← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Avalanche
Thread ID: 6587 | Posts: 5 | Started: 2003-05-10
2003-05-10 05:37 | User Profile
Some excerpts from:
[url=http://www.globalchange.com/sars.htm]http://www.globalchange.com/sars.htm[/url]
The Truth about SARS Infection Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome - Symptoms and Survival Mutant virus warning given in 1998: Latest update: [color=red]8 May 2003[/color]
* On average it takes 3-5 days from first symptoms to someone seeking hospital treatment. In 10% to 20% of cases, patients require mechanical ventilation to breathe. Symptoms of SARS start in most cases 2 to 5 days after exposure but sometimes it seems to take as long as 10 days - rarely
up to 2 weeks.
* At first WHO said only 4% with SARS died, then 5%. Latest analysis of data from Hong Kong suggests the rate is probably around 14% on average. A key factor is age. Death rates are 50% in those who are over 65 even if treated early. Fatalities can be as low as 4% in those in their 20s - but even this is very high compared to most other infectious diseases today.
* Up until recently most deaths were in the elderly or those who were unwell from other causes, but recent deaths have included women in their 30s, while babies have become ill after women with SARS have given birth. Some fear the virus is becoming more virulent.
* We assume at present that people can become an infection risk 24-48 hours before they feel ill.
* 213 people appear to have been infected by SARS in one apartment complex alone in Hong Kong - all of which landed up in hospital - with a further 240 people from the same block in strict quarantine. The question is how and why did they all become infected? Of the 213, over 100 were in a single residential block. The greatest risk of transmission seems to have been to those living directly above or below others already infected, suggesting a new factor is involved other than normal person to person spread, such as infected body secretions entering common ventilation or plumbing systems of other flats. Huge efforts are being made to answer this question.
* If a significant SARS outbreak hits a densely populated city like Calcutta or Bombay and the rural areas beyond, (these cities already have cases) it will be very difficult to contain with a highly mobile population of over a billion people, huge overcrowding, ignorance of the disease, difficulty in diagnosis, poorly developed health infrastructure, low access to radio and TV, high levels of illiteracy among the poor and the impossibility of quarantining many tens of thousands of people. Only those who have traveled to India or live there can fully understand the vast scale of the challenge if India should see an established outbreak on its own soil. The first cases have already hit India.
2003-05-10 07:25 | User Profile
**
What do you mean "the media isn't covering it"? The media is saturated with it (click any search engine for the last two months). Why would you say that? Front page of local paper, above the fold, every day. That, in fact, is one way you know it is a planned poison release. Does your MD friend who is involved in planning and communicating about this disease take this into consideration? Planned releases, like planted dead crows, would fit this bill:
*** 213 people appear to have been infected by SARS in one apartment complex alone in Hong Kong - all of which landed up in hospital - with a further 240 people from the same block in strict quarantine. The question is how and why did they all become infected? Of the 213, over 100 were in a single residential block. The greatest risk of transmission seems to have been to those living directly above or below others already infected, suggesting a new factor is involved other than normal person to person spread, such as infected body secretions entering common ventilation or plumbing systems of other flats. Huge efforts are being made to answer this question.**
Does your friend do any Big Picture thinking? -- like, regarding timing. Why now?
No, the entire thing has been set up somehow in order to stage poison rescue, this time from the Red Chinese Communists -- to have a global scare story set against the backdrop of saving the world from the Red Chinese. Takes the heat off lying about war causes, while keeping up that killing-in-self-defense attitude, this time focused on Red Chinese meanies. The end game end game of Republican neocon war effort to save the globe from all evil. Another example of the way Freepers are, or make me feel, anyway.
The healthy world knows this. Its the health world that is obviously sick.
2003-05-16 04:29 | User Profile
According to a former deputy chief of the Soviet biological-warfare program, Ken Alibek, who defected to the U.S. in 1992, it would be unwise at this stage to dismiss out of hand the possibility that SARS might be a weapon that leaked from a lab. Mr. Alibek, who spends his time these days on issues of U.S. biodefense, notes that in 1982, when he worked in a Soviet lab that was weaponizing a nasty disease called tularemia, the local rodent population became infected by accident. In the case of China, and SARS, Mr. Alibek, well-versed in the pathology of weaponized diseases, tells me "I would never rule out this possibility."
and
China's regime runs a system, of course, in which the primary imperative since Mao's 1949 communist revolution has had very little to do with protecting the people and everything to do with ensuring the prosperity and power of the party elite. One recent product of China's health-care arrangements has been the spread of AIDS via hideously irresponsible techniques such as collecting blood for plasma and then retransfusing pooled, processed blood back into donors, in some instances infecting entire villages. When a brave Chinese doctor, Wan Yanhai, blew the whistle, China's authorities jailed him for disclosing state secrets--until world outcry proved too embarrassing.
From: Wall Street Journal Online:
The Red Plague How communism gave us SARS.
[url=http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/cRosett/?id=110003489]http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/c...t/?id=110003489[/url]
2003-05-17 04:43 | User Profile
NPR angle on the SARS business: uppity white yuppies are braving quarantine to continue about the business of snapping up their little yellow ones. I was pleasantly reminded of a VNN essay I once read, and now reproduce, for OD'ing pleasure.
Niglets: Canââ¬â¢t Give ââ¬ËEm Away
by D. W.
Iââ¬â¢m not dropping any bombshells on VNN readers by declaring that Whites are largely hypocrites on the issue of race. They frantically declare nig-nogs their best friends, desperately pointing to Carl, the unobjectionable black guy from work who came along on the fishing trip two years ago, as proof of their racial goodwill, and while theyââ¬â¢re at it, the absolute and unquestioned equality of all races on earth. But actions speak louder than words, and Whitesââ¬â¢ actions fairly scream at lung-top. Social circles remain White, school and office cliques remain White, neighborhoods at least try to stay White, and spouses, unless youââ¬â¢re living in my Odin-forsaken gayborhood, remain White.
But thereââ¬â¢s a particularly naked example of this racial hypocrisy ribboning across the land. In three words, Chinese baby girls.
Let me back up a bit. Itââ¬â¢s well-known that for prospective White adoptive parents, White babies are priced like platinum: the demand is high and supply is low (most are either aborted or raised by the natural parents). By sharp contrast, few White parents have any interest in a precious bundle of future Central Park wilder. In Washington state, for instance, a couple can expect to pay $35,000 for a White baby or $4,000 for a black baby. Nationwide, 40 percent of the available children are black, compared to an overall population of about 12 percent. In other words, not even negroes want negroes. In San Francisco, with a population thatââ¬â¢s a lower-than- national-average 8 percent black, 70 percent of the available children are black. In the words of one ultra-liberal (race unspecified, article implies White) San Francisco writer determined to adopt a niglet:
Of these children, the ones hardest to place are those with the darkest skin: Not only do many white couples prefer part-white children, many black couples - regardless of their skin tone - prefer to adopt light-skinned children as well. (On the Internet), Children are listed... with photos, biographies, and price tags attached - like used automobiles, except that the cost variation is largely based on color. A paraplegic Bulgarian tot with a cleft palate costs $30,000, whereas a mobile and dentally normal Chinese or Guatemalan urchin runs only $15,000. And black children? Absolutely nothing. Drop in and take a dozen. The Caribbean islands of Martinique, Grenada, and Barbados offer free black children to anyone who wants to fly there and pick them up. Regional markets duplicate this scenario. The price of the few Caucasians available is preposterously steep (up to $50,000), and the bidding is intensely competitive (only a third of would-be adoptive parents ever receive their white Baby X). Meanwhile, dark-skinned babies and children languish in hospitals and foster homes, often virtually free, but unwanted.
But whatââ¬â¢s missed in most accounts of modern adoption is just how far childless Whites will go to avoid adopting a niglet. Hereââ¬â¢s a hint: Halfway around the damn planet. ABC reporter and shegress Carole Simpson, after reporting on the tragedy of unwanted niglets in Chicago, was moved to adopt one herself. "There were 10 black babies available for every one white child available for adoption," Simpson told a reporter. So she decided to adopt 6-week-old Adam "to make a difference... We have people in the United States of America traveling to the far corners of the Earth, and there are black American babies in this country that need families."
And travel they do. Mostly to China, whose communist government in 1979 instituted the one- baby policy, which clashed with the feudal favoring of males when Baby No. 1 popped out female. The unwanted female babies were suffocated, drowned, or dropped off at the orphanage. Enter legions of liberal White American would-be parents, who were willing to endure global flights, customs, impenetrable foreign languages and laws and reams of paperwork, all for that little yellow prize: a calm, smooth-haired little Chinese baby girl, sure to grow up to be docile, respectful and good enough at math to land a scholarship at SUNY. Fits into the White lifestyle as smooth as a Golden Retriever. Meanwhile, they could have tripped over their Birkenstocks and picked up a cheap black baby right here in the USA. What say you, Volvo drivers? Itââ¬â¢s easy enough to be racially ridiculous from a distance, but stick a squirming, shitting, flesh-and-blood human being under their noses, and all but the most determined race-denying Whites come to Jesus. Because if black behavior is the result of ââ¬Åenvironment,ââ¬Â as they say, wouldnââ¬â¢t being raised in a loving White home turn a niglet into a strapping John McWhorter, enough to make Mr. and Mrs. White burst into uncontrollable grins of parental pride as he delivers a keynote address for a C-SPAN audience? Whites ainââ¬â¢t betting on it, whether they admit it or not.
From a Delaware paper: In 1997 Americans adopted 3,616 Chinese babies. In Delaware, Chinese adoptions outpaced those of Russian children 25 to 19, according to the six licensed agencies that did international adoptions that year in the First State. Many more Chinese babies, almost all girls, are coming. ââ¬ÅWe're sending about a group a monthââ¬Â to China, said Tara Miller, executive director of Adoptions from the Heart, the nonprofit adoption agency that sent Morrison, a 44-year-old unmarried woman, to China in October to pick up Emily. Delawareans are paying as much as $20,000 to bring home a child from China. By comparison, it can be fairly simple and inexpensive to adopt here at home.
All the while, of course, Mr. and Mrs. White style themselves magnanimous PBS spirit workers, surely worthy of an invite to dinner at Bill Moyersââ¬â¢ house, slaying the twin evils of racism and sexism with one bold adoption. Listen to this treacle from a freelance writer: ââ¬ÅIn the spring of 2000, my husband and I journeyed to a small town in southern China to meet our new daughter, a beautiful 13-month-old baby girl. On that momentous occasion, we joined the thousands of Americans who are part of a growing cross-cultural phenomenon in which East meets West in unprecedented ways. By adopting a little girl from China, we became part of a new configuration of family that crosses the divides of geography, race, language, economics, and even politics.ââ¬Â
But hereââ¬â¢s the problem with this little Hallmark moment. The racial divide between Asians and Whites isnââ¬â¢t nearly as gaping as the one between blacks and Whites, as the piles of IQ data and other evidence demonstrate. The bottom line is that White babies arenââ¬â¢t available for adoption because the supply has been diminished either by Whitesââ¬â¢ own avoidance of live birth or care of their own young, both of which are traceable, for better or for worse, to White hyper- responsibility. Black babies are available by the negro-ton for the opposite reason: Blacks spit out offspring in high numbers because theyââ¬â¢re simply not thinking about the future ââ¬â itââ¬â¢s beyond their conceptual abilities. Nor do they have the capacity to embrace the future when it comes. The mini-simians are left to roam, unattended except by the White taxpayer-funded welfare system, which is inevitably blamed for the messes left. And Chinese baby girls fit somewhere between these extremes, their supply caused by something resembling a social system, however crude, and their demand ensured by desirable genetic traits.
So try this for fun, next time you see Mr. and Mrs. White out for a stroll with Emily Chang Wong Edwards. First, confirm that the child was adopted. Then ask, ââ¬ÅAre you aware of the high numbers of black babies who go unadopted in America? Why did you make the choice you made?ââ¬Â Pretend to upset about discrimination against American blacks. If you encounter hostility, match it with feigned hostility toward their racism toward blacks. You may get a clever answer. Or you may make two White race-deniers uncomfortable. And that always makes my afternoon in the park.
2003-05-17 07:30 | User Profile
Does anyone have info on how difficult it is to adopt white babies? I've read before that the demand is high, therefore the whites turn to the Asian babies before the browns and blacks would even be considered. On the other hand, I've also heard that whites are made to jump through an endless series of hoops to adopt (not be foster parents) if they want to adopt a white baby, hence they'll shell out 20k to avoid the hassle. Anyone know the whole story on this?