For the fifth time in recorded history, the World Health Organization (WHO) has declared a global health emergency, this time in response to an Ebola outbreak that continues to ravage the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to official data, some 2,500 people have already been infected this time around – and some of these infected individuals may have entered the United States, as the government has been importing Congolese “refugees” through San Antonio, Texas, and distributing them across the country.
A known testing ground for bioweapons experimentation, Africa is where Ebola outbreaks often start. But they usually stay contained within Africa, which is why health officials are now starting to panic over the prospect that a global pandemic could be in the works.
Despite declaring this Ebola outbreak as a global emergency, WHO’s general director Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus stopped short of classifying it as an “international” emergency – the implication being that the disease is still contained within the Congo, despite still being a threat to the rest of the world.
Where Ebola is spreading is still anyone’s guess, however, as Congolese migrants continue to make their way into the United States via Texas, threatening the lives and liberty of American citizens who never voted to allow such an invasion in the first place.
What we do know is that at least 1,700 people have died thus far as a result of this latest Ebola outbreak, which was recently detected in the city of Goma, which has a population of roughly two million people.
“This is still a regional emergency and by no way a global threat,” insists WHO’s emergency committee chairman from the University of Zurich in Switzerland.
Don’t be fooled: disease outbreaks in Africa are practice efforts for a real global pandemic
The other four global health emergencies declared by WHO include one in 2016 for the Zika virus epidemic; another in 2014 for Ebola in West Africa; another that same year for polio resurgence in a handful of countries; and the infamous one in 2009 for influenza.
This latest declaration comes roughly a year after Ebola first struck the Congo and began to spread rapidly, despite efforts to stop it. Ghebreyesus says it’s the worst possible disease to impact one of the world’s most dangerous areas, and that it could continue well into 2020.
It’s currently the second-largest Ebola outbreak in history next to the one from 2014-2015, which is said to have infected nearly 29,000 people, resulting in more than 11,000 deaths.
What’s interesting about these outbreaks is that they often appear in conjunction with calls by the “elite” for better “population control,” which is exactly what happened a few years back when a plague outbreak started not long after Prince William publicly stated that “urgent depopulation efforts” were necessary to save the world.
As Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, warned at the time, deep state globalists are actually creating, and then weaponizing, these deadly diseases as an act of medical genocide against the world’s “useless eaters,” which apparently include black people in Africa.
You see, the “elite” don’t actually think that black lives matter, at least beyond their votes. And since black people in Africa can’t vote in elections where the “elite” hold power, they’re easy targets for elimination.
“These vaccines, notably, contain chemicals that are administered without the informed consent of the women being injected. In fact, the women are deliberately lied to and told the injections are meant to ‘protect your health.’ But the real reason for the shots is to exterminate blacks in the name of ‘science’ and ‘medicine.’”
“Public Health England attributes the 249 percent increase in gonorrhea cases between 2009 and 2018 to “increases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (referred to collectively as ‘MSM’).”
(Natural News) Asked to visualize what an apocalyptic end of the world might look like, few people would picture death by superbug, and yet uncontrollable, antibiotic-resistant bacteria are one of the greatest threats facing mankind.
The World Health Organization warns that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has the potential to be more deadly than cancer, with the ability to kill as many as 10 million people a year. In addition to costing the world economy upwards of $100 trillion annually, left unchecked, AMR threatens to reverse all the health gains and longer lifespans that antibiotics made possible in the 20th century.
STDs are on the increase across the globe. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned late last year that close to 2.3 million new cases of gonorrhea, chlamydia and syphilis were diagnosed in the United States in 2017. This was the fourth consecutive year in which the number of diagnosed STDs rose dramatically.
Although chlamydia remained the most common STD overall, gonorrhea cases increased by a staggering 67 percent.
Interestingly, a health protection report published by Public Health England last year reflected a similar trend in the United Kingdom. The Independent reported:
Gonorrhoea diagnoses in England have risen to their highest level for 40 years and jumped 26 per cent since 2017, sparking warnings from health chiefs about the threat from drug resistant strains. …
The biggest increase was in gonorrhoea where there were 56,259 cases diagnosed, 14,000 more than in 2017. [ Emphasis added]
Gonorrhea – also known as “the clap” – is one of the most common STDs. It can cause a white, yellow or green inflammatory discharge from the penis or vagina, along with painful urination and, in some cases, painful, swollen testicles.
After the discovery of penicillin, this disease became little more than an inconvenience, but that gradually changed over the years.
Penicillin remained a reliable clap killer until 1976, when the mutating microbe finally gained the upper hand over that go-to antibiotic.
Over the following decades, gonorrhea quickly overpowered each new antibiotic that doctors threw at it.
In 2007, the afflicted could rely on only one class of drugs, called cephalo-sporins.
By 2012 … the CDC recommended switching from an oral form of cephalosporin to an injectable version that would pump higher concentrations into the patient’s bloodstream.
Now, gonorrhea has mutated to become resistant even to cephalosporin. Cases of super-gonorrhea have been reported in several countries, and experts like infectious disease specialist Dr. Peter Leone believe that gonorrhea will soon conquer the last few remaining drugs that still have some effect on it. (Related: Men who take Viagra have 200 percent increased risk of sexually transmitted disease.)
Why the increase?
Public Health England attributes the 249 percent increase in gonorrhea cases between 2009 and 2018 to “increases among gay, bisexual and other men who have sex with men (referred to collectively as ‘MSM’).”
In addition, a British YouGov survey revealed that about half (47 percent) of all youngsters between the ages of 16 and 24 admitted to having sex with total strangers without using a condom, while one in 10 said that they had never used a condom.
Clearly, promiscuity and lack of sexual safety precautions are causing the dramatic increase in the number of STD cases. With STD superbugs on the rise, this type of irresponsibility will likely have grave consequences in the future.
Learn more about the dangers of antimicrobial resistance at Superbugs.news.
Public health experts have been warning for decades that overuse of antibiotics reduces the effectiveness of drugs that cure bacterial infections. At least 2,000,000 Americans get antibiotic-resistant infections per year.
Notably, gluttonous overuse of antimicrobial drugs to combat bacteria and fungi via hospitals, clinics, and farms is backfiring and producing superbugs or “Nightmare Bacteria,” which is especially lethal for people with compromised immune systems and autoimmune disorders that use steroids to suppress bodily defenses.
Federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (“CDC”) recently labeled a fungus called Candida auris or C. auris an “Urgent Threat.” This Nightmare Bacteria is a brutal killer that’s unstoppable and flat-out travels fast.
The CDC claims antibiotic resistance is “one of the biggest public health challenges of our time.”
According to the World Health Organization: “The world is facing an antibiotic apocalypse.”
The UK’s chief medical officer believes antimicrobial resistance: “May spell the end of modern medicine,” as routine surgeries turn into medical emergencies.
In short, new antibiotic resistance mechanisms are emerging and spreading worldwide, quickly. Knowledgeable sources worry that society at large is headed for a “Post-Antibiotic Era,” in which common infections and minor injuries can kill once again (Source: WHO Fact Sheet on Antibiotic Resistance, Nov. 2017).
According to a recent British governmental study, without new medicines and without curbing unnecessary use of antimicrobial drugs, infections followed by ensuing deaths will likely eclipse cancer deaths over succeeding decades. The harsh fact is nearly one-half of patients that contract C. auris die within 90 days. (Source: Pew Campaign on Human Health and Industrial Farming)
Nowadays, the dangers of “Nightmare Bacteria” are growing out of control. The latest concern is that C. auris will begin spreading to healthier populations, even though healthy people are normally not at risk. Within only five years, C.auris has established itself as one of the world’s most intractable health threats. It is drug-resistant, tenacious and nearly impossible to exterminate and travels the globe looking for innocent victims, killing people mostly in hospital settings.
C.auris has already established a beachhead in Venezuela, Spain, the UK, India, Pakistan, South Africa, New York, New Jersey, and Illinois. Nobody knows where else it may be cloaking.
A British hospital aerosolized hydrogen peroxide in a C.auris-infected room for one week solid. Subsequently, only one organism grew back in a Petri dish in the room. It was C. auris. The hospital serves wealthy patients from Europe and the Middle East, and it has not made a public announcement of the outbreak.
An outbreak of C.auris at a Spanish hospital resulted in 41% deaths of infected patients. The hospital has not made a public announcement of the outbreak.
In the U.S., the Brooklyn branch of Mount Sinai Hospital had a case of C. auris with an older man hospitalized for abdominal surgery.
According to a New York Times article d/d April 7th 2019: Deadly Germs, Lost Cures: A Mysterious Infection, Spanning the Globe in a Climate of Secrecy: “The man at Mount Sinai died after 90 days in the hospital, but C. auris did not. Tests showed it was everywhere in his room, so invasive that the hospital needed special cleaning equipment and had to rip out some of the ceiling and floor tiles to eradicate it… C. auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world’s most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.”
Indeed, Mount Sinai’s public exposure is an exception, as hospitals and governmental agencies keep C.auris’s whereabouts secret. Public transparency is shunned. Hospitals and local governments are reluctant to disclose outbreaks because of concern about tarnishing reputations and spreading of rumors. Even the Center for Disease Control is not allowed, in a pact with states, to publicly announce outbreaks.
There are multiple causes behind antibiotic-resistant infection outbreaks. As for one, using antifungals on crops to prevent rotting, in turn, contributes to drug-resistant fungi infecting people. Also, infamously, antibiotics are widely used (in fact, overused-by-a-country-mile) for disease prevention of farm animals.
“Indeed, researchers estimate that up to 70 percent of all antibiotics sold in the U.S. are given to healthy food animals to artificially expedite their growth and compensate for the effects of unsanitary farm conditions. This routine use of antibiotics in animals presents a serious and growing threat to human health because it creates new strains of dangerous antibiotic-resistant bacteria.” (Source: How Much Do Antibiotics Used on the Farm Contribute to the Spread of Resistant Bacteria? Scientific American magazine)
Furthermore, and of serious deliberate interest, Denmark is testament to what occurs by restricting non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in cattle, broiler chickens, and swine. Following Denmark’s restrictions, the use of antibiotics for swine dropped 50% from 1992-2008. Results: (1) swine production increased by nearly 50% and (2) antibiotic resistance in humans decreased.
By way of contrast, in the United States up to 70% of antibiotics go to farm animals that are not sick.
One pressing issue is no new classes of antibiotics have been invented for decades. In fact, all the antibiotics brought to the market in the past 30 years have been variations on existing drugs discovered by 1984, meaning they are just follow-up compounds, without a novel mechanism of action, meaning no major breakthroughs.
Problematically, only a few large drug companies are involved in antibiotic research and development because the cost of developing the drugs is high and profit margins are slim. In that regard, according to the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy: The antibiotic pipeline is near collapse, and the country needs to act now to preserve the infrastructure to support antibiotic research and development.
Pew Charitable Trust/Antibiotic Resistance Project is trying to muster public support for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA, H.R. 1587/S. 619), which withdraws from animal production use of seven classes of antibiotics vitally important to human health, unless animals are diseased or drug companies can prove that their use does not harm human health.
Other groups in support of legislation include the American Medical Association, American Academy of Pediatricians, Infectious Diseases Society of America and World Health Organization.
In a letter to congressional leaders Feb. 5, 2019 The Pew Charitable Trusts, Infectious Diseases Society of America, and Trust for America’s Health, together with U.S. antibiotic developers large and small, called on Congress to move swiftly to enact a package of economic incentives to reinvigorate the stagnant pipeline of antibiotics.
A number of sponsors for congressional action are urging concerned citizens to call their representatives and senators and push for action on this life-or-death issue.
Far beyond the distractions of political bickering and cultural trends, the big, big picture that’s unfolding across our world right now is a plan to exterminate 90% of the current human population in order to “save” the planet and protect what globalists see as the future of human survival on a cosmic scale.
This plan is under way now due to two very important developments:
#1) The rise of robotic systems that can replace human labor, eliminating the need for a world of impoverished human workers whose only reason for existence — from the point of view of the globalists — was to be exploited for cheap labor and manipulated votes.
If you aren’t yet aware that robots are replacing human labor, you’re way behind the curve. As this Zero Hedge story shows, heavy duty robots are already being introduced that can replace human labor in construction and other similar jobs.
Critically, the reason Democrats and globalists are ready to replace low-wage humans with robots is because robots will be granted voting rights. Once robots are granted voting rights under the justification that AI is “conscious,” Democrats will have no more need for humans, migrant waves or Third World populations. They will simply program all the robots to vote Democrat in every election… which, originally, isn’t far from what’s being done right now with human voters.
#2) Entitlement payouts to humans are draining government resources that globalists believe should be spent on space colonization, space weaponization, faster-than-light (FTL) travel technology and other exotic tech systems that can defend human civilization against cosmic threats.
Thanks to the socialist policies of Leftists, so many people are now collecting entitlements that governments now see the masses as an unsustainable financial burden. If the masses were eliminated, governments that were on the path to financial insolvency could suddenly achieve balanced budgets and remain solvent (rather than collapsing under endless debt spending). This is especially true when considering the robot replacement of human workers, given that robots collect no welfare, food stamps workers comp, sick days or retirement benefits. Once robots can replace all the benefits of human labor without all the costs associated with human entitlements, the globalists will very quickly accelerate their plan to exterminate what they see as “excess humans.”
(See my full, accompanying Counterthink video below, which explains this in more detail.)
Part of the elitist justification for all this rests on the fact that globalists believe Earth is a vulnerable planet for multiple reasons, including space weather events (asteroid strikes, solar flares, etc.) as well as the human depletion of natural resources. The elimination of 90% of the human population, they believe, is necessary to prevent the planet’s resources from being consumed by “useless eaters” instead of being redirected into exotic research projects that would shore up the survival of the human species and protect against cosmic events that, right now, could wipe out humanity in an instant.
Specifically, globalists believe that Earth’s elitists must:
Colonize other planets in order to diversify the survival odds of the human race. Ultimately, this colonization must move beyond our solar system and build human worlds near other stars.
Build faster-than-light travel systems to colonize planets orbiting other stars within our galaxy.
Build exotic planetary defense systems that protect Earth from attacks by other civilizations that they know inhabit the cosmos.
Achieve breakthrough leaps in Artificial Intelligence, quantum computing and materials science that enable, for example, the construction of space elevators — a necessary breakthrough for lifting materials into orbit to support the construction of human colonies on Mars and elsewhere.
The current situation where Earth’s governments are spending the vast majority of their wealth paying for “useless eaters” to continue living and reproducing isn’t a sustainable scenario, globalists believe. Thus, they see the extermination of 90% of the human population as a necessary evil in order to save the world and save humanity on a cosmic scale. (It almost reminds you of Thanos from the Marvel universe, a powerful cosmic being who travels around the universe exterminating half the population on each planet he encounters, all in the name of sustainability.)
In essence — and this is not my point of view, but theirs — every dollar that’s currently going to feed a food stamp recipient, process a migrant or finance the retirement of a former government worker would be better spent on colonizing Mars, the globalists believe. All their current talk of advocating for migrants is merely a way to overthrow sovereign nations, eliminate borders and establish global United Nations control from which global depopulation can be directed without resistance from independent nation states (i.e. Trump is the enemy).
One coming conflict, by the way, will be between this UN-directed global government and communist China, which is about to face its own economic and environmental collapse. Brexit is also playing a role here, throwing a huge delay into the globalism plan.
How globalists plan to exterminate 90% of the human race
The extermination plan rests on the “accidental / on purpose” release of an engineered bioweapon viral strain. Such bioweapons offer several distinct advantages to extermination efforts, from the point of view of globalists:
1) They are not traceable and are easily released into the population with complete anonymity.
2) They are self-replicating. Once the initial population is infected, there’s no need to manufacture more because cellular physiology runs the replication automatically.
3) They exploit the natural social structure of human societies. People will automatically spread the virus because people like to be around other people. Very few people are completely isolated in modern society.
4) They allow globalist governments to declare “pandemic emergencies” and mandate mass vaccinations which, of course, will be laced with additional bioweapons to accelerate the pandemic die-off. As more people become infected from the vaccines, governments will mandate mass vaccination as an “emergency” public health initiative. Those who comply will be infected. Never forget that the mass polio vaccinations of the 1960s and 70s were laced with cancer viruses. This was admitted by the CDC for decades, right up until a few years ago when the CDC scrubbed its website of all such history. Further supporting this realization, UN-approved vaccines administered to women in Kenya have been exhaustively tested in science labs and confirmed be laced with infertility chemicals designed to reduce the population of blacks. See also this story with further details.
5) They tend to more aggressively target low-wage populations and Third World populations, achieving one of the key goals of the globalists which is to wipe out the “useless eaters” as they see them, while maintaining the top 10% of the human population to carry out the science and innovation that globalists see as necessary to protect Earth. In effect, the globalists are carrying out Adolf Hitler’s eugenics “utopia” on a global scale, but instead of merely six million people being exterminated, the globalists seek to eliminate more than six billion people.
The other advantage of bioweapons, from the point of view of globalists, is that they do not destroy the ecosystem in the way that nuclear weapons do. Since part of the goal here is the extermination of humans without damaging the ecosystem, bioweapons become the obvious choice, and they can even be tweaked to target specific races such as South Americans, Africans or Europeans.
Global immune system suppression is under way to prepare humanity for the bioweapon assault
For bioweapons to succeed in their goal of exterminating 90% of the human race, humans must have their immune systems suppressed in advance of bioweapons exposure.
This plan is already well under way.
Immunosuppression is easily accomplished through multiple vectors described below. Here are just a few of the ways this is being done right now:
#1) Biosludge mass contamination of soils and the food supply. See my upcoming film Biosludged, which launches Nov. 28th. You can watch the entire film for free at BrighteonFilms.com. The trailer is posted here:
#2) Toxic medicine and toxic vaccines – Nearly all the prescription medications now consumed by westerners are biologically toxic. Most cause immune suppress in one way or another, and many lead to nutritional deficiencies that further weaken the human immune system. Flu shot vaccines are scientifically proven to weaken immune response in subsequent years, meaning anyone who takes vaccines is more vulnerable to bioweapons. This is not a coincidence. It is a global IQ test to see which humans are stupid enough to commit suicide via injection while calling it “medicine.”
#3) Toxic food supply laced with neurodegenerative chemicals and immunosuppressive chemicals – The human food supply is intentionally laced with toxic chemicals that impede brain function, immune function and fertility. These chemicals, known as pesticides and herbicides, are intentionally designed to interfere with key neurological or physiological functions, otherwise they would not kill other living organisms such as insects. The fact that they are designated as pesticides is proof that they kill living organisms. Most people don’t realize this, but popular breakfast cereals such as Corn Flakes are made almost entirely out of ingredients that are registered with the EPA as “biopesticides.”
#4) Propaganda attacks on nutrition: The entire fake news media complex continues to denigrate the importance of immune-enhancing nutrients such as vitamin D, zinc and selenium, knowing that gullible news consumers can be convinced to avoid nourishing their own bodies. Those who believe the corporate-run news cartels are committing nutritional suicide, turning to Big Pharma instead of supplementary nutrition, causing them to become weak in both body and mind. This is all by design: Weak-minded people are easier for the info-propagandists to manipulate and control. And the last thing they want is people obtaining the ability to operative with cognitive clarity and presence of mind.
#5) Chemtrails. This is a very controversial subject. Not every contrail in the sky is a chemtrail, but it is a simple scientific fact that “global warming” scientists are well into the process of altering the atmosphere using what they call “geoengineering” experiments. The very subject of chemtrails used to be derided as a conspiracy theory, but now it’s openly explored by scientists in the name of reversing climate change. See Geoengineering.news for coverage of some of the current experiments being conducted by university and government scientists. According to some analysts, the substances being “amended” into the atmosphere also serve to suppress human immune function.
#6) The promotion of immunosuppressive sexual behaviors involving multiple partners and anal penetrative sex. This point offends the easily offended, but the promotion of gay lifestyles involving unprotected sex with multiple sex partners also creates the rapid transmission of blood borne disease. This is exactly why the gay community is currently experiencing an epidemic explosion in anal cancer, which the left-wing media is desperately trying to sweep under the rug and pretend isn’t happening. See this article on Outbreak.news for more details of the anal cancer cover-up (and the desperate protection of anal penetrative sexual promiscuity by the LGBT propagandists).
#7) The planned global debt bubble collapse is being engineered right now by the central banks of the world. One of the desirable outcomes of this is the plunging of first world nations into financial destitution, which ultimate promotes infectious disease and dissuades access to medical care. Right this very moment, the streets of San Francisco are littered with human feces and drug needles. The medical implications of the financial collapse of cities into feces-ridden filth hubs should be obvious. Impoverished cities and nations are cesspools for the spread of pandemics. Financial collapse is just one small part of the very big picture.
The bottom line is that the effort to soften up your immune system is well under way. Be sure to do exactly what the anti-human media tells you to do and keep taking “your” flu shot. Your obedience to this quack science ritual is required in order for you to “serve” the interests of the globalists by eliminating yourself from the human gene pool. The sicker you are, the more easily you can be killed off in the interests of “saving the world.”
Solutions: The greatest act of resistance against eugenics is found in herbs, nutrients and healthy living
In a way, globalists are running a planet-wide IQ test for humanity: Anyone stupid enough to keep taking vaccine shots, popping medications and avoiding nutrition is probably not qualified to represent the future of humankind, they figure. On that particular point, they may not be wrong.
The defense against the global pandemic is simple and readily available: Boost your health with herbs and nutrition, and you are far more likely to survive the planet-wide culling of 90% of the human population.
In anticipation of this, I have created a little-known website based on cutting-edge modern science and medicine research. It’s called NaturalAntibiotics.news, and the site covers both plant-based antibiotics as well as anti-viral phytonutrients that can also help protect you from viral pandemics. (Note that antibiotics alone do not harm viral strains. Anti-virals are necessary for that.)
I also publish Herbs.news, which documents the scientifically-backed evidence on hundreds of medicinal herbs, including anti-viral and anti-bacterial herbs. Many of these herbs can be grown in your own garden, meaning that you can literally grow your own anti-pandemic medicine at home, without permission from any doctor, drug company or government.
Over the last several years, I have also built a multi-million dollar analytical research laboratory running multiple mass-spec instruments. The lab is ISO accredited, and we use the lab to produce the world’s cleanest supply of nutritional supplements, superfoods and green living products for home and health. Here’s a recent photo of me giving a tour of the QQQ (triple-quad) mass spec instrument that we use for quantitation of pesticides and herbicides (a full video tour of the mass spec analysis process is coming soon).
The lab-verified products we offer to the public are found at HealthRangerStore.com, the only nutrition manufacturer and online retailer in the world which lab-tests every raw material and every production lot. We have the most strict heavy metals limits in the world, which is why tens of thousands of customers who have survived cancer, heart disease, diabetes or other ailments shop at our store to find ultra-clean foods that support their healing journey.
Avoiding exposure to toxic chemicals and heavy metals can strengthen your immune response to viral infections. Clean food, clean water and clean air is the answer to making it through the global attack on humanity that’s now under way. (Read CleanFoodWatch.com for more stories on clean food.) If you aren’t yet drinking clean water, eating clean food and avoiding toxic chemicals in the food supply — be sure to buy organic where possible — you are playing right into the hands of the globalists who can’t wait to eliminate you (and people like you) from the planet.
Here’s the full video explanation that accompanies this story:
A “new” strain of deadly bird flu dubbed “Disease X” by the World Health Organization (WHO) has killed hundreds of people in China, and is just three mutations away from becoming transmissible between humans, according to experts.
The strain, H7N9, circulates in poultry and has killed 623 people out of 1,625 infected in China – a mortality rate of 38.3%. While first identified in China in 2013, H7N9 has recently emerged as a serious threat seemingly overnight.
Professor Jonathan Van-Tam, deputy chief medical officer for the UK, told The Telegraph that H7N9 could cause a global outbreak.
“[H7N9] is an example of another virus which has proven its ability to transmit from birds to humans,” said Van-Tam, who added “It’s possible that it could be the cause of the next pandemic.”
The WHO says N7N9 is “an unusually dangerous virus for humans,” and “one of the most lethal influenza viruses that we’ve seen so far”
“H7N9 viruses have several features typically associated with human influenza viruses and therefore possess pandemic potential and need to be monitored closely,” said Dr. Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Researchers led by James Paulson of the Scripps Research Institute in California have been studying the mutations which could potentially occur in H7N9’s genome to allow for human-to-human infection.
The team’s findings, published in the journal PLoS Pathogens on Thursday, showed that in laboratory tests, mutations in three amino acids made the virus more able to bind to human cells — suggesting these changes are key to making the virus more dangerous to people. –Japan Times
That said, the mutations would need to occur relatively close to each other to become more virulent, which has a low probability of happening according to Fiona Culley, an expert in respiratory immunology at Imperial College London.
“Some of the individual mutations have been seen naturally … these combinations of mutations have not,” and added: “The chances of all three occurring together is relatively low.”
Wenday Barclay, a virologist and flu specialist also at Imperial College says the study’s findings reinforce the need to keep the H7N9 bird flu under close surveillance.
“These studies keep H7N9 virus high on the list of viruses we should be concerned about,” she said. “The more people infected, the higher the chance that the lethal combination of mutations could occur.”
According to the CDC, Human infections with bird flu viruses can happen when enough virus gets into a person’s eyes, nose or mouth, or is inhaled. This can happen when virus is in the air (in droplets or possibly dust) and a person breathes it in, or when a person touches something that has virus on it then touches their mouth, eyes or nose.
The reported signs and symptoms of avian influenza A virus infections in humans have ranged from mild to severe and included conjunctivitis, influenza-like illness (e.g., fever, cough, sore throat, muscle aches) sometimes accompanied by nausea, abdominal pain, diarrhea, and vomiting, severe respiratory illness(e.g., shortness of breath, difficulty breathing, pneumonia, acute respiratory distress, viral pneumonia, respiratory failure), neurologic changes (altered mental status, seizures), and the involvement of other organ systems –CDC
Rare human infections with some avian viruses have occurred most often after unprotected contact with infected birds or surfaces contaminated with avian influenza viruses. However, some infections have been identified where direct contact was not known to have occurred. Illness in people has ranged from mild to severe.
Marseille during the Great Plague of 1720. A study of mortality records for the Black Death in nine European cities seems to indicate human lice and fleas spread the disease. (Michel Serre/Musée des Beaux Arts Marseille)
The Black Death, which killed thousands throughout Europe in a pandemic stretching from the 14th to 19th centuries, was likely spread by parasites such as fleas and lice carried on the human body.
While rats have long been blamed for spreading the fatal disease throughout Europe, researchers at the University of Oslo in Norway and the University of Ferrara in Italy now believe humans and their parasites were the biggest carriers.
“There are so many questions that this pandemic raises and how it spread so quickly is one of them,” said Katharine R. Dean, lead author on a paper published Monday in the journal Proceedings in the National Academy of Sciences,
Dean and her colleagues studied nine outbreaks of the plague from 1348 to 1813 in European cities, including Barcelona, Florence, London, Stockholm, Moscow and Gdansk, Poland. A total of 125,000 people died in those outbreaks, sometimes so quickly that they could not be buried properly.
The bacteria killing them was Yersinia pestis, called bubonic plague or the Black Death, and it resulted in three significant plague periods in Europe.
Second Pandemic outbreaks
The period of the 14th to the 19th centuries, the time of the Second Pandemic, was the focus because there are fairly reliable official records of death rates as well as contemporary descriptions of the disease, Dean said.
An archaeologist works on March 10, 2015, at the site where eight mass graves with more than 200 skeletons were found under the Monoprix Reaumur Sebastopol store in Paris. Experts believe they are victims of an outbreak of bubonic plague in the Middle Ages. (Philippe Wojazer/Reuters)
The First or Justinian Pandemic in 541-544 was too early to result in accurate records.
Nor are rats blameless — they are believed to be carriers of the disease in the Third Pandemic, starting in 1855, Dean said. But that plague was accompanied by “rat falls,” or mass deaths of rattus rattus in the streets.
The rapid spread of Yersinia pestis in the Second Pandemic is considered mysterious, said Dean, who is a PhD researcher interested in infectious disease epidemiology.
“Our citizens should know the urgent facts…but they don’t because our media serves imperial, not popular interests. They lie, deceive, connive and suppress what everyone needs to know, substituting managed news misinformation and rubbish for hard truths…”—Oliver Stone
