don't have to. I have a friend who has never owned
a car or a house nor held down a full time job, but he lives a very
dignified Thoreauvian existence. There are so many options out there.
We excuse things that pain us because we say we have to, but we don't.

Christopher taught me and other wise people and animals around the world
have also taught me that the range of possibility is much greater than we're
conditioned to imagine.

Pick up something that you can do something with. If you're doing just one
good thing that makes you feel empowered, you're doing well.

We do have the choice not to obsess about what upsets us and carry
on about those things. If we let those things run our lives, they win. You
can sometimes harness your own demons. In a writer's case, you can use your
demons to harass you to get the impossible thing done on time
or to make you write more. What is true for our inner demons can also
be true for the demons outside of ourselves as well. We can make them what
martial artists call worthy enemies.

Sarah Palin got this close to the presidency of this country. George Bush
was president. I don't know why we don't make a sandwich out of them, but
the important thing is to make good choices for yourself.

LT: What are you working on now?

Yesterday, I was reading the galleys from my new books about birds. My first
research, as you know, was on emus. The new book for adults is entitled
"Birdology," a title I got from a sermon I attended by a visiting Unitarian
Universalist pastor. I try to convey the essence of birds through adventures
with seven different species including our chickens at home, the ladies and
the cassowary - the species that kills the most people of any bird. A
children's book is also coming out, "Kakapo Rescue," about a giant,
nocturnal, flightless parrot, who
is extremely rare and only lives off the south shore of New Zealand.

New Zealand committed the ecological sin of bringing in outside species that
eat ground-nesting birds and have wrecked the ecological balance. The Kakapo
is not extinct, but for a long time it was thought that the entire
population was male, when a dramatic discovery of some living females
occurred. It's been possibly the most concentrated, dedicated battle to
rescue a species from the edge of extinction ever. For five years, we'd wait
for a nesting event by the telephone and it finally happened two springs
ago. I basically ran out of the door in my bathrobe to get to New Zealand.
All my children's books are for fourth through eight grade children, who are
a pretty sophisticated audience. This is a very dramatic and emotional book.

LT: You mentioned learning from snakes?

Well, their experience of life has to be so different: They have completely
different senses from ours and they move so differently through the world.
Mostly, my experience has been of their patience. Cobras in Thailand and
Borneo don't bother you. I had the experience of watching a photographer
trying to set up a tripod in the Borneo jungle, but this root kept getting
in the way. Then we notices, it wasn't a
root, but a cobra, patiently sitting with its head inflated as though
saying, "I'm a cobra, please could you move. I am not a root." I was
very impressed that it should so patiently wait for this dullard mammal to
get that it really needed to move.

As Henry Beston said in one of my all-time favorite quotes,

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals.
Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in
civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and
sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image
in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic
fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and
greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older
and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with
extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we
shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are
not underlings; they are other nations caught with ourselves in the net of
life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."

LT: Thank you so much, Sy Montgomery.

Leslie Thatcher is is Truthout's French Language Editor and some-
time book reviewer. Chelsea Green provided reviewer copies of the four
Sy Montgomery books it has published.

Dog carpets as "art"-Archives

What is this project about?

Ondrej: The dog carpets are essentially about society’s hypocrisy. It questions the special status that dogs and cats have in our, western society. Although we can see that in China, despite the local culture and cuisine, the pet culture is on its rise as well. The Bolivian experience was about hypocrisy as well, but it involved on a larger and direct scale mechanisms and structures within the society.

Kristofer: It’s about the tradition of producing carpets with wild animals as a hunting fetish. But in this case we were using an inappropriate animal, a pet - and like this we wanted to question the values behind this tradition. Ondrej was speaking to me about this idea already before the Bolivia show, but when I got the opportunity to participate in that show I thought it would be interesting to realize the dog carpets there with Ondrej, mainly for three reasons: more adventure, lower production costs and the problem of street dogs in South America (in contrast to the beloved inhouse pet in North America and in most European countries).
Full interview:

http://www.brodypaetau.com/?page_id=119

Can you Alzheimer's- proof your brain

When you bite into a hamburger or chicken sandwich, what do you think that this grass eating animal was eating before it died? Most likely it was a mixture of ground up eyeballs, anuses,bones, feathers, and euthanized dogs . Most animals that we eat spend the entirety of their short lives in factories eating recycled meat and animal fat. These herbivores have been turned into carnivores thanks to our process of ‘waste removal’ better known as rendering.

Every day thousands of pounds of slaughterhouse waste such as brains, eyeballs, spinal cords, intestines, bones, feathers or hooves as well as restaurant grease, road kill, cats and dogs are produced. From this need for large waste disposal came the development of rendering plants. Rendering plants recycle the dead animals and their wastes into products known as bone meal, and animal fat. These products are sold to the companies that grow animals for meat or milk cattle, poultry, swine, sheep and put into their feed.. Each slaughterhouse has a privately owned rendering plant nearby .


These facilities operate 24 hours a day all over the world. Till the BJP came to government in 1998 rendering was banned in India by the department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Ministry of Agriculture, which prohibited the use of animal byproducts in ruminant feeds (Order No.2-4/99-AHT/ FF) However , the BJP, influenced by a coterie of slaughterhouse owners and interested bureaucrats, repealed this ban and India’s first rendering plants came up in 2001. No one in India knows about them – and few people in America where there are thousands of plants. They are not advertised - and for good reason.



The process itself is very disturbing and those who have witnessed it have often sworn off meat for good. The rendering plant floor is piled high with 'raw product' - tonnes of feet, tails, feathers, bones, spinal cords, hooves, milk sacs, grease, intestines, stomachs and eyeballs of slaughtered animals.. In the heat, the piles of dead animals seem to have a life of their own as millions of maggots swarm over the carcasses. First the raw material is cut into small pieces and then transported to another machine for fine shredding. It is then cooked at 280 degrees for one hour ,melting the meat away from bones in the hot 'soup.' This continuous batch cooking process goes on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. During this cooking process, the soup produces yellow grease or tallow that rises to the top and is skimmed off. The cooked meat and bone are then sent to a hammer mill press, which squeezes out the remaining moisture and pulverizes the product into a gritty powder. Shaker screens remove excess hair and large bone chips that are unsuitable for consumption. Now recycled meat, yellow grease, and bone meal are produced and used exclusively to feed vegetarian animals.


In India no testing is done of these plants . In America and Europe state agencies spot check , yet testing for pesticides and other toxins in animal feeds is not done or is done incompletely with toxic wastes accompanying the dead animals – all of which the rendering plants do not remove. Poisoned cattle stomachs, animals that have been lying dead for weeks before being picked up , animals that have been run over by trucks, all their noxious parts are part of this. The package includes euthanasia drugs given to pets, animals with flea collars containing organophosphate insecticides, fish oil laced with DDT, heavy metals from pet ID tags, and plastics from thrown away meats. Labor costs are rising and therefore many rendering plants refuse to hire extra hands to cut off flea collars or unwrap spoiled shopmeat. Every week, millions of packages of plastic-wrapped meat go through the rendering process and become one of the many unwanted ingredients in animal feed.


Even if some people do realize how animal feed is made and feel that it is still too far removed to be a concern to them, most of them do not know of the risks ,consumption of this meat entails. Perhaps the best-known health concern associated with rendering plants is Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, or Mad Cow Disease. In America regulations mandate that brain and other nerve tissue be removed from cattle after they are slaughtered for human food. Yet these most infectious parts, the brain and spinal cord, are allowed to go to a rendering facility where they can be processed into pet and animal feed. This means it is possible that a cow with Mad Cow Disease can be ground up and fed to a pig or chicken that is, in turn, fed back to other cows that are eventually eaten by people. India has no regulations of any kind . Behind the scenes and out of public view, these practices are unfolding around the world putting millions of people at risk for Mad Cow Disease.


Other diseases that can be contracted from rendering plant product feed include tuberculosis , variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob Disease (CJD), and Alzheimer’s. All of these diseases, except Alzheimer’s, are transmissible spongiform encephalopathy diseases (TSEs), which means that they is are infectious diseases that leave the brain resembling a sponge. The process by rendering plants makes chickens, goats, sheep, pigs,cows and buffaloes into cannibals. – a factor that has been cited as a cause of Alzheimer’s disease which did not exist in the world until this practice started. Millions of people are affected by Alzheimer’s making it one of the leading causes of death among the elderly across the globe. Scientific evidence shows that people eating meat more than four times a week for a prolonged period have a three times higher chance of suffering from dementia than vegetarians. A preliminary 1989 study at the University of Pennsylvania showed that over 5% of patients diagnosed with Alzheimer’s were actually dying from human spongiform encephalopathy. That means that as many as 200,000 people in the United States may already be dying from mad cow disease each year. God knows how many in India but certainly thousands more after 2001.


In India ,in 2001 the BJP led Government, prepared a secret position paper on the “Utilisation of Slaughter House Waste for the Preparation of Animal Feed”. This is what the report said: “ India ranks topmost in the world in livestock holding and has the potential to utilize slaughterhouse by products to partly meet the growing requirement of animal feeds. The total availability of offal/bones in the country generated from large slaughterhouses is estimated to be more than 21-lakh tonnes/annum. It can also be used for the preparation of animal feeds”. The report further goes on to explain that “Presently in India , live stock feed production is cereal based. This results in livestock, especially poultry, pig and fish competing with humans for grains and cereals which can easily be replaced with slaughterhouse waste.”


The Office International des Epizooties (OIE World Organisation for Animal Health) had surveyed the risk of CJD/BSE in Asia . The report revealed that no attention had been paid to any risk analysis on bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in China , India , Pakistan and seven other countries. According to OIE, significant quantities of animal feed of meat origin have been imported into Asia , which may mean that the BSE agent could have reached domestic cattle in these countries. The Report noted that” the spread of BSE through rendering plants cannot be excluded in some countries such as China , India , Japan , Pakistan and Taiwan . Therefore, much more stringent management at slaughterhouses and rendering plants, as well as extensive surveillance programmes, are required in those countries. “


The Indian companies on the Internet advertise their rendered meal as having been made from "spray-dry" machines that turn blood into a fine, brown powder (gardeners know it as blood meal); gigantic kettles that boil fat to make tallow; grinders that crush bones into minuscule fragments.. Millions of tons are supplied to dairy industry, poultry farms, cattle feed-lots, pig farms, fish-feed plants, and pet-food manufacturers. Leading manufacturers of “Meal” ,as they call it, are Standard Agro Vet (P) Ltd., Allanasons Ltd., Hind Agro Ltd., Al Kabeer, and Hyderabad – also the four largest private slaughterhouses in the country.

All animal feed manufacturers use meat and bone meal in their feeds. Recent reports state most domestic animals are fed such rendered animal tissues. A 1991 United States Department of agriculture report states that approximately 7.9 billion pounds of meat, bone meal, blood meal, and feather meal was produced by rendering plants in 1983. Of that amount: 12 %percent was used in dairy and beef cattle feed ,34 % in pet food ,34% in poultry feed and 20 %in pig food . This has doubled by 2006. So has the use of animal protein in commercial dairy feed since 1987 all over the globe. Grass or cereal fed cattle and other animals are nonexistent abroad and lessening in India . BSE expert Richard Lacey states “The time bomb of the twentieth century equivalent of the bubonic plague ticks away.” Do you think Nature will forgive you for a baby chick is eating on what's left of her mother after she's been stripped down, a calf being fed on her mother’s slaughtered remains, a pig being reared on a diet of dead pigs, a goat being fed on a goat’s leftovers


Maneka Gandhi


When I was Minister for Social Justice there were demands for giving grants to build Alzheimer’s Disease Homes- a disease unknown in India till the 1970s. In the West the first 150 cases happened in 1948, rose to 600 by 1978 . Now there are 500,000 cases in the U.K. , 250,000 in Canada and 4.5 million in the U.S. 10% of people over 65 in the US have it and 50% of 85 year olds . It is now very much in India – which means homes have to be set up as it is almost impossible for anyone to look after an Alzheimer’s patient for a long time .

Alzheimer’s disease is an irreversible brain disorder in which a person loses his capacity to reason, think, recognize and function. The disease progresses from mild forgetfulness to death in just 8 years and is most prevalent in people over the age of 65. 55% of all senility cases are now Alzheimer’s.

Is it to do with old age ? If so, everyone would get it. But, the Journal of the American Medical Association shows that very poor people in Nigeria/India are far less likely to develop Alzheimer's disease than their relatives in New York , Obviously it is a lifestyle related disease .

Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging. It is caused by sticky plaque-like deposits and neurofibrillary tangles that kill off brain cells until all memory disintegrates. Ultimately the patient dies.
What is the cause of this deadly epidemic? There is no mention of anything that could be considered Alzheimer’s disease in any medical or other literature before 1900. In the last 100 years, Alzheimer’s disease has gone from non-existence to a disease that affects 12 million people yearly and kills 200,000 people .


Dr Murray Waldman is the coroner of Toronto . He is a professor of Toronto University and medical director of a large rehabilitation hospital . His book Dying for a Hamburger has taken the medical world by storm.


He contends that Alzheimer’s is caused by a protein called a prion. The same prion that causes Mad cow Disease, (bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE), variant Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (vCJD), and other neurodegenerative diseases called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs ).

Prions are misshapen proteins normally found in the nervous systems of animals. When prions come into contact with normal proteins, they cause these proteins to become misshapen, too. As the chain reaction continues, more and more proteins become misshapen and begin to impair normal neurological functions. In all prion diseases the brain is clogged by dense deposits and dementia is the m aj or symptom. The disease shows up only in later age. It is irreversible. All these factors are true of Alzheimer’s.


Waldman correlates the growth of the industrial meat industry( where cows are fed meat and chickens fed other chicken) and meat eating directly to the increase in Alzheimer’s. WHO’s figures correlate with Waldman’s theory. After researching the spread of Alzheimer’s disease , Waldman concludes that Alzheimer’s disease behaves like an infectious disease, not something congenital. He has linked the spread of the disease to industrialized nations that eat factory-farmed animal meats, saying that ,just like mad cow disease, Alzheimer’s disease is the result of the modern factory farm and increased meat consumption in the last century. Till a few years ago scientists denied that mad cow disease could be transmitted to humans through beef. Now hundreds of people who ate infected beef have died of Creutzfeldt- Jakob disease (CJD), with perhaps lakhs more at risk. Could the same scenario hold true for Alzheimer's disease?

Waldman shows that Alzheimer’s disease first showed up in medical records at about the same time that world meat consumption began to rise and makes a direct correlation between the levels of meat consumption and the number of Alzheimer’s disease afflicted across the world. In countries, where meat consumption is lower, Alzheimer’s disease are much lower than developed countries, where meat consumption is high.


The Alzheimer’s Society is the world’s premier body on this disease. Their head of Research, Dr Sorensen, refuses the prion theory( which is weird because the Nobel Prize winner Prof Stanley Prusiner who discovered prions agrees with Waldman )Instead, he says that the factors that cause heart disease are the same that apply to Alzheimer’s.


This still makes meat the culprit. Saturated fat and cholesterol have been conclusively linked to heart disease and strokes. So have high levels of a substance called homocysteine and high blood pressure – all created by animal products.

Cholesterol is a waxy solid substance. High levels are found in meat,dairy,eggs, fish. Too much cholesterol damages the blood vessels as it deposits in the arteries . The only time vegetable fats carry cholesterol is when they have been altered by industry to be hydrogenated (hardened for shelf life) High cholesterol doubles the risk of Alzheimers unless you already have the Alzheimer’s gener ApoE in which case it goes up sixteen times. ( Only 50% of people with the ApoE gene actually develop the disease – those who eat a high-fat diet during their 40s ). 70% of people in the West , according to WHO have high cholesterol

In a 21-year study, investigators examined the association of cholesterol with brain plaques and tangles in people who had died of Alzheimer’s. They found a strong correlation between increased cholesterol levels and increases in the number of plaques and tangles in the brain , the two characteristics of Alzheimer’s disease..

Not only does meat and dairy consumption raise cholesterol, it raises the levels of an amino acid called homocysteine, which is now widely seen as a risk marker for heart disease.The American Heart Association has shown a clear association between homocysteine levels ,heart attack and stroke – and Alzheimer’s.

Boston University investigators have found that elevated levels of Homocysteine increases the risk of Alzheimer’s three fold. Homocysteine is formed in the human liver after ingesting another amino acid, methionine, found in animal food . High homocysteine levels make nerve cells weak and prone to premature death. Like cholesterol it causes deposits in the arteries and 100gms of chicken have more than 12 times of what your body needs. In Alzheimer's patients much higher levels of homocysteine were found than in elderly individuals with no cognitive impairment. In fact , now tests on levels of homocysteine are useful in *predicting* who might get Alzheimer's.

The only things that brings down cholesterol and homocysteine levels are vegetables, green leaves and citrus. People who adopt a diet free of meat, eggs, and dairy products can drop their homocysteine levels by 20% in one week. This is because folic acid, a B vitamin found in whole grains, green vegetables, beans, and other plant-based foods, helps convert homocysteine to another, more useful amino acid.

In a study, reported at the World Alzheimer's Congress in 2000, researchers looked at 5,395 elder individuals who were free from dementia in 1993 and again in 1999 ."People who remained free from dementia had consumed higher amounts of beta-carotene, vitamin C, vitamin E and vegetables than the people in the study who developed Alzheimer’s disease."



The same findings have been reported at Case Western University School of Medicine and University Hospitals of Cleveland , Ohio , and St. George's Medical School in London . Scientists at The Oxford Project to Investigate Memory and Ageing have brought out an ideal menu: it is entirely vegetarian with no milk products . WHO recommends stopping animal based food as exchanging red meat for white, full cream for skimmed, butter with margerine – reduces less than 5% cholesterol

Why do our doctors not look at prevention – simple, there is no money in that. Medicine, pharmaceuticals and hospitals are huge business. Why do medical colleges not teach nutrition anywhere in the world ? If prevention became the norm who would need doctors ?


Maneka Gandhi



And while no mention is made of the indelible mark on the American/western diet
made by the fast-food giants McDonalds, Burger King and Wendy's and their contribution to this terrible picture, please consider if those burgers and nuggets are really worth it and especially when you take into account the major contribution made by cattle raised for food, to the destruction of rainforests, to soil degradation, pollution of rivers and streams and of course, as a major cause of global warming. Also, our kids are being raised on these very unhealthy diets and so the picture for the future is certainly bleak if major changes in diet are not made.

============ ========= ========= ========= ========Special Report: Can you Alzheimer's- proof your brain============ ========= ========= ========= ======== The answer is a resounding YES... you can. So no, it is NOT our fate to go senile when we enter ourgolden years, even if it "runs in our family." Thankgoodness, because it's not a pretty picture. If you knowsomeone who has lost touch, you know how they becomepathetic shells of their former selves. But it doesn't have to happen to you. ============ ========= ========= ========Alzheimer's / Dementia is Rare In India============ ========= ========= ======== You see, dementia and Alzheimer's in India is very rare. Here are the remarkable statistics: In India , fewer than 1 in 100 people over the age of 65have any form of dementia or Alzheimer's. Less than 1 percent. In the U.S. , it's 1 in 8. 13 percent! More than 13 times higher in the U.S. than in India ! It gets worse: According the Alzheimer's Association, by age 85, over 47% of Australians have Alzheimers. You are shocked, "Can't be true!" But it is. Plus, Alzheimer's Disease International says that 24million people worldwide have Alzheimer's, and over 5million of them are in the U.S. The U.S. has over 21% of allAlzheimer's sufferers even though they only have 5% of theworld's population. Fair to say that our lifestyles are killing us. Consultation with some of the foremost anti-agingdoctors confirmed that dementia in any formis rare in India . Why? India is still mostly vegetarian - Draw your own conclusions





--

Philip Wollen OAM

The Winsome Constance Kindness Trust

Australia

Venture Capital for Good Causes

http://www.kindnesstrust.com

Telephone (613) 98221662

God Does Not Eat Meat-A Must to Read!

By Arthur Poletti
From All-Creatures
Book Archive
God Does Not Eat Meat
Table of Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Chapter One: A Life of Kindness, Dreams of Cruelty
Chapter Two: How Kindness to Animals Has Changed the World
Chapter Three: How Bad Things Used to Be
Chapter Four: More Benefits from Protecting Animals
Chapter Five: More Fertile Land, More Prosperous Farmers
Chapter Six: Great Companions, Wonderful Helpers
Chapter Seven: Before We Knew We Really Cared
Chapter Eight: Stop Hunting - Start Protecting
Chapter Nine: Choose Kindness and Life, Renounce Cruelty and Death
Chapter Ten: There Are No Slaughterhouses in Heaven
Epilogue
Commentary On Vegetarianism
Click here for more information and to read the book
http://www.all-creatures.org/book/gdnem.html

INVASION OF THE MOVEMENT SNATCHERS-ARCHIVE

This essay originally appeared in the October, 2006 issue of Satya Magazine, titled Milking Us Gently? Continuing the Debate on Humane Meat.Click here to read the magazine's editorial.Printable version of this essay (including editorial) here.
Invasion of the Movement Snatchers A Social Justice Cause Falls Prey to the Doctrine of "Necessary Evil"
By James LaVeck
You never know when a PR agency is being effective; you'll just find your views slowly shifting.—PR Executive
Few of us realize that some U.S. industries pay hundreds of millions of dollars to public relations firms charged with the removal of any and all obstacles to their acquisition of profit. High on the list of those obstacles are grassroots social justice movements.
In a 2002 article on their Center for Media and Democracy website, authors and social activists John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton described the activities of MBD, one such PR firm involved in the dismantlement of citizen movements concerned about problems ranging from acid rain, dioxin, biotechnology and toxic wastes, to apartheid, nuclear energy, endangered species and oil spills.
"Their favorite method," wrote Stauber and Rampton, "is a ‘divide and conquer' strategy heavily dependent on co-optation: First identify the ‘radicals' who are unwilling to compromise and who are demanding fundamental changes to redress the problem at hand. Then, identify the ‘realists'—typically, organizations with significant budgets and staffs working in the same relative area of public concern as the radicals. Then, approach these realists, often through a friendly third party, start a dialogue and eventually cut a deal, a ‘win-win' solution that marginalizes and excludes the radicals and their demands.
"Next, go with the realists to the ‘idealists' who have learned about the problem through the work of the radicals. Convince the idealists that a ‘win-win' solution endorsed by the realists is best for the community as a whole. Once this has been accomplished, the ‘radicals' can be shut out as extremists, the PR fix is in, and the deal can be touted in the media to make the corporation and its ‘moderate' nonprofit partners look heroic for solving the problem. Result: industry may have to make some small or temporary concessions, but the fundamental concerns raised by the ‘radicals' are swept aside." [Emphasis added.]
Full essay:http://www.tribeofheart.org/tohhtml/essay_ims.htm

How PETA is damaging to the animal rights cause -Archive

Please note: the general arguments against new welfarist tactics among the following apply to all new welfarist groups of course, however the focus of this post is on PETA, due to several recent comments brought up by PETA supporters in the blog comments as well as elsewhere.
PETA is not an animal rights organization, yet they have managed to use their large influence to create and foster a false impression of themselves with the public as "the" animal rights group. This is extremely harmful to the cause of animal rights since they engage in campaigns, and have organizational policies, that are incompatible with animal rights. So, not only are they engaging in campaigns that are inconsistent with animal rights, but they are promoting these campaigns as what animal rights is all about. No wonder much of the public, and some activists as well, do not know the difference between animal welfare reform and animal rights and that the two are fundamentally incompatible. At this point in time, this confusion about what animal rights means is one of the most important hurdles we must overcome on the road to the eventual end of animal exploitation - we must explicitly make the distinction between welfare and rights and explicitly show that it is the property status of animals that is the root of all atrocities committed against them. In short, we must first get people used to hearing a true animal rights position that explains the property paradigm while denouncing suffering and cruelty, instead of only focusing on cruel treatment, and that points out how the fundamental differences between our position and one that accepts animal use under certain circumstances guides our efforts away from welfare reform. PETA and other new welfarist groups actually perpetuate the confusion and misrepresent the concept of animal rights, and are thus not only doing nothing to overcome this important hurdle, but they are continually raising the hurdle.
As far as just a few specific examples from among many of PETA's problematic campaigns and policies:
-they do not advocate right-to-life for nonhumans (search this page for "we do not advocate 'right to life' for animals"), and accordingly, they kill healthy nonhuman animals, and are opposed to no-kill shelters as well as to trap-neuter- return, taking the position that the better way to help feral cats is to kill them (also summarized in same link as above).
Formerly a last-chance shelter rescue and a feral cat respectively, PETA would have killed S.P. and Oliver
-they give awards to slaughterhouse designers and vendors of "humanely raised" animal products, and promote non-vegan fast food products such as the Burger King veggie burger.
-they employ sexist ad campaigns that objectify women. Their reasoning seems to be that "sex sells", but how does portraying scantily clad women (and men, sometimes), who unfailingly fit the traditional- western-beauty- ideal and are presented as cheap entertainment, actually encourage anyone to reflect seriously on a social justice issue? One social justice issue (animal rights) cannot be furthered at the expense of another (feminism), as all forms of oppression are related. Their supporters may balk at accusations of sexism, with the excuse that the women have willingly participated in the campaigns. They may participate willingly, but in a society built on patriarchy that is so ingrained that many people cannot recognize it and some even think sexism has been resolved and is no longer a problem, this does not mean that the campaigns are not sexist. One discussion of PETA's commodification of women can be read here.
-They use non-vegan celebrity spokespeople in many campaigns - this encourages mixed messages that it is enough to be against fur even though you wear leather, or to be against meat even though you eat dairy. This only reinforces the impression that veganism is "extreme", and it furthers the compartmentalizatio n of animal issues when what should be done Is to make the needed links between all exploitation of sentient beings even while focusing on one aspect or another of animal exploitation.
What about the "good" things that Peta does, in getting some people to go veg? Even if we disagree with welfarism and some of their other tactics, should we support at least that part of the organization? No, we should not. For example, I am sure that any given medical charity does some good things, but as vegans we do not support them if they fund any animal experiments at all, because to support them would be to give approbation to their policies and to encourage all aspects of their organization, some of which we are vehemently opposed to. Similarly we should not support PETA if we do not approve of their policies and tactics. People such as Gary Francione have already urged them at length to change their problematic positions, and they have completely refused.
For every one person who goes vegan because of them, how many do they alienate to the idea of animal rights (that is mistakenly associated with them), because of their sexism, because of their attention-seeking stunts that trivialize the issue? How many do they influence to instead embrace "humanely raised" animal products or to feel better about eating at fast-food places such as Burger King that have made some small change in husbandry standards which then gets promoted as a victory for animals, the new welfarist groups becoming nothing more than part of the animal exploiting industries' marketing team when they praise companies' new "humane standards" - and how many, of even those that are influenced to go vegan by PETA, continue indefinitely to believe that welfare reform tactics further the goal of animal rights rather than undermine it? The fact that some people do become vegan through them does not mean we must retain some sort of loyalty to them once we understand that their policies and campaigns are inconsistent with animal rights. They may get some people to go vegan, but if any of these people do undergo the full paradigm shift towards abolition that is needed for eventual social change, it is not because of PETA’s influence on them.
We don't need these groups and their campaigns; there is more than enough work to do without using new welfarist tactics, more than enough to do that is consistent with animal rights and does not force us to compromise our position by trying to work with exploiters or new welfarist groups. We don't need their resources such as pamphlets and posters to further our own vegan education campaigns; we can use those of the abolitionist sanctuary Peaceful Prairie or simply make our own for the time being. The abolitionist movement is in its infancy, and as it grows a greater variety of resources that promote a message consistent with abolitionism will become available for those who cannot create their own. In the meantime we do not need to compromise ourselves by distributing new welfarist groups' materials, for to do so is to imply approval of the policies of the group whose name appears.
Rejecting new welfarism is not a question of whether or not to speak out against animal exploiting companies perpetrating horrible abuses of animals such as those seen in undercover slaughterhouse videos, the implication of this claim being that if we do not participate in welfare reform campaigns then we do not care about these abuses or that we somehow want to allow them to continue. We can still speak out against cruelty and continue to expose the conditions of the animals' suffering, but in a way that recognizes that the underlying problem that allows this cruelty to occur is the property status of animals which permits their exploitation as resources. We still speak out against the cruelty, but not in a way that makes us compromise with the exploiters, that compels us to thank them when they make some small reform we have asked them for, that forces us to implicitly accept the legitimacy of animal exploitation by using the system of welfare reform, an institutionalized system that is based upon animals’ property status and the legitimacy of animal exploitation.
We cannot be effective in denouncing the property status of animals when we are working within this system. The system has a built in limit: it necessarily assumes, as its fundamental basis, the legitimacy of the property status of animals, and so there is no way to transcend that limit from within it. Welfare campaigns may seem on the surface to be all about reducing the suffering of the individuals being exploited, but they are in fact nothing more than a property rights issue. Animals are currently the legal property of their exploiters, and welfare reformists are trying to tell those exploiters how to use their property. The exploiters will fight the reforms, even the ones presented to them as economically advantageous, as no one likes to be told how to use their own property. To engage in these property rights campaigns with exploiters and legislators is to implicitly accept that it is a property rights issue, and using this institutionalized system of welfare reform only serves to further legitimize the system and thus reinforce the property status of animals. If we want rights for animals we must completely reject these counterproductive tactics and the groups like PETA who employ them and perpetuate the confusion about what "animal rights" means, essentially marginalizing animal rights and veganism all the while reinforcing the status of animals that allows them to be exploited in the first place.
Credit:The Starting Point,Le Point De Depart.

http://www.animalemancipation.com/2007/04/how-peta-is-damaging-to-animal-rights.html


"Let no animal die that I may live!"

A tale of two religions

The religious view of animals of the judeo.christian, islamic tradition, that their lives are worth less than human life is at the root of all the abuse, callous indifference and lack of integrity even by the animal protection community that we are confronted with daily.

"Nothing has changed!" And nothing will change until the issue of religious complicity in animal abuse is openly, directly, acknowledged and confronted.

A tale of two religions:

Religions influence their followers with epic myths and stories - These two tales help explain why one tradition today embraces compassion for ALL beings, while the other is stoll willing to sacrice animals to benefit humans.

The following is a lovely story of compassion for the lives of ALL beings as shown by Yudhishthira a hero in the Mahabharata epic of the Hindu religion. It contrasts sharply with the story of Abraham, of the judeo.christian tradition, who was willing to kill another living being for his own benefit:

"Questioning Abraham's Choice
At this point, let me commit the blasphemy of questioning the propriety of Abraham's actions. I hope rational minds will not condemn me for doing so. If the relevant section of the Bible (Genesis 22:01-22:13, reproduced below) is read carefully then one sees nowhere that God asked Abraham to sacrifice a ram instead. He just relieves Abraham of his command to sacrifice his child (Genesis 22:12). It is Abraham's own choice to go ahead and kill the ram (Genesis 22:13). Why was that justified? It is not that some sacrifice or the other had to be performed. Was it right of Abraham then to unnecessarily take the ram's life?

One is reminded of the story of Yudhishthira and the dog, in Yudhishthira' s last days, in the epic Mahabharata. The Pandavas renounce their kingdom and the worldly life to spend the twilight of their lives roaming around in the forest. Sahadeva, Nakula, Arjuna, and finally Bheema fall dead one by one. A dog joins Yudhishthira to keep him company in his wanderings. At the gates of heaven, Yudhishthira is asked to enter but without the dog, who is not allowed inside. Yudhishthira refuses the offer to enter alone, his conscience not allowing him to accept the prize of heaven at the cost of abandoning his faithful companion. Seeing his fidelity even to such a mute and non-human companion, and his sacrifice in refusing what a lifetime of walking the right path had earned him, God is pleased and reveals the true identity of the dog -- it is none other than Dharma, come to subject Yudhishthira to his final test of character. Yudhishthira is allowed inside.
How devoutly it is to be wished that Abraham would have replied similarly.

I do not think that the all-merciful and just God would have found his refusal objectionable at all. Millions of innocent animals the world over would have been spared the slaying at the hands of man; children would have been more sensitized to the sanctity of life; and less blood would have been split in the name of religion.

For my own part, I must say that if anyone were to ask me to sacrifice another's life to prove my dedication to God, I would refuse. I would commit the sin of not proving my dedication to God sooner than committing the sin of taking away another's life and thus showing total disrespect to the giver of life Himself. My children's lives may be more dear to me than my own, but they are not mine to take away. I should give up my life to protect theirs, not take theirs away to demonstrate my devotion to anybody, even God. There I differ with Abraham in the choice he made five thousand years ago -- I would consider it a transgression of my privileges if I were to agree to offer my son's life. However, Abraham's choice was different and presumably dictated by his times." It was written by Dr Ranjit Konkar -- Winter 1997 -of Beauty Without Cruelty India"

Until we acknowledge the destruction heaped on animals by religious teachings which devalue their lives, all the screaming, ranting and protesting will make no difference. We may save one or two animals along the way, but in the long run, NOTHING WILL CHANGE.
Ruth

CASEIN AND CHEESE MORE ADDICTIVE THAN CHOCOLATE?

ARCHIVES
A couple days ago I joked that I was detoxing from dairy and that I needed a 12-step program because I find it so hard to give up cheese. Amazingly, little did I know that cheese has actually been proven to be addictive. This explains why so many people like me find it incredibly difficult to give up cheese. It has been harder for me to give up dairy than cigarettes. I am not joking about that. Perhaps the more shocking thing is that the Dairy Industry has deliberately fed on cheese's addictive quality, with all of us being completely duped. I feel sickened by the following article. I feel cheated, fooled, angry, repulsed, and depressed that people can be so evil. If you can honestly read the last paragraph of this article and not be furious, you are a better person than I am.

So here is an excerpt from an article in the Orlando Sentinel July 13 2003:

Of all the potentially addicting foods, cheese may be the most complex. In research studies using vegan and vegetarian diets to control cholesterol or reduce body weight, most participants soon forget the lure of ice cream, sour cream, and even burgers and chicken. But for many people, the taste for cheese lingers on and on. Yes, 70 percent of its calories may come from waist-augmenting fat, and, ounce for ounce, it may harbor more cholesterol than a steak. But that cheese habit is tough to break.
Why is cheese so addicting? Certainly not because of its aroma, which is perilously close to old socks. The first hint of a biochemical explanation came in 1981, when scientists at Wellcome Research Laboratories in Research Triangle Park, N.C., found a substance in dairy products that looked remarkably like morphine. After a complex series of tests, they determined that, surprisingly enough, it actually was morphine. By a fluke of nature, the enzymes that produce opiates are not confined to poppies -- they also hide inside cows' livers. So traces of morphine can pass into the animal's bloodstream and end up in milk and milk products. The amounts are far too small to explain cheese's appeal. But nonetheless, the discovery led scientists on their search for opiate compounds in dairy products.

And they found them. Opiates hide inside casein, the main dairy protein. As casein molecules are digested, they break apart to release tiny opiate molecules, called casomorphins. One of these compounds has about one-tenth the opiate strength of morphine. The especially addicting power of cheese may be due to the fact that the process of cheese-making removes water,lactose and whey proteins so that casein is concentrated. Scientists are now trying to tease out whether these opiate molecules work strictly within the digestive tract or whether they pass into the bloodstream and reach the brain directly.

(some paragraphs about chocolate addiction snipped)

The cheese industry is miles ahead of them, having gone to great lengths to identify people who are most vulnerable to addiction. It dubs them "cheese cravers," and tracks their age, educational level and other demographics so as to target them with marketing strategies that are tough to ignore. With a $200 million annual research and marketing budget, the dairy industry is not content to have you just sprinkling a little mozzarella on your salad. It is looking for those Americans who will eat it straight out of the package, whatever the cost to their waistlines or cholesterol levels.

At a "Cheese Forum" held Dec. 5, 2000, Dick Cooper, the vice president of Cheese Marketing for Dairy Management Inc., laid out the industry's scheme for identifying potential addicts and keeping them hooked. In his slide presentation, which was released to our organization under the Freedom of Information Act, he asked the question, "What do we want our marketing program to do?" and then gave the answer: "Trigger the cheese craving." He described how, in a partnership with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the dairy industry launched Wendy's Cheddar Lover's Bacon Cheeseburger, which single-handedly pushed 2.25 million pounds of cheese during the promotion period. That works out to 380 tons of fat and 1.2 tons of pure cholesterol in the cheese alone. A similar promotion with Pizza Hut launched the "Ultimate Cheese Pizza," which added an entire pound of cheese to a single pizza and sold five million pounds of it during a six-week promotion in 2000. The presentation concluded with a cartoon of a playground slide with a large spider web woven to trap children as they reached the bottom. The caption had one spider saying to another, "If we pull this off, we'll eat like kings."

DO VACCINES HELP?-ARCHIVE

London Times
Edition 1 MON 11 MAY 1987

Smallpox vaccine 'triggered Aids virus'
http://www.wanttoknow.info/870511vaccineaids

BY PEARCE WRIGHT, SCIENCE EDITOR

The Aids epidemic may have been triggered by the mass vaccination
campaign which eradicated smallpox. The World Health Organization,
which masterminded the 13-year campaign, is studying new scientific
evidence suggesting that immunization with the smallpox vaccine
Vaccinia awakened the unsuspected, dormant human immuno defence virus
infection (HIV).

Some experts fear that in obliterating one disease, another disease
was transformed from a minor endemic illness of the Third World into
the current pandemic. While doctors now accept that Vaccinia can
activate other viruses, they are divided about whether it was the main
catalyst to the Aids epidemic.

But an adviser to WHO who disclosed the problem, told The Times: 'I
thought it was just a coincidence until we studied the latest findings
about the reactions which can be caused by Vaccinia. Now I believe the
smallpox vaccine theory is the explanation to the explosion of Aids.'
'In obliterating one disease, another was transformed.'

Further evidence comes from the Walter Reed Army Medical Centre in
Washington. While smallpox vaccine is no longer kept for public health
purposes, new recruits to the American armed services are immunized as
a precaution against possible biological warfare. Routine vaccination
of a 19-year-old recruit was the trigger for stimulation of dormant
HIV virus into Aids.

This discovery of how people with subclinical HIV infection are at
risk of rapid development of Aids as a vaccine-induced disease was
made by a medical team working with Dr Robert Redfield at Walter Reed.
The recruit who developed Aids after vaccination had been healthy
throughout high school. He was given multiple immunizations, followed
by his first smallpox vaccination.

Two and a half weeks later he developed fever, headaches, neck
stiffness and night sweats. Three weeks later he was admitted to
Walter Reed suffering from meningitis and rapidly developed further
symptoms of Aids and died after responding for a short time to
treatment. There was no evidence that the recruit had been involved in
any homosexual activity.

In describing their discovery in a paper published in the New England
Journal of Medicine a fortnight ago, the Walter Reed team gave a
warning against a plan to use modified versions of the smallpox
vaccine to combat other diseases in developing countries.

Other doctors who accept the connection between the anti-smallpox
campaign and the Aids epidemic now see answers to questions which had
baffled them. How, for instance, the Aids organism, previously
regarded by scientists as 'weak, slow and vulnerable,' began to behave
like a type capable of creating a plague.

Many experts are reluctant to support the theory publicly because they
believe it would be interpreted unfairly as criticism of WHO. In
addition, they are concerned about the impact on other public health
campaigns with vaccines, such as against diptheria and the continued
use of Vaccinia in potential Aids research.

The coincidence between the anti-smallpox campaign and the rise of
Aids was discussed privately last year by experts at WHO. The
possibility was dismissed on grounds of unsatisfactory evidence.
Advisors to the organization believed then that too much attention was
being focussed on Aids by the media.

It is now felt that doubts would have risen sooner if public health
authorities in Africa had more willingly reported infection statistics
to WHO. Instead, some African countries continued to ignore the
existence of Aids even after US doctors alerted the world when the
infection spread to the United States.

However, as epidemiologists gleaned more information about Aids from
reluctant Central African countries, clues began to emerge from the
new findings when examined against the wealth of detail known about
smallpox as recorded in the Final Report of the Global Commission for
the Certification of Smallpox Eradication.

The smallpox vaccine theory would account for the position of each of
the seven Central African states which top the league table of most-
affected countries; why Brazil became the most afflicted Latin
American country; and how Haiti became the route for the spread of
Aids to the US. It also provides an explanation of how the infection
was spread more evenly between males and females in Africa than in the
West and why there is less sign of infection among five to 11-year-
olds in Central Africa.

Although no detailed figures are available, WHO information indicated
that the Aids league table of Central Africa matches the concentration
of vaccinations. The greatest spread of HIV infection coincides with
the most intense immunization programmes, with the number of people
immunised being as follows: Zaire 36,878,000; Zambia 19,060,000;
Tanzania 14,972,000; Uganda 11,616,000; Malawai 8,118,000; Ruanda
3,382,000 and Burundi 3,274,000.

Brazil, the only South American country covered in the eradication
campaign, has the highest incidence of Aids in that region. About
14,000 Haitians, on United Nations secondment to Central Africa, were
covered in the campaign. They began to return home at a time when
Haiti had become a popular playground for San Francisco homosexuals.

Dr Robert Gello, who first identified the Aids virus in the US, told
The Times: 'The link between the WHO programme and the epidemic in
Africa is an interesting and important hypothesis. 'I cannot say that
it actually happened, but I have been saying for some years that the
use of live vaccines such as that used for smallpox can activate a
dormant infection such as HIV. 'No blame can be attached to WHO, but
if the hypothesis is correct it is a tragic situation and a warning
that we cannot ignore.'

Aids was first officially reported from San Francisco in 1981 and it
was about two years later before Central African states were
implicated. It is now known that these states had become a reservoir
of Aids as long ago as the later 1970s.

Although detailed figures of Aids cases in Africa are difficult to
collect, the more than two million carriers, and 50,000 deaths,
estimated by the World Health Organization are concentrated in the
Countries where the smallpox immunization programme was most
intensive. The 13-year eradication campaign ended in 1980, with the
saving of two million lives a year and 15 million infections. The
global saving from eradication has been put at dollars 1,000 million a
year.

Charity and health workers are convinced that millions of new Aids
cases are about to hit southern Africa. After a meeting of 50 experts
near Geneva this month it was revealed that up to 75 million, one
third of the population, could have the disease within the next five
years.

Some organizations which have closely studied Africa, such as War on
Want, believe that South Africa's black population, so far largely
protected from the disease, could be most affected as migrant workers
bring it into the country from the worst hit areas further north. The
apartheid policy, they predict, will intensify its outbreak by
confining the groups into comparatively small, highly populated towns
where it will be almost impossible to contain its spread.

******************************************



III Gerald Ford
Quote:
In February 1976, an outbreak of swine flu struck Fort Dix Army base
in New Jersey, killing a 19-year-old private and infecting hundreds of
soldiers. Concerned that the U.S. was on the verge of a devastating
epidemic, President Gerald Ford ordered a nationwide vaccination
program at a cost of $135 million (some $500 million in today's
money). Within weeks, reports surfaced of people developing Guillain-
Barré syndrome, a paralyzing nerve disease that can be caused by the
vaccine. By April, more than 30 people had died of the condition.
Facing protests, federal officials abruptly cancelled the program on
Dec. 16. The epidemic failed to materialize.
Poster's note: Gerald Ford for other actions was made a billionaire by
a grateful Wall St.

IV West Nile Virus: Mad Bird Disease by Another Name

There have been countless suppressions of
information by the US government's CDC, FDA, USDA,
NIH, etc. one remembers the socalled West Nile Virus.

There was concern about the many carnivorous birds
dropping dead in the national parks and elsewhere.

These birds had eaten park dumpster food such
as factory farmed chicken's legs and breasts, from
birds fed on chicken food (feed is a human chauvinist
word for food given to animals) containing cattle and
pig parts.

The owls were dying of avian spongiform encephalopathy
.. or mad bird disease.

The US government agencies called this West Nile virus
and tried to vaccine scam the public.

http://www.madcowboy.com
http://www.rense.com/health/madcowdata.html
dozens of Mad Cow story links
http://www.rense.com/general6/cow.htm
products which can contain BSE

V Individual Vaccine Stories: A Sliver of the Endless Stream
http://thinktwice.com/allvacs.htm

VI A
The CDC, WHO, Anthony Fauci of NIH, Janet Napolitano, Roche, Gilead
and Glaxo, with help
from NPR, CNN, and other Zionist run media
are promoting a fraud on the world public known as H1N1.

VI B
Now Glaxo Smith Kline and Bill Gates are working
on African vaccinations while Gates has met with
other billionaires about population control.

Glaxo has been held guilty of vaccine deaths by a French
court. It is a primate torturer as is Duke which Gates has
also funded. Whether or not this Glaxo Gates project
is bioterror, it is human chauvinism.

http://www.thinktwice.com/s_polio.htm

**************************
portland.indymedia.org

1918 flu pandemic originated in pigs, study finds

Vivisectors Admit that Flu Epidemic in WW1 was caused by pig flesh

WASHINGTON (AP) - The 1918 influenza virus that killed more than 20
million people worldwide originated from American pigs and is unlike
any other known flu bug, say researchers. They warn that it could
strike again.

Using lung tissue taken at autopsy 79 years ago from an Army private
killed by the flu, scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of
Pathology made a genetic analysis of the virus and concluded it is
unique, though closely related to the ''swine'' flu.

''This is the first time that anyone has gotten a look at this virus
which killed millions of people in one year, making it the worst
infectious disease episode ever,'' said Dr. Jeffery K. Taubenberger,
leader of the Armed Forces Institute team. ''It does not match any
virus that has been found since.''

Although the disease that caused the worldwide epidemic was called
''Spanish flu,'' the virus apparently is a mutation that evolved in
American pigs and was spread around the globe by U.S. troops mobilized
for World War I, said Taubenberger.

The Army private whose tissue was analyzed contracted the flu at Fort
Jackson, S.C. For that reason, Taubenberger and his colleagues suggest
in the journal Science that the virus be known as Influenza A/South
Carolina.

Science is publishing the study today.

Army doctors in 1918 conducted autopsies on some of the 43,000
servicemen killed by the flu and preserved some specimens in
formaldehyde and wax.

Taubenberger said his team sorted through 30 specimens before finding
enough virus in the private's lung tissue to partially sequence the
genes for hemagglutinin and neuraminidase, two key proteins in flu
virus.

''The hemagglutinin gene matches closest to swine influenza viruses,
showing that this virus came into humans from pigs,'' said
Taubenberger.

The finding supports a widespread theory that flu viruses from swine
are the most virulent for humans.

Most experts believe that flu viruses reside harmlessly in birds,
where
they are genetically stable. Occasionally, a virus from birds will
infect pigs. The swine immune system attacks the virus, forcing it to
change genetically to survive. The result is a new virus. When this
new
bug is spread to humans, it can be devastating, said Taubenberger.

Two other flu viruses spread all over the world since 1918 - Asian flu
in 1957 and the Hong Kong flu in 1968 - and both mutated in pigs.
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Flu Epidemic in WW1 was caused by pigs

1918 flu pandemic originated in pigs, study finds

Vivisectors Admit that Flu Epidemic in WW1 was caused by pig flesh

The flesh of murdered pigs is forbidden to observers of Islam, of
Judaism,
of Hinduism, Buddhism, to Sikhs, to Christians following the example
of
Christ.

Pigs eat the waste of other animals when nothing else is available.

Pigs are a cause of trichinosis. Their cadaver flesh must be cooked
at high temperatures to kill the trichinella worm.

Pig flesh is correlated to heart disease, stroke, cancer, kidney
disease,
arthritis, etc.

Smithfield is perhaps the biggest of the many American factory
farmers of pigs.

The concentration of pig waste from factory farms in NC, NJ, MD, VA
has caused what was called in the bible a 'red tide', otherwise known
as pfiesteria. Nature creates special organisms to process the
concentrations of feces.

http://www.hogwatch.org

Meanwhile John Oxford of St Mary's College, London, and Richard Harris
of NPR, the CBC, BBC, American neocon owned media and pharmaceutically
dominated newspapers continue to promote Roche's toxic tamiflu, in
which Donald
Rumsfeld is illegally and heavily invested.

homepage: http://www.pcrm.org

(Whether or not another institute, USAMRIID
at Ft Detrick, used Inuit autopsies from WW1
flu deaths to develop bioterror weapons
is not known. It is known that swine flu samples
are missing from Ft Detrick, according
to the Frederick Maryland local newspaper.)

******************************

http://www.recombinomics.com
Commentary


**********************************
http://www.thinktwice.com
Vaccines: Are They Really Safe and Effective?

1. Monkey kidneys are used to develop polio vaccines.
2. SV-40, a cancer-causing virus, thrived in monkey kidneys.
3. Polio vaccines were contaminated.
4. Millions of people in the USA and throughout the world were
infected.
5. Cancer rates have increased. SV-40 is found in brain tumors, bone
cancers, lung cancers, and leukemia.

Polio information


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Polio Vaccine Has Been Linked to Cancer:

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virus 40 in ependymomas and choroid plexus tumors of childhood." New
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of the National Cancer Institute, 1995, 87(17):1331.
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Human Choroid Plexus and Ependymoma Tumors." Virology, 1995, 212(2):
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Viruses, BK and SV-40, and Nonrandom Chromosome Changes in Two
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Oncogene, 1996, 13(3):527-35.
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Like Sequences in Human Mesotheliomas." Important Advances in
Oncology, 1996, pp. 89-108.
Rock, Andrea. "The Lethal Dangers of the Billion Dollar Vaccine
Business," Money, (December 1996), p. 161. [Article]
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harbored virus now feared to cause cancer in humans." San Francisco
Chronicle (July 15, 2001), p. 7. [Article: Research by Susan Fisher,
epidemiologist, Loyola University Medical Center.]
Bookchin, D. and Schumacher J. "Tainted polio vaccine still carries
its threat 40 years later." The Boston Globe (January 26, 1997).
[Article]
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after inoculation with killed-poliovirus vaccine of mothers offspring
with neurological tumors." New England Journal of Medicine, 1988;
318:1469.
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inoculation of mothers with killed poliovirus vaccine." New England
Journal of Medicine, 1988, 319:1226.
Martini, F., et al. "SV-40 Early Region and Large T Antigen in Human
Brain Tumors, Peripheral Blood Cells, and Sperm Fluids from Healthy
Individuals." Cancer Research, 1996, 56(20):4820-4825.
The Polio Vaccine and AIDS:

Essex, M., et al. "The origin of the AIDS virus." Scientific American,
1988; 259:64-71.
Karpas, A. "Origin and Spread of AIDS." Nature, 1990; 348:578.
Kyle, Walter S. "Simian retroviruses, poliovaccine, and origin of
AIDS." Lancet, 1992; 339:600-601.
Elswood, B.F. and Stricker, R.B. "Polio vaccines and the origin of
AIDS." Medical Hypothesis, vol. 42, 1994, pp. 347-354.
Myers, G., et al. "The emergence of simian/human immunodeficiency
viruses." AIDS Res Human Retro 1992: 8:373-86.
Workshop on Simian Virus-40 (SV-40): A Possible Human Polyomavirus.
(National Vaccine Information Center, January 27-28, 1997.)
http://www.909shot.com/polio197.htm (Includes a summary of evidence
presented at the Eighth Annual Houston Conference on AIDS.)
Martin, Brian. "Polio vaccines and the origin of AIDS: The career of a
threatening idea." Townsend Letter for Doctors (January 1994), pp.
97-100.
Curtis, Tom. "Did a polio vaccine experiment unleash AIDS in Africa?"
The Washington Post (April 5, 1992), pp. C3+.
World Health Organization. "T-lymphotropic retroviruses of nonhuman
primates." WHO informal meeting. Weekly Epidemiology Records, 1985;
30:269-70.
Huet, T., et al. "Genetic organization of a chimpanzee lentivirus
related to HIV-1." Nature 1990; 345:356-359.
Desrosiers, R.C. "HIV-1 origins: A finger on the missing link." Nature
1990; 345:288-89.
Sabin, A.B. "Properties and behavior of orally administered attenuated
poliovirus vaccine." Journal of the American Medical Association 1957;
164: 1216-23.
Plotkin, S.A., Koprowski, H., et al. "Clinical trials in infants of
orally administered poliomyelitis viruses." Pediatrics 1959;
23:1041-62.
Barin, F., et al. "Serological evidence for virus related to simian T-
lymphotropic retrovirus III in residents of West Africa." Lancet 1985;
ii:1387-1389.
Hirsch, V.M., et al. "Simian immunodeficiency virus infection of
macaques: End-stage disease is characterized by widespread
distribution of proviral DNA in tissues." Journal of Infectious
Disease 1991; 163:976-988.
Bohannon, R.C., et al. "Isolation of a Type D retrovirus from B-cell
lymphomas of a patient with AIDS." Journal of Virology 1991; 65(11):
5663-72.
Khabbaz, R.F., et al. "Simian immunodeficiency virus needlestick
accident in a laboratory worker." Lancet 1992; 340:271-73.
Gao, F., et al. "Human infection by genetically diverse SIVsm-related
HIV-2 in West Africa." Nature 1992; 358:495-99.
Giunta S., et al. "The primate trade and the origin of AIDS viruses."
Nature 1987; 329:22.
Seale, J. "Crossing the species barrier?viruses and the origins of
AIDS in perspective." J R Soc Med 1989; 82:519-23.
Lecatsas G. "Origin of AIDS." Nature 1991; 351:179.
Koprowski, H. "Historical aspects of the development of live virus
vaccine in poliomyelitis." British Medical Journal 1960; ii:85-91.
Lebrun, A., et al. "Vaccination with the CHAT strain of Type 1
attenuated poliomyelitis virus in Leopoldville, Belgian Congo."
Bulletin of the World Health Organization 1960; 22:203-213.
Sabin, A.B. "Present position of immunization against poliomyelitis
with live virus vaccines." British Medical Journal 1959; i:663-680.
Mahmias, A.J., et al. "Evidence for human infection with an HTLV III/
LAV-like virus in Central Africa, 1959." Lancet 1986; i:1279-80.
Huminer, D., et al. "AIDS in the pre-AIDS era." Rev Infect Dis 1987;
9:1102-08.
Corbitt, G., et al. "HIV infection in Manchester, 1959." Lancet 1990;
ii:51.
Cohen, J. "Debate on AIDS origin: Rolling Stone weighs in --
Controversial article angers vaccine experts by claiming AIDS could
have been spread by polio vaccines in Africa." Science (March 1992),
p. 1505. [Article]
Sonnet, J., et al. "Early AIDS cases originating from Zaire and
Burtundi (1962-1976)." Scandinavian Journal of Infectious Disease
1987; 19:511-17.
The Polio Vaccine is Mutating, Causing Virulent Strains

Crainic, R., et al. "Polio virus with natural recombinant genomes
isolated from vaccine associated paralytic poliomyelitis." Virology
1993; 196:199-208.
Yoshida, H., et al. Lancet (October 28, 2000).
Reuters Health. "Polio outbreak in Dominican Republic and Haiti Caused
by vaccine-derived virus." Reuters Medical News (December 4, 2000).
http://www.id.medscape.com/reuters/p...04epid001.html

************************************
Killer Drug Companies..
http://pittsburgh.indymedia.org


International pharmaceutical companies like Glaxo, Roche, Bayer,
Pfizer, Merck, Lilly have killed billions of animals to attempt to
legitimize their products which poison human beings. These companies
have overthrown governments and caused wars, and in the cases in which
their products are beneficial and not toxic, have killed as well by
their pricegouging prices

International pharmaceutical companies like Glaxo, Roche, Bayer,
Pfizer, Merck, Lilly have killed billions of animals to attempt to
legitimize their products which poison human beings. These companies
have overthrown governments and caused wars, and in the cases in which
their products are beneficial and not toxic, have killed as well by
their pricegouging prices

(Bayer of Germany, Roche of Switzerland, Glaxo of the UK,
join Pfizer, Lilly, Merck, etc. in the US)

'Smallpox Vaccine' .. the cause of AIDS by Pearce Wright,
science editor of London Times
http://www.wanttoknow.info/870511vaccineaids

French court rules Glaxo vaccine causes multiple sclerosis
pittsburgh.indymedia.org/news/2007/05/27422.php

War profiteer Glaxo 'vaccines' sickened and killed soldiers

Pfizer's killing of 200 African children used as guinea pigs
causes lawsuit by Nigeria
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6907799.stm
(Google's link fraudulently claimed the lawsuit had been delayed)

Roche's Lariam a factor in marines killing their wives
http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/ar...hp/t-8852.html

Roche to whose Tamiflu Rumsfeld has American distribution
rights has been trying to push their ineffective Tamiflu
as a cause of the nonexistent W Nile Virus which is
in reality sometimes Mad Chicken Disease, sometimes
histoplasmosis or any of thousands of other diseases
caused by the overcrowding, urine, f*c*s, nicotinic insecticides,
antibiotics of factory farms

Merck developed WMD's allegedly destroyed at Ft Meade in 2003
groups.google.com/group/ahims...f22b0e337171b3

Merck's Gardasil allegedly an ovarian cancer vaccine attributed to 3
deaths
http://www.theconservativevoice.com/article/25338.html

Brain atrophy, homicide, suicide, weight gain, birth defects
associated with Paxil, Prozac, Zoloft and other antidepressants
http://www.vagusnervestimulation.com...eight_gain.cfm

World's bees killed by Bayer
dc.indymedia.org/newswire/dis...8555/index.php

Gulf War Syndrome
all-natural.com/riley.html

http://www.emorylies.com
http://www.stopanimaltests.com
http://www.neavs.org

Autism comes from mercury laced childhood vaccinations

Tardifdyskinesia or rigidity and shaking.. come from drugs
forced on patients

Thalidomide.. which did not harm dogs.. took off the limbs of
human babies.. it was banned after a series of 1959 birth defects..
but now the pharmaceuticals are trying to get it back

Ritalin.. forced on 3 year olds!

This is an infinite subject.

Hans Ruesch wrote Slaughter of the Innocents about pharmaceutical
sacrifice of animals to attempt to legitimize their killing of humans.
There are thousands of books about the barbaric tortures of
vivisection.

Pfizer incinerates a truckload of research animals daily in
Connecticut.. and has finally shut down their Kalamazoo lab in
which a dog died in a washing machine

Drug companies lobby through cat vivisector exSenator Frist to
have immunity from liability lawsuits

Drug companies spend a billion a year lobbying
and have Medicare drug payments not subject to negotiation

http://www.wanttoknow.info/870511vaccineaids
*****************************
Nigeria files new Pfizer claims re deaths of Nigerian children.


Nigeria has accused Pfizer of fraud in a fresh court case filed
against the drugs firm over its alleged role in the deaths of Nigerian
children.
The government earlier withdrew the case - just as it was due to begin
in the capital Abuja - to add new charges.

The government is seeking $7bn (£3.4bn) in damages from the US group.

It claims Pfizer conducted illegal trials of an anti-meningitis drug
that killed and disabled children. Pfizer denies the allegations.

Pfizer has denied all wrongdoing and maintains that it had local and
international approval for the drug trial, which it says helped to
save lives.

But government lawyers have now filed a new lawsuit adding a number of
additional charges to the original claims, which follows the recent
discovery of new evidence.

This includes papers that suggest Pfizer committed fraud by not
obtaining consent from the affected families as they were obliged to
do under company rules, government lowers said.

They said the original suit made reference to a softer charge of
"fraudulent representation".

Drug tests

The move came almost a month after the court rejected the government's
request to amend its suit.

The Nigerian government has accused Pfizer of carrying out illegal
trials of its Trovan antibiotic in 1996, which they say caused many
deaths and severe mental and physical disabilities in many of the
people it was given to.

It maintains its regulatory authorities had not approved the then-
unregistered drug, which was tested in Nigeria's north-western Kano
State at the height of a meningitis outbreak.

The Kano regional government is also mounting both civil and criminal
cases against Pfizer, which has undertaken a major public relations
offensive in the country to explain its position.

Story from BBC NEWS:
news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/h...ss/6907799.stm

2007/07/20 15:12:41 GMT

**************************************

*****************************
"British Firm to Compensate Two French Multiple Sclerosis Victims"
Agence France Presse (http://www.afp.com) (05/03/01)

A French court has upheld a lower court ruling that found a link
between GlaxoSmithKline's hepatitis B vaccine and multiple sclerosis
(MS) and has ordered the company to pay two women who contracted MS
after receiving the vaccine an as-yet undetermined amount of
compensation. The ruling is important, because it rejected arguments
that a direct and irrefutable link between the vaccine and MS is
needed, said Gisele Mor, the plaintiffs' attorney. "It ruled that
barring scientific evidence, serious, precise, and similar evidence
was enough proof," Mor noted.

**
Glaxo H5N1 flu vaccine:
a. like fans at David Bowie concerts
who show up in last year's costume
are vaccine makers.. always obsolete
for the rapidly mutating flu virus
b. there are billions of varieties of flu
... Glaxo vaccines are an obsolete
response to only 1 of them
c. Vaccines are contaminated by
excess heat and cold.. there are
many steps in the transportation process
.. they are also contaminated by
human handling
******************************
Roche, a profiteer re the 'swine flu' scam with its
lethal Tamiflu, has a drug called Lariam
under which influence 4 Marines have killed their wives

By Mark Benjamin and Dan Olmsted
Published 7/10/2003 4:09 PM

WASHINGTON, July 10 (UPI) -- The Food and Drug Administration has
taken the rare step of ordering that patients are warned directly of
serious mental problems and reports of suicide linked to a common anti-
malaria drug called Lariam.

The move -- which the FDA has ordered only 17 times previously --
follows a decade of increasingly dire warnings about the drug, and a
trail of horror stories from people who said they have suffered from
side effects from the drug.

Lariam hit the news last summer after three Fort Bragg, N.C., soldiers
accused of killing their wives after returning from Afghanistan
appeared to have taken the drug. Two of the three shot themselves
after killing their wives; the third hanged himself in his jail cell
in March. A U.S. Army report said the drug was an "unlikely" factor
for the cluster of deaths but did not rule it out in any one case.

The FDA on Wednesday required by law that all doctors hand patients a
"medication guide" with the new Lariam warnings. It is the 18th time
the FDA has made the aggressive move.

The new warnings say the drug has been associated with "serious
psychiatric adverse events" that "may persist even after stopping the
medication." It also notes "rare reports have claimed that Lariam
users think about killing themselves" and "rarer reports of suicides."

The FDA says the guides are used for drugs "that pose a serious and
significant public health concern."

"The Lariam Medication Guide is an important new tool for managing the
risks of Lariam, one of the most highly effective means of combating
one of the deadliest diseases in the world," FDA Commissioner Mark B.
McClellan said.

Lariam's manufacturer, Roche Pharmaceuticals of Nutley, N.J., is also
sending letters to U.S. doctors and pharmacists about the new guide.

Critics said the FDA move is late. "This is probably long overdue,"
said Larry Sasich, of Public Citizen, a government and business
watchdog group. "This information should have been in people's hands
years ago."

The FDA also requires that doctors hand out a medication guide warning
of possible suicide risk for another Roche drug, Accutane, which is
used to treat serious cases of acne.

With Lariam, Roche in May 2002 settled a lawsuit brought by an Ohio
woman who claimed her husband had committed suicide after taking the
drug. The terms were not disclosed.

For more than a decade, Peace Corps volunteers and U.S. travelers
given Lariam have complained of frightening episodes of
hallucinations, delusions and suicidal thoughts. Starting in Somalia
in the early 1990s, soldiers from a series of deployments have told
similar stories about the drug, saying it has also caused sudden,
uncontrollable rage and homicidal urges.

Roche has placed increasingly serious warnings on the Lariam's product
label, read by doctors and pharmacists, since the FDA approved it in
1989. It added in 1999 that, "Suicidal ideation has also rarely been
reported, but no relationship to drug administration has been
established."

Last July, the FDA updated Lariam's official product label warning of
"anxiety, paranoia and depression" and "hallucinations and psychotic
behavior" that "have been reported to continue long after (Lariam) has
been stopped." It also said that, "Rare cases of suicidal ideation
(thinking) and suicide have been reported though no relationship to
drug administration has been confirmed."

Roche last September sent a letter to 120,000 doctors about those
label changes.

Following the string of events at Fort Bragg last summer, the drug
company told United Press International that malaria is a dangerous
disease and that, "It is important to note that Lariam is not
associated with violent, criminal conduct."

The FDA told UPI last September that suicide might have to be
tolerated because malaria is such a deadly disease. "Suicide in one in
perhaps -- I don't know -- 1 million or however many cases you can
actually calculate for Lariam may have to be acceptable on the basis
for the risk for malaria," said Dr. Leonard Sacks, a medical officer
with the FDA.

2001-2003 United Press International

http://www.sftt.org/cgi-bin/csNews/c....1190554520971

Related

* http://www.wanttoknow.info/870511vaccineaids



1933 Human Flu in Korean Swine Raise Bioterror Issues

Recombinomics Commentary
February 24, 2005

>> In December, the biologist Henry Niman of Recombinomics, a biotechnology company in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, examined the data as part of an analysis of flu sequences. He concluded that the samples contained genes from a strain of human flu virus that was created decades ago by scientists experimenting with the virus that caused the global flu pandemic of 1918.

Neither the World Health Organization (WHO), which coordinates the
international response to flu, nor the South Korean government have
commented on the claim. But Laurie Garrett, a former journalist and
analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, says that the
WHO attributes the sequence to an error at the lab that deposited the
information.

Sang Heui Seo, one of the Korean researchers, says he is unable to
comment yet, adding that "further confirmation" of the sequence "is
under way at this moment". <<

As indicated earlier, the lab error story has some significant flaws.
The explanation of computer files sent in error is not credible
because there are over 30 WSN/33 sequences involved. Virtually all are
slightly different from each other as well as WSN/33, although all
share greater than 99% homology. The contamination is hard to
understand because each of the 30 sequences is slightly different,
there is no WSN/33 in the lab, and the viruses were isolated in eggs.

As noted above, the sequences are being independently confirmed.
Confirmation will eliminate the lab error story. However, the route of
the sequences from lab to swine remains open, as does the possibility
of bioterrorism. The inability to resolve the existence of the
sequence after being in the public domain for almost 3 months also
raises serious bioterrorism preparedness issues.



Buried WMDs Found ... In Maryland

FORT DETRICK, May 28, 2003 AP
and the U. S. Army Research Institute
of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick. (AP)
"You never know what's there until you start digging."
Col. John Ball,
Fort Detrick garrison commander,
to The Post

(CBS) U.S. weapons experts are struggling to deal with the remnants of
a decades-old biological weapons program.

They are trying to find potentially dangerous materials - once
shrouded in secrecy - with only poorly kept records and fading
memories to go on.

Thousands of tons of hazardous substances like anthrax are at stake.

Only the hunt is not in Iraq.

It's in Maryland.

According to The Washington Post, the U.S. Army has spent two years
and $25 million cleaning up an area of central Maryland's Fort Detrick
that was used as a target range and waste dump.

In what has become the Army's biggest remediation project ever, the
cleanup of Area B has unearthed vials of live bacteria and nonvirulent
anthrax. Some 2,000 tons have been scooped out of the ground to date,
in a project due to end in 2003.

"You never know what's there until you start digging," Col. John Ball,
Fort Detrick garrison commander, told The Post.

The site is so toxic that clean-up crews wear respirators and the
materials sometimes burst into flames as they are dug up. Animals from
the surrounding forest are autopsied when they die to see what killed
them. At one point, digging released a petroleum that sent workers to
the hospital.

The very small amount of anthrax that was found was in vaccine form
and could not have spread the disease. But cleanup crews have also
unearthed old lab rats, syringes, and drums and canisters with
unidentified contents.

"The documentation for where this came from doesn't exist," Lt. Col.
Donald Archibald, Fort Detrick's director of safety, environment and
integrated planning, told The Post.

The dump was used from 1955 into the 1960s. The cleanup began ten
years after tests of monitoring wells near the dump showed dangerous
chemicals. Subsequent testing indicated that wells used by houses near
the site were contaminated.

The United States' biological weapons program ran from 1941, when it
was headed by pharmaceutical magnate George Merck, until President
Nixon ended the research in 1969.

During the intervening 28 years, the U.S. conducted research and
testing on a wide variety of agents at several facilities across the
country, as well as in cities where civilians were unwitting guinea
pigs in tests using harmless bacteria to trace weapons' potential.

According to a history of the program provided by the Henry L. Stimson
Center, research at facilities like Fort Detrick and Pine Bluff, in
Arkansas, included development of 500-pound bombs for anthrax and
botulinum toxin, as well work on strains of tularemia, staph and
encephalitis.

In 1950, open-air tests with apparently harmless agents were conducted
on Navy ships off Norfolk, Va., and over the San Francisco Bay. In
1965, the Army used nonhazardous Bacillus globigii to test the way
germs might spread through Washington DC's National Airport and
Greyhound bus terminal.

In 1969, when Mr. Nixon announced he was halting U.S. research on germ
warfare, national security adviser Henry Kissinger said it was
because, "We have simply not concluded that this is an effective or
proper instrument of warfare."

©MMIII, CBS
http://www.wanttoknow.info/870511vaccineaids