There Will Be Pestilences Ebola, Marburg, Enterovirus and Chikungunya

There Will Be Pestilences:

Why Are So

Many Deadly Diseases Breaking Out All

Over The Globe Right Now?

So why is this happening?

by Michael Snyder | Economic Collapse | October 7, 2014

 

Ebola, Marburg, Enterovirus and Chikungunya – these diseases were not even on the radar of most people coming into 2014, but now each one of them is making headline news.  So why is this happening?  Why are so many deadly diseases breaking out all over the world right now?  Is there some kind of a connection, or is the fact that so many horrible diseases are arising all at once just a giant coincidence?  And this could be just the beginning.  For example, there are now more than a million cases of Chikungunya in Central and South America, and authorities are projecting that there will be millions more in 2015.  The number of Ebola cases continues to grow at an exponential rate, and now an even deadlier virus (Marburg) has broken out in Uganda.  We have gone decades without experiencing a major worldwide pandemic, and many people believed that it could never happen in our day and time.  But now we could potentially see several absolutely devastating diseases all racing across the planet at the same time.

On Monday, we got news that the first confirmed case of Ebola transmission in Europe has happened.  A nurse in Spain that had treated a couple of returning Ebola patients has contracted the disease herself…

A nurse’s assistant in Spain is the first person known to have contracted Ebola outside of Africa in the current outbreak.

Spanish Health Minister Ana Mato announced Monday that a test confirmed the assistant has the virus.

The woman helped treat a Spanish missionary and a Spanish priest, both of whom had contracted Ebola in West Africa. Both died after returning to Spain.

Health officials said she developed symptoms on September 30. She was not hospitalized until this week. Her only symptom was a fever.

How many people did she spread the virus to before it was correctly diagnosed?

Meanwhile, Ebola continues to rage out of control in West Africa.  It is being reported that Sierra Leone just added 121 new Ebola deaths to the overall death toll in a single day.  If Ebola continues to spread at an exponential rate, it is inevitable that more people will leave West Africa with the virus and take it to other parts of the globe.

In fact, it was being reported on Monday that researchers have concluded that there is “a 50 percent chance” that Ebola could reach the UK by October 24th…

Experts have analyzed the pattern of the spread of the disease, along with airline traffic data, to make the startling prediction Ebola could reach Britain by October 24.

They claim there is a 50 percent chance the virus could hit Britain by that date and a 75 percent chance the it could be imported to France, as the deadliest outbreak in history spreads across the world.

Currently, there is no cure for the disease, which has claimed more than 3,400 lives since March and has a 90 percent fatality rate.

I have written extensively about Ebola, but it is certainly not the only virus making headlines right now.

Down in Uganda, a man has just died from a confirmed case of the Marburg Virus…

A man has died in Uganda’s capital after an outbreak of Marburg, a highly infectious hemorrhagic fever similar to Ebola, authorities said on Sunday, adding that a total of 80 people who came into contact with him had been put under quarantine.

Marburg starts with a severe headache followed by haemorrhaging and leads to death in 80% or more of cases in about nine days. It is from the same family of viruses as Ebola, which has killed thousands in West Africa in recent months.

There is no vaccine or specific treatment for the Marburg virus, which is transmitted through bodily fluids such as saliva and blood or by handling infected wild animals such as monkeys.

The Marburg Virus is an absolutely horrible disease, and many consider it to be even more deadly than Ebola.  But the fact that it kills victims so quickly may keep it from spreading as widely as Ebola.

We shall see.

Meanwhile, a disease that sounds very similar to Ebola and Marburg has popped up in Venezuela and doctors down there do not know what it is…

“We do not know what it is,” admitted Duglas León Natera, president of the Venezuelan Medical Federation.

In its initial stages, the disease presents symptoms of fever and spots on the skin, and then produces large blisters and internal and external bleeding, according to data provided week stop by the College of Physicians of the state of Aragua, where the first cases were reported.

Then, very quickly, patients suffer from respiratory failure, liver failure and kidney failure. Venezuelan doctors have not been able to determine what the disease is, much less how to fight it.

Why aren’t we hearing more about this in the mainstream news?

Here in the United States, enterovirus D-68 has sickened hundreds of children all over the country.  So far cases have been confirmed in 43 different states, several children have been paralyzed by it, and one New Jersey boy has died…

Parents in New Jersey are concerned after a state medical examiner determined a virus causing severe respiratory illness across the country is responsible for the death of a 4-year-old boy.

Hamilton Township health officer Jeff Plunkett said the Mercer County medical examiner’s office found the death of Eli Waller was the result of enterovirus D-68. Waller, the youngest of a set of triplets, died in his sleep at home on Sept. 25.

The virus has sickened more than 500 people in 43 states and Washington, D.C.— almost all of them children. Waller is the first death in New Jersey directly linked to the virus.

The CDC seems to have no idea how to contain the spread of enterovirus D-68.

So why should we be confident that they will be able to contain the spread of Ebola?

Last but not least, the Chikungunya virus is at pandemic levels all over Central and South America.

We aren’t hearing that much about this disease in the U.S., but at this point more than a million people have already been infected…

An excruciating mosquito-borne illness that arrived less than a year ago in the Americas is raging across the region, leaping from the Caribbean to the Central and South American mainland, and infecting more than 1 million people. Some cases already have emerged in the United States.

The good news is that very few people actually die from this disease.

The bad news is that almost everyone that gets it feels like they are dying.

In a previous article, I wrote about the intense suffering that victims go through.  According to Slate, the name of this virus originally “comes from a Makonde word meaning ‘that which bends up,’ referring to the contortions sufferers put themselves through due to intense joint pain.”

Right now, the number of cases of Chikungunya is absolutely exploding.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent Fox News report…

In El Salvador, health officials report nearly 30,000 suspected cases, up from 2,300 at the beginning of August, and hospitals are filled with people with the telltale signs of the illness, including joint pain so severe it can be hard to walk.

“The pain is unbelievable,” said Catalino Castillo, a 39-year-old seeking treatment at a San Salvador hospital. “It’s been 10 days and it won’t let up.”

Venezuelan officials reported at least 1,700 cases as of Friday, and the number is expected to rise. Neighboring Colombia has around 4,800 cases but the health ministry projects there will be nearly 700,000 by early 2015.

So why is this happening?

Why are so many absolutely horrible diseases emerging all at once?

 

 

Some Ebola experts worry virus may spread more easily than assumed

Caption Ebola crisis

John Moore / Getty Images

World Health Organization instructors watch as health workers in protective suits take part in a training session in Monrovia, Liberia.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Matua Fallah waits to receive a ration of rice at a makeshift distribution center in Dolo Town, Liberia, in August.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Relatives of a local government official are escorted from the West Point slum of Monrovia, Liberia, in August after unrest erupted in response to a government quarantine.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Saah Exco, 10, lies in a back alley of Monrovia’s West Point slum in August. The boy was one of the patients pulled out of a holding center for suspected Ebola patients when the facility was overrun by a mob.

Caption Ebola crisis

John Moore / Getty Images

A resident looks from behind a gate during the Liberian government’s 11-day Ebola quarantine in the West Point district of Monrovia.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Residents of Monrovia’s West Point slum wait for a food aid distribution during the government-imposed quarantine there.

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John Moore / Getty Images

A burial team from the Liberian Ministry of Health unloads the bodies of Ebola victims onto a funeral pyre at a crematorium in the town of Marshall.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Residents in New Kru Town, Liberia, complain they have not received enough disinfection kits being distributed by the aid group Doctors Without Borders.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Liberians in New Kru Town wait before dawn for disinfection kits being distributed by Doctors Without Borders.

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John Moore, Getty Images

A health worker speaks with a boy at a center for suspected Ebola patients, formerly the maternity ward at Redemption Hospital in Monrovia.

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John Moore / Getty Images

A woman carries a disinfection kit distributed by Doctors Without Borders in New Kru Town.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Residents walk home with disinfection kits distributed in New Kru Town.

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John Moore / Getty Images

Sanitized gloves and boots hang to dry at a Liberian Ministry of Health center for cremation in Monrovia.

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John Moore / Getty Images

An Ebola awareness mural is displayed in Monrovia.

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A Liberian Ministry of Health worker speaks to Banu, 4, in a holding center for suspected Ebola patients at Redemption Hospital in Monrovia.

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John Moore / Getty Images

U.S. Air Force personnel offload a mobile command center from a transport plane outside Monrovia to assist Liberia’s Ebola response.

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John Moore / Getty Images

A man walks past the residence in Monrovia, Liberia, where Thomas Eric Duncan, the first patient to be diagnosed with Ebola in the United States, had rented a room.

Caption Ebola crisis

John Moore, Getty Images

A health worker watches as a burial team collects the bodies of Ebola victims from a Ministry of Health center for cremation in Monrovia.

By David Willman contact the reporter

NationMedical ResearchAfricaScientific ResearchDiseases and IllnessesEbolaU.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Ebola researcher says he would not rule out possibility that the virus spreads through air in tight quarters

‘There are too many unknowns here,’ a virologist says of how Ebola may spread

Ebola researcher says he thinks there is a chance asymptomatic people could spread the virus

U.S. officials leading the fight against history’s worst outbreak of Ebola have said they know the ways the virus is spread and how to stop it. They say that unless an air traveler from disease-ravaged West Africa has a fever of at least 101.5 degrees or other symptoms, co-passengers are not at risk.

"At this point there is zero risk of transmission on the flight," Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said after a Liberian man who flew through airports in Brussels and Washington was diagnosed with the disease last week in Dallas.

Three more were placed under quarantine at Madrid hospital where a Spanish nurse became infected, the first case infection outside of West Africa.

Other public health officials have voiced similar assurances, saying Ebola is spread only through physical contact with a symptomatic individual or their bodily fluids. "Ebola is not transmitted by the air. It is not an airborne infection," said Dr. Edward Goodman of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas, where the Liberian patient remains in critical condition.

Yet some scientists who have long studied Ebola say such assurances are premature — and they are concerned about what is not known about the strain now on the loose. It is an Ebola outbreak like none seen before, jumping from the bush to urban areas, giving the virus more opportunities to evolve as it passes through multiple human hosts.

Dr. C.J. Peters, who battled a 1989 outbreak of the virus among research monkeys housed in Virginia and who later led the CDC’s most far-reaching study of Ebola’s transmissibility in humans, said he would not rule out the possibility that it spreads through the air in tight quarters.

"We just don’t have the data to exclude it," said Peters, who continues to research viral diseases at the University of Texas in Galveston.

Dr. Philip K. Russell, a virologist who oversaw Ebola research while heading the U.S. Army’s Medical Research and Development Command, and who later led the government’s massive stockpiling of smallpox vaccine after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, also said much was still to be learned. "Being dogmatic is, I think, ill-advised, because there are too many unknowns here."

If Ebola were to mutate on its path from human to human, said Russell and other scientists, its virulence might wane — or it might spread in ways not observed during past outbreaks, which were stopped after transmission among just two to three people, before the virus had a greater chance to evolve. The present outbreak in West Africa has killed approximately 3,400 people, and there is no medical cure for Ebola.

"I see the reasons to dampen down public fears," Russell said. "But scientifically, we’re in the middle of the first experiment of multiple, serial passages of Ebola virus in man…. God knows what this virus is going to look like. I don’t."

The deteriorating conditions in Africa make it more likely additional cases of Ebola will appear in the United States and officials are pushing for increased screenings at airports.

Tom Skinner, a spokesman for the CDC in Atlanta, said health officials were basing their response to Ebola on what has been learned from battling the virus since its discovery in central Africa in 1976. The CDC remains confident, he said, that Ebola is transmitted principally by direct physical contact with an ill person or their bodily fluids.

Skinner also said the CDC is conducting ongoing lab analyses to assess whether the present strain of Ebola is mutating in ways that would require the government to change its policies on responding to it. The results so far have not provided cause for concern, he said.

The researchers reached in recent days for this article cited grounds to question U.S. officials’ assumptions in three categories.

One issue is whether airport screenings of prospective travelers to the U.S. from West Africa can reliably detect those who might have Ebola. Frieden has said the CDC protocols used at West African airports can be relied on to prevent more infected passengers from coming to the U.S.

"One hundred percent of the individuals getting on planes are screened for fever before they get on the plane," Frieden said Sept. 30. "And if they have a fever, they are pulled out of the line, assessed for Ebola, and don’t fly unless Ebola is ruled out."

Individuals who have flown recently from one or more of the affected countries suggested that travelers could easily subvert the screening procedures — and might have incentive to do so: Compared with the depleted medical resources in the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea, the prospect of hospital care in the U.S. may offer an Ebola-exposed person the only chance to survive.

Relatives pray over a weak Siata Johnson, 23, outside the Ebola treatment center at a hospital on the outskirts of Monrovia, Liberia. (John Moore / Getty Images)

A person could pass body temperature checks performed at the airports by taking ibuprofen or any common analgesic. And prospective passengers have much to fear from identifying themselves as sick, said Kim Beer, a resident of Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, who is working to get medical supplies into the country to cope with Ebola.

"It is highly unlikely that someone would acknowledge having a fever, or simply feeling unwell," Beer said via email. "Not only will they probably not get on the flight — they may even be taken to/required to go to a ‘holding facility’ where they would have to stay for days until it is confirmed that it is not caused by Ebola. That is just about the last place one would want to go."

Liberian officials said last week that the patient hospitalized in Dallas, Thomas Eric Duncan, did not report to airport screeners that he had had previous contact with an Ebola-stricken woman. It is not known whether Duncan knew she suffered from Ebola; her family told neighbors it was malaria.

The potential disincentive for passengers to reveal their own symptoms was echoed by Sheka Forna, a dual citizen of Sierra Leone and Britain who manages a communications firm in Freetown. Forna said he considered it "very possible" that people with fever would medicate themselves to appear asymptomatic.

It would be perilous to admit even nonspecific symptoms at the airport, Forna said in a telephone interview. "You’d be confined to wards with people with full-blown disease."

On Monday, the White House announced that a review was underway of existing airport procedures. Frieden and President Obama’s assistant for homeland security and counter-terrorism, Lisa Monaco, said Friday that closing the U.S. to passengers from the Ebola-affected countries would risk obstructing relief efforts.

CDC officials also say that asymptomatic patients cannot spread Ebola. This assumption is crucial for assessing how many people are at risk of getting the disease. Yet diagnosing a symptom can depend on subjective understandings of what constitutes a symptom, and some may not be easily recognizable. Is a person mildly fatigued because of short sleep the night before a flight — or because of the early onset of disease?

Moreover, said some public health specialists, there is no proof that a person infected — but who lacks symptoms — could not spread the virus to others.

"It’s really unclear," said Michael Osterholm, a public health scientist at the University of Minnesota who recently served on the U.S. government’s National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. "None of us know."

Russell, who oversaw the Army’s research on Ebola, said he found the epidemiological data unconvincing.

"The definition of ‘symptomatic’ is a little difficult to deal with," he said. "It may be generally true that patients aren’t excreting very much virus until they become ill, but to say that we know the course of [the virus’ entry into the bloodstream] and the course of when a virus appears in the various secretions, I think, is premature."

The CDC’s Skinner said that while officials remained confident that Ebola can be spread only by the overtly sick, the ongoing studies would assess whether mutations that might occur could increase the potential for asymptomatic patients to spread it.

Finally, some also question the official assertion that Ebola cannot be transmitted through the air. In late 1989, virus researcher Charles L. Bailey supervised the government’s response to an outbreak of Ebola among several dozen rhesus monkeys housed for research in Reston, Va., a suburb of Washington.

What Bailey learned from the episode informs his suspicion that the current strain of Ebola afflicting humans might be spread through tiny liquid droplets propelled into the air by coughing or sneezing.

"We know for a fact that the virus occurs in sputum and no one has ever done a study [disproving that] coughing or sneezing is a viable means of transmitting," he said. Unqualified assurances that Ebola is not spread through the air, Bailey said, are "misleading."

Peters, whose CDC team studied cases from 27 households that emerged during a 1995 Ebola outbreak in Democratic Republic of Congo, said that while most could be attributed to contact with infected late-stage patients or their bodily fluids, "some" infections may have occurred via "aerosol transmission."

Ebola patient Ashoka Mukpo is loaded into an ambulance after arriving in Omaha. The American photojournalist became ill while working in Liberia and was taken to Nebraska Medical Center, where he will be kept in isolation. (James R. Burnett / World-Herald)

Skinner of the CDC, who cited the Peters-led study as the most extensive of Ebola’s transmissibility, said that while the evidence "is really overwhelming" that people are most at risk when they touch either those who are sick or such a person’s vomit, blood or diarrhea, "we can never say never" about spread through close-range coughing or sneezing.

"I’m not going to sit here and say that if a person who is highly viremic … were to sneeze or cough right in the face of somebody who wasn’t protected, that we wouldn’t have a transmission," Skinner said.

Peters, Russell and Bailey, who in 1989 was deputy commander for research of the Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, in Frederick, Md., said the primates in Reston had appeared to spread Ebola to other monkeys through their breath.

The Ebola strain found in the monkeys did not infect their human handlers. Bailey, who now directs a biocontainment lab at George Mason University in Virginia, said he was seeking to research the genetic differences between the Ebola found in the Reston monkeys and the strain currently circulating in West Africa.

Though he acknowledged that the means of disease transmission among the animals would not guarantee the same result among humans, Bailey said the outcome may hold lessons for the present Ebola epidemic.

"Those monkeys were dying in a pattern that was certainly suggestive of coughing and sneezing — some sort of aerosol movement," Bailey said. "They were dying and spreading it so quickly from cage to cage. We finally came to the conclusion that the best action was to euthanize them all."

david.willman@latimes.com

Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times

Is IT Time To Worry about Ebola Yet OBAMA

 

Is IT TIME To Worry about EBOLA Yet KING DICTATOR OBAMA

Canadian Health Agency Deletes Info on “Airborne Spread” of Ebola

Text amended amidst concern over first confirmed case in America

by Paul Joseph Watson | October 1, 2014

The Public Health Agency of Canada has deleted information from its official website which indicated that the “airborne spread” of Ebola was strongly suspected by health authorities, amidst efforts by officials in Texas to calm concerns about the first outbreak of the virus in America.

The image below shows the original Public Health Agency of Canada website’s information page on the Ebola virus as it appeared on August 20th compared to how it appears now.

Under a section entitled “mode of transmission,” the original text stated that, “airborne spread among humans is strongly suspected, although it has not yet been conclusively demonstrated.”

However, the amended text states that, “airborne transmission has not been demonstrated between non-human primates.”

Both passages refer to a 2012 study by Canadian scientists which indicated that the Ebola virus could be transmitted by air between different species.

“Researchers from the Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the country’s Public Health Agency have shown that pigs infected with this form of Ebola can pass the disease on to macaques without any direct contact between the species,” reported BBC News.

Although there is no confirmation that Ebola has gone airborne, Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, acknowledged in a recent New York Times op-ed that virologists are “loath to discuss openly but are definitely considering in private” the possibility that Ebola has gone airborne.

Some have questioned why hundreds of health workers have become sick and died from Ebola given that they take extreme precautions to avoid bodily contact with victims.

 

How Bad Could It Get? US Government Order Of 160,000 HazMat Suits Gives A Clue

What do they know the we don’t?

Image Credits: ssoosay, Flickr

by Zero Hedge | October 1, 2014

Now that Ebola is officially in the US on an uncontrolled basis, the two questions on everyone’s lips are i) who will get sick next and ii) how bad could it get?

We don’t know the answer to question #1 just yet, but when it comes to the second one, a press release three weeks ago from Lakeland Industries, a manufacturer and seller of a “comprehensive line of safety garments and accessories for the industrial protective clothing market” may provide some insight into just how bad the US State Department thinks it may get. Because when the US government buys 160,000 hazmat suits specifically designed against Ebola, just ahead of the worst Ebola epidemic in history making US landfall, one wonders: what do they know the we don’t?

From Lakeland Industries:

Lakeland Industries, Inc. (LAKE), a leading global manufacturer of industrial protective clothing for industry, municipalities, healthcare and to first responders on the federal, state and local levels, today announced the global availability of its protective apparel for use in handling the Ebola virus.  In response to the increasing demand for specialty protective suits to be worm by healthcare workers and others being exposed to Ebola, Lakeland is increasing its manufacturing capacity for these garments and includes proprietary processes for specialized seam sealing, a far superior technology for protecting against viral hazards than non-sealed products.

“Lakeland stands ready to join the fight against the spread of Ebola,” said Christopher J. Ryan, President and Chief Executive Officer of Lakeland Industries.  “We understand the difficulty of getting appropriate products through a procurement system that in times of crisis favors availability over specification, and we hope our added capacity will help alleviate that problem.  With the U.S. State Department alone putting out a bid for 160,000 suits, we encourage all protective apparel companies to increase their manufacturing capacity for sealed seam garments so that our industry can do its part in addressing this threat to global health.

Of course, purchases by the US government are bought and paid for by taxpayers. For everyone else there’s $1200 mail-order delivery:

That said… 160,000 HazMats for a disease that is supposedly not airborne? Mmmk.

 

Flashback: World Health Organization Rejects Ebola Travel Ban

U.N. organization downplays risk of Ebola spreading via air travel

Image Credits: Kuba Bożanowski / Flickr

by Kit Daniels | Infowars.com | October 1, 2014

The World Health Organization rejected a travel ban to and from Ebola-stricken countries several weeks before an airline passenger infected with Ebola unknowingly brought the disease from Liberia into America.

In its Aug. 14 press release, WHO disapproved of a potential ban on international travel to and from the West African nations hit hardest by Ebola, suggesting instead that governments provide “their citizens traveling to Ebola-affected countries with accurate and relevant information on the Ebola outbreak and measures to reduce the risk of exposure.”

In explaining the reasoning behind the decision, WHO said “the risk of transmission of Ebola virus disease during air travel remains low,” which completely ignores the possibility that someone infected with Ebola could spread the disease weeks after flying back to his home country.

“On the small chance that someone on the plane is sick with Ebola, the likelihood of other passengers and crew having contact with their body fluids is even smaller,” the press release states. “Usually when someone is sick with Ebola, they are so unwell that they cannot travel.”

“WHO is therefore advising against travel bans to and from affected countries.”

That small chance became reality on Tuesday when the U.S. Center for Disease Control confirmed a person in Dallas, Texas, contracted Ebola after visiting Liberia, which is the first case of Ebola diagnosed in the United States.

The man had arrived in the U.S. by plane from Liberia on Sept. 20 and went to the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital with symptoms of Ebola a few days later.

“The patient was discharged with antibiotics and returned again days later with watery diarrhea and other symptoms, tested for both malaria and Ebola, and put in isolation on the 28th,” Erick Erickson with Red State wrote, quoting a source reportedly from the CDC.

Earlier this morning, Dallas health officials announced they are now monitoring a second person who may have contracted Ebola after coming into contact with the first patient.

“Let me be real frank to the Dallas County residents: the fact that we have one confirmed case, there may be another case that is a close associate with this particular patient,” Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson said in an interview with local ABC affiliate WFAA. “So this is real.”

Despite the WHO’s recommendation against a travel ban, multiple countries decided to terminate air service to and from West African nations back in August, further indicating that WHO downplayed the risk of Ebola spreading via air travel.

 

Ebola Case in Texas Validates Concerns Over Open Border

Concerns that virus could enter US proven valid

by Adan Salazar | Infowars.com | October 1, 2014

As the first American case of Ebola was confirmed in Dallas yesterday, some laid blame on the Obama administration’s lax immigration policies for the ease at which the illness penetrated the nation’s borders.

During the past year, the federal government has struggled to deal with an influx of immigrants, 75 percent of which have arrived from countries other than Mexico.

The scale of diseases entering the US became apparent earlier this year when several Border Patrol agents working in crowded detention facilities began contracting illnesses, such as H1N1 swine flu, scabies and chicken pox, stemming from contact with diseased illegals.

Indeed, as more cases of tuberculosis and other contagious illnesses surfaced, experts began predicting that, given the lack of border security enforcement and health screenings, viral outbreaks occurring in parts of the world such as West Africa had a higher chance of reaching the U.S.

“Why are more doctors in the southern border states not already on alert to handle sudden increase in TB, adult chicken pox, measles, H1N1 influenza, dengue, Ebola, plus other unknown but lethal diseases?” asked practicing medical doctor Elizabeth Lee Vliet back in June.

Dr. Vliet and a host of politicians and medical professionals, including radio host and epidemiologist Michael Savage, were long ago warning of the dire threats posed to public health by the Obama administration’s de facto open border policies, which allowed illegals into the U.S. absent proper health screenings.

“These diseases are highly contagious,” wrote Vliet, “especially in crowded and poor sanitary conditions in the detention and processing centers where thousands of illegals are housed until sent to other areas of America, without full screening for such diseases.”

“Many of the diseases of concern, such as Ebola hemorrhagic fever, have NO effective treatments,” wrote Dr. Vliet, noting infectious disease is the leading cause of death worldwide.

Others, such as Texas Rep. Phil Gingrey, expressed concerns that “the border poses many risks, including grave public health threats.”

“Reports of illegal migrants carrying deadly diseases such as swine flu, dengue fever, Ebola virus and tuberculosis are particularly concerning,” Gingrey wrote in a letter to the CDC back in July.

While the CDC claims the Ebola patient did not cross through the southern border, last month, Dr. Vliet cast a prediction that the “global array of viral illnesses,” in addition to the nation’s porous borders, were a recipe for disaster.

“Ebola is one of the most lethal diseases we face, with a death rate from 60-90 percent of infected patients. It is a horrible death as the virus attacks the blood vessels leading to hemorrhaging internally and externally. There are no good treatments or vaccines,” she wrote.

Additionally, the doctor highlighted, the CDC unbeknownst to the public has already established emergency health facilities across the country to deal specifically with an Ebola outbreak.

“If risk is so low for the U.S., why is the CDC quietly setting up Ebola Quarantine Centers in 20 cities across the U.S.? Why did the Congressional Record report that Ebola bio kits have been deployed to National Guard units in all 50 states?” Dr. Vliet questioned last month.

Alarmingly, the CDC has also proceeded to issue guidelines to U.S. funeral homes on how to deal with the corpses of dead Ebola patients, and the U.S. State Department has also put out a bid for 160,000 Hazmat suits in anticipation of a viral outbreak.

Concerns over an American Ebola outbreak were also raised last month when the US decided to fly patients infected with the disease back into the US for treatment, rather than restricting flights from affected regions.

With fears of an Ebola pandemic coming to fruition inside the United States, the administration can now drop its facade of securing the border and move forward with efforts to scale up emergency powers, such as those outlined in the Model State Emergency Health Powers Act – which among other things would “Force persons to be vaccinated, treated, or quarantined for infectious diseases” – and President Obama’s executive order mandating the apprehension and detention of “well persons” who merely show signs of “respiratory illness.”

 

 

Obama Still Refuses to Halt Flights From Ebola Hot Zone

Multiple nations stopped flights over a month ago

Image Credits: Intel Photos / Flickr

by Kit Daniels | Infowars.com | October 1, 2014

After U.S. officials disclosed another potential case of Ebola in Dallas, Texas, this morning, the question remains whether the Obama administration will finally stop flights from Ebola-stricken countries as multiple nations did over a month ago.

In mid-August, Korean Air and Kenya Airways announced they were halting flights to the West African countries ravaged by Ebola, and British Airways and Air France also decided to suspend service to the Ebola hot zone a few weeks later.

“France is recommending that its citizens leave Sierra Leone and Liberia, two of the countries hardest hit by the worst ever outbreak of the disease,” Jessica Plautz reported for Mashable. “The government said the increasing spread of the disease prompted its request that the airline to suspend flights.”

Yet the Obama administration made no such request to U.S. airlines and government flights, despite the Center of Disease Control advising Americans to avoid “non-essential travel” to Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea several weeks ago.

“CDC urges all US residents to avoid non-essential travel to Liberia, Guinea, and Sierra Leone because of unprecedented outbreaks of Ebola in those countries,” the CDC travel health advisory states. “CDC recommends that travelers to these countries protect themselves by avoiding contact with the blood and body fluids of people who are sick with Ebola.”

The patient in Dallas, Texas, who the CDC confirmed as the first case of Ebola virus diagnosed in the United States, flew into the U.S. on Sept. 20 after contracting the disease in Liberia.

This morning, Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson said officials are currently monitoring another person who they fear may have Ebola after coming into contact with the patient currently being treated in Dallas.

“Let me be real frank to the Dallas County residents: the fact that we have one confirmed case, there may be another case that is a close associate with this particular patient,” Dallas County Health and Human Services Director Zachary Thompson said Wednesday in an interview with local ABC affiliate WFAA. “So this is real.”

So far, the White House has done little to prevent the spread of Ebola in the U.S. and may have in fact encouraged an outbreak by sending thousands of U.S. troops into West Africa earlier this month who could potentially contract the disease.

 

Five Dallas ISD students may have had contact with Ebola patient, none are sick

By Tawnell D. Hobbs

thobbs@dallasnews.com
12:21 pm on October 1, 2014 | Permalink

A Dallas ISD police officer arrives Wednesday at Sam Tasby Middle School, one of four Dallas schools attended by students who may have had contact with the man being treated for Ebola at Presbyterian Hospital of Dallas. (Andy Jacobsohn/Staff Photographer)

Five Dallas ISD students at four schools may have had contact with the Ebola patient in Dallas and stayed home from school as a precaution, according to a district email (see below) sent to employees today.

The kids are not showing symptoms of having the virus.

The students, who were not named, attend Tasby Middle School, Hotchkiss Elementary School, Dan D. Rogers Elementary and Conrad High School. The schools are in the Vickery Meadow area in northeast Dallas where many refugee families and other immigrants have settled in apartments.

DISD is also monitoring Lowe Elementary since it is connected to Tasby.

Mikey Terrell, a Conrad volunteer who lives in downtown Dallas, said news was spreading around the school that the man with Ebola lived or was visiting family nearby.

“It’s just getting around, just a few minutes ago,” he said today. He said he’d read about symptoms and prevention tips.

“I’ll just keep my hands to myself,” he said.

Click here for more information on the Ebola virus. Here’s a link on DISD’s website with more information.

More information, 12:49 p.m.:

Superintendent Mike Miles said during an afternoon news conference that impacted schools would have additional health professionals and custodial staff. He said that the district was informed this morning by Dallas County Health and Human Services of the five students that could have had contact with the Ebola patient.

“They possibly had contact with the patient over the weekend, and they have been in school since,” Miles said.

More information from Staff Writer Melissa Repko, 12:55 p.m.:

Tammy Brown, a mother of two students at Conrad, drove to pick up her daughter for a doctors appointment. She was greeted by a closed gate.

Her daughter, a junior in high school, came home Tuesday and said she didn’t want to go to school. She’d heard the man diagnosed with Ebola lived in a nearby apartment or was visiting there.

“She was real freaked out about it,” Brown said. “She worried someone was floating around with it.”

Brown spent Tuesday night researching on Google where the virus came from and how it spreads. She said she wishes the school district had sent home informational fliers to notify parents and tell them the virus’ symptoms. They could also make courtesy calls like they did when a middle school student was diagnosed with tuberculosis nearby, she said.

Her daughter’s fears concerned her, too.

“It made me nervous,” she said. “I had to stop because she was asking me questions and I didn’t have answers. I didn’t want to scare her.”

But Wednesday, Brown said her daughter decided to go to school anyway. “She tries to keep good attendance.”

More information from Staff Writer Jeff Mosier, 2:17 p.m.:

Shortly after lunch, a handful of Hotchkiss Elementary parents showed up to pull their children out of class.

Mayra Duarte, mother of a Hotchkiss first grader, said she first heard about the Ebola connection on the DISD Facebook page. “I don’t think I’m going to bring him until we go to the doctor and check him and see if he’s okay,” Duarte said.
This as well as the start of flu season has her worried about her son’s health.

One woman, who declined to give her name and appeared frantic, rushed up to the school and would only say: “I’m picking up my baby. ”

On her way out, she said she was hurrying to another of the schools to get her other child.

Deatra Allen, the aunt of a Hotchkiss kindergarten student, was unaware of the Ebola exposure until she was surrounded by members of the media in front of the school. She said this was a little too close to home.

“I don’t know if I want him to come back tomorrow,” she said.

More information, 2:38 p.m.:

The NEA-Dallas employees association urged health officials “to quarantine the five children” until they are satisfied that the kids have not contacted the disease.

“As always, their teachers will go the extra mile to help them get caught up on their studies after they return to class,” the group said in a statement.

Dallas ISD Ebola Notice

Urgent! Ebola Hits The US: Feds to Enact Emergency Measures?

Doctors give dire warnings as feds attempt to downplay

by Infowars.com | October 1, 2014

Infowars reporter Joe Biggs is on the scene where The Centers for Disease Control confirmed today that an Ebola victim was admitted to the Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital in Dallas

Washington’s Web of Lies and Deception

Washington’s Secret Agendas

The public continues to fall for the lies

by Paul Craig Roberts | Infowars.com | September 29, 2014

One might think that by now even Americans would have caught on to the constant stream of false alarms that Washington sounds in order to deceive the Washington people into supporting its hidden agendas.

The public fell for the lie that the Taliban in Afghanistan are terrorists allied with al Qaeda. Americans fought a war for 13 years that enriched Dick Cheney’s firm, Halliburton, and other private interests only to end in another Washington failure.

The public fell for the lie that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had “weapons of mass destruction” that were a threat to America and that if the US did not invade Iraq Americans risked a “mushroom cloud going up over an American city.” With the rise of ISIS, this long war apparently is far from over. Billions of dollars more in profits will pour into the coffers of the US military security complex as Washington fights those who are redrawing the false Middle East boundaries created by the British and French after WW I when the British and French seized territories of the former Ottoman Empire.

The American public fell for the lies told about Gaddafi in Libya. The formerly stable and prosperous country is now in chaos.

The American public fell for the lie that Iran has, or is building, nuclear weapons. Sanctioned and reviled by the West, Iran has shifted toward an Eastern orientation, thereby removing a principal oil producer from Western influence.

The public fell for the lie that Assad of Syria used “chemical weapons against his own people.” The jihadists that Washington sent to overthrow Assad have turned out to be, according to Washington’s propaganda, a threat to America.

The greatest threat to the world is Washington’s insistence on its hegemony. The ideology of a handful of neoconservatives is the basis for this insistence. We face the situation in which a handful of American neoconservative psychopaths claim to determine the fate of countries.

Many still believe Washington’s lies, but increasingly the world sees Washington as the greatest threat to peace and life on earth. The claim that America is “exceptional and indispensable” is used to justify Washington’s right to dictate to other countries.

The casualties of Washington’s bombings are invariably civilians, and the deaths will produce more recruits for ISIS. Already there are calls for Washington to reintroduce “boots on the ground” in Iraq. Otherwise, Western civilization is doomed, and our heads will be cut off. The newly created propaganda of a “Russian threat” requires more NATO spending and more military bases on Russia’s borders. A “quick reaction force” is being created to respond to a nonexistent threat of a Russian invasion of the Baltics, Poland, and Europe.

Usually it takes the American public a year, or two, three, or four to realize that it has been deceived by lies and propaganda, but by that time the public has swallowed a new set of lies and propaganda and is all concerned about the latest “threat.” The American public seems incapable of understanding that just as the first, second, third, fourth, and fifth, threat was a hoax, so is the sixth threat, and so will be the seventh, eighth, and ninth.

Moreover, none of these American military attacks on other countries has resulted in a better situation, as Vladimir Putin honestly states. Yet, the public and its representatives in Congress support each new military adventure despite the record of deception and failure.

Perhaps if Americans were taught their true history in place of idealistic fairy tales, they would be less gullible and less susceptible to government propaganda. I have recommended Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the US, Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the US, and now I recommend Stephen Kinzer’s The Brothers, the story of the long rule of John Foster and Allen Dulles over the State Department and CIA and their demonization of reformist governments that they often succeeded in overthrowing. Kinzer’s history of the Dulles brothers’ plots to overthrow six governments provides insight into how Washington operates today.

In 1953 the Dulles brothers overthrew Iran’s elected leader, Mossadegh and imposed the Shah, thus poisoning American-Iranian relations through the present day. Americans might yet be led into a costly and pointless war with Iran, because of the Dulles brothers poisoning of relations in 1953.

The Dulles brothers overthrew Guatemala’s popular president Arbenz, because his land reform threatened the interest of the Dulles brothers’ Sullivan & Cromwell law firm’s United Fruit Company client. The brothers launched an amazing disinformation campaign depicting Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was a threat to Western civilization. The brothers enlisted dictators such as Somoza in Nicaragua and Batista in Cuba against Arbenz. The CIA organized air strikes and an invasion force. But nothing could happen until Arbenz’s strong support among the people in Guatemala could be shattered. The brothers arranged this through Cardinal Spellman, who enlisted Archbishop Rossell y Arellano. “A pastoral letter was read on April 9, 1954 in all Guatemalan churches.”

A masterpiece of propaganda, the pastoral letter misrepresented Arbenz as a dangerous communist who was the enemy of all Guatemalans. False radio broadcasts produced a fake reality of freedom fighter victories and army defections. Arbenz asked the UN to send fact finders, but Washington prevented that from happening. American journalists, with the exception of James Reston, supported the lies. Washington threatened and bought off Guatemala’s senior military commanders, who forced Arbenz to resign. The CIA’s chosen and well paid “liberator,” Col. Castillo Armas, was installed as Arbenz’s successor.

We recently witnessed a similar operation in Ukraine.

President Eisenhower thanked the CIA for averting “a Communist beachhead in our hemisphere,” and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles gave a national TV and radio address in which he declared that the events in Guatemala “expose the evil purpose of the Kremlin.” This despite the uncontested fact that the only outside power operating in Guatemala was the Dulles brothers.

What had really happened is that a democratic and reformist government was overthrown because it compensated United Fruit Company for the nationalization of the company’s fallow land at a value listed by the company on its tax returns. America’s leading law firm or perhaps more accurately, America’s foreign policy-maker, Sullivan & Cromwell, had no intention of permitting a democratic government to prevail over the interests of the law firm’s client, especially when senior partners of the firm controlled both overt and covert US foreign policy. The two brothers, whose family members were invested in the United Fruit Company, simply applied the resources of the CIA, State Department, and US media to the protection of their private interests. The extraordinary gullibility of the American people, the corrupt American media, and the indoctrinated and impotent Congress allowed the Dulles brothers to succeed in overthrowing a democracy.

Keep in mind that this use of the US government in behalf of private interests occurred 60 years ago long before the corrupt Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama regimes. And no doubt in earlier times as well.

The Dulles brothers next intended victim was Ho Chi Minh. Ho, a nationalist leader, asked for America’s help in freeing Vietnam from French colonial rule. But John Foster Dulles, a self-righteous anti-communist, miscast Ho as a Communist Threat who was springing the domino theory on the Western innocents. Nationalism and anti-colonialism, Foster declared, were merely a cloak for communist subversion.

Paul Kattenburg, the State Department desk officer for Vietnam suggested that instead of war, the US should give Ho $500 million in reconstruction aid to rebuild the country from war and French misrule, which would free Ho from dependence on Russian and Chinese support, and, thereby, influence. Ho appealed to Washington several times, but the demonic inflexibility of the Dulles brothers prevented any sensible response. Instead, the hysteria whipped-up over the “communist threat” by the Dulles brothers landed the United States in the long, costly, fiasco known as the Vietnam War. Kattenburg later wrote that it was suicidal for the US “to cut out its eyes and ears, to castrate its analytic capacity, to shut itself off from the truth because of blind prejudice.” Unfortunately for Americans and the world, castrated analytic capacity is Washington’s strongest suit.

The Dulles brothers’ next targets were President Sukarno of Indonesia, Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba of Congo, and Fidel Castro. The plot against Castro was such a disastrous failure that it cost Allen Dulles his job. President Kennedy lost confidence in the agency and told his brother Bobby that after his reelection he was going to break the CIA into a thousand pieces. When President Kennedy removed Allen Dulles, the CIA understood the threat and struck first.

Warren Nutter, my Ph.D. dissertation chairman, later Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, taught his students that for the US government to maintain the people’s trust, which democracy requires, the government’s policies must be affirmations of our principles and be openly communicated to the people. Hidden agendas, such as those of the Dulles brothers and the Clinton, Bush and Obama regimes, must rely on secrecy and manipulation and, thereby, arouse the distrust of the people. If Americans are too brainwashed to notice, many foreign nationals are not.

The US government’s secret agendas have cost Americans and many peoples in the world tremendously. Essentially, the Foster brothers created the Cold War with their secret agendas and anti-communist hysteria. Secret agendas committed Americans to long, costly, and unnecessary wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Secret CIA and military agendas intending regime change in Cuba were blocked by President John F. Kennedy and resulted in the assassination of a president, who, for all his faults, was likely to have ended the Cold War twenty years before Ronald Reagan seized the opportunity.

Secret agendas have prevailed for so long that the American people themselves are now corrupted. As the saying goes, “a fish rots from the head.” The rot in Washington now permeates the country.

Paul Craig Roberts