You See, What Happened Wuz..., Isht Just Up and Mutated and Whatnot!

SCMP |  The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according to new research by scientists in China and Europe.

The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it.

Scientists showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane. And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a similar path.

But the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of 2002-03, in which infected about 8,000 people around the world.

Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.

When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola.

“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed.

“This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.”

According to the study, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein.

The virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell, but normally this protein is inactive. The cleavage site structure’s job is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular membranes.

Compared to the Sars’ way of entry, this binding method is “100 to 1,000 times” as efficient, according to the study.

Just two weeks after its release, the paper is already the most viewed ever on Chinarxiv.

Conspiracy "Theories" Come From "Gain of Function" Facts

slate |  Responsible outlets have covered the conspiracy theories, attempting to debunk them. But even some experts don’t seem immune here. One rejected the idea of the virus being a biological weapon and praised the Wuhan Institute of Virology as a “world-class research institution that does world-class research” to the Washington Post at the end of January. Less than a month later, he was tweeting sympathetically about a New York Post opinion piece claiming the SARS-CoV-2 virus, the virus that causes COVID-19, had escaped from the same lab. 

These kinds of conspiracy theories thrive on our fear of the uncertain, on our tendency to demand absolute proof that something is not the case—and it’s difficult to prove something 100 percent false. Even scientists can get sucked into this: During the Ebola outbreak, a colleague and I tried to address concerns about ebolavirus “becoming airborne,” a theory based on the argument that because no one could prove it absolutely couldn’t happen, we should act as if it was happening.

Coronavirus (WARS) Uses HIV Packing Mechanism

SCMP |  The new coronavirus has an HIV-like mutation that means its ability to bind with human cells could be up to 1,000 times as strong as the Sars virus, according to new research by scientists in China and Europe.

The discovery could help to explain not only how the infection has spread but also where it came from and how best to fight it.

Scientists showed that Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) entered the human body by binding with a receptor protein called ACE2 on a cell membrane. And some early studies suggested that the new coronavirus, which shares about 80 per cent of the genetic structure of Sars, might follow a similar path.

But the ACE2 protein does not exist in large quantities in healthy people, and this partly helped to limit the scale of the Sars outbreak of 2002-03, in which infected about 8,000 people around the world.

Other highly contagious viruses, including HIV and Ebola, target an enzyme called furin, which works as a protein activator in the human body. Many proteins are inactive or dormant when they are produced and have to be “cut” at specific points to activate their various functions.

When looking at the genome sequence of the new coronavirus, Professor Ruan Jishou and his team at Nankai University in Tianjin found a section of mutated genes that did not exist in Sars, but were similar to those found in HIV and Ebola.

“This finding suggests that 2019-nCoV [the new coronavirus] may be significantly different from the Sars coronavirus in the infection pathway,” the scientists said in a paper published this month on Chinaxiv.org, a platform used by the Chinese Academy of Sciences to release scientific research papers before they have been peer-reviewed.

“This virus may use the packing mechanisms of other viruses such as HIV.”

According to the study, the mutation can generate a structure known as a cleavage site in the new coronavirus’ spike protein.

The virus uses the outreaching spike protein to hook on to the host cell, but normally this protein is inactive. The cleavage site structure’s job is to trick the human furin protein, so it will cut and activate the spike protein and cause a “direct fusion” of the viral and cellular membranes.

Compared to the Sars’ way of entry, this binding method is “100 to 1,000 times” as efficient, according to the study.

Just two weeks after its release, the paper is already the most viewed ever on Chinarxiv.

Charles Lieber Is The Father Of EXTREMELY Wuhan Relevant Technology

Harvard |  Two of the world’s biggest threats may someday be reduced by wires thousands of times thinner than a hair but capable of detecting a single virus. The specter of worldwide viral epidemics is always with us, so detecting them quickly offers the possibility of saving thousands of lives. The pathogens also can be stealthy biological weapons, making their positive detection a vital national defense requirement.

“We want to find a single virus before it finds you,” says Charles Lieber, Hyman Professor of Chemistry at Harvard University. Tests recently completed in his laboratory show that these unimaginably thin nanowires can sense and distinguish between viruses that cause flu, measles, and eye infections. Lieber believes future versions will be able to spot HIV, Ebola, SARS, West Nile, hepatitis, bird flu, and other dangerous viruses.

“Viruses are among the most important causes of human disease and are of increasing concern as agents for bioterrorism,” Lieber says. “Our work shows that nanoscale silicon wires can be configured as detectors that turn on or off in the presence of a single virus particle. Such detectors could be fashioned into arrays capable of sensing thousands of different viruses, ushering in a new era for diagnoses, biosafety, and quick response to viral outbreaks.”

“Nano” refers to a “nanometer,” one billionth of a meter, four hundred billionths of an inch, or about 10 atoms in size. One hundred thousand wires, each 20 nanometers long, would fit on the head of a pin.

The Department of Defense, Office of Naval Research, and National Cancer Institute all supported Lieber’s research, and at least two commercial companies have shown interest in manufacturing nanosensors.

In his office, Lieber shows visitors a two-inch-square silicon and metal chip containg an array of nanowires and two pinhead-size entry ports through which blood, saliva, or other bodily fluids can enter. Air samples put into a fluid solution would also be tested this way.

The Geopolitical Deployment of Biological Weapoons

globalresearch |  t should be apparent that the launching of bio-warfare, as with conventional warfare, is considerably eased by locating military bases, offensive weapons and delivery systems as physically close as possible to one’s potential enemies. This is one reason the US has established its nearly 1,000 foreign military bases – to ensure the capability of putting an enemy under attack within 30 minutes anywhere in the world. Clearly, the same strategy applies to biological warfare, the US military having created scores of these labs euphemistically defined as “health-security infrastructure” in foreign countries.

 

It is frightening to learn that many of these foreign bio-installations are classified as so “Top-Secret” they are outside the knowledge and control of even the local governments in the nations where they are built. It is also frightening to learn that the Ebola outbreaks all occurred in close proximity to several of these well-known (and top-secret) US bio-weapons labs in Africa.

There were great fears a few years ago when American scientists recreated the Spanish flu virus that killed around 50 million people in 1918. They spent nine years on this effort before succeeding, and now large quantities of this virus are stored in a high-security government laboratory in Atlanta, Georgia. More recently, scientists have created a mutated super-strain of the deadly H5N1 bird flu virus that is directly transmissible among humans and would have at least a 50% kill rate, spawning fears in 2005 of a global pandemic that might kill hundreds of millions.

In late 2013, more than 50 of the world’s most eminent scientists severely criticised the research Ron Fouchier and colleagues at the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who have been developing mutant varieties of the H5N1 bird-flu virus that are far more dangerous to humans. The scientists wrote that the research was designed to make the virus fully transmissible between humans, and clearly had a dual civil-military function. This engineered flu could kill half the world’s population, and not by accident. The US military funded this research with more than $400 million.

Spaceweather Skywatcher Breakaway Dude - Offers Cool Liminal Perspective

banditobooks |  Why not actually think this through? I’m especially talking to those who ‘agree with’, say, Jon Rappoport, who believes the China Scare is a complete hoax, i.e., there are no more people dying in China today than two months ago. This is the ‘reasoning’ some of you have used to subtly (in subtext) claim that I am somehow ‘wrong’ in suggesting you prepare for the worst.

Okay, if the scare is a complete hoax, then what’s the motive? And what’s next? Did any of you Rappoport fans even think about these questions, and the questions that follow from them?

Come on, fellas, why would they do that? You haven’t thought about this, have you? Why engineer a completely false pandemic scare? Do I have to do your thinking for you?

‘Well, duhhh,’ you’re going to say, ‘They want to keep us frightened.’ (Therefore being prepared for infrastructure collapse is ‘giving in to fear.’) Is this it?  This is all you’ve got?  How would this even work? I mean when it becomes obvious that there is no pandemic and all’s well? Wouldn’t people start thinking that all the scary shit is really just a hoax or misunderstanding. So in the long run a hoax like this would lessen general fear.

Do you really think they’d go to the media lengths you see now if this was just a hoax?   

‘They’ve done it before,’ you say? ‘Remember the Mexican flu in 2009? How about the bullshit ebola scare?’

See, I was in Mexico for the 2009 ‘scare’ and it was like no one, especially not the locals, seemed to notice. Yes, it was probably a hoax, to keep us nerve-wracked. But neither that one nor the ebola scare (one ebola infected person in the U.S.) were on this scale. Does this seem to be the case with the Chinese Scare? Do you think all those street scenes are faked? Why hasn’t someone blown the whistle on fakery of this magnitude? Do you have an answer?

Don’t you think that at some point they are going to have to come up with the real thing? I mean if they are going to get what they want, be it a one-world economy and/or government, or a culling of the population down to half a billion (their number). 

 

A complete hoax is not going to work in bringing about the world-changing paradigm they yearn for. They will need the real thing.

If the Chinese are behind the hoax, what are they accomplishing?

Push Your Sheeple Mind to Track the Competing nCoV Propaganda Schemes

vox |  We’re at a pivotal moment in the outbreak of the new coronavirus in China. Depending on whom you ask, we’re either already in a pandemic, meaning there are ongoing epidemics of the virus on two or more continents; we’re hurtling toward one; or we’re on the path to averting a spiraling crisis. 

As of February 6, more than 28,000 people have been infected with 2019-nCoV, as the respiratory virus is known, and 565 people have died. There are also nearly 200 cases in 26 countries besides China, including one death in the Philippines. This toll represents a tragic and stunning increase from a month ago, when it looked like there were no more than 50 patients with the virus in Wuhan, the mainland Chinese city where the virus is thought to have originated. 

There’s still so much we don’t know about 2019-nCoV, including how exactly it’s transmitted, where it’s spreading, and how deadly it is. And that uncertainty is important because viruses have funny ways of surprising us: H1N1 “swine flu,” which was a pandemic, turned out to be much less deadly than feared. (A disease can be pandemic and not particularly severe.) Ebola, meanwhile, was known to science for decades and then behaved in ways that caught infectious disease experts off guard during the 2014-2016 epidemic in West Africa.

Given the unknowns about 2019-nCoV, in the coming days and weeks, we’re in for some twists and turns. For now, many experts believe this outbreak could get a lot worse: burdening the Chinese health system, spreading in poorer countries with weaker health systems, and sickening and killing thousands more people along the way. Alternatively, it could get much better, with new cases and deaths steadily dropping. Here are the key factors that will determine which way it goes. 

Trump Wants to Know if nCoV is an Engineered Bioweapon

zerohedge |  The real reason behind the viral spread, we suggested, was that a weaponized version of the coronavirus (one which may have originally been obtained from Canada), was released by Wuhan's Institute of Virology (presumably accidentally ), China's only top, level-4 biohazard lab, which was studying "the world's most dangerous pathogens."

At the time we summarized the series of dots and asked "real reporters" to connect them:

1. One of China's top virology and immunology experts was and still works at China's top-rated biohazard lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which some have affectionately called the real Umbrella Corp.
2. Since 2009, Peng has been the leading Chinese scientist researching the immune mechanism of bats carrying and transmitting lethal viruses in the world.
3. His primary field of study is researching how and why bats can be infected with some of the most nightmarish viruses in the world including Ebola, SARS and Coronavirus, and not get sick.
4. He was genetically engineering various immune pathways (such as the STING pathway in bats) to make the bats more or less susceptible to infection, in the process potentially creating a highly resistant mutant superbug.
5. As part of his studies, Peng also researched mutant Coronavirus strains that overcame the natural immunity of some bats; these are "superbug" Coronavirus strains, which are resistant to any natural immune pathway, and now appear to be out in the wild.
6. As of mid-November, his lab was actively hiring inexperienced post-docs to help conduct his research into super-Coronaviruses and bat infections.
7. Peng's work on virology and bat immunology has received support from the National "You Qing" Fund, the pilot project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the major project of the Ministry of Science and Technology.

Of course, that is all ancient history and Zero Hedge was permanently banned from Twitter for raising such a conspiracy theory about a publicly-searchable person working a publicly-searchable place.

But, bygones being bygones, we moved on... until today when no lesser entity than The White House began asking questions about the origin of the deadly coronavirus.

Specifically, ABC News' Chief Medical Correspondent Dr. Jennifer Ashton asked the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease about concerns that stem from misinformation online that the novel coronavirus could have been engineered or deliberately released.

Modi-BJP-Sangh Start Weighing In On the nCoV Wee Phuk Yu SNAFU

TheHindu |  The government has ordered an inquiry into a study conducted in Nagaland by researchers from the U.S., China and India on bats and humans carrying antibodies to deadly viruses like Ebola, officials confirmed to The Hindu.

The inquiry comes as officials worldwide grapple with the spread of novel coronavirus 2019, from Wuhan, China, to 20 countries, that has resulted in over 300 deaths.

The study came under the scanner as two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). They would have required special permissions as foreign entities.

The study, conducted by scientists of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. and the Duke-National University in Singapore, is now being investigated for how the scientists were allowed to access live samples of bats and bat hunters (humans) without due permissions. The results of the study were published in October last in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) sent a five-member committee to investigate. The inquiry is complete, and a report has been submitted to the Health Ministry,” a senior government official told The Hindu.

The U.S. Embassy and the Union Health Ministry declined to comment on the inquiry. In a written reply to questions from The Hindu, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta said it “did not commission this study and had not received any enquiries [from the Indian government] on it.” An American official, however, suggested that the U.S. Department of Defense might not have coordinated the study through the CDC.

The study, ‘Filovirus-reactive antibodies in humans and bats in Northeast India imply Zoonotic spillover’, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases states the researchers found “the presence of filovirus (e.g. ebolavirus, marburgvirus and dianlovirus) reactive antibodies in both human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat populations in Northeast India, a region with no historical record of Ebola virus disease.”

Bats often carry ebola, rabies, marburg and the SARS coronavirus.

Overpopulation Leads to Catastrophe

medicalnewstoday |  The potentially catastrophic consequences of an exponentially growing global population is a favorite subject for writers of dystopian fiction. 

The most recent example, Utopia - a forthcoming David Fincher-directed series for HBO - won critical acclaim in its original incarnation on UK television for its depiction of a conspiracy-laden modern world where the real threat to public health is not Ebola or other headline-friendly communicable viruses, but overpopulation. 

Fears over the ever-expanding number of human bodies on our planet are not new and have been debated by researchers and policy makers for decades, if not centuries. However, recent research by University of Washington demographer Prof. Adrian Raftery - using modern statistical modeling and the latest data on population, fertility and mortality - has found that previous projections on population growth may have been conservative. 

"Our new projections are probabilistic, and we find that there will probably be between 9.6 and 12.3 billion people in 2100," Prof. Raftery told Medical News Today. "This projection is based on a statistical model that uses all available past data on fertility and mortality from all countries in a systematic way, unlike previous projections that were based on expert assumptions." 

Prof. Raftery's figure places up to an additional 5 billion people more on the Earth by 2100 than have been previously calculated. 

 

A key finding of the study is that the fertility rate in Africa is declining much more slowly than has been previously estimated, which Prof. Raftery tells us "has major long-term implications for population."

if I'm not large and in-charge, then phuggit, I'm out!!!

theatlantic |  Since 1998, people all over the world have been living healthier and living longer. But middle-aged, white non-Hispanics in the United States have been getting sicker and dying in greater numbers. The trend is being driven primarily by people with a high-school degree or less.

That's the sobering takeaway from a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences published this week.

The study authors sum it up:

Between 1978 to 1998, the mortality rate for U.S. whites aged 45 to 54 fell by 2 percent per year on average, which matched the average rate of decline in the six countries shown, and the average over all other industrialized countries. After 1998, other rich countries’ mortality rates continued to decline by 2 percent a year. In contrast, U.S. white non-Hispanic mortality rose by half a percent a year. No other rich country saw a similar turnaround.

That means “half a million people are dead who should not be dead,” Angus Deaton, the 2015 Nobel laureate in economics and co-author of the paper, told The Washington Post. “About 40 times the Ebola stats. You’re getting up there with HIV-AIDS.”

The reasons for the increased death rate are not the usual things that kill Americans, like diabetes and heart disease. Rather, it’s suicide, alcohol and drug poisonings, and alcohol-related liver disease.

The least-educated are worst off: All-cause mortality among middle-aged Americans with a high-school degree or less increased by 134 deaths per 100,000 people between 1999 and 2013, but there was little change in mortality for people with some college. The death rate for the college-educated fell slightly.

if by "animal link" you mean homo sapiens sapiens...

Reuters | Liberia confirmed a third Ebola case on Thursday, nearly two months after it was declared Ebola free, and officials said they were investigating whether the disease had managed to lurk in animals before resurfacing.

Dr Moses Massaquoi, case management team leader for Liberia's Ebola task force, said the three villagers who had tested positive for the disease had shared a meal of dog meat, which is commonly eaten in Liberia.

"They come from the same time and have a history of having had dog meat together," he said.

The response team was investigating whether domestic animals might be carrying the virus, he said, referring also to mysterious deaths of hundreds of cattle in remote Lofa county.

Liberia, the country worst hit by the West African Ebola outbreak discovered last year, was also its biggest success story: the only one of the three hard-hit countries so far to be declared Ebola free.

preznit stays standing down devils by promoting socio-political inclusion and exogamy

UN |  The General Assembly today adopted a resolution which for the twenty-third year in a row called for an end to the United States economic, commercial and financial embargo on Cuba.

Exposing an intractable demarcation of the international community, 188 Member States voted in favour and, as in previous years, the United States and Israel voted against.  Three small island States — Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia and Palau — abstained from the vote.

By the terms of the text, the Assembly reiterated its call upon States to refrain from promulgating and applying laws and regulations, such as the 1996 Helms-Burton Act, the extraterritorial effects of which affected the sovereignty of other States, the legitimate interests of entities or persons under their jurisdiction and the freedom of trade and navigation.

It once again urged States that had and continued to apply such laws to repeal or invalidate them as soon as possible, in line with their obligations under the United Nations Charter and international law.

In recent times, the blockade imposed by the United States against Cuba had been tightened, and its extraterritorial implementation had also been strengthened through the imposition of unprecedented fines, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of Cuba told the Assembly as he introduced the draft resolution.  The accumulated economic damages of the blockade totalled $1.1 trillion, based on the price of gold.

The representative of the target of the resolution, the United States, disagreed with that assessment, saying in a statement explaining its negative vote that Cuba’s economic woes were due to the policies it had pursued over the last half century.  And while Cuba’s fight against Ebola was laudable, it did not excuse the country’s treatment of its own people.

It was a sentiment echoed to some degree by Italy’s representative, speaking on behalf of the European Union, who after criticizing the embargo reiterated the Union’s call on the Cuban Government to fully grant its citizens internationally recognized civil, political and economic rights and freedoms.

But regionally, Barbados’s representative, speaking on behalf of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), chose to focus on how students from CARICOM countries had benefited from free tertiary education in Cuba, also noting with appreciation that Cuba was in the process of mobilizing 461 doctors and nurses to West Africa — the largest medical contingent of any country to help in the fight against Ebola.

transparency and consistency would go a long way toward restoring public trust...,

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salon |  The success of vaccination – of all public health campaigns – relies on trust. We put faith in medical professionals that they’re acting in everyone’s best interest, and that faith is undergirded by decades of medical research. The benefits of vaccination are well documented and vital to our collective health (you don’t see many people afflicted with smallpox these days). The arguments against vaccinating have been so thoroughly debunked that it’s impossible to mount a coherent argument against the practice. But even still, trust can be eroded when the people we put in positions of authority give unwarranted deference to discredited ideas.

And that brings us to Rand Paul, United States Senator from Kentucky and doctor of medicine. The last few months have witnessed two high-profile public health scares: the resurgence of measles as a consequence of anti-vaccine activism, and the Ebola panic. Few people in positions of authority have acted as irresponsibly in addressing these health concerns as Sen. Paul.

When health scares are in the news, print and broadcast networks inevitably ask Rand Paul for his opinion because he is a doctor (of ophthalmology, but a doctor nonetheless) and a likely 2016 presidential candidate. On vaccinations, Paul went on television yesterday and endorsed the centerpiece of the junk anti-vaccine argument: that the injections somehow induce autism and other mental disorders in young children. “I have heard of many tragic cases of walking, talking normal children who wound up with profound mental disorders after vaccines,” Paul said on CNBC. He may as well have laid blame for mental illness on an imbalance of the humors – he’d have been no less inaccurate.

He also presented the vaccination argument as a question of “freedom” from government tyranny. “The state doesn’t own your children,” he argued. “Parents own the children, and it is an issue of freedom and public health.” That’s a very strange way of describing the parent-child relationship, but he’s right that the state does not own your kid. The state does, however, have a compelling interest in making sure your child/property isn’t a vector for highly contagious diseases. But behaving in a way that is dangerous – both for your child and the community – is your “freedom,” so fight the power and show big government that the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the pertussis-laden saliva of toddlers.

ebola in mosul?

zerohedge |  Forget targeted US airstrikes, ISIS faces a new existential threat. Citing an unnamed source in a Mosul hospital, Iraq's official pro-government newspaper, al Sabaah, said Ebola arrived in Mosul from "terrorists" who came "from several countries" and Africa. Mashable further confirms, three outlets reported that Ebola showed up at a hospital in Mosul. For now, it's unclear if any disease experts or doctors in Mosul are even able to test for the Ebola virus; but it would mark the first time the virus had been detected in an area controlled by ISIS, a group that doesn't embrace science and modern medicine.

As Mashable reports,

Reports that Islamic State militants in Mosul have contracted Ebola swirled though Iraqi media sources on Wednesday. World Health Organization officials said they haven't confirmed the cases, but the organization has reached out to offer assistance.

"We have no official notification from [the Iraqi government] that it is Ebola," Christy Feig, WHO's director of communications told Mashable.

Feig added that WHO is in the process of reaching out to government officials in Iraq to see if they need help investigating the cases, a task that could be a challenge, given the restrictions that would come with operating in ISIS-controlled territory.

It's unclear if any disease experts or doctors in Mosul are even able to test for the Ebola virus. A Kurdish official, who was convinced the cases are Ebola, told the Kurdish media outlet Xendan that the militants' symptoms were similar to those of the Ebola virus.

Citing an unnamed source in a Mosul hospital, Iraq's official pro-government newspaper, al Sabaah, said the disease arrived in Mosul from "terrorists" who came "from several countries" and Africa.

If the cases in Mosul turn out to be Ebola — a scenario that, at this point, seems highly unlikely — it would mark the first time the virus had been detected in an area controlled by ISIS, a group that doesn't embrace science and modern medicine.

Over the past few weeks, militants affiliated with ISIS have executed more than a dozen doctors in Mosul, according to Benjamin T. Decker, an intelligence analyst with the Levantine Group, a Middle East-based geopolitical risk and research consultancy.

never mind the headlines, we've never lived in such peaceful times....,

slate |  It’s a good time to be a pessimist. ISIS, Crimea, Donetsk, Gaza, Burma, Ebola, school shootings, campus rapes, wife-beating athletes, lethal cops—who can avoid the feeling that things fall apart, the center cannot hold? Last year Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified before a Senate committee that the world is “more dangerous than it has ever been.” This past fall, Michael Ignatieff wrote of “the tectonic plates of a world order that are being pushed apart by the volcanic upward pressure of violence and hatred.” Two months ago, the New York Times columnist Roger Cohen lamented, “Many people I talk to, and not only over dinner, have never previously felt so uneasy about the state of the world. … The search is on for someone to dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.”

As troubling as the recent headlines have been, these lamentations need a second look. It’s hard to believe we are in greater danger today than we were during the two world wars, or during other perils such as the periodic nuclear confrontations during the Cold War, the numerous conflicts in Africa and Asia that each claimed millions of lives, or the eight-year war between Iran and Iraq that threatened to choke the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf and cripple the world’s economy.

How can we get a less hyperbolic assessment of the state of the world? Certainly not from daily journalism. News is about things that happen, not things that don’t happen. We never see a reporter saying to the camera, “Here we are, live from a country where a war has not broken out”—or a city that has not been bombed, or a school that has not been shot up. As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

china dispatching some gunsels into liberia to "fight" ebola...,

HuffPo |  China will dispatch an elite unit of the People's Liberation Army to help Ebola-hit Liberia, the Foreign Ministry said on Friday, responding to U.N. calls for a greater global effort to fight the deadly virus in West Africa.

Washington has led the international drive to stop the spread of the disease that has killed nearly 5,000 people, sending thousands of troops and committing about $1 billion, but Beijing has faced criticism for not doing enough.

The PLA squad, which has experience from a 2002 outbreak of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), will build a 100-bed treatment center in Liberia, the first such facility in the three countries most impacted by Ebola to be constructed and run by a foreign country, said Lin Songtian, director general of the ministry's Department of African Affairs.

The center will be open for operation in a month's time, he told a briefing in Beijing. China will also dispatch 480 PLA medical staff to treat Ebola patients, he said.

It's the first time China has deployed a whole unit of epidemic prevention forces and military medical staff abroad, Lin said.

China is Africa's biggest trade partner, tapping the continent's rich vein of resources to fuel its own economic growth over the past couple of decades. Some critics have rounded on Beijing for not helping more in Africa's hour of need.

China has so far donated 750 million yuan ($123 million) to 13 African countries and international organizations to combat Ebola, according to the government.

"China's assistance will not stop until the Ebola epidemic is eradicated in West Africa," Lin said.

how would you like to live in denial of what goes on under the stairs?

thiscantbehappening |  On Thursday, a reader who is an MD contacted someone he knew at Tulane, Vice President for Research Laura Levy, asking her to explain what Tulane was doing in Kenema. He later sent me her response, which was a link to a web page on Tulane's website. It seeks to debunk "myths" about Tulane's work in West Africa. In that article [3], it states that it is a "myth" that Tulane has been ordered to leave Sierra Leone. But no one is saying that. Tulane was ordered to shut down it's Ebola lab in the town of Kenema, not to leave Sierra Leone altogether. The article also states that it is a "myth" that the University and its researchers are "collaborating" with the military in Sierra Leone. It goes on to say that "Tulane is working with Harvard University and others in the Viral Hemorrhagic Fever Consortium to develop diagnostics, vaccines and therapeutics for Lassa fever and Ebola. Support for the consortium has come principally from the National Institutes of Health."

But actually the consortium's own website [4] says that Tulane is the leader of the consortium. It lists a number of partners, including Harvard University, Scripps Research Institute, and a company called Corgenix. No government "partners" are listed. Yet Corgenix, on its company site [5], lists USAMRIID, the Pentagon's bioweapons research unit, as a "member of the consortium." 

Curious indeed that Tulane Research VP Levy omitted that important bit of information.

Here's what Coregenix had to say about USAMRIID:
 

USAMRIID (U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases), located at Fort Detrick, Maryland, is the lead medical research laboratory for the U.S. Biological Defense Research Program, and plays a leading role in national defense and in infectious disease research. The Institute’s mission is to conduct basic and applied research on biological threats resulting in medical solutions (such as vaccines, drugs and diagnostics) to protect the warfighter. USAMRIID is a subordinate laboratory of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Material Command.

Corgenix and USAMRIID are members of the Viral Hemorrhagic fever Consortium, working to develop state of the art diagnostic products for biothreat agents and emerging pathogens./em>
 

Navy Times, hardly a den of conspiracy writers, published an article about Ebola [6] and the US decision to send 3000 troops (not doctors!) to the impacted countries in west Africa, back on August 1. That article states:
 

Filoviruses like Ebola have been of interest to the Pentagon since the late 1970s, mainly because Ebola and its fellow viruses have high mortality rates — in the current outbreak, roughly 60 percent to 72 percent of those who have contracted the disease have died — and its stable nature in aerosol make it attractive as a potential biological weapon.

Since the late 1970s and early 1980s, researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) have sought to develop a vaccine or treatment for the disease.
 

Boyle’s contention is that ever since the US signed onto the Geneva Convention outlawing germ warfare, it has used research into defense against germ weapons as a cover for US research into germ weapons themselves. 

It’s interesting that Navy Times is reporting that Pentagon-funded researchers at USAMRIID have been trying to develop a vaccine for Ebola for decades, yet how does that square with a report on Oct. 23 in the New York Times [7] that Canadian and US researchers had developed an Ebola vaccine that was 100% successful in monkeys a full decade ago, long after the Pentagon began “seeking to develop a vaccine” and several years after the NIH began a campaign to develop one. And yet, as the Times article states, the promising vaccine “sat on the shelf” for years without being tested in humans, because it encountered a “biotech valley of death” with no drug companies willing to pay for human testing.

So where was all that public US Defense Department and NIH funding, given the promise that this vaccine was showing? 

Maybe it was just bureaucratic bumbling, nationalist prejudice (the vaccine was developed by the Public Health Agency of Canada, for god’s sake!, a concept that is toxic to the US drug industry), or just Washington stupidity. But then, if Boyle is right, then the Pentagon may not really have been all that interested in finding a vaccine, but rather was focussed on doing covert research on bioweapons, including Ebola. 

It may seem hard to swallow the idea that your government could be contemplating such awful weapons, but let’s remember that the US is the country that continues to insist on its right to strew highly toxic and carcinogenic depleted uranium dust all over countries it invades or bombs, like Afghanistan, Syria and especially Iraq (according to a new report by David Swanson [8], the Obama administration is sending DU-armed aircraft to the Middle East again, evidently for use in its attacks on ISIS in Syria and Iraq, as if it hadn't spread enough of the stuff across the desert already). 

As well, the US stands credibly accused of having deployed germ weapons in Cuba, Nicaragua and East Germany over the years, and perhaps in other places too. 

And there was one other article in the New York Times [9] -- this one pulled, oddly, after it made it into the first edition of the paper on October 17. It reported that President Obama, “Prompted by controversy over dangerous research and recent laboratory accidents,” had announced that he was temporarily halting “all new funding for experiments that seek to study certain infectious agents by making them more dangerous.” He asked those scientists already doing such government-funded research to “voluntarily halt” their work during this moratorium. Could this be a backhanded admission, or at least hint, that something like that might have been done to the Zaire Ebola strain that is circulating now in west Africa?

Got that? Your government has been paying researchers to do genetic modification of dangerous pathogens like avian or pandemic flu strains, SARS...and hemorrhagic fever viruses like Ebola, to make them more deadly and/or more easily transmitted! (Of course the government and its apologists insist that they and the researchers they fund in this work are only trying to see if it could be done, either by some nefarious enemy, or by nature itself.)

the ebola weather report

MoBS Lab | The 2014 West African Ebola Outbreak is so far the largest and deadliest recorded in history. The affected countries, Sierra Leone, Guinea, Liberia, Nigeria, and recently Senegal have been struggling to contain and to mitigate the outbreak. We have developed a modeling approach aimed at assessing the progression of the epidemic in West Africa and its international spread under the assumption that the EVD outbreak continues to evolve at the current pace. 

Our results have been published in PLOS Currents Outbreaks. However, our modeling work has been motivated by the need for a rapid assessment of the EVD outbreak trends and the obtained results may change as more information becomes available from the EVD affected region and more refined sensitivity analysis can be implemented computationally. For this reason, the paper on PLOS Current Outbreaks shall be considered as a live paper that is constantly updated with new data, projections and analysis. 

In this web page we try to provide a home for such a "live" paper. More in general we link to constantly updated versions of the paper, new figures/analysis and supplementary data files.

bat bombs bringing the ebola

Wikipedia | Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon's intended target.

Overview

The Bat Bomb was originally conceived by a Pennsylvania dentist named Lytle S. Adams, a friend of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.^[1] Dr. Adams submitted it to the White Housein January 1942, where it was subsequently approved by President Roosevelt^[2] on the advice of Donald Griffin.^[3]

Adams observed that the infrastructure of Japan was especially susceptible to incendiary devices as many of the buildings were made of paper, bamboo, and other highly flammable material. The plan was to release bat bombs over Japanese cities having widely-dispersed industrial targets. The bats would spread far from the point of release due to the relatively high altitude of their release, then at dawn they would hide in buildings across the city. Shortly thereafter built-in timers would ignite the bombs, causing widespread fires and chaos.

The United States decided to develop the Bat Bomb during World War II as four biological factors gave promise to this plan. First, bats occur in large numbers (four caves in New Mexico are each occupied by several million bats^[4]). Second, bats can carry more than their own weight in flight (females carry their young—sometimes twins). Third, bats hibernate, and while dormant they do not require food or maintenance. Fourth, bats fly in darkness, then find secluded places (often in buildings) to hide during daylight.

Project Details

By March 1943 a suitable species had been selected. The project was considered serious enough that Louis Fieser, the inventor of military napalm, designed 0.6 ounce (17 g) and one ounce (28 g) incendiary devices to be carried by the bats. A bat carrier similar to a bomb casing was designed that included 26 stacked trays, each containing compartments for 40 bats. The carriers would be dropped from 5,000 feet (1,525 m). Then the trays would separate but remain connected to a parachute that would deploy at 1,000 feet (305 m). It was envisioned that ten B-24 bombers flying from Alaska, each carrying a hundred shells packed with bomb-carrying bats could release 1,040,000 bat bombs over the target—the industrial cities of Osaka Bay. A series of tests to answer various operational questions were conducted. In one incident the Carlsbad Army Airfield Auxiliary Air Base 32°15′39″N 104°13′45″W near Carlsbad, New Mexico, was set on fire on May 15, 1943, when armed bats were accidentally released.^[5] The bats incinerated the test range and roosted under a fuel tank. Following this setback, the project was relegated to the Navy in August 1943, who renamed it Project X-Ray, and then passed it to the Marine Corps that December. The Marine Corps moved operations to the Marine Corps Air Station at El Centro, California. After several experiments and operational adjustments, the definitive test was carried out on the "Japanese Village" a mockup of a Japanese city built by the Chemical Warfare Service at their Dugway Proving Groundstest site in Utah. Fist tap Drew.