Swine Flu Facts

Is It A Pandemic? Let's Get The Swine Flu Facts.

Do you have all the swine flu facts?  Before you run off and get vaccinated spend a little time on this site and learn what's really going on here.  This CBS report takes the angle that it is not nearly as bad as is being reported.

Today, president Obama declared the outbreak of swine flu a National Emergency.  It seems everyone has a different opinion regarding just what is going on.  Take some time, read, learn and educate yourself.  Show your children you care enough about them to research every aspect of the swine flu and talk to them about your findings.  Make it a family learning project.

Syringe

The big news I hope you come away with, regardless of whether or not you get the vaccination, is how changing your diet can change your families health for the better, now and for many years to come.  For this flu season and the ones that will follow, year after year.  That should be one of the biggest swine flu facts.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) states on their main flu Web site http://www.cdc.gov/flu/ that flu activity is increasing in the United States, with most states reporting "widespread influenza activity." The CDC goes on to say, and I quote: "So far, most flu is 2009 H1N1 flu (sometimes called "swine flu")." But wait, stop the presses.

A three-month-long investigation by CBS News, released earlier this week that included state-by-state test results, revealed some very different swine flu facts. The CBS study found that H1N1 flu cases are NOT as prevalent as feared. A CBS article even states: "If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn't have H1N1 flu. In fact, you probably didn't have flu at all."

Obviously CBS News and the CDC are completely contradicting each other. So who is right?

Well, CBS reports that in late July 2009 the CDC advised states to STOP testing for H1N1 flu, and they also stopped counting individual cases. Their rationale for this, according to CBS News, was that it was a waste of resources to test for H1N1 flu because it was already confirmed as an epidemic. So just like that virtually every person who visited their physician with flu-like symptoms since late July was assumed to have H1N1, with no testing necessary because, after all, there's an epidemic.

It's interesting to note that at the same time as the CDC decided the H1N1 epidemic warranted no further testing for cases due to its epidemic status, Finnish health authorities actually downgraded the threat of swine flu.

In late July the health ministry and the National Institute for Health and Welfare (THL) in Finland actually removed swine flu from a list of diseases considered dangerous to the public because the majority of cases recovered without medication or hospital care!

And, as the CDC continues to use fear to motivate and control Americans with their worst-case swine flu scenarios, they say nothing of the experience of those in the southern hemisphere, which just finished their flu season and found it was not as bad as expected.

CBS News Finds H1N1 Tests "Overwhelmingly Negative" Before beginning their investigation, CBS News asked the CDC for state-by-state test results prior to their halting of testing and tracking. The CDC did not initially respond so CBS went to all 50 states directly, asking for their statistics on state lab-confirmed H1N1 prior to the halt of individual testing and counting in July.

What did they find? CBS reported: "The results reveal a pattern that surprised a number of health care professionals we consulted. The vast majority of cases were negative for H1N1 as well as seasonal flu, despite the fact that many states were specifically testing patients deemed to be most likely to have H1N1 flu, based on symptoms and risk factors, such as travel to Mexico."

As you can see from this CBS News graphic, not only are most cases of suspected flu-like illnesses not H1N1, they're not even the flu but more likely some type of cold or upper respiratory infection!

Where is the CDC Getting Their Data?
Given CBS News' findings that most cases of flu-like illnesses are neither H1N1 nor the flu, it begs the question: Why is the CDC reporting that most flu in the United States is in fact H1N1?

Barbara Loe Fisher, founder of the National Vaccine Information Center who I spoke with in the interview above, was a consumer representative on the FDA Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee in 2003, and she asked the head of the influenza branch of the CDC how much of the flu-like illness that occurs in America every year is actually due to the flu.

The answer was about 20 percent, which corresponds more closely with the CBS News data from 2009.

According to the CBS News study, when you come down with chills, fever, cough, runny nose, malaise and all those other "flu-like" symptoms, the illness is likely caused by influenza at most 17 percent of the time and as little as 3 percent! The other 83 to 97 percent of the time it's caused by other viruses or bacteria.

So remember that not every illness that appears to be the flu actually is the flu. In fact, most of the time it's not.

Curiously, the CDC still advises those who were told they had 2009 H1N1 (and therefore should be immune to getting it again) to get vaccinated unless they had lab confirmation.

Is the CDC Purposely Misinforming the Public to Sell More Flu and H1N1 Vaccines?

Conflicts of interest are rampant in the vaccination infrastructure. The same people who are regulating and promoting vaccines are also evaluating vaccine safety.

For instance, Dr. Paul Offit of the Children\'s Hospital of Philadelphia earned at least $29 million as part of a $182-million sale by the hospital of its worldwide royalty interest in the Merck Rotateq vaccine. He also formerly sat on the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) to help create the market for rotavirus vaccine.

This type of conflict of interest has been going on for some time. In August 1999, the Committee on Government Reform initiated an investigation into Federal vaccine policy. During the investigation the Committee extensively reviewed financial disclosure forms and related documents and interviewed key officials from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the CDC.

It was revealed that many individuals on two key advisory committees had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that manufacture vaccines. These individuals were even granted waivers allowing them to fully participate in discussions about vaccine licensing and recommendations for children, despite the fact that federal law states members of advisory committees are required to disclose such ties and recluse themselves from such discussions and decisions.

Further, the investigation revealed that the FDA's and CDC's conflict of interest rules were not strongly enforced while the rules themselves were weak. Specific problems noted by the Committee included: *The CDC routinely granted waivers from conflict of interest rules to many members of its advisory committee.  *Those CDC advisory committee members who were not allowed to vote on certain recommendations due to financial conflicts of interest were still allowed to actively participate in committee deliberations and advocate specific positions.  *The Chairman of the CDC's advisory committee owned 600 shares of stock in Merck, a pharmaceutical company with an active vaccine division.  *Members of the CDC's advisory committee often left key details out of their financial disclosure statements, and were not required to provide the missing information by CDC ethics officials.  

And, when the FDA and CDC approved the controversial rotavirus vaccine in 1998 and 1999, the Committee's report said: *3 out of the 5 FDA advisory committee members who voted to approve the rotavirus vaccine in December 1997 had financial ties to the pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.  *4 out of the 8 CDC advisory committee members who voted to approve guidelines for the rotavirus vaccine in June 1998 had financial ties to pharmaceutical companies that were developing different versions of the vaccine.

The rotavirus vaccine was pulled from the market one year after approval, after it was found to cause severe bowel obstructions.

Given their sordid history, can the CDC really be trusted, even today? Do you think that much has changed in just one decade?

Is the H1N1 Vaccine Really Safe as the CDC Says it Is?  Be sure to get all the swine flu facts.

Gas Mask

CDC officials are screaming that H1N1 is so different from the seasonal influenza strains that have circulated in the past few decades that a national alarm must be sounded and everyone needs to be so afraid that we all should get vaccinated to prevent a deadly pandemic.

Yet, they say the new H1N1 vaccine is safe based on vaccines for that very same flu strain from which it is so different. They write on their Web site "the 2009 H1N1 influenza vaccines are expected to have similar safety profiles as seasonal flu vaccines ..." Another contradiction.

While symptoms of H1N1 flu and seasonal flu are virtually identical, the H1N1 vaccine is showing signs of being quite different from the seasonal flu shot. Although both are produced using antiquated 50-year-old technology that involves injecting the virus into eggs and allowing it to grow, the virus being used to produce the swine flu vaccine has been found to reproduce much more slowly in eggs than the ordinary flu virus.

And according to a separate CBS News report, the U.S. government is now funding newer unprecedented technologies to speed up vaccine production, including one that involves growing the virus inside animal cells and another that involves flu proteins grown inside insect cells.

The risks of these, and the current fast-tracked swine flu vaccine, are truly unknown at this time.

There is NO Incentive for the CDC or Vaccine Manufacturers to Care About Safety You may think that the CDC and the vaccine manufacturers must be concerned about safety, as if they released a dangerous vaccine and promoted it to the American public, imagine the lawsuits they would face.

This is actually no longer reality as the U.S. government has granted vaccine makers total legal immunity from any lawsuits that result from the new swine flu vaccine.

In fact, drug manufacturers got a major boost in protection and were granted unprecedented powers to experiment on the population with the passing of the 2006 Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness Act (the PREP Act). This law allows the DHHS Secretary to invoke almost complete immunity from liability for manufacturers of vaccines and drugs used to combat a declared public health emergency, which the "swine flu pandemic" qualifies as.

The PREP Act removes your right to a trial jury unless you can provide clear evidence of willful misconduct that resulted in death or serious physical injury. But that's not all. First you must apply for and be granted permission to sue by the DHHS Secretary.

The most problematic aspect of the PREP Act is that it removes all financial incentive to make a safe product.

In fact, vaccine makers now have a negative incentive to test it for safety, because if they are aware of problems, then they could potentially be held liable for willful misconduct!

As long as they can prove they "didn't know" of any problem, they will not be liable for damages. Hence it's in their best interest to know as little as possible about the adverse reactions it might cause.

It seems unimaginable, but you and your children are now being enlisted as an unpaid human trial subjects for experimental, fast-tracked vaccines like the swine flu vaccine.

Even if They Were Effective or Safe, Most Vaccines Will Come Too Late Recent national polls have revealed that 30 percent to 50 percent in many communities are not planning to get a swine flu shot ... but there are many who are still ready to stand in line.

If you have not yet made up your mind and have questions, we have created some fact-filled posters that you can print and post ALL over your community, your local stores, office and schools.

You can also visit the special section of my site that is devoted to giving you all the latest H1N1 Swine Flu Alerts. This is an excellent go-to source to stay updated on all the new swine flu developments.

But I wanted to share one final detail, and that is a new study just released by Purdue University researchers and published in the journal Eurosurveillance. The researchers found that at this point in time any vaccinations that are given in the United States will likely have little effect on the number of infections. The researchers state: "The model predicts that there will be a significant wave in autumn, with 63% of the population being infected, and that this wave will peak so early that the planned CDC vaccination campaign will likely not have a large effect on the total number of people ultimately infected by the pandemic H1N1 influenza virus."

In other words, infections are predicted to peak in late October (now) and by the end of the year it's estimated that 63 percent of the U.S. population will have been infected with H1N1 swine flu.

What does this mean? By the end of the year the majority of the U.S. population
will have likely acquired natural immunity.

Natural immunity is what you gain when you recover from influenza and natural immunity is what is protecting older Americans, who have recovered from exposure to H1N1 strains of influenza in the past and are therefore less susceptible today.

This new revelation, coupled with CBS News' finding that swine flu cases are already being greatly overestimated ... and the fact that vaccines do not offer long-term immunity anyway ... and the questionable motives behind CDC's massive vaccination campaign ... puts an entirely different slant on the swine flu "epidemic," don't you think?

If you are still concerned about the swine flu, you should know that it is relatively easy to improve your immune response to fight this infection. If 99.9% of the people are not having any serious complications from H1N1, it would seem perfectly rational to believe that minor lifestyle changes could have dramatic effects on fighting this infection, and none of these involve taking potentially dangerous and unproven vaccine interventions.

Simple Measures That Can Help You Fight Illness *Vitamin D has been well documented to increase the production of over 200 anti microbial peptides that fight infection.  *Eliminate sugar from your diet as that will impair your immune response  *Get plenty of rest  *Exercise appropriately

You can also help make a BIG difference in protecting your right to make
informed, voluntary vaccination choices by supporting the National Vaccine Information Center.

I have made this non-profit organization -- America's Vaccine Safety Watchdog -- one of my favorite charities and I urge you to become a donor member and help NVIC protect your informed consent rights and your children's health.  "

http://www.foodconsumer.org/newsite/Non-food/Disease/cbs_reveals_that_swine_flu_cases_seriously_overestimated_2410200.html

This article was written by Dr. Mercola.

From Science blogs we get these swine flu facts regarding the above mentioned CBS report.

A reader (h/t MVD) sent me this link to a "CBS News Exclusive," Study Of State Results Finds H1N1 Not As Prevalent As Feared. As far as I can see the main aim was to raise CBS News's profile and gain readership. That's what news organizations do. We hope they do it by good journalism. I think this is an example where the reporters just didn't have enough knowledge of what they were reporting and put the wrong spin on it.

The central claim is that CDC stopped testing for swine flu hastily and without advance notice to the states:

"If you've been diagnosed "probable" or "presumed" 2009 H1N1 or "swine flu" in recent months, you may be surprised to know this: odds are you didn’t have H1N1 flu.

In fact, you probably didn’t have flu at all. That's according to state-by-state test results obtained in a three-month-long CBS News investigation.

The ramifications of this finding are important. According to the Center for Disease Control, CDC, and Britain's National Health Service, once you have H1N1 flu, you're immune from future outbreaks of the same virus. Those who think they've had H1N1 flu -- but haven't -- might mistakenly presume they're immune. As a result, they might skip taking a vaccine that could help them, and expose themselves to others with H1N1 flu under the mistaken belief they won't catch it. Parents might not keep sick children home from school, mistakenly believing they've already had H1N1 flu.

Why the uncertainty about who has and who hasn't had H1N1 flu?

In late July, the CDC abruptly advised states to stop testing for H1N1 flu, and stopped counting individual cases. The rationale given for the CDC guidance to forego testing and tracking individual cases was: why waste resources testing for H1N1 flu when the government has already confirmed there's an epidemic?" (CBS News)

The implication here is that this was a precipitous and unilateral decision on the part of CDC that took the states by surprise. They support this by quoting unnamed public health "officials" who told CBS they disagreed with it and quoting from an email from the Council for State and Territorial Epidemiologists to its members (CSTE is a non-profit organization used by state epidemiologists to exchange information and advance their interests). The email was from CDC to CSTE members:

"Attached are the Q&As that will be posted on the CDC website tomorrow explaining why CDC is no longer reporting case counts for novel H1N1. CDC would have liked to have run these by you for input but unfortunately there was not enough time before these needed to be posted."

It is clear that CDC is saying to the state epidemiologists they are sorry they did not run the Q&As about stopping testing by them , not the decision to stop testing. Contrary to this article, I heard throughout this period that the pressure on CDC to stop the testing was coming from the states, not the other way around. It's no secret that state health departments are hard pressed to keep their heads above water financially and are short staffed all around. Expensive swine flu testing was something they couldn't afford. The burden to do the testing was on the states, not CDC, but as long as CDC recommended it, states couldn't easily stop on their own, especially if neighboring states were still testing. The reason for stopping was confusing (and CBS News shows themselves confused) and bound to be controversial. In effect, CDC decided to take the bullet for state health departments. And CBS News obligingly pulled the trigger.

The kind of testing asked for here -- determining the subtype of an influenza isolate -- is not a piece of cake. It requires specialized equipment and specialized expertise. Both the equipment and expertise exist in state health departments thanks to money and training CDC did in anticipation of a bird flu pandemic, but it wasn't designed for high throughput. There was no way states could handle tens of thousands of specimens. If taxpayers don't want to pay taxes, they shouldn't complain when the infrastructure isn't there, but in fact they might legitimately have complained about a laboratory capacity that goes unused except during an influenza pandemic. Since pandemics are unpredictable, that capacity would mostly lie fallow.

As an epidemiologist would I like to have more detailed information about the distribution and pattern of this disease? Of course. Influenza is an important public health problem. Yet influenza outbreaks happen seasonally and we never test and report to CDC individual cases with an eye to having a complete count. Why is that? First, a little digression on how diseases get their names.

A disease can get its name in two distinct ways, sometimes referred to as manifestationally and causally. Manifestationally named diseases are named by how they appear or manifest themselves. An example is cancer. We call diseases with malignant cells that form tumors and grow where they shouldn't grow, cancers: in other words, by how they look or manifest themselves. Another example is a fracture, a break in the continuity of the bone. Another is congestive heart failure. What caused the disease isn't in the picture. But the cause of a disease can be the basis for naming a disease, too. Some examples are asbestosis (scarring of the lungs from breathing asbestos), cholera (a disease caused by a specific micro-organism, Vibrio cholerae) or cyanide poisoning.

What about influenza? It's a weird hybrid. On the one hand it's part of a group of influenza-like illnesses (ILI), which is a manifestational name. When a doctor tells you that you "have the flu" these days, most often he or she is using the manifestational name. But there is also a causal name for influenza, referring specifically to the ILI caused by infection with influenza virus. That's the name that can be placed on your disease after some very specific and sophisticated testing to see what is causing your ILI. There are a lot of viruses that can cause ILI (we've talked about some of them here a couple of times, for example, here and here), and undoubtedly they are responsible for some ILIs that are now being diagnosed as swine flu. We know, however, that during flu outbreaks, the proportion of ILI that is influenza goes way up, so that the kind of clinical (manifestation only) diagnoses are much more often correct (there is a theorem in probability theory that explains why that is). So it makes a difference that CBS News was looking at data from May, June and July rather than now. At that time there were other viruses around besides swine flu, and the tests indicate that. Why not do better testing?

There are "rapid flu tests" that are done in doctor's office that can show if you have influenza, but they miss somewhere around half the cases of real flu, so a negative test isn't helpful, nor does the test tell what kind of flu it is (seasonal or swine flu). For that you need the expensive lab test. And even if we could do all those lab tests, it would entail many days' wait, during which you aren't being treated with antivirals, or if you are, then getting the test didn't make a difference. Most people who have the flu probably never see anyone about it. They suffer and get over it or if it is not so bad they keep going about their business. So they would never get counted anywhere. And many people have ILIs that aren't flu. And they aren't counted either as other respiratory diseases.

CBS's own investigation found that in all 50 states, prior to stopping testing in July, lab-confirmed cases showed that most specimens were not influenza. As I noted, since other viruses cause ILI during non-flu season this isn't too surprising. What was surprising was the amount of influenza there was at a time when we expect to see very little. Now that flu season is here, the chances that an ILI is truly influenza (causally defined) is much greater. And frankly, there is no possibility of testing all ILI cases for swine flu. There will be millions of cases of ILI and they can't all be tested and most won't even be seen by anyone. Moreover, during the period of the CBS "study" many people were having specimens taken that would not ordinarily have seen a doctor. The data they looked at were from all 50 states (and we don't know what data it was or what they counted or whether they even calculated things correctly) and were mostly cases that were not epidemiologically linked.

This last is important. CBS News cites an outbreak of 250 cases at Georgetown University as an example where no testing was done so it isn't certain this was a flu outbreak. Admittedly, it could have been adenovirus or respiratory syncytial virus or a bunch of other things. But when something like this happens in the setting of a pandemic, the odds are that it was influenza. More importantly, data on the number of positive specimens for all the people of Georgia over a several month period three months prior is not the same as 250 cases among students who were in contact with each other and that occurred over a few weeks. And think about the alternative? Nothing prevented Georgetown University from testing all those cases. Nothing except that it would have been infeasible and the resources weren't available, that's all. And it wouldn't have changed how they were treated, except perhaps to delay treatment.

Still, as an epidemiologist, we need to know what virus subtypes are out there and roughly where they are. CDC has a multipart surveillance system we've written about quite a lot here. It supplies a great deal of useful information for epidemiological purposes and special studies fill in some of the gaps. So it isn't true that lack of routine testing makes it impossible to know where flu is occurring, what is happening over time and what kind of influenza it is. We have a jury-rigged but fairly efficient influenza surveillance system that has been operating for years and continues to operate.

But compared to countries that have universal health care with efficient electronic medical records we have a much harder time. Our health care system, which is mainly private, isn't set up to make it easy to get the kind of information people think we should have.

That's not CDC's fault. And I haven't seen that CBS News has done such a bang up job of reporting on health insurance reform. Unless being a stenographer for talking points from the insurance and health care industries counts.

The swine flu facts, as they come out, make for some interesting reading.  It's an important topic to stay up to date with, for you and your family

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