Struggle to contain 1957 influenza virus

[Celebration]

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/13/health/main687713.shtml

"CBS/AP) Scientists around the world were scrambling to prevent the possibility of a pandemic after a nearly 50-year-old killer influenza virus was sent to thousands of labs, a decision that one researcher described as "unwise."

"It's very important these samples be destroyed very, very rapidly," Dr. Klaus Stohr of the World Health Organization told CBS Radio News.

Nearly 5,000 labs in 18 countries, received the virus from a U.S. company that supplies kits used for quality control tests."

Conspiracy theorist on Coast to Coast AM speculated that this is yet another attempt to frighten us into getting flu shots next year.

[tanyev]

1. Frighten us into getting flu shots?

Heck, this could be an attempt to frighten us into doing just about anything.

[donsu]

2. here's another article on the subject

http://www.counterpunch.com/lindorff04132005.html

How "Socialist" Medical Lab in Canada Saved the World from a New Flu Pandemic
A Sickening Error

-snip-

And how was this accidental terror "device" detected?

Not by the alert folks at Tom Ridge's or Mike Chertoff's Homeland Security Department, but by an alert technician working for the "socialist health care system" in Manitoba, Canada, who tested the virus in the kit and determined that it was the same strain of flu virus that caused a worldwide flu pandemic in 1957 and who immediately alerted the World Health Organization and the U.S. Center for Disease Control.

The alert Canadian lab detected and identified the virus sample on March 25, but thousands of the samples have been shipped over the past six months.

-snip-

Compounding the irony of this still active threat (hundreds of the shipped test kits are still unaccounted for) is the fact that years of cuts in public health spending, with the resulting shuttering of public clinics in poor neighborhoods, years of cuts in Medicaid funding for low-income families, and the ongoing trend of companies dropping health coverage of their employees (every year for the past four years, another four percent of U.S. employers terminate health benefits for employees, while many more drop coverage for dependents), are leaving millions of Americans with no access to a physician. This situation makes it all the more likely that any flu epidemic, when it strikes, will spread like wildfire in the US, as people will be less likely to get treatment early and more likely to continue working and transmitting their disease to others
-snip-
---------------------------

[Ian David]

3. The three major vaccine producers all have same-sex partner benefits

Please tell anti-gay fundamentalists to boycott flu vaccines, unless they support the homosexual agenda.

Tell them vaccinations are for fags!

[Celebration]

4. More Discussion here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=3478368#3478464

[Celebration]

5. now made the greatest page in general discussion

deserves it

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3479258