(Swine Flu News)WASHINGTON — Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said Wednesday that people should expect “a big influx” of swine flu cases this fall and prepare as best they can.
“The best thing we all can do are the very simple things, the washing of the hands, the coughing into the sleeve,” Napolitano said in a nationally broadcast interview. ” … We’re in all likelihood going to have them (new infections) before the vaccine is available.”
(Swine Flu News)As the debate rages on about health care, issues of basic rights and essential services are the focus of much discussion. Just what should our government provide for us? If services are provided, how much should each citizen get?
In South Africa today and tomorrow, the Constitutional Court will be looking at exactly those questions. And their conclusions will be instructive.
When I lived in Cape Town and Johannesburg, the most shocking difference, and there are a lot of differences, was the lack of water fountains. We expect, in North America, to pause on our bike ride or run by a standing tap to fill up our water bottles. Practically speaking, those without homes, can do the same - ensuring that, of the many ailments plaguing our poorest citizens, dehydration won’t be top of the list.
In the southern part of Africa, water is a scarce resource, kind of like trying to find a knee surgeon in rural Illinois.
When the Apartheid government crowded Black South Africans into townships to provide cheap labor for the adjoining white neighborhoods, water was provided free to every home. Fifteen years after Mandela’s victory, water is sold, at a profit, to most township homes. Those who cannot afford to pay are provided with just enough water per month, per household to flush the toilet a few times a day.
Those cholera outbreaks that make the news every few months are no accident. They are the product of a government that decided essential services don’t need to be provided for free.
Well, residents of Johannesburg grew tired with the lack of government support and brought a legal challenge to the water privatization scheme. In the lower courts, their argument for government-provided essential services has been accepted. We will soon see what the high court has to say about free basic water for all.
South Africa’s constitution is very different from that of the United States. They have the tools to demand essential services in court and we are left with political wrangling in Washington. But the argument is the same.
If the government abandons the most basic needs of its population, the result is widespread disease and death. It may be cholera in South Africa and swine flu here in the North, but the consequences will be dire.
Let’s hope that the Constitutional Court and the U.S. court of public opinion come to the right conclusion and accept responsibility for essential services.
Read more: Cholera Outbreak, South Africa, Swine Flu Outbreak, Constitutional Court, Profits,Profit, Swine Flu Pandemic, Water, Health, Swine Flu, Health Care Reform, Privatization, Cholera,Health Care, Politics News
(Swine Flu News)What’s dragging the Democrats down in the health care debate isn’t confusion about details. On this the president and his supporters have proven themselves the ablest of technocrats, easily identifying each plan’s particulars and its shortcomings, laying everything out on nice flow charts.
It is the big questions that are tripping them up. Concerns about the size and role of government are what seem to leave reformers stammering and speechless in town-hall meetings. The right wants to have a debate over fundamental principles; elected Democrats seem incapable of giving it to them.
And in the silence, some lousy ideas have flourished. If universal health insurance goes down to defeat again this year, Democrats will have to live with the shame not only of having failed to enact their No. 1 priority, but also of having been beaten by arguments that a novice debater would have no trouble putting down.
Consider the assertion, repeated often in different forms, that health insurance is a form of property, a matter of pure personal responsibility. Those who have insurance, the argument goes, have it because they’ve played by the rules. Sure, insurance is expensive, but being prudent people, they recognized that they needed it, and so they worked hard, chose good employers, and got insurance privately, the way you’re supposed to.
Those who don’t have what they need, on the other hand, should have thought of that before they chose a toxic life of fast food and fast morals. Healthiness is, in this sense, how the market tests your compliance with its rules, and the idea of having to bail out those who failed the test–why, the suggestion itself is offensive. We have all heard some version of the concluding line, usually delivered in the key of fury: By what right do you ask me to pay for someone else’s health care?
This image of sturdy loners carving their way through a tough world is an attractive one. But there is no aspect of life where it makes less sense than health care.
To begin with, we already pay for other people’s health care; that’s how insurance works, with customers guarding collectively against risks that none of them can afford to face individually. Our health-care dollars are well mingled already, with some of us paying in more than we consume while others use our money to secure medical services for themselves alone.
The only truly individualistic health-care choice — where you receive care that is unpolluted by anyone else’s funds — is to forgo insurance altogether, paying out-of-pocket for health services as you need them. Of course, such a system would eventually become the opposite of the moral test imagined by our Calvinist friends, with the market slowly weeding its true believers out of the population.
The idea that merit determines healthiness is almost as risible. To be sure, we should all eat right, brush our teeth, and cut down on sweets, but that will hardly help us if we’re born with a condition that requires expensive treatment. Or if we eat cookie dough that’s tainted with E. coli. Or if our industry dies and our employer shuts down. Or if our insurance company, looking out for its own health, finds some pretext to rescind our policy.
The righteous individualists among us might also consider that our current health-insurance system, which delivers them the medicine they think they’ve earned, is in fact massively subsidized by government, with Uncle Sam using the tax code to encourage employers to buy health insurance. And were it not for government programs like Medicare and Medicaid taking over the most expensive populations, the political scientist Jacob Hacker pointed out to me recently, the system of private insurance would probably have destroyed itself long ago. That image we cherish of our ruggedly self-reliant selves, in other words, is only possible thanks to Lyndon Johnson and the statist views of our New Dealer ancestors.
One reason government got involved is that our ancestors understood something that escapes those who brag so loudly about their prudence at today’s town-hall meetings: That health care is not an individual commodity to be bought and enjoyed like other products. That the health of each of us depends on the health of the rest of us, as epidemics from the Middle Ages to this year’s flu have demonstrated. Health care is “a public good,” says the Chicago labor lawyer Tom Geoghegan. “You can’t capture health care just for yourself. You have to share it with others in order to protect your own health.”
Yes, Democrats can prove that America pays more for health care than other countries; yes, they have won the dispute that private health insurance is needlessly expensive. But what they’ve lost is the argument that we are a society.
(Swine Flu News)BEIJING — The answer may be near to a crucial question about vaccine for the advancing swine flu – one shot or two?
Chinese officials say they are about to approve vaccines that prevent the new flu in a single dose.
Read more: Swine Flu Vaccination, Swine Flu, Swine-Flu-Vaccine, Swine Flu Vaccine, Swine Flu Pandemic, China Vaccine, Swine Flu Health, Swine Flu Single Dose Vaccine, Chinese Vaccine, Swine Flu China, World News
(Swine Flu News)The federal government has enlisted Elmo to help in the fight against Swine Flu. The beloved Sesame Street character was scheduled to do four public service announcements teaching kids simple hygiene practices, but a fifth more radical PSA was released last night on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”
WATCH:
(Swine Flu News)When it comes to avoiding the transmission of swine flu - without awkwardness or rudeness - perhaps the Samoans are best prepared.
“In Samoa, people do not touch when they greet each other,” the linguistic anthropologist Alessandro Duranti says.
(Swine Flu News)The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has confirmed that it will be investigating the role of vitamin D in protection against swine flu, NutraIngredients-USA.com has learned.
The agency started a study last year on the role of vitamin D in severe seasonal influenza, which it said it will now adapt to the H1N1 swine flu virus.
(Swine Flu News)Aug. 26, 2009 — Who’s on the front line of this fall’s flu fight? You are, say HHS and CDC officials.
Until Thanksgiving, at the earliest, it’s going to be up to you to try not to catch the flu. And if you do catch the flu, it’s going to be up to you to try not to infect anyone else.
The United States Department of Agriculture agreed last week to buy an additional $30 million dollars worth of pork from the ailing pork industry, for a total of $151 million dollars purchased this year, as recompense for supposed damage wrought by the emergence of the swine flu in our common public lexicon (and the result will no doubt keep kids in public schools flush with factory-farmed sausage pizza this year).
The industry has been pushing the American media and our politicians to refer to the virus instead as “novel H1N1,” which is indeed a scientific way to reference the flu. But “swine flu” has stuck because this is a virus that has passed between humans and pigs. It is uncertain still how the virus evolved and from where exactly, but as we are producing a glut of pork in the US it is not far off to consider that keeping thousands of pigs in close confinement in order to create cheap meat could be exacerbating the potential for disease.
When the news broke about the flu, many in the media focused on the personal aspect of avoiding getting ill, followed the illness as it took victims, or otherwise detailed the ways flus have played out historically. A few bloggers on sustainable food issues, like Tom Philpott at Grist, questioned the proximity of the virus outbreak in Perote, Mexico, 5 miles from a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO) producing meat for pork giant Smithfield in the state of Vera Cruz.
But now, as the World Health Organization expects a second wave of the flu to hit the northern hemisphere in the fall, it is worth considering some of the looming questions on how CAFOs could be contributing to the occurrence of disease.
Environmental Health Perspectives’ (EHP) cover story this month by Charles W. Schmidt focuses on the issue in detail, reigniting questions surrounding our country’s current standard animal industry practices:
…one potential source of the original outbreak–swine farming in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs)–has received comparatively little attention by public health officials. CAFOs house animals by the thousands in crowded indoor facilities. But the same economy-of-scale efficiencies that allow CAFOs to produce affordable meat for so many consumers also facilitate the mutation of viral pathogens into novel strains that can be passed on to farm workers and veterinarians, according to Gregory Gray, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the University of Iowa College of Public Health.
“When respiratory viruses get into these confinement facilities, they have continual opportunity to replicate, mutate, reassort, and recombine into novel strains,” Gray explains. “The best surrogates we can find in the human population are prisons, military bases, ships, or schools. But respiratory viruses can run quickly through these [human] populations and then burn out, whereas in CAFOs–which often have continual introductions of [unexposed] animals–there’s a much greater potential for the viruses to spread and become endemic.”
So how would we in the US know if there were sick pigs at a 2,000 sow facility? The EHP article also follows up on the $1.5 million dollar USDA surveillance program assigned to look for novel flu strains in pigs, which is relying on voluntary samples. From that article:
[distinguished professor at Kansas State University College of Veterinary Medicine, Jürgen A. Richt] asserts that without more industry cooperation, the USDA’s surveillance program is “dead in the water.” In other words, he explains, producers won’t submit their animals for analysis without a guarantee of indemnification, meaning economic protection to recover losses should the virus be discovered.
In addition, Schmidt writes,
CAFOs fall through regulatory cracks when it comes to sampling for novel viruses that could make people sick. [Associate director for epidemiologic science in the Influenza Division of the CDC Carolyn Bridges] explains that producers have little incentive to test for swine influenzas, in part because they aren’t included on a list of 150 “reportable illnesses” that, when detected, must be documented with the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE).
CAFO operators like to claim that their facilities are biosecure — sealed off from the world and therefore unaffected by it — where workers shower before and after entering, wear protective coverings over hair and clothing, and visitors are highly restricted. But this biosecurity could also be seen as an incubator for the creation of super viruses. As the article points out, animals in these facilities are given eight times the antibiotics that the average American human consumes, therefore increasing the risk for confined livestock with antibiotic resistant immune systems to pass novel viruses unchecked among herds.
So far, four swine herds have been identified as having H1N1, one in Alberta, Canada (which was destroyed without compensation to the owner when discovered) one in Québec, Canada, and two herds in Argentina’s Buenos Aires Province. But American pork farmers are terrified of the possibility of herd loss and trade sanctions on the already hurting industry, and as such, actively have sought to keep inspectors out.
The CAFO workers — according to EHP, there are an estimated 54,000 working in swine and poultry CAFOs in the US — could be a crucial link in the spread of disease. If a worker acquires swine flu, it would probably go undetected, as the systems in place currently do not vaccinate or observe them for the flu. It is not a stretch to suggest, then, that new super viruses emerging in these environments could be passed to unaware, impoverished and even sometimes illegal CAFO employees, unlikely to complain to the Occupational Safety Hazards Agency (OSHA) for fear of losing their job. The disease then has the potential to spread to their communities and beyond. Again, from EHP:
OSHA typically exempts facilities with fewer than 11 employees from routine inspection unless otherwise requested by employees or other agencies. Yet, like many other modern production facilities, CAFOs are largely automated, so a typical factory farm housing 2,000 sows requires a crew of just 7 people, according to Don Butler, director of government relations and public affairs for Murphy-Brown, the livestock production subsidiary of Smithfield Foods. And [Steven Wing, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill] adds that CAFOs in some regions are often staffed by black and Hispanic workers who might fear racial harassment for reporting safety infractions to OSHA, as well as low-income workers of all races who worry about keeping their jobs in the industry and access to health care, housing, and other services provided by their employers.
When asked how OSHA regulates zoonotic disease risk at CAFOs, a spokesman at the agency said its purview applies exclusively to bloodborne pathogens via the Bloodborne Pathogens Standard (29 CFR 1910.1030), which excludes respiratory infections such as swine flu.
So where does this leave the public? Information has been lacking on these and other issues relating to the consequences of our industrial food system for far to long. It is possible that the USDA and the rest of the Obama administration has dropped the ball on investigating this issue — and that there will come a harsher version of the flu with no understood origin this fall. But the public deserves the facts about the consequences of industrial agriculture. And those facts, in the light of day, could force this administration to stop dragging its feet when it comes to building a sustainable food system.
Originally published on Civil Eats
I got this post over at Tennessee Preppers Network
Most of the mainstream media has dropped much following on the H1N1 (swine) flu, but you need to know that researchers, the CDC and the WHO haven't dropped their following of it. This virus, while not showing itself to be particularly severe here in the US - at least not yet- is still one that demands our attention and respect.
Here are a few updates you should be aware of - just from today:
from Recombinomics: Suspect Swine H1N1 in Toddler Death in New York Raises Concerns - this one you should definitely read - here's a partial quote:
The evolution of the H1N1 is being closely monitored by sequencing labs across the world, and most isolates to date are closely related. However, the presence of avian PB2 raises concerns that the frequency of cases will not decline in the summer in the northern hemisphere, because the avian PB2 is optimal at 41 C, which would lead to efficient transmission in the summer. Moreover, the seasonal flu has the mammalian version of PB2, which has optimal activity at 34 C. However, the swine H1N1 transmitting in the summer hemisphere may acquire E627K, leading to a virus efficiently transmitting in the winter also.
Similarly, swine H1N1 in the southern hemisphere may acquire H274Y, leading to Tamflu resistance, which could complicate treatment of the more severe cases, which may involve previously healthy young adults.
