This guy is their leader...
Posted on 03/04/2009 12:11:48 PM PST by Mother Abigail
PANDI, Bulacan — At least six members of the so-called "depopulation team" at Win Farm in this town where 6,000 pigs are infected with the dreaded Ebola Reston virus have been suffering from "some kind of illness," a health officer said.
Dr. Joy Gomez, public health officer of Bulacan, confirmed at yesterday’s press briefing that six members of the team have experienced dizziness, headache, and fatigue.
The sickness experienced by the workers might be due to the protective suits that they are wearing, Gomez said, adding that the discomfort caused by the suits, which are uncomfortably hot, could become unbearable when the workers are near a fire pit and working under the sun.
Gomez did not say if the sickness might have been caused by the Ebola Reston virus.
The health of the depopulation team, Gomez said, is closely monitored by medical response teams.
She said that workers entering the "hot zone of the farm," where the depopulation processes are going, are subjected to thorough health checkup before they are allowed to proceed to the work area.
Once some symptoms are noted, the workers are immediately ordered to take a rest and undergo further medical tests.
Senior Supt. Allen B. Bantolo, Bulacan police director, said that Supt. Manaranay Lopez of the 306th Provincial Mobile Group of the Bulacan Police Office said that security is very strict in the area.
He said they have specific orders not to let anyone leave and enter the farm even if the depopulation operation has been completed.
Bantolo said that the airspace over the farm has been declared a "no-fly zone" by the Air Transport Office and that anyone found violating it will be dealt accordingly.
The license of the pilot may be suspended and the aircraft may be grounded.
As of Tuesday night, the team of experts has already killed 2,663 pigs. At the rate that the process is progressing, authorities expect to complete the depopulation by Friday night.
The team carries out two shifts of the four-hour process – from gathering the pigs to burning them. The first shift starts at 5 a.m. and ends at 9 a.m., while the team resumes for the second shift at 4 p.m. and ends it at 8 p.m.
The government had initially planned to kill around 6,000 hogs in the process that would eventually cost the state about P16 million to P17 million.
But Davinio Catbagan, director of the Agriculture department’s Bureau of Animal Industry, said by the time they conclude the depopulation on Friday, the toll of the slaughtered pigs would have reached to 6,500.
Health workers noticed that some sows continued giving birth to piglets ever since the culling started Sunday. Authorities estimate that by Friday, a total of 500 more pigs would have been born.
Meat vendors in and around Pandi town have already taken the brunt of the ERV scare, claiming that sales have plummeted even if they had already slashed their prices.
While they have yet to determine how the ERV transferred from infected pigs to at least five pig farmers and a slaughterhouse worker in Central Luzon, health authorities have repeatedly assured that the ERV continues to pose a low health risk among humans.
“Hindi ito air-borne pero ang dugo to body fluid ay puwede na mahawa [This is not air-borne but the virus can be contracted when the blood of an infected pig mixes with the body fluid]," Tayag said.
The provincial and municipal governments have begun offering livelihood packages to the affected farm. Health experts have yet to the determine the exact scope of the infection, as ERV testing in hog farms continue to be conducted in the select regions in central and southern Luzon. - GMANews.TV
Number of Humans With Pig Ebola in the Philippines Rises to Five
The number of people infected with Ebola traced from pigs in the Philippines has reached five, but health officials say there is no cause for panic–although they do advise wary attention. The strain of the disease, Ebola Reston, is thought not to be dangerous to humans, and the first identified case, a pig handler who was infected at least six months ago, is still healthy. But experts say there remains some concern because pigs are mixing vessels for other human and animal viruses, like flu, and because it shows that pigs may also be able to transmit the lethal strains of Ebola. Far more humans are in regular contact with pigs than with apes, monkeys or bats, the other known hosts [The New York Times].
The virus was first identified in pigs in the Philippines last year, at which point two farms were closed and blood samples collected from 6,000 pigs and 50 workers. From those, four pigs and one worker tested positive, says Francisco Duque, the Philippine health secretary. In January, a new round of testing turned up four more infected men who worked on pig farms and in slaughterhouses.
Duque insists there is no reason for the public to be alarmed, saying that all five men seem to be in good health and are no longer carrying the virus. He adds that the presence of antibodies in the five patients demonstrates the “protective defense” that they have built up against the Ebola Reston virus. Like the first positive human, the four others are also healthy and have not been seriously ill in the previous 12 months” [The Philippine Star], says Duque.
There is “more need to investigate than to worry” [The New York Times] says Juan Lubroth, an agriculture official with the United Nations. Lubroth also says that the pigs involved had multiple infections, and that it might not have been Ebola that made them so sick. “But farmers, of course, would prefer to have pigs without Ebola,” he said. “So we want to do more testing to see what they can do to protect them” [The New York Times].
Porcine ping (Ebola Reston in the Philllipines)
No adobo tonight!
Wasn’t Ebola Reston first isolated in monkeys from the Philippines? It’s been a while since I read “The Hot Zone”.
Depopulation? ROTFL
So now slaughtering pigs is "depopulation engineering".
By: Maneka Gandhi
The Ebola virus spreads one of the most dangerous diseases in the world. No scientist knows who the hosts are and how it is transmitted to humans.
Ebola is the common term for a group of viruses of the family Filoviridae, and for the disease that they cause, Ebola hemorrhagic fever. The virus is named after the Ebola River, where the first recognized outbreak of Ebola hemorrhagic fever occurred. Ebolavirus first came to light in 1976 in outbreaks of Ebola hemorrhagic fever in Zaire and Sudan. The Zaire epidemic last year had a fatality rate of 90%, the highest of any pathogenic virus. The virus is believed to be transmitted to humans via contact with an infected animal host. The virus is transmitted to other people that come into contact with the blood and body fluids of the infected person,
Ebola hemorrhagic fever symptoms are fever, vomiting, diarrhea, generalized pain with internal and external bleeding. Mortality rates are extremely high, with the human fatality rate ranging from 50–89%.
There is no vaccine or treatment. A typical outbreak spreads through a village or hospital, infects the entire population, and then dies out when it runs out of hosts.
Ebola Reston is a variation. It came to the attention of the world when it was found in monkeys imported from the Philippines into the United States in the city of Reston, Virginia in 1989. It kills monkeys but was not known to seriously harm people. So, after the initial scare which inspired Richard Preston to write The Hot Zone (which became the movie Outbreak) it has been largely ignored even though it is the only strain known to be airborne.
However , it can be ignored no longer. Ebola Reston has been found in pigs in the Philippines which were bound for export as meat , in two commercial and two backyard free range farms in three provinces. The Philippine Government , in December 2008 , asked the UN World Health Organisation and the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) to send scientists to help them discover how pigs contracted Ebola.Planned shipments of 50,000 tonnes of pork to Singapore and other countries have now been suspended after traces of Ebola-Reston virus were found. If the virus had not been caught in America , they would have gone completely undetected in their home country or in any other country that the meat had been exported to.
Unusual deaths in pigs in May 2008 caused the Philippine government to send the pork for testing to the USDA’s Foreign Animal Disease Diagnostic Laboratory on Long Island in August. Ebola Reston was identified on October 30, 2008 in the samples and the Philippine Department of Agriculture was informed. International health officials have expressed concern over the fact that this was not made public until December end and pork continued to be served across the country. The Philippine government’s Davinio Catbagan, director for the Philippines’ Bureau of Animal Industry cited concern for the pork industry as the reason for the delay ! According to people at the WHO and the Paris-based World Organization for Animal Health, the Philippine authorities decided to go public only after being pressured by those two groups and the FAO. Dr. Bernard Vallat, director-general of the OIE, said it was “not an easy negotiation” to persuade Philippine authorities to go public with the news which they did on December 10, 2008.
Ebola in pigs is a very bad thing. It should scare the hell out of you. Viruses cause diseases like the common cold, HIV, chicken pox, small pox etc.Viruses mutate very fast because they multiply very fast. They can be harmless now but be very harmful in an instant. The scary thing about Ebola Reston is that it is airborne. It just needs one tiny mutation and every other disease will look good.
The presence of the Ebola-Reston virus in the Philippine pigs has rung emergency alarms all over the world . The virus has gone from monkeys to pigs in a very short time. Pigs serve as genetic mixing vessels for viruses that pass from animals to humans. “When a virus jumps species, in this case from monkeys to pigs, we become concerned, as pigs are much closer to humans than monkeys and this is usually the route viruses take to “jump” to humans,” says Peter Cordingley, spokesman for the WHO.
More than 60% of the estimated 1,415 infectious diseases known to us are capable of infecting both animals and humans. Diseases such as anthrax, Rift Valley fever and monkey pox are zoonotic, meaning they originated in animals but have crossed the species barrier to infect people. New virulent zoonotic diseases have originated such as West Nile Fever, Marburg , Ebola Hemorrhagic Fever and Avian Influenza..
It is estimated that about 75 % of the new diseases that have affected humans over the past 20 years have been caused by pathogens originating from animals or animal products. This was the case of HIV— the virus that causes Aids, which experts believe jumped the species divide from apes to humans and has killed over 100 million people so far.
Livestock agriculture is the most important industry of many countries. Factory farming, careless imports and exports , a rise in meat eating which has lead to farms overcrowding their livestock, feeding them bad food, hormones and antibiotics have led to many more viral mutations which are zoonotic
Who knows which pig farms sold pork from ebola victims or exported the meat to countries like India that have no safeguards on checking meat ? Who knows how many live pigs have been brought in by breeders . This could be the lethal bomb that could kill us all – starting with those people who eat the meat. All across India , pigs are grown for meat in all the slum colonies in the filthiest conditions. Who knows where they will take this disease and who knows which other animals bred for meat could be carrying it ? After all bird flu also started as a common flu for chickens only.
Scary stuff. Thanks for posting Mother Abigail.
It does sound more like simple dehydration and heat exhaustion.
If the monkeys were from there, I don’t know why it is not called “Ebola Philippines.” According to the online Encyclopedia Britanica, “Four strains of Ebola virus, known as Ebola-Zaire, Ebola-Sudan, Ebola–Côte d’Ivoire, and Ebola-Reston, named for their outbreak locations, have been described.”
For some reason that turn of phrase makes me {{{shudder}}}.
Given their job, any onset of symptoms of illnesses is going to scare the daylights out of people. I'm sure they go to bed hoping its just dehydration or heat exhaustion but have to be thinking "what if?"
“before setting them aflame. “
They are confident that the virus cannot live in the mix of particulates and vapors this will generate.
There was a case several years ago of a dermatologist who used a CO2 laser to ablate warts, among them some STD warts. He, and his two assistants, got the warts from this procedure (a career ending step for a dermatologist). The “smoke” coming from the vaporized wart contained infectious virus. Since then ablation lasers have fancier and fancier smoke evacuators.
Rabies?
Try burning poison ivy and select which hospital to be taken too. It’ll coat the wall of your lungs.
I know what you mean. will they use they term at the future concentration camps?
Scary book. Good book.
Yeah. Exactly.
This guy is their leader...
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