Pandemics

see corona covid 19

global warming will amplify and accelerate

USAID DID EBOLA RESPONSE W/ CDC AND WHO

disaster capitalism

chaos disruption

SEE BIRD FLU

SEE GUBMINT VAXX RFK TRUMP FAIL ~ WHO

===

marburg and ebola now 1 25 bird flu US

freeze cdc nih, mid trial?! comms?! pepfar kill will boost disease resistant strain

~ WHO

===

MEASLES WHOOP COUGH RED STATES RFK 2 screw worm flesh eat paraside usda brooke rollins

--=

---

npr

In March 2025, Nicholas Enrich was the top U.S. official for global health when two major events were happening at the same time: The Trump administration was dismantling USAID, and an Ebola outbreak was spreading in Uganda.

It was Enrich's job to manage the U.S. response. He says he was stymied at every turn.

"I was told by one of the political appointees, who was the head of the Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance, that Ebola is a scam," Enrich says.

A year later, as the worst Ebola outbreak in more than a decade spreads in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Enrich has published a timely book with a title drawn from Elon Musk's plans for the premier U.S. foreign aid agency: Into the Woodchipper: A Whistleblower's Account of How the Trump Administration Shredded USAID.*

Simon & Schuster

It's written from the perspective of a civil servant who served at the premier U.S. foreign aid agency under four administrations –- until he was put on leave and then dismissed after leaking memos about plans to dismantle the agency.

In an interview with NPR , Enrich talked about his view of the agency and his perspective on the current Ebola outbreak in a world where USAID no longer exists.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Let's start with a controversial question. The administration gave various rationales to justify the sunsetting of USAID –- accusations of political bias, waste, fraud and abuse. Did you agree with any of their points?

Okay, I'm gonna say yes, but before I talk about them, it's important to recognize that the agency was not destroyed because it was wasteful or because it didn't work or because they wanted to realign aid with the American First priorities. It was destroyed by a bunch of people who did not understand what the agency did, who were completely uninformed and unqualified about our programs, and who were there tearing down the agency that they didn't get for the sole purpose of soothing the ego of a billionaire.

That's a very stark explanation.

One of the reasons I wrote this book was to make sure that it's very, very clear why the agency was destroyed and why it wasn't. That said, I think that there are ways that aid could have been more efficient and could have been less likely to foster dependency in ways that it had.

But you know, I also want to make the point that USAID actually was considered one of the most efficient agencies within the government [operating] on less than 1% of the federal budget. We, among many other things, saved the lives of 92 million people over the last 20 years alone, which is a staggering impact for a relatively shoestring budget. So it's not that we weren't efficient, it's just that, of course, there were ways that we could have become more so.

You were put on leave immediately after leaking the memos. Looking back, is there anything you would have done differently in your final months there?

I do feel like I was quite naive. I was a civil servant for my whole career, and I was no activist or advocate. So it did not come naturally to me to stop and say: "Wait a minute. This is not an opportunity for me to figure out how to administer the policies of this administration. This is completely off the rails and is a violation of laws, of court orders, of congressional intent and it is unethical and causing destruction and harm to public safety." And I wish that I had been able to say earlier, "This is not okay and I cannot continue to work within the bounds of these walls that are collapsing around me to try to save this tiny bit of our program."

I wish I had said I need to not agree to some of the directives, because I did [agree]. I did implement directives from our political leadership that I'm not proud of, like making lists of our staff, knowing that some of those people would be terminated, or taking life-saving activities off the list of what I was asking to be approved.

For example…?

I was told by the political appointees, for example, that they wouldn't be approving any of the Ebola activities, because Ebola was a scam, and so I made a decision that I regret to this day of removing Ebola activities from those that I was hoping to get approved.

You were involved in Ebola efforts even before the Uganda outbreak last year. What was the agency's position on the virus?

I was thrust into the top official of global health role for the agency and my job was to set up a robust U.S. government response to the Ebola outbreak, and I was just stopped at every single turn. It started with the refusal to even allow us to screen passengers at international airports for symptoms of Ebola before they got onto flights that were headed to Europe and potentially onward to the United States.

And we were never able to even get a team into the country. They had banned us from communicating with our sister agencies like the CDC, which made it extremely difficult to manage an Ebola outbreak in the ways that we were used to. For example, in preparation for an outbreak like this one [we] had pre-positioned personal protective equipment in nearby Kenya so that it could be delivered to the outbreak zone within a matter of hours. But we were never able to move that, because the warehouse was owned by the World Health Organization, and our political leadership wouldn't even let us talk to the World Health Organization.

What's going through your mind as you see the news of the current Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo?

This is the first Ebola outbreak since USAID has been destroyed. I think about the systems and the expertise and the experience that USAID had in leading and coordinating responses to Ebola outbreaks — the way that we would immediately get our DART [Disaster Assistance Response Team] teams into place to move PPE [personal protective equipment], to coordinate partners in the country, to do contact tracing on a massive scale and community education and safe burial procedures. This is what we need in an outbreak — response with speed — and what instead we have without that expertise and systems from USAID is a State Department that, in the best of light, is rapidly trying to respond but is reinventing the wheel and trying to improvise systems that used to exist.

You were at USAID during the 2014 outbreak of Ebola as well. Were there lessons learned during that response that could have been implemented now with this outbreak if the agency were still around?

Because of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, we completely changed the way that we do infectious disease preparedness and have an entirely new global health security strategy. We invested billions of dollars in that time period to set up what my former boss [Atul Gawande] used to call the global immune system, which allowed for early detection and early response efforts. So we could make sure that our surveillance is in place and our testing is working and our community health workers know what to be looking for –- so we are detecting outbreaks at such an early stage that there's no time for them to spread.

And what has happened to that system?

That entire system was ripped apart in 2025. What we're seeing with Ebola in DRC {Democratic Republic of Congo] and Uganda and the recent hantavirus outbreak, these are a couple of examples within just a few weeks of how far American leadership has fallen in detection and response to infectious disease outbreaks.

It does make me nervous that if there is a pathogen that is more likely to be the next pandemic that we're just way, way underprepared as compared to how we were just a few months ago.

How do you think we should be talking about USAID at this moment?

I think of it as an era that I'm very proud of in American history and extremely proud of myself for getting just the opportunity to be a part of when the official policy of the United States government was to make the world a safer and healthier place. I'm sad that it's gone. I do remain optimistic, however, that we will need to have a new and independent agency that does international development and foreign aid — in the same way that no one would be satisfied folding the State Department into the Department of Defense because they do completely different pillars of foreign policy, so too does international development need a separate and unique kind of organizational structure to provide the third leg of the foreign policy stool.

---

an 6 25

If you think viruses are fake, chemtrails are real and public health is a conspiracy, you’re probably up in arms about four hundred potentially diseased Canadian ostriches.

Federal inspectors are poised to euthanize the flock to contain a novel strain of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) that killed 69 ostriches on a remote farm in Edgewood, British Columbia.

After losing their court case to save the flock, the owners of Universal Ostrich Farms invited the dregs of the antigovernment antivax trucker convoy that paralyzed Ottawa to surround the premises to stop the cull.

The fate of the ostriches has become a cause célèbre in rightwing media. We didn’t hear a peep out of maga when Trump declared open season on migratory birds, but every self-respecting antivaxer is an ostrich fancier now. In keeping with their philosophy of governance by trolling, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr and his wingman Dr. Mehmet Oz are stirring the pot.

Oz offered to adopt the enormous flightless birds and bring them to live on his 900-acre Florida estate because, apparently, we don’t have enough bird flu at home. “The Canadians should stop putting their heads in the sand,” he said, indulging in a little light colonialism. “We just have to get [the ostriches] out of Canada.”

IFrame Content

After initially rejecting the offer, a spokesperson said the farmers would consider it as a last resort. Oz’s grandiose gesture coincided with HHS’s abrupt cancellation of a $766 million contract with Moderna to finish testing a promising mRNA bird flu vaccine.

“I think this is an incredibly stupid idea,” said Dr. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan. Oz is pitching the move as an opportunity to study the effects of bird flu in ostriches, but Rasmussen sees zero scientific value in his plan because “[t]here are no controls, no baseline immunological data, no testing, and no clear experimental objective.”

The birds wouldn’t pose an imminent threat to the health of Americans, Rasmussen says, but they would pose a risk to Oz’s employees and the birds could also spread the virus to wild birds and animals in Florida.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza can be lethal to people. Currently, the virus does not spread readily between humans, but if it mutated, experts say, it could cause a pandemic several times deadlier than covid.

The farm’s owners insist that their birds are healthy, but they actually have no way of knowing. Ostriches can be asymptomatic carriers of the virus, Rasmussen warns. The birds could be passing the bug around like the world’s tallest kindergarten class.

The longer the virus circulates, the more opportunities it has to mutate into something more dangerous. Experts fear that someday, somewhere in some innocent-looking duck or chicken or ostrich, the virus will mutate into a human-to-human transmissible variant. It’s a numbers game. That’s one reason why the Canadian authorities stamp out HPAI wherever they find it. Nobody wants to be responsible for Ostrich Zero. Another reason is that Canada is bound by trade agreements to stamp out HPAI and British Columbia poultry farmers are locked out of key export markets until the flock is culled. Finally, stamp-out is the law in Canada and the courts have found no basis to overrule CFIA.

Showing no awareness that Canada is a sovereign nation with laws, treaty obligations, and a justice system, Kennedy tried to browbeat the head of the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) into sparing the birds. Because “my fans love ostriches and hate the government” isn’t a persuasive argument, Kennedy insinuated that Universal Ostrich is actually an elite biomedical research outfit probing the mysteries of bird flu. The birds should be spared, he argued, because the flock is in a controlled environment where it can be studied.

However, court records paint a picture of a decidedly uncontrolled environment on an ordinary farm with lax biosecurity. The owners have produced no evidence to CFIA that any research is taking place on the premises and in the agency’s opinion, “the current physical facilities at their location are not suitable for controlled research activities or trials.” The farm has also been fined $20,000 by CFIA for failing to report the outbreak and failing to follow quarantine procedures. This lackadaisical attitude is particularly alarming because the farm is on the great Pacific Flyway, a river of migratory birds that runs from Patagonia to Alaska and is a major conduit for novel strains of bird flu. The ostriches live in giant outdoor pens that bring them into direct contact with wild birds.

To add insult to injury, the owners have invited strangers from all across the country to commune with the birds, creating even more opportunities to spread the virus. Rasmussen notes that “the avian freedom fighters of the True North are not abiding by quarantine protocols and are in the pens with the ostriches.”

Luckily, the Canadians don’t take our overexcitable Secretary of Health and Human Services any more seriously than we do. Asked about Kennedy’s pressure campaign, Canadian Minister of Agriculture Heath MacDonald said he didn’t think it was appropriate for Canadians to make major decisions based on social media. CFIA says it is still planning to euthanize the birds.

A normal HHS secretary might have qualms about egging on antigovernment protesters on friendly foreign soil, but not Kennedy. Dozens of protesters have been gathered at the farm for weeks and additional reinforcements rolled in recently. The atmosphere is festive with merch, live music and plenty of drumming for the ostriches.

However, if protesters tried to resist federal agents, the situation could devolve into another standoff like we saw at the Bundy ranch, the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and the siege of Ottawa. In the winter of 2022, a convoy of antivax truckers laid siege to Canada’s capital city for three weeks. As a private citizen, Kennedy supported the convoy financially and assailed the Canadian government as “a monster” for freezing the occupiers’ bank accounts.

The Universal Ostrich conflict is unique because instead of protesting the containment of an existing pandemic, these extremists might be causing the next one. By offering to import the birds and killing the most promising bird flu vaccine, Kennedy and Oz are only too eager to help.

---

===

an 1 25 badash

**Dr. Jerome Adams, the Surgeon General during President Donald Trump’s first administration, is sounding the alarm on his former boss’s actions and disease outbreaks in the U.S. and around the world.

Adams, now a Purdue University professor and the Executive Director of the Center for Community Health Enhancement and Learning, pointed to news reports on the rapidly spreading bird flu, which has killed at least one person in the U.S., a tuberculosis outbreak in Kansas, and an Ebola outbreak in Uganda.

“Bird flu spreading like crazy in US, and now in UK,” he wrote on Friday. “Largest tuberculosis outbreak in decades… IN KANSAS! Ebola in Uganda.”

He then blasted President Donald Trump’s decision to temporarily suspend all external communications from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including warnings and advisories—a block that has no stated end date—and immediately sever all ties with the World Health Organization.

“Regardless of how you feel about ‘public health,’ or ‘Fauci,’ it’s a real bad time to have blocked public communications from CDC, and work with WHO…” he added.

Back in November, after Trump made highly controversial nominations for U.S. public health roles, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to head the Department of Health and Human Services, Dr. Adams issued a warning.

“Republicans must understand,” he said, that “they’re gonna own any and all preventable outbreaks / harm moving forward.”

According to Scientific American, “Bird flu continues to spread among commercial and backyard poultry. As of January 23, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that there were 98 infected flocks within the past 30 days, with more than 15 million birds affected. Avian influenza is so contagious and deadly in poultry that the entire flock is culled as soon as the presence of the virus is confirmed. Since the bird flu outbreak began in February 2022, more than 140 million birds have been infected or proactively culled.”

A USDA map shows bird flu has been detected in mammals in nearly every state in the country. The University of Minnesota reports bird flu outbreaks “in poultry in 11 states,” and in “cows in California.”

“In events that could worsen egg shortages, more [egg] layer farm outbreaks were reported in Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, and Washington state, totaling at least 1.5 million birds. The virus also struck turkey farms in Minnesota and Ohio, as well as broiler farms in Arkansas and Missouri,” the University’s Center for Infectious Disease Research & Policy also reported. “The virus also turned up in backyard flocks in Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Vermont, and California.”

The Kansas tuberculosis outbreak, according to the CDC, is one of the largest in U.S. history, the Associated Press reported.

Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and an instructor at Harvard Medical School, on his Substack declared Friday as “day 11 of President Trump’s full-throttle attack on the US public health.” He added that this is the “second week of government censorship” for the CDC’s medical journals.

“Included in the censored studies are manuscripts that ‘reveal whether veterinarians who treat cattle have been unknowingly infected by the bird flu virus. Another report documents cases in which people carrying the virus might have infected their pet cats.’ These have the potential to be highly important reports,” Dr. Faust wrote. “Keeping them from the public eye is unethical, to say nothing of the nauseating policy that the Trump Administration has pursued: a gag order on public health publications ‘until it has been reviewed and approved by a presidential appointee.’ I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence from the United States of America.”

He added: “Last week President Trump not only announced that the US would withdraw from the WHO, but also directed an immediate stop-work order, and a halt to all foreign aid and related communications. This means that CDC and other US officials cannot help Uganda respond to an Ebola outbreak that was reported today. The WHO has committed $1 million in aid already.”

---

an 12 24

Highly pathogenic avian influenza detected in Michigan

---

Rare ‘flesh-eating’ bacterium spreads north as oceans warm - Alternet.org

---

Coronavirus Pandemic Linked to Destruction of Wildlife and World's Ecosystems

https://www.ecowatch.com/coronavirus-wildlife--ecosystem-destruction-2645713976.html

from DW

Charli Shield

After the novel coronavirus broke out in Wuhan, China in late December 2019, it didn't take long for conspiracy theorists to claim it was manufactured in a nearby lab.

Scientific consensus, on the other hand, is that the virus — SARS-CoV-2 — is a zoonotic disease that jumped from animal to human. It most likely originated in a bat, possibly before passing through another mammal.

While the virus was certainly not engineered in a laboratory, this doesn't mean we haven't played a role in the current pandemic. Human impingement on natural habitats, biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation are making virus spillover events much more likely, a major new study from scientists in Australia and the US has found.

The number of emerging infectious disease outbreaks has more than tripled every decade since the 1980s. More than two thirds of these diseases originate in animals, and about 70% of those come from wild animals. Many of the infectious diseases we're familiar with — Ebola, HIV, swine and avian flu — are zoonotic.

Aided by a hyper-connected global population, SARS-CoV-2 and the disease it causes, COVID-19, has also demonstrated how quickly modern outbreaks can become pandemics.

While the speed at which COVID-19 has spread across the world has shocked many, scientists have long been warning of such a pandemic.

By disrupting ecosystems, we have created the conditions that allow animal viruses to cross over into human populations, says Joachim Spangenberg, ecologist and vice-president of the Sustainable Europe Research Institute.

"We are creating this situation, not the animals," Spangenberg told DW.

Deforestation, habitat encroachment

As people move further into the territories of wild animals to clear forests, raise livestock, hunt and extract resources, we are increasingly exposed to the pathogens that normally never leave these places and the bodies they inhabit.

"We're getting closer and closer to wild animals," says Yan Xiang, professor of virology at the University of Texas Health Science Center, "and that brings us into contact with these viruses."

"As you increase human population density and increase encroachment onto natural habitats, not just by people but by our domesticated animals, you're increasing the rolls on the die," David Hayman, professor of infectious disease ecology at Massey University in New Zealand, told DW.

But, as well as increasing the likelihood of transfer, ecosystem disruption also has an impact on how many viruses exist in the wild and how they behave.

In the last century,tropical forests, home to around two thirds of the world's living organisms, have been halved. This profound loss of habitat has ripple effects throughout the entire ecosystem, including on the "parts we tend to forget — infections," says Hayman.

In some cases, scientists have observed that when animals at the top of the food chain disappear, the animals at the bottom of the food chain, like rats and mice that carry more pathogens, tend to fill that space.

"It's not just about how many species we have in an ecosystem," says Alice Latinne at the Wildlife Conservation Society, "it's about which species."

"Each species plays a different role in the ecosystem and sometimes, if you just replace one species with another, this can have a huge impact in terms of disease risk. And sometimes we can't predict it," she told DW.

Habitat changes can also force animals — and their pathogens — to go elsewhere, including areas populated by people.

Latinne draws on the example of the emergence of Nipah virus in Malaysia in the late 1990s, where deforestation drove fruit bats from their forest habitat to mango trees on pig farms. Bats often carry pathogens that don't bother them, but in this case when the pigs came into contact with bat droppings and saliva, they became infected. The pigs then went on to infect farmers.

Evidence linking disruption of ecosystems to increased risk of novel infection transfer is why, Spangenberg says, experts talk about the importance of the "One Health" concept; the idea that the health of animals, the ecosystem and humans are all interlinked, and when one is out of balance, others follow suit.

Wildlife trade

So-called "wet markets" selling produce, meat and live animals provide another incubator for the emergence of infectious disease. Scientists believe there's a strong possibility SARS-CoV-2 emerged at a wet market in Wuhan, China.

Cramming stressed, sick animals into cages together is, in many ways, the "perfect setting" to incubate new pathogens, Spangenberg says, and "an excellent way to transfer diseases from one species to another." For that reason, many scientists, including Spangenberg, say the world needs, at the very least, to introduce strict regulations for live animal markets.

That's the message from Elizabeth Maruma Mrema, the United Nations' biodiversity chief, who has called for a global ban on wildlife markets.

But as Mrema also pointed out, millions of people — particularly in low-income communities — rely on the food and income sources these markets provide.

That's part of what makes solutions to preventing disease outbreak complex, according to Hayman. Animal exploitation is one part of it, he says. But "poverty, access to jobs, how people are treated in remote areas, the way people engage with food" also contribute to conditions that lead to spillovers.

Even just on an economic level, Latinne believes, "we will be forced to change — because the cost of disease emergence and spillover from wildlife will be much higher than the economic benefit of our exploitation of the environment."

"We are part of nature — we're part of the ecosystem where our health is linked to the health of wildlife, the health of livestock and the health of the environment," Latinne says. "We have to find a better way to live together safely."

Reposted with permission from Deutsche Welle.environment coronavirus biodiversity health china wildlife deforestation

china and africa

---

...

The current outbreak is just the latest example of viruses jumping from animals to humans. HIV is perhaps the most infamous example: It originated from chimps in central Africa and still kills hundreds of thousands of people annually. It likely jumped to humans through consumption of bushmeat, or meat from wildlife, which is also the likely origin of several Ebola oubreaks. PREDICT, a U.S.-funded nonprofit, suggests there are thousands of viral species circulating in birds and mammals that pose a direct risk to humans.

Decimating wildlife and humans

Trade in wildlife has decimated populations and species for millennia and is one of the five key drivers of wildlife declines. People hunt and deal in animals and animal parts for food, medicine and other uses. This commerce has an estimated value of US$18 billion annually just in China, which is believed to be the largest market globally for such products.

My own work focuses on African and Asian elephants, which are severely threatened by the wildlife trade. Demand for elephant ivory has caused the deaths of more than 100,000 elephants in the last 15 years.

Conservationists have been working for years to end the wildlife trade or enforce strict regulations to ensure that it is conducted in ways that do not threaten species’ survival. Initially, the focus was on stemming the decline of threatened species. But today it is evident that this trade also harms humans.

For example, conservation organizations estimate that more than 100 rangers are killed protecting wildlife every year, often by poachers and armed militias targeting high-value species such as rhinos and elephants. Violence associated with the wildlife trade affects local communities, which typically are poor and rural.

The wildlife trade’s disease implications have received less popular attention over the past decade. This may be because bushmeat trade and consumption targets less-charismatic species, provides a key protein source in some communities and is a driver of economic activity in some remote rural areas.

---

https://www.alternet.org/2020/03/bill-gates-warned-about-a-pandemic-years-ago-now-he-says-we-did-not-act-fast-enough/

https://www.mediamatters.org/coronavirus-covid-19/trump-repeats-lie-sean-hannity-about-obama-and-h1n1-flu

---

Former deputy national security adviser: Obama left a solid ‘global health infrastructure’ — and Trump shut it down

Alex Henderson

According to former Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes, the Obama Administration left Trump with a solid “global health infrastructure” when the former president left office in January 2017.

---

white House overruled CDC on recommendation that seniors avoid flying

Could it be any clearer that the Trump administration is…

===

320

:{:{}:

https://theintercept.com/2020/02/29/cronyism-and-conflicts-of-interest-in-trumps-coronavirus-task-force/

alex AZAR, the secretary of health and human services, admitted Wednesday that a vaccine for a new coronavirus might not be affordable for all Americans. “We can’t control that price,” Azar told Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., during a congressional hearing about the novel strain, which has been spreading throughout the world and is widely expected to become a serious public health issue in the United States.

After a wave of criticism from Democrats, Azar walked the comment back the next day, saying that he would ensure public access to a vaccine for Covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, if one should be developed.But Azar, who served as the top lobbyist for Eli Lillybefore becoming president of the drug company’s U.S. operations in 2012 and the secretary of health and human Services in 2018, knows of what he unthinkingly speaks. Exorbitant drug pricing often leaves life-saving treatment out of reach for the poorest Americans. And to the extent that Azar and the other businessmen who make up the majority of the president’s coronavirus task force have any experience with pharmaceuticals, one of the most profitable sectors of the economy, it’s been making money off the system that keeps them out of reach.

In the case of Azar, who earned nearly $2 million during his last year at Lilly, that profit came at the expense of the people who needed the drugs, according to a lawsuit filed in 2017. While Azar was leading the pharmaceutical giant, the cost of its drugs went up significantly. In particular, insulin sold by the company more than doubled in price. According to the suit, which also names Novo Nordisk and Sanofi, Eli Lilly engaged in a scheme to artificially inflate the price of its drug, leaving some diabetic people unable to pay the cost and forced to use expired insulin or none at all. Eli Lilly did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company has told other publications that the suit has no merit and that it follows the “highest ethical standards.”

For another task force member, the profits could come from the coronavirus itself. Joseph Grogan was a lobbyist for the pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciencesbefore he joined the Trump administration as director of the Domestic Policy Council and led the Drug Pricing and Innovation Work Group. On Wednesday, after Gilead announced that it would be starting two clinical trials of an antiviral drug that could be used to treat Covid-19, the company’s stock price surged.

As a former lobbyist for a company that stands to gain big from a possible treatment for the respiratory disease, Grogan’s participation on the task force poses a host of ethical problems, according to Robert Klitzman, professor of psychiatry and director of the bioethics master’s program at Columbia University. “Does he have a conflict of interest? Yes!” said Klitzman, who points out that the government is likely to spend money on both the research and purchase of treatments for the virus. “Gilead could help shape a government request for proposals so that they could have an unfair advantage.”

While Grogan appears to have sold his Gilead stock and, according to the Office of Management and Budget, has severed all financial relationships and taken “the Trump pledge,” the situation is still problematic, according to Klitzman. “When he gets out of office, they could give him a gift for doing a good job or just hire him again. And what about his buddies? I’m sure he is still close to people who work for Gilead who will benefit. These are all major ethical concerns.”

Although Grogan and his friends may have a lot to gain from his participation on the task force, it is not clear what expertise he and most of the others serving on the group bring to it. Of the task force’s 16 members — 17, if you include Vice President Mike Pence, who is heading the effort — only four have any training in science or medicine. The others mostly hail from the business world, including Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, an investment banker who was sued for asset stripping; Ken Cuccinelli, a lawyer and self-described “opponent of homosexuality” now serving as acting deputy secretary of homeland security; and Christopher Liddell, a former executive at Microsoft and General Motors, who worked with Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner on the modernization of federal IT systems before directing the country’s response to what may be the biggest public health crisis in over a century.

Pence also named Larry Kudlow to the task force on Thursday. Kudlow, a top economic adviser to Trump who used to work for Bear Stearns, went on Fox Business to reassure the American public that reports of increasing coronavirus infections around the world don’t necessarily mean “that this thing is going to skyrocket in North America.” Kudlow then encouraged everyone to keep investing, saying, “Stocks look pretty cheap to me.”

Trump has fired many of the people who actually know how to coordinate government responses to epidemics. As Laurie Garrett reported in January, the president shut down the National Security Council’s global health security unit and cut $15 billion in national health spending, including funding for the management of infectious global diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Department of Homeland Security, and HHS. At the CDC, the funding cuts to the global health section were so severe, Garrett wrote, that “the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10.”

While four doctors are on the task force, it’s not clear how much they will be allowed to direct the response to the virus. The White House reportedly told Anthony Fauci, an immunologist who directs the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease and has extensive experience combating infectious diseases, not to speak publicly without clearance after he said at a meeting that the virus “has adapted extremely well to human species.”

On Thursday, Deborah Birx, a physician who has served as the U.S. Global AIDS Coordinator since 2014, was named as the White House coronavirus response coordinator, and Surgeon General Jerome Adams was added to the task force. Their appointments came after Sen. Bernie Sanders slammed Trump for putting “political cronies, not scientists” in charge of the government response to the virus.

===

Why so many epidemics originate in Asia and Africa – and why we can expect more

Suresh V Kuchipudi, Pennsylvania State University

COVID-19 is not the first – nor likely the last – to emerge from the two continents.

Laurie Garret hot zone pandemic kpfa

https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-1360

---

https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/zombie-flu-how-the-1919-influenza-pandemic-fueled-the-rise-of-the-living-dead/

How factory farms could trigger a antibiotic crisis — and what we can do to stop it

Christy Spees / Independent Media Institute

New Tick Species Spreads in U.S. for First Time in 50 Years

---

https://www.alternet.org/environment/5-scary-diseases-climate-change-may-awaken-melting-permafrost

If you are lacking in thoughts to keep you up at night, may I submit for your consideration the melting of the Arctic permafrost. The frozen subterranean soil in the Earth's polar regions accounts for about 25 percent of the Northern Hemisphere. Climate change, that great consequence of human arrogance, industry and tendency toward destruction, is causing that ice to melt at rates previously unseen. Studies show the Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world, and a 2017 report from the Arctic Council suggests 20 percent of the uppermost layers of permafrost may melt by 2040. As the ice begins to thaw, each eroding layer will expose new layers, along with microbes that have been frozen away for thousands of years. That vast collection of bacteria, viruses and other pathogens may impact—or infect—our lives in ways that are best not to consider just before bed.

Here are five scary diseases climate change may expose to humanity....

http://www.ecowatch.com/superbug-pig-farms-2131983846.html

Rare and Deadly Superbug Mysteriously Appears on U.S. Pig Farms

---

cdc conf ~

THE SENATE VOTED to confirm Donald Trump’s pick for administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency today over the objections of Democratic senators, hundreds of former EPA officials, and hundreds of current EPA employees. Although an Oklahoma judge had ruled on Thursday that Pruitt’s office had to release more than 2,500 emails he had exchanged with energy and gas companies and industry groups, Republicans crammed through his confirmation in a 52-46 vote (with Democrats Joe Manchin and Heidi Heitkamp voting with the Republican majority) before anyone had a chance to review the emails exchanged with the companies he’s now in charge of regulating.

Meanwhile, on Thursday, while Republicans in Washington were holding the first of two votes to confirm an EPA chief who will roll back regulations on the oil and gas companies responsible for most global warming, hundreds of climate scientists gathered in Atlanta to talk about the way climate change is already sickening and killing people around the country and the world.

The Climate and Health Meeting, which was organized in January after the CDC cancelled a similar conference, was far from being a litany of the gloom and doom predictions and statistics that you might expect from the scientists studying increases in temperature, rising sea levels, and extreme weather. Those things were present, of course, summed up perhaps most frighteningly by former Vice President Al Gore, the meeting’s host, who noted that humans emit 110 million tons of global warming pollution into the atmosphere every 24 hours — and that the heat energy trapped by this daily dump is the equivalent of “exploding 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs.” Or the graph that showed how the continued release of these greenhouse gases could lead to a 12-degree temperature rise by 2300, a change that would render large swaths of the earth uninhabitable.

Instead, the focus was on the extremes that have already happened— and, more importantly, their human consequences. Gore pointed out the parts of the world that are already on the outer limits of human habitability, a spot in Iran where the heat index hit 165 for the first time in 2015, for instance, or a town in India, where the temperature hit a record 123.8 degrees last year. He showed people in Pakistan digging mass graves in advance of killer heat waves because they now know what to expect and traced how warmer temperatures contributed to the spread of the virus that causesdengue fever in India, where there are now 37 million infections each year.

While poor countries are being hit the hardest, the U.S. is already seeing its fair share of human casualties. Air pollution, which is worsened by heat — and produced by the same fossil fuel combustion that warms the climate — already kills 200,000 Americans each year and costs the country almost 4 percent of GDP in 2010. Two-thirds of water-borne disease outbreaks in the U.S. are set off by extreme weather events. We saw pictures of refrigerator trucks for bodies that couldn’t fit into the morgue after a Chicago heat wave, elderly people felled by heat stress in the American Southwest, and children forced to carry around backpacks of emergency asthma supplies for their heat-exacerbated asthma.

In what was may have been the saddest presentation in a day of sad presentations, psychiatrist Lise Van Susteren described the mental health consequences of climate change on children, telling of kids suffering from clinical anxiety about the climate and the particular difficulty of reckoning with human-caused crises. “What happens from intentional negligence is harder to put behind us,” she explained. Van Susteren predicted that children, as they grow older, will experience their parents’ “destructive inaction on climate” as child abuse.

If the unsparing presentations about the mounting human toll of climate change begged for “bowls of Prozac and certificates for free vasectomies,” as one scientist joked, they also reflected the recognition that past efforts to convey the urgency of climate change to voters had failed — and were partly responsible for the fact that the climate experts were presenting their calamitous news essentially in exile.

With its focus on climate reality, the meeting paid less attention to the political reality that is the biggest obstacle to addressing it. Most presenters made just the barest nods to our anti-science president who derides climate change as a hoax. Ashish Jha, director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, noted dryly that walls won’t keep out the malnutrition, diseases, and death that await us if we don’t reduce our burning fossil fuels.

Former President Jimmy Carter, who made the Carter Center available for the conference, was also restrained, referring only obliquely to “this last election.” At the same time that the victor of that last election was signing a bill that will reverse protections on waterways from coal mining ash, Carter, who has devoted his life to humanitarian causes, was talking about the impact of climate change on “the lives of the poorest people on earth.” Carter acknowledged his relative freedom to speak his mind on the subject, noting, “I have secret service protection the rest of my life.”

The few representatives of the CDC who attended the meeting were more constrained. Only about 12 staff members from the federal agency originally slated to host the conference were in attendance, according to CDC Spokesperson Bernadette Burden. And many of them were using personal or vacation time to be there, exercising “their right to attend as private citizens,” as Burden put it.

George Luber, a CDC epidemiologist who attended the meeting in an official capacity, gave a clear presentation showing the agency’s efforts to prepare cities and states for the health changes brought by climate change. The program helps project local disease burdens, draft response plans, and develop “the best science so we can make the best decisions,” Luber said.

What was less obvious was whether that government work will continue under the new administration. “No one knows what will happen,” said Julia Gold, who manages the Rhode Island’s climate change program, which is funded by a grant from the CDC.

Patrick Breysse, director of the CDC’s National Center for Environmental Health, of which the Climate and Health program is part, told me he’s confident the agency’s health-focused work will continue. While there may be disagreement over the root causes of climate change, Breysse said, “The good news is that people generally agree that there are increasing temperatures, more wildfires.” He even expressed hope that the agency would reschedule its climate meeting, but was unable to say when that might happen.

As government scientists find themselves less able to communicate about the environmental disaster to which they’ve devoted their professional lives, those free to speak are trying to figure out how to rectify the communications failures that have cast them politically powerless. Climate change used to be understood mostly as a problem of the planet and the endangered species on it. But this meeting made it clear that the emphasis will no longer be on shrinking habitats or abstract graphs with lines pointing off into the distant future. However poignant, the plight of the polar bear is out.

In its place, we’ll be seeing images of kids like Will, a 7-year-old in Texas, who is now forced to wear a cooling vest because of a medical condition that makes him particularly susceptible to heat and to stay inside on the increasing number of very hot days in his hometown in Texas.

The best strategy, according to Ed Maibach of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University, is to keep the message simple — that climate change is real and — if we cut back on fossil-fuel use — reversible.

Maibach, who has divided the American public into six categories according to their beliefs about climate change, presented perhaps the most encouraging message of the event: that much of the country is open to learning about climate change. The good news, according to Maibach, is that only 9 percent of the country are “dismissers,” the most ideologically extreme end of the spectrum who are dead-set against recognizing the reality of climate change. The bad news is that that many of them are now leading our government.

mosquito: west nile, dengue fever, zika

http://www.climatecentral.org/news/zika-virus-climate-change-19970

---

rfk2

John Graham's central role is undermining environmental protection through ‘research' papers based on cost-benefit analysis. John Graham has blocked every rule change that protects the environment including two dozen proposed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Rules John Graham has fought to have rescinded include reduced arsenic levels in drinking water, reduced pollution from coal burning plants and regulation of fecal waste from industrial factory farms.

{Cost-benefit analysis = only 50 humans out of a thousand will die prematurely from cancer over the next five years and the cost to save the 200,000 thousand or so people that will die prematurely would require entire industry upgrades costing 200 billion dollars or a million per individual saved from premature death and is therefore not economically feasible. Since American aristocracy can and does chose to live far from toxic polluters their chance of dying from cancer due to toxins approaches zero. Must be nice!}:

"Factory farmed animals such as cattle, pigs and chickens, live in unnatural and cruel conditions, which do not allow them to live the way nature intended. Factory farmers treat them as commodities rather than living, breathing, sentient beings that feel pain and suffer, just as we do. It's time to make changes, not just because of the harm to our health and environment but because having respect for all beings will help create a more humane world." - Valerie Belt

Wise Use ideology has engineered the passage of laws in Missouri and Iowa making it a crime to photograph industrial factory farm animals!

{The 2009 swine flu pandemic started at a Smithfield Foods - the world's largest pork packer and hog producer - massive hog-raising operation in Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz. A Smithfield subsidiary, Granjas Carrol, raises 950,000 hogs per year. Residents of Perote believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area which polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies and in turn led to the disease outbreak.

A municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the industrial pig farms. According to residents the organic and fecal waste produced by Granjas Carrol isn't adequately treated. Swarms of flies hovering around waste lagoons transfer respiratory ailments.

Mexican health agency Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social has acknowledged that the original carrier for the flu could be the "clouds of flies" that multiply in the Smithfield subsidiary's manure lagoons.

The increased use of antibiotics in animal production has gone hand-in-hand with the development of factory farms - industrial-style livestock operations. Thousands of animals are crammed into the unhygienic, crowded quarters of a typical industrial-style livestock operation, and antibiotics are dispensed constantly through the animals' feed.

Twenty-five million pounds of antibiotics are fed to livestock in the United States annually - eight times more than the amount used as human medicine. Six of the 17 classes of antibiotics used to promote growth in animals are also used to treat diseases in humans. A Harvard University study showed that antibiotic-resistant genes found in bacteria infecting humans were identical to some of the same bacteria infecting animals.

The Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production recommended: "Ban the non-therapeutic use of antimicrobials in food animal production to reduce the risk of antimicrobial resistance to medically important antibiotics and other microbials."

In 1998 in the nation's largest pig farm, a North Carolina factory farm, an aggressive H3N2 virus of a never-before-described triple hybrid of three viruses - a human virus, a pig virus and a bird virus - was discovered.

"Recently evolving intensive farming practice of raising pigs and poultry in adjacent sheds is unsound. Within the swine population, we now have a mammalian-adapted virus that is extremely promiscuous." - Dr. Robert Webster, world's leading flu virus evolution expert

"If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association - the oldest and largest in world - called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realize the real cost of factory farming." - Dr. Michael Greger

Industrial farming has also been labeled as CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).

"Adrian Gibbs, 75, who collaborated on research that led to the development of Roche Holding AG's Tamiflu drug, said in an interview that he intends to publish a report suggesting the new strain may have accidentally evolved in eggs scientists use to grow viruses and drugmakers use to make vaccines. Gibbs said he came to his conclusion as part of an effort to trace the virus's origins by analyzing its genetic blueprint." - Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett}:

Thirteen states have laws making it illegal to criticize produce!

The outbreak of a new flu strain — a nasty mash-up of swine, avian, and human viruses — has infected 1,000 people in Mexico and the U.S., killing 68. The World Health Organization warned Saturday that the outbreak could reach global pandemic levels.

Is Smithfield Foods, the world’s largest pork packer and hog producer, linked to the outbreak? Smithfield operates massive hog-raising operations Perote, Mexico, in the state of Vera Cruz, where the outbreak originated. The operations, grouped under a Smithfield subsidiary called Granjas Carroll, raise 950,000 hogs per year, according to the company Web site.

On Friday, the U.S. disease-tracking blog Biosurveillance published a timeline of the outbreak containing this nugget, dated April 6 (major tip of the hat to Paula Hay, who alerted me to the Smithfield link on the Comfood listserv and has written about iton her blog, Peak Oil Entrepreneur):

Residents [of Perote] believed the outbreak had been caused by contamination from pig breeding farms located in the area. They believed that the farms, operated by Granjas Carroll, polluted the atmosphere and local water bodies, which in turn led to the disease outbreak. According to residents, the company denied responsibility for the outbreak and attributed the cases to “flu.” However, a municipal health official stated that preliminary investigations indicated that the disease vector was a type of fly that reproduces in pig waste and that the outbreak was linked to the pig farms. It was unclear whether health officials had identified a suspected pathogen responsible for this outbreak.

From what I can tell, the possible link to Smithfield has not been reported in the U.S. press. Searches of Google News and the websites of the New York Times, Washington Post, andWall Street Journal all came up empty. The link is being made in the Mexican media, however. “Granjas Carroll, causa de epidemia en La Gloria,” declared a headline in the Vera Cruz-based paper La Marcha. No need to translate that, except to point out that La Gloria is the village where the outbreak seems to have started. Judging from the article, Mexican authorities treat hog CAFOs with just as much if not more indulgence than their peers north of the border, to the detriment of surrounding communities and the general public health. Get this:

De acuerdo con uno de los habitantes de la comunidad, Eli Ferrer Cortés, los desechos fecales y orgánicos que produce Granjas Carroll no son tratados adecuadamente, lo que genera contaminación del agua y del viento en la region.

My rough translation: According to one community resident, the organic and fecal waste produced by Granjas Carrol isn’t adequately treated, creating water and air pollution in the region. I witnessed — and smelled — the same thing in Hardin County, Iowa, a couple of years ago, another area marked by intensive industrial hog production. The article goes on to say that area residents have long complained of “fetid odors” in the air and water, and swarms of flies hovering around waste lagoons. Like their counterparts who live in CAFO-heavy U.S. areas, they also complain of respiratory ailments. Now, with 30 percent of the area’s residents now infected with the virulent flu bug, people are demanding that state and federal authorities inspect hog operations there. So far, reports La Marcha, the response has been: nada.

The Mexico City daily La Jornada has also made the link. According to the newspaper, the Mexican health agency IMSS has acknowledged that the orginal carrier for the flu could be the “clouds of flies” that multiply in the Smithfield subsidiary’s manure lagoons.

I’ll be in touch with contacts in Mexico as this story develops — and I’ll be curious to see whether the U.S. media explores the link with Smithfield’s Mexico operation.

Note: In the original version of this post, I had called production at Granjas Carroll “nearly equal to Smithfield’s total U.S. production.” I had been confusing total production at Granjas Carroll — 950,000 hogs produced in fiscal 2008 — with the number of sows, or breeding pigs, kept by Smithfield in the United States. According to my source — “Concentration of Ag Markets, 2007″ (PDF) by Hendrickson and Heffernan — Smithfield keeps 1.2 million sows. Actual hog production is much larger — thus Smithfield’s total U.S. hog production is much larger than Granjas Carroll’s. I regret the error.

Tom Philpott was previously Grist's food writer. He now writes for Mother Jones.