Rats Add Health Concerns to List of New York’s Disaster Problems

A rat peeks out of a hole at a Brooklyn subway stop in 2005. (Photo: AP/Julie Jacobson)

(The Blaze) With more than half a dozen of New York City’s subway tunnels flooded from Hurricane Sandy, subterranean residents usually seen scurrying from one hiding place to another might have an extended stay on the surface, which has some concerned about the health implications.

National Geographic reported exterminator Benett Pearlman of New York-based Positive Pest Management Corp saying that although some rats may have died underground, it’s probable that many escaped a watery grave. Things on the surface are probably looking pretty good to them too:

Sandy has brought a feast to their feet. New sources of food are washing out of the waterways and along flooded streets, including loads of rotting trash, other rats, pigeons, and fish. The well-fed rats will burrow beneath buildings under cover of night to establish new homes, sliding into holes as small as a half inch (1.3 centimeters)—the width of their skulls—even though their bodies can measure up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) long.

Bora Zivkovic has a very detailed blog post for Scientific American with various scenarios for how the rats would have died or survived. He also points out that some rats didn’t even have to deal with the flooding because they were not in an area that went under.

“[..] my guess is that most of the rats survived,”Zivkovic wrote. ”But quite a large number of rats drowned – depending on exact location, depth, how much they know how to get to the surface at all, their exact route to the surface, and their status in the social hierarchy.”

With that, diseases and other health concerns associated with rats come into play. The Huffington Post reported Rick Ostfeld of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies saying that rats are known to “exacerbate disease” if the population is high. Diseases spread through rat bites, feces or urine include hantavirus — seen earlier this year in Yosemite National Park — salmonella and the bubonic plague.

“A rat distrubance is something we should be concerned about,” Ostfeld said, according to the Huffington Post.

HuffPost reported Ostfelt noting that high flood waters could also serve to dilute the disease pathogens associated with the creatures though and lead to less of a risk of contraction.

But these flood waters, National Geographic reported in a separate article, could contribute to illness themselves. Beyond driving out the rats — those who made it — there are several risk factors associated with the water. These include hiding dangerous objects — like glass you could step on — or being electrified from a downed power line.

Sewage brought up from the flood waters could pose an issue as well:

The most concerning urban bacteria is Escherichia coli—also known as E. coli—the organism that most mammals use for digestion. Found in the lower intestine, it can be toxic if ingested into the stomach. Floods that carry raw sewage into high density areas can spread the bacteria.

National Geographic reported University of Michigan Homer Nowlin Chair in Water Research Joan Rose saying there is almost always an uptick in illness after an extreme flooding situation.

Suggestions to prevent illness in this situation are to adhere to any boil water advisories, avoid walking in flood water and don’t eat anything coming in contact with the water without properly cleaning it.

Technorati Tags: NYC,New York,disease,natural disasters,rats,pests,Hurricane Sandy,rodents,sewage

The E.coli outbreak in Europe is BioWar ???

Europe Blog: Waterboarding The World, Part 1:
Out of nowhere a strange new deadly disease has sprung up in Europe, causing an explosion of over 3,500 serious illnesses and 35 or more deaths in at least 10 European nations (and now 4 suspected cases in the U.S. - Ed.).  There are four scientific indications that this is a case of man-engineered Advanced Biowar, as well as strong circumstantial indications that this is a part of something much larger politically.

Scientifically, the four strong indications of an Advanced Biowar (genetically engineered recombination DNA) basis for this new outbreak are as follows:

(1) Multipoint release.  That is the disease has quickly come from nowhere and is in multiple locations almost overnight.  It is now in at least ten European nations.  In writing this article, I have had to change the numbers twice (total illnesses and deaths and nations involved) as the numbers are increasing almost hourly.
(2) Multi-drug resistance.   Chinese scientists, at the Shenzhen, China laboratory BGI (working with scientists at the University Medical Center of Hamberg-Eppendorf)  have confirmed that the new bacterium carries genes that make it resistant to several classes of antibiotics!  Patients often have bloody diarrhea, and many require intensive care including kidney dialysis.

More Here...

 

Alex talks with Mike Adams of Nat­ural News about evi­dence that the deadly e.coli bac­terium sweep­ing Ger­many was cooked up in a lab.

 

Evidence Suggests Superbug was Bioengineered

by Steve Beckow - http://stevebeckow.com/2011/06/evidence-suggests-superbug-was-bioengineered/

Here we go again….  I’m surprised that we didn’t have to wait for Matthew to tell us this time. We’re definitely catching on. No comfort for those who lost their loved ones. Thanks to Roth.

Forensic evidence emerges that European e.coli superbug was bioengineered to produce human fatalities

Monday, June 06, 2011
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com, http://www.naturalnews.com/032622_ecoli_bioengineering.html

(NaturalNews) Even as the veggie blame game is now under way across the EU, where a super resistant strain of e.coli is sickening patients and filling hospitals in Germany, virtually no one is talking about how e.coli could have magically become resistant to eight different classes of antibiotic drugs and then suddenly appeared in the food supply.

This particular e.coli variation is a member of the O104 strain, and O104 strains are almost never (normally) resistant to antibiotics. In order for them to acquire this resistance, they must be repeatedly exposed to antibiotics in order to provide the “mutation pressure” that nudges them toward complete drug immunity.

So if you’re curious about the origins of such a strain, you can essentially reverse engineer the genetic code of the e.coli and determine fairly accurately which antibiotics it was exposed to during its development. This step has now been done (see below), and when you look at the genetic decoding of this O104 strain now threatening food consumers across the EU, a fascinating picture emerges of how it must have come into existence.

The genetic code reveals the history

When scientists at Germany’s Robert Koch Institute decoded the genetic makeup of the O104 strain, they found it to be resistant to all the following classes and combinations of antibiotics:

• penicillins
• tetracycline
• nalidixic acid
• trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazol
• cephalosporins
• amoxicillin / clavulanic acid
• piperacillin-sulbactam
• piperacillin-tazobactam

In addition, this O104 strain posses an ability to produce special enzymes that give it what might be called “bacteria superpowers” known technically as ESBLs:

“Extended-Spectrum Beta-Lactamases (ESBLs) are enzymes that can be produced by bacteria making them resistant to cephalosporins e.g. cefuroxime, cefotaxime and ceftazidime – which are the most widely used antibiotics in many hospitals,” explains the Health Protection Agency in the UK (http://www.hpa.org.uk/Topics/Infect…).

On top of that, this O104 strain possesses two genes — TEM-1 and CTX-M-15 — that “have been making doctors shudder since the 1990s,” reports The Guardian (http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentis…). And why do they make doctors shudder? Because they’re so deadly that many people infected with such bacteria experience critical organ failure and simply die.

Bioengineering a deadly superbug

So how, exactly, does a bacterial strain come into existence that’s resistant to over a dozen antibiotics in eight different drug classes and features two deadly gene mutations plus ESBL enzyme capabilities?

There’s really only one way this happens (and only one way) — you have to expose this strain of e.coli to all eight classes of antibiotics drugs. Usually this isn’t done at the same time, of course: You first expose it to penicillin and find the surviving colonies which are resistant to penicillin. You then take those surviving colonies and expose them to tetracycline. The surviving colonies are now resistant to both penicillin and tetracycline. You then expose them to a sulfa drug and collect the surviving colonies from that, and so on. It is a process of genetic selection done in a laboratory with a desired outcome. This is essentially how some bioweapons are engineered by the U.S. Army in its laboratory facility in Ft. Detrick, Maryland (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation…).

Although the actual process is more complicated than this, the upshot is that creating a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight classes of antibiotics requires repeated, sustained expose to those antibiotics. It is virtually impossible to imagine how this could happen all by itself in the natural world. For example, if this bacteria originated in the food (as we’ve been told), then where did it acquire all this antibiotic resistance given the fact that antibiotics are not used in vegetables?

When considering the genetic evidence that now confronts us, it is difficult to imagine how this could happen “in the wild.” While resistance to a single antibiotic is common, the creation of a strain of e.coli that’s resistant to eight different classes of antibiotics — in combination — simply defies the laws of genetic permutation and combination in the wild. Simply put, this superbug e.coli strain could not have been created in the wild. And that leaves only one explanation for where it really came from: the lab.

Engineered and then released into the wild

The evidence now points to this deadly strain of e.coli being engineered and then either being released into the food supply or somehow escaping from a lab and entering the food supply inadvertently. If you disagree with that conclusion — and you’re certainly welcome to — then you are forced to conclude that this octobiotic superbug (immune to eight classes of antibiotics) developed randomly on its own… and that conclusion is far scarier than the “bioengineered” explanation because it means octobiotic superbugs can simply appear anywhere at any time without cause. That would be quite an exotic theory indeed.

My conclusion actually makes more sense: This strain of e.coli was almost certainly engineered and then released into the food supply for a specific purpose. What would that purpose be? It’s obvious, I hope.

It’s all problem, reaction, solution at work here. First cause a PROBLEM (a deadly strain of e.coli in the food supply). Then wait for the public REACTION (huge outcry as the population is terrorized by e.coli). In response to that, enact your desired SOLUTION (total control over the global food supply and the outlawing of raw sprouts, raw milk and raw vegetables).

That’s what this is all about, of course. The FDA relied on the same phenomenon in the USA when pushing for its recent “Food Safety Modernization Act” which essentially outlaws small family organic farms unless they lick the boots of FDA regulators. The FDA was able to crush farm freedom in America by piggybacking on the widespread fear that followed e.coli outbreaks in the U.S. food supply. When people are afraid, remember, it’s not difficult to get them to agree to almost any level of regulatory tyranny. And making people afraid of their food is a simple matter… a few government press releases emailed to the mainstream media news affiliates is all it takes.

First ban the natural medicine, then attack the food supply
Now, remember: All this is happening on the heels of the EU ban on medicinal herbs and nutritional supplements — a ban that blatantly outlaws nutritional therapies that help keep people healthy and free from disease. Now that all these herbs and supplements are outlawed, the next step is to make people afraid of fresh food, too. That’s because fresh vegetables are medicinal, and as long as the public has the right to buy fresh vegetables, they can always prevent disease.

But if you can make people AFRAID of fresh vegetables — or even outlaw them altogether — then you can force the entire population onto a diet of dead foods and processed foods that promote degenerative disease and bolster the profits of the powerful drug companies.

It’s all part of the same agenda, you see: Keep people sick, deny them access to healing herbs and supplements, then profit from their suffering at the hands of the global drug cartels.

GMOs play a similar role in all this, of course: They’re designed to contaminate the food supply with genetic code that causes widespread infertility among human beings. And those who are somehow able to reproduce after exposure to GMOs still suffer from degenerative disease that enriches the drug companies from “treatment.”

Do you recall which country was targeted in this recent e.coli scare? Spain. Why Spain? You may recall that leaked cables from Wikileaks revealed that Spain resisted the introduction of GMOs into its agricultural system, even as the U.S. government covertly threatened political retaliation for its resistance. This false blaming of Spain for the e.coli deaths is probably retaliation for Spain’s unwillingness to jump on the GMO bandwagon. (http://www.naturalnews.com/030828_G…)

That’s the real story behind the economic devastation of Spain’s vegetable farmers. It’s one of the subplots being pursued alongside this e.coli superbug scheme.

Food as weapons of war – created by Big Pharma?

By the way, the most likely explanation of where this strain of e.coli was bioengineered is that the drug giants came up with it in their own labs. Who else has access to all the antibiotics and equipment needed to manage the targeted mutations of potentially thousands of e.coli colonies? The drug companies are uniquely positioned to both carry out this plot and profit from it. In other words, they have the means and the motive to engage in precisely such actions.

Aside from the drug companies, perhaps only the infectious disease regulators themselves have this kind of laboratory capacity. The CDC, for example, could probably pull this off if they really wanted to.

The proof that somebody bioengineered this e.coli strain is written right in the DNA of the bacteria. That’s forensic evidence, and what it reveals cannot be denied. This strain underwent repeated and prolonged exposure to eight different classes of antibiotics, and then it somehow managed to appear in the food supply. How do you get to that if not through a well-planned scheme carried out by rogue scientists? There is no such thing as “spontaneous mutation” into a strain that is resistant to the top eight classes of brand-name antibiotic drugs being sold by Big Pharma today. Such mutations have to be deliberate.

Once again, if you disagree with this assessment, then what you’re saying is that NO, it wasn’t done deliberately… it happened accidentally! And again, I’m saying that’s even scarier! Because that means the antibiotic contamination of our world is now at such an extreme level of overkill that a strain of e.coli in the wild can be saturated with eight different classes of antibiotics to the point where it naturally develops into its own deadly superbug. If that’s what people believe, then that’s almost a scarier theory than the bioengineering explanation!

A new era has begun: Bioweapons in your food

But in either case — no matter what you believe — the simple truth is that the world is now facing a new era of global superbug strains of bacteria that can’t be treated with any known pharmaceutical. They can all, of course, be readily killed with colloidal silver, which is exactly why the FDA and world health regulators have viciously attacked colloidal silver companies all these years: They can’t have the public getting its hands on natural antibiotics that really work, you see. That would defeat the whole purpose of making everybody sick in the first place.

In fact, these strains of e.coli superbugs can be quite readily treated with a combination of natural full-spectrum antibiotics from plants such as garlic, ginger, onions and medicinal herbs. On top of that, probiotics can help balance the flora of the digestive tract and “crowd out” the deadly e.coli that might happen by. A healthy immune system and well-functioning digestive tract can fight off an e.coli superbug infection, but that’s yet another fact the medical community doesn’t want you to know. They much prefer you to remain a helpless victim lying in the hospital, waiting to die, with no options available to you. That’s “modern medicine” for ya. They cause the problems that they claim to treat, and then they won’t even treat you with anything that works in the first place.

Nearly all the deaths now attributable to this e.coli outbreak are easily and readily avoidable. These are deaths of ignorance. But even more, they may also be deaths from a new era of food-based bioweapons unleashed by either a group of mad scientists or an agenda-driven institution that has declared war on the human population.

Additional developments on this e.coli outbreak

• 22 fatalities have so far been reported, with 2,153 people now sickened and possibly facing kidney failure.

• An agricultural ministry in Germany said that even though they now know the source of the outbreak is a German sprout farm, they are still not lifting their warnings for people to avoid eating tomatoes and lettuce. In other words, keep the people afraid!

• “The German variant of E coli, known as O104, is a hybrid of the strains that can cause bloody diarrhoea and kidney damage called ‘hemolytic uremic syndrome’.” (http://www.independent.ie/world-new…)

• A total of ten European nations have reported outbreaks of this e.coli strain, mostly from people who had visited northern Germany.

• The following story is in German, and it hints that the e.coli outbreak might have been a terrorist attack (http://www.aerztezeitung.de/medizin…). Yeah, a terrorist attack by the drug companies upon innocent people, as usual…

Learn more:  http://www.naturalnews.com/032622_ecoli_bioengineering.html#ixzz1OYlXsve4

RELATED ARRTICLES:

• Germany steps up hunt for deadly E.coli source
• Three suspected cases of mystery e-coli in US

Links to relevant articles: 

Deadly E.coli outbreak in Europe caused by rare strain of bacterium, UN confirms ~ link

E.coli Outbreak Linked to Aggressive New Strain ~ link

EHEC: Update from Spiegel ~ link

Killer germ very antibiotic resistant: German researchers ~ link

Europe E.coli is toxic new strain, trade row grows ~ link

Killer E.coli strain described as deadliest yet ~ link

E.coli in Europe outbreak never seen before - with video ~ link

WHO: E.coli outbreak cause by new strain ~link

Never seen before E.coli strain hits Europe - video ~ link

Outbreak in Europe blamed on 'super-toxic' strain ~ link

UK confirms E.coli cases linked to German outbreak - with video ~ link

Cucumbers cleared, sources of E.coli not yet found ~ link

Thanks to Dr. Bill Deagle, MD, for his advice and to various readers of my blog for sending me links and information and to Lord Stirling for post.

Pool Rules – Diseases You Can Catch In The Pool

Content provided by:

Are there Communicable Diseases Swimming in your Public Pool?

By Robert Shmerling, M.D., Harvard Health Publications

The other day, the "pool monitor" of a public pool in our neighborhood wandered around reminding people to shower before getting into the water. For anyone asking why, she simply pointed to the conspicuous sign, posted, as required by public health regulations, that read: "All persons are required to take a cleansing shower bath before entering the pool."

The next rule caught my eye, as well: "No person with a communicable disease is allowed to use the pool."

When I first read these rules, they seemed reasonable enough. But as I thought about it, the logic was difficult to understand. What diseases or conditions are being prevented by these health codes? Many communicable diseases are not spread through water (for example, the common cold or most sexually transmitted diseases). How do these rules promote health?

Swimming by the rules

It's probably reassuring to most people to know that everyone is required to shower before getting in the pool and that a person who might pass a disease to you or your kids is not allowed in the water. Yet, it struck me that, as written, these rules were unlikely to be effective and would prohibit many from swimming who pose no threat to the health of others.

For example, a number of important communicable diseases; hepatitis B, hepatitis C and HIV come to mind; are not known to be spread by simply swimming in a pool with others. It would be unfair and would accomplish nothing to exclude people with these diseases from swimming pools. Never mind that these rules are probably impossible to enforce; my own observation is that they are often ignored.

I looked into what these rules were intended to accomplish, and here's what I found. First, the "communicable diseases" are only those known to be spread from person to person via contaminated water. More specifically, the regulations are aimed at preventing diseases caused by organisms that are shed in the feces of an infected person and can spread to another person who ingests contaminated water. The particular concerns are bacterial infections, (Shigella, Campylobacter, Salmonella, certain types of E. coli), hepatitis A and parasitic infections (Cryptosporidium and Giardia). A person who has been diagnosed with one of these infections should not swim in a pool in which others swim until the infection has resolved and recovery is complete. The time required to eliminate an infection and to no longer be considered infectious varies, depending on the organism, but waiting at least two weeks after complete recovery before swimming in a public pool is recommended. In the world of infectious diseases, there are relatively few that are relevant to your swimming decisions.

Now, about that pre-swim shower…

The reason a shower is required before entering the pool is that an infectious organism could be living on your skin and the shower is intended to reduce or eliminate the risk that you will expose others in the pool to that organism.

However, for those people who do take a shower before entering a pool, it is not likely that the quick rinse or even use of soap and water will do much to change what must be a very low risk in the first place. The acid level and chlorine in swimming pools already kills most infectious organisms (though cryptosporidia is a notable exception); and other than infections such as those listed above (that are spread by water contaminated with feces), most organisms living on your skin are of no risk to others anyway.

Why do health codes continue to require this?

It is possible that health codes and regulations were created in response to diseases that used to be more common than they are today. In addition, the understanding of disease may be better now than when these rules were established. For example, before different types of hepatitis were identified and their means of spread understood, it may have been more difficult to prevent their spread, so restricting pool access may have seemed reasonable at the time. There may have been fear of people who were ill, and sickness may be associated with poor hygiene, so requiring showers of everyone may have been appealing to those charged with overseeing public health. Finally, it may also be a matter of "inertia" once rules are set up, it's harder to change them over time than to simply leave them in place, especially if they don't seem to be causing much harm. It's hard to say that requiring showers of everyone entering a pool even if it's unnecessary is particularly harmful. On the other hand, if a person with HIV is kept out of the pool because of his or her "communicable disease," that's a discriminatory misunderstanding of the regulations' purpose.

Conclusions

It can be difficult to understand what your own doctor is saying but at least you have the opportunity to ask questions to clarify the message. But when the message is coming from your "public health doctor," it's not so easy to ask questions or to apply a one-size-fits-all rule to your own particular situation. Of course, that's the challenge of establishing public health codes and regulations to effectively protect health with rules that are not too constrictive and are applied fairly to all.

Perhaps the most important thing to know about preventing the spread of illness while swimming is to avoid the pool if you have a diarrheal infection or have been diagnosed with one of the waterborne communicable diseases mentioned above. If you don't have any of those illnesses and are otherwise healthy, you may still have no choice rules are rules but speaking from a strictly medical point of view, there's little reason to shower before swimming unless that's what you like to do.

Copyright © 2009 by the Presidents and Fellows of Harvard College. Used with permission of StayWell. All rights reserved. Harvard Medical School does not approve or endorse any products on the page. Harvard is the sole creator of its editorial content, and advertisers are not allowed to influence the language or images Harvard uses.

Posted: True Health Is True Wealth