by F. William Engdahl
April 29, 2009
from
GlobalResearch Website
F. William Engdahl is
author of Seeds of Destruction: The Hidden Agenda of
Genetic Manipulation (Global Rersearch, 2007, see below)
and A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and
the New World Order (Pluto Press).
His new book, Full
Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New
World Order (Third Millennium Press) is due out end of
May.
He may be contacted
through his website: www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net. |
Part 1
If we are to believe what our trusted international media report,
the world is on the brink of a global pandemic outbreak of a new
deadly strain of flu, H1N1 as it has been labeled, or more
popularly, Swine Flu.
As the story goes, the outbreak of the
deadly flu was first discovered in Mexico. According to press
reports, after several days, headlines reported as many as perhaps
150 deaths in Mexico were believed caused by this virulent
people-killing pig virus that has spread to humans and now is
allegedly being further spread from human to human. Cases were being
reported hourly from Canada to Spain and beyond.
The only thing wrong with this story is
that it is largely based on lies, hype and cover-up of possible real
causes of Mexican deaths.
One website, revealingly named Swine Flu Vaccine, reports the
alarming news,
‘One out of every five residents of
Mexico's most populous city wore masks to protect themselves
against the virus as Mexico City seems to be the epicenter of
the outbreak. As many as 103 deaths have been attributed to the
swine flu so far with many more feared to be on the horizon. The
health department of Mexico said an additional 1,614 reported
cases have been documented.’
We are told that the H1N1 ‘shares
genetic material from human, avian and swine influenza viruses.’1
Airports around the world have installed
passenger temperature scans to identify anyone with above normal
body temperature as possible suspect for swine flu. Travel to Mexico
has collapsed. Sales of flu drugs, above all Tamiflu from Roche
Inc., have exploded in days. People have stopped buying pork fearing
certain death.
The
World Health Organization has
declared,
‘a public health emergency of
international concern,’ defined by them as ‘an occurrence or
imminent threat of illness or health conditions caused by
bioterrorism, epidemic or pandemic disease, or highly fatal
infectious agents or toxins that pose serious risk to a
significant number of people.’2
What are the symptoms of this purported
Swine Flu?
That’s not at all clear according to
virologists and public health experts. They say Swine Flu
symptoms are relatively general and nonspecific.
‘So many different things can cause
these symptoms. it is a dilemma,’ says one doctor interviewed by
CNN. ‘There is not a perfect test right now to let a doctor know
that a person has the Swine Flu.’
It has been noted that most individuals
with Swine Flu had an early onset of fever. Also it was
common to see dizziness, body aches and vomiting in addition to the
common sneezing, headache and other cold symptoms. These are
symptoms so general as to say nothing.
The US Government’s
Center for Disease Control (CDC)
in Atlanta states on its official website,
‘Swine Influenza (swine flu) is a
respiratory disease of pigs caused by type A influenza viruses
that causes regular outbreaks in pigs. People do not normally
get swine flu, but human infections can and do happen. Swine flu
viruses have been reported to spread from person-to-person, but
in the past, this transmission was limited and not sustained
beyond three people.’
Nonetheless they add,
‘CDC has determined that this swine
influenza A (H1N1) virus is contagious and is spreading from
human to human. However, at this time, it is not known how
easily the virus spreads between people.’3
How many media that have grabbed on the
headline ‘suspected case of Swine Flu’ in recent days bother to
double check with the local health authorities to ask some basic
questions?
For example,
-
the number of confirmed cases of
H1N1 and their location?
-
the number of deaths confirmed
to have resulted from H1N1?
-
dates of both?
-
number of suspected cases and of
suspected deaths related to the Swine Flu disease?
Some known facts
According to
Biosurveillance, itself part of
Veratect, a US Pentagon and
Government-linked epidemic reporting center, on April 6, 2009 local
health officials declared a health alert due to a respiratory
disease outbreak in La Gloria, Perote Municipality, Veracruz State,
Mexico.
They reported,
‘Sources characterized the event as
a ‘strange’ outbreak of acute respiratory infection, which led
to bronchial pneumonia in some pediatric cases. According to a
local resident, symptoms included fever, severe cough, and large
amounts of phlegm.
Health officials recorded 400 cases
that sought medical treatment in the last week in La Gloria,
which has a population of 3,000; officials indicated that 60% of
the town’s population (approximately 1,800 cases) has been
affected. No precise timeframe was provided, but sources
reported that a local official had been seeking health
assistance for the town since February.’
What they later say is ‘strange’ is not
the form of the illness but the time of year as most flu cases occur
in Mexico in the period October to February.
The report went on to note,
‘Residents claimed that three
pediatric cases, all under two years of age, died from the
outbreak. However, health officials stated that there was no
direct link between the pediatric deaths and the outbreak; they
stated the three fatal cases were "isolated" and "not related"
to each other.’
Then, most revealingly, the aspect of
the story which has been largely ignored by major media, they
reported,
‘Residents believed the outbreak had
been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in
the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas
Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which
in turn led to the disease outbreak.
According to residents, the company
denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases
to "flu." However, a municipal health official stated that
preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was
a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak
was linked to the pig farms.’4
Since the dawn of American
‘agribusiness,’ a project initiated with funding by
the Rockefeller Foundation in the
1950s to turn farming into a pure profit maximization business, US
pig or hog production has been transformed into a highly efficient,
mass production industrialized enterprise from birth to slaughter.
Pigs are caged in what are called
Factory Farms, industrial
concentrations which are run with the efficiency of a Dachau or
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. They are all conceived by
artificial insemination and once born, are regularly injected with
antibiotics, not because of illnesses which abound in the
hyper-crowded growing pens, but in order to make them grow and add
weight faster. Turn around time to slaughter is a profit factor of
highest priority.
The entire operation is vertically
integrated from conception to slaughter to transport distribution to
supermarket.
Granjas Carroll de Mexico (GCM) happens to be such a
Factory Farm concentration facility for hogs. In 2008 they produced
almost one million factory hogs, 950,000 according to their own
statistics.
GCM is a joint venture operation owned
50% by the world’s largest pig producing industrial company,
Smithfield Foods of Virginia.5
The pigs are grown in a tiny rural area
of Mexico, a member of the North American Free Trade Agreement,
and primarily trucked across the border to supermarkets in the USA,
under the Smithfields’ family of labels. Most American consumers
have no idea where the meat was raised.
Now the story becomes interesting.
Manure Lagoons and other playing fields
The Times of London interviewed the mother of 4-year-old
Edgar Hernandez of La Gloria in Veracruz, the location of the
giant Smithfield Foods hog production facility.
Their local reporter notes,
‘Edgar Hernández plays among the
dogs and goats that roam through the streets, seemingly unaware
that the swine flu he contracted a few weeks ago -
the first known case - has almost brought his
country to a standstill and put the rest of the world on alert.
‘I feel great,’ the five-year-old boy said. ‘But I had a
headache and a sore throat and a fever for a while. I had to lay
down in bed.’'
The reporters add,
‘It was confirmed on Monday (April
27 2009-w.e.) that Edgar was the first known sufferer of swine
flu, a revelation that has put La Gloria and its surrounding
factory pig farms and ‘manure lagoons’ at the centre of a global
race to find how this new and deadly strain of swine flu
emerged.’ 6
That’s quite interesting.
They speak of ‘La Gloria and its
surrounding factory pig farms and manure lagoons.’ Presumably the
manure lagoons around the La Gloria factory pig farm of Smithfield
Foods are the waste dumping place for the feces and urine waste from
at least 950,000 pigs a year that pass through the facility. The
Smithfield’s Mexico joint venture, Norson, states that alone they
slaughter 2,300 pigs daily. That’s a lot. It gives an idea of the
volumes of pig waste involved in the concentration facility at La
Gloria.
Significantly, according to the Times reporters,
‘residents of La Gloria have been
complaining since March that the odor from Granjas Carroll’s pig
waste was causing severe respiratory infections. They held a
demonstration this month at which they carried signs of pigs
crossed with an X and marked with the word peligro
(danger).’7
There have been calls to exhume the
bodies of the children who died of pneumonia so that they could be
tested.
The state legislature of Veracruz has
demanded that Smithfield’s Granjas Carroll release documents about
its waste-handling practices. Smithfield Foods reportedly declined
to comment on the request, saying that it would ‘not respond to
rumors.’8
A research compilation by Ed Harris reported,
‘According to residents, the company
denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases
to ‘flu.’ However, a municipal health official stated that
preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was
a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak
was linked to the pig farms.’9
That would imply that the entire Swine
Flu scare might have originated from the PR spin doctors of the
world’s largest industrial pig factory farm operation, Smithfield
Foods.
The Vera Cruz-based newspaper La Marcha blames Smithfield’s
Granjas Carroll for the outbreak, highlighting inadequate treatment
of massive quantities of animal waste from hog production.10
Understandably the company is perhaps more than a bit uncomfortable
with the sudden attention. The company, which supplies the
McDonald’s and Subway fast-food chains, was fined $12.3 million in
the United States 1997 for violating the Clean Water Act.
Perhaps they are in a remote tiny
Mexican rural area enjoying a relatively lax regulatory climate
where they need not worry about being cited for violations of any
Clean Water Act.
Pig Factory Farm
Industrial Production
is a classic breeder
of disease and toxins but little attention is being paid to this
source
Factory Farms as toxic concentrations
At the very least the driving force for giant industrial
agribusiness outsourcing of facilities to third world sites such as
Veracruz, Mexico has more to do with further cost reduction and lack
of health and safety scrutiny than it does with improving the health
and safety quality of the food end product.
It has been widely documented and
subject of US Congressional reports that large-scale indoor animal
production facilities such as that of Granjas Carroll are notorious
breeding grounds for toxic pathogens.
A recent report by the US Pew Foundation in cooperation with
the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health notes,
‘the method of producing food
animals in the United States has changed from the extensive
system of small and medium-sized farms owned by a single family
to a system of large, intensive operations where the animals are
housed in large numbers in enclosed structures that resemble
industrial buildings more than they do a traditional barn.
That change has happened primarily
out of view of consumers but has come at a cost to the
environment and a negative impact on public health, rural
communities, and the health and well-being of the animals
themselves.' 11
The Pew study notes,
‘The diversified, independent,
family-owned farms of 40 years ago that produced a variety of
crops and a few animals are disappearing as an economic entity,
replaced by much larger, and often highly leveraged, farm
factories. The animals that many of these farms produce are
owned by the meat packing companies from the time they are born
or hatched right through their arrival at the processing plant
and from there to market.’ 12
The study emphasizes that application
of,
‘untreated animal waste on cropland
can contribute to excessive nutrient loading, contaminate
surface waters, and stimulate bacteria and algal growth and
subsequent reductions in dissolved oxygen concentrations in
surface waters.’13
That is where the real investigation
ought to begin, with the health and sanitary dangers of the
industrial factory pig farms like the one at Perote in Veracruz.
The media spread of panic-mongering
reports of every person in the world who happens to contract
‘symptoms’ which vaguely resemble flu or even Swine Flu and the
statements to date of authorities such as WHO or CDC are far from
conducive to a rational scientific investigation...
Tamiflu and Rummy
In October 2005 the Pentagon
ordered vaccination of all US military personnel worldwide against
what it called Avian Flu, H5N1.
Scare stories filled world media. Then,
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announced he had budgeted
more than $1 billion to stockpile the drug
Oseltamivir, sold under the name
Tamiflu. President Bush called on Congress to appropriate
another $2 billion for Tamiflu stocks.
What Rumsfeld neglected to report at the time was a colossal
conflict of interest. Prior to coming to Washington in January 2001,
Rumsfeld had been chairman of a California pharmaceutical company,
Gilead Sciences. Gilead Sciences
held exclusive world patent rights to Tamiflu, a drug it had
developed and whose world marketing rights were sold to the Swiss
pharma giant, Roche.
Rumsfeld was reportedly the largest
stock holder in Gilead which got 10% of every Tamiflu dose
Roche sold. 14 When it leaked out, the Pentagon issued a
curt statement to the effect that Secretary Rumsfeld had decided not
to sell but to retain his stock in Gilead, claiming that to sell
would have indicated 'something to hide.’
That agonizing decision won him reported
added millions as the Gilead share price soared more than 700% in
weeks.
Tamiflu is no mild candy to be taken lightly. It has heavy
side effects. It contains matter that could have potentially deadly
consequences for a person’s breathing and often reportedly leads to
nausea, dizziness and other flu-like symptoms.
Since the outbreak of Swine Flu Panic (not Swine Flu but Swine Flu
Panic) sales of Tamiflu, as well as any and every possible drug
marketed as flu-related, have exploded.
Wall Street firms have rushed to issue
‘buy’ recommendations for the company.
‘Gimme a shot Doc, I don’t care what
it is…I don’t want to die…’
Panic and fear of death was used by
the Bush Administration skillfully to promote the Avian Flu fraud.
With ominous echoes of the current Swine Flu scare, Avian Flu was
traced back to huge chicken factory farms in Thailand and other
parts of Asia whose products were shipped across the world.
Instead of a serious investigation into
the sanitary conditions of those chicken factory farms, the
Bush Administration and WHO blamed
‘free-roaming chickens’ on small family farms, a move that had
devastating economic consequences to the farmers whose chickens were
being raised in the most sanitary natural conditions.
Tyson Foods of Arkansas and CG Group of
Thailand reportedly smiled all the way to the bank.
Now it remains to be seen if the
Obama Administration will use the
scare around so-called Swine Flu to repeat the same scenario,
this time with ‘flying pigs’ instead of flying birds.
Already Mexican authorities have
reported that the number of deaths confirmed from so-called Swine
Flu is 7, not the 150 or more bandied in the media,
and that most other suspected cases were ordinary flu or influenza.
Notes
1 Health Advisory, accessed in
http://www.swine-flu-vaccine.info/.
2 Ibid.
3 Centers for Disease Control, Swine Influenza and You, accessed
in http://www.cdc.gov/swineflu/swineflu_you.htm.
4 Biosurveillance, Swine Flu in Mexico- Timeline of Events,
April 24, 2009, accessed in http://biosurveillance.typepad.com/biosurveillance/2009/04/swine-flu-in-mexico-timeline-of-events.html.
5 Smithfield Foods website, accessed in http://www.smithfieldfoods.com/our_company/our_family/Norson.aspx.
6 Ruth Maclean in La Gloria and Chris Ayres in Mexico City, I
had a headache and fever’ says boy who survived, London Times,
April 28, 2009.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
9 Ed Harris, Bloggers Examine Environmental Role in Mexico Swine
Flu Outbreak, April 27, 2009, accessed in
http://www.planetthoughts.org/?pg=pt/Whole&qid=2870.
10 Ibid.
11 The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production,
Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in
America, accessed in http://www.ncifap.org/_images/PCIFAPFin.pdf.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 F. William Engdahl, Is Avian Flu another Pentagon Hoax?,
GlobalResearch, October 30, 2005.
Part 2
WHO takes a page from a Michael
Crichton Novel
As the great American poet Yogi
Berra might have put it, ‘this just gets absurder and absurder.’
The international agencies
supposedly responsible for monitoring worldwide dangers of new
pandemic threats, the WHO and CDC are acting like the directors
of a Hollywood ‘B’ grade sci-fi movie or the author of a copycat
version of Michael Crichton’s Andromeda Strain novel.
The global panic over outbreak of a
new human-to-human Swine Flu pandemic is increasingly revealed
as a likely operation in mass psychological terror whose only
beneficiaries are the few global pharmaceutical giants that are
in the business of peddling so-called ‘antiviral’ drugs
The losers are the rest of us normal
folks.
The releases of the WHO in Geneva and
the US Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the central
coordinating agencies in this production, are worth careful study.
On April 30 the CDC issued a detailed report with the alarming
title, Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a
School - New York City.
The report described in detail a school
in New York City where,
‘As of April 28, approximately half
(45) of all U.S. cases of S-OIV infection had been confirmed
among students and staff members.’
The CDC called these cases all,
‘genetically similar to viruses
subsequently isolated from patients in Mexico.’1
We are not told in scientific terms what
‘genetically similar to’ means, but it sure sounds ominous.
At that point, the CDC claimed 109 victims of confirmed Swine Flu in
the United States. Forty five of the 109 came from this New York
School. The TV news channels were flooded with panic messages of the
uncontrolled spread of Swine Flu.
On April 29, the next day, the WHO Director-General, Dr Margaret
Chan, upgraded their Swine Flu Pandemic alert status from a
Phase 4 event to Phase 5, a step below full global Pandemic Alert.
According to WHO, Phase 5 indicates that there is evidence of the
virus being spread from human-to-human in at least two countries in
one WHO region. Phase 6, the pandemic phase, is characterized by
increased and sustained transmission in the general population.
In her announcement of the upgrade, Dr
Chan made an unfortunate panic-making added comment that was
predictably grabbed onto by CNN and the world media:
‘After all it really is all of
humanity that is under threat during a pandemic.’2
Note the WHO Director-General had not
declared a Pandemic Phase 6 alert, but in a speech in Geneva
in an apparent side comment, merely made the self-evident
observation that ‘during a pandemic all humanity is under
threat.’
A press release by the Atlanta-based CDC stated,
‘On May 3, CDC is scheduled to
complete deployment of 25 percent of the supplies in the
Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) to all states in the
continental United States. These supplies and medicines will
help states and US territories respond to the outbreak. In
addition, the Federal Government and manufacturers have begun
the process of developing a vaccine against the novel H1N1 flu
virus.’3
The pandemic response apparatus was
going into high gear.
The 45 New York City school children the CDC solemnly reported were
‘confirmed cases of swine-origin influenza A (H1N1) virus (S-OIV)
infection,’ ninety-five percent of whom reported to the health
authorities symptoms that included,
‘fever plus cough and/or sore
throat, meeting the CDC definition for influenza-like illness
(ILI).’
OK. Better to be cautious when dealing
with a new form of Andromeda Strain. But cough? Sore throat?
Fever? Aren’t these pretty vague ordinary symptoms? Not for CDC
apparently.
The 45 kids were immediately added to
the growing ‘confirmed cases’ statistics, fuelling emergency
responses, statements by the President of the United States,
economic catastrophe to the fragile Mexican economy as tourism dried
up overnight, and worldwide fears of a new Black Death or at
least a new version of the 1918 Spanish Flu plague.
The CDC hastened to add the note,
‘symptoms in these patients appear
to be similar to those of seasonal influenza.’
For those bothering to read through
three detailed pages of the CDC New York report, they found near the
end that,
‘on April 27, 37 patients (84%)
reported that their symptoms were stable or improving, three
(7%) reported worsening symptoms (two of whom later reported
improvement), and four (9%) reported complete resolution of
symptoms. Only one reported having been hospitalized for syncope
and released after overnight observation.’
The CDC adds,
‘To date, this school-based outbreak
is the largest cluster of S-OIV cases reported in the United
States.’ 4
In addition to the 109 ‘confirmed cases’
reported in the United States, including one death of a Mexican boy
in Texas, the CDC reported as of April 29,
‘a total of 57 confirmed cases had
been reported, including seven deaths (in Mexico). By country,
the following numbers of cases had been reported: Mexico (26);
Canada (13); United Kingdom (five); Spain (four); Germany and
New Zealand (three each); Israel (two); and Austria (one).’
5
Is this another case of ‘Chicken Little’
crying the sky is falling?
A revealing name change
Now, not only are the alleged
victims in New York of the worst plague since the Black Death
showing signs of remarkable recovery after only days, but the WHO
also announces a name change in the middle of the worldwide events.
By May 1 the WHO, the CDC and the
National Institutes of Health in Maryland all announced the name
Swine Flu was no longer appropriate, that, despite the fact that
according to Dr. Raul Rabadan, a professor of computational
biology at Columbia University, six of the eight genetic segments
are purely swine flu and the other two segments are bird and human,
but have lived in swine for the past decade.6
We instead are told to call it Influenza A (H1N1). That’s a
catchy name.
The name change came following a heavy lobbying campaign by the US
pig industry to drop the Swine Flu label as it was apparently
cutting into pork sales. The largest US and world pig producer,
Smithfield Foods of Virginia, was most certainly among those
lobbying CDC and the WHO for the name change. They won their wish.
But name change or not, the swine
production process of Smithfield Foods and other industrialized
Factory Farms or as they are technically known, CAFOs -
Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation - bears closer scrutiny.
As I detailed in Part I above, the Mexican Swine Flu deaths
and illness first were recorded in La Gloria, Perote Municipality,
Veracruz State, Mexico, where local residents had for weeks prior to
the official announcement been protesting the dangers of the huge
Smithfield Foods pig CAFO in the village. Children and adults alike
were reported having a rash of symptoms in the vicinity of the vast
pig waste linked to the site. Smithfield Foods is the world’s
largest industrialized pig meat producer.
It also has one of the most egregious
health and safety records.
Pig feces and other niceties
Feces is the Latin
term for what most of the world terms shit, the waste product
of human or animal digestion.
Pigs are world champion waste producers.
An average pig produces some three times in weight the amount of
fecal matter that an adult person does.
As GRAIN, an agricultural organization
reports,
‘the rise of large-scale factory
farms in North America has created the perfect breeding grounds
for the emergence and spread of new highly-virulent strains of
influenza.’ 7
The pig fecal waste product is at the
center of the problem, something the CDC name change conveniently
tends to obscure.
As the GRAIN study notes, because concentrated animal feeding
operations tend to concentrate large numbers of animals close
together, they are ideal breeding grounds for toxins and virulent
pathogens.
In 2003 Science magazine warned
that swine flu was,
‘on a new evolutionary ‘fast track’
due to the increasing size of factory farms and the widespread
use of vaccines in these operations.’8
It’s the same story with bird flu, where
huge industrial CAFO Factory Farms with tens of thousands of
chickens breed toxic waste galore.
Smithfield Foods, the world’s biggest hog butcher and CAFO owner has
an impressive track record of violations of health and safety
including water safety laws. In the USA, the world’s largest pig
CAFO is in Tar Heel, North Carolina. According to local reports the
town could easily be renamed Pig Waste, N.C. given the scale of
fecal waste and combined matter Smithfield Foods’ Tar Heel CAFO
emits locally.
As Jeff Tietz, in an analysis of the pig waste problem
calculated,
‘the best estimates put Smithfield's
total waste discharge at 26 million tons a year. That would fill
four Yankee Stadiums. Even when divided among the many small pig
production units that surround the company's slaughterhouses,
that is not a containable amount.’9
Tietz adds,
‘So prodigious is its fecal waste,
however, that if the company treated its effluvia as big-city
governments do - even if it came marginally close to that
standard - it would lose money. So many of its contractors allow
great volumes of waste to run out of their slope-floored barns
and sit blithely in the open, untreated, where the elements
break it down and gravity pulls it into groundwater and river
systems.
Although the company proclaims a
culture of environmental responsibility, ostentatious pollution
is a linchpin of Smithfield's business model.’10
The problem, he and other critics of
CAFO pollutants stress, is not just normal pig waste, but waste
combined with staggering volumes of antibiotics and toxic chemicals
used by Smithfield Foods and similar industrial CAFO operations to
maximize ‘efficiency.’
Tietz notes,
‘A lot of pig shit is one thing; a
lot of highly toxic pig shit is another. The excrement of
Smithfield hogs is hardly even pig shit: On a continuum of
pollutants, it is probably closer to radioactive waste than to
organic manure. The reason it is so toxic is Smithfield's
efficiency.
The company produces 6 billion
pounds of packaged pork each year. That's a remarkable
achievement, a prolificacy unimagined only two decades ago, and
the only way to do it is to raise pigs in astonishing,
unprecedented concentrations.’11
The degrees of concentration in the
Smithfield Foods vertically integrated pig meat concentrations have
little to do with traditional hog farming.
In facilities now spread around the
world, Smithfield's pigs live by the hundreds or thousands in
warehouse-like barns, in rows of wall-to-wall pens. Sows are
artificially inseminated and fed and delivered of their piglets in
cages so small they cannot turn around.
As Tietz notes,
‘Forty fully grown 250-pound male
hogs often occupy a pen the size of a tiny apartment. They
trample each other to death. There is no sunlight, straw, fresh
air or earth.
The floors are slatted to allow
excrement to fall into a catchment pit under the pens, but many
things besides excrement can wind up in the pits: afterbirths,
piglets accidentally crushed by their mothers, old batteries,
broken bottles of insecticide, antibiotic syringes, stillborn
pigs - anything small enough to fit through the foot-wide pipes
that drain the pits.
The pipes remain closed until enough
sewage accumulates in the pits to create good expulsion
pressure; then the pipes are opened and everything bursts out
into a large holding pond.’12
He continues on the toxic CAFO
conditions:
‘They become susceptible to
infection, and in such dense quarters microbes or parasites or
fungi, once established in one pig, will rush sprite-like
through the whole population.
Accordingly, factory pigs are
infused with a huge range of antibiotics and vaccines, and are
doused with insecticides. Without these compounds -
oxytetracycline, draxxin, ceftiofur, tiamulin - diseases would
likely kill them.
Thus factory-farm pigs remain in a
state of dying until they're slaughtered. When a pig nearly
ready to be slaughtered grows ill, workers sometimes shoot it up
with as many drugs as necessary to get it to the slaughterhouse
under its own power.
As long as the pig remains
ambulatory, it can be legally killed and sold as meat.’ 13
Jeff Tietz is not the only one
who has noticed the gargantuan scale of the Smithfield Foods CAFO
pig waste problem.
The United States Government
Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, has repeatedly
fined Smithfield Foods for damage to local water supply with
discharge of its pig waste from its CAFOs at Tar Heel and elsewhere
across the USA. In Virginia, its home state, Smithfield was fined
$12.6 million in 1997 for 6,900 violations of the Clean Water Act -
the third-largest civil penalty ever levied under the act by the
EPA, for waste generated during the hog-slaughtering and meat
processing operations.14
There was little convincing evidence the
fines changed their practice of waste disposal in any significant
way.
Smithfield Foods has spread its hog CAFOs to other countries where
environmental regulations are presumably less strict, including
Romania, Poland, and of course, rural Mexico. Several years ago the
Smithfield pig CAFO in Romania was focus of major accusations by
local and Government health officials.
Smithfield refused to let local
authorities enter its pig farms after residents complained of the
stench coming from hundreds of dead corpses of pigs left rotting for
days at the farms.
‘Our doctors have not had access to
the American [company's] farms to effect routine inspections,’
stated Csaba Daroczi, assistant director at the Timisoara
Hygiene and Veterinary Authority in Romania. ‘Every time they
tried, they were pushed away by the guards. Smithfield proposed
that we sign an agreement that would oblige us to warn them
three days before each inspection.’
It later emerged that Smithfield had
been covering up a major outbreak of classical swine fever on its
Romanian CAFO farms.15
The Drug Cartel comes in
Rather than order a
full-scale independent investigation into the pathogen-generation in
the toxic waste of Smithfield Foods’ Veracruz CAFO pig operations or
other similar pig CAFOs around the world for production of deadly
toxics and various possible pathogens, the CDC and increasingly the
WHO seem to be more concerned with creating a climate for mass
distribution of what have been documented to be dangerous, and in
some cases deadly, influenza drugs such as Tamiflu.
On April 14, almost two weeks before the panic over Mexico’s cases
of Swine Flu or as CDC now prefers, Influenza A H1N1, the US
pharmaceutical company, Novavax announced a pre-clinical study
allegedly showing,
‘an investigational H1N1 virus-like
particle (VLP) vaccine based on the 1918 Spanish influenza
strain protected against both the Spanish flu and a highly
pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza strain.’
The
genetically-manipulated vaccine of
Novavax, the company claimed,
‘protected Mice and Ferrets Against
the Spanish Flu and Highly Pathogenic H5N1 Bird Flu,’ and also
conveniently ‘provided protection against highly pathogenic H1N1
and H5N1 Influenza strains.’16
On April 24, the
WHO issued a press release stating
that,
‘The Swine Influenza A/H1N1 viruses
characterized in this outbreak have not been previously detected
in pigs or humans. The viruses so far characterized have been
sensitive to oseltamivir…’
Osteltamivir is the technical
name for Tamiflu, the drug invented by Donald Rumsfeld’s
Gilead Sciences and licensed to Roche Inc. The US Food
and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a convenient Emergency
Authorization on April 27 that allows US health officials and
others to administer Tamiflu even to infants under one year
of age.
The FDA statement added it had decided,
‘to authorize the use of unapproved
or uncleared medical products or unapproved or uncleared uses of
approved or cleared medical products following a determination
and declaration of emergency.’17
That suggests that the US Government has
or is about to release experimental drugs on a panicked population
such as the VLP-based Influenza vaccine of Novavax, as well as the
vast stockpiles of Tamiflu and influenza drugs sold by giants
like GlaxoSmithKline’s Relenza (zanamivir).
With the evidence to date of the scale of the ‘confirmed’ cases of
Swine Flu H1N1 variety worldwide, 985 cases of influenza A (H1N1) or
Swine Flu infection, there is hardly grounds to subject the human
population to drugs whose side effects have included death or severe
complications and typically flu-like symptoms and, as in the case of
Tamiflu, never even claim to ‘prevent or cure’ the influenza.
The entire drama of the past weeks is
reading more and more like a bad remake of Crichton’s Andromeda
Strain.
Adding a note of the bizarre to the entire drama, in November 2004,
amid the early days of the then-world panic over alleged Avian Flu,
when Tamiflu was first promoted as a wonder drug by Donald
Rumsfeld and others, the WHO published an extraordinary fantasy
scenario.
In a UN agency normally given to issuing
dull scientific notices to world health professionals, the 2004
report was extraordinarily ‘prescient’ of the current scenario with
Swine Flu panic.
In a fantasy section titled ‘Sometime in
the future…’ the WHO wrote four years ago,
Rumors of an outbreak of unusually
severe respiratory illness in two villages in a remote province
reach the ministry of health in one of the World Health
Organization’s (WHO’s) Member States. A team is dispatched to
the province and learns that the outbreak started about a month
earlier. The team is able to identify at least 50 cases over the
previous month. All age groups have been affected.
Twenty patients are currently in the
provincial hospital. Five people have already died of pneumonia
and acute respiratory failure. Surveillance in surrounding areas
is increased, and new cases are identified throughout the
province. Respiratory specimens collected from several patients
are tested at the national laboratory and are found to be
positive for type A influenza virus, but they cannot be further
subtyped.
The isolates are sent to the WHO
Reference Centre for Influenza for further characterization,
where they are characterized as influenza A(H6N1), a subtype
never isolated from humans before. Gene sequencing studies
further indicate that most of the viral genes are from a bird
influenza virus, with the remaining genes derived from a human
strain.18
If one changed the name from Influenza A
(H6N1) to Influenza A (H1N1) we could be talking about the current
situation.
That 2004 WHO fictional scenario reads as if it were the
handbook for what has unfolded since late April in the US Mexico and
beyond. It leads to serious question whether the world is being
submitted to a giant psychological warfare game aimed at inducing
them to take massive doses of dangerous drugs to counter a danger
that does not actually exist as claimed.
With the reported cases in Mexico clearly dropping off at present
and little sign of the feared repeat of the
1918 Spanish Flu or worse as
officials were warning only days earlier, it is well beyond time to
launch a full-scale worldwide health inquiry into the toxic
conditions of CAFO pig and other animal Factory Farm concentrations,
and to end the official cover-up of what has become a colossal
health danger.
Notes
1 Centers for Disease Control,
Swine-Origin Influenza A (H1N1) Virus Infections in a School ---
New York City, April 2009, April 30, 2009. Accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm58d0430a1.htm.
2 Margaret Chan, WHO Director-General, quoted in Murray
Wardrop, Swine flu All of humanity under threat WHO warns, Daily
Telegraph, London, April 30, 2009.
3 CDC, H1N1 (Swine Flu), accessed in http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/.
4 Centers for Disease Control, Swine-Origin Influenza A
(H1N1) Virus Infections in a School --- New York City… Op. Cit.
5 Ibid.
6 Seth Borenstein, Swine flu name change? Flu genes spell
pig, AP, May 1, 2009, accessed in http://www.physorg.com/news160371024.html.
7 GRAIN, A food system that kills: Swine flu is meat
industry’s latest plague, April 2009, accessed in http://www.grain.org/articles/?id=48.
8 Bernice Wuethrich, Chasing the Fickle Swine Flu,
Science, Vol. 299, 2003.
9 Jeff Tietz, Pork’s Dirty Secret: America’s Top Hog
Producer is also one of America’s Worst Polluters, Rolling
Stone, December 14, 2006.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 EPA, UNITED STATES SUES SMITHFIELD FOODS FOR POLLUTING
VIRGINIA WATERWAYS, Press Release, December 16, 1996.
15 Mirel Bran, Swine Plague: Romania Criticizes American
Group’s Attitude, Le Monde, 15 August 2007, translated by Leslie
Thatcher, cited in GRAIN Op Cit..
16 Tricia J. Richardson, NOVAVAX Announces Publication of
a Preclinical Study Demonstrating that a Virus-like Particle
Vaccine Provided Protection Against Highly Pathogenic H1N1 and
H5N1 Influenza Strains, April 14, 2009, Rockville, Md. Press
Release.
17 FDA News, FDA Authorizes Emergency Use of Influenza
Medicines, Diagnostic Test in Response to Swine Flu Outbreak in
Humans, April 27, 2009.
18 WHO, WHO checklist for influenza pandemic preparedness
planning, November 2004, accessed in
here.
|