Avicenna:
Exellent points. Considering that Roche is the largest pharmacutical company in the world, they have the most to gain from hysteria. Just ask that often rhetorical, self answering question "who benefits" and whalla! Presto! (off topic, but I liked your pics, by the way) It all suddenly becomes a touch more crystal clear.

I agree. If you like dead food, expect results that are less than lively. Naturally, we are what we eat. To eat air breathing animals and birds is unnecessary to our health to begin with. We've got the tech and we should know better, regardless of some dummies slow witted insights to the contrary.

What is interesting to note is that a pandemic might not come from birds, but from dogs or cats. Within the last year or two, a virus has been spreading throughout North America from southern states that has been killing dogs in populated areas. Cats and other animals have their own vulnerablilties to flu's and virus's as well.

While it is easy to assume that deadly bird flu's would be the most probable origin to the next pandemic due to related deaths, it is also much easier to assume that it could come other hosts including our own pets. I won't even start with parasites that can be transmitted from them since the population is so paraniod these days, other than to offer this advice.

The main trigger to earthquakes in diver places, and pestilence and disease and all that biblical stuff is global warming. Its global warming and pollution that is heating up and mutating these nano's and this problem as global as it is, is ours to face and solve, or guttlessly run from and face the consequences of never having tried. To this end, there is much that we can do, or run away from while making fat cats like Roche richer along the way.

Finally, the H151 virus does have its environmental limitations. The questions that need to be asked if it ever does go airborne is:

What is the humidity content of the air?
What is the air temperature?

Define these environmental atmospheric conditions, and we can define our levels of risk if the enemy past the gates takes flight.

Re: Correction: I meant airborn "to humans".

With further repects to Roche and Tammiflu, media was all over the pandemic button and then offered the Roche brochure of what to take. Wasn't it nice of them to give Roche such a sales boost while whisking away reporting news that has always been more relevant as Avencienna has pointed out with malaria and west nile?

Back to the hype and the case of what makes bird flu so deadly, is that it is an airborne flu that is spreading to all types of birds. Obviously, airborne virus's from human to human is the pandemic we all fear. But the major question once again is the environmental links to exposure. What makes bird flu percieved as being dangerous is that it is an airborne transmitted virus between birds and we either don't know the environmental parameter's, or we aren't being told. Yet.

But even the average person off the street can see the dangers of a flu that is transmitted by air instead of contact and this is what is creating the hype. As well, H151 seems to take a pause in the summer, reaffirming environmental conditions for and against.

Bear with me when I say with simplicity that chickens are raised in close proximity. They breathe the same air as their neighbor's exhale. Often in many cases there is also contact and contact is an issue that hasn't been fully determined, at least in the media as far as I know.

Birds in the wild also migrate in groups over long distances and this creates a major risk with airborne virus's. If an airborne virus ever spreads from human to human or becomes intertransmittable from bird to human and human to bird, the parameters of virus survival in atmospheric conditions, or transission boundaries, is the one thing that has to be addressed and made public in any case.

So far, out of all of the media hype, I've yet to hear atmospheric conditions of H151 being mentioned or if bird to human contact has been the primary cause of human related contraction of the disease as opposed to air, or both, and that worries me most, because we are either not looking for these answers, are looking but don't know the answers or we know and aren't saying anything because the news isn't good.

So far, the public knows far less than it should, isn't being properly prepped, and that the media would promote corporations like Roche as irresponsibly as they have done doesn't do much to instill our complete trust in what is being reported.

Until, farmers in Asia stop breeding pigs and fowl, in crowed unsanitary areas, bird flu or variations of it will always be with us.

Large pharmacutical companies have little or no moral ethics, as with all multinational companies, the bottom line is delivering dividends to the stock owners. They will lie & cheat to make a buck and what the hell a few scare stories about avian flu will boost our sales 10% or maybe even 20%!

Avian flu is good business!

Farmers in Asia? How about right here at home?

"Good business."

So this is a...CONSPIRACY.

Of course. Sensible thinking. Industry wants the pandemic.

Today's Bourque is linking to a report suggesting that 1 in 20 Canadians could be killed by flu, with presumably at least as many incapacited temporarily. I rather doubt our, or any, medical system has the resources to treat that much of the population simultaneously.

Naturally, we will all be able to and interested in going to the mall under those conditions.

The pandemic is coming, it's just a matter of time. Conspicuous consumption will reach record high levels as the citizens shop even more furiously to distract themselves. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, subsistence farmers are hiding their poultry from the authorities to avoid losing their life savings.

As far as I'm concerned this is just another "Fear Tactic" to keep the masses off balance to the real ever present danger, "The Three Stooges" Bush, Cheney & Rumsfeld

Nature's schedule cares nothing about the antics of "the Three Stooges", Big Pharma's profit designs, the timetables of war and human discord, or retail shopping seasons.

H5N1 is a uniquely dangerous virus, which has managed to capitalize on the complex interplay of both natural and artificial systems to achieve an extraordinary range and virulence. The only thing standing between us and disaster is H5N1 chancing on the adaptation that will allow it to efficient use human tissue to meet its reproductive imperatives.

We would be very foolish to dismiss this risk because of politics. H5N1 doesn't care if it brings windfall profits to the makers of Tamiflu or devastation to KFC.

These tiny pathogens don't even clearly fit the definition of being alive. All they do is replicate and occasionally mutate. The combined might of Big Pharma, the Three Stooges and anything else we can throw at them will do little or nothing to stop them. They're coming, and the best we can hope for is the miracle that they'll somehow miss the mutations that would allow them to use humans in their blind, relentless march.

Name:
You've got that right. Human exploitation aside...

Just when we think our information is current, it gets dated fast. This article is so on with this point. The lastest is worth a read:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/background/avianflu/index.html

On the topic of evil pharmaceutical companies. Check out this story on PBS News Hour.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/jan-june06/research_2-14.htm

"The decision by many pharmaceutical companies to conduct clinical drug trials in India, a country with a large number of scientists, doctors and patients has sparked an ethical debate over whether the trials will benefit the participants, many of them who are poor and cannot afford medical attention otherwise.

When I saw the movie the Constant Gardener, I found it a touch preachy. But after coming across this PBS story ... I inclined to believe what the movie is warning us about is true.

What next! Avian flu vaccination trials in India!

As for INDUSTRIAL CHICKEN FARMING. Folks at PETA will have a lot to say about this. If we stopped industrial poultry farming maybe we wouldn't have to worry about avian flu.

I will try to paraphrase, and then answer, some of Avicenna's questions.

Q: Is avian flu a new phenomena?
A: It depends on your definitions. All influenza started out in birds, so in that sense it's very old news indeed. Perhaps as old as mankind. This particular strain of flu, H5N1, is very new in comparison. I believe it was first isolated in birds back in 1997. The first human case was diagnosed in 2003. It was first detected in Western Europe a few days ago. (In dead birds there, not yet in humans.)

Q: Is this just a scheme to sell Tamiflu?
A: Unlikely. If it is, Roche didn't plan very well. Rache has very limited manufacturing capacity for this drug. They could probably sell ten times the amount they can conceivably make in the next few years. And, given the hoopla about Tamiflu shortages, and demands that they open up their patents, Roche dares not even raise their prices. And of course, Tamiflu doesn't even work very well against H5N1.

Q: Is there a test for H5N1? Do these people really even have the bird flu?
A: Yes. There are a couple tests. There's a "quick one" that's pretty accurate and only takes 24 hours(?) Then there's a more definitive one that only a few labs can do. Samples need to be shipped, and results typically take weeks to be returned. Everybody on that list of ~165 victims has been confirmed by the definitive test. Many more have yet to be confirmed. It is "hoped" that many, many more people have been infected but were never even tested. Why? Because that would mean that H5N1 is not as deadly as it appears to be from the official totals. Hopefully we're only counting the most serious cases.

Q: Aren't malaria and TB more of a threat?
A: Right now? Certainly. To date, less than 100 people have been killed by this new strain of flu. Malaria kills about 4,000 people a day. But the potential threat from H5N1 is enormous. If it turns out to be about as contageous and deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic, H5N1 could kill something on the order of 300 million people worldwide. That's a million deaths a day, for the better part of a year, just give you a feel for the numbers. Do we know that H5N1 will be that bad? No. Could it be? Yes. Could it be worse? Yes. (The 1918 flu killed around 5% of the people it infected. So far this year, H5N1 has killed well over 50% of the people that it is known to have infected. Hopefully there were a lot of milder cases that haven't been reported, or we could really be in trouble.)

Viruses are more likely to be transmitted when there is a large population in a small area. Many flu viruses originate in southern China because they have a high population density.

Stockpiling of Tamiflu is probably an artificial-measure to pretend to take action, there have been some studies in reputable journals showing that Tamiflu was not effective against this type of virus. Taking a real measure such as regulating how chickens and other animals are kept would not only reduce the probability of large scale viral infections but it would also dramatically improve the quality of meat for those who do eat meat.

Most likely Health Minister Tony Clement will not take this measure and not only that but the opposition MPs will probably not point it out because you do not need to know biology to be minister of health or even a health-critic. I guess no one wants to offend people who produce eggs or chickens. Better yet if we stop testing chickens we won’t offend anybody or find any infected chickens quite similar to the mad-cow approach.

Other health-related item
{Just last week Brian Day (Cambie Surgery Centre) was nominated for a senior position by the CMA (Canadian Medical Association) and now I read that the CMA has fired 2 editors John Hoey and Anne-Marie Todkill. Brian Day is a well known proponent of private-healthcare and the editors of the medical journal did not share his views. Things that make me go hmmm…}

To mutate or not to mutate. That is the question. As long as H5N1 can continue to kill the ocassional human being whose particular base pairing allows for overpowering of white blood cells, and as long as humans insist on living with their livestock and poultry a few of them are going to die.

Mutations are part and parcel of the neo-darwinian scientific ideology and as long as people believe that the virus is just on the verge of mutating into a form that can be passed from human to human, the hype will contine.

I think this story is mostly about our relationship with death.

We fear it, we love it, we deal it and shiver at the thought that our deaths deal with us. In the sixties it was the Russians and the Americans. They each had enough nukes to kill us all a thousand times. Or was it ten thousand times? The statistic is important, for some reason, though the death rate for humans is the same as it always has been; 100%

On a single night of cable television are more murders than could ever be really found in a year. Why is that?

What does the expression mean, "if it bleeds, it leads"? We know that if a bad flu hits again it's still beyond our powers to stop, but the thought of it still sells newspapers. Even if it was in the power of humans to devise a cure, what difference would that make? How many of the ones with AIDS are getting treated. That could be done for a few dollars a person, but is only done for those who can pay a few thousand dollars.

A million sick birds and a couple of hundred people, and the thought of death.

Big business. Indeed.

Incidentally, the H5N1 has no interest in killing hundreds of millions. Where's the stressor that will change the raison d'etre of this mean little chunk of protein-covered DNA.

So far--and allowing for the paths of electrons encircling atoms, and the life style of certain other quantum phenomena, we live in a cause and effect world.

Not to worry, people. There's no real evidence that any virus has ever mutated into a non-degenerative form. This is called scientific hype.

Reread Avicenna, everybody. He got it pretty well spot on. There's probably NOTHING new actually happening with H5N1. Humans always died from coming in close contact with animals. In Africa people still get anthrax from their cattle.

The H5N1 has probably been around for thousands of years. It's perfect happy as it is, I'm sure.

Now, if you want to know what viruses we should be afraid of, you might want to think about the ones that already have the capacity to infect among humans. (flu viruses, that is)

It's a far shorter evolutionary path for them to follow than it is for H5N1.

Thankfully the harmlessness of H5N1 is proven by its modus operandi as a small-time operator.

Think about a common, usually harmless streptococcus bacteria colonizing into numbers that can kill two linear centimeters of human flesh per hour. Why does it do this? Nobody knows, except for individual human genome speculation. Same thing for the odds of H5N1 killing millions. Same as winning the 365 million dollar lottery. Really bad (in this case good) odds! Thankfully!

Reread Avicenna. He got it pretty well spot on, notwithstanding Dingo62's attempt to conventionalize him with scientific hype.

Some well thought out, most excellent posts here. Its refreshing, helping me to believe in my fellow man (and woman) sometimes more often than I do now.

The main emphasis with bird flu has been with the way it spreads and the fatalities it creates. A human 51N1 equivalent is perhaps the most scary scenario of all, because it spreads by air, as well as by contact. This isn't the nature of most virsus's that spread through body fluids or blood.

The spanish influenza pandemic was devastating because it wasn't just a killer, it spread through contact (not sure if that one was airborne or not). Deadly virus's that spread through contact alone have what it takes to become a pandemic. so the thought of virus's that are killers spreading through air contact and capable of hopping from species to species, is the ultimate classic fiction plot in a novel. Or is it fiction?

Again, what we know is that what triggers mutations is the same thing that triggers mutations in cellular genetics. Hostile environments. Pollution. So as long as this planet becomes more polluted, combined with rapidly changing environments triggered by global warming, the odds of pandemics occuring will increase. The odds were already there, but now they've increased due to the influences humanity is having on the worlds environments.

So is there something we can do? Yes, there is. Live clean. Keep our own bodies clean. Set clean examples for others to follow. Consume clean energy. It might sound insignifigant to most, but try it.

The challenges we face trying to live a clean life at home are extremely difficult. Most of you know the dangers that lie in grocery stores. Most of you know how difficult it is to get off the grid. To travel without releasing signifigant sulfur emmissions and CO2. But if any of us can do it in every way, we have not only become the living example others should follow, we have found the example that works to keep the risks of a pandemic from ever happening in the future, quite low. We have found the major component to the solution to the problem. Prevention.

Avicenna knows it. Live clean. Don't contribute to the problem. Contribute to prevention as part of the solution and in trying, we'll know much more than we know now, and live much longer, stess free lives because of it.

Brain can you please give me an example of a mutation that was more sophisticated than the organism that it replaced?

Scientists have been using this silly mutation hype for everything from a person to person killer H5N1 to explaining why they can't produce a vaccine for HIV, and why the anti-retrovirals like protease inhibitors just sicken and kill their victims. (The darn bug just keeps on mutating and mutating and mutating and outsmarting all our vaccines and nucleoside analog reverse transcriptase inhibitors)

It's all a bunch of crap. H5N1 will never mutate to a person to person virus. Why would it?

And HIV will remain a harmless virus totally incapable of causing sickness in anyone, with the possible exception of those who go into depression upon receiving an HIV positive test.

Human beings are not very intelligent, eh.

The recent lab reconstruction of the human flu virus responsible for Spanish Flu in 1918 showed that it was an avian virus in origin and that it probably adapted to humans over 10 - 15 years.

Isolated strains of H5N1 have already been found with genetic changes that make them more suited to infect human vs avian tissue. (Read a pretty good effort to explain this in lay terms here: http://effectmeasure.blogspot.com/2006/01/background-science-for-turkish_20.html. Or check out the background literature linked from Crawford's H5N1 blog -- link above)

Credible scientists with absolutely no ties to industry are explicit in warning that we would be very foolish to ignore the risks posed by H5N1. With very few exceptions (e.g. a contrarian vet tied to the poultry industry) most scientists in the field agree that a human flu pandemic is inevitable, and that it will have devastating global consequences. It's clear that H5N1 is a uniquely different bird virus, but no one can be certain at this point that it will be the culprit, or just how bad the next flu pandemic will be.

We do know that our own socioeconomic structures have evolved in the last century in ways that make us uniquely vulnerable to massive disruption in the next serious flu pandemic. And we know that if you go back 300 - 400 years, such pandemics have occured with great regularity.

The insurance industry is preparing; the big banks are quietly preparing; Ontario's health sector, which understands all too well how close they came with SARS, is also taking this very seriously. And SARS didn't come close to presenting the risks that would be posed by an easily transmissible new flu virus for which we have no resistance.

And as noted, simply stockpiling Tamiflu or relying on a vaccine isn't the answer either. Vietnamese doctors reported that Tamiflu was of very limited help to their patients and a human vaccine wouldn't be ready for many months after the emergence of a human strain.

The solution is far more complex and thus needs far more forethought and planning than most governments or individuals are willing to give it at this point. But of course more immediate risks compete for our attention, and thus uncertainties about when a human flu pandemic might emerge and whether H5N1 is indeed the right candidate provide the perfect excuse to dismiss the threat and delay action.

Like failing to instal home smoke detectors, we're unlikely to regret it tomorrow, or even next year, but at some point, we're certain to regret it.

Google, "1918 killer Spanish flu was a bird flu" and get a quick lesson on the efficiency (or lack of same) of mutating viruses--and the convenient hype machine into which the CDC has recently mutated. (Everything's funnier on fox news--not only Dick Cheney trying to be emotional about shootings his pal).

Also learn that the CDC claims that some army scientists reverse engineered the l918 virus from some buried corpses from that era. They pretend, oops I mean claim, to have the virus locked up in some high security vaults at the CDC so it doesn't escape and cause a new pandemic--and are fascinated by how close it is the the H5N1, even though it' a H1N7, I think. (Something like that).

Viruses have genes eh, like the rest of us, but flu viruses have ten or so, a bit fewer than the 26-28 thousand we have. (interesting how we humans only differ at 1/1000 base pairings).

When scientists speak of mutation they really mean minute sequencing changes in these genes, which usually are of no consequence to higher species.

As for the "reverse engineering" of the l918 flu virus-- uh, yeah, right!

And for anyone who wants to see a virus with a 1000 genes, guilty of an insipid darwinian ideological rationalization called "reductive evolution," go buy a copy of the March edition of "Discover" magazine and look at "Mimivirus", (bacteria mimicker) a virus which can give many a smart bacteria a run for its money, yet can only infect amoebas. Weird evolutionary stasis going on here, wouldn't you say.

Seems that viruses have been around since the beginning--some scientists even speculating that they were indeed the precursors to the nuclei which contain the sequencing algorithms for protein production in eukaryotes and many bacteria--and us.

We're talking billions of years here, eh. To think that we're going to sit around watching while H5N1 randomly mutates into a virus that can be passed between humans is as silly as thinking a human with web toes (well, actually a mutation) is going to be able to fly--or even bring home the gold in swimming from the Summer Olympics, eh.

Darwinism's means big bucks for vaccine manufacturers!

Pompouslopulous on CBC's The Hour claims the dead cat in Europe is a new leap in H5N1's ability. Human's are a bit more sophisticated than cats, eh. And we already know that H5N1 can kill humans.

I still say it's more yankee fear mongering.

I keep assuming that everyone's been obsessing about evolution for 25 years like me.
The reference to "reductive evolution" refers to the fact that one way conventional darwinists can ideologically deal with a virus with a 1000 genes is to speculate that it has shed some of its original genome, and is in fact an "offspring" of an even more sophisticated virus or even organism.

(The ultimate size doesn't matter rationalization!)

And has, in fact, become more sophisticated by becoming simpler. Mimivirus, mimicks the whales and evolves by random mutations and natural selection IN REVERSE.

Silly, eh!

hey, Truman:
You know I'm always good for a spin on it. Its quite interesting what you are pointing out, evolution in reverse and all that. With mutations, and evolution for that matter, its been observed through the diversity of species that 3 things need to occur.

The first is an appropriate or realistic timeline. Continental drift, say 225 million years to one continent, add another, just guessing as everyone else does, 3 or 400 million years, and thats how old life is. Maybe.

The second is scale. The larger the scale, the greater the probability for life to occur at some level.

The third, is most obviously environments. Not so much static environments, but changing ones. Its why I've taken such an interest with former asteroid collisions that have the potential to knock the Earth into the orbital variations needed to cause more rapid environmental changes such as ice ages. In fact, these environmental changes have spawned or accelerated a number of evolutionary changes.

Just so you know, I'm a creationist, myself, but I see God needing to create the early stuff only. Algae, plankton, all of the stuff on the bottom of the food chain. Everything else takes its own course from there, but the origins. Where did it begin? Where did the sexes begin? And there is most definitely a common signature with the life that is here. There are a ton of commonalities, so its easy to assume that evolution exists, because it does! But the spark to the flame had to start somewhere.

My own take on it, is that the origins of life began with a very large scale. Larger then we could possibly imagine. As large as the mass that was together before the big bang. Its my own belief, however true or not, that life existed back then evolving around a mass that had a very strong gravitational pull, meaning that its composite is in some ways, as light as light itself. However its happened, I don't know, but it comes back to the same three things I just outlined. Scale, timelines, and environments. If this life form had the power to cause this mass to explode, then it is easy enough to take a leap from there that everything in this universe is the domain of its creator. Is all of this possible? Hell yah. Its possible. Its just as possible as all life or most life being born from a few, highy evolved creations. This planet also has a scale, timeline and fixed but changing environments to pull it off, maybe not from scatch persay, but from simplicity. But its like the darwinist theories you've quoted with reductive evolution and natural selection in reverse ... silly, eh?

Hi Truman, check this Harper's story out:

http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2006/AIDS-Medical-Corruption1mar06.htm

Hi, brain. As you probably figured out I'm an "intelligent design" sort of guy, myself, though not a "creationist." You realize that creationism as we know it is the theory of origins espoused by the writers of Genesis, eh: That some kind of god said "let there be life and poof there came life in all of its infinite forms--in one fell swoop.

Clearly this is not the way it happened.

My intelligent design is more a theory of default because there are dead ends at the end of all natural selection-mutation-based darwinist progressions.

I once had my own theory of evolution. I called it something like: the theory of variant saturation or simply teleological design, meaning only that there is some kind of learning and planning going on at molecular levels, but I admit that I have no idea of the origin of this learning.

"Variant saturation" because species seem to occur not as a result of even algorithmic natural selection, but at the point when organisms seem to have reached certain unknowable limits of variation. Dinosaurs didn't become extinct due to a nemesis star, but because they had accomplished their role.

As my favourite evolutionary biologist, Elisabeth Sahtouris has written, "There seems to be a vast intelligence here. If there wasn't I think the whole thing (genetic systems) would quickly revert to chaos."

Read her essay, "A message to us from our genome" by googling the title and or her name.

Hi Danielle. Thanks for that link. I'm going out to buy the magazine.

Thanks again, Danielle for all your work. I'm so proud of you for standing up to the Vaccine
and HAART cartel and to being open-minded enough to examine the HIV/AIDS hypothesis.

More after I read the Harpers article. I'm self-limiting my internet time to an hour a day because I was a bit over dependent on google, so I'm at the library with only a few minutes left.

Hi Danielle. I just printed all 32 pages. It cost me $6.40, but I have a felling that it's going to be my archetypical HIV/AIDS story.

Wonderful that Harpers would do this story!

Danielle:
Read most of it as well. Quite the story.

Truman:
Creationist, yes, but I look at it differently than most. I give weight to Moses, but not the dingnut interpretations like Stockwell Day's and extremist suchlike. Many of these old passages are distorted through naturalizing the spiritual meanings of these words. Quick examples are swords meaning truth, stones meaning the ten commandments, fish meaning followers and schools of ideologies, bread meaning a group of life forms with one common will, et. el, the will of God. Stuff like that. Helps to explain why Jesus couldn't make bread out of a stone, yet feed the masses with a couple of loaves and a few fish. Yah know? And don't cross me, or I'll start throwing stones. :-)

And I give weight to John's explanation of Gods origins as well. You know, "In the beginning was the word, and the word was God and the word became God. And the same was the beginning with God."

In other words, God didn't just start out all knowing and perfect as we might assume, but as a life form that adopted a strict set of guidelines, a language of principled truths that held up to their, you know, word. And, in rigidly following such constitutions and proven principles, a permanent or fixed identity follows, especially if this identity is incapable of what we know as death in terms of ended consciousness. Enter God or deity, one who is equal to, but not above its own word. One see's the parellel's to our own keeping of our word as well. You know, as in, were real! So, when God says something, it gets done. Not confusing to me at all, but like I say, I see it differently than most, and I see God as a somewhat self-chosen design that evolved out of randomness, supported by an extremely large scale, indefinitely long timeline, environmental influences and last but not least, evolution.

I guess you could say I'm a hybreed, since I believe in a combination of evolution (God's own origins), and creation/intelligent design, with the seeds of life on this planet coming from God's source, of course.

Nah, the environment became hostile, likely from an asteroid and most couldn't adapt to the death of its food chain, but what do I know? Just a fella with alot of opinions. Cheers.

I just read the Harpers' story. As I have discovered, much of the scientific-medical-industrial corruption seems to be coming from the NIH-NIAID which has become a mere front organization for the major pharmaceutical players. That is why I was getting so shrill at recommending a link to their latest halted trials, which failed miserably and proved that Haart=death, but which they cynically and miraculously spun into a success story for the drugs' manufacturers!

Nobel laureate Kary Mullis is probably correct. He says:

"Look, there's no sociological mystery here, It's just people's income and position being threatened by the things Peter Duesberg is saying."

So this is what our species has come down to.

Most of us would gladly cower and hide from whatever contrarian view that might threaten our loan payments. I don't know why I'm surprised at all. I actually wrote the whole thing in my story, "Smart Animals," in which an alien spacecraft is on the way to "Chonps"
(earth, of course) to gather protein (guess who) for a new protein industry because they are tired of eating aromatic polycyclic hydrocarbons. The characters have a lot of trouble seeing "chonpsians" as anything other than a criminal species.

I did a nevirapine study and discovered the Uganda story on a website by a dissident writer called Sepp Hasslberger, a really smart guy who chronicles the entire AIDS crime on his site.

See: AZT,Nevirapine: Do Anti-retroval drugs cause Aids by Sepp Hasslberger.

Besides my own acquaintance who committed suicide after being teased about being HIV-positive, I read a study on the web which says that out of 27 HIV/positve people studied, 7 of them had committed suicide. I can't recall the amount of time involved. But this really portrays the evil involved in this disgusting hoax.

But God, it's really an evil thing, isn't it, Danielle. Imagine treating people with poison to fight a harmless virus and blaming the illnesses and deaths on the virus instead of the poison. I doubt if Shakespeare could have come up with anything like that. It makes the Merchant of Venice seem utterly benificent in comparison.

My character, Plaxon says, "Well they do seem to be fond of a good ethnic cleansing once in awhile."

And even the brightest and best immunologists among them have totally forgotten what an antibody does--that its existence in any significant numbers heralds the defeat of an infection, not the progression of a disease.

marvellous dialog ! i cannot clearly remember those lessons so long ago,but what i can remember makes me doubtful of anything i hear in the media.

the big Pharmacompanies are making billions of dollars for every new illness that hits the news stand.the last years shortage of flu vaccine in the united states meant canadian providers had a market one way or the other.and we all remember the media frenzy with the americans buying all our resources.

so any scare,can SCARE UP monies from the gullible.

as a person that has a compromised immune system ,i have over the last 5 years had 1 case of really bad flu,three days later after chicken soup and garlic sandwiches,i was back to normal.no vaccine,no drugs, either over or under the counter.now, like most, relatively sane and reasonably educated people,my hygene,my diet,my outlook on life/lifestyle dictate my health and longevity.

add an unknown virus i may sucuumb,if i have a predisposition or there are mitigating factors .all these things are blown out of porportion when looking at history.it's like having typhoid mary on the late news and telling every one, you are going to die, because of this woman.no reasons , no rhyme .

that is my outlook on these supposedly deadly diseases that are haunting us.as a few have pointed out,these entities have been around longer than we have and have been mutating.some will naturaly be killers others benign.some of us will sucuumb and others will flourish , and the pharmacompanies will make profits regardless of circumstances,because of ignorance and fear.

we are a species that cultivates stupidity for profit.and as don henley put it,"like cows looking at a passing train ".

thomas 49, so right you are. I have a similar story to tell. When I first discovered (just a few weeks ago) that the HIV/AIDS direct ratio causal hypothesis has never been proven and that it was actually an almost unbelievable hoax, I got quite demoralized and even a bit depressed, not because it affects me directly but because of how it further damaged my already shakey view of our species--not to mention bringing on a deep sadness for all the people who have been diagnosed HIV positive and feel that they've been chosen for a long and painful death--when in fact, they have a harmless virus that some scientists believe is just a ubiquitous passenger virus, not able to cause any disease.

I haven't had a cold since 1978 and may be one of the world's healthiest 61 year olds, but I came down with a very nasty bit of cold or flu virus and and am just now almost totally recovered.

Viruses are often "emboldened" by stress. When I was a teenager I used to get cold sores whenever I had a bit of crisis, like a date with a new girlfriend, for instance. Sure enough the day before I'd feel those nasty little water-filled blisters growing on my face. Herpes Simplex 1 they call it, and it scurries back into the ganglia at the base of the spine until next called up at a moment of weakness.

All the best to you, thomas 49.

brain, you certainly do have all the bases covered in your speculation about origins. I enjoyed your comments anyway, as usual.

May I give your theory a name? I was thinking, "stream of conscious non-algorithmic wishful, non-empirically-based happy evolution"--or "SOCNAWNEBHE" for short.

I'm just having fun, brain. All origin ideas are, so far, of equal value. But when that alien space-craft shows up looking for protein units...well all bets are off then, eh.

Now that would really cause a paradigm (oh darn, I used THAT word!) shift, wouldn't you say.

brain, "intelligent design" is more about the problem of "irreducible complexity" than any big god, I think--the idea that complex organs like the human eyeball could never have come into existence by a confluence of random events because the individual parts, cornea, conjunctiva, iris, fovea, retina, lens, etc are EACH necessary for the eyeball to work, because in the absence of one you have nothing. (conventional darwinism just ain't making it here) Not to mention the OPTIC NERVE! And when you think of the genetic code being 4 nucleotide bases and 20 amino acids, well, it is pretty obvious that something, sometime somehow worked this out. Maybe just a really smart guy on another planet, who can't figure out where he came from either.

As for Moses and most-loved people and grace by belief...well, I dunno, brain. Sounds like a load of crap to me, eh.

hey brain, you might get a kick out of my long drawn out attempt to explain the relationships between the ideas of intelligent design, creationism, natural-selection-mutation-based darwinian evolution and religion. Type in "Lusting After the Apocalypse" here on Tyee and read the commentary. Whatdya think? Lemme know. There's more "irreducible complexity" there, too.

See also: "Voodoo Hexing" by Matt Irwin and the tradition of bone pointing of the Australians natives.