Hysteria sells and...
It's hysteria time again. Let me run it down for you.
This is the word:
The dreaded Zika virus! Watch out! It's carried
by mosquitos! It can cause birth defects---babies are born with very
small heads and impaired brains!
Here are a few scare headlines that were running on Drudge as of 1/26:
"Brazil sends 200,000 soldiers to stop spread of Zika."
"Stay away from Rio if you're pregnant."
"'Losing battle' against mosquito."
"Virus threatening two continents."
Want more hysteria? The Daily Mail indicates pregnant women are being
warned not to travel to 22 countries in Latin America and Africa.
Several Zika cases are being reported in Italy, the UK, and Spain.
Then we have this from the Washington Post (
"As Zika virus spreads, El Salvador asks women not to get pregnant until 2018," 1/22, with italics added):
"The rapid spread of the Zika virus has prompted Latin American governments to urge women
not to get pregnant for up to two years, an extraordinary precaution aimed at avoiding birth defects believed to be linked to the mosquito-borne illness.
"
...a potentially culture-shaping phenomenon in which the populations of several nations have been asked to delay procreation.
The World Health Organization says at least 20 countries or territories
in the region, including Barbados and Bolivia, Guadeloupe and
Guatemala, Puerto Rico and Panama, have registered transmission of the
virus."
So we now have governments warning women not to get pregnant. A new
form of depopulation. Don't get pregnant. If you do, and a mosquito
bites you, you could give birth to a severely damaged child. Not only
that, we have massive advisories against travel, for pregnant women.
And 200,000 soldiers in Brazil, the site of the upcoming Olympics, are
going door to door and distributing information about this new
"plague." Are the soldiers also telling men and women not to have sex?
Who knows?
So let's take a little side trip to Scam City and examine the science
behind the Zika virus and the assertion that it is causing birth
defects.
Before a virus can be said to cause disease, a few procedures need to
occur. First, the virus must be proved to exist. It has to be isolated
from a human carrier as diseased tissue, and then that tissue has to be
put under an electron microscope, where many, many (Zika) viruses can
be seen. Second, tests have to be run on many suspected human cases,
and these tests have to reveal very large amounts of Zika in the body.
That's your basic starter kit for deciding that a virus might be causing
actual human disease.
In examining the published literature on Zika, so far I see no reports
of diseased-tissue removal from a human, followed by electron microscope
photos revealing large amounts of Zika.
As far as diagnostic tests on suspected human cases are concerned, I
see, as usual, two major types of testing: antibody, and PCR. I'll
briefly review the egregious flaws in these tests.
Antibodies are immune-system scouts which identify invaders in the
body. The antibodies ID these villains so other elements of the immune
system can repel and destroy them. When a test shows that antibodies
geared to a specific virus/villain (like Zika) are present in the body,
it means the body has contacted that Zika virus---if the test was done
well and didn't come up with a falsely-positive result. False positives
are frequent.
But more disastrously, proving the body had
contact with a specific virus says absolutely nothing about whether the
patient is sick or will get sick. In fact, before 1985, a
positive antibody test was generally taken to be a good sign: the body's
immune system had encountered and overcome the invader. After 1985,
the "science" was turned upside down: a positive test meant the person
was sick or going to get sick. And that meant, of course, more (false)
diagnoses of disease and more profit from treatments. In announced
"epidemics," health agencies can falsely inflate the numbers of cases to
the moon.
The PCR is a very sophisticated and tricky test to run. It is prone to
errors. It takes a tiny, tiny amount of material assumed to be a
fragment of a virus, and it amplifies (blows up) that fragment so it can
be observed. The first problem with the test is: did technicians
indeed choose a tiny sample that actually is a piece of the virus in
question? Or is it simply a bit of genetic debris? The second problem
is: the test, despite claims to the contrary, says nothing reliable
about the
amount of virus (like Zika) that is in the patient's
body. Why is this important? Because you need a great deal of virus in
the body to begin to say it is causing disease. A very small amount is
trivial.
With these two useless tests in tow---the antibody and the
PCR---researchers and doctors don't have a meaningful clue about whether
a patient is ill as a result of Zika infection. All case-number
reports are suspect, to say the very least.
Therefore, attributing very serious problems to Zika on a worldwide basis is insupportable and speculative. It isn't science.
And to make the leap to claiming the virus is causing pregnant women to
give birth to babies with very small heads and impaired brains is
absurd.
Who benefits from this Zika "science"? Certainly, the people who are
releasing genetically engineered (GE) mosquitos as a form of
disease-prevention. The big honcho is a company named Oxitec. So far,
the GE mosquitos are being used to curtail dengue fever in Brazil,
Malaysia, and the Cayman Islands. Florida is next up on the agenda.
But with Zika coming on strong in the press as a "mosquito-carried
plague," how long will it be before special bugs are modified to save
the planet from this new threat...
Just a few problems with the GE mosquitos, though.
A town in Brazil has reported continuing elevated levels of dengue fever
since the GE (genetically engineered) mosquitoes have been introduced
to combat that disease.
The scientific hypothesis is: the trickster GE bugs (males) will
impregnate natural females, but no actual next generation will occur
beyond the larval stage. However, this plummeting birth rate in
mosquitoes is the only "proof" that the grand experiment is safe. No
long-term health studies have been done---this is a mirror of what
happened when GMO crops were introduced: no science, just bland
assurances.
Needless to say, without extensive lab testing, there is no way to tell
what these GE mosquitoes are actually harboring, in addition to what
researchers claim. That's a major red flag.
Wherever these GE mosquitoes have been introduced, or are about to be
introduced, the human populations have not been consulted for their
permission. It's all being done by government and corporate edict.
It's human experimentation on a grand scale.
There are concerns that, if indeed the dengue-carrying mosquitos are
actually wiped out, the vacuum may be filled by another dengue carrier,
the Asian Tiger Mosquito---which breeds much faster.
Other than that, everything is perfect. Let's have a big parade and welcome genetically-engineered mosquitos to planet Earth.
Back to the Zika virus: what actually is causing mothers to give birth
to babies with very small heads and impaired brains? If this is indeed a
fairly recent phenomenon, I would start with a deep and very specific
investigation of the genetically engineered mosquitos that were recently
released in Brazil to decimate the dengue-fever mosquitos.
Then I would pay attention to a report like this (Rio Times, 5/5/15,
"Brazil Shown to Be Largest Global Consumer of Pesticides"):
"The use of pesticides in Brazil grew by more than 162 percent from 2000
to 2012, according to the latest report by the Brazilian Association of
Collective Health (ABRASCO), making the country the number one consumer
of pesticides in the world. According to the entity, the Brazilian
agriculture sector purchased more than 823,000 tons of pesticides in
2012."
"The ABRASCO report, titled
'An Alert of the Impacts of Pesticides on Health',
was released last week in Rio de Janeiro. The report includes
scientific studies including data from the National Cancer Institute
that shows a direct link between the use of pesticides and health
problems."
A quote inside the report:
"Not only are we using more [pesticides] but we are using more powerful,
stronger pesticides. We have been forced to import pesticides which
were not even allowed in Brazil to combat pests which attacked GM
soybean and cotton plants..."
"...22 of the fifty main active ingredients used in pesticides in Brazil today have been banned in most other countries. "
How about an in-depth investigation, on the ground, probing the connection between these pesticides and birth defects?
Or is it better, for the chosen few, to use a virus as a false cover
story, in order to explain away horrendous damage from what amounts to
chemical warfare?
****Try this study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives on
July 1, 2011: "Urinary Biomarkers of Prenatal Atrazine Exposure..."
Here is a quote referring to what is now being called a prime Zika
effect:
"The presence versus absence of quantifiable levels of [the
pesticide] atrazine or a specific atrazine metabolite was associated
with fetal growth restriction... and small head circumference... Head
circumference was also inversely associated with the presence of the
herbicide metolachlor."
Getting the picture?
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