The Black Death moved relentlessly northwards through Europe like a giant wave. Its progress was very rapid in the early stages, from December 1347 to June 1348, when it spread through Italy and France, Spain and the Balkans. Crossing the Alps and Pyrenees, it eventually reached Sweden, Norway, and the Baltic by December 1350. Many villages were completely depopulated and disappeared, but the progression of the disease included zones of total avoidance as well. The Black Death stayed in Europe for the next three centuries, disappearing finally in the seventeenth century in 1670 when it was apparently at the peak of its power.

Why did it appear, spread, and disappear as it did? A new and unique virus formed under conditions facilitated by cosmic impacts could be lethal to a population that is not previously immunized (here, natural immunity is intended) against it. But as immunization is acquired within a population, the course of the disease or the disease itself can change.

There is compelling evidence that the Black Death was not an outbreak of bubonic plague, but was in fact caused by a hemorrhagic virus. This case is synthesized in the book Return of the Black Death [8], in which Susan Scott and Christopher Duncan from Liverpool University carefully put all the available clues together, tracking the plague from its first appearance out of nowhere and chronicling its unprecedented catastrophic effects on European civilization - death on a scale that is unimaginable, but could very well happen again, at any time.

The United States has a 32.2 percent C-section rate, a maternal mortality rate of approximately 16 per 100,000 (which means more than 600 women die from childbirth-related causes in America each year), and an infant mortality rate of six deaths for every 1000 live births, a rate so high compared to other developed countries that the Washington Post has called it a "national embarrassment." We also have the highest maternal mortality rate of any country in the industrialized world. Though Flowers tells me they are still compiling the most recent statistics, out of over 2,800 births, The Farm has never lost a mother and have had a single-digit number of infant mortalities.

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"This is a real danger zone, " says Dr. Diane Harper.

Why might you care about what she says? Dr. Harper is one of the world's top experts on the Human Papilloma virus, HPV, which can lead to cervical cancer. In fact, she's one of the leading scientists the pharmaceutical industries turned to for help to conduct clinical trials - including those that led to approval by the US Food and Drug Administration of Gardasil - and the recommendations that followed.

According to Dr. Harper, "the vaccine has not been out long enough for us to have post marketing surveillance to really understand what all the potential side effects are going to be. We feel it is very safe." However, she adds, "We don't know yet what's going to happen when millions of doses of the vaccine have been given and to put in process a place that says you must have this vaccine, it means you must be part of a big public experiment. So we can't do that until we have more data."

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