Swine Flu News Updates

Posted: 24 Apr 2009 02:22 PM PDT

Swine flu news updates will be posted here continually throughout
the day. Our original post on the swine flu outbreak in Mexico and the
US can be read here. Swine Flu - Outbreak in Mexico, U.S. Tied To New Unique Strain

UPDATE: April 24, 9:00pm PST Additional News Story Links

• Source
  

• Possible Swine Flu Outbreak At NYC Prep School…
  

• Most fatal flu victims aged between 25-45…
  

• Swine flu could infect trade and travel…
  

• Schwarzenegger has ‘rigorous’ plan..
  

• WHO ready with antivirals…
  

• The mysterious respiratory illness…
  

• CDC says too late to contain…
  

• 60 DEAD: Mexico City launches huge vaccination campaign…
  

• CLOSE TO 1,000 SUSPECTED CASES…
  

• Heighten Risk of Pandemic…
  

• Concerns in California, Texas…
  

• Mutated from pigs, transmitted to humans…
  

• Mexico has not suffered serious flu epidemic before…
  

UPDATE: April 24, 5:42 pm PST New York City health
officials say that about 75 students at a Queens high school have
fallen ill with flu-like symptoms and testing is under way to rule out
the strain of swine flu that has killed dozens in Mexico. Read More

UPDATE: April 24, 3:02 PST California has activated
the Joint Emergency Operations Center (JEOC) of the Department of
Public Health, in coordination with the California Emergency Management
Agency.

UPDATE: April 24, 2:38 PST 1004 cases of swine flu in Mexico, 68 people have died. Source

US medical authorities expressed strong concern Friday about an unprecedented multi-strain swine flu outbreak that has killed at least 60 people in Mexico and infected seven people in the United States.

"It's very obvious that we are very concerned. We've stood up emergency operation centers," Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) spokesman Dave Daigle told AFP.

One major source of concern was that the virus included strains from different types of flu.

"This is the first time that we've seen an avian strain, two swine strains and a human strain," said Daigle, adding that the virus had influenza strains from European and Asian swine, but not from North American swine.

In 11 of 12 reported human cases of swine influenza (H1N1) virus infection in the United States from December 2005 to February 2009, the CDC has documented direct or indirect contact with swine.

But the seven known cases of the previously undetected strain in the United States — five from California and two from Texas — did not have contact with pigs. The seven people infected have all recovered from the flu.

"We have determined that this virus is contagious and is spreading from human to human," the CDC said on its website. "However, at this time, we have not determined how easily the virus spreads between people."

Local and state health officials were interviewing not just the people who were infected but the people with whom they had contact, Daigle noted.
Source

CDC says too late to contain U.S. flu outbreak

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Friday it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.

CDC acting director Dr. Richard Besser told reporters in a telephone briefing it was likely too late to try to contain the outbreak, by vaccinating, treating or isolating people.

"There are things that we see that suggest that containment is not very likely," he said.

He said the U.S. cases and Mexican cases are likely the same virus. "So far the genetic elements that we have looked at are the same." But Besser said it was unclear why the virus was causing so many deaths in deaths in Mexico and such mild disease in the United States.

3rd Possible Swine Flu Outbreak In Mexico

Mexico has reported a third possible outbreak of swine flu in Mexicali, near the U.S. border, with four suspect cases and no deaths to date, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Friday.
Source

World Health Orginization calls emergency meeting on swine flu

The World Health Organization said on Friday that it was convening an emergency committee to advise whether outbreaks of swine flu in the United States and Mexico constituted an international public health threat.

"WHO will convene, sometime in the very near future, an emergency committee under the International Health Regulations, which will consider whether or not this event constitutes a public health event of international concern," WHO spokesman Gregory Hartl told Reuters in Geneva.

This story comes to us via Homeland Security - National Terror Alert. National Terror Alert is America's trusted source for homeland security news and information.

Swine Flu and Martial Law 26 Apr 2009 | 2:01 pm Infowars

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars
April 26, 2009

As the AP video here reports, countries around the world are reacting to the Swine Flu (H1N1 ) outbreak in Mexico with quarantines and travel warnings. The United Nation's World Health Organization convened an emergency meeting Saturday to develop a response to the "pandemic potential" emerging from Mexico (although the threat is apparently not considered serious enough to prompt officials in the United States to close the border).
featured stories Swine Flu and Martial Law



If the outbreak indeed turns into a global pandemic, as WHO seems to think, we can expect not only quarantines, but the imposition of martial law in the United States. In fact, the government has planned for just such a scenario for some time now.

In late 2007, the Bush administration issued a "directive" establishing a "National Strategy for Public Health and Medical Preparedness" based on Biodefense for the 21st Century (see PDF). HSPD 21, short for Homeland Security Presidential Directive (signing statement bypassing Congress), defines "catastrophic health event" as "any natural or manmade incident, including terrorism, that results in a number of ill or injured persons sufficient to overwhelm the capabilities of immediate local and regional emergency response and health care systems."

HSPD 21 established an academic Joint Program for Disaster Medicine and Public Health housed at a National Center for Disaster Medicine and Public Health at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. It teamed up the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense to "carry out respective civilian and military missions."

Prior to this, in May of 2007, the U.S. military had the foresight to "plan for a possible avian flu pandemic that could kill as many as three million people in the United States in as little as six weeks," according to Yahoo News. Guidelines and "planning assumptions for US military services and combatant commands" were published in a document entitled "Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza."

"Possible scenarios include US troops being called in to put down riots, guard pharmaceutical plants and shipments, and help restrict the movement of people inside the country and across its borders," Yahoo summarizes. "The plan envisions fast moving, catastrophic waves of disease that would overwhelm health facilities and cripple the ability of state and local authorities to provide even basic commodities or services."

The military would be used to restrict traffic within states to contain the spread of the virus, according to the document. "It said the military will be called on to evacuate non-infected people from areas abroad that are having problems, and to help allies." In other words, think FEMA during Hurricane Katrina — the relocations, the toxic camps, the confiscation of firearms.

A key military role will be to distribute medical supplies and medications and provide security for the production and shipment of vaccines on orders of the president.

DoD's "Implementation Plan for Pandemic Influenza" proposes nothing less than the militarization of health care. In short, the military — provided to "augment civilian law enforcement" — will be used to vaccinate the population, as "directed by the president."

Considering the above, the purpose of the brand spanking new KBR camps ostensibly built for "an emergency influx of immigrants into the U.S., or to support the rapid development of new programs" comes into focus.

As Michel Chossudovsky wrote in 2005, the "hidden agenda consists in using the threat of a pandemic and/or the plight of a natural disaster as a pretext to establish military rule" and "suspend Constitutional government and allow the Military to intervene in civilian affairs in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act."

Bush said as much when he announced that in the event of a flu outbreak in the U.S. he would consider using the military to "effect a quarantine" and place National Guard troops under federal, rather than state, control. Dr. Irwin Redlener, associate dean of Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and director of its National Center for Disaster Preparedness, told the Associated Press that a law enforcement role for the military would be an "extraordinarily Draconian measure."

Since Redlener made his comment, the military, under the Northern Command, according to the Army Times, announced the transfer of the 3rd Infantry Division's 1st Brigade Combat Team and its "dedicated assignment… as an on-call federal response force for natural or manmade emergencies and disasters, including terrorist attacks." Training for homeland operations commenced last year at Fort Stewart and at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs.

* A d v e r t i s e m e n t
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Over the last few months, the military has steadily increased its collaboration with local law enforcement in violation of Posse Comitatus, most notably and egregiously in Alabama and Tennessee (see Damage Control: U.S. Army Investigates Deploying Troops in Samson, Alabama and Massive Checkpoint Operation in Tennessee Violated Posse Comitatus, Fourth Amendment).

The federalization and militarization of law enforcement has continued apace since 1994 when the DoD issued a directive allowing military commanders to take emergency actions in domestic situations.

Is it possible a mutant influenza virus would be used as an excuse to impose martial law now that the military is in place ?

"Our best intelligence estimate is that pandemic Avian Flu has already been created through genetic engineering in the United States, fusing the deadly genome of the 1918 Pandemic, misnamed the 'Spanish Flu', with the DNA of the innocuous H5N1 virus in a growth medium of human kidney cells, according to the National Institutes of Health and the vaccine's manufacturer. Some virologists believe that this would insure that the man-made mutant virus recognizes human cells and knows how to invade them," writes Rima E. Laibow, MD, head of the Natural Solutions Foundation, a citizen watchdog group monitoring the pharmaceutical industry.

Laibow underscores what we stress above: "Given the shockingly obvious lack of any threat from an un-weaponized H5N1 virus, how can we explain the Bush Administration spending billions of dollars preparing each of the 50 States, for what it calls the 'inevitable Bird Flu pandemic,' which they say could kill half or more of all Americans and similar numbers of people around the globe?"

Of course, the current swine flu is not H5N1. It is the H1N1 virus. It is however an odd duckling with a suspicious composition: the virus contains genes of human, bird and swine origin.

As the virus spreads, more and more people — and even a few virologists — believe H1N1 is a human-engineered pathogen. On April 25, the journalist Wayne Madsen wrote:

Our Mexico City source said a top scientist for the United Nations, who has examined the outbreak of the deadly Ebola virus in Africa, as well as HIV/AIDS victims, concluded that H1N1 possesses certain transmission "vectors" that suggest that new flu strain has been genetically-manufactured as a military biological warfare weapon. The UN expert believes that Ebola, HIV/AIDS, and the current A-H1N1 swine flu virus are biological warfare agents.

Past swine flu outbreaks have been spread from pigs to humans, who then passed the flu on to other humans. However, with A-H1N1, there have been no reported infections of pigs. In fact, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), A-H1N1 has gene segments from North American swine, bird and human flu strains and a segment from Eurasian swine flu. Costa Rica, Brazil, and Peru have issued alerts to check all incoming passengers from Mexico at border crossings, airports, and seaports for symptoms of the swine flu.

Meanwhile, in the United States, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has instituted "passive surveillance" of travelers entering the country.

Napolitano announced this on Sunday. On Friday the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said it was too late to contain the swine flu outbreak in the United States.

Baxter To Develop Swine Flu Vaccine Despite Bird Flu Scandal
The fox has been given the duty of guarding the henhouse

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, April 27, 2009

A U.S. based pharmaceutical company that just weeks ago was involved in a scandal involving vaccines tainted with deadly avian flu virus has been chosen to head up efforts to produce a vaccine for the Mexican swine flu that has seemingly migrated into the U.S. and Europe.

http://www.infowars.net/articles/april2009/270409Baxter.htm