Influenza affects pigs, birds in China, kills man in Vietnam(Avian Flu into Pigs)

(Kyodo) _ Bird flu virus was found in pigs bred in China's Hunan Province, which means the virus could be a step closer to infecting human in a large scale, according to reports in Hong Kong on Thursday, while Vietnam reported the first human death from the A H3 strain of bird flu.

Ming Pao Daily News quoted an interview on China's Phoenix Satellite TV in which a deputy agricultural minister in Hunan admitted the bird flu virus had been found in pigs for the first time.

Local and foreign health officials are still investigating whether a 12-year-old girl, her brother and another man in the province were infected with bird flu earlier last month. The girl died after eating a sick chicken, while the other two recovered from flu like illnesses.

The report said China's health ministry was notified of the pig infections and scientists were inspecting pigs in the surrounding area, but the provincial agricultural ministry later told Phoenix TV that the official who exposed the pig infections "made a mistake" and retracted what the official said.

A spokesman from the farm ministry said Thursday they have not gathered enough information to disclose further details.

"What has happened is still not very clear to us," the spokesman, who refused to be identified, said. ADVERTISEMENT

The health ministry also refused to comment on the report and the Hong Kong government said it has yet to receive any notification about pigs infected with bird flu in Hunan.

Hong Kong had 18 people infected with the deadly bird flu virus H5N1 in 1997 -- six of them died -- and there are signs the virus is regaining its strength and spreading among migratory birds this fall from Russia to North America.

In Hanoi, a local health official who refused to be identified, reported a 43-year-old man has died of the type A H3 strain of bird flu, the first person in Vietnam to die of that virus strain.

The man from the northern city Haiphong was admitted to a hospital Nov. 1 and died the following day after being transferred to Viet-Tiep Hospital, an official at the hospital told Kyodo News.

The man had developed symptoms of high fever and breathing difficulties on his way back from Vung Tau where he had eaten chicken.

Samples from the patient were sent to the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology in Hanoi and test results confirmed he was infected with the type A H3 virus, the hospital official said.

At least one H3 virus currently circulating is said to be a variant of the "Hong Hong flu" virus prevalent in 1968 and has been called the "Fujian flu."

A total of 42 Vietnamese people have been killed by the often dangerous H5N1 virus since the first outbreak of that avian flu strain hit the country in 2003.

The World Health Organization has warned that up to 7 million people may die if a flu pandemic caused by avian influenza hits the world as humans do not have immunity against the virus.

Lo Wing-lok, an infectious disease expert in Hong Kong, said it is "not unexpected" that the pigs in Hunan could be infected with bird flu virus.

"Farmers do not separate their pigs from poultry in Hunan, making it possible for a chicken disease to infect pigs," Lo said. "In fact, pigs in Indonesia had been reported having contracted bird flu virus in 2004, where farmers placed the chicken cages on top of where they bred the pigs and fed the pigs with chicken droppings."

Since pigs can carry flu virus from different species, the virus could cross-mutate and allow bird flu to gain the ability to infect human, according to scientists.

"More species of bird flu virus found in pigs means higher chance for virus mutation and for humans to be infected," Lo said.

In Beijing, the World Organization for Animal Health reported late Wednesday that another 2,150 Chinese chickens have caught bird flu and 1,100 have died this week.

According to a Chinese Ministry of Agriculture report filed with the organization, a French intergovernmental disease information network, poultry in two villages in Liaoning Province of northeastern China fell sick with highly pathogenic avian influenza Sunday after exposure to wild birds.

China's National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory in Harbin diagnosed the disease, the report said.

Authorities believe 11,590 birds in the affected areas are susceptible to the disease, and they destroyed 500,000 birds to prevent any disease spread, the farm ministry said.

They also have quarantined, disinfected and sprayed the affected areas. About 198 million animals have been vaccinated in the province.

This fall, China has reported other poultry bird flu outbreaks in Anhui and Hunan provinces plus the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.

On Oct. 26, 8,940 poultry in another village in Liaoning Province died of bird flu and local authorities killed 369,900 birds in the Heishan County village to prevent the disease from spreading.

China has no reported cases of human infection of bird flu, which has occurred in Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia and Cambodia since December 2003, with at least 62 of the 121 patients dying.

Please pass this along , spread the word.

Hi cleel,

I got a very interesting article from another Freeper that exposes the lies of the Democrats/Liberals/MSM and those of the " Political Correctness " crowd.
I told Freeper ( defconw ) that I will do my best to help spread the word, and send this to as many people as I can.
We need to organize now to counter the Liberals lies, Democrats lies, MSM lies, not only the lies that they are trowing at President Bush and his administation, but, against all Conservatives/Republicans, and most important, those who love America.
We need to shout this from the roof tops.
Please send this to as many people as you can.

Re: The Tony Snow Show, Thursday, November 10, 2005 From defconw | 11/10/2005 12:33:51 PM PST replied

Check this out.

Unmasking Political Correctness by William S. Lind

In this edition, Paul Weyrich refers to "cultural Marxism." He asked me, as Free Congress Foundation's resident historian, to write this column explaining what cultural Marxism is and where it came from.
In order to understand what something is and what to do about it, you have to know its history.
Cultural Marxism is a branch of western Marxism, different from the Marxism-Leninism of the old Soviet Union.
It is commonly known as "multiculturalism" or, less formally, Political Correctness.
From its beginning, the promoters of cultural Marxism have known they could be more effective if they concealed the Marxist nature of their work, hence the use of terms such as "multiculturalism."
Cultural Marxism began not in the 1960s but in 1919, immediately after World War I.
Marxist theory had predicted that in the event of a big European war, the working class all over Europe would rise up to overthrow capitalism and create communism. But when war came in 1914, that did not happen.
When it finally did happen in Russia in 1917, workers in other European countries did not support it.
What had gone wrong?
Independently, two Marxist theorists, Antonio Gramsci in Italy and Georg Lukacs in Hungary, came to the same answer: Western culture and the Christian religion had so blinded the working class to its true, Marxist class interest that Communism was impossible in the West until both could be destroyed.
In 1919, Lukacs asked, "Who will save us from Western civilization?" That same year, when he became Deputy Commissar for Culture in the short-lived Bolshevik Bela Kun government in Hungary, one of Lukacs's first acts was to introduce sex education into Hungary's public schools.
He knew that if he could destroy the West's traditional sexual morals, he would have taken a giant step toward destroying Western culture itself.
In 1923, inspired in part by Lukacs, a group of German Marxists established a think tank at Frankfurt University in Germany called the Institute for Social Research.
This institute, soon known simply as the Frankfurt School, would become the creator of cultural Marxism.
To translate Marxism from economic into cultural terms, the members of the Frankfurt School - - Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Wilhelm Reich, Eric Fromm and Herbert Marcuse, to name the most important - - had to contradict Marx on several points.
They argued that culture was not just part of what Marx had called society's "superstructure," but an independent and very important variable.
They also said that the working class would not lead a Marxist revolution, because it was becoming part of the middle class, the hated bourgeoisie.
Who would? In the 1950s, Marcuse answered the question: a coalition of blacks, students, feminist women and homosexuals.
Fatefully for America, when Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, the Frankfurt School fled - - and reestablished itself in New York City.
There, it shifted its focus from destroying traditional Western culture in Germany to destroying it in the United States.
To do so, it invented "Critical Theory."
What is the theory?
To criticize every traditional institution, starting with the family, brutally and unremittingly, in order to bring them down.
It wrote a series of "studies in prejudice," which said that anyone who believes in traditional Western culture is prejudiced, a "racist" or "sexist" of "fascist" - - and is also mentally ill.
Most importantly, the Frankfurt School crossed Marx with Freud, taking from psychology the technique of psychological conditioning.
Today, when the cultural Marxists want to do something like "normalize" homosexuality, they do not argue the point philosophically.
They just beam television show after television show into every American home where the only normal-seeming white male is a homosexual (the Frankfurt School's key people spent the war years in Hollywood).
After World War II ended, most members of the Frankfurt School went back to Germany.
But Herbert Marcuse stayed in America.
He took the highly abstract works of other Frankfurt School members and repackaged them in ways college students could read and understand.
In his book "Eros and Civilization," he argued that by freeing sex from any restraints, we could elevate the pleasure principle over the reality principle and create a society with no work, only play (Marcuse coined the phrase, "Make love, not war").
Marcuse also argued for what he called "liberating tolerance," which he defined as tolerance for all ideas coming from the Left and intolerance for any ideas coming from the Right.
In the 1960s, Marcuse became the chief "guru" of the New Left, and he injected the cultural Marxism of the Frankfurt School into the baby boom generation, to the point where it is now America's state ideology.
The future goal of conservatism must include unmasking multiculturalism and political correctness and tell the American people what they really are: cultural Marxism.
Its goal remains what Lukacs and Gramsci set in 1919: destroying Western culture and the Christian religion.
It has already made vast strides toward that goal.
But if the average American found out that political correctness is a form of Marxism, different from the Marxism of the Soviet Union but Marxism nonetheless, it would be in trouble.
The next conservatism needs to reveal the man behind the curtain - - old Karl Marx himself.
William S. Lind is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism of the Free Congress Foundation.
The Free Congress Foundation's website,

www.freecongress.org,

Includes a short book on the history and nature of cultural Marxism, edited by William S. Lind.
It is formatted so you can print it out as a book and share it with your family and friends.

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