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How Team Psi stopped the Bird Flu
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By Yoichi Shimatsu | |
The mass killing is idiotic when there is a known simple method to end the spread of the H5N1 virus – without drugs in feed or injections. The sole problem with the environmental agriculture’s preventative measures is that the crooks of agribusiness would not make a single penny from such a cost-free solution. (The other issue not addressed here is that Americans would be far better fed with smaller batches of diverse types of chickens and other fowl raised outdoors amid fresh air, nutritious plants and trees with edible leaves on family farms like the ones I’ve seen in rural China where grandmas meet together to chat in their backyards, surrounded by very curious clucking chickens relaxing on the branches of short shade trees. That way life was meant to be ever since the Garden of Eden – instead of imprisonment of animals and their caretakers confined in concrete prisons.) The killing off and mass burning/burial of fowl are a complete waste of money and human energy as a prescription from failed “scientific” fools aka financial crooks of the pharma industry. Despite my longtime misgivings toward the ridiculously overblown agribusiness sector (cramming millions of chickens into multi-story prisons), I lay out here how my scientific team from Hong Kong quickly ended the chicken contagion for Asia’s largest poultry producer CP Foods (Charoen Pokphand) back in 2004 soon after the U.S.-NATO idiotic invasion of Afghanistan – which turned out to be 13 years of wasted money and lost lives. Following our nature-based solution of avian infection – which cost producers next to nothing but instead saved them a bundle of cash better spent on paying hen workers - it look less than two weeks to end the contagion and restore fresh eggs and roast chicken as the protein staple for millions of Thai residents. As a result, the death toll from bird flu was held back at 12 human victims of avian influenza. The solution is a quick - cheap, cost reducing and permanent fix - ridiculously simple, absolutely astonishing to scientists and so completely natural that as the lead consultant/scout for that research consultant team I never made a penny much less a speculative fortune for saving millions of fowl and billions of dollars for poultry raisers across Asia. What I will charge you the reader - in lieu of a consulting fee - is your valuable time reading about my foreign adventures in the Middle East and South Asia as the backdrop for the remarkable rescue of the poultry industry. After being threatened – with the same fate as two of my Japanese colleagues in journalism who were shot dead in Iraq near an allied checkpoint as a warning to critical journalists entering the gladiatorial arena, I had to figure out how to finance my investigative journalism along the fringes of the Arabian Gulf. Apparently, from insider sources, I learned my name was in the top-20 of the 200 journalists posted for execution. So instead of trying to preserve your old eggs in the freezer, just scramble them! So what does a journalist do when overtly threatened (and nearly killed in a planned “accident” in Hong Kong) by madmen like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney? Become a salesman, of course, the perfect cover and the means to pay for investigative journalism. Hustling during the War on Terror Dubai. The invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan and the rest of the misguided so-call “War on Terror” during the phony hunt for the CIA asset Bin Laden put huge pressure on me to ramp up my investigative journalism and news reporting from the Arabian Gulf region. Skimpy fees from publishers for Afghanistan articles (so soon after expending a lot of my savings from a previous editorial adventure in Serbia) had already put me on a strict budget of residing within and dining at a terrorist haven on the edge of Peshawar along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, where I supplied one of my cheaper video-cams to Taliban-supporters to provide me with footage of Islamist defenses against the U.S.-NATO alliance. Even in those early days, my university studies in history assured me that the Yanks and Germans would be eventually kicked out just like the Imperial British colonialist before them. The Brit retreat from Kabul was the bloodiest engagements for the Royal Army. Likewise those unnecessary13 deaths of troopers left behind in Afghanistan was the sad and unnecessary closing chapter of that misguided invasion prompted by W. Bush and, earlier, Jimmy Carter which ended in some 4,000 deaths of NATO troopers and untold numbers of our Afghan auxiliaries. As the old saw goes: Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it. Think Local, Act Ethical For a stranger to survive in the Islamic universe, one has to think like an Asian since that is the closest analogy to pondering incessantly like an Arabian over the does-and-don’t from the Koran (similar in ways to the environs of Vatican City) - with a long historical perspective rather than “instant solutions”. It’s Old World alright, with a thin veneer of all the modern luxuries. First, hard-line Christians and Muslims are so much alike that they enjoy fighting Crusades and Jihads against the other faithful (a pastime that only recently subsided in mutually agreed-upon co-habitation at an arm’s length.) Total victory has proven impossible for many a would-be conqueror, whereas a closer view on a different value system produces insights into the futility of dreams of overnight transformation.Acclimatizing is the key to mutual understanding on some - although not all - issues. Take Dubai UAE for instance: marriage-age women still wear nearly full-face coverings yet underneath their robes there are the latest fashionable dresses from Paris and Milan. Every boy and man goes to the camel races yet they all check their mobile phones for messages. The muezzin’s morning wake-up call is irritating (especially after a heathen’s late night’s boozing and carousing) but breakfast at 5-or-4 star hotels is typically British (other than the absence of bacon) with enough super-strong Arabian-Ethiopian coffee to blast open one’s eyelids. And to crush any remaining prejudices, the ladies who fly in from Iran every morning for shopping in Dubai’s malls are slender and gorgeous. No, they do not wear masks because they have mustaches. Dubai blows away one’s prejudices about the microcosm of the Gulf region. The United Arab Emirates is an oil-sustained welfare society where the heavy lifting is done by temporary workers, mostly from southwest India who all enjoy the wages and sometimes the job. My hustle – involvement - with anti-bacterial technologies for the agricultural and medical sectors began with a trade show in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), where I was promoting a mishmash of technologies at a major trade fair, including counter-microorganism protection systems (which I was hoping to sell to camel drovers, who merely shrugged their shoulders at such a ridiculous concept - mainly because dying camels can be sold at high price for barbecue parties, so let them keel, right?) Why ruin that final reward by encouraging the bellowing beasts to live to a ripe old age of inedible toughness? On a hot morning’s hike along the dunes, it dawned on me that my over-civilized sales pitch was like trying to convince Texan cattlemen to purchase French perfume for their Angus steers. Culture - I learned way too late - is the key to profit. The Dancing Queen My business role for a wealthy industrialist family that ran an electronics-assembly company on the outskirts of Hong Kong was to hawk their array of medical products in the super-wealthy Gulf region, a pioneering venture that quickly turned into a misadventure. Throughout a major 3-day trade show in Dubai, my booth had by far the largest number of visitors, indeed a sweltering crowd of local ladies wearing robes and face coverings and their turbaned husbands, brothers and sons. No girls were allowed to contaminate their virginal purity by association with grubby foreign hawkers like myself, especially one with Aladdin dreams. The secret to this marketing success was a small stereo music player with a video screen (which when folded looked like a small computer, a great way to cheat on the job). So continuously for some 10 hours a day, it blared out “ABBA’s greatest hits” - programmed to repeat the song “Dancing Queen”. That mesmerizing tune brought back long-suppressed memories for those over-wrapped folks of when they were westernized teenagers way before Carter’s invasion of Afghanistan, which only reaffirmed puritanical Muslim values, and the more recent collapse of the World Trade Center (WTC) and the start of an endless War on Terror, with its subsequent atmosphere of fear, loathing, face coverings and handguns tucked inside robes (including women’s wear). ABBA was everything that Bin Laden and George W. Bush were not - mindless fun and whirlwind dancing back when everyone was young and happy - and sometimes stupid and promiscuous. It is now unimaginable that Muslim kids once went out on whirlwind dates in the middle of the Arabian nights. So emboldened by the memories, those by-now stern mothers kept pleading with me to sell them a golden phone. Those cell-phone handsets were hardly innovative technology but had super-appeal to people who believe gold can prevent infections (other than of greed) and cause healing through “true love” – as opposed to a boring marital existence. As my sales rap went: “When you phone your daughter who’s just got engaged or your son at Oxford, wouldn’t it make you feel just a little better if your cellular phone was made of gold?” Gold-plated actually. Every woman just had to touch that awesome golden phone and then she was sure to beg me to sell it. It’s unimaginable what sort of offers I got. But my response was: Sorry ladies, you must wait until I sign on a local distributor. It’s coming your way soon. I was something like a Santa Claus with shiny-wrapped but empty boxes for the kids. After passing around a couple of those fantastical devices, I was swarmed by a crowd begging to be the first to buy the golden trophy. One was a very good-looking statuesque lady offered in a whisper to take me to a hotel room for the thrill of my life plus any amount in hundred-dollar bills for the privilege of being the first owner of a gold phone in the Gulf region and at time in the entire world. I was sorely tempted by her beauty (glimpsed from a quickly opened veil for less than a second while the crowd was distracted watching the video of the Abba girls). That was the most tempting offer ever, but I held fast because of the risk of being jailed by the morality police for such an outlandish crime against public morality punishable by a public flogging. Had it been anywhere else in the planet I certainly would have done like Adam biting apple - especially when it was such a rare opportunity for jotting down in my notebook of bizarre adventures around the world. The trade show meanwhile attracted the right sort of interest. Over the following week, eager businessmen kept pestering me about my unimaginably gorgeous gold-plated phones in need of a local distributor. Meanwhile, I suffered waking dreams of her unusual blue-tinted eyes. As it turned out she was not a housewife or a prostitute, whereas I was a chicken-hearted idiot for not accepting her most generous offer - since later on after the show closed an Arab vendor informed me the beautiful lady was the spoiled daughter of a wealthy sheikh who spent most of her year lolling around bored at a university in Paris. Aladdin had the chutzpah to steal the goods and I could have done the same in regal style. Oh, well, another strike-out for being a miserable timid gentleman loser rather than a happy bold crook. The only way to resolve my self-doubts is a very Islamic, Buddhist and Catholic approach to failure - assuring myself that the Divine Intelligence wanted me to pursue worthier objectives beneficial for human souls – as if He actually cares for my useless carcass. That’s what a religious upbringing is, after all, for - to teach you to suffer unbearable labors and severe pain for the welfare of people you never met. That is true happiness. Why? Because last I came to my senses. If I enabled myself to be trapped by that gorgeous creature, her angry Dad would have ordered his henchmen to use their scimitars to hack off my sinful parts to prevent the birth of a mere commoner heathen half-breed kids as dumb and naive as their father. Saved again! Or maybe worse, I could be lolling inside a palace in the Middle East with a laughing George Bush in a B-52 eagerly dropping a bomb on my Arabian fantasy. Sour grapes are why vintage wine cannot be produced in the Arub Al Khali - The Empty Quarter - a mercilessly hot desert crossed only by the world’s greatest stallions such as Hidalgo. Lifesaving Technology Posted behind the ABBA show was my more potentially lucrative sales items - by contrast completely boring medical technologies developed by researchers at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) and offshoot of the University of Hong Kong (HKU). Unfortunately, that more important sales offering - innovative medical technologies - failed to receive a single question not even from Iranian weapons dealers. The glittery wrapping paper was prized the treasure inside went unnoticed and unwanted. So after the trade show closed, I holed up in a downward spiral of hotels from the Intercontinental down to an India(n) owned guest house, which at least had a swimming pool. I idled at the beach with a view of oil tankers, dined with a client by the world’s largest fish tank inside a 7-star hotel, sipped a Guinness stout after dining on barbecued Iranian lamb at the Intercontinental, and then started to dine at cheap felafil (falafel) window-shops as my funds started to dwindle toward a vanishing point. It was time to fly back to Hong Kong for the brand owners to weigh the offers for a phone franchise for the lucky guy among the bidders. (The fellow from Mumbai eventually got it but sold his quota of gold phones in India instead of Dubai, where the population was gold-crazy fanatic about those otherwise useless handsets without a video screen. By then, I was out of that business and deep inside another farther away desert.) My flight aboard an African airline from Kenya landed me in Bangkok, Thailand, where I decided to spend a week to catch up on beer-drinking, which had been severely restricted across the Mideast, and also to dine on barbecued pork (totally banned across the Arab world) - and stayed mainly to visit a goat farm where inventor/scientist Dr. Jeffrey Wong was developing a dialysis machine that used sheep cells (instead of hog particles) to clear platelets out of the living human bloodstream. The switch from hog-to-sheep cells was aimed at penetrating the Muslim market with its vast overload of clot-caused heart failures. Peering through the electron microscope was enlightening in that the microscopic universe is a complex living society, although much like our higher level where the bad guys usually win. After that insight, I got back to Bangkok on the following morning only to learn from a waiter that scrambled eggs were unavailable due to a massive disease outbreak among chickens. To quell my curiosity, the quick-thinking fellow brought me a copy of the Bangkok Post newspaper that reported CP Foods, the world’s largest chicken producer, was under siege from a rapidly spreading avian influenza (bird flu) outbreak. Since my collection of poster-boards in my hotel room included anti-bacterial technical solutions, I phoned CP Foods that morning to connect with a supervisor mentioned in the news article. She urged me to visit their facility in the countryside on the outskirts of Bangkok. Click. Never let an opportunity to make a windfall profit for a bottle of good wine go to waste. And so I prepared for the mission ahead by not venturing into a sleazy nightclub area to take my eager mind off of business dealings and that mesmerizing Arabian Jinn still spinning around my brain. At the crack of dawn, I was out the hotel door with my charts like an old-style foot-loose salesman before the lazy days of the Internet. Swamp Dog The taxi ride to the remote countryside rolled past dark swamps packed with hideous stoop-shouldered giant black cranes with huge menacing beaks and millions of black birds squeaking angrily. It was a vision of Hell. The driver pulled up his bandana over his nose and rolled up the windows. He tried to dump me at the huge industrial building but I refused to pay and told him to wait. He was upset, needless to say. Too bad because I too could easily die of bird flu while hiking back to the city. There had been no other cars on the road. In front of gigantic rotating fans as tall as a house, there were guards with sub-machine guns. I presumed those automatic weapons were to prevent a massive avian air-attack like in the Hitchcock movie “The Birds.” I knocked my knuckles on the steel entry door and a narrow slot eventually opened. “Sorry no visitors allowed.” I calmly stated my having an appointment with the secretary. “She did not show up today.” OK, when you hit a predicament as impenetrable as a steel door, think out loud. “She contacted me to obtain some technical information on stopping the bird flu outbreak - and I just arrived from Dubai to save your industry from perishing.” It was all true somewhat, although I could not offer an airtight guarantee of total success at saving the lives of 600,000 or more chickens in their cages.. After a five minutes, a cute little secretary stepped outside gingerly to tell me: “About three kilometers down the road is the lab of the chief scientist. Go talk to him.” Whew, what a stroke of luck. I got back into the reluctant driver’s cab and boldly said: “You shall get a big tip for risking your life to save Thailand!” That gave him at least an ounce of courage and a pound of greed as he accelerated away like an earthworm out of hell from the chicken processing plant. I asked him how many people had died so far from the bird flu. His answer was: “Too many to count! And we’ll soon be among the uncounted!” The Bangkok Post had reported about a dozen human deaths but I kept silent – or could risk being dumped on the road. Screeching to a halt in front of a small building, the driver simply said: “Here.” I walked to yet another steel door and banged on it with a fist. The morning coolness had vanished into sticky humid heat. Another secretary slowly opened the door and stared at me in total disbelief. “What are you doing here? You must be lost!” What she really meant was that I had lost my mind coming to the epicenter of bird flu. My calm response: “The chief secretary at CP headquarters told me to talk to your boss about stopping the bird flu.” After about five minutes a gentleman with shielded glasses and face shield emerged to tell me: “You really should not have come. We cannot take responsibility for your death. Nobody’s allowed to enter here. What do you want?” Luckily I had my posters, unrolled one and told him: “This is how to stop the bird flu - with a respiratory antiviral spray and UV spotlights to wipe out all the bugs!” After looking over the drawings, the research leader asked: “How soon can you arrange a meeting here with your research team?” Always show confidence on the brink of disaster even if when doomed to failure: “How about in three days - which is how long it’ll take my team to arrive from Hong Kong?” He nodded with satisfaction that I wasn’t a total con artist. In that heady atmosphere so resembling the Great Plague that wiped out old Europe, anyone who dared risk his life to offer a solution is a dead man if he fails to honor his promise. Team Hong Kong Sai Chan M.D. (my nickname for him is Doktor Psi) the lead medical authority who served with NIH, CDC and the DoD, Professor Jeffrey Wong who was a top research biochemist (and engineering whiz) with HK Science and Tech, and even a visiting Egyptian biochemist visiting Hong Kong were available and ready to travel. So I arranged for several rooms at a top hotel in central Bangkok, which enabled me during the waiting period to be the only swimmer who dared to splash around in the pool while watching the pigeons passing overhead. A lot of previous scrapes with certain death and fatal pandemics had taught me the power of mind over matter - and if you happen to miscalculate and die, so what? Nobody will grieve. If life’s going to be short, make it sweet. The airport pickup went smooth and so the researchers boarded a rental van to reach the chicken lab while I briefed them - without ever hinting at the absurdity of this crazy mission. Bravely, I led the scientists like a platoon leader on a suicide mission into that house of horrors. The lab director threw open the door and guided us in past an open freezer packed with frozen chickens with ID tags tied to their cold feet with numbers marking the date of their deaths by respiratory flu. The Egyptian lady recoiled, shuddered and groaned in horror at the sight of those ice-cold avian flu victims. We were seated at a long conference table and provided with cups of coffee, which I was the first to drink with gusto. My rationale was: If you’re going to die, do it fearlessly or at least pretend to be brave. After a nervous wait in silence, the Thai team entered solemnly, notebooks in hand, led by a tall fellow with a ramrod backbone who turned out to be a former military colonel. The intros were followed by a painful silence, before the colonel who was Vice President of Charoen poultry was the first to speak - raising the totally unexpected question: “What does tap water have to do with bird flu?” OK, start the contest with the 64 million dollar question, why not? Looking to either side of my silent team, I bluffed: “That’s a simple matter, really, since it has to do with a vulnerable point for immunity in fowl. I see Dr. Sai Chan has all the answers - right, Doktor Psi?” Dr. Sai Chan, a veteran of CDC, NIH, DoD and Oregon’s medical research centers, calmly began to speak: “Chlorination has an adverse effect on immunity in fowl because it disrupts the symbiotic relationship between the paramecium water-borne microorganism and its host algae, which provides it with nutrition along with shelter from parasites. When deprived of its host plant, the panicked microorganism releases several defensive mechanisms in self-protection mode from microscopic predators. One of those micro-defenses is your avian influenza virus.” The colonel nodded as jaws dropped. “Then what should we do about it?” Dr. Psi again: “Stop using chlorinated tap water and instead just let the birds drink pond water since the natural algae will not harm them. In the wild, birds drink all sorts of murky water yet are immune to most pathogens that might affect humans. As you know, fowl have strong digestive systems in most situations. And nobody is going to eat chicken raw, right, except for crazy Japanese sushi fanatics?” he added while staring at me. The CP researchers were furiously scribbling notes and then walked out of the room leaving us to finish our luke-warm coffee. It was up to me to figure out what to do in that bizarre situation of fear and loathing. The chief lab scientist reentered and told us: “Well, I do thank you for coming to beautiful Thailand and we still have all of you giving speeches at a special Ministry of Health conference in Bangkok tomorrow,” On the return ride aboard the van, I mentioned casually. “Of course, the bad news is that it seems we are leaving without a contract for an expensive pharmaceutical solution. The chickens will be safe from now on, but rest assured that I’m the first to be financially ruined by this epic victory over the bird flu. Doktor Psi, we should have sold them Kool-Aid for starters.” My colleagues laughed, since they were enjoying a rare VIP vacation in Thailand and now had something to brag about to their colleagues upon returning to Hong Kong. The candle-lit dinner that night at a posh restaurant cheered the scientists, who were extremely content with all that had transpired. The next day’s conference went well, and the scientific team returned to the airport with all sorts of souvenirs, contact lists and stipends for their effort. Indeed in less than two weeks the last traces of avian influenza had disappeared from Thailand and chicken was again on family dinner tables. I wanted to shout out loud: It’s in the water, stupid! Instead, I settled for a Singha beer in a dive while trying to figure how to recover my costs for the Dubai adventure. Later that night I got a text message from my tiny eco-agriculture research team that we had just received an expenses-paid eco-consulting visit to the outer fringe of the Gobi Desert along the ancient Silk Road - a dream come true. Meanwhile, I had have to find out why the mobile phone deliveries to Dubai were stalled, which turned out to be a long-expired overseas sales contract. By the time that thorny issue was resolved, I was completely out of phone sales and instead working on a remote environmental project on the far end of the Gobi Desert and also with a Tibetan region yak dairy project focused on grassland protection. The cost of living was negligible along that primitive frontier, my cash expenditures were negligible, enabling me to focus on my interest in ancient sites along the Silk Road, including mystical Dunhuang while riding horses and camels across the shimmering dunes to ancient sites and new discoveries. Lesson: There’s Life after Bird Flu – and before Fukushima. Life without Chemicals Since that ridiculously simple breakthrough for old-fashioned wisdom based on nature, bird flu has not been a problem in Thailand. If plain old natural water without chlorine or chemicals had such amazing results in the tropics of Southeast Asia, the same easy solution will succeed across chicken and duck farms across an over-technical and scientifically blind-sided USA. Nature itself prevents bird flu. For backyard chicken raisers, a daily few drops of vinegar in their bird’s fresh water bowl will do fine to prevent most diseases with the precautionary advice to never allow drinking water to sit more than a day or risk microorganisms from defecation mutating and spreading harmful versions of themselves. If the poultry industry here is interested in donating to my personal charity as the “mover and shaker” behind effective and super-cheap money-saving bird flu prevention, please be sure to send a hefty check to my publisher at rense.com so that we can use the money for a bucket of fried chicken and a case of beer. In advance, thanks much even although I could also use a few extra bucks for a newer cowboy hat. With a happy cluck for your chickens, I remain your research adviser at large, awaiting the next “unsolvable” crisis that may someday enrich my personal account so I can purchase a seat on the next available tourist flight to the final frontier eco-adventure on planet Mars. Oh, ever hear of Robby the Robot? Bring him along with the booze - just in case things get a little crazy up there. |