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According to the World Health Organization, there have been 6,947,192 confirmed COVID-19 deaths globally as of June 28. Of those, 1,127,152 occurred in the United States, making the number of Americans killed by the virus more than 19 times the number of American soldiers killed in the Vietnam War.And yet, over three years since the beginning of the pandemic, we still don’t know where the virus originated. The fear is that the next time around, the number of deaths could be much higher; because we didn’t learn from this pandemic, we wouldn’t be as prepared as we should for the...

Texas investigates a THIRD potential US coronavirus case as second suspected victim is hospitalized in LA and doctors monitor SIXTEEN people who came into contact with Patient Zero in Washington State. Health officials in Brazos County on Thursday said they are investigating a suspected case of the deadly new coronavirus. The person possibly infected, who has not been named, recently traveled to Wuhan - the Chinese city where the disease originated. They have been isolated in their home after health care providers recognized their symptoms as consistent with the coronavirus. So far only one US case of the virus has...

The top lawyer at a Queens public defender’s office is patient zero of a COVID-19 outbreak — sparking an ongoing conflict over her decision to keep colleagues in the dark about her diagnosis for three days, the Daily News has learned. Lori Zeno, the embattled executive director of Queens Defenders, informed her office Sunday that a staff member had tested positive for COVID. It wasn’t until Tuesday that she admitted she was actually the infected staffer. ...After Zeno tested positive, four other Queens Defenders also got COVID, three of them attorneys who shared their names with the rest of the...

AIDS likely made the leap from chimpanzees to humans because of a starving World War I soldier who was forced to hunt the animals for food, according to a new book. The unknown “Patient Zero” was part of an invasion force of 1,600 Belgian and French troops who, along with 4,000 African aides, had traveled from Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo to a remote outpost in Cameroon, says Canadian microbiologist Jacques Pepin, who once worked as a bush doctor in central Africa in the 1980s. Pepin, a professor in the Department of Microbiology and Infectious Diseases at Universite de Sherbrooke...

Coronavirus has been with us for longer than you think. According to documents seen by the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the Chinese government first detected a case of COVID-19 on Nov. 17. Yet it still hasn’t been able to confirm that this case really is the fabled “Patient Zero.” Officially, the coronavirus didn’t exist until Dec. 31. The new leak of government documents therefore pushes the discovery of COVID-19 back by several weeks. In other words, the first person to have had the coronavirus may have caught it even earlier than November. That;s why people who had pneumonia in...

The Arkansas Republican cited a study published by the Lancet that showed of the original 40 cases in Wuhan, the epicenter of the outbreak, 14 people who contracted the virus never set foot in the Wuhan wildlife market where Chinese authorities have claimed the virus originated. "As one epidemiologist said, 'That virus went into the seafood market before it came out of the seafood market.' We still don't know where it originated," Cotton said. "I would note that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level four super laboratory that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus."...

There is an old Arab proverb, "If the camel gets his nose in the tent, his body will soon follow." A metaphor for a small, insignificant action opening the door to something much larger and more nefarious. Overlooked in this past weekend’s brouhaha over the Nunes memo is the role of Carter Page. A Russian spy or the FBI camel’s nose to get under the Trump tent? Given that to date Page has not been charged with a single crime, unlike Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, is he really a spy or just a dodgy business consultant who did business...

The biggest of all BIGGER story aspects to the HPSCI Memo, in all coverage, has been overlooked by all Main Stream Media. The Department of Justice FBI FISA request was for “Title I” surveillance authority. This is not some innocuous request for metadata exploration – the FBI said American citizen Carter Page was a “foreign agent of a hostile foreign government”; the FBI was calling Carter Page a spy. “Title I” FISA surveillance of U.S. citizens is the most intrusive, exhaustive and far reaching type of search, seizure and surveillance authority, permitting the FBI to look at every scintilla of...

In Randy Shilts’ history of AIDS, “And the Band Played On,” he tells the story of an Air Canada steward named Gaëtan Dugas, who suffered from what Dugas called “gay cancer” and infected 40 people or more with HIV. He was, Shilts wrote, “Patient Zero.” Modal TriggerDugas, through his extensive travels and unrepentant, unprotected sex even after he was diagnosed, undoubtedly helped spread AIDS. But was he the man who brought the disease to America? In the new book, “The Chimp and the River: How AIDS Emerged from an African Rain Forest” (W.W. Norton), author David Quammen says no.

“I knew Duncan well. As refugees in Bujumbura Camp we were there hustling to see how we could make it. We were at war back home, so we were like trying to do everything humanly possible to make sure we stay alive to come back home. So when the war ended we began to come home one by one and he came before me. I came in 2011. We met once and that was around the 72nd belt, somewhere around Boulevard Junction and we just waved to each other because I was in a taxi; that’s the last time I...

The first reported case of Ebola in the United States is spooking airline investors and raising the prospect that some frightened travelers might stay home despite repeated reassurances from public-health experts. Details of the man's 28-hour trip from western Africa emerged Wednesday. He flew on two airlines, took three flights, and had lengthy airport layovers before reaching Texas on Sept. 20. Still, federal officials say other passengers on the flights are at no risk of infection because the man had no symptoms at the time of his trip. Thomas Eric Duncan left Monrovia, Liberia, on Sept. 19 aboard a Brussels...

Investigators say they have discovered the case which sparked the West Africa pandemic, as Rwandan authorities quarantine the country's first suspected Ebola patient A toddler who died in a Guinea border town just before Christmas last year was the “patient zero” who sparked the Ebola crisis, according to reports. The two-year-old boy was from Guéckédou, a jungle village which lies on the country’s border with Liberia and Sierra Leone – two countries which have been badly affected by the deadly virus....

A two-year-old boy from a remote village in Guinea was 'patient zero' in the deadliest-yet Ebola outbreak, epidemiologists believe. The boy from the village of Meliandou, Guéckédou province, suffered with fever, black stools and vomiting for just four days until he died on December 6. Seven days later, his mother died too, followed by his three-year-old sister, who fell sick on Christmas Day and was dead before she could see the New Year. Guéckédou sits by the borders with both Sierra Leone and Liberia. In a region where borders are porous, it gave the Ebola virus a route into three...

A state in eastern Mexico is to erect a statue to a small boy suspected as being the first patient of swine flu here, to be modeled on the famous Manneken Pis statue of a child urinating in Brussels. Five-year-old Edgar Hernandez appeared in media across the world after the health ministry in April confirmed that he had contracted, and overcome, the A(H1N1) virus at the start of the epidemic's outbreak here. Hernandez's role in putting his poor village of La Gloria on the map merited recognition in the shape of a small statue -- resembling the famous Belgian landmark...

"A 23-month-old child from Texas has become the first American to die from the swine flu outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta confirmed today. The CDC released no other information about how — or where — the child may have contracted the disease." — ABC report, “First U.S. Death From Swine Flu in Texas the CDC Confirms”, April 29, 2009 [emphasis added] My antennae started to go up as I heard various reports about the first reported swine flu death in the USA. A 23-month old child “from Texas” was all that we were told. Googling,...

A man who shook Barack Obama's hand in Mexico died the next day from symptoms similar to those of swine flu. The White House insisted the President's health was not in any danger, but he was said to be taking the threat of an epidemic 'very seriously'. The President's health advisers were already concerned about his visit south of the border after learning the contagious virus first struck in Mexico City on April 13 - three days before Mr Obama flew in to meet government officials. Their alarm grew after learning that Felipe Solis, an archaeologist

Top link now on Drudge- from article: The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

WASHINGTON -- President Obama went golfing and the Department of Health and Human Services is short a secretary, so other U.S. officials took the controls Sunday as the Obama administration ramps up efforts to find and isolate U.S. cases of swine flu.During a White House briefing, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that HHS will issue a public health emergency warning that will free up resources to address the outbreak that has hit 20 Americans in five states. Richard Besser, acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the agency is prepared to move millions of doses...

A new, highly resistant strain of HIV that appears to develop rapidly into AIDS has been diagnosed in a New Yorker who had not previously undergone antiviral drug treatment, says the city health department, which is holding a press conference today. While drug resistance is increasingly common in people who have been treated for the human immunodeficiency virus, city officials called the case “extremely rare.” The patient, who now has AIDS, is a male in his mid-40s who reported multiple male sex partners and unprotected anal intercourse, often while using crystal methamphetamine. The patient appears to have developed AIDS within...

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Filed at 8:06 p.m. ET NEW YORK (AP) -- New York's first diagnosed case of highly drug-resistant HIV in a person never before treated for the virus is ``a wake up call'' to anyone who has unprotected sex, the city's health commissioner said Friday. The patient, a man in his mid-40s who had unprotected sex with other men, contracted a strain of HIV that is ``difficult or impossible to treat and which appears to progress rapidly to AIDS,'' said the Health Commissioner Dr. Thomas Frieden. The diagnosis ``is a wake up call to men who have...