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

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

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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.  [Read more →]

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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.

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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 »

I guess this lawyer, Ed Hallman, of the Atlanta law firm Decker, Hallman, Barber & Briggs, has done more for the anti-BS effort than any other single individual I know. And let me just quickly follow that up by saying that I know a lot of dedicated individuals in this game. People who have committed immense amounts of time, energy, and money to the goal of ending land-application of BS, and for no other reason than to see that the right thing is done, particularly with respect to the rural people who are forced to eat BS spread all over the Atlantic Coast by Synagro, Nuti-Blend, and many smaller players. A few of these sludge-warriors do this work as a part of their job and get some remuneration, but many of them are slogging away week after week without a dime of compensation for their efforts. Every one of them is a part of the effort that will — eventually — eliminate all land application of sewage sludge in this country.

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Tags: Players, Litigation, EPA, Spin, States, Maryland // Add Comment »

The most mundane, and painful, of human maladies — a tooth ache — has led me to a testable hypothesis that wind-blown sludge-dust produces asymptomatic infections in humans (and cows and pigs). It’s all laid out over at the Mother Site.

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In my day job, which pays the web hosting fees for this blog, I’m a patent lawyer. And the reason I tell you that is to make the point that the US Patent and Trademark Office and the US EPA must be running a race to see which one can do the most damage to the country. There are real issues here that go beyond the normal incompetence we expect from large bureaucracies; there are issues of dishonesty and misleading the public and Congress.

The other thing these agencies have in common is that they are powered by b’cratic mules who, by and large, are competent and who work hard to do a good job. But the damage is done by the high-paid, nano-cephalic, nematode managers, like Jon Dudas and Margaret Peterlin in the USPTO and Stephen Johnson, John Walker, and Alan Rubin of, or formerly of, the EPA, who could screw up a one-car funeral and call it a success.

Now comes a report from the Union of Concerned Scientists telling us what David Lewis, who was the victim of career and character assassination by the EPA, has been hollaring for years: the EPA heavies gag the front line scientists who deliver scientific results that contradict EPA policy. Here is a report from the LA Times. (Thanks, Jo.) Nowhere has this scientific censorship been more of a problem than in the EPA’s suppression of evidence that the EPA’s policy of spreading BS from sea to shining sea was a real, real bad idea.

Gagging people, particularly scientists with hard data, who raise valid criticisms of government policy is the way Stalin worked. It’s the way you breed contempt and distrust of the government. It’s the way you destroy a government.

Fortunately, the US has a federal judiciary, like Judge Alaimo in the US Southern District Court of Georgia and Judge Cacheris in the US Eastern District Court of Virginia, who are more than willing to spank these dangerous governmental thugs if we can just get them into court.

Tags: Players, EPA, Spin // 1 Comment »

When I moved to Canada from Virginia, my Virginia friends said “Won’t it be good to get away from all of this sludge.” Ha, ha, ha, . . . joke’s on me. Some areas of Canada have got to be as stinking bad as anything in the US. Even Buckingham and Appomattox Counties, Virginia. Maybe we should hold a BS tournament and give a golden honey bucket to the most sludged area.

Marueen Reilly has her eye on what’s going down (literally) on both sides of the border. She publishes the e-Newsletter “Sludge Watch.” No one is more determined or more tireless in their efforts to stop the spreading of toxic sludge in Canada and the US than Maureen. My guess is that she knows as much about the subject as anyone living, and I know for sure that her observations are keener than anyone’s, and that includes the academics, who mostly seem to be just following up on her leads.

True to form, Marueen has let rip with a critique of that notorious human experiment carried out in Baltimore:

“Biosolids compost amendment for reducing soil lead hazards: a pilot study amendment and grass seeding in urban yards” by Farfel, Orlova, Chaney, Lees, Rohde, Ashley Science of the Total Environment. 340(1-3):81-95

I have published Maureen’s cutting analysis over at the Mother Site. Link here. She asks some very direct questions about the procedures used, the design, and the results of the study. Mark Farfel and Rufus Chaney ought to do themselves a favor and hire Maureen as a consultant to help them design their next far-fetched, abysmal piece of . . . research.

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I know nothing about the BS laws and regulations in North Carolina, but judging from recent Emails from Nancy Holt, a sludge warrior/victim near Burlington, N.C, the Tarheel state is even further behind in this dangerous game than Virginia is.

But on the sunny side, you have one of the top-dog b’crat MD’s taking on the uber-lame regulatory branch, and that can only be good for the citizens and bad for Synagro et al. In 2005 Douglas Campbell, head of the Occupational & Environmental Branch of the state health department sent Kim Colson supervisor of the BS Land Application Unit a copy of the health department’s report “Human Health Risk Evaluation of Land Application of Sewage Sludge/Biosolids” and a list of 5 what I would call extremely conservative recommendations regarding BS land application. Here’s a .pdf..

The recommendations are not bad, as far as they go, and the report has some quite interesting and helpful material in it. But it seems to me to be overly focused on the rate of application of nitrates and testing for them in well water. I think I would have recommended, say, testing the BS before it is spread and testing core samples from sludged land at least twice a year for about 50 different potential toxins, at a minimum.

Unlike Virginia, apparently the NC permit procedures do not require local public hearings before permits are issued. It looks like the local governments have virtually no role in the permits. This appears to me to be a clear violation of federal law — namely 33 USC 1345(e), which says that the determination of how BS is disposed of is “a local determination” — no ifs, ands, or butt-heads, Kim. At any rate, due to Nancy’s effective advocacy, NC is about to hold it’s first public hearing on land application of BS.

I’d love to be there for that one.

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When I was an avid listener of National Public Radio, I often noticed that when an interview was on a subject I knew zip about, the interviewer always seemed so brilliant and asked such pointed questions. But when the interview was on a subject within my (admittedly limited) sphere of knowledge, the interviewer seemed clueless and missed every opportunity to deflect or detect spin. An NPR interview on the Johns Hopkins human experiments on Baltimore children is a good example of the later. See my Apr 14 blog post on the experiments.

The interview, dated April 24, was conducted by Farai Chideya. Here’s a link to the audio, it’s about 12 minutes long. (Thanks Maureen) Chideya starts out interviewing John Heilprin, one of the reporters who exposed this Nazi-inspired human research with a series of AP articles, which, apparently isn’t finished yet.

Then Chideya dials into the Hopkins spin machine and gets Dr. Michael Klag, dean of the Bloomberg School of Public Health at JHU. Klag attacks the AP article on the grounds that the BS that was put in the kids’ yards was totally safe because it was Class A, which is the good stuff – Class B is the stuff to worry about. No damage, no foul. What a load of BS.

Does Chideya go after him? Does she point out that Class A sludge has the same exact risks as Class B for being contaminated with pharmaceuticals, thallium, mercury, cadmium, dioxins, drug resistance genes, or any of thousands of additional toxic metals, synthetic organics and biologicals? Does Chideya confront Klag with what Dr. Thomas Burke, who chaired the 2002 NAS report on BS and who is also a professor at the Bloomberg School of Public Health, said in the original AP article about the Class A BS that was spread in the kiddie experiments?

“There are potential pathogens and chemicals that are not in the realm of safe,” Burke told the AP. “What’s needed are more studies on what’s going on with the pathogens in sludge — are we actually removing them? The commitment to connecting the dots hasn’t been there.”

Nope, not a single pointed question. Chideya gives this Rovian spin-meister, Klag, the last word: the BS was as safe as mothers’ milk. He was, of course, talking straight to the potential jurors who are going to hear this case when Hopkins gets sued for fraud or when the researchers who conducted the experiments go on trial for child endangerment.

But now it looks like Burke, who, of course works for Klag, is being forced into line. Over at Yahoo.com LINK they have tagged the following note onto an op ed of Apr 21 titled “Of Sludge and Syphilis”:

“Update: A Kennedy Krieger Institute representative has contacted us to dispute the accuracy of the AP report cited. The materials used in the Baltimore study were Class A grade, and are sold commercially for residential use. We spoke with Thomas Burke, one of the experts cited in the original AP report, who confirmed their safety. According to Burke, his quote–and the EPA reports referenced in the article–were referring to the potential hazards of Class B sludge. No correction has yet been posted on the AP website.”

Burke’s retraction is as smelly as his boss’ spin-job. After all, in his original quote to AP Burke is asking the question of whether “we” are actually removing all of the pathogens from the sludge. Well . . . hello – Class A is the only sludge in which any attempt is made to reduce pathogens to acceptable levels. Furthermore, the whole AP interview was about Class A. There was never any confusion about what class was put down. So of course Burke was referring to Class A.

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