Posted on 05/04/2005 5:24:50 AM PDT by genefromjersey
Marburg : Malice or Malpractice ?
I entered some correspondence today,concerning possible origins of the Angola Marburg epidemic: an outbreak that started among very young children,and that is killing anywhere from 89% to 97% of those it infects-(depending on whose stats you trust.)
This was the response I got.
" I think if you check back, previous Marburg epidemics have been in places where there weren't any children, e.g. gold-mining camps.
WHO has reported that traditional healers are re-using non-sterilized syringes & needles to give their medicines to victims, hence spreading the disease, also some local doctors have not been using proper precautions & have become exposed.
Clearly there was an index case who caught the virus somewhere out there, went to hospital and started a chain of contamination.
But ProMed won't get into speculation about where & how the index case got it from, in the absence of any hard evidence."
It would seem ProMed,which is ( I believe) maintained by the Federation of American Scientists,has now adopted the ludicrous proposition that :
There was an adult Marburg patient; Needles were stuck in this patient for incomprehensible reasons; The self-same needles were then used to inject the (now dead) children-again for incomprehensible reasons; Maybe the "native healers" (witchdoctors) were responsible.
I've given serious thought to other possibilities,including this one :
The infection began with children who were in some sort of daycare/nursery situation. (Angola is definitely the sort of place where both parents must hustle if the family is to survive.)
Powdered milk and/or powdered protein drink was served to the children.This is very common in 3rd world countries.
The powder was contaminated-with Marburg , by unknown means.When the children drank it,their doom was sealed.
There was a case a few years ago in the back-country of India:children were dying mysteriously.The mystery poison killing them was finally identified as a mycotoxin:the product of a fungus,which had contaminated their powdered milk.
This case was "baffling" to the world medical community,until proper testing was done.
So how did our hypothetical Marburg get into our equally hypothetical powdered milk ?
I doubt we'll ever know.There is no way to construct a "chain of evidence" on bulk stores of powdered milk,and thereby establish whether malice or "malpractice" was involved.
Clearly,there is little interest in the origins of this outbreak;nor is there likely to be,as long as the World Health Organization can shrug and (inferentially) blame "native healers".
Powdered milk and/or powdered protein drink was served to the children.This is very common in 3rd world countries.
True enough albeit it has been proven over and over again that it is not the actual, physical powered drink that kills/sickens those it is given to but the fact that the powder is not mixed with pure,clean water but with local, untreated water; which is many time straight river water.
The powder was contaminated-with Marburg , by unknown means.When the children drank it,their doom was sealed.... There was a case a few years ago in the back-country of India:children were dying mysteriously.The mystery poison killing them was finally identified as a mycotoxin:the product of a fungus,which had contaminated their powdered milk.
Again, the tail does not wag to dog. If I were a betting woman I would lay good money down on the source of the fungus not being the powdered milk, per se but the conditions whereupon this milk was stored and/or the potable quality of the water used to reconstitute it and/or the cleanliness of the vessels used to store and serve the liquid.
No quarrel there ! In the Indian episode,poor storage conditions during an unusually heavy monsoon season was pretty much the culprit.
The contamination (still hypothetical,or course)would have probably occurred not long before mixing-or,as you suggest-at the time of mixing.
WHO doesn't want to get into little details like this-even if it could save thousands of lives down the road.
Oh, of course! Where's the money and/or notoriety in discovering that the cause of the victim's malady is, in fact, the actions of the "victim" himself; nowhere more so than when 3rd world is involved.
There is also the problem (Most vexing !)of how the UN kleptocracy can profit from this...this sort of thing !
Excellent vanity. Would it be okay with you if I post a link to it on the Marburg Surveillance Project thread?
Please do...and ping.
Ping to a very interesting vanity by genefromjersey.
I'll put a link to this thread on the Marburg Surveillance Thread, fyi.
Can't have anything to with traditional healers or they'd all be dead. We have only one report of a dead healer in Songo. And we have several reports of MSF/WHO reaching out to (apparently alive) traditional healers in Uige/Elsewhere.
Hmmmm....one dead healer, 17 (or 19) dead official health workers, including two (at least) doctors....
Oh, how I wish this thread had been posted on the main thread...I'd really like everyone to be seeing your posts...
one moment .... let me adjust my tinfoil ... krinkle krinkle ...
Marburg .... a little town in Germany where "somehow" a "new" virus just sort of popped up a few years ago.
Of course the lab monkeys brought it with them from the jungle ...
Does this sound a little fishy to anybody but me?
And then you have got to field test these things, even the a-bomb had to be exploded a time or 2 to make sure it would work , and yet be "controlable".
Lets just hope that they really do have an "off" switch.
"New" diseases are very often new only to us "Europeans".
Before it was called Marburg, this virus was probably called "whatever-it-is-that's-killing-off-those-stupid-monkeys".
A lab in Marburg had some of those stupid monkeys,and made 2 important discoveries: the monkeys were sick,and the disease they had could pass to humans via simple air circulation.
The "aerosol" capability excited a lot of the bioweapons people. Russia,South Africa,and Cuba are SAID to have experimented with it.
There is no known vaccine: a fact that would discourage most bioweaponeers.( It's one thing to experiment with a virus in a well designed high biosafety lab;quite another to tinker with it in the shed,or load it into projectiles,or be anywhere near it if you're not wearing a "space suit".
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