- Five years ago cases of West Nile Virus were unheard
of in America. Then cases erupted for the first time in New York City
in the summer of 1999. Now in the summer of 2004 the virus has spread across
the continent to the West coast. On August 10, 2004, it was announced
that two women (an 88-year-old and a 91-year-old woman) were the first
to die of the disease in Los Angeles County.
-
- West Nile Virus encephalitis is yet another new infectious
disease from Africa that is mysteriously appearing in the U.S., seemingly
out of the blue. Is this another disease like AIDS that poses a threat
to certain "high risk" groups? Could the outbreak of WN virus
be some sort of biologic "test" (like the anthrax mailings) to
wake people up to the dangers of bioterrorism? Are all these new "emerging
diseases" and "emerging viruses" merely cruel and unprecedented
acts of Mother Nature? Or could the "hand of man" in the form
of crazy biological warfare scientists be causing these new outbreaks?
Is it just a "coincidence" that all these weird bugs and illnesses
have erupted in the past several decades? Or is all this just "paranoid"
thinking?
-
- New Emerging Diseases; Accident of Nature or man-made
illnesses?
-
- In the 1970s it was thought that many infectious diseases
had been banished from the industrialized world. But, remarkably, over
the last 25 years more than 30 new "emerging diseases" have appeared
in various places. Some of the better-known diseases include AIDS, Legionnaire's
disease, toxic shock syndrome, Lyme disease, hepatitis C, "mad cow
disease", hanta virus, various new encephalitis and hemorrhagic viruses,
Lassa fever, and Ebola virus. (New controversial diseases like chronic
fatigue syndrome and Persian Gulf War Illness affecting veterans, are not
included in the government's list of "emerging diseases.") In
addition, older diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and cholera, have
re-emerged in more virulent and drug-resistant forms. After 80 years of
steady declines in infectious disease, the mortality rate in the U.S.
rose 58% between 1980 and 1992.
-
- Health officials place the blame on increased global
travel and globalization, population growth and movements, deforestation
and reforestation programs, human sexuality (in the case of HIV), and increased
human contact with tropical miniforests and other wilderness habitats that
are reservoirs for insects and animals that harbor unknown infectious agents.
-
- Nowhere in the official list of causes is the fact that
for many decades millions of animals and innumerable vials of infectious
material have been shipped around the world for commercial and biological
warfare purposes. This world trade in these deadly agents, coupled with
the gene-splicing technology developed in the 1970s, has increased the
dangers of new disease outbreaks. In addition, many new viruses have been
passed around between various species of animals, and some of these viruses
have been adapted to human tissue. This has resulted in the production
of new laboratory diseases that have potential biological warfare capabilities.
The b/w implications of all these scientific "advances" have
led some conspiracy-minded people to suspect that the hand of man might
be responsible for the outbreak of one or more of these newly emerging
diseases.
-
- The anthrax mailings that followed the World Trade Center
bombings of 9/11 were certainly a "wake up call" indicating
America was unprepared for a bioterrorist attack. More than 3 years later,
the perpetrators have not been apprehended, and the U.S government's own
b/w scientists are the #1 prime suspects.
-
- The new epidemic of West Nile Virus encephalitis in America
-
- West Nile virus infection in humans first broke out in
New York City in August 1999. The first sign of the WN epidemic occurred
in early July when many birds died mysteriously. Half the crows in the
New York City area died, as well as some exotic bird species housed at
the Bronx zoo. The virus has an affinity for some species of birds; and
the mosquito acts as a vector for the virus. Thus, the virus spreads from
birds to mosquitoes, and the virus is spread to humans and other animals
via mosquito bites. A few weeks after the bird kills, the first human cases
of encephalitis appeared in local hospitals in the northern Queens section
of the city. By September, nine of 25 infected horses with WN virus died
in Long Island.
-
- Although the virus is contagious between birds, the disease
is not contagious between humans. It is estimated that only 20% of infected
people will develop a mild flu-like form of the illness; but 1 in 150 people
will develop a severe form of the disease with mental confusion, headache,
swollen glands, high fever, severe muscle weakness, and the tell-tale symptoms
of encephalitis (inflammation of the brain). Mild cases last a few days;
severe cases can last several weeks.
-
- In 1999, the disease was totally confined to the New
York City area, with 62 cases and 7 deaths. As many as 10,000 wild birds
died. In year 2000, there were 21 cases and two deaths; in 2001 there were
56 cases with 7 deaths. By October 8, 2002 the CDC had reported a cumulative
total of 2768 cases of WN virus with 146 deaths; and it is estimated that
as many as 200,000 people are infected nationally. In 2004, there were
406 U.S. cases with 7 deaths as of August 3. The states with the largest
number of cases are Arizona (247); California (69); and Colorado (44).
-
- Until 2002 the virus was confined to states in the eastern
half of the country. By the summer of 2002, all but 6 of the lower 48 states
reported WN virus in birds, mosquitoes, animals or humans.
-
- Also by 2002 the CDC confirmed that a transplant patient
became infected by WN virus after having received organs from a Georgia
accident victim infected with the virus. There was also evidence that the
virus could be transmitted by an infected mother to her infant during breast
feeding. Shockingly, it was announced that WN virus was in the nation's
blood supply - and there is no blood screening test available to test for
the new virus.
-
- At first, infectious disease experts believed that the
St. Louis encephalitis (SLE) virus was the cause. Oddly, this endemic virus
occasionally causes mild outbreaks of disease in other areas of the U.S.,
but no cases were ever seen in New York. At the Bronz zoo, veterinary
pathologist Tracey McNamara suspected a different virus because the SLE
virus was not known to kill birds. Trained at Plum Island (see later),
the pathologist suspected a connection between the bird kills and the human
cases, but the Centers for Disease Control rebuffed her concerns. In September,
officials re-instituted extensive spraying over New York in attempts to
kill the mosquito population and control the encephalitis epidemic.
-
- It was only through McNamara's heroic efforts to enlist
the aid of biologists at other national labs, as well as at Fort Detrick,
that it was finally determined on September 24, that the virus was indeed
WN virus - a virus that had never been seen in America - and a virus
for which there was no testing available in any NY state laboratory.
-
- West Nile virus: Out of Africa? Or out of a virus laboratory?
-
- WN virus was first discovered in 1937 in encephalitis
cases in Uganda, in East Africa. African cases tend to be a mild, and the
virus there does not affect animal and bird populations to any significant
degree. In fact, the ability of WN virus to infect and kill birds has only
been noticed very recently. Could this indicate that the virus has been
genetically-altered or 'weaponized' for b/w purposed during the many decades
that it has been available for study in virus laboratories?
-
- Mild outbreaks of WN have occurred in Israel in 1951-1954
and 1957, and also in South Africa in 1974. However, since the mid 1990s,
outbreaks of increasing frequency and severity have appeared in Morocco,
Tunisia, Italy, Israel, and Russia, and have been strangely accompanied
with a large number of bird deaths. A Romanian epidemic, reported in 1996,
infected 90,000 people and caused 17 deaths.
-
- Scientists have determined that the closest viral "relative"
of the New York 99 strain of the WN virus is a strain of WN virus that
circulated in Israel from 1997-2000. The NY99 strain has remained stable
for the past 3 years.
-
- Health authorities suspect the virus entered the U.S.
via travelers from the Middle East, or via a stray mosquito on an airplane.
Other researchers claim the virus arrived with African animals or birds
placed in zoos. But, in fact, the WN virus has been housed in U.S. labs
for decades, and has been openly sold to researchers around the world.
-
- It is hardly a secret that the WN virus, along with
dozens of other infectious agents, was sold and shipped by the National
Type Culture Collection (in Rockville, Maryland) to Iraq during the 1980s
when the U.S. was on friendlier terms with Saddam Hussein.
-
- From the very beginning of the WN virus outbreak, there
were rumors that the disease outbreak was bioterrorism, but these rumors
were denied by health officials. CDC spokesperson Barbara Reynolds told
CNN that "the possibility of bioterrorism is at the bottom of the
list for how some outbreak may have occurred. It appears Mother Nature
is at work." (CNN report, 10/11/99).
-
- Various new theories of origin still appear in the press.
For example, a Los Angeles Times editorial (9/28/02) proclaimed that "scientists
think (the virus) may have arrived in the early 1980s when Asian tiger
mosquitoes traveled in tire casings from Japan to Houston." (One wonders
who supplies the press with these bizarre and undocumented stories.)
-
- None of these theories has deterred Vermont Senator
Patrick Leahy from urging federal officials to determine if the introduction
of WN virus is a terrorist attack. On September 12, 2002, Leahy declared:
"I think we have to ask ourselves: Is it a coincidence that we're
seeing such an increase in WN virus - or is that something that's being
tested as a biological weapon against us." Leahy is no stranger to
bioterrorism, having received an anthrax-laden letter at his Washington
office a year earlier.
-
- The current presence of WN virus in the blood supply
poses a potentially serious threat. Receiving WN virus by a blood transfusion
undoubtedly infects the body with a larger dose of virus than a dose received
from an infected mosquito. High-risk people for WN virus infection include
elderly, debilitated, immunodeficient people (like cancer, AIDS, and transplant
patients) and the very young. Furthermore, people who require blood transfusions
are not in the best of health and should be considered "high risk"
as well.
-
- Certainly the arrival of the virus in the warmer southern
states, where mosquitoes are active year-round and where many elderly retirees
reside, is not a good omen.
-
- Currently, all blood is tested for syphilis, as well
as viruses such as HTLV-1 and 2, HIV-1 and -2, and hepatitis B and C virus.
However, there is no blood screening test for WN virus unavailable; and
no current treatment, vaccine or cure for WN virus disease.
-
- Secret U.S. military b/w experiments on human populations
-
- A July 24, 2000 Report ("The West Nile Virus Wake
Up Call") from the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee dismisses
the idea of WN virus infection as biowarfare, although the CDC was criticized
for its "tunnel vision" and its failure "to expect the unexpected."
The Committee concluded that: "The next outbreak of an infectious
disease - whether naturally occurring or deliberately inflicted - may not
be so forgiving." (The 2001 anthrax attack proved to be the next "deliberately
inflicted" b/w attack.)
-
- It is surprising that the U.S. government quickly eliminated
bioterrorism as a cause for the WN outbreak, particularly when the government
has a long and well-documented history of b/w experimentation against unsuspecting
citizens.
-
- In the 1950s, the U.S. military planned a project to
cripple the Soviet economy by killing horses, cattle, and swine, with
b/w weapons developed from exotic animal diseases. The laboratory at Plum
Island, off the coast of Long Island, New York, is the Army's repository
for viruses derived from the most dangerous animal diseases in the world.
According to Norman Covert, base historian and public information officer
at Fort Detrick, only a handful of scientists were aware of this project.
"In many cases there were only maybe five people who knew what was
going on in weapons research. People in one lab didn't know what happened
in the next lab, and they didn't ask." Details of these Plum Island
animal experiments were classified as secret until 1993. ("Plum Island's
shadowy past: Once-secret documents reveal lab's mission was germ warfare,"
Newsday, 11/21/93)
-
- During the 1950s and 60s secret military biowarfare
attacks on unsuspecting civilians took place in many parts of America.
The most notorious was a six-day attack on San Francisco in which clouds
of potentially harmful bacteria were sprayed over the city. Twelve people
developed pneumonia due to the infectious bacteria, and one elderly man
died from the attack. This attack was not revealed to the public until
years later when classified documents were finally released ("Army
germ fog blanketed S.F. for 6 days in '50 test," Los Angeles Times,
9/17/79).
-
- In other classified experiments, the military sprayed
bacteria in New York City subways, in a Washington D.C. airport, and on
highways in Pennsylvania. B/w testing also took place in military bases
in Virginia, In Key West (Florida), and off the coasts of Southern
California and Hawaii ("Army used live bacteria in tests on U.S. civilians,"
Los Angeles Times, 3/9/77).
-
- The Army also experimented on its own soldiers. Project
Whitecoat, a code name for a series of b/w experiments that took place
at Fort Detrick between 1954 and 1973, utilized about 2,300 Seventh-Day
Adventist volunteers who were exposed to germs causing tularemia, malaria,
anthrax, Queensland fever, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, encephalitis,
and a host of other exotic diseases. The experiments were aimed at preventing,
diagnosing, and treating these diseases, as well as the development of
vaccines. No one died in the experiments, but critics contend that the
men were essentially coerced into participating in research that, despite
military assurances to the contrary, could have been used to produce b/w
weapons. ("Adventists' faith put to test; 2,300 soldiers were used
in germ-warfare experiments," The Washington Times, 10/19/98)
-
- In preparing America for nuclear attack during the
Cold War years following World War II, thousands of U.S. citizens were
used as unsuspecting guinea pigs in over 4,000 secret and classified radiation
experiments conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and other agencies,
such as the Department of Defense, the Department of Health, Education,
and Welfare, the Public Health Service (now the CDC), the National Institutes
of Health, the Veterans Administration, the CIA and NASA (see "The
Nuking of America; Secrets and Lies of America's Cold War," Paranoia,
Issue #18, Winter 97/98).
-
- Not only is the public kept ignorant of b/w research,
but b/w "accidents" are officially covered-up, downplayed, or
blamed on animals. For example, the Russians finally revealed the truth
about an epidemic of anthrax that caused at least 68 deaths in 1979 in
the city of Sverdlovsk, 850 miles east of Moscow. The outbreak was officially
blamed on eating meat from infected animals. Officials at the nearby top-secret
b/w compound maintained that the anthrax spores were spread among cattle
through ingestions of contaminated bone meal, and that the people who
got anthrax acquired it through the illegal sale of diseased cattle from
private farms. In 1992, Russian President Boris Yeltsin finally acknowledged
the real truth. The cause was not "natural", but due to the
accidental escape of spores of weapons-grade anthrax produced by the nearby
b/w installation. ("Soviet germ lab caused epidemic in '79",
Los Angeles Times, 6/16/92)
-
- The full extent of the U.S. government's experiments
on unsuspecting people will probably never be known because many incriminating
documents remain Top Secret or classified. Other documents are often declared
as missing, destroyed, or "unavailable", in an attempt to hide
the truth from the public.
-
- AIDS: A designer disease with a genetically-altered laboratory
virus?
-
- As the 1970s began, the U.S. Army's b/w program intensified,
particularly in the area of genetic engineering research. In 1971, Nixon
transferred a major part of the Army's Biological Warfare Unit at Ft. Detrick
over to the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Thereafter, secret b/w experimentation
continued under the cover of bona-fide cancer research.
-
- During the 1970s the NCI's Special Virus Cancer Program
also brought together leading national and international medical scientists
in a unified attempt to uncover and genetically alter cancer-causing and
immunosuppresive viruses. The genetic manipulation of cells and infectious
agents, as well as the mixing and transferring of viruses between various
animals (including monkeys, chimps and other primates), resulted in the
creation of many "man-made" infectious agents for research, commercial
and b/w purposes.
-
- At the end of this decade a new immunosuppressive called
HIV (the AIDS virus) began to exclusively infect gay men, the most hated
minority in America (1).
-
- Some AIDS researchers believe that this Special Virus
Cancer Program (and its covert connection to America's b/w program) spawned
HIV and that the new virus was subsequently seeded into the U.S. homosexual
community via the government-sponsored experimental hepatitis B vaccine
program (1978-1981). These experiments in Manhattan , Los Angeles, and
San Francisco, utilized only highly promiscuous, healthy white gay and
bisexual men as guinea pigs. Shortly after this experiment began, the first
cases of "gay-related immune deficiency disease" (later known
as AIDS) erupted in New York City in 1979.
-
- (See my article "The man-made origin of AIDS"
@ http://www.rense.com/general45/cant.htm)
-
- The idea of AIDS as a man-made virus that was deliberately
seeded via vaccine programs into the American gay and African black population
in the late 1970s is considered by most scientists to be a joke. Scientists
pooh-pooh the idea of a "man-made" virus, even though the laboratory
transfer of viruses from one species to another always results in a "man-made
virus".
-
- There is also a little-known reason why HIV continues
to disproportionately affect gay men and bisexuals in America, and why
it is predominantly a heterosexual disease elsewhere. It is now recognized
that there are 10 different "subtypes" of HIV, which reflect
differences in the genetic composition of the AIDS virus. Subtype B is
the form of HIV that exists in America; this subtype is not prevalent in
Africa. (Another reason to suspect that HIV in America was not "introduced"
from Africa.)
- Subtype B spreads more easily with anal sex and IV drug
use, whereas the African subtypes spread more easily via heterosexual contact.
Laboratory studies, undertaken by Dr Max Essex of the Harvard School of
Public Health in Boston, have demonstrated that subtypes C and E infect
and replicate more efficiently than subtype B in certain cells of the vagina,
cervix and the foreskin of the penis - but not on the wall of the rectum.
Essex contends that these subtypes are spread more efficiently through
vaginal intercourse. Subtype B helps explain why the U.S. epidemic spread
quickly among homosexual men and IV drug users, while in Africa and Asia,
subtypes C and E have spread rapidly among heterosexuals.
-
- (http://www.aids.harvard.edu/news_publications/har/fall_1998/fall98-5.html
)
-
- In my view, all these subtypes further suggest that HIV
is a manipulated virus introduced by the "hand of man", rather
than a genetically-diverse virus descended and derived from primates in
the African jungle by "Mother Nature."
-
- Killer Germs for Sale
-
- Further complicating bioterrorism is the sale of deadly
microbes to anyone and any country with the cash to buy them. From 1985-1988,
when the U.S. was still friendly with Saddam Hussein, his Education Ministry
purchased 70 shipments of anthrax, West Nile virus, and other disease-causing
organisms from the American Type Culture Collection, in Maryland. At that
time, such shipments were entirely legal and received quick approval by
the U.S. Commerce Department. ("Germ library's inventory is making
detractors queasy," Los Angeles Times, March 16, 1998.) Even after
Hussein gassed the Kurds in 1988, and even after the Gulf War, U.S. officials
continued to supply Iraq with biochemical warfare ingredients ("U.S.
was a key supplier to Saddam," Seattle Post Intelligencer, Sept 24,
2002). The CDC also sent WN virus and numerous other biological agents
to Iraq during the years 1984 and 1993.
-
- (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2002/9/23/210336.shtml)
-
- The Riegle Report (May 25, 1994) further details biological
and biochemical shipments from the U.S. to Iraqi government agencies. It
was later learned that these microorganisms exported by the U.S. were identical
to those the UN inspectors found and recovered from the Iraqi b/w program.
-
- (http://www.gulfweb.org/bigdoc/report/riegle1.html)
-
- On October 18, 2001, the CDC issued an unprecedented
alert asking physicians to watch out for cases of smallpox, plague, botulism,
tularemia, and even "emerging" hemorrhagic African viruses
that cause Ebola and Marburg disease. Before the terrorist bombings, virologists
were blaming animals in the wild. Now it is clear that the more likely
threat comes from crazy scientists who will use any deadly infectious agent
as a potential b/w agent if it suits their national, political, or religious
agenda.
-
- Was West Nile virus deliberately seeded into the environment?
-
- Could the new outbreaks of WN virus be a result of decades
of animal experimentation and manipulation of the African virus in various
laboratories worldwide? Surely over the past 60 years new strains of WN
virus have been developed and "weaponized" by genetic and/or
b/w engineers. Once a virus like WN is "introduced" into the
environment it can spread rapidly on its own. Already the WN virus causes
disease in humans and animals unlike that seen in Africa back in the 1930s.
-
- In late September 2002, there were various media reports
claiming that some WN patients were developing signs and symptoms of polio,
even though that disease is caused by a different virus. Could these never-before
seen manifestations of WN virus be an indication that the virus has been
altered in a laboratory? Could this more deadly form of WN virus reflect
manipulation, not by Mother Nature, but by the hand of man?
-
- Besides acting as a wake up call, what would be the advantage
of introducing WN virus into the American environment? For a foreign terrorist,
WN virus would be a poor choice of bioweapon. As a killer of old and sick
people, it would not be a terribly effective b/w weapon. However, if the
virus was introduced domestically as a "test" (like anthrax),
the killing off of old and sick people would certainly aid the fiscal problems
of Social Security and Medicare.
-
- The World Trade Center bombing of 1993 did not serve
as wake up call for the second WTC bombing of 9/11. Similarly, the introduction
of WN virus into the New York population in 1999 did not serve as a wake
up call for bioterrorism because it was followed two years later by successful
anthrax letter attacks.
-
- How many more wake up calls with bioterrorism will be
required before health officials stop looking in rain forests and African
animals for the origin of these new epidemic diseases -and begin to look
at the world trade in deadly infectious agents, and the insanities of biowarfare
and b/w research, as reasons for our current new plagues?
-
- Biowarfare agents are designed solely to kill large
numbers of civilians. And any country that is willing to employ and deploy
these agents should be fully aware that - What Goes Around, Comes Around.
-
- (1) In this article it is only possible to discuss a
tiny bit of evidence pointing to AIDS as a man-made disease. My two books,
AIDS and the Doctors of Death (1988), and Queer Blood: The Secret AIDS
Genocide Plot (1993), provide extensive documentation for this theory.
Although the scientific community and the major media have avoided all
research pertaining to the man-made origin of HIV/AIDS, there is a wealth
of information on the net regarding this topic: simply go to google.com
and type in "man-made AIDS" or "alan cantwell".
-
- [Dr. Cantwell is a frequent contributor to Rense.com.
His books on the man-made origin of AIDS are available on the internet
from Book Clearing House at www.bookch.com or by phone at 1-800-431-1579.
Email: alancantwell@sbcglobal.net]
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