SARS and Gulf War Syndrome
It is difficult to make either heads or tails out of the mainstream media SARS reporting. I find the article of Peter Chowka useful for getting some of the background and some hints for web pages to visit.
Making sense of SARS continues to be extremely difficult, however. For example, reports that Canada supposedly had licked the "epidemic" were followed within days by news that almost 8,000 Canadians had been quarantined following more deaths attributed to SARS and that the danger wasn't over yet.
Chowka links the SARS data with increased personal surveillance and with data on other illnesses such as the Gulf War (II) Syndrome.
SARS, Gulf War II Syndrome,
Big Brother, & More© By Peter Chowka
(June 1, 2003) As reported on naturalhealthline.com on May 1, SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) seemingly came out of nowhere this spring and dominated the news during the weeks that followed the end of active hostilities in Iraq in April.
As the month of May went on, coverage of SARS in the U.S. tended to be overshadowed by developments in the investigation into the murder of 27-year old California resident Laci Peterson and her unborn son, which captivated much of the media, particularly the cable TV news channels. But SARS stories kept appearing and by month's end over 27,000 recent SARS-related news articles were linked from google.com and the number of stories, and deaths, continued to rise daily. By the end of the month, almost 800 people around the world had reportedly died of SARS, an increase of almost 100 percent since April 29. No deaths in the U.S. have been attributed to SARS.
Making sense of SARS continues to be extremely difficult, however. For example, reports that Canada supposedly had licked the "epidemic" were followed within days by news that almost 8,000 Canadians had been quarantined following more deaths attributed to SARS and that the danger wasn't over yet.
On May 28, a news release datelined Denver announced that a new "watchdog" organization, Truth About Reporting of SARS (TARS), had been formed to challenge and clarify "misleading" reporting on SARS by the World Health Organization (WHO) of the United Nations.
The day before, it was reported from Geneva that, at its annual meeting, the WHO called for a revision of international health regulations in order to give the organization more power to monitor disease outbreaks, make recommendations to individual countries, and regulate international travel and trade whenever something like SARS first emerges. A statement said the WHO is "deeply concerned that SARS, as the first severe infectious disease to emerge in the century, poses a serious threat to global health security, the livelihood of populations, the functioning of health systems, and the stability and growth of economies."
A few observers continued to raise substantive criticisms of mainstream media reporting about and official responses to SARS, most notably journalist Jon Rappoport. On a daily basis at nomorefakenews.com, Rappoport writes things like, "Now, understand that the basic truth remains unchanged: SARS is a fake disease from top to bottom. The vaunted coronavirus has never been established as the cause of anything. Older disease---regular pneumonias, flu, even TB, all sorts of ordinary lung infections---is being arbitrarily and randomly imported over into a new category. SARS."
On May 21, it was reported that the U.S. government is examining a variety of alternative methods, including Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), as potential SARS treatments. "We are looking at anything," Catherine Laughlin, chief of the Virology Branch at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told a meeting at the New York Academy of Sciences. "There are some natural products which we are quite excited about, including Chinese herbal medicine."
On May 6, the Bush Administration announced that a new policy had gone into effect allowing federal agents at U.S. borders and ports of entry including major airports to use force, if necessary, to detain and quarantine travelers suspected of having SARS. The task is complicated by the fact that a definitive test for SARS does not exist. But various methods for surveying people for possible SARS-related symptoms are already in place, including remotely screening passengers at airports for elevated body temperatures.
SARS, like HIV-AIDS before it, represents an emerging profit center for a variety of businesses, including pharmaceutical companies, the academic sector (which is already receiving government funds to "study" SARS), and businesses that are developing technologies to screen for the presence of SARS.
An example of the latter is found in a news release dated May 21, titled "A New Weapon in the Fight Against SARS? - 'SARS-Ready' Software Debuts at Two U.S. Hospitals." The release begins, "Doctors and nurses anticipating a wave of potentially new patients with Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) may have a new ally in the detection and treatment of the epidemic illness. Patient Care Technology Systems (PCTS), a medical software company based in Aliso Viejo, Calif., that specializes in clinical information systems that enhance emergency room patient care and administration, has enhanced its Amelior ED software system protocols for rapidly identifying and treating SARS. The upgrades were released this week to Amelior ED(R) customers nationwide. . .The technology allows emergency room physicians and staff to quickly identify patients presenting with SARS or SARS-like symptoms. After an automatic warning identifies a potential SARS candidate, the software expedites the ordering of SARS diagnostic and nursing interventions."
The news release quotes Dr. Clif Sheets, an ER physician at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, VA: "With the heightened concern over SARS, quickly identifying candidate patients and prescribing appropriate tests and treatment are pivotal."
Big Brother Marches OnA careful observer cannot not fail to notice these days, virtually every day, reports about new intrusions into the area of personal privacy.
On May 19, the Associated Press reported that the Pentagon is developing a radar-based device that can identify people by monitoring their individual movements - the way they walk. "The individual 'gait signatures' [supposedly unique to each person like his or her fingerprints] could become part of the data to be linked together in a vast surveillance system the Pentagon agency calls Total Information Awareness." The same day, another AP story noted: "To track and thwart terrorists, the Pentagon wants to give U.S. agents fingertip access to records from around the world that could fill the Library of Congress more than 50 times. . .it is trying to design software that could access and analyze an unprecedented amount of data, 'measured in petabytes.' In computer jargon, a byte is what it takes electronically to represent one letter of the alphabet. A petabyte is a quadrillion, or 1,000,000,000,000,000, bytes."
On May 16, in a story titled "Extent of UK snooping revealed," the BBC reported that "Officials in the UK are routinely demanding huge quantities of information about what people do online and who they call. . .Police and other officials are making around a million requests for access to data held by net and telephone companies each year, according to figures compiled from the government, legal experts and the internet industry. The findings were announced at a public debate into government proposals to widen powers for internet snooping held in London this week. . .The requests include telephone billing data, e-mail logs and customer details, which privacy experts estimate could amount to a billion individual items of data, ranging from credit card numbers to numbers dialed."
On May 15, the New York Times reported that a test is underway at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport to scan the irises of 7,000 frequent travelers. "In exchange for an annual subscription fee and background check, they are able to confirm their identities to the Dutch immigration service by letting one of seven infrared cameras scan their irises." The new high tech ID program is expected to go into more widespread use later, including at other airports.
In April, the AP revealed that the school district of Plumsted, NJ had implemented iris scanning. "The iris scanning technology will be used to identify employees and those authorized to pick up children in the 1,800-student district." In a follow-up story published on May 10, it was reported in the Daily News that "Plumsted was among some 400 school districts that applied for a grant from the Justice Department for the iris-recognition technology. The federal agency is building a database on school security and is using Plumsted as its first data collection." On May 28, the Akron, Ohio Beacon Journal reported that the school board in that city had voted to spend $700,000 in order to identify students waiting in cafeteria lines by their fingerprints.
The intersection of medical issues and public policy, as in the much-hyped fears about SARS and possible bioterrorism, provides the greatest, and least challenged, momentum for the most extreme levels of data basing, privacy busting, and high tech snooping. In an article published on January 27, the New York Times reported that "To [provide] early warning of a bioterror attack, the government is building a computerized network that will collect and analyze health data of people in eight major cities. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to lead the multimillion-dollar surveillance effort, which officials expect to become the cornerstone of a national network to spot disease outbreaks by tracking data like doctor reports, emergency room visits and sales of [over the counter] flu medicine [in drugstores]. . .the emerging network has raised concerns that such surveillance may violate individual medical privacy rights."
Gulf War II SyndromeIn the years after the first Gulf War (Operation Desert Storm) ended in February 1991, thousands of U.S. and coalition troops who had served in the area complained of a variety of serious health problems including fatigue, digestive maladies, psychological problems like depression, wasting muscles, birth defects, and nausea. These symptoms came to be called Gulf War Syndrome (GWS), or, officially by the military, Gulf War Illnesses. Possible causes, individually or synergistically, include vaccines administered before the war, depleted uranium used in munitions, and chemical-biological warfare exposure from the destruction of Iraqi weapons caches.
On May 27, the Evening Standard in London published a story titled "'War vaccines poisoned us'" reporting that "Four British soldiers who received jabs [vaccinations] for the Iraq conflict are to sue the Ministry of Defence claiming they are suffering from a new form of Gulf War Syndrome. The revelation comes as a veterans' support group predicted today that thousands of UK servicemen will come forward with mystery illnesses linked to 'vaccine overload.' Tony Flint of the National Gulf Veterans and Families' Association, confirmed he now anticipates a fresh wave of health cases. 'We are expecting at least 6,000 new cases as a result of the Iraq conflict - about 30 per cent of the 22,000 troops who had the anthrax vaccination.'"
Earlier in May, as reported by CNN and the Evening Chronicle in Newcastle, the UK, "Former service personnel last night hailed as a landmark victory a ruling which links vaccinations given before the last Gulf War and illnesses among soldiers. Calls for a public inquiry into 'Gulf War Syndrome' (GWS) were gathering pace after the ruling declared a link between one of the main symptoms of the illness and injections given to servicemen. Former Lance Corporal Alex Izett described the judgment by the War Pensions Appeal Tribunal as a watershed moment in the battle to have the condition officially recognised. The tribunal found that Mr Izett - who did not serve in the war - had, before the Gulf conflict, been given a concoction of drugs which had caused osteoporosis. Defence Minister Lewis Moonie yesterday insisted that the ruling did not prove the existence of GWS, but said the Ministry of Defence would not appeal against the decision - potentially opening the floodgates to claims."
In its introduction to the story, the Chronicle cautioned that "It is clear that the Government's policy is to only concede ground when it feels it absolutely has to. And when it does concede ground it will be inches, not miles. To gain anything more then the veterans are going to have to fight on and fight hard - just as they have done for the last 12 years."
In the U.S. military, at least, declining a vaccination prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom was not an option. On May 28, a military panel took only 40 minutes to find an Army reservist, Pvt. Kamila Iwanowska, 26, a naturalized American citizen originally from Poland, guilty of disobeying orders for refusing to take the anthrax vaccine. The New York Post cleverly headlined its May 29th story, "Pvt. Guilty of 'Thrax Vax Nix. Iwanowska was ordered by her commanding officers on three occasions to take the vaccine, according to press accounts, but she refused, contending that she considered the injection potentially harmful to her ehalth and to children she might have in the future, adding that the long-term effects of the anthrax vaccine are unknown. She also cited religious reasons for refusing the shots. Her attorneys argued that the anthrax vaccine has never been properly licensed by the government and is being used by the military even though it isn't intended to treat anthrax inhalation infections.
The prosecution asked the military panel to sentence Iwanowska to six months in jail. Instead, she was dismissed from the Army and given a bad conduct discharge.
Medical Child Custody Case Ends with Victory for the StateIn April, a case in Michigan involving a critically ill child whose parents wanted to use alternative medicine received media attention in the state and in several national wire service stories. Noshin Hogue, 2, was diagnosed in January with a malignant brain tumor. Her parents, Jalal and Shaheda Hoque, originally from Bangladesh, were charged with medical neglect when they opted for homeopathy instead of surgery. The parents' attorney said that even with surgery, the child stood only a 20 to 30-percent chance of reaching full life expectancy, and there was a high risk of permanent impairment if she underwent the surgery.
After being threatened with a trial set to begin on May 29, according to press accounts, the parents reached an agreement with prosecutors on May 15 that requires them to seek regular care from a licensed medical doctor. Noshin must visit the doctor at least once a month and the parents have to obtain all conventional medical treatment for her that is deemed necessary by the physician.
In recent years, the case of four year-old Thomas Navarro, whose parents wanted to treat his brain cancer with antineoplastons, and, several decades ago, the case of Chad Green, who was taken out of the country by his parents for alternative treatment for leukemia, pointed to the obstacles facing parents who are challenged by the state over the issue of parents' rights vs. alleged child's rights in medical cases.
Michael and Raphaele Horwin, whose son Alexander died in 1999 at age 4 of brain cancer as his parents were trying to get government approval for him to be treated with antineoplastons by Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, told me something in 2000 that seems truer than ever today: "People need to understand a very simple fact that, because of the government, parents do not have the opportunity to fight as best they can for their child's life when their child is diagnosed with cancer. . .As long as the current medical monopoly remains in effect, cancer patients will only have access to therapies that are basically ineffective. The treatments that are really effective. . .will be controlled by the FDA so that few patients can access them. But for children, the situation is even worse. Adults can say 'no' to chemo and radiation. Children can't."
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See also:
Health Investigation into China's recent SARS outbreak yields important lessons
It has been more than a year since the Ministry of Health of China notified WHO and the world about an outbreak of SARS in Beijing and Anhui Province. Since then, WHO experts have been supporting the Chinese authorities in their investigation into the cause of the laboratory-acquired cases, and in assessing the effectiveness of measures taken to control the outbreak. During the investigation, it became apparent that all the positive laboratory workers worked in the same general laboratory at the Institute. Although no research involving live SARS viruses was known to have taken place in this laboratory, SARS coronavirus that had been inactivated in a Biosafety Level 3 laboratory in the Institute was used on several occasions during the early months of 2004 in experiments carried out in this area. The timing of the use of inactivated SARS coronavirus in the general laboratory coincides with the presence there of all the positive workers and with their likely incubation periods.
posted by Sepp Hasslberger on Tuesday June 3 2003
updated on Friday December 17 2010URL of this article:
http://www.newmediaexplorer.org/sepp/2003/06/03/sars_and_gulf_war_syndrome.htm
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