Plagues

China's African swine flu outbreak spreads, 'will move markets and influence geopolitics for years to come'

RT
Fri, 03 May 2019 09:52 UTC

A minor outbreak of African swine fever among some 400 pigs in Shenyang in northeastern China is now threatening the global food supply chain and may increase pork prices for years.

Despite a mass cull, a blockade to prevent any further transmission and a government declaration that the outbreak of the particularly nasty strain of swine fever had been "effectively controlled," China, the country with half of the world's pigs, failed to stop the spread of the disease in time. Domestically, this contagion is already massive: China has a $128 billion pork industry and is third-highest global consumer of pork.

In the truest sense of the word, the outbreak has already gone viral, spreading to Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia and farther afield. The strain of African swine fever kills virtually every pig it infects with a bloody death reminiscent of Ebola, although it is not known to infect humans.

Comment: While the best solution to problems like these likely lies in changing the way farming is practiced, perhaps cooperation between countries to make up for the short fall could help mitigate the situation; for example, Russia is becoming well known for it's sustainable farming methods and has offered up land for those willing to use it productively. Until then, as with the increasingly erratic seasons and the resulting crop failures, outbreaks like these will likely become a regular occurrence:

A Book Review - Prehistory Decoded

Cosmic Tusk
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 01:13 UTC

Any follower of Catastrophism the last few years has seen extraordinary confirmations of ancient cataclysm and novel contributions to our way of thinking. To the Tusk, three revelations have characterized the period: The discovery of an extraordinarily youthful late Pleistocene crater in Greenland; a series of popular, comprehensive and unrefuted major journal articles which exquisitely defined hard evidence for the Younger Dryas impact catastrophe; and the singular contribution of Dr. Martin Sweatman, as made in his fabulous book, Prehistory Decoded.

Dr. Sweatman has done our planet and history a tremendous favor by writing Prehistory Decoded. By employing the hard science of probability, he has managed to demystify the world's very earliest and most mysterious art.

Prehistory Decoded begins by documenting Sweatman's initial discovery, reported worldwide in 2015, of an empirical method for decoding the world's first art using pattern matching and statistics. Guess what? The code is a memorial and date stamp for our favorite subject here: the Younger Dryas Catastrophe, and its associated Taurid meteor traumas.

Sweatman has managed to produce a synthesis explanation for the previously indecipherable succession of artistic animal figures at Gobekeli Tepe in Turkey, Chauvet Cave in France, Lascaux Cave in France, and Çatalhöyük in Turkey, among others. Unsurprisingly to the open minded, the ancient artists are communicating using a universally handy and persistent reference set: Stars. Or, more precisely, the appearance of constellations as adjusted over time according earth's precession.

(Don't you love the internet? One hyperlink and no need to explain all that!)

It seems reasonable then to the Tusk that, if there were a code, someone, somewhere, would break the code soon given the global availability and intense interest in the information. In fact, if I waited much longer without someone cracking it, the Tusk may have become convinced the oldest art is simply stunning cave paintings, and heavy carved rocks, with no relevant common narrative (other than horses are pretty, and moving rocks is cool).

Flea infestations triple due to UK's mild winter

Daily Mail
Thu, 25 Apr 2019 00:53 UTC

Calls to pest controllers surged in the first three months of the year, with reports of fleas up by 198 per cent on the same period in 2018 and of flies by 120 per cent (stock image)

Fleas and flies are normally a blight of the summer but infestations have begun early this year because of climate change, according to experts.

Calls to pest controllers surged in the first three months of the year, with reports of fleas up by 198 per cent on the same period in 2018 and of flies by 120 per cent.

The blame has been laid on milder winters allowing the insects to emerge earlier to breed.

This February was the warmest on record, according to the Met Office, with temperatures soaring as high as 20C.

David Cross, head of Rentokil's technical training academy, said: 'There's been a sharp increase in the number of flea and fly inquiries out of season - they are coming out much earlier than we would expect.

Comment: While it is true that, for some areas, this winter has been unusually warm and dry, other areas have seen a continuation of the record breaking cold. Because, overall, our planet is seeing serious cooling and these anomalous and extreme weather patterns are congruent with those that occurred during the last little ice age, and do not correlate with any global warming 'models'. Lest we forget that it was only last year that the UK was being battered with bitter cold by the 'beast from the east':

Deadly swine fever spreads throughout China threatening massive pork shortage

RT
Mon, 22 Apr 2019 21:32 UTC

© Reuters / Hallie Gu
Workers in protective suits are seen at a checkpoint near a farm where African swine fever was detected in Hebei province, China on February 26, 2019.

African swine fever has spread all across China's mainland, threatening the country's entire sprawling hog industry and the global supply of pork. The epidemic broke out nine months ago but still appears to be uncontained.

It has now reached China's southernmost province of Hainan - which had thus far been spared from swine fever. Over 140 pigs have already died from the disease at six farms in the province, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said on Sunday.

The outbreak of the virus began last August and has now spread to all 31 provinces of mainland China, with more than 100 cases reported over the past few months across the country. The virus is highly contagious and deadly for pigs, it causes high fever, massive hemorrhaging in internal organs and, ultimately, death. While, fortunately, the African swine fever does not affect humans as such, it has heavily affected the massive pork industry of the country.

Comment: Food prices across the planet are already rising because of the increasingly erratic seasons and extreme weather events, animal pandemics could result in a catastrophe for our food supply:

'Urgent threat': Mysterious, deadly fungus Candida auris sweeps the globe

New Straits Times
Sun, 07 Apr 2019 11:01 UTC

Candida auris is so tenacious, in part, because it is impervious to major antifungal medications, making it a new example of one of the world's most intractable health threats: the rise of drug-resistant infections.(stock image for illustration purposes)

In May, an elderly man was admitted to the Brooklyn, New York City branch of Mount Sinai Hospital for abdominal surgery. A blood test revealed that he was infected with a newly discovered germ as deadly as it was mysterious. Doctors swiftly isolated him in the intensive care unit.

The germ, a fungus called Candida auris, preys on people with weakened immune systems, and it is quietly spreading across the globe. Over the past five years, it has hit a neonatal unit in Venezuela, swept through a hospital in Spain, forced a prestigious British medical centre to shut down its intensive care unit, and taken root in India, Pakistan and South Africa.

Recently, C. auris reached New York, New Jersey and Illinois in the United States, leading the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to add it to a list of germs deemed "urgent threats."

Comment: It may be that there are other factors contributing to the rise and the virulence of these outbreaks:

Other recent outbreaks of note:

Nearly 100 species of frogs, toads and salamanders wiped out by fungus

Adam Vaughan
New Scientist
Thu, 28 Mar 2019 12:00 UTC

The extinction of 90 species of amphibians can be pinned on a deadly fungal disease, according to the most comprehensive exercise yet to map its impact.

In total, chytridiomycosis contributed to the decline of more than 500 species of frogs, toads and salamanders, or nearly 7 per cent of all amphibian species, since the disease first emerged in the 1980s.

The toll means the disease has wrought the greatest loss of biodiversity by any pathogen, on an order of magnitude greater than other wildlife diseases, such as the bat-killing white-nose syndrome.

"It's crazy what this pathogen does," says Trenton Garner from the Zoological Society of London, one of the paper's authors.

Previous work has been undertaken on the spread of the disease, and regional efforts have been made to gauge its impact on frogs and other species. But the team behind the new study say it is the best effort yet to aggregate its effects globally. "It's a smoking gun that wasn't there before," says Garner.

Comment: Outbreaks of various kinds appear to be on the rise in both humans and the animal kingdom:

YDB team publishes evidence from Chile for global climate cataclysm

Cosmic Tusk
Thu, 14 Mar 2019 06:15 UTC

The main objective of this study was to test the YDB impact hypothesis by analyzing a wide range of data from the Pilauco site in southern Chile. The following conclusions show that our data and interpretations are consistent with the YDB impact hypothesis and we found no evidence that refutes the hypothesis.

(1) At Pilauco, ~12,800-year-old peaks in high-temperature Pt-rich and native-Fe spherules are comparable to similar impact-related evidence found at more than 50 YDB sites in North America, Europe, and western Asia. It appears that the YDB layer at Pilauco is coeval with similar layers found at these sites on several continents and is also possibly related to the proposed YDB impact event.

(2) Identification of the YDB layer at Pilauco greatly expands the proposed YDB proxy feld ~6,000 km farther south of the closest well-studied YDB site in Venezuela, and ~12,000 km south of the northernmost YDB site in Canada, a distance equaling ~30% of Earth's circumference.

(3) Cr-rich spherules are found in the YDB layer at Pilauco, but not found at the ~50 other sites on four continents, suggesting that one or more local impacts/airbursts occurred in the Cr-rich basaltic terrain
circa Pilauco.

#PropagandaWatch - Shoving 'climate grief' down our throats

James Corbett
Corbett Report
Wed, 13 Mar 2019 20:20 UTC

The propagandists are in overdrive shoving "climate grief" down our collective throats. And the next step in that indoctrination, the acceptance of climate eugenics to atone for our climate sins, is almost here. Join James for this week's important edition of #PropagandaWatch dissecting the dangerous lies that are being pushed in the name of the environment.

Measles outbreak rocks Madagascar

Jef Akst
New Scientist
Thu, 07 Feb 2019 22:18 UTC

© WIKIMEDIA, CDC/CYNTHIA S. GOLDSMITH; WILLIAM BELLINI
Transmission electron micrograph of a single measles virus particle.

While the US faces measles outbreaks from New York to Washington state, reigniting discussions about the risk of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children, Madagascar has been fighting the worst eruption of the disease in decades. Since October, the African island nation has seen more than 50,000 cases of the highly contagious viral infection, which has so far taken the lives of more than 300 people, mostly kids, the country's secretary general of the ministry of health tells CNN. That's more than double the numbers reported by the World Health Organization (WHO) in mid-January.

"We heard rumblings of a measles outbreak in the capital between December and January and I just knew we were going to get hit," Lon Kightlinger, a former South Dakota state epidemiologist and regular Peace Corp volunteer in Madagascar, tells CNN. "Our one doctor here, who has been [a] practicing physician for 12 years, had never seen a case of measles until a month ago. And then boom, boom, boom, they started walking through the door. And it hasn't stopped." Measles cases have now been reported in all major Madagascan towns and cities and throughout rural areas as well.

'Hundreds of thousands' of fish dead in Australia

Digital Journal
Tue, 29 Jan 2019 05:27 UTC

© ROBERT GREGORY, ROBERT GREGORY/AFP
Just weeks after up to a million fish were killed, another mass death occurred in the Murray-Darling river system.

"Hundreds of thousands" of fish have died in drought-stricken Australia in the last few days and more mass deaths are likely to occur, the authorities warned Tuesday.

Locals around the Darling River were confronted with a sea of white, as dead fish carpeted the waters near the southeastern Outback town of Menindee.

Just weeks after up to a million were killed -- with scientists pointing to low water and oxygen levels as well as possibly toxic algae -- another mass death occurred in the key agricultural region.

Inspectors from the New South Wales Department of Primary Industries have visited the site and said they found that "hundreds of thousands of fish have died".

"Further fish deaths in the Darling River are anticipated as a significant number of fish have been observed under stress," the department said in a statement.

Some 700 kilos (1,543 pounds) of dead fish were removed from the river Monday, with similar amounts expected to be collected Tuesday, it added.

The Darling River is part of the Murray-Darling River system that stretches thousands of kilometres across several states.