A call to global solidarity in the face of H5N1 and other avian influenza viruses signed by Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello and others. Bird flu is not a media scare story, it is a major threat to poor people throughout the world. What we need is a global justice response.
This is a new statement on the threat of pandemic influenza initiated by Pandemic Action, drawn up for the Nairobi World Social Forum, and circulated there.
(For more about Pandemic Action, please see bottom of page and/or : .)
Bird flu is not a media scare story, designed to distract and frighten us into conformity, it is a major threat to millions of people in the developing world, and demands a political response from activists in the Global North.
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A call for a global justice response to the threat of pandemic flu
Today humanity faces a massive global threat from avian infl uenza ('bird flu'). Leading researchers believe a human pandemic is not only inevitable but overdue
In December 2006, the Lancet medical journal estimated that a global H5N1 influenza pandemic could kill over 60 million people - 96% of them in the Global South.
n 1918, an influenza virus killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. Overwhelmingly, these deaths took place in the Global South. People with HIV and AIDS will be particularly vulnerable to a new influenza pandemic, along with those affected by malnutrition and war.
The world needs:
* an end to corporate patents that restrict access to critical medicines
* urgent funding by the rich world to boost health and surveillance systems in countries most at risk in Asia and Africa
* the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming, which is accelerating the development of new pandemic viruses.
Corporate greed and Western self-interest are blocking these urgently-needed actions.
The Global Justice Movement can and must take action now.
Signed by:
Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello, Mike Davis (author of 'The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu'), Michael Greger MD (author 'Bird Flu: A virus of our own hatching'), Caroline Lucas (Green MEP, UK), John Pilger, Jonathan Stevenson (Pandemic Action), Kathy Kelly (Voices for Creative Nonviolence), Michael Albert (ZNet), Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Winner), Hans von Sponeck (former UN Assistant Secretary-General), Denis Halliday (former UN Assistant Secretary-General) and others.
*****
Pandemic Action is a new group based in the UK provoked into action by the book 'The Monster At Our Door' by US professor Mike Davis. Members include Gabriel Carlyle (Voices in the Wilderness UK), Jonathan Stevenson (Jubilee Debt Campaign), Milan Rai (Justice Not Vengeance), Patrick Nicholson (Scientists for Global Responsibility), and Martin Hearson (British Overseas NGOs for Development) (all in personal capacities).
(For more about Pandemic Action, please see bottom of page and/or : .)
Bird flu is not a media scare story, designed to distract and frighten us into conformity, it is a major threat to millions of people in the developing world, and demands a political response from activists in the Global North.
******
A call for a global justice response to the threat of pandemic flu
Today humanity faces a massive global threat from avian infl uenza ('bird flu'). Leading researchers believe a human pandemic is not only inevitable but overdue
In December 2006, the Lancet medical journal estimated that a global H5N1 influenza pandemic could kill over 60 million people - 96% of them in the Global South.
n 1918, an influenza virus killed more people in 24 weeks than AIDS has killed in 24 years. Overwhelmingly, these deaths took place in the Global South. People with HIV and AIDS will be particularly vulnerable to a new influenza pandemic, along with those affected by malnutrition and war.
The world needs:
* an end to corporate patents that restrict access to critical medicines
* urgent funding by the rich world to boost health and surveillance systems in countries most at risk in Asia and Africa
* the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming, which is accelerating the development of new pandemic viruses.
Corporate greed and Western self-interest are blocking these urgently-needed actions.
The Global Justice Movement can and must take action now.
Signed by:
Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Walden Bello, Mike Davis (author of 'The Monster At Our Door: The Global Threat of Avian Flu'), Michael Greger MD (author 'Bird Flu: A virus of our own hatching'), Caroline Lucas (Green MEP, UK), John Pilger, Jonathan Stevenson (Pandemic Action), Kathy Kelly (Voices for Creative Nonviolence), Michael Albert (ZNet), Mairead Corrigan Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Winner), Hans von Sponeck (former UN Assistant Secretary-General), Denis Halliday (former UN Assistant Secretary-General) and others.
*****
Pandemic Action is a new group based in the UK provoked into action by the book 'The Monster At Our Door' by US professor Mike Davis. Members include Gabriel Carlyle (Voices in the Wilderness UK), Jonathan Stevenson (Jubilee Debt Campaign), Milan Rai (Justice Not Vengeance), Patrick Nicholson (Scientists for Global Responsibility), and Martin Hearson (British Overseas NGOs for Development) (all in personal capacities).
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Hide the following 25 comments
if only
05.02.2007 02:28
so many people would be cheering
snake oil companies (known as pharmaceuticals)
KFC
chargrilled chicken proprietors
other assorted blood-runnin-down-mah-lips humanoids.
for a crtiticism of the whole bird-flu hysteria
"Robert Webster: Scientist or Alarmist" Melbourne Indymedia, reposted on flu-trackers.
you and the purveyors of the hysteria are more rampant than the virus itself.
Zagovor
Bird Flu Will Kill millions…
05.02.2007 04:24
If it mutates to humans it will be because of the fact that previous biological warfare programs have created a modified and patented pathogen that can evolve to accommodate its DNA.
Mike O’Plasma
Jakarta - floods + flu + poverty = trouble
05.02.2007 09:15
* an end to corporate patents that restrict access to critical medicines
* urgent funding by the rich world to boost health and surveillance systems in countries most at risk in Asia and Africa
* the elimination of large-scale intensive livestock farming, which is accelerating the development of new pandemic viruses.
dp
Factory farmer Matthews = Typhoid Mary
05.02.2007 12:38
Now we know.
"On 30th June 1992 Sárvári Poultry Processing Company was turned into a state-owned shareholding company under the name of Sárvári Poultry Processing Shareholding Company. The turning point in the life of the company came on 17th April 1993: Bernard Matthews UK took over the management of the company in the framework of privatisation. "
So much for wild birds being blamed.
dp
I think
05.02.2007 13:29
C Sanders
I
05.02.2007 13:51
B Mathews
The Scam of the Century
05.02.2007 15:41
They are all 'man-made' for depopulation and demand "global co-opeartion."
Globalist
If only... it was not a threat to the world's poor
05.02.2007 17:04
I checked out the article that you cited: and I find nothing in it to refute the documentation and arguments put forward in The Monster At Our Door (Mike Davis) or Bird Flu (Michael Greger) - neither of the authors have any financial interest in the matter, or any connection to the corporations, so far as I know. (The latter book is available online in its entirety: .
The 1918 influenza pandemic killed 50-100 million humans. Before it struck the virus was circulating or 'smouldering' for perhaps two years , and the first wave of infection in humans was relatively mild.
In the two years of smouldering, the scale of the disaster that was coming would have seemed unbelievable. In the first mild wave of human infection, the scale of the disaster coming would have seemed unbelievable.
We don't know what the scale of the H5N1 epidemic/pandemic will be (there are other avian influenza viruses evolving towards pandemic capability), but there is close to a scientific consensus that H5N1 will be transmitted to human beings.
BIO WEAPONS
The 1918 pandemic was clearly not caused by bioweaponry. If there's any evidence that the current H5N1 virus variant is the result of military research, it hasn't surfaced in public.
The references to mycoplasma given by Mike O'Plasma, which may or may not be soundly-based, do not seem to have any relevance to H5N1.
Best wishes
Milan Rai
Pandemic Action
Milan Rai
e-mail:
milan@pandemicaction.net
Homepage:
http://www.pandemicaction.net
If Biowar
05.02.2007 21:41
It will take a catastrophic economic collapse for that to happen. The Powers That Be will not allow that, they use every trick they can think of to maintain Growth. If bird 'flu becomes human to human infectious, maintains the 70% lethality it has in some places, (in Vietmnam they got it down to 50%) and is caught by about 80% of he people in the world, then maybe there will be a sufficient collapse for Life to survive on this planet. Satan wlll be defeated.
It is a bit of a giggle to see so many people praying to God to save them. Their badgering makes the conentration necessary to beat the Scientists impossible. No one works out what they have to do to help God save this Creation. Those who get closest get sidetracked into going on Marches, or waiting about after an action to be arrested, and NVDA..
There is a Global Economy to be collapsed. There are power structures to be destroyed. Perhaps good Moslems will turn off all their Oil. Unfortunately they have many Leaders who have sold out to Satan.
If Bird 'flu is not a threat to the Rich, then that in itself is proof that it is deliberately engineered by the Rich to reduce the Global population to sustainable proportions. Pandemic Action have the wrong end of the stick.
But the real rot is back in the 1920s when those who saw what had to be done did not argue their case in order to avoid offending their Religious friends. There is no easy solution now.
Ilyan
“The 1918 pandemic was clearly not caused by bioweaponry”
05.02.2007 21:52
But the 1918 flu virus was modified with bird mycoplasma…
The manufacture of viral cancers combined with mycoplasma was the hallmark of the SVCP as well as the earliest bio-warfare. Mycoplasma was found in the late 1800 and crystallized from tobacco in 1935. 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt had appointed George W. Merck (Merck & Company Pharmaceutical founder) to direct the War Research Service with oversaw our biological weapons industry.
As early as 1918 a flu virus modified with bird mycoplasma killed millions (associated with "Federation of the American Society for Experimental Biology").
---
The pathogenic Mycoplasma used to be very innocuous, but biological warfare research conducted between 1942 and the present time has resulted in the creation of more deadly and infectious forms of Mycoplasma.
Researchers extracted this mycoplasma from the Brucella bacterium and actually reduced the disease to a crystalline form. They "weaponized" it and tested it on an unsuspecting public in North America.
Dr Maurice Hilleman, chief virologist for the pharmaceutical company Merck Sharp & Dohme, stated that this disease agent is now carried by everybody in North America and possibly most people throughout the world.
---
The CIA, Deadly Vaccines And GWS Propaganda
Mycoplasm are pathogens found in Autism, ME, MS, GWS, AIDS and many other neurological/immune system diseases....Mycoplasma fermentants (Incognito) was created in a lab for bio-warfare, and is said to live undetected in the immune system, hence the name 'incognito'. Some say that mycoplasma and the monkey herpes virus SV40 has mutated, perhaps to form a deadly human herpes virus (HHV-6), which again is said to be the real cause of AIDS, MS, ME, Autism, GWS, etc...
---
"...And advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool."
'Rebuilding Americas Defences' - The Project for the New American Century 2001
Mike O'Plasma and Huw Jenicks
flu, health and wealth
05.02.2007 22:28
So there is some dissent here that I'd normally call healthy, I'm no intellectual after all as most of you know. I did call the London Whale death as caused by deafness by human sounds a year before anyone else did, now that is established fact though nobody paid attention to me at the time. I'm not uneducated- anyway, say I am a stupid, deluded, arse. Can you say that about Milan ? Milan wrote one of the best books about the causes of the Iraq war before it occurred plus he took action to protest it. Who here can intellectually criticise Chomsky and Klein ? Thought not.
Once the bird shit does hit the fan, I'll repeat a wee tip for those of us who can't afford Tamiflu. Chinese star aniseed contains exactly the same compound. Add hot water for a tea, wash your hands every five minutes and choose your government 'buddies' with extreme care.
If the pandemic comes, it will come from intermingling with one of the thousand normal flu in a poor person in a poor country. You are only 24 hours from those countries. It will be caused by factory farming. I'd bet my life on it, though I doubt I'll die from it myself.
The best way to protect yourself is to persuade everyone to stop eating poultry forever. Pigs too, they are also virus heaven. And we all know about cows don't we ? Prions ?
dp
“If there's any evidence…
05.02.2007 23:00
If there was evidence we would not be having this conversation. But there is plenty of speculation based of several undisputable facts which, when put together, certainly paints a very murky picture.
Why this obvious possibility is not even discussed is very curious. Surely when investigating something as serious as this all possibilities should be looked at, even the politically unpalatable…?
Google - 1918 flu bird mycoplasma
previously undescribed mycoplasma may be the trigger
05.02.2007 23:05
Genetic analysis of bird flu
The villain in the 1918 epidemic is known as H1N1. Both the 1997 bird flu and the new outbreak are examples of H5N1, although they are not identical.
More than 400 harbor seals, most of them immature, died along the New England coast between December 1979 and October 1980 of acute pneumonia associated with influenza virus, A/Seal/Mass/1/180 (H7N7). The virus has avian characteristics, replicates principally in mammals, and causes mild respiratory disease in experimentally infected seals.
Concurrent infection with a previously undescribed mycoplasma or adverse environmental conditions may have triggered the epizootic.
Mike O'Plasma
On Forecast, but 30 years late.
06.02.2007 00:45
Jack
Avian Flu and Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
06.02.2007 02:19
Thankyou for taking the time to read the article I cited.
I do not wish to pursue the "scientific" line of argument, I am not a supporter
of the methodology of modern science.
(Bird Flu and Pseudo Science) (Constant War: The Death of Science and Rationality)
(Melbourne Indymedia) perhaps no longer available.
But you have to take stock of your approach. Self-Fulfilling Expectations (prophecies) are very powerful forces in every aspect of our society (Jussim). The real danger is that if enough people promote the bird-flu catastrophe and constantly think and act that it will occur then it more than likely WILL occur. Do you want this to happen?
Also, you promote the issue with the name of Noam Chomsky. It is sad but true, I believe, that Chomsky's intellectual acumen has deteriorated markedly in the last 10 years. His latest article in Linguistic Inquiry (Three Factors of Language Design) is a disjointed summary of what he believes to be major findings in linguistic research. The paper is peppered with references to researchers studying parts of the Chomskian paradigm but who, perhaps, need recognition and funding.
Jerry Fodor says more about the nature of thought and language in one page than today's Chomsky says in ten.
Zagovor
Michael Greger’s book
06.02.2007 03:40
Unfortunately a quick look at Michael Greger’s book shows he is shockingly myopic about Lyme disease and AIDS, which indicates he may be just as myopic on bird flu…Its not so much what he says that bothers me, it is more what he leaves out…
Also his emphasis on the alleged wonders of Tamiflu has all the hallmarks of viral marketing:
“In the months the pandemic is expected to rage before a vaccine is available, an elite segment of the privileged world will have antiviral drugs like Tamiflu, and the rest of the world will essentially have nothing… Just imagine the ethical, political and security implications of a world where only rich countries have access to lifesaving drugs or vaccines, and the rest of the world stands while [poor countries] march toward death.”
Yet… “Tamiflu, a worthless drug that in no way shape or form treats the avian flu, but only decreases the amount of days one is sick and can actually contribute to the virus having more lethal mutations…”
However, since US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld holds major portions of stock in the company that developed Tamiflu he will make millions out of this initiative…! I wonder what other worthless drugs they are in the process of developing to combat new emerging diseases
Acinetobacter Baumannii
Homepage:
http://uspolitics.about.com/b/a/207474.htm
Mycoplasmas will forever be at the heart of the U.S. biological warfare program
06.02.2007 15:19
In 1898, we knew we could use mycoplasma to cause epidemics, because we were able to do so in cattle, and we saw it in tobacco plants.
In 1899, the U.S. Congress began investigating "leprosy in the United States".
In 1902, We organized a "Station for Experimental Evolution" and we were able to identify diseases of an ethnic nature.
In 1904, we used mycoplasma to cause an epidemic in horses.
In 1910, we used mycoplasma to cause an epidemic in fowl/birds.
In 1917, we formed the "Federation of the American Society for Experimental Biology" (FASEB).
In 1918, the influenza virus killed millions of unsuspecting. It was aflu virus modified with a bird mycoplasma for which human primates had no "acquired immunity".
In 1921, lead eugenics philosopher, Betrand Russell, publicly supported the "necessity for "organized" plagues" against the Black population...
Mike
Facts
06.02.2007 22:56
If avian flu mutates with a modified mycoplasma, subsequently making it deadly to humans, there will be a pandemic.
"...And advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes may transform biological warfare from the realm of terror to a politically useful tool." 'Rebuilding Americas Defences' - The Project for the New American Century 2001
The US is on the brink of a world war but nevertheless have neither the finances or the troop numbers needed. However, if avian flu is modified with advanced forms of biological warfare that can "target" specific genotypes they don’t need the finances or troops required for a conventional war…
Some relevant science…:
Means, Motive and Opportunity
Mike - about Russell
07.02.2007 00:45
Jack - Was that short story in the URL you put "The Unparalleled Invasion" about Biological Warfare against China , written before or after you sold "The Yellow Peril" in 1904?
Ilyan
Bertrand Russell, Eugenics and race.
07.02.2007 03:14
"At present the population of the world is increasing at about 58,000 per diem. War, so far, has had no very great effect on this increase, which continued throughout each of the world wars.... War ... has hitherto been disappointing in this respect ... but perhaps bacteriological war may prove more effective. If a Black Death could spread throughout the world once in every generation, survivors could procreate freely without making the world too full.... The state of affairs might be somewhat unpleasant, but what of it?"
– Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society (Routledge Press: New York, 1951)
Mike
Homepage:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread193551/pg1
Misrepresented Russell
07.02.2007 10:45
By including that all the points about Mycoplasmas have been discredited.
What Mike is this? Are you one of those bigotted Marxist who fail to see that the approaching Mass Extinction is largely due to the stupidity of Karl Marx who failed to see the necessity of a Dialectical Synthesis of Marxism and what most people call Mathusianism, that Higher Communism can only be achieved through that route?
Are you also a supported of the gutless coward Darwin? Look for the superior Russel person in that field who spells his name with only one l.
Ilyan
Ilyan’s denial…
07.02.2007 14:28
However a quick look at wikipedia will at least show you that Bertrand Russell was a racist who supported the eugenics movement and germ warfare. Okay he later criticised the eugenics movement for being corrupt…but initially he did supported them.
Mike (made up name…)
This should be interesting…
07.02.2007 15:07
Mike
For Ilyan
07.02.2007 17:00
.
My Error
14.02.2009 09:23
My source, Sam Mainwaring Jr, was back in Wales in 1917 after his round the world adventures. He fled South Africa when his mixed race Union organising in 1910 caused arrests. He had used an alias there. Went to Moscow to some sort of Socialist Conference in the 1920s.
Ilyan
e-mail:
......thomas@virgin.net