WHO got it wrong on other outbreaks

There are no pigs in radical Muslim countries. With the citizens of many other countries in the world on edge because of the pandemic potential of swine flu, Kuwait was doing a little boasting yesterday. “Kuwait free of swine flu” was he headline on the Kuwait Times website. The story was accompanied by a picture of two backpack-laden, long-haired students, one of whom was sporting Planet Earth on his T-shirt.

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“We are ready in case the virus enters Kuwait. We also have vaccines,” Dr. Khalid Al-Hasawi, Deputy Director General of the Infectious Disease Hospital told the Kuwait Times, mentioning the Tamiflu vaccine, but admitted that there is no specific vaccine available yet for the new strain of influenza. “But my prediction is that Kuwait is unlikely to contract the swine flu virus. We have been spared the bird flu virus which is carried by birds; the swine flu virus is perhaps unlikely since we are a pig-free country,” Hasawi said. “He pointed out that the swine flu virus is carried by pigs, and that Kuwait and neighboring countries are Islamic countries which have banned pig farms. ‘We are unlikely to have an outbreak since we don’t have pig farms here. We don’t have pig products and the distance (of the countries with the virus) is miles away from Kuwait,” he stressed. The swine flu, suspected in more than 150 deaths in Mexico, is a natural when it comes to striking terror in the human heart now that officials have raised the global alert to unprecedented levels. The WHO (World Health Organization) has been spooking people for years with dire predictions of bird flu, and is on the public record for calling a world pandemic of avian flu “inevitable”. In times of stress and worry people forget that WHO is the health arm of the devious United Nations. Already Mexicans have come up with the Town of Xaltepec whose breeding farms are co-owned by a U.S. company as swine flu’s “Ground Zero. The heart attack of 64-year-old Felipe Solis Olguin, director of Mexico’s National Museum of Anthropology, who shook hands with President Barack Obama last week, is being blamed on ‘swine flu like’ symptoms. Before the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) scare ran its full gamut in 2003, about 8,098 people in 29 countries contracted the deadly virus, with 774 of them dying. Included in the SARS fatalities were 44 in the Toronto area. With SARS on the wane, WHO concluded that there was no evidence to suggest that SARS was an airborne virus. But WHO got it wrong. A Toronto study found evidence that the SARS virus may spread through the air. That means SARS had spread not just through human contact, making it far more contagious than what was previously thought. Cautious in its wording, the Toronto study warned that just because the virus is in the air doesn’t constitute proof that it spreads that way. Although it has been suspected, there is no documented case of a patient getting airborne SARS anywhere. During the SARS scare, in spite of all infection-control measures, health-care workers continued to fall ill from the virus, leading researchers to speculate by what other means the virus could be spreading. Until then, researchers had maintained that SARS spread only through direct contact with infected water droplets, of the type that comes from human coughs. The Toronto study identified SARS as an “opportunistic airborne infection”, in the same league as the common cold. In their testing, scientists detected the SARS coronavirus in the air in one of four hospital rooms that was occupied by patients with the disease, said the study published in the May 2005 issue of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, released by the Infectious Diseases Society of America. That could explain how air travelers in Asia and people in adjacent apartment buildings in Hong Kong contracted it even though they had no direct contact, said Timothy Booth, a virologist at the Public Health Agency of Canada laboratory in Winnipeg, who led the study. “It does show SARS is in the air and if you’re in the same room with a patient, you might get enough to infect you if you were not wearing a mask,” Booth said. WHO’s stand notwithstanding, it is now “beyond doubt” that SARS can spread through breathing the same air as a patient. Although the story was originally downplayed by the mainstream media, 64-year-old Professor Liu Jian Lun, world renowned microbiologist working to find a cure for SARS, was rushed to Kwong Wah Hospital early in the morning of March 4, 2003, where he died of the virus. When 78-year-old grandmother, Kwan Sui-Chu returned to Toronto from Hong Kong in February 2003, no one had heard of the deadly SARS with which she was infected. In Hong Kong, she and her husband had stayed on the ninth floor of the Metropole Hotel at the same time as Prof. Liu Jian Lun, now known as the case that triggered the coming global epidemic. Nor is this the first time WHO has been wrong. Malaria increased under WHO’s Roll Back Malaria Project, although WHO had promised to halve it. Economies also fall victim to influenza outbreaks. Toronto became the first Western city declared a no-go zone in a WHO health warning. When SARS had run its course, Canadian tourism lost an estimated $1.5 billion and some say the city of Toronto has never fully recovered.