Posted on 02/09/2009 12:36:11 AM PST by nw_arizona_granny
http://www.legitgov.org/flu_oddities.html
FLU ‘ODDITIES’ BREAKING NEWS
Last updated: 04/26/2009 15:58:17
Azcentral.com material cannot be posted due to copyright complaint.
Thanks to Davey Crockett for this link:
ProMed Mail.org site with a map and the latest on the flu.
You can sign up for Promed Mail here also.
[Interesting, even tho they do not approve of pig farms...granny]
http://www.hsus.org/farm/news/ournews/swine_flu.html
The Humane Society of the United States | humanesociety.org
Swine Flu and Factory Farms: Fast Track to Disaster
April 25, 2009
Factory farms confine thousands of animals in one building—a breeding ground for disease.© USDA
by Michael Greger, M.D.
The H1N1 swine flu virus in North America currently concerning global public health officials is not the first triple hybrid human/bird/pig flu virus to be discovered.
First Found on a Factory Farm
The first was discovered in a North Carolina factory farm in 1998. Since the 1918 pandemic, an H1N1 flu virus has circulated in pig populations, becoming one of the most common causes of respiratory disease on North American pig farms.[1]
In August 1998, however, a barking cough resounded throughout a North Carolina pig farm in which all the thousands of breeding sows fell ill. An aggressive H3N2 virus was discovered, the type of influenza that had been circulating in humans since 1968.
Not only was this highly unusual—only a single strain of human virus had ever previously been isolated from an American pig population—but upon sequencing of the viral genome, researchers found that it was not just a double reassortment (a hybrid of human and pig virus, for example), but a never-before-described triple reassortment, a hybrid of three viruses—a human virus, a pig virus, and a bird virus.[2]
Intensive Farming is the Problem
Dr. Robert Webster, one of the world’s leading experts of flu virus evolution, blames the emergence of the 1998 virus on the “recently evolving intensive farming practice in the USA, of raising pigs and poultry in adjacent sheds with the same staff,” a practice he calls “unsound.”[3] “Within the swine population, we now have a mammalian-adapted virus that is extremely promiscuous,” explained another molecular virologist at the time, referring to the virus’s proclivity to continue to snatch up genes from human flu viruses. “We could end up with a dangerous virus.”[4] This may indeed be what we are now facing.
Within months of the 1998 emergence, the virus showed up in Texas, Minnesota, and Iowa.[5] Within a year, it had spread across the United States.[6] This rapid dissemination across the country has been blamed on long-distance live animal transport.[7]
Long Way to Go
The rapid dissemination of the virus has been blamed on long-distance live animal transport.© Compassion Over Killing
In the United States, pigs travel coast to coast. They can be bred in North Carolina, fattened in the corn belt of Iowa, and slaughtered in California.[8] While this may reduce short-term costs for the pork industry, the highly contagious nature of diseases like influenza (perhaps made further infectious by the stresses of transport) needs to be considered when calculating the true cost of long-distance live animal transport.
What led to the emergence of the North Carolina strain in the first place? What changed in the years leading up to 1998 that facilitated the surfacing of such a unique strain? It is likely no coincidence that the virus emerged in North Carolina, the home of the nation’s largest pig farm. North Carolina has the densest pig population in North America and reportedly boasts more than twice as many corporate swine mega-factories as any other state.[9]
Agricultural Intensification
The year of emergence, 1998, was the year North Carolina’s pig population hit ten million, up from two million just six years before.[10] At the same time, the number of hog farms was decreasing, from 15,000 in 1986 to 3,600 in 2000.[11] How do five times more animals fit on almost five times fewer farms? By crowding about 25 times more pigs into each operation.
In the 1980s, more than 85 percent of all North Carolina pig farms had fewer than 100 animals. By the end of the 1990s, operations confining more than 1,000 animals controlled about 99 percent of the state’s inventory.[12] Given that the primary route of swine flu transmission is thought to be the same as human flu—via droplets or aerosols of infected nasal secretions[13]—it’s no wonder experts blame overcrowding for the emergence of new flu virus mutants.
Starting in the early 1990s, the U.S. pig industry restructured itself after Tyson’s profitable poultry model of massive industrial-sized units. As a headline in the trade journal National Hog Farmer announced, “Overcrowding Pigs Pays—If It’s Managed Properly.”[14]
Crowding Breeds Disease
“Influenza [in pigs] is closely related with pig density.”© The HSUS
The majority of U.S. pig farms now confine more than 5,000 animals each. A veterinary pathologist from the University of Minnesota stated the obvious in Science: “With a group of 5,000 animals, if a novel virus shows up it will have more opportunity to replicate and potentially spread than in a group of 100 pigs on a small farm.”[15]
Recent Outbreak
The swine flu virus discovered this week in California and Mexico appears to be a quadruple reassortment virus incorporating genes from human and avian flu viruses as well as North American and European strains of swine flu. In Europe in 1993, a bird flu virus had adapted to pigs, acquiring a few human flu virus genes, and infected two young Dutch children, even displaying evidence of limited human-to-human transmission.[16]
Recipe for Disaster
“Influenza [in pigs] is closely correlated with pig density,” said a European Commission-funded researcher studying the situation in Europe.[17] As such, Europe’s rapidly intensifying pig industry has been described in Science as “a recipe for disaster.”[18] Some researchers have speculated that the next pandemic could arise out of “Europe’s crowded pig barns.”[19]
The European Commission’s agricultural directorate warns that the “concentration of production is giving rise to an increasing risk of disease epidemics.”[20] Concern over epidemic disease is so great that Danish laws have capped the number of pigs per farm and put a ceiling on the total number of pigs allowed to be raised in the country.[21] No such limit exists in the United States.
With massive concentrations of farm animals within which to mutate, these new swine flu viruses in North America seem to be on an evolutionary fast track, jumping and reassorting between species at an unprecedented rate.[22] This reassorting, Webster’s team concludes, makes the 60 million strong U.S. pig population an “increasingly important reservoir of viruses with human pandemic potential.”[23] “We used to think that the only important source of genetic change in swine influenza was in Southeast Asia,” said Christopher Olsen, a molecular virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Now, “we need to look in our own backyard for where the next pandemic may appear.”[24]
Dr. Michael Greger is director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture in the farm animal welfare division of The Humane Society of the United States. A physician specializing in clinical nutrition, Greger focuses his work on the human health implications of intensive animal agriculture, including the routine use of non-therapeutic antibiotics and growth hormones in animals raised for food, and the public health threats of industrial factory farms.
1 Zhou NN, Senne DA, Landgraf JS, et al. 1999. Genetic reassortment of avian, swine, and human influenza A viruses in American pigs. Journal of Virology 73:8851-6. http://birdflubook.org/resources/ZHOU8851.pdf.
2 Zhou NN, Senne DA, Landgraf JS, et al. 2000. Emergence of H3N2 reassortant influenza A viruses in North American pigs. Veterinary Microbiology 74:47-58. http://birdflubook.org/resources/Zhou47.pdf.
3 Webster RG and Hulse DJ. 2004. Microbial adaptation and change: avian influenza. Revue Scientifique et Technique 23(2):453-65.
4 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://birdflubook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
5 Zhou NN, Senne DA, Landgraf JS, et al. 1999. Genetic reassortment of avian, swine, and human influenza A viruses in American pigs. Journal of Virology 73:8851-6. http://birdflubook.org/resources/ZHOU8851.pdf.
6 Webby RJ, Swenson SL, Krauss SL, Gerrish PJ, Goyal SM, and Webster RG. 2000. Evolution of swine H3N2 influenza viruses in the United States. Journal of Virology 74:8243-51.
7 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://birdflubook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
8 Shields DA and Mathews KH Jr. 2003. Interstate livestock movements. USDA Economic Research Service: Electronic Outlook Report from the Economic Research Service, June. usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/reports/erssor/livestock/ldp-mbb/2003/ldp-m108-01.pdf.
9 Environmental Defense. 2000. Factory hog farming: the big picture. November.http://environmentaldefense.org/document...armingBigPicture.pdf.
10 Duke University Center on Globalization, Governance and Competitiveness. 2006. Hog farming overview. February 23. http://www.soc.duke.edu/NC_GlobalEconomy/hog/overview.php.
11 North Carolina Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. 2001. North Carolina agriculture overview. February 23. http://ncagr.com/stats/general/livestoc.htm.
12 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://BirdFluBook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
13 Brown IH. 2000. The epidemiology and evolution of influenza viruses in pigs. Veterinary Medicine 74:29-46. http://BirdFluBook.org/resources/Brown29.pdf.
14 1993. Overcrowding pigs pays-if it’s managed properly. National Hog Farmer, November 15.
15 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://BirdFluBook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
16 Webster RG, Sharp GB, and Claas CJ. 1995. Interspecies transmission of influenza viruses. Americal Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine 152:525-30.
17 MacKenzie D. 1998. This little piggy fell ill. New Scientist, September 12.
18 Ibid.
19 Delgado C, Rosegrant M, Steinfeld H, Ehui S, and Courbois C. 1999. Livestock to 2020: the next food revolution. Food, Agriculture, and the Environment Discussion Paper 28. For the International Food Policy Research Institute, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and the International Livestock Research Institute. http://ifpri.org/2020/dp/dp28.pdf.
20 MacKenzie D. 1998. This little piggy fell ill. New Scientist, September 12, p. 1818.
21 Ibid.
22 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://birdflubook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
23 Webby RJ, Rossow K, Erickson G, Sims Y, and Webster R. 2004. Multiple lineages of antigenically and genetically diverse influenza A virus co-circulate in the United States swine population. Virus Research 103:67-73. http://BirdFluBook.org/resources/webby67.pdf.
24 Wuethrich B. 2003. Chasing the fickle swine flu. Science 299:1502-5. http://BirdFluBook.org/resources/WUETHRICH1502.pdf.
Related Links
What’s a Factory Farm, Anyway?
Avian Influenza: Flu Factories
Welfare Issues with Gestation Crates for Pregnant Sows
http://www.thefreshloaf.com/thebreadfeed
I would like to alter a
I would like to alter a recipe from using leaven to Instant Active Dried Yeast. Dan Lepards recipe for Crusty Potato Bread uses 250 gms leaven, 500 gms flour 75 gms grated potato 1 1/2 teaspoons of salt, 25 gms honey and 300 gms water. I use 2 teaspoons of instant yeast to 5oo gms of flour. Any suggestions
* Login or register to post comments
Submitted by apprentice on June 21, 2007 - 8:41am.
yeast conversions
Hi Abigail,
Crusty potato bread. mmmmm sounds good. Not sure what the recipe means by “leaven” or if it’s active dry or instant yeast you’d like to use. In my experience, there are 3 types of yeast: fresh (also known as baker’s or compressed yeast); active dry which must be dissolved in lukewarm water before incorporating in dough; and instant dry which can be included directly, without first dissolving, with other ingredients in the dough.
Here are some conversion formulas that might be useful:
From fresh yeast to active dry: For each pound of yeast, use 0.4 lb of active dry. Or if you’re dealing in ounces, use 0.4 oz of active dry for each ounce of fresh yeast.
From fresh yeast to instant dry: For each pound of fresh yeast, use 0.33 pound instant dry yeast or 0.33 oz instant dry for each ounce of fresh.
Dry yeast (active or instant): 0.3 oz = 2.7 teaspoons.
Good luck! Carol
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user icon
Submitted by ejm on September 13, 2007 - 5:41am.
converting from natural starter to commercial yeast
Abigail, when I was searching for the opposite information (how to alter from active dry yeast to natural starter), I came across the following in the sourdough section of Artisan Baking Across America by Maggie Glezer. She wrote:
Any sourdough-based recipe can be converted into a yeast-based recipe. The bread will not have the complex flavor [...] of a true sourdough, but it will still be a very fine loaf.
To convert a recipe from sourdough to commercial yeast, you will just use a small amount of yeast in the levain and omit the sourdough starter. [...] Dissolve 1/4 teaspoon yeast in 1/4 cup warm water and use 2 tablespoons of the yeasted water per cup (150 grams, 5.3 ounces) flour. [...] Be sure to reduce the water measure in the levain by the same amount as the added yeasted water.
Let the levain, which is now technically a pre-ferment, ferment for 2 to 3 hours, or until it has risen to about half again its original volume, then refrigerate it overnight until ready to use. Let it come to room temperature before adding it to the final dough. Continue with the recipe as directed - there is no need to add more yeast.
And Richard Packham wrote the following on his webpage Sourdough and Sourdough Starter:
The general rule for substituting sourdough starter for yeast is to use one cup of starter for each one-ounce yeast cake, and then reduce the amounts of flour and liquid each by about one cup.
So my guess is that you could go in the opposite direction to use one one-ounce yeast cake (28.5gm) instead of one cup of starter and add a cup of flour and liquid to the mix. (I believe that Mr.Packham is from Idaho, where 1cup = 240ml)
Hope that helps!
-Elizabeth
P.S. I did manage to make a sourdough rye using my natural starter converting a recipe in ‘Joy of Cooking’ that called for 1+1/4 tsp active dry yeast. Please excuse the shameless self-promotion; here is the post: http://etherwork.net/blog/?p=430
Giving up bread due to allergy
Check out www.mercola.com and search there using “allergy”. Unless your allergy is hereditary there may be some help to get rid of the allergy and not the bread.
Good luck
cooking measurements and commonly used substitutions
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Cooking Measurement Equivalents
16 tablespoons = 1 cup
12 tablespoons = 3/4 cup
10 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons = 2/3 cup
8 tablespoons = 1/2 cup
6 tablespoons = 3/8 cup
5 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon = 1/3 cup
4 tablespoons = 1/4 cup
2 tablespoons = 1/8 cup
2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoons = 1/6 cup
1 tablespoon = 1/16 cup
2 cups = 1 pint
2 pints = 1 quart
3 teaspoons = 1 tablespoon
48 teaspoons = 1 cup
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Teaspoon-Gallon Measures
1 teaspoon
= 1 1/3 fluid drams
1 tablespoon
= 3 teaspoons
1/4 cup
= 4 tablespoons
1/3 cup
= 5 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon
1/2 cup
= 8 tablespoons
2/3 cup
= 1/2 cup + 2 tablespoons + 2 teaspoon
1 cup
= 16 tablespoons
1 pint
= 2 cups
1 quart
= 4 cups
1 gallon
= 4 quarts
Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4
Commonly used Substitutions
Ingredient
Quantity
Substitute
Baking Powder
1 tsp double acting
1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/2 cup buttermilk or
Baking Powder
1 tsp double acting
1/4 tsp baking soda + 1/2 tsp cream of tartar
Butter
1 cup
1 cup margarine or
Butter
1 cup
7/8 cup lard + 1/2 tsp salt
Chocolate
1 ounce
3 Tbsp cocoa + 1 Tbsp shortening
Corn Starch (for thickening)
1 Tbsp
2 Tbsp flour
Cream
1 cup
1/2 cup butter + 3/4 cup milk
Egg
1 whole
2 egg yolks
Flour
1 cup all purpose
1 cup + 2 Tbsp cake flour
Flour
1 cup cake flour
7/8 cup all purpose flour
Flour
1 cup self-rising Flour
1 cup flour (omit baking powder & salt)
Garlic
1 small clove
1/8 tsp garlic powder
Herbs
1 Tbsp fresh
1 tsp dried
Honey
1 cup
1 1/4 cups sugar + 1/4 cup liquid
Milk, fresh whole
1 cup
1 cup reconstituted dry milk + 2 tsp butter
Milk, whole
1 cup
1/2 cup evaporated milk + 1/2 cup water
Milk, sour
1 cup
1 Tbsp lemon juice or vinegar + sweet milk to make 1 cup
Minced Dry Onion (hydrated)
1 Tbsp instant
1 small fresh onion
Molasses
1 cup
1 cup honey
Mustard, prepared
1 Tbsp
1 tsp dry mustard
Ricotta Cheese
1 cup
1 cup cottage cheese + 1 Tbsp skim milk
Sour Cream
1 cup
1 cup yogurt
Sugar, Brown
1 cup
3/4 cup granulated sugar + 1/4 cup molasses
Sugar, Powdered
1 1/3 cups
1 cup granulated sugar
Yogurt
1 cup
1 cup buttermilk
vincent
http://www.fda.gov/oc/po/firmrecalls/landolakes04_09.html
Limited Voluntary Recall of Country Acres® Layer 16 Crumbles Poultry Feed
Contact:
Jeanne Forbis, Land O’Lakes, Inc. 651-481-2071
Dave Karpinski, Land O’Lakes, Inc. 651-481-2360
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE — (St. Paul, Minn.) April 24, 2009 – Land O’Lakes Purina Feed has initiated a limited voluntary recall of a single lot of a Country Acres® poultry feed product, due to the potential for higher than acceptable levels of salt. The presence of salt above acceptable levels can cause serious health issues, and at high levels, potential mortality in poultry.
The product was manufactured at a St. Joseph, Mo., feed plant and was distributed to dealers in a four-state region (northeastern Oklahoma, eastern / central Kansas, western Arkansas, and western Missouri). Dealers have been contacted and asked to hold these products and to notify and retrieve the product from customers. The affected product should be returned to the retail dealer and not used.
The product was distributed only in 50-pound bags and is typically used by small flock owners. The recalled product is identified as follows:
Formula No.
Item No.
Description
Lot No.
6514
0013357
Country Acres® Layer 16 Crumbles
9MAR19STJ3
Lot numbers are printed on the sewing strip of each bag. Lot numbers are formatted as follows: 9MAR19STJ3, 9=Year / MAR= Month / 19=Day of Month / STJ3 = Plant Code.
The recall was initiated after receiving a small number of customer complaints, which involved poultry mortality.
Customers who purchased these products will receive a full refund. For more information on the product recall, contact your local dealer or Customer Service at 1-800-227-8941 between the hours of 8:30 a.m. and 4 p.m. Central time.
#
Economic Collapse to Trigger Social Pandemonium
Lee Bellinger
(Editor’s Note: This urgent, time-sensitive briefing from Lee Bellinger, Publisher of Independent Living, reveals some deeply disturbing developments right under the surface. While, to some, the following might seem like sensationalist hogwash, to your editor, it is like “singing to the choir”. It would be foolish not to consider these possibilities. - JSB)
U.S. Preparing a Military Response to Coming Social Chaos
As the shocking confidential information contained in this briefing shows, the threat of social meltdown and chaos is so large a domestic law-enforcement arm of the U.S. military (referred to by The Army Times as the “Consequence Management Response Force”) has been created to deal with what U.S. officials believe to be a coming, unprecedented wave of massive social chaos.
Later I’ll show you why many Washington insiders (including officials directly involved in homeland security) are personally making emergency preparations for social chaos. In addition, outgoing Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson told Sen. James Inhofe and Rep. Brad Sherman that so much financial mayhem lies ahead U.S. troops may have to impose martial law to deal with social unrest.
Yes, U.S. Officials Are Quietly Preparing for BIG Trouble Ahead
A new report by the Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute states flatly the U.S. military must prepare for “a violent, strategic dislocation inside the United States” that could be provoked by “unforeseen economic collapse” or “loss of functioning political and legal order.”
Late last year, The Washington Post noted the incoming Obama Administration is going to “earmark” at least 20,000 troops returning from Iraq to deal with “domestic emergencies.” Since then, the Army Times has broken the story that the domestic emergency army unit has been increased to 80,000 troops, who are being trained right now in Georgia.
In short, U.S. officials expect big trouble ahead - but they are not warning the general public about the danger (much less urge the unsuspecting masses to make basic preparations).
A rare critic of the government’s keep-the-public-in-the-dark mentality is former head of the U.S. Commission on National Security, Stephen Flynn. He noted in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial: “Too many officials believe telling the truth to Americans about the risk would set off a nationwide panic. Thus, they keep us sheep in the dark for our own good.”
Boiled down, you need a real plan to deal with massive social dislocations that are headed our way. And you need to get started right now, because the government isn’t going to give you a heads-up.
Here’s Why Washington Expects to Use Troops Against Americans
Let me get straight to the point about the high probability of social chaos, what it will look like, and what you can do to not be among the millions of unsuspecting Americans who are going to get caught flat-footed.
You see, a government-consumer debt bubble 20+ years in the making is imploding - as desperate federal meddling to stave off financial collapse is “funded” by frantic funny-money printing to shower trillions of dollars over a restive public.
Even “mainstream” financial figures are finally admitting we may be in more than a recession. For example, the CEO of General Electric, Jeff Immelt, recently conceded the U.S. may be descending into a depression.
Until a few short months ago, official Washington wasn’t even using the “R” word. The “experts” are finally fessing up to what the rest of us can already see: Ghost malls springing up from coast to coast, with an estimated 148,000 store closures projected so far for 2009 - including Steve and Barrys, Sharper Image, Wicks, Levitz, CompUSA, Circuit City, Linens and Things, KB Toys, Whitehall Jewellers, and Shoe Pavilion.
Frightened U.S. policy-makers also note a number of giant chains are on the brink of bankruptcy for 2009, including Phillip Van Heusen (IZOD/Calvin Klein), Macys, Office Depot, Pacific Sunware, Bombay Company, Pep Boys, Sprint-Nextel service stores, Ethan Allen, Ann Taylor, Lane Bryant, Dillards, Starbucks, the Gap, Footlocker, and Home Depot.
Dire Unemployment Picture Foreshadows Social Chaos
John Williams of the authoritative Shadow Government Statistics notes that unfudged, un-manipulated government statistics suggests a whopping civilian unemployment rate of 17% - with a projected total to exceed 30% (during the Great Depression, unemployment approached an historic 25%).
In the U.S., job-shedding has now exceeded post-World War II levels and the January 28 Wall Street Journal warned: “One troubling sign is that the states that were first into recession - those with a heavy concentration of home building and manufacturing - are getting worse, not better...”
In December, the International Monetary Fund’s managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn warned of riots and unrest sweeping through Western countries as lower-income households are beset with credit constraints and rampant unemployment. (Such riots have already caused the government of Iceland to fall and triggered riots in Greece.)
Today’s Americans Don’t Resemble the Hardy Depression-Era Generation
Not to be politically-incorrect, but the simple truth is millions of Americans who’ve never known anything but prosperity and easy-money have a militant expectation that society “owes” them something. And with so many families on the margins of survival already, the speed of the downward unemployment spiral is downright ominous (and unprecedented).
Worse, there are few signs the taxpayer dependents of today have any of the self-reliance skills that saw the hardy Great Depression generation through the tough times.
In fact, there is mounting evidence tens of millions of low-income government dependents and many others infected with a sense of entitlement are prone to crime and violence - especially when it dawns on the masses there are not enough jobs and government promises of “relief” are as empty as the U.S. Treasury is bankrupt.
For example, in response to financially-troubled New York State making minor trims to its budget, an ugly 50,000+ mob took to the streets around city hall to demand higher taxes against the “rich.” (Similar protests were mounted in Albany, Buffalo, and White Plains.)
In just the last year, when fuel prices were soaring and metals such as platinum were exploding, gasoline thefts across the nation became rampant. Copper was being ripped off from construction sites, pipes were torn out of abandoned houses and catalytic converters containing trace elements of platinum were being shanghaied from parked cars all over the country.
Of course, the possibility of a full-scale depressionary unemployment is just one “trigger” threatening to cause society to come completely unglued.
Systemic Collapse is a Real Possibility: Other Shoes Are Getting Ready to Drop
It is far too dangerous to ignore the growing signs of impending national social chaos. Even after absorbing some of the unsettling facts in this briefing, you need to act calmly and decisively make sure you can get the things you need and protect what’s yours - with undertones of frantic - while you still can. The signs of trouble abound.
Congressional Quarterly notes that pension fund losses are about to spill out onto the front pages - with nearly as much financial exposure as that which brought down America’s banking giants.
It has not made much news yet, but the pension funds of millions of retirees is down by a whopping $1.9 trillion. This is why cities such as Philadelphia are quietly seeking federal money to bolster pension funds which CQ notes are 60% invested in the stock market - which itself has collapsed by a catastrophic 50% in just the last 18 months.
Not to scare the pants off you, but the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has quietly informed Congress that the “insurance” agency for private pension funds, the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, is at high risk of failure. (This will not become a “crisis” until desperate people start trying to tap early retirement money that is not there - for now the looming pension catastrophe remains a “dormant”
threat).
Worse, the former head of the U.S. Comptroller General Office, David Walker, essentially told Congress (before resigning in disgust) that the Social Security “Trust Fund” is a vault of IOUs; and Medicare will soon be effectively bankrupt.
State Governments Are Becoming Too Broke for Law-Enforcement
The American Association of Architects’ historically-reliable construction index has plunged 34.7% - a grim indication the commercial real estate market is the next shoe to drop, which analyst Mike Larson forecasts will lead to an “unstoppable chain reaction of bankruptcies.”
The reason I bring this up is because 46 states are already experiencing major budget shortfalls. And yet it is taxes from U.S.
commercial real estate on which local and state governments depend to fund fire, police and social services. (Not to mention major insurance carriers - many of which are going to go belly-up when the full extent of the commercial real estate bust hits their reserve portfolios.)
States such as California and Kansas don’t even have enough money to send out tax refund checks (much less properly fund police departments) and are coping with the biggest annual job loss in a single year since
1945 (down 2.8 million jobs in 2008 alone).
The Washington Post notes two out of three large police departments in U.S. cities are already reporting budget cuts and hiring freezes, even as 233 departments told the Police Executive Research Forum that they are noticing a major “uptick” in property crime which they attribute to financial unrest.
The National Center for the Victims of Crime reports a whopping 24% increase in calls from October 2007 to October 2008 as “job losses and economic stress factor into increased violence.”
In addition, cash-strapped states have been forced by collapsing tax revenue to release hardened criminals back into society, noted the Post. On February 21, The Charlotte Observer reported on a disturbing trend which is going on all over the country: Major budget cuts for jails even as criminality is on the rise.
The Observer story cited the closing of a youth detention center for violent offenders, an all-too-common “low-profile” budget-cutting practice going on all over the country.
More Evidence the You-Know-What is Going to Hit the Fan
Think about the widespread collapse of order and emergency services in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina - except on a national level. The implementation of gun-confiscation laws, looters and thugs terrorizing the elderly with impunity, besieged hospitals without power, doctors and medicine. People forcibly herded into “containment zones” and denied access to food, water, and medical attention. At least 45 patients died in one city-run hospital after being abandoned by doctors and staff.
More recently, a simple fuel pipeline break in America’s barely-functioning, antiquated energy infrastructure spawned major gasoline delivery disruptions throughout the entire Southeastern Seaboard region. For over six weeks, drivers could not find gasoline except by standing in line for hours to get just a few gallons of fuel.
The recent regional collapse of the U.S. fuel infrastructure is a major warning sign that the energy supply chain is stretched dangerously thin - which combined with financial unrest has the strong potential to create major disruptions in the food supply chain (most population centers have only three days of food available to the public through supermarkets - meaning panic runs on food are a distinct possibility as the potential for social chaos continues to mount).
If you think these scenarios cannot happen in the United States of America, talk with anyone who has ever been in the path of a hurricane. They will confirm that by the time the general public catches on to the danger, getting everyday items such as gasoline, batteries, plywood, medicine, water, and food becomes next to impossible. Social services, police protection, public transportation, and highway systems become next to useless.
When the Police Abandon Law-Abiding Neighborhoods to Mobs
And don’t even get me started on police protection. Past riots in Washington DC and Los Angeles portend a disturbing pattern when social chaos overwhelms order. The police almost always “pull back” and abandon entire neighborhoods to vicious mobs.
In the case of the 1992 Los Angeles Rodney King riots (as Caucasians and Asians were hunted down, robbed, and slaughtered), the police hunkered behind their defensive cordons as the murderous racist rage unfolded - the only outside contact law-abiding victims had in the riot zone were with intrepid news helicopters hovering overhead, broadcasting the racial programs on live TV.
You may even remember the only community to come out unscathed were sections of Los Angeles populated by Asian merchants - who fended off the mobs by placing shooters on the roofs of buildings within their defense perimeter. These heroic Korean merchants successfully protected their families, shops and homes. All because they knew how worthless bureaucrats truly are and made their own preparations. Where are you in this process?
The coming social chaos will magnify these problems a thousand-fold. In short, it is extremely important to be one step ahead of the general public during an unfolding crisis. And at least three long steps ahead of the government’s draconian, blunderbuss, freedom-stealing response.
Government Deliberately Keeps Public in the Dark About Multiple Threats to Public Order
Some Americans have learned from past history and are quietly making basic emergency preparations for social chaos. Private gun sales at all-time record highs. Safe makers and alarm and generator installers have never been so busy. Not even close.
Highly successful financial players such as commodities genius Jim Rogers now openly says the U.S. is heading for an inflationary holocaust.
Which is why, for over a year - as confidence in the U.S. financial and political system continues to evaporate - physical gold and silver have been flying off the shelves - not just in the United States but all over the globe. The unavailability of physical gold and silver has become so acute that major U.S. mints have either curtailed or stopped taking orders for new coins.
The Washington Elite Are Quietly Making Themselves More Self-Reliant
Now I want to share an important personal insight with you that will probably never make the news. You see, I belong to two Washington, D.C. membership organizations which date back to the 1800s - with members that include a smattering of cabinet officials, members of Congress, mid-level federal managers and many, many, retired former insiders.
This is how I first learned that many top-level Washington insiders - many of whom have been directly involved in developing the Homeland Security Department, do not have confidence in government preparations for social chaos.
I know this for a fact, not just because of my conversations with club members. I am also an acquaintance with a private contractor who has a booming specialty business which does nothing but work in posh DC neighborhoods, installing emergency back-up generators, freezers for food, and safes (Even a quick review of the DC yellow pages suggests that installing emergency generators and other survival precautions has become a prospering cottage industry in the Washington area.)
As one of my very best Hillsdale College professors would have mused: “What would lead so many influential Washington insiders (who are in a position to know) to seek out ways to become so much more self-reliant than the average citizen?”
Outgoing Vice President Dick Cheney’s Chilling Prediction
Of course, financial mayhem may be the least of America’s problems. Right after leaving office, Vice President Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of “perhaps hundreds of thousands of Americans” in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. “I think there is a high probability of such an attempt,” the straight-talking Cheney warned during an interview with Politico.
An important item buried deeply in The Washington Post recently noted there are already 20,000 commercially-available labs in the world where a single person could synthesize any existing virus. In those same 20,000 labs, five people with $2 million can create an advanced pathogen-meaning a virus that will be able to infect even those people who have been immunized with conventional vaccines, and kill perhaps a million of them.
Former Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy Thompson confessed to a reporter he “worries every single night” about a possible bioterror attack on the U.S. food supply. “For the life of me,” he said, “I cannot understand why the terrorists have not attacked our food supply because it is the easiest thing to do”.
Two Categories of People: The Prepared vs. the Clueless
Whatever form the “triggering event” takes, not only will millions of Americans suddenly discover they are completely on their own, they will be completely unprepared for the government’s draconian response to social chaos.
So there are two categories of people in America right now: Category 1 are the millions of clueless who blissfully assume their political overlords are going to take care of them. These are the people most likely to get caught flat-footed when all hell breaks loose. Category 2 are prudent, savvy people who are taking basic steps toward making their families and their households more self-reliant.
http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/04.09/pandemonium.html
>>> So there are two categories of people in America right now: Category 1 are the millions of clueless who blissfully assume their political overlords are going to take care of them. These are the people most likely to get caught flat-footed when all hell breaks loose. Category 2 are prudent, savvy people who are taking basic steps toward making their families and their households more self-reliant. <<<
Thank You for posting this insight.
Stepped up prep 400%.. !!
We aren’t in the city but a small rural community where there are more guns and cows than people. Everyone pretty much knows everyone else that they’re not already related to.
I plan on doing a bit more stocking up once mr.mm gets paid Thurs. More veggies are going in the garden and I’ll be hitting my favorite outlet for grains and flour, US grown.
>>>have stories like this always been there or is it more prevalent lately?<<<
Not like this!!!
Y2K X (many multiples)
IMO
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/51913.php
“Four years ago, I became convinced that vitamin D was unique in the vitamin world by virtue of three facts. First, it’s the only known precursor of a potent steroid hormone, calcitriol, or activated vitamin D. Most other vitamins are antioxidants or co-factors in enzyme reactions. Activated vitamin D - like all steroid hormones - damasks the genome, turning protein production on and off, as your body requires. That is, vitamin D regulates genetic expression in hundreds of tissues throughout your body. This means it has as many potential mechanisms of action as genes it damasks.”
Article Date: 15 Sep 2006 - 0:00 PDT
In early April of 2005, after a particularly rainy spring, an influenza epidemic (epi: upon, demic: people) exploded through the maximum-security hospital for the criminally insane where I have worked for the last ten years. It was not the pandemic (pan: all, demic: people) we all fear, just an epidemic. The world is waiting and governments are preparing for the next pandemic. A severe influenza pandemic will kill many more Americans than died in the World Trade Centers, the Iraq war, the Vietnam War, and Hurricane Katrina combined, perhaps a million people in the USA alone. Such a disaster would tear the fabric of American society. Our entire country might resemble the Superdome or Bourbon Street after Hurricane Katrina.
It’s only a question of when a pandemic will come, not if it will come. Influenza A pandemics come every 30 years or so, severe ones every hundred years or so. The last pandemic, the Hong Kong flu, occurred in 1968 - killing 34,000 Americans. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic killed more than 500,000 Americans. So many millions died in other countries, they couldn’t bury the bodies. Young healthy adults, in the prime of their lives in the morning, drowning in their own inflammation by noon, grossly discolored by sunset, were dead at midnight. Their body’s own broad-spectrum natural antibiotics, called antimicrobial peptides, seemed nowhere to be found. An overwhelming immune response to the influenza virus - white blood cells releasing large amounts of inflammatory agents called cytokines and chemokines into the lungs of the doomed - resulted in millions of deaths in 1918.
As I am now a psychiatrist, and no longer a general practitioner, I was not directly involved in fighting the influenza epidemic in our hospital. However, our internal medicine specialists worked overtime as they diagnosed and treated a rapidly increasing number of stricken patients. Our Chief Medical Officer quarantined one ward after another as more and more patients were gripped with the chills, fever, cough, and severe body aches that typifies the clinical presentation of influenza A.
Epidemic influenza kills a million people in the world every year by causing pneumonia, “the captain of the men of death.” These epidemics are often explosive; the word influenza comes from Italian (Medieval Latin ?nfluentia) or influence, because of the belief that the sudden and abrupt epidemics were due to the influence of some extraterrestrial force. One seventeenth century observer described it well when he wrote, “suddenly a Distemper arose, as if sent by some blast from the stars, which laid hold on very many together: that in some towns, in the space of a week, above a thousand people fell sick together.”
I guess our hospital was under luckier stars as only about 12% of our patients were infected and no one died. However, as the epidemic progressed, I noticed something unusual. First, the ward below mine was infected, and then the ward on my right, left, and across the hall - but no patients on my ward became ill. My patients had intermingled with patients from infected wards before the quarantines. The nurses on my unit cross-covered on infected wards. Surely, my patients were exposed to the influenza A virus. How did my patients escape infection from what some think is the most infectious of all the respiratory viruses?
My patients were no younger, no healthier, and in no obvious way different from patients on other wards. Like other wards, my patients are mostly African Americans who came from the same prisons and jails as patients on the infected wards. They were prescribed a similar assortment of powerful psychotropic medications we use throughout the hospital to reduce the symptoms of psychosis, depression, and violent mood swings and to try to prevent patients from killing themselves or attacking other patients and the nursing staff. If my patients were similar to the patients on all the adjoining wards, why didn’t even one of my patients catch the flu?
A short while later, a group of scientists from UCLA published a remarkable paper in the prestigious journal, Nature. The UCLA group confirmed two other recent studies, showing that a naturally occurring steroid hormone - a hormone most of us take for granted - was, in effect, a potent antibiotic. Instead of directly killing bacteria and viruses, the steroid hormone under question increases the body’s production of a remarkable class of proteins, called antimicrobial peptides. The 200 known antimicrobial peptides directly and rapidly destroy the cell walls of bacteria, fungi, and viruses, including the influenza virus, and play a key role in keeping the lungs free of infection. The steroid hormone that showed these remarkable antibiotic properties was plain old vitamin D.
All of the patients on my ward had been taking 2,000 units of vitamin D every day for several months or longer. Could that be the reason none of my patients caught the flu? I then contacted Professors Reinhold Vieth and Ed Giovannucci and told them of my observations. They immediately advised me to collect data from all the patients in the hospital on 2,000 units of vitamin D, not just the ones on my ward, to see if the results were statistically significant. It turns out that the observations on my ward alone were of borderline statistical significance and could have been due to chance alone. Administrators at our hospital agreed, and are still attempting to collect data from all the patients in the hospital on 2,000 or more units of vitamin D at the time of the epidemic..
Four years ago, I became convinced that vitamin D was unique in the vitamin world by virtue of three facts. First, it’s the only known precursor of a potent steroid hormone, calcitriol, or activated vitamin D. Most other vitamins are antioxidants or co-factors in enzyme reactions. Activated vitamin D - like all steroid hormones - damasks the genome, turning protein production on and off, as your body requires. That is, vitamin D regulates genetic expression in hundreds of tissues throughout your body. This means it has as many potential mechanisms of action as genes it damasks.
Second, vitamin D does not exist in appreciable quantities in normal human diets. True, you can get several thousand units in a day if you feast on sardines for breakfast, herring for lunch and salmon for dinner. The only people who ever regularly consumed that much fish are peoples, like the Inuit, who live at the extremes of latitude. The milk Americans depend on for their vitamin D contains no naturally occurring vitamin D; instead, the U.S. government requires fortified milk to be supplemented with vitamin D, but only with what we now know to be a paltry 100 units per eight-ounce glass.
The vitamin D steroid hormone system has always had its origins in the skin, not in the mouth. Until quite recently, when dermatologists and governments began warning us about the dangers of sunlight, humans made enormous quantities of vitamin D where humans have always made it, where naked skin meets the ultraviolet B radiation of sunlight. We just cannot get adequate amounts of vitamin D from our diet. If we don’t expose ourselves to ultraviolet light, we must get vitamin D from dietary supplements.
The third way vitamin D is different from other vitamins is the dramatic difference between natural vitamin D nutrition and the modern one. Today, most humans only make about a thousand units of vitamin D a day from sun exposure; many people, such as the elderly or African Americans, make much less than that. How much did humans normally make? A single, twenty-minute, full body exposure to summer sun will trigger the delivery of 20,000 units of vitamin D into the circulation of most people within 48 hours. Twenty thousand units, that’s the single most important fact about vitamin D.. Compare that to the 100 units you get from a glass of milk, or the several hundred daily units the U.S. government recommend as “Adequate Intake.” It’s what we call an “order of magnitude” difference.
Humans evolved naked in sub-equatorial Africa, where the sun shines directly overhead much of the year and where our species must have obtained tens of thousands of units of vitamin D every day, in spite of our skin developing heavy melanin concentrations (racial pigmentation) for protecting the deeper layers of the skin. Even after humans migrated to temperate latitudes, where our skin rapidly lightened to allow for more rapid vitamin D production, humans worked outdoors. However, in the last three hundred years, we began to work indoors; in the last one hundred years, we began to travel inside cars; in the last several decades, we began to lather on sunblock and consciously avoid sunlight. All of these things lower vitamin D blood levels. The inescapable conclusion is that vitamin D levels in modern humans are not just low - they are aberrantly low.
About three years ago, after studying all I could about vitamin D, I began testing my patient’s vitamin D blood levels and giving them literature on vitamin D deficiency. All their blood levels were low, which is not surprising as vitamin D deficiency is practically universal among dark-skinned people who live at temperate latitudes. Furthermore, my patients come directly from prison or jail, where they get little opportunity for sun exposure. After finding out that all my patients had low levels, many profoundly low, I started educating them and offering to prescribe them 2,000 units of vitamin D a day, the U.S. government’s “Upper Limit.”
Could vitamin D be the reason none of my patients got the flu? In the last several years, dozens of medical studies have called attention to worldwide vitamin D deficiency, especially among African Americans and the elderly, the two groups most likely to die from influenza. Cancer, heart disease, stroke, autoimmune disease, depression, chronic pain, depression, gum disease, diabetes, hypertension, and a number of other diseases have recently been associated with vitamin D deficiency. Was it possible that influenza was as well?
Then I thought of three mysteries that I first learned in medical school at the University of North Carolina: (1) although the influenza virus exists in the population year-round, influenza is a wintertime illnesses; (2) children with vitamin D deficient rickets are much more likely to suffer from respiratory infections; (3) the elderly in most countries are much more likely to die in the winter than the summer (excess wintertime mortality), and most of that excess mortality, although listed as cardiac, is, in fact, due to influenza.
Could vitamin D explain these three mysteries, mysteries that account for hundreds of thousands of deaths every year? Studies have found the influenza virus is present in the population year-around; why is it a wintertime illness? Even the common cold got its name because it is common in cold weather and rare in the summer. Vitamin D blood levels are at their highest in the summer but reach their lowest levels during the flu and cold season. Could such a simple explanation explain these mysteries?
The British researcher, Dr. R. Edgar Hope-Simpson, was the first to document the most mysterious feature of epidemic influenza, its wintertime surfeit and summertime scarcity. He theorized that an unknown “seasonal factor” was at work, a factor that might be affecting innate human immunity. Hope-Simpson was a general practitioner who became famous in the late 1960’s after he discovered the cause of shingles. British authorities bestowed every prize they had on him, not only because of the importance of his discovery, but because he made the discovery own his own, without the benefit of a university appointment, and without any formal training in epidemiology (the detective branch of medicine that methodically searches for clues about the cause of disease).
After his work on shingles, Hope-Simpson spent the rest of his working life studying influenza. He concluded a “seasonal factor” was at work, something that was regularly and predictably impairing human immunity in the winter and restoring it in the summer. He discovered that communities widely separated by longitude, but which shared similar latitude, would simultaneously develop influenza. He discovered that influenza epidemics in Great Britain in the 17th and 18th century occurred simultaneously in widely separated communities, before modern transportation could possibly explain its rapid dissemination. Hope-Simpson concluded a “seasonal factor” was triggering these epidemics. Whatever it was, he was certain that the deadly “crop” of influenza that sprouts around the winter solstice was intimately involved with solar radiation. Hope-Simpson predicted that, once discovered, the “seasonal factor” would “provide the key to understanding most of the influenza problems confronting us.”
Hope-Simpson had no way of knowing that vitamin D has profound effects on human immunity, no way of knowing that it increases production of broad-spectrum antimicrobial peptides, peptides that quickly destroy the influenza virus. We have only recently learned how vitamin D increases production of antimicrobial peptides while simultaneously preventing the immune system from releasing too many inflammatory cells, called chemokines and cytokines, into infected lung tissue.
In 1918, when medical scientists did autopsies on some of the fifty million people who died during the 1918 flu pandemic, they were amazed to find destroyed respiratory tracts; sometimes these inflammatory cytokines had triggered the complete destruction of the normal epithelial cells lining the respiratory tract.. It was as if the flu victims had been attacked and killed by their own immune systems. This is the severe inflammatory reaction that vitamin D has recently been found to prevent.
I subsequently did what physicians have done for centuries. I experimented, first on myself and then on my family, trying different doses of vitamin D to see if it has any effects on viral respiratory infections. After that, as the word spread, several of my medical colleagues experimented on themselves by taking three-day courses of pharmacological doses (2,000 units per kilogram per day) of vitamin D at the first sign of the flu. I also asked numerous colleagues and friends who were taking physiological doses of vitamin D (5,000 units per day in the winter and less, or none, in the summer) if they ever got colds or the flu, and, if so, how severe the infections were. I became convinced that physiological doses of vitamin D reduce the incidence of viral respiratory infections and that pharmacological doses significantly ameliorate the symptoms of some viral respiratory infections if taken early in the course of the illness. However, such observations are so personal, so likely to be biased, that they are worthless science.
As I waited for the hospital to finish collecting data from all the patients taking vitamin D at the time of the outbreak - to see if it really reduced the incidence of influenza - I decided to research the literature thoroughly, finding all the clues in the world’s medical literature that indicated if vitamin D played any role in preventing influenza or other viral respiratory infections. I worked on the paper for over a year, writing it with Professor Edward Giovannucci of Harvard, Professor Reinhold Vieth of the University of Toronto, Professor Michael Holick of Boston University, Professor Cedric Garland of U.C., San Diego, as well as Dr. John Umhau of the National Institute of Health, Sasha Madronich of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and Dr. Bill Grant at the Sunlight, Nutrition and Health Research Center. After numerous revisions, we submitted our paper to the same widely respected journal where Dr. Hope-Simpson published most of his work several decades ago.
Epidemiology and Infection, known as The Journal of Hygiene in Hope-Simpson’s day, recently published our paper. The editor, Professor Norman Noah, knew Dr. Hope-Simpson and helped tremendously with the paper. In the paper, we detailed our theory that vitamin D is Hope-Simpson’s long forgotten “seasonal stimulus.” We proposed that annual fluctuations in vitamin D levels explain the seasonality of influenza. The periodic seasonal fluctuations in 25-hydroxy-vitamin D levels, which cause recurrent and predictable wintertime vitamin D deficiency, predispose human populations to influenza epidemics. We raised the possibility that influenza is a symptom of vitamin D deficiency in the same way that an unusual form of pneumonia (pneumocystis carinii) is a symptom of AIDS. That is, we theorized that George Bernard Shaw was right when he said, “the characteristic microbe of a disease might be a symptom instead of a cause.”
In the paper, we propose that vitamin D explains the following 14 observations:
1. Why the flu predictably occurs in the months following the winter solstice, when vitamin D levels are at their lowest,
2. Why it disappears in the months following the summer solstice,
3. Why influenza is more common in the tropics during the rainy season,
4. Why the cold and rainy weather associated with El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), which drives people indoors and lowers vitamin D blood levels, is associated with influenza,
5. Why the incidence of influenza is inversely correlated with outdoor temperatures,
6. Why children exposed to sunlight are less likely to get colds,
7. Why cod liver oil (which contains vitamin D) reduces the incidence of viral respiratory infections,
8. Why Russian scientists found that vitamin D-producing UVB lamps reduced colds and flu in schoolchildren and factory workers,
9. Why Russian scientists found that volunteers, deliberately infected with a weakened flu virus - first in the summer and then again in the winter - show significantly different clinical courses in the different seasons,
10. Why the elderly who live in countries with high vitamin D consumption, like Norway, are less likely to die in the winter,
11. Why children with vitamin D deficiency and rickets suffer from frequent respiratory infections,
12. Why an observant physician (Rehman), who gave high doses of vitamin D to children who were constantly sick from colds and the flu, found the treated children were suddenly free from infection,
13. Why the elderly are so much more likely to die from heart attacks in the winter rather than in the summer,
14. Why African Americans, with their low vitamin D blood levels, are more likely to die from influenza and pneumonia than Whites are.
Although our paper discusses the possibility that physiological doses of vitamin D (5,000 units a day) may prevent colds and the flu, and that physicians might find pharmacological doses of vitamin D (2,000 units per kilogram of body weight per day for three days) useful in treating some of the one million people who die in the world every year from influenza, we remind readers that it is only a theory. Like all theories, our theory must withstand attempts to be disproved with dispassionately conducted and well-controlled scientific experiments.
However, as vitamin D deficiency has repeatedly been associated with many of the diseases of civilization, we point out that it is not too early for physicians to aggressively diagnose and adequately treat vitamin D deficiency. We recommend that enough vitamin D be taken daily to maintain 25-hydroxy vitamin D levels at levels normally achieved through summertime sun exposure (50 ng/ml). For many persons, such as African Americans and the elderly, this will require up to 5,000 units daily in the winter and less, or none, in the summer, depending on summertime sun exposure.
By: J. J. Cannell
Acknowldegement: We wish to thank Professor Norman Noah of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Professor Robert Scragg of the University of Auckland and Professor Robert Heaney of Creighton University for reviewing the manuscript and making many useful suggestions.
— Dr. John Cannell, Atascadero State Hospital, 10333 El Camino Real, Atascadero, CA 93422, USA, 805 468-2061, jcannell@dmhash.state.ca.us
— Professor Reinhold Vieth, Mount Sinai Hospital, Pathology and Laboratory Medicine, Department of Medicine, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
— Dr. John Umhau, Laboratory of Clinical and Translational Studies, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, MD
— Professor Michael Holick, Departments of Medicine and Physiology, Boston University School of Medicine, Boston, MA, USA
— Dr. Bill Grant, SUNARC, San Francisco, CA
— Dr. Sasha Madronich, Atmospheric Chemistry Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO, USA
— Professor Cedric Garland, Department of Family and Preventive Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA
— Professor Edward Giovannucci, Departments of Nutrition and Epidemiology, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA
http://www.vitamindcouncil.com/
Cannell JJ, Vieth R, Umhau JC, Holick MF, Grant WB, Madronich S, Garland CF, and Giovanucci E. Epidemic Influenza and Vitamin D. Epidemiol Infect. 2006 Sep 7;:1-12 (Epub ahead of print)
Thanks .... note to self ... Vitamin D tablets to purchase.
You’re most welcome. I feel like this post has been spammed over FR but if it’s true, it’s vital to let everyone know!
Mexico Says Suspected Swine Flu Deaths Now At 149 (Schools now closed nationwide!)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2239002/posts
Nevermind. Please excuse my ADD. The article only mentioned SEVERAL times to take 2000 units, at least. Duh. Going shopping.....
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