Bird flu or cash cow?

Catholic New Times, May 21, 2006 by Eve Hillary

I had a chance to think again about the emergence of diseases for profit, an issue that I had just published in my second book Health Betrayal.

I thought about AIDS, a previously unheard of disease, which emerged in the early 1980s.

A few years earlier Merck pharmaceutical company had developed an experimental hepatitis vaccine, which was given to gay men and Africans. By 1980 the AIDS epidemic started in those populations that had received the experimental vaccine.

Since that time, the WHO (World Health Organization) with its close ties to pharmaceutical companies, has strictly mandated billions of doses of various types of vaccines to Africans and other developing world residents where AIDS has spread like wild fire. Governments have vaccinated unwilling populations at gunpoint.

In 2002, Nkuba, an African activist, wrote after a vaccination campaign, "There was one mother who had four children, and she hid one and took three other children for vaccination, and three children died and that one survived."

It is noteworthy that of over 45 million people afflicted with HIV/AIDS worldwide, 39 million of them are in developing countries. In 2003, the average AIDS patient, who could afford it, paid US $15,000 per year for AIDS drugs which have not been shown to be effective in the treatment of the disease.

Prior to 1997, the wild bird flu was a rare and relatively mild virus affecting only birds. The first case of bird flu affecting a human appeared in Asia in 1997. Apparently the wild virus had mysteriously changed to H5N1 strain, a strain that had been known to be located in many biohazard labs around the world.

The H5N1 strain hit the Asian countries hardest, such as Thailand, Japan, Vietnam and China. Tyson Foods chief administrative officer, Greg Lee, is reported by Reuters to have said, "We are seeing and do expect to see some positive benefit as a result of disruptions in some of the Asian production."

Meanwhile the poultry infection near the eastern block has caused widespread suspicion. A member of the Liberal Democratic faction of the Russian State Duma, Aleksei Mitrofanov, has indicated his belief that the Americans invented bird flu in order to dominate the world's poultry markets.

Dr. Len Horowitz, U.S. independent public health expert, writes, "In not a single case has human-to-human communicability been confirmed. So long as that remains the case, there is no bird flu threat to the human population of places such as Vietnam, much less the United States."

An editorial in the prestigious British Medical Journal maintains, "The lack of sustained human-to-human transmission suggests that this H5N1 avian virus does not currently have the capacity to cause a human pandemic."

Meanwhile panic is being spread globally. Without a sign of a human epidemic, on October 28, 2005 the U.S. Senate passed an $8 billion emergency bill to fund research, drugs and vaccines.

President Bush is discussing the use of the military to enforce quarantine of suspected bird flu carriers. This has resulted in heavy opposition among independent thinkers.

Many qualified doctors would agree, including Dr. Lorraine Day MD who states; "It is virtually impossible to get sick if your immune system is functioning properly."

A culture change is spreading around the world, albeit largely unreported by mainstream media. It empowers people to act, to challenge wrongs, and to make informed choices. One important approach is to not depend only on mainstream media but to seek balanced information from independent media sources.

Hillary Eve is based in Sydney, Australia and has been a health-care professional for over 25 years. For more information see www.evehillary.org