_logo_phere . . .Takin’ the “BS” out’a the BlogoSphere

As Letterman recently observed, since marrying his latest trophy bimbo — what? his 5th? — Rush Limbaugh is on a Viagra drip.  But he still has time to show the world how ignorant he is.

I recently got one of those be-a-patriot-and-pass-it-on Emails from a Numballs fan, who also happens to be one of my best friends, which is the only reason I read it.  It showed the graph below, which was produced by the  “official climatologist” for EIB, Numballs’ phony “Excellence In Broadcasting” carnival.  Read more . . .

Environment — 018

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Helen Thomas, of late retired, famously suggested that the Jews should “get the hell” out of Israel.  Far less known were the comments of NY Sen. Chuck Schumer a day or so later, in which he told the Jewish Orthodox Union that Israel should continue to strangle Gaza.  UC Irvine history professor, Mark LeVine, has brilliantly juxtaposed these extreme comments.  Link

About the time LeVine’s opinion piece came out in Al Jazeera, a member of the Canadian Parliament, Libby Davies from Vancouver, made a public comment about the Israeli occupation of Palestine that set off fireworks from the Canadian Neo-cons, including Zionist-butt-kisser Prime Minister Harper.

That evening Steven Quinn on CBC radio interviewed Denis Pilon, a political scientist at the University of Victoria.  Quinn asked some very relevant questions about why it is that any mention of Israel in a negative tone brings such exaggerated reactions from politicians — even non-Jews.  Pilon struggled for an answer, and never did succeed.  He failed, for instance, to speculate on the money politicians receive from Jewsish donors and organizations and what effect that has on reactions.  But Quinn’s questions were pointed and Pilon’s answers were honest — trying to understand why it is that any criticism of Israel brings such outrage.  The Pilon interview can be heard here.  Link

LeVine and Pilon are right, Israel has an amazing knack for shutting down negative dialog.  My explanation for this phenom is the time-worn, jaded one: Jews control so much of what gets put out by the media, they can pretty well be sure their arguments are heard first, last, and loudest.  But not here on the LogoPhere where everybody’s BS gets equal airtime.

As for Chuck Schumer — for anyone who had any doubts, his let’s strangle Gaza sentiments prove he is a American Jew representing Israel in the US Congress.  Had any congressman made a comment about strangling Israel, he would have been tarred and feathered and run out of town — the way Helen Thomas was.  The fact that the US media ignored Schumer’s apartheid statements tells us all we need to know about who runs the media.

– The Gutter Grunt
P/I — 002.

Tags: Palestine/Israel, Israeli BS // Add Comment »

It goes almost without saying that the Israelis will do anything it takes to spin the May31.2010 Israeli Defense Forces attack on the Mavi Marmara in order to dampen the growing backlash of negative world opinion.  Violence followed by deceit and lying is Israeli’s modus operandi and it’s one of the reasons the world is beginning to detest them. Here is an example.

Read . . .

P/I — 001

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The CDC is falsifying the H1N1 data it presents on its website.  They are trying to make the public believe that the weekly body count is 75, when it is actually hundreds.  They are trying to make the public believe that the cumulative body count is considerably less than it is — exact number, who knows?  They are playing hide-the-ball with the data.

These are serious allegations, but they are too complex to explain here.  Besides, I can’t paste the CDC graphs I need to prove the point.

I know what you’re thinkin’ — the ole’ Gutter Grunt is cooking up another conspiracy theory. Over at the mother site I have gone all out and published the CDC’s own data and statements.  I show you their falsified data, and I give you all the links.   You can see it here, and then make up your own mind.

Tags: H1N1 // Add Comment »

I lived in New Zealand for about a decade, and so things from and about NZ tend to catch my eye.  This one sure did – it’s a lecture given in 2005 by Canterbury University history professor, Geoffery Rice. Prof Rice published a book about the 1918 flu; it’s called Black November.  This lecture is a synopsis of his book as it relates to the experiences of this small city in NZ during Nov. 1918.

The complete lecture is posted on FluTrackers.  http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=19396

If you want to get an idea of what the near future looks like, this is mandatory reading. More here . . .  

Tags: H1N1 // Add Comment »

I’m not going to crunch any numbers in this H1N1 post.  Nope, all verbal.  In fact, I’m not even going to write this post.  I’m going to lift it all from recent US government sources.

Here are excerpts from the CDC and from Homeland Security’s  Water and Wastewater Annex to the Guide for Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources. (“Annex”)  You can download the whole W/W/ Annex here: http://wwn-online.com/Whitepapers/2009/08/Flu-Pandemix-Annex/Asset.aspx

More here . . .

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In my last post, July 25th, I ran a few numbers from the CDC and the UK Ministry of Health and came to the conclusion that the next 6 months or so could see 800,000 US deaths from swine flu. This would be the largest fatal event in US history. The prediction was based on an infection rate of 40% and a kill rate of 0.7%. If either of these numbers is off, the guess is off.

Since then I have been scanning the data-horizon to see if any information is coming to light that would suggest my conclusions are way off. I get data primarily from the European CDC, which gives a daily update of European and world data. http://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/Default.aspx

I also check out the US CDC for weekly reports. http://cdc.gov/h1n1flu/update.htm . And I find that SwineFlu.org has some very worthwhile on-going discussions that often lead to other sources of data.

Putting the bottom line here near the top, I cannot say that I have found any compelling reasons to modify my predictions, either up or down, but I am having trouble believing that 40% of the population will become infected.

You only need 2 numbers to follow what’s going on — one number represents how efficiently the virus spreads, and the other represents how efficiently the virus kills the people it does infect. Unfortunately, these numbers are all over the board.

The first number is generally presented as the percent of people in the population that get infected. The complication is that this can be expressed as the total number of people ever infected divided by the total population, or the total number of people presently infected divided by the total population. Mostly, the total infection rate is given. At the present, the number that seems to be the most accepted is that H1N1 will infect 40% of the total population over the entire course of the pandemic.

The killing efficiency of a virus is the second number of interest. One would think that the most dangerous virus is the one that kills with 100% efficiency. Not true — sort of. Influenza is a disease that runs its course very fast – days or a couple weeks, as opposed to, say, HIV, which takes years to kill the person. So if a flu virus kills 100% of the people it infects, it is killing off people faster than it can spread. It ends up as a flash in the pan. From a Darwinian point of few, such a virus is a loser.

A far more dangerous flu virus is one that kills only a moderate fraction of people it infects. The walking infected then spread the disease around. That’s H1N1.

There are two ways to quantify killing efficiency. One is the number of dead per capita. The other is the number of dead per infected persons. This second number is called the Case Fatality Rate (CFR). It is the most widely used. A CFR of 20% for instance says that the virus is killing 20% of those it infects and the remaining 80% are still able to transmit the disease. Sometimes CFR includes a time period, such as 25% per year. I don’t see that being done much with H1N1.

In my previous calculations I used a CFR of 0.7%. I got this by dividing the total US H1N1 deaths by the total cases reported as of July 25th. (Based on the latest available data, Aug10.09, the US CFR has increased to 1.2%. The CDC stopped reporting cases as of Aut10.09, so it’s no longer possible to track the number for the US.)

The European CDC has been reporting a much lower CFR for Europe – about 0.15%, or 10x lower than the US. I think the best explanation for the discrepancy is that the US is underestimating the number of cases, which results in an overestimation of CFR. Currently in Australia the CFR is running about 0.4%.

At any rate, we have a CFR range of 0.15% to 1.2%. This is interesting because estimates of past H1N1 pandemics range from 0.1% (1957 — a mild pandemic) to 2.5% (1918 — a deadly pandemic).

Compare the H1N1 figures to the estimates of avian flu (H5N1) CFR of 14% to 60% and you’ll understand why avian flu is such a scary prospect. http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/62/6/555

The 1918 H1N1 pandemic ran its course in three waves or peaks. In terms of deaths, the second peak, P2, was by far the worse. And so it is very significant that the CFR for P2 was 2.5%, while the CFR for P1 was only 0.5%, which is not a bad estimate for our present CFR. For some reason the killing efficiency of the 1918 virus increased 4-5x over the course of a couple months. The CFR for P3 dropped to about 1.5%.

In these terms, the goal of Tamiflu is to reduce the CFR. Tamiflu doesn’t keep anyone from getting the virus, it just shortens the course and, presumably, prevents deaths.

Of course, killing efficiency doesn’t tell the whole story. If the CFR of a virus is 50% but only 2 people get infected, then the situation is very dire for one of them, but not for the whole population. The first big question as to H1N1 is what percentage of its victims will die. The second big question is how many victims will there be.

I have no idea where the currently proposed number of 40% infection rate comes from. If you look at the current reported numbers of infections in different countries, none of them are above 1%. While I have no problem with the prediction that H1N1 could kill 2% of its targets, I just can’t get my mind around the possibility that the infection rate will go from 0.05% to 40% over the next few months.

BTW, vaccines work to decrease infection rate. They don’t help people who are infected to survive, but they reduce the number of infected people. So the pharmacological strategy is that Tamiflu lowers CFR and the vaccine lowers the transmission rate.

And so the world waits . . . with fingers crossed.

Tags: H1N1 // Add Comment »

As reported in my last post, in early July the UK Health Secretary, Andy Burnham, publicly predicted that Britain could see 100,000 new cases of swine flu PER DAY by September.   Unless you monitor the UK media, you weren’t going to see that startling figure.  So far as I know, the US media have virtually ignored it.  The CDC sat on it, too, until yesterday, Friday, Jul24.09, when CDC spokesman Tom Skinner disclosed in an interview with AP that the swine flu infection rate in the US was expected to reach 40%.

40%.  Ho hum.  Big deal.  According to media reports, H1N1 has been characterized as fairly “mild,” as these things go.  We keep reading that the symptoms are mild and that the few fatalities that have occurred have mostly been in individuals with “underlying” health problems.  But if you’re willing to do the numbers, that CDC prediction of 40% infection rate is a pretty good reason to poop yourself.  Grab the TP and I’ll show you some of those numbers:

Two other figures from the CDC are required to calculate expected total US deaths in the next few months.  As of Jul23.09 the total reported cases in the US is 43,771.  Total fatalities: 302.  So the reported fatality rate as per infections so far is 0.7%, which is actually on the moderate to high side for past flu pandemics.

Based on this fatality rate we can calculate the chance that a presently non-infected person will die from H1N1.  First calculate the total expected cases in the US, which is 40% of 300 million total population => 120 million Americans will become infected.  Of those, 0.7% will die – that’s 840,000, which is 0.3% of the total population.  OK, not too bad, you’ve got 997 chances out of 1000 of surviving this monster.

Doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that 840,000 is over twice the number of Americans killed in WWII, and about 1.5 times the combined number of Americans and Confederates killed during the Civil War.  Taking into account the changes in population, that 0.3% is about the same figure as your chances of dying in WWII as of 1941 (400,000 deaths out of a population of about 131 million) and 10x higher than your chances of getting killed in Vietnam as of 1965  (58,000 dead out of a population of about 200 million).

Still no big deal?  After all, you were a 3 year old female in 1965 so your chances of dying in Vietnam were really O%.  How about some predicted daily rates – hold on to your seats.  I don’t know what a good figure would be for the duration of this flu season, but according to Google Flu Trends, flu seasons last about 6 months.  180 days.  Based on that estimate, the average new cases rate in the US will be 666,666 new cases PER DAY.  The average death rate will be 4,667 PER DAY, which is about 21 times higher than the average daily death rate of American servicemen in WWII (~220/day) and about 1550 times higher than the average daily death rate for American servicemen during the Vietnam War (~3/day).

Note that although these rates are extrapolated from the single 40% infection rate the CDC put out yesterday, the calculated 666,666 daily infection rate is in fair agreement with the UK figure, given that the population of the UK is about 1/5 that of the US.  Oddly, the UK figure for their expected death rate of 40 per day is way low.  Extrapolating from these US figures, the UK should expect more than 200 deaths per day from swine flu.

Even if these estimates are waaaay off, this situation is still very serious, and the US government is doing a piss poor job of warning the public about what is coming.  Basically, all we’ve had is an off-the-cuff comment by a CDC spokesman during an interview with a news reporter.  Think about it: twice as many Americans could die between November and April from swine flu than died in the whole 5 years of WWII.  Hello?  Wolf?  Chris?  Katie?  Barack? Anybody home???? There’s a story here . . .

You have to go to the UK media to get a sense of the seriousness of this mess. For instance, the UK has warned its commercial sector to be prepared for a 20% illness rate for the duration of the flu season.  Obviously, everybody is not going to call in sick with swine flu the same week.  Over the next 6 months there will be a rolling disabled list in all sectors.  And because this virus is  targeting the 15 - 44 year old crowd, just keeping the country running is going to be problematic.  Look at the flight controllers.  The FAA is having trouble as it is keeping enough flight controllers at their screens.  We’ve already had one situation this year in which air space over North Carolina had to be shut down so an over-worked flight controller could take a break.  What happens when 20% of all cops, firemen, air traffic controllers, truck drivers, grocery store employees, utilities workers, teachers, and military personnel call in sick over a 6 month period?  Shouldn’t the government start getting the public prepared for these possibilities?

The health officials so far seem to be hanging all their hope on technology to bend these numbers away from disaster.  Tamiflu and vaccines, to be specific.  But the chances of Tamiflu containing this virus are nil.  There will be a large population of drug-resistant virus that the drug won’t touch, and that fraction will expand rapidly.  The more Tamiflu you administer, the less effective it will be.  As for the vaccine, NPR reported on July 20th that production of the H1N1 vaccine is not going well — just at the point in time when we need it to be going very well.  Doris Bucher, of the NY Medical College, whose lab created the pandemic virus seed strain from which vaccines are produced, told NPR that manufacturers are getting very poor yields.  Pass the TP, please.

The meta-message from the silence we get from the CDC, your president, and your government is that you’re going to have to look after yourselves.  Personally, I’m watching the Obama girls.  If their daddy takes them out of school and quietly moves them to safety in the next few weeks – such as the post-flu season Southern Hemisphere – then we will know the shoe is about to drop.

Tags: H1N1 // Add Comment »

July 05, 2009

Well, folks my blood pressure peaked again this week, and not because of Pailin’s resignation.

Did you see the UK Health Secretary’s pig-flu warning? Argentina’s weekly figures? The New England Journal of Medicine?

The UK is predicting 100,000 new cases of pig flu PER DAY by the end of August — that’s August THIS YEAR. As in 60 DAYS hence!!!! (Why don’t they say “by September” instead of “by the end of August”?)

They are predicting 40 deaths a DAY by “the end of September;” i.e. by October. Here’s a link:
The 40 deaths number is way, way low relative to the new cases number — it’s only 0.04%. I believe CDC estimates for flu death rates generally range from 0.5% to 2.0% of cases. Even the lower figure of 0.5% would mean 500 deaths per day in the UK. Don’t even want to think about the upper figure. Don’t even want to think about the US figures will be, but based strictly on population, the UK number converts to 500,000 new cases a day for the US.

According to the Independent article above, the UK govt has already cut off treatment for infected folks. If you have symptoms, you have to quarantine yourself and call the pharmacy, which can’t really do anything but send aspirin.

And you know how governments are. If the UK government is sending out this message, . . . well, you know it must be 5x worse than what they tell the public. Most governments, including Obama, are keeping the lid on this, but it’s coming up on us real quick now. I’m just glad the US has Homeland Security to get the country through this. Ha, ha, ha, ha. BTW, I wonder where Michael Brown is.

But the bad news continued last week . . . in Argentina, the number of new cases jumped from 1000 the previous week to 100,000 last week.
And there was more . . . the New England Journal of Medicine published the first analysis of the pig-flu cases in Mexico. This is probably the most detailed analysis of the new H1N1 demographics so far.

Similarities with the 1918 pig-flu pandemic that killed 50 million people (no one seems to have a number for the pigs) are what makes today’s pandemic scary. The 1918 pandemic also started off as little more than a whimper in the N. Hemisphere spring, smoldered during the summer, and exploded during the flu season. In 1918, the victims, both in terms of infections and deaths, were disproportionately young adults.

The Mexican study shows the same pattern. Normally, the bulk of seasonal flu infections (60%) and almost all deaths are distributed among those younger than 5 and older than 60, in fact, mostly older than 80. The age group 15- 44 represents only 8% of the seasonal cases. But the pig-flu cases in Mexico, 64% of the cases were in the 15-44 age range, which is similar to what people think the 1918 flu looked like. There are no accurate numbers for 1918.

Tags: H1N1 // Add Comment »

Last year the Va. “expert panel” on BS checked in with its final report. There has been a fair amount of media coverage and Email chatter among sludge-warriors, but mostly over the way Synagro’s Virginia Biosolids Council put the spin on the Report’s conclusions.

I have had a close look at the Report, and it ain’t too good, in my opinion. Here’s a link to a long spew (Spew #16) on it back at the Mother Site: http://www.something-stinks.com/Feb09.htm

To re-state my conclusion verbatim:

“When has so much time been so badly wasted on such a listless and meaningless endeavor as this? Even by a state government. Hardly a single valid conclusion or useful recommendation in the whole 61 pages. In short: The HJR 694 report is as helpful as pigeon poop on the pump handle. I could have produced a far more informative, accurate, and helpful report by assigning the task to a group of high school students as a joint senior research project. But the troubling aspect is the deceit.”

This Report was cooked by the sludgers and then spun by Synagro. What a tag-team.

At the bottom of my rant I link to objections to the Report that were submitted jointly by two members of the panel: Henry Staudinger and Alan Rubin. If you don’t have time to wade through my drivel, drop down to the bottom and have a look at the way Satudinger/Rubin slammed the Report. That is definitely worth your time. (I would give you a direct link, but it’s been so long since I’ve fired up WordPress I don’t remember how to add the hyperlinks.)

Tags: Research, Legislation, Spin, Virginia, Sludge // Add Comment »