U.S. Professor Says Ebola Is LAB-CREATED Bioterrorism Experiment

"WE ARE APT TO SHUT OUR EYES AGAINST A PAINFUL TRUTH... FOR MY PART, 

I AM WILLING TO KNOW THE WHOLE TRUTH; TO KNOW THE WORST; AND TO 

PROVIDE FOR IT." ---- Patrick Henry


U.S. Professor Tells Africans Ebola Is Bioterrorism Experiment

A U.S.
professor of plant pathology is suggesting to West Africans that the
Ebola virus is a bioterrorism weapon developed by the U.S. being used on
Africans.



The essay, published by Dr. Cyril Broderick in the influential Liberian
newspaper the Daily Observer, comes on the heels of an announcement by
the U.S. that it will be sending 3,000 troops to help contain the spread
of Ebola.

He also alleges
that various sites in West Africa have been set up over the years to
test emerging diseases, including Ebola, with part of the purpose to
test vaccinations. There are currently a number of experimental
treatments for Ebola victims being tested in the U.S. on a handful of
medical and aid workers who have returned from Africa with the virus for
treatment. The most recent patient, Rick Sacra, was an Ebola patient
released from a Nebraska hospital on Thursday.



COULD HE BE RIGHT?



“Disturbingly,
many reports also conclude that the U.S. government has a viral fever
bioterrorism research laboratory in Kenema, a town at the epicentre of
the Ebola outbreak in West Africa,” he added.   

Dr.
Broderick listed research into Ebola and similar viruses conducted in
West Africa, and Liberia, by the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of
Infectious Diseases, “a well-known centre for bio-war research, located
at Fort Detrick, Maryland;” Tulane University through the National
Institutes of Health; the Centers for Disease Control; Doctors Without
Borders; UK-based GlaxoSmithKline; and the Kenema Government Hospital in
Kenema, Sierra Leone.


The CDC owns the patent on the Ebola vaccine! 

HOW can the CDC own the patent on Ebola? 

BECAUSE IT IS INDEED MANMADE?

Ebola vaccines would financially benefit both the CDC and wealthy drug companies.



Dave Hodges at The Commonsense Show website has published a detailed article on the ownership of Ebola vaccines. In
an article entitled The CDC, NIH & Bill Gates Own the Patents On
Existing Ebola & Related Vaccines: Mandatory Vaccinations Are Near,
Hodges "follows the money" and reveals how Ebola vaccines would
financially benefit both the CDC and wealthy drug companies.

The U.S. Dept. of Justice has proven that U.S. drug companies, for example, routinely engage in conspiracies against the public.



NOT A CONSPIRACY THEORY, PROOF!

“There is no natural disease called Ebola,” according
to Dr. Abdul Alim Muhammad, minister of health and human services for
the Nation of Islam. He called Ebola a “weaponized virus” rooted in
chemical and biological weapons research by Germany in the 1930s and
perfected in the United States. It is a weapon that can be used to
depopulate, weaken and dominate nations, he said.

Others postulate that
the U.S. or Russia released Ebola to initiate a desired depopulation
agenda, hoping to reduce world population by half. 

In an interview conducted in 2007, a prominent Russian scientist who defected to the United States told PBS Frontline that Ebola is just one of many genetically engineered bioweapons:

(See: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/plague/interviews/alibekov.html )

Dr. Kanatjan
Alibekov was the former First Deputy Director of Biopreparat from 1988
to 1992. Biopreparat was the Soviet Union's biological weapons program.
Alibekov defected from the Soviet Union and moved to Washington, DC in
1992... In the 70s and beginning of 80s the Soviet Union started
developing new biological weapons -- Marburg infection biological
weapon, Ebola infection biological weapon, Machupo infection, [or] Bolivian hemorrhagic biological weapon, and some others.

The U.S. Dept.
of Defense mirrors all biological weapons developed by the Russians, of
course. And as the theory goes, they need to be tested somewhere to see
just how well they work. Why not target a bunch of rural Africans? After all, that's what Pfizer did with its own vaccine experiments that killed African children.

Africa has been the target for a LOT of things!

WASN'T THE AIDS VIRUS ALSO UNLEASHED ON AFRICA, WASN'T HIV-1 AND/OR 2 ALSO LAB-CREATED?


As John
Rappoport rightly points out, the CDC and White House both have a long
history of lying about infectious diseases in order to cause precisely
the kind of panic that results in record vaccine sales. 

The history of the great swine flu hoax from a few years back is a perfect example: 

The CDC and WHO conspired to
declare it a stage six pandemic while the CDC committed scientific
fraud by fabricating pandemic numbers which were released to the media.
This resulted in billions of dollars in profits for vaccine
manufacturers, all by design.


We now know that most of the people who were counted by the CDC as dying from swine flu actually died from the regular flu. And since that time, we've also learned that a top CDC scientist has now openly admitted to a conspiracy of scientific fraud at the CDC, whereby the agency deliberately altered study data to hide any link between vaccines and autism. 


A video has also been released revealing how CDC scientist Dr. William Thompson was ordered to lie about the cover-up by CDC officials. View that video here.  http://vimeo.com/user5503203/review/106398908/44f9634e1b


Given this evidence, it is entirely credible to suspect that the CDC might invent any lies
that serve its aims and goals. Just like any government agency, the CDC
is primarily interested in gaining power and authority while boosting
its budgets and payroll bonuses. Not surprisingly, the CDC has no doubt
figured out that staging false flag threats is the easiest way to expand
its budget and power. And since nobody can actually see a virus, it's
the perfect false flag because the CDC is the "authority" on what
happened. So the agency can simply invent a pandemic and invent all the
clinical fraud to back it up. (Hospitals around the country send samples
to the CDC for diagnosis during a pandemic. The CDC can simply declare
all samples to be positives and thereby quack up some "scientific
evidence" for an outbreak.)




ANOTHER SIGN EBOLA IS LAB-CREATED



...this
particular strain of Ebola is different from anything seen before in the
history of Ebola outbreaks. It's mutating far faster than any other
Ebola strain.

Here are three quotes harvested from recent news reports that support this theory:

"This is
different than every other Ebola situation we've ever had. It's
spreading widely, throughout entire countries, through multiple
countries, in cities and very fast." - Vincent Martin, head of an FAO
unit in Dakar, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization
(https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/24883440/man-infected-with-ebola-virus-flees-isolation-terrifies-market/)

"The current
Ebola virus's hyper-evolution is unprecedented; there has been more
human-to-human transmission in the past four months than most likely
occurred in the last 500 to 1,000 years." - Michael T. Osterholm,
director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the
University of Minnesota, printed in the New York Times on Sep. 11, 2014

"It is
impossible to keep up with the sheer number of infected people pouring
into facilities. In Sierra Leone, infectious bodies are rotting in the
streets." - Dr. Joanne Liu, the international president of Doctors
Without Borders (http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/...)

It's clear from the behavior of the virus that this is no ordinary Ebola.
This is, crudely stated, a "super Ebola strain" which has already
out-evolved and outpaced all the efforts in the world to stop it.



There
are “stories of the U.S. Department of Defense funding Ebola trials on
humans, trials which started just weeks before the Ebola outbreak in
Guinea and Sierra Leone. The reports continue and state that the DoD gave a contract worth $140 million dollars to Tekmira, a Canadian pharmaceutical company, to conduct Ebola research. This
research work involved injecting and infusing healthy humans with the
deadly Ebola virus,” according to Dr. Cyril Broderick, a professor of
plant pathology at Delaware State University and a Liberian national.
His thoughts were contained in a piece published in an online edition of
The Daily Observer, a newspaper in Monrovia.


Abandoned vials
labeled "dengue," "influenza," and "Q fever" were among those
discovered inside 12 boxes sitting in the corner of a cold storage room
at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) facility in Maryland, sparking outrage over the government's poor handling of potentially pandemic diseases.


The
NIH, for anyone keeping track, is the same federal agency that funded
the heinous medical experiments on Guatemalan prisoners for which President Obama was recently forced to apologize. 

The U.S. media
quickly buried this story, but it's an historical fact that the United
States government has a long track record of using helpless citizens of
poor countries as human guinea pigs in deadly medical experiments.

The search for a killer virus like AIDS or Ebola began decades ago!

Below
you will find proof of all kinds of horrific human experimentation by
the U.S. on unsuspecting subjects, and you may have been one of them...I
was!

A HISTORY OF AIDS

1900s

Researchers
estimate that some time in the early 1900s a form of simian
immunodeficiency virus, SIV, was transmitted to humans in central
Africa. The mutated virus was later identified as the first of other
human immunodeficiency viruses, HIV-1.



1959

X-ray showing infection with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia.

The first known
case of HIV in a human occurs in a man who died in the Congo, later
(from his preserved blood samples) confirmed as having HIV infection .

The authors of
the study did not sequence a full virus from his samples, writing that
"attempts to amplify HIV-1 fragments of >300 base pairs (bp) were
unsuccessful ... However, after numerous attempts, four shorter
sequences were obtained"; these represented small portions of two of the
six genes of the complete HIV genome



1960s

HIV-2, a viral
variant found in West Africa, is thought to have transferred to people
from sooty mangabey monkeys in Guinea-Bissau during this period.


1964

Jerome Horwitz
of Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute and Wayne State University
School of Medicine synthesize AZT under a grant from the US National
Institutes of Health (NIH). AZT was originally intended as an anticancer
drug.


1966

Genetic studies
of the virus indicate that, in or about 1966, HIV first arrived in the
Americas, infecting one person in Haiti. At this time, many Haitians
were working in Congo, providing the opportunity for infection.


1968

A 2003 analysis
of HIV types found in the United States, compared to known mutation
rates, suggests that the virus may have first arrived in the United
States in this year.[6] The disease spread from the 1966 American
strand, but remained unrecognized for another 12 years.


1969

A St. Louis
teenager, identified as Robert Rayford, dies of an illness that baffles
his doctors. Eighteen years later, molecular biologists at Tulane
University in New Orleans test samples of his remains and find evidence
of HIV.


1972

Gaëtan Dugas
becomes sexually active. Although he was proved to not be patient zero
in the context of his partners he was with in the late 1970s, presenting
with Kaposi's Sarcoma in 1982 suggests he may have been infected as
early as 1972.


1975

The first reports of wasting and other symptoms, later determined to be AIDS, are reported in residents of Africa

The daughter of Arvid Noe dies in January 1975.


1976

Norwegian sailor Arvid Noe dies; it is later determined that he contracted HIV/AIDS in Africa during the early 1960s.


1977

Danish physician Grethe Rask dies of AIDS contracted in Africa.

A San Francisco
prostitute gives birth to the first of three children who were later
diagnosed with AIDS. The children's blood was tested after their deaths
and revealed an HIV infection. The mother died of AIDS in May 1987. Test
results show she was infected no later than 1977.

Gaetan Dugas
gets legally married in Los Angeles in order to get citizenship. He
stays in Silver Lake, a section of Los Angeles, whenever he is in town.


1978

A Portuguese
man known as Senhor José (English: Mr. Joseph) dies; he will later be
confirmed as the first known infection of HIV-2. It is believed that he
was exposed to the disease in Guinea-Bissau in 1966.


1979

An early case
of AIDS in the United States was of a female baby born in New Jersey in
1973 or 1974. She was born to a sixteen-year-old girl, an identified
drug-injector, who had previously had multiple male sexual partners. The
baby died in 1979 at the age of five. Subsequent testing on her stored
tissues confirmed that she had contracted HIV-1


1980s

1980

April 24, San
Francisco resident Ken Horne, the first AIDS case in the United States
to be recognized at the time, is reported to the Center for Disease
Control with Kaposi's sarcoma (KS). He was also suffering from
Cryptococcus.

October 31,
French-Canadian flight attendant Gaëtan Dugas pays his first known visit
to New York City bathhouses. He would later be deemed "Patient Zero"
for his apparent connection to many early cases of AIDS in the United
States.

December 23,
Rick Wellikoff, a Brooklyn schoolteacher, dies of AIDS in New York City.
He is the 4th US citizen known to die from the disease.


THE REST WE KNOW, BUT DO WE KNOW EVERYTHING?

Is it
"conspiracy theory" to question whether a virus "closely related" to HIV
was created in any of the many laboratories contributing to the Special
Virus Cancer Program and its connection to biowarfare research during
the 1970s? Could covert human testing of classified biowarfare agents
explain the exclusive "introduction" of HIV into gay men, the most hated
minority in America, via the government-sponsored experimental
hepatitis B experiments that began in Manhattan in New York City in 1978
-- the year before the onset of the "gay plague."


In 1979 the
first young white gay men to come down with "gay-related
immunodeficiency disease" was reported to the CDC. For the first year of
the epidemic all the men were from Manhattan. They were all defined as
young, predominantly white, previously healthy, well-educated and
promiscuous.


The Manhattan
men were similar in profile to the 1,083 gay men who signed up for the
hepatitis B experiment conducted at the New York Blood Center, also
located in Manhattan. The experimental vaccine was developed in
chimpanzees. The injections began in November 1978, and were concluded a
year later. Similar vaccine experiments in gay men were undertaken in
San Francisco, Los Angeles, Denver, St. Louis and Chicago, beginning in
March 1980 and continued until October 1981, a few months after the
epidemic had become "official." (For more details, google: the hepatitis
B vaccine experiment.)


AIDS became
official in the U.S. in June 1981. At the time AIDS was unknown in
Africa, and the epidemic did not begin there until autumn 1982 at the
earliest. After Gallo discovered HIV in April 1984, an HIV blood test
was developed and was used on the stored gay blood specimens deposited
at the Center as part of the ongoing experiment and follow-up. In 1980, a
year before the epidemic became official, already 20% of the men's
blood in the experiment were HIV-positive. By 1983, 30% of the men were
positive; by 1984, 40%.


AIDS scientists
repeatedly claim HIV was lurking in Africa for decades, centuries, even
millennia, before the epidemic. But there was no "incubation period" in
America.


As soon as
large numbers of gay people came out of the closet and signed up for
government experiments, the gay community was doomed. Not only was one
virus (HIV) "introduced" into the homosexual population, but two
additional "mycoplasma" bacteria-like agents and a new herpes virus as
well. In addition, "cancer-causing bacteria" were also operative in
AIDS, but all research linking AIDS to cancer remains ignored by the
AIDS establishment. (For full details and 458 citations: google: "alan
cantwell" +bacteria +AIDS.)


 "Gay Cancer": A mystery wrapped in an enigma

In 1993,
Shyh-Ching Lo of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology reported the
finding of 2 different infectious agents in the blood, urine and KS
tumors of AIDS patients. At first, he thought the microbes were viruses,
but later determined they were actually very small forms of bacteria
called "mycoplasmas." After Lo's discovery, the Army quickly took out
patents on his infectious agents, which he calls Mycoplasma fermentens
and M. penetrans. My KS research was never mentioned in any of his
papers.

In 1994, a new
infectious and sexually-transmitted herpes virus called "human herpes
virus-8" was proclaimed to be the agent causing all pre-AIDS and
AIDS-related KS. This virus is now widely accepted as the sole cause. I
thought it rather strange that there was never any evidence that KS was
transmissible before AIDS, and that a "new" virus could cause a rare
cancerous disease that has been around since the 1870s.

Whatever the
theoretical origin of HIV/AIDS, there is no doubt that the epidemic
started a decade after scientists began "adapting" massive numbers of
cancer-causing and immunosuppressive animal viruses and transferring
them between various animal species in an attempt to experimentally
produce cancer in the laboratory. In the process of these
"species-jumping" experiments, the scientists mixed viruses together,
seeded them into the bodies of various animal species, and planted them
into animal and human cell cultures. In the process myriads of new,
laboratory-created mutant, hybrid and recombinant viruses were created,
some of which were exceedingly dangerous.


These
engineered and deadly viruses were obviously of interest to biowarfare
scientists. Donald A MacArthur stated in Congressional testimony in 1969
that "molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly and
eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it
would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that
does not exist naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could
have been acquired."


The dangers
provoked by all these laboratory-created new virus were well known. At a
symposium on leukemia research in 1973, Danish pathologist J Clemmesen
warned that the transmissibility of these genetically -altered viral
agents could cause a world epidemic of cancer if they escaped from the
laboratory. (Gallo has publicly stated AIDS is an epidemic of cancer.)
That same year cancer virologists convened at a conference entitled
"Biohazards in Biological Research" at Asilomar, California. Despite the
risks, it was decided to continue perilous animal cancer virus
experimentation.


People are
often surprised to find there is a close relationship between
traditional cancer virus research and biological warfare programs and
experimentation. However, it is a fact that in 1971 President Richard
Nixon, as part of his War On Cancer, combined the U.S. Army's biowarfare
department at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, with the National Cancer
Institute. The army's DNA and genetic engineering programs were
coordinated into anti-cancer research and molecular biology programs.
This marriage also cemented the governmental ties of cancer research to
the CIA, the CDC, the World Health Organization, and private industry.


During this
same period the Special Virus Cancer Program (1968-1980), now largely
and conveniently forgotten, was established to coordinate the search for
cancer-causing viruses. The U.S. biological warfare program is highly
secret. This secrecy also surrounds the many scientists who directly or
indirectly contribute to the program. Naturally, there is no complete
record of what this Virus Cancer Program has achieved or what
cancer-causing and immunosuppressive animal cancer viruses were adapted
for biological warfare use and for covert military testing on human
populations.(For more details and 129,000 citations, go to
www.google.com and type-in key words : biological warfare human
experimentation.) 


The chimp in the freezer at Fort Detrick

 FORT DETRICK IS BUT ONE OF DOZENS OF NOTORIOUS SITES FOR HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION AND BIO-WARFARE TESTING/RESEARCH.

TWO ARTICLES ALL SHOULD READ ABOUT DETRICK ARE THESE:

http://www.detrick.army.mil/cutting_edge/chapter09.cfm


http://archive.wusa9.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=116490



ALSO SEE:

http://www.naturalnews.com/019187_human_medical_experimentation_ethics.html


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/



On February 1, 1999 Lawrence K Altman, M.D, longtime AIDS-writer for The
New York Times, dutifully reported "the riddle of the origin of the
AIDS virus has apparently been solved." A team of researchers, headed by
Beatrice Hahn at the University of Alabama, performed viral studies on
three chimps in the African wild and studied the frozen remains of a
chimp, discovered by accident in a freezer at the Army's biowarfare center at Fort Detrick.
The chimp had tested positive for HIV in 1985. On the basis of this
research, Hahn declared that a common subspecies of chimp (Pan
troglodytes troglodytes) was the animal source of the virus "most
closely" related to HIV. In a media blitz U.S. government scientists
presented a phylogenetic ancestral "family tree" of primate viruses
(which few people could understand) to prove that HIV was genetically
descended from a chimp virus in the African bush.

During World War II, Camp Detrick and the USBWL became the site of intensive biological warfare (BW) research using various pathogens. This research was originally overseen by pharmaceuticals executive George W. Merck and for many years was conducted by Ira L. Baldwin,
professor of bacteriology at the University of Wisconsin. Baldwin
became the first scientific director of the labs. He chose Detrick Field
for the site of this exhaustive research effort because of its balance
between remoteness of location and proximity to Washington, DC – as well
as to Edgewood Arsenal,
the focal point of U.S. chemical warfare research. Buildings and other
facilities left from the old airfield – including the large hangar –
provided the nucleus of support needed for the startup. 

DID AIDS COME OUT OF DETRICK?

OR WAS IT COURTESY OF THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION?

HERE ARE DOCUMENTED FACTS ON WHO'S TRYING TO FIND THE WORLD'S BEST KILLING VIRUS...

Many
viruses grow in animals and many grow in humans, but most of the
viruses that affect animals don't affect humans. There are exceptions,
of course, such as yellow fever and small pox. 

There
are some viruses in animals that cause very lethal cancer in those
animals, but do not affect man or other animals. The bovine leukemia
virus (BLV), for example, is lethal to cows but not humans. There is
another virus that occurs in sheep called sheep visna virus which is
also non-reactive in man. These deadly viruses are "retro viruses"
meaning that they can change the genetic composition of cells that they
enter. 

The
World Health Organization, in published articles, called for scientists
to work with these deadly agents and attempt to make a hybrid virus
that would be deadly to humans:

"And
attempt should be made to see if viruses can in fact exert selective
effects on immune function. The possibility should be looked into that
the immune response to the virus itself may be impaired if the infecting
virus damages, more or less selectively, the cell responding to the
virus."

That's AIDS. What the WHO is saying in plain English is,

"Let's cook up a virus that selectively destroys the T-cell system of man, an acquired immune deficiency."

Why
would anyone want to do this? If you destroy the T-cell system of man
you destroy man. Is it even remotely possible that the World Health
Organization would want to develop a virus that would wipe out the human
race? 

If
their new virus creation worked, the WHO stated, then many terrible and
fatal infectious viruses could be made even more terrible and more
malignant. 

Does this strike you as being a peculiar goal for a health organization? 

AMERICA HAS A LONG HISTORY OF LOOKING FOR NEW WEAPONS OF WAR, SILENT WEAPONS, CHEMICALS, VIRUSES, BACTERIA, GASES...

TO SEE A SMALL LIST OF THESE EXPERIMENTS, GO HERE:
http://www.rense.com/general36/history.htm

THE SUFFERING BEHIND THE 'SCIENCE'

Agent
Orange Orphans : 50 years on ,children  born  to many still suffer from
effects of EXPERIMENTAL U.S chemical weapons used in Vietnam, as do our
Nam veterans/

BUT,
AS BAD AS THIS IS, AGENT ORANGE WAS NOT THE WORST OF AMERICA'S DRIVE TO
FIND BIOCHEMICAL WEAPONS.  IT WAS NOT THE CRUELEST EXPERIMENT ON HUMAN
BEINGS, UNAWARE THAT THEY WERE MERE GUINEA PIGS. 

In the 1880s, in Hawaii, a California physician working at a hospital for lepers injected six girls under the age of 12 with syphilis.^[6] In 1895, New York City pediatrician Henry Heiman intentionally infected two mentally disabled boys—one four-year-old and one sixteen-year old—with gonorrhea as
part of a medical experiment. A review of the medical literature of the
late 19th and early 20th centuries found more than 40 reports of
experimental infections with gonorrheal culture, including some where
gonorrheal organisms were applied to the eyes of sick children

U.S. ARMY doctors in the Philippines infected five prisoners with bubonic plague and induced beriberi in 29 prisoners; four of the test subjects died as a result. In 1906, Professor Richard Strong of Harvard University intentionally infected 24 Filipino prisoners with cholera, which had somehow
become contaminated with plague. He did this without the consent of the
patients, and without informing them of what he was doing. All of the
subjects became sick and 13 died.  

In 1908, three Philadelphia researchers infected dozens of children with tuberculin at
the St. Vincent's House orphanage in Philadelphia, causing permanent
blindness in some of the children and painful lesions and inflammation
of the eyes in many of the others. In the study they refer to the
children as "material used"

In 1911, Dr. Hideyo Noguchi of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research injected
146 hospital patients (some of whom were children) with syphilis. He
was later sued by the parents of some of the child subjects, who
allegedly contracted syphilis as a result of his experiments.

In 1941, at the University of Michigan, virologists Thomas Francis, Jonas Salk and other researchers deliberately infected patients at several Michigan mental institutions with the influenza virus by spraying the virus into their nasal passages. 

Francis Payton Rous, based at the Rockefeller Institute and editor of the Journal of Experimental Medicine, wrote the following to Francis regarding the experiments:

"It may save you much trouble if you publish your paper... elsewhere than in the Journal of Experimental Medicine. The Journal is
under constant scrutiny by the anti-vivisectionists who would not
hesitate to play up the fact that you used for your tests human beings
of a state institution. That the tests were wholly justified goes
without saying."

CONSTANT COVER-UP, EVEN BY JONAS SALK!!! AND BY THE NAMES YOU WILL SEE IN BLOOD RED IN THIS BLOG.

 The Stateville Penitentiary was the site of a controlled study of the effects of malaria on the prisoners of Stateville Penitentiary near Joliet, Illinois beginning in the 1940s. The study was conducted by the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago in conjunction with the United States Army and the State Department.
At the Nuremberg trials, Nazi doctors cited the precedent of the
malaria experiments as part of their defense. The study continued at
Stateville Penitentiary for 29 years. In related studies from 1944 to
1946, Dr. Alf Alving, a professor at the University of Chicago Medical
School, purposely infected psychiatric patients at the Illinois State
Hospital with malaria, so that he could test experimental treatments on
them

In a 1946 to 1948 study in Guatemala, U.S. researchers used prostitutes to infect prison inmates, insane asylum patients, and Guatemalan soldiers with syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases,
in order to test the effectiveness of penicillin in treating the STDs.
They later tried infecting people with "direct inoculations made from
syphilis bacteria poured into the men's penises and
on forearms and faces that were slightly abraded . . . or in a few
cases through spinal punctures". Approximately 700 people were infected
as part of the study (including orphaned children). 

In 1950, in order to conduct a simulation of a biological warfare attack, the U.S. Navy used airplanes to spray large quantities of the bacteria Serratia marcescens – considered harmless at this time – over the city of San Francisco. Numerous citizens contracted pneumonia-like illnesses, and at least one person died as a result.

The
family of the man who died sued the government for gross negligence,
but a federal judge ruled in favor of the government in 1981. 

Serratia tests were continued until at least 1969.

From the 1950s to 1972, mentally disabled children at the Willowbrook State School in Staten Island, New York were intentionally infected with viral hepatitis, for research whose purpose was to help discover a vaccine. 

In 1952, Chester M. Southam, a Sloan-Kettering Institute researcher, injected live cancer cells into prisoners at the Ohio State Prison. Also at Sloan-Kettering,
300 healthy women were injected with live cancer cells without being
told. The doctors stated that they knew at the time that it might cause
cancer.  

THE INCIDENTS OF SECRET HUMAN TESTING SEEM INNUMERABLE.

THESE AND OTHERS WE KNOW ABOUT, BUT HOW MANY ARE UNKNOWN, AND HOW MANY ARE GOING ON RIGHT NOW?

ARE WE GUINEA PIGS?   

WILL WE BE LIKE PEOPLE IN ST. LOUIS WHO JUST FOUND OUT THEY WERE EXPERIMENTS?

http://archive.ksdk.com/news/article/344422/3/Secret-human-testing-Victims-in-St-Louis-speak-demand-answers

There is a considerable probability that unethical and involuntary human experiments are currently being conducted by the U.S. Federal Government for research into behavioral control.

In
this research, bio-effects of EM fields and beamed energy are used to
directly affect the central nervous system, with the goal of influencing
human behavior.

THE EPA WAS RECENTLY REVEALED AS AN EXPERIMENTER ON UNSUSPECTING HUMANS!

A REVIEW of HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION By the EPA.

IN
ALMOST EVERY INSTANCE OF SUCH TESTS IN AMERICA, AND MANY DONE BY
AMERICA ABROAD, THE POOR, MINORITIES, THE SICK, OUR MILITARY PERSONNEL,
AND ORPHANS SEEM TO BE FAVORED GUINEA PIGS.

WHY???

WHY!?

Dr. R. J. Biggar said in Lancet.

"...The AIDS agent... could not have originated de novo."

That
means in plain English that it didn't come out of thin air. AIDS was
engineered in a laboratory by virologist. It couldn't engineer itself.
As Doctor Strecker so colorfully puts it:

"If a person has no arms or legs and shows up at a party in a tuxedo, how did he get dressed? Somebody dressed him."

There are 9,000 to the fourth power possible AIDS viruses. (There are
9,000 base pairs on the genome.) So the fun has just begun.

IF
YOU READ THE ARTICLES ABOVE, FOLLOW THE LINKS IN JUST THIS ARTICLE I
LINK BELOW, MAYBE YOU,TOO, WILL ASK IF EBOLA IS JUST ANOTHER
BIO-ENGINEERED ASSAULT ON AFRICA.  

THE PROFESSOR MAY BE CORRECT!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unethical_human_experimentation_in_the_United_States#Pathogens.2C_disease.2C_and_biological_warfare_agents

FURTHER READING:  

http://www.livescience.com/13002-7-absolutely-evil-medical-experiments-tuskegee-syphilis.html

http://www.cnn.com/2012/03/01/health/human-test-subjects/

http://www.ranker.com/list/the-13-most-evil-u-s-government-experiments-on-humans/robert-wabash

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/41811750/ns/health-health_care/t/ugly-past-us-human-experiments-uncovered/

http://junkscience.com/2014/04/01/epa-medical-schools-complicit-in-unethical-and-immoralillegal-human-experiments/

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1361275/Americas-shocking-secret-US-experimented-disabled-citizens-prison-inmates.html

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A Dugyot in the U.S.A.: How is the Fellowship Going?

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Solving Ebola

The press have been discussing the current outbreak of Ebola in West
Africa. They stress that it is an awful way to die, that there is no
cure, and that health workers are dying despite apparently taking all
necessary precautions. More learned writers have been explaining that
Ebola is quite hard to catch unless you come into direct contact with
contaminated bodily fluids, and that simple precautions should be enough
to contain it. Yet other commentators are pointing out that the death
rate is very low compared to other well known diseases, and that we need
to keep the threat in perspective. So, we have an intelligence test
item to solve.



The World Health Organization, in partnership with
the Ministries of Health in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria
announced a cumulative total of 1440 suspect and confirmed cases of
Ebola virus disease (EVD) and 826 deaths, as of July 30, 2014. Of the
1440 clinical cases, 953 cases have been laboratory confirmed for Ebola
virus infection. Previous outbreaks have been more often in the Congo,
Gabon and Uganda.

Infectious disease dynamics can be modelled,
and controlling this outbreak should be pretty easy, at least from a
conceptual point of view. This disease is a short-incubation period
(about three weeks), relatively low transmissibility, high lethality
infection. Whereas a sneeze can transmit pathogens with great
efficiency, hence the easy airborne spread of influenza, avoiding fluids
is easier. Soap, water, disinfectants, protective clothing for nurses,
body bags for victims, quick burial in chlorine covered graves or better
still cremation, quarantine for all contacts, and the same procedures
for those quarantined victims if they die: all of these should be
sufficient. In terms of disease control it should be noted that men who
have recovered from the disease can still transmit the virus through
their semen for up to 7 weeks after recovery from illness. Severely ill
patients require intensive supportive care. Patients are frequently
dehydrated and require oral rehydration with solutions containing
electrolytes or intravenous fluids. No specific treatment is available.
New drug therapies are being evaluated. Barrier nursing is required to
protect health staff, but the standards of protection required are very
high, and hard to observe when health workers are subject to high
ambient temperatures. If treatment is really unlikely to help victims,
then in a big outbreak it might best to avoid attempts at close contact
nursing, and rely on quarantine and subsequent disinfection as the best
way to save more lives. Perhaps hydration packs distributed to homes
under quarantine would be best, but that is for public health
specialists to judge.



Why isn’t all this happening? Many of the
locals either do not understand the transmission method (from forest
animals like bats), or chose to disbelieve it, and are not changing
their behaviours regarding funereal procedures, which involve bathing
and kissing the corpse, all of which are part of altruistic respect for
the dead person. The locals are also prey to false correlation: they see
people who are mildly ill going into hospital, and then taken out dead
soon afterward by space-suited Western health workers. In terms of
Kahneman’s Type 1 fast and sloppy thinking, this is understandable.
Ebola hospitals are dangerous places. Westerners in space suits are
unusual and disturbing, and in fact even the notion of a hospital may be
the wrong strategy in these outbreaks. However, if a populace suspect
that health workers spraying disinfectant may be malevolently spreading
bottled Ebola, then there is a massive health education challenge to be
faced.

Western doctors very much want to help, but getting to the
outbreak locations they quickly find that local facilities are
inadequate, that barrier nursing is very difficult to achieve to a high
standard and, although this is less often conceded, that nursing might
be of little real help. However, early treatment improves outcomes, and
about 40%  are pulling through at the moment.  Hence the wish to provide
treatment, and some groups like Medecins sans Frontieres have not lost
doctors to Ebola. Wanting to help others is humanity at its best. These
missionary doctors write heart-wrenching diaries about families being
wiped out, and about their lack of resources, about the stigma with
which the afflicted are treated and about their guilt at seeing ill
patients dying without comforters next to them. They don’t publically
question why the countries in which they operate are in such a mess. The
conventional answer is that they are poor and wracked by conflict.



Guinea,
Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Nigeria, the countries in the front line of
this particular outbreak, share West African environments. Sierra Leone
and Liberia have a particular history, in that they were formed and
settled to take repatriated American slaves. From some points of view,
they should be models of governance. That has not been the case. If all
these countries had been governed well even remote country hospitals
would have had basic resources, and there would have been widespread
knowledge of basic hygiene and disease control. Quarantine would have
been explained, established and monitored. 



Can we deduce
anything from the failure to deal with the epidemic? The governments of
these countries may have regarded their poorer citizens as being of
little interest to them, living as they do in poverty in remote villages
near tropical forests. Government officials tend to be snooty, and
African governments have often disregarded the needs of their citizens.
They say that they have given plenty of public health warnings, but the
disease keeps spreading. Disasters test the morality of the organising
structure, and those structures have often been found wanting.



Could
it be that these countries simply don’t understand the threat and don’t
understand how to deal with it, or that they don’t do so in sufficient
numbers to provide an effective response?

Little is known with
certainty about intelligence levels in these countries. Those
governments do not measure cognitive ability, nor do they participate in
the PISA and other international scholastic studies. If one gathers
together various published papers on intelligence test results, then the
IQ figures for the Congo are in the 64 to 73 range; for Guinea 70; for
Ghana 60-80; for Nigeria 64-70; and Sierra Leone 64. Some of the samples
are of reasonable size, one and a half thousand, so it is not all a
patchwork of tiny studies, though there is plenty of room for
improvement. The figures are so low by Western standards that they are
hard to believe, but when educational elites in South Africa are tested
they are often in the IQ 100 range, consistent with being the top 2% of a
population which has an actual mean of IQ 70.



Botswana is an
exceptional African country in many ways, has put a lot of money into
education, and has participated in Trends in International Mathematics
and Science 2011, and Progress in International Reading Literacy Study
2o11. Botswana is a test case, an exemplar of the current achievement of
an African country which takes education seriously. If you look at
their scholastic achievement and compare it with the achievements of
countries with well established IQ measures, then Botswana comes out at
an estimated IQ of 70. Sub-Sarahan African intelligence test results
have been much debated by intelligence researchers, and the estimates
range from about IQ 70 from Richard Lynn to IQ 80 from Jelte Wicherts.
The key argument is about the representativeness of samples. The tests
seem to be OK, much to popular surprise. Humans in all continents appear
to solve basic problems in the same way. Africans have the same
cognitive operating system as other continental groups. There are power
differences, but not operating system incompatibilities.



Are the
behaviours of the average citizens in these countries consistent with
these estimates? Western critics of international intelligence testing
regard these estimates with considerable scepticism, particularly
considering that IQ 70 is seen as too low to lead an independent life
and earn a living in Western economies. However, that is the way the
results come out, and the match with achievements is reasonably close,
certainly when scholastic achievements are measured. Although all
countries have the equivalent of witchdoctors, in the West these are
usually a homeopathic side-line and less dominant in public health, but
in African countries they still sway many people on important health
matters. Seen from afar, the response to Ebola has not been intelligent.
Equally, the response to HIV has often been weak and contradictory. 



Finally,
should we be less alarmed about Ebola, and be more scared of measles,
malaria and car accidents? Those who would ask us to bear in mind these
comparative statistics misunderstand human nature. New threats demand
great fear, which is the prudent reaction till the true nature of the
predator is known. We humans are also concerned about how we die.
Bleeding to death from a galloping haemorrhagic fever is far more scary
than our favoured exit, to breathe our last as peacefully as possible,
expiring gently, entirely unblemished, while lying in clean sheets in
our own house with our loving family in attendance. Furthermore, as even
the dullest actuary must know, the statistics on Ebola are comforting
only at the moment. If this outbreak continues to be mismanaged, the
numbers could look very different in a few year’s time. Then we would
have to say that we had failed a simple test in public health.

Hope not.

Read More

Ebola in 2040: will stigma save us?

One of the few perks of being a psychologist in a medical school
(apart from occasionally running to a colleague to check a personal
health matter) was talking to researchers about the real state of
knowledge in any particular field. 



The Middlesex Hospital Medical
School, which started in 1746 and was subsumed into UCL in 1987, had a
great talent for developing new services. In a very minor way I added to
that trend by setting up, with two other colleagues, a national
referral centre for post-traumatic stress disorder, which is still in
operation as an NHS clinic. 



However, of much greater importance
was the clap clinic. At a time when the usual appellation was Venereal
Disease, two clinicians got together and decided, over a glass of
champagne, to move it from the dark basement to the full daylight. In
1964 Duncan Catterall established the first Chair of Genito-urinary
Medicine at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and so when the first
symptoms of a strange sexually transmitted disease showed up in the
very early 80s, James Pringle House started seeing the first cases and
was at the forefront of European research. I went to seminars, talked to
colleagues, and sometimes met the guest speakers for a canteen lunch.
The greater the expert, the quicker they were to admit that no-one knew
what the hell was going on. 



To my dismay, the public management
of the disease quickly veered away from traditional public health
concerns, and became a political battlefield. At the WHO headquarters in
Geneva senior colleagues muttered that they had been criticised for
saying the virus came from Africa: a colonialist perspective, they were
told. Even years later, those who worked in the field in London talked
sadly, and privately, of the difficulties they encountered with giving
straightforward health warnings. I wanted to design a simple poster to
illustrate the relative risks, but it got no further than a large page
in my filing cabinet. Such, dear readers, were the difficulties of
quickly disseminating an opinion before blogging became available. 



It
was clear to researchers that blood was the key vector of transmission
(contaminated blood transfusions had a 90% chance of resulting in the
recipient getting HIV), so that shared needle drug injecting and to a
lesser extent anal intercourse without condoms were high risk
activities, but public broadcasts talked vaguely about icebergs, and
suggested everyone was at risk. I did some research on public
perceptions of risk at that time, and AIDS figured high in the public
mind. The common folk knew that it was a “gay plague” but the expert
emphasis seemed to be on getting heterosexuals to use condoms. The great
and the good were interviewed and asked to say the word “condom” on
camera which they valiantly did. The correct way of putting on a condom
was demonstrated on television, using a cucumber. This led to some
worried calls about whether one could catch AIDS from a cucumber. 



However,
it was generally agreed that the UK government had done “rather well”
and had got on top of the crisis. Now, with Ebola in the news, I thought
it worthwhile looking at the current situation for the HIV virus in the
UK, 30 years on from the first outbreak. This might give us a possible
scenario for imagining what Ebola might look like in terms of
prevalence. 



In fact, the UK response to HIV seems to have been at
the European average. Statistics vary in different parts of the world,
but I imagine that European statistics have a modicum of accuracy.
Finland, Germany, Malta, Norway (and Cuba, see below) did very well (0.1
%); Denmark, Greece, Netherlands and Sweden and Israel pretty well
(0.2%) and Belgium, Iceland, Ireland, Luxemburg and the United Kingdom
were average (0.3%). Austria, France, Italy, Spain, Switzerland were a
bit worse (0.4 %) and Portugal very much worse (0.7%). Of course, these
are not sub-Saharan African levels (as high as 25% in Swaziland and
Botswana) but given that the governments knew what was coming, and had
resources available, they are not stellar achievements.

Greg
Cochran mentioned the case of Cuba, which had forewarning of the virus
in the US and two years to prepare for their first case. 



http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/forty-days/

They
quarantined patients for 8 weeks of health education, tracked contacts
in a very determined way, and used their relative isolation to put
public health before private liberty, an approach which comes naturally
to the regime. Their resultant prevalence of roughly 0.1% is one-sixth
the rate of the United States, one-twentieth of nearby Haiti. 



http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2003/denver_2003/2770631.stm

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/08/health/a-regimes-tight-grip-lessons-from-cuba-in-aids-control.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

HIV
probably moved from monkeys to humans before the 1950s, although the
first cases were recognised in 1981 in the US. About 100,000 people in
the UK are infected, mostly homosexuals, and heterosexuals from
sub-Saharan Africa. More than 20 per cent of them do not know it, and
are several times more likely to transmit the virus to their partners
than those who have a diagnosis. Half of the newly diagnosed cases in
the UK seek medical help when they are in the late stages of disease. In
2012, there were 6,360 new diagnoses of HIV, which is 17 a day in case
you find that more dramatic. In England the local authorities with the
highest prevalence of diagnosed infections are London, Brighton and
Hove, Salford, Manchester, Blackpool and Luton, and in Scotland,
Edinburgh. Treatment with antiretroviral drugs reduces the risk of
transmission by more than 90 per cent. The cost of these drugs is said
to be £20,000 a year and given the current almost normal life spans of
HIV patients, 20 years of medication seems a prudent minimum for
budgeting purposes. The money spent per capita on NHS services in
England was £1,979 in 2011, so each patient with HIV consumed at least
10 times the resources of an average patient every single year. 



http://www.avert.org/uk-hiv-aids-statistics.htm

A
possible explanation for the apparently lacklustre performance of the
UK may be that many of the cases are imported: that is, brought in by
Black Africans infected in Africa. Looking at the demographics of the UK
in 2011 that shows that 55,730,000 persons are classified as White and
1,905,000 are classified as Black or Black British. Looking at the HIV
figures (this is broad brush, because I have omitted the “mixed” groups)
the HIV rates per 100,000 are as follows:

Whites: 93 per 100,000

Blacks: 2015 per 100,000

So,
the rate seems to be 21 times higher among Africans. The fact that so
many Africans have come to the UK cannot be blamed on the quality of UK
public health warnings aimed at changing the behaviour of the local
population. The White rate is exactly comparable with the best European
nations at 0.1%

Nonetheless, considering that about 36 million
people in the world are infected by HIV and that 30 million have died,
the management of HIV is hardly a global success story. Does this give
us any help in looking ahead to the prevalence of the Ebola virus in 30
years’ time? Prediction will depend on whether treatments or
vaccinations become available, but my impression, no more than that, is
that the spread of the virus should be much slower, very much slower.
HIV can be passed on whilst the carrier still looks good for sex, and
sex is fun, so HIV gets an easy ride. Ebola can only be passed on (if
the experts are right) when the carrier is looking pretty ill and
unattractive, and dealing with ill people is a duty, and not much fun.
Furthermore, Ebola is so virulent at the moment that immediate death
rates are high. With simple precautions it should be contained. Even
when “protocols” fail, the reproduction rate of the virus in human
carriers should be low. Despite all the worrying news, it should be a
simple matter to avoid the spread of the disease. 



On a more
speculative note, perhaps we shall be saved by stigma. By fearing all
people who look as if they are ill with Ebola, stigmatising them and
avoiding all contact with them, definitely not putting ourselves at risk
by helping them, particularly not touching them when they are dying or
dead, the virus will die out. So, in one corner we have the virus, in
the other corner the uncertain public, caught in an awkward tussle
between altruism and abject fear. Ebola has its best chance of spreading
in societies which don’t believe it exists (like in parts of Africa),
and to a lesser extent in those which don’t believe that, given the
virus does exist, the absolute priority is to change our behaviour
quickly (parts of the wealthy West). Informed opinion ought to be right,
but with every failure of both treatment and containment in Western
hospitals public belief is eroded.

Although it goes against altruistic instincts, futile attempts at interventionist treatments may be making matters worse.

Read More

The flu is a virus!

It is winter and a lot of people are sick. Around here, and around the
country, there are two big kinds of sick – one is mainly gastrointestinal
disease with vomiting and diarrhea as the main symptoms, and the other upper
respiratory infections with congestion, cough, and sometimes shortness of
breath as the main symptoms. The first (GI) are mostly caused by norovirus in adults and adolescents and
rotavirus in small children (and, recent reported, the elderly). The
respiratory version is frequently influenza, or other viruses.  Viruses. Not bacteria, which can be treated
with antibiotics. Viruses do not respond to antibiotics.

This is not to say that they cannot make you very sick. They can, and do.
Especially in the old and very young and immunocompromised, influenza virus can
lead to major bacterial complications and death; the swine flu outbreak of 1918
killed more people than WW I. When there are major influenza epidemics, there
is a big excess of deaths. This is a really good reason to get the flu shot.
Everyone who does not have a firm contraindication (e.g., allergy to eggs, a
previous episode of Guillain-Barre syndrome) should receive the vaccine. People
should expect that their health care providers have received the vaccine. It is
not 100% effective, but it is very effective, and helps make the disease milder
even if you contract it, and it decreases transmission.

It is not a reason to get antibiotics for a viral upper respiratory
infection or bronchitis. Pneumonia, yes (even though a fairly large percent of
pneumonias are viral, it is hard to tell); pneumonia as a complication of
influenza, particularly in elderly or immunocompromised people with other
chronic diseases (heart, lung, kidney, diabetes, cancer) is very serious. But these people, who
have or are likely to have bacterial pneumonia and need antibiotics, represent
a tiny fraction of the people treated with antibiotics for viral bronchitis
(not to mention even less severe viral upper respiratory infections such as
sinusitis, non-strep pharyngitis, and otitis). Bronchitis is no fun. It can
make you feel miserable, create chest pain when you cough, and generally make
you really sick. It can also last a really long time – 4-6 weeks of coughing is
typical. But viruses don’t respond to antibiotics, even if you’ve been sick for
a week or a month.

A recent study published
on-line-before-print in JAMA-Internal
Medicine by Gonzales and colleagues[1] looked at the
use of decision support by either paper algorithms or computer systems in
reducing the use of antibiotics for acute bronchitis in a very large
multi-practice group in rural Pennsylvania (Geisinger Health System). They
found basically two things: both the paper and computer assisted decision
support tools reduced the rate of antibiotic prescribing about equally and both
did so significantly more than in “control” practices that got neither.
Unfortunately, the rate dropped from about 80% of to about 68%; that is, a
large majority of those presenting with acute bronchitis received antibiotic
prescriptions even after the intervention.

In a “Commentary” in the same issue, “Antibiotic Prescribing for Acute Respiratory Infections—Success
That’s Way Off the Mark”[2] , Jeffrey Linder
notes that the problem with the study is that the “success” was very limited;
that is, it moved the inappropriate use of antibiotics down, but it was still
many times too high. His comparison is to the use of aspirin after heart attack,
and how improving the rate from 30% to 40% would have been inadequate; luckily
we are now at 94-99%. Another metaphor, more graphic, would be if we were happy
that, over 10 years, the number of people killed by the average mass murderer
dropped from 15 to 12!  

“Since 2005," Linder notes,"a Healthcare Effectiveness Data
and Information Set measure for patients aged 18 to 64 years states that the
antibiotic prescribing rate for acute bronchitis should be zero. Despite the
evidence, meta-analyses, and performance measures, antibiotic prescribing for
acute bronchitis in the United States remains at more than 70%.” He is
critical of the Gonzales study because, even after its “statistically
significant” intervention, “The
antibiotic prescribing rate—an event that should never happen for these
patients—in ‘successful’ intervention practices was still more than 60%. For
individual clinicians…we need to redefine success. Success is not reducing the
antibiotic prescribing rate by 10%;
success is reducing the antibiotic prescribing rate to 10%.”

 Or less. Many people will say “I got antibiotics and I felt better in a
couple of days”.  Almost all of these
people would have gotten better anyway. There are some studies that show, in
large populations, taking antibiotics can shorten symptoms by about a half-day.
(This is probably because of some minor bacterial co-infection in some folks,
especially those with chronic lung disease). But not by a week, or 2 or 3.
Length of time of symptoms is not an indication for antibiotics for a viral
illness. And that half day? Linder points out that “5% to 25% of patients who will have an adverse reaction. Worse, at
least 1 in 1000 patients who take an antibiotic will wind up in the emergency
department with a serious adverse drug event.”  This is, to put it mildly, not good.

Let’s review this: acute bronchitis, much less other “colds”, are viral
and viral infections do not benefit in any way from treatment with antibiotics.
They can, however, last a long time, and make you miserable. These symptoms are
still not indications for antibiotics. The algorithm used by the Geisinger
group, and posted on the walls of their examination rooms, is attached. There
are some people, particularly the old, immunocompromised, and those with
chronic bronchitis (mostly long-time smokers) who can develop pneumonia, which
should be treated with antibiotics. They do not have acute bronchitis.

Doctors and other health professionals should know this, and most of them
do. Sadly, however, they not only frequently prescribe antibiotics for viral
illnesses because their patients “want them”, but also take them themselves for
the same non-indications. Doctors, nurses, and others are among the greatest
“abusers” of antibiotics (by which I mean taking them when they are not
needed). Amazingly, many of these same health care providers are those who do
not get the influenza vaccine, which they should be getting! The justification
of “I need to stay healthy, and can’t miss work, because I need to care for my
patients and don’t want to transmit illness to them” is wrong on 3 counts: 1)
Taking antibiotics for a virus won’t make you less sick or shorten the course
of your illness, 2) Taking antibiotics won’t prevent you from transmitting a
viral illness, and 3) Taking antibiotics for a viral illness increases the risk
of superinfections (e.g., yeast vaginitis), drug reactions, and the development
bacteria that are resistant to common antibiotics, which you can spread to your
patients. By the way, you also don’t need antibiotics for norovirus or other
viral (or, indeed many forms of bacterial) gastroenteritis.

 This Batman-and-Robin cartoon illustrates the frustration that many of us
feel. Obviously, we cannot even think about literally or figuratively treating
our patients that way, but I think one of the interesting parallels is that the
person asking Batman for antibiotics is not a “regular person” but Robin, a
kind of Batman-in-training, and thus Batman’s frustration mirrors that many of
us feel when our own trainees (students and residents) inappropriately use
antibiotics for themselves.

Linder says “We should address
patients’ symptoms, but for antibiotics we need to tell our patients that ‘this
medicine is more likely to hurt you than to help you.’” Those of us
who are
sick and not health care providers need to understand that; those of us
who are health care providers have an even greater responsibility.

 

Ref:  [1] Gonzales R, et al., A Cluster Randomized Trial of Decision Support Strategies for Reducing Antibiotic Use in Acute Bronchitis, JAMA-Internal Medicine Published online January 14, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.1589

[2] Linder, J, “Antibiotic Prescribing for Acute Respiratory Infections—Success That’s Way Off the Mark” JAMA-Internal Medicine Published online January 14, 2013. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.1984

Read More

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Caribbean medical schools: "second chance" or serving a real need?

“Second
chance med school”, by Anemona Harticollis in the New York Times July 31, 2014,
is the most recent treatment of the topic of for-profit Caribbean medical
schools that train American students who, in most cases, were unable to gain admission
to traditional US-based schools. This is not the first time Ms. Harticollis has
covered the story; they are also the subject of her article in the Times from December 22, 2010, “Medical
schools in region fight Caribbean flow”, which focused on the fear of US
schools that these Caribbean schools are willing to pay for the use of clinical
teaching spots in hospitals that these US-based schools have been using for
free. This most recent piece focuses on St. George’s University in Grenada, one
of the more established and better-regarded Caribbean schools. It was briefly
famous when protection of its students was one of the justifications for
President Ronald Reagan’s invasion of that country in 1983. The article also
mentions the other three schools that have been approved for US loans by the
Department of Education. However, beyond this, and despite Harticollis’
efforts, the discussion gets murky on two counts: which Caribbean schools are
under discussion, and what are the issues of concern.

 Harticollis notes
that

There are more than 70
medical schools across the Caribbean, about half of them catering to Americans.
A handful — including St. George’s, Saba University, Ross University in
Dominica and American University of the Caribbean in St. Maarten, all of which
are for-profit — have qualified for federal financial aid programs by
demonstrating that their standards are comparable to those in the United
States. And they report that high numbers of their test-takers — 95 percent or
more — pass the United States Medical Licensing Exam Step 1, a basic science
test.

But quality is all over
the map in the Caribbean. A 2008 study in the journal Academic Medicine looked
at 14 schools and found that the first-time pass rate on the exam ranged from
19 percent to 84 percent. Countries whose schools performed lowest were the
Cayman Islands, Haiti, Cuba, Aruba, Dominican Republic, Antigua and Barbuda
and, the lowest, St. Lucia, which hosted four medical schools at the time. High
performers were in Jamaica, Barbados, Dominica and, the highest, Grenada.

It is irrelevant to the discussion of American medical
students going to the Caribbean to look at the national medical schools in
Caribbean (or any other) countries; it is only relevant to look at those which
were created to educate Americans, and for the purpose of this discussion to
limit it to the four that have Department of Education approval. The next thing
is to understand that what is “good” or “bad” about any of these schools, or whether
they should exist altogether, depends on who is looking and what their interests
are. From the point of view of the individuals or companies that own these
schools, the motivation is profit, but having a high-quality product increases
their enrollment. From the point of view of students enrolling, the motivation is
a chance to become physicians and practice in the US. From the point of view of
those who are responsible for the academics of the schools themselves, it is to
support students, provide a good education, and help them to be successful.
From the point of view of many American medical schools, it may be to limit
competition, whether that is for clinical teaching spots in hospitals such as
those of the New York City public hospitals or for good students.

Most US allopathic medical schools, and their trade
association, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), disparage the
Caribbean medical schools in terms of quality of the students that they accept,
since the majority of those attending such schools have failed to gain
admission to AAMC member schools. However, since most of these AAMC schools
have recently or are in the process of expanding their own classes, they must
believe that there are well-qualified students who are not currently being
admitted, and many of these have ended up in Caribbean schools. When AAMC
campaigns to disparage the Caribbean schools, they tend to lump them all
together, rather than looking at individual schools or only the 4 listed above.
Unquestionably, students even at these four schools have, on average, lower grade-point
averages (GPAs) and Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) scores, and may, on
average, not do as well on the USMLE exams as those from US allopathic schools,
but there is great overlap. On the other hand, what is perhaps the most
concerning part of education at the Caribbean schools is their clinical
training – where they learn clinical medicine in the last two years of school.
Are the doctors teaching them and the institutions in which they practice of
high quality? Is there a well-defined curriculum? Is there standardization of
the curriculum so that they can be confident that students are learning what
they need to whether they are doing, say, a surgery clerkship in a NYC public
hospital or a community hospital in Michigan? However, when AAMC schools are
fighting with them about whether they should be able to have spots at the same
places US medical schools use – say, NYC public hospitals – this point is also
moot.

The most important perspective, of course, is not that of the students,
the owners or faculty of the Caribbean schools, or that of the US schools and
the AAMC. It is that of the American people and whether they will have access
to physicians who will provide excellent care for them. The measures that are
usually used for assessing the “quality” of applicants and students – MCAT and
GPA and USMLE Step 1 scores – are at best peripheral, since, as I have often
argued, they are scarcely relevant to being a good doctor. Does it matter that
a doctor didn’t focus when they were a freshman in college and so got C’s, and
so even after doing well for 3 years had a lower GPA than another? Should the chance
to become a doctor be a reward for having your nose to the academic grindstone
your whole life without surcease, or an opportunity for those with skill,
passion, and commitment? I have often argued that the way to judge a medical
school is by what its graduates do with their lives, and that the percent that
enter primary care and practice in underserved areas is a major criterion. It
is fine to have some of your graduates doing laboratory research or entering
narrow subspecialties, but a school should be judged on its overall output and
how well it provides for the needs of our nation.

There is some concern that because of recent agreements
between the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), which
accredits allopathic (MD) residencies and the American Osteopathic Association
(AOA), which accredits DO residencies, that osteopathic graduates will be more
welcome in allopathic residencies, tending to crowd out Caribbean graduates. I
would doubt that this will be an issue in the Midwest, where osteopathy is
strong and most residencies already tend to prefer DOs to Caribbean grads, but
it might have an impact in the East, where osteopathy is less present, and
where I hear that information pre-med students get from peers (and perhaps
sometimes pre-med advisors) is that Caribbean schools are preferable to
US-based osteopathic schools.

Like osteopathic schools, Caribbean medical schools,
including the 4 DOE-certified schools, place a much higher percentage of their
graduates into primary care than do US-based allopathic schools. Is this just a
result of the fact that primary care residencies are less competitive than many
other specialties, so easier for students from Caribbean schools to get into?
Unquestionably, this is part of the explanation, but there is also more
encouragement for primary care in these schools, which do not boast a huge
research enterprise or maintain tertiary-care hospitals. It also doesn’t change
the fact that graduates of these schools, like many international graduates who
were not US citizens, are serving the needs of our country because the US
schools are not stepping up to the plate. US medical schools are very selective
about taking students with high grades, and putting most of them into
oversupplied specialties.

The education at Caribbean schools varies, and it would be a
mistake to say that they are doing a better job than US allopathic schools.
However, US schools are doing a poor job of training the doctors America needs,
of ensuring that all people have equal access to quality health care, and the
students graduating from Caribbean schools are often filling the holes that
they leave.

Those who live in glass houses…

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Leukaemia risk from mitoxantrone: higher than previously reported

"All the discussion now days, when we
discuss DMTs in MS, is risk benefit. One of the more risky drugs that
is licensed in several countries for treating MS, is the chemotherapy
agent, mitoxantrone. This drug works by inhibiting an enzyme that unzips
DNA and causes mistakes when the DNA strands are spliced and stitched
back together. As a result of the mistakes, mitoxantrone causes a
specific kind of treatment-related leukaemia. This meta-analysis shows
that the risk is higher than previously reported and occurs in 1 in 137
MSers treated. I suspect the risk is actually lower than this due to
reporting bias; i.e. reports are more likely to pick up leukaemia cases.
Despite this, this figure is very high. This sort of leukaemia has a
mortality of ~50%. Hence would you be prepared to take the risk of
developing leukaemia and death associated with this treatment? Prior to
natalizumab and fingolimod arriving on the market we had little option
but to offer mitoxantrone to MSers with breakthrough disease that was
highly active. As a result of the new drugs we have virtually stopped
using this drug. We also had to stop our trial to get rid of NABs to
interferon-beta because it included a single dose of mitoixantrone. When
you mentioned to potential trial subjects the risk of leukaemia and
mentioned that it would potentially put them at high risk of developing
PML if they went onto natalizumab they said 'Thanks, but no thanks.'"

"Just as 'video killed the radio star'
new DMTs kill older therapies. We mustn't forget that the relentless
drive of innovation is changing the face of MS management. Don't expect
innovation to stop the MS development pipeline is deep and rich, which is why I am such an optimist."

Epub: Ellis et al. Therapy-related acute leukaemia with mitoxantrone: Four years on, what is the risk and can it be limited? Mult Scler. 2014 Jul .

Background: Therapy-related acute leukaemia (TRAL) is a significant concern, when considering treatment with mitoxantrone for MS. 

Methods: We re-evaluated the literature, identifying all case reports and series of > 50 patients reporting TRAL cases in MS. 

Results: TRAL was diagnosed in
0.73% of the 12,896 MSers identified. Median onset was 22 months
following treatment. We calculated a number needed to harm of 137.5
exposed MSers, significantly higher than our 2008 analysis. We found
that 82.8% of MSers were exposed to > 60 mg/m2 with a relative risk
of 1.85 (p = 0.018) compared to < 60mg/m2, strongly suggesting a
relationship to dose. 

Conclusion: MS treatment regimens which limit the mitoxantrone dose to < 60mg/m2 reduce the risk of TRAL.

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Vitamin D birth levels do not affect risk of MS

Multiple Sclerosis Research: Vitamin D birth levels do not affect risk of MS: Ueda P, Rafatnia F, Bäärnhielm M, Fröbom R, Korzunowicz G, Lönnerbro R, Hedström AK, Eyles D, Olsson T, Alfredsson L.  Neonatal vitamin D s...

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