Quebec woman dies after contracting H1N1 after vaccination

Yup, you read that right, two days after receiving the H1N1 vaccination she contracted the H1N1 virus dying 6 days later.

A 42-year-old Quebec woman has died from complications resulting from the H1N1 virus.

She had also received the H1N1 vaccination on Oct. 29, two days before coming down with symptoms of the flu.

Here is another story:

A 42-year-old Quebec woman has died from complications after receiving the H1N1 vaccination two days before coming down with symptoms of the flu.

She had received the H1N1 vaccine on Oct. 29, which may have lead to complications leading to her death six days later.

Public health officials said the woman was not a nurse or front line worker who was in contact with patients.

What were the complications? Did the vaccine play a role in this death?

What killed Evan Frustaglio?

This is interesting. Apparently this was not reported in English - Canada.
The link is here in French

Put into Google Translate it turns into this.

Ontario

De quoi est mort le jeune Evan? What died young Evan?

Mise à jour : 31/10/2009 13h38 Updated: 31/10/2009 13h38

The health authorities have an update on causes of death of Evan Frustaglio, Ontario this young hockey player died last week.

L'adolescent de 13 ans avait d'abord été diagnostiqué du virus de la grippe A (H1N1). Puis, on avait laissé entendre qu'il pouvait avoir été atteint de la méningite. The 13 year old was first diagnosed with influenza virus A (H1N1). Then we had suggested he might have been suffering from meningitis.

Comme il y avait bien de l'ambiguïté, le directeur national de la santé publique est revenu sur ce cas. Il nous a informés que les parents ne souhaitaient pas demander une autopsie. As there was much of the ambiguity, the national director of public health is back on the case. He told us that parents do not wish to request an autopsy.

Nous n'aurons donc pas de confirmation à savoir si la grippe A (H1N1) qui est à l'origine de son décès. We shall therefore have no confirmation whether the influenza A (H1N1) that is responsible for his death.

Which is interesting because in the week of his death, I noticed Public Health Canada's tracking website had reduced by one, the number of deaths in Ontario for that week, there had been 3 and then there was 2. Was it Evan's death? It would appear to be because there has been no confirmation of H1N1 according to this article.

And, yes it is entirely possible the parent's are completely unaware. The initial diagnosis was H1N1, and they must have been so distraught. So horrifically distraught....

Compact-LRAD for Crowd Control at Vancouver Olympics

This is insane. Military weaponry at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, Canada

Vancouver police get sonic crowd control device

Military design put to civilian use

The device - which is a compact version of its predecessor, the Long Range Acoustic Device - can be mounted on top of a vehicle. It is capable of emitting a blast of directional sound measuring an estimated 146 decibels at one metre away and an estimated 99 decibels at 500 metres.

Sound above the range of 120 to 140 decibels is considered painful and damaging to human hearing.

The devices were originally designed for the American military and was first used publicly in North America in September as police in Pittsburgh tried to control anti-G20 demonstrators.

Tried to control G-20 protestors, nice spin. Used to torture G-20 protestors is more accurate. To stop them from doing what they are lawfully entitled to do.

But police in Vancouver have no plans to use the device as a sonic weapon, said Houghton.

"It was looked at solely for its effectiveness at delivering a message to a large number of people," said Houghton.

So they say? But this is interesting...

Lack of regulations raises concerns

SFU criminologist David MacAlister, whose research focuses on police powers and civil liberties, said the public should be concerned about the police bringing in new tactics just months before the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

Protesters have threatened to hold large public demonstrations and possibly attempt to disrupt the Games.

"We want to be concerned whenever we're putting a new weapon in the hands of the police and they're basically telling us 'Trust us, we're not going to use it,'" said MacAlister.

"I'm always concerned when the police have a device like this that can be deployed and have that incidental effect on people who aren't necessarily the target of its use," he said.

Protocols and policies must be put in place to govern how the MRAD will be used during the Olympics, MacAlister maintains.

"The very fact they have the device and it has a weapon capability to it, there's always a risk its going to be used and I think we have to ask some serious questions whether this is the kind of device we want in the hands of the police," said MacAlister.

Does the Vaccine Matter?

This is quite a lengthy article, definitely worth reading in it's entirety.
I'll excerpt some interesting parts.

Drive too fast along Red Lion Road, beside Philadelphia’s Northeast Airport, and you will miss the low-rise cement building where the biotech company MedImmune has been quietly pumping out swine flu vaccine at about a million doses a week. Through the summer and fall, workers wearing protective gear that covered them from head to toe brewed up batches of live, genetically modified flu virus. Robots then injected tiny doses of virus-laden fluid into glass vials, which were mounted into nasal spritzers, labeled, and readied for shipment at the direction of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Atlanta, which is helping to coordinate the nation’s pandemic-preparedness plan. In the most ambitious vaccination program the nation has mounted since the anti-polio campaign in the 1950s, the federal government has commissioned MedImmune and four other companies to produce enough vaccine to cover the entire U.S. population..........

But what if everything we think we know about fighting influenza is wrong? What if flu vaccines do not protect people from dying—particularly the elderly, who account for 90 percent of deaths from seasonal flu? And what if the expensive antiviral drugs that the government has stockpiled over the past few years also have little, if any, power to reduce the number of people who die or are hospitalized? The U.S. government—with the support of leaders in the public-health and medical communities—has put its faith in the power of vaccines and antiviral drugs to limit the spread and lethality of swine flu.

Yet some top flu researchers are deeply skeptical of both flu vaccines and antivirals. Like the engineers who warned for years about the levees of New Orleans, these experts caution that our defenses may be flawed, and quite possibly useless against a truly lethal flu. And that unless we are willing to ask fundamental questions about the science behind flu vaccines and antiviral drugs, we could find ourselves, in a bad epidemic, as helpless as the citizens of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina

.

The term influenza, which dates back to the Middle Ages, is taken from the Italian word for occult or astral influence. ( I thought that was in interesting little factoid) Then as now, flu seemed to appear out of nowhere each winter, debilitating or killing large numbers of people, only to vanish in the spring. Today, seasonal flu is estimated to kill about 36,000 people in the United States each year, and half a million worldwide.

Yet the flu, in many important respects, remains mysterious. Determining how many deaths it really causes, or even who has it, is no simple matter. We think we have the flu anytime we fall ill with an ailment that brings on headache, malaise, fever, coughing, sneezing, and that achy feeling as if we’ve been sleeping on a bed of rocks, but researchers have found that at most half, and perhaps as few as 7 or 8 percent, of such cases are actually caused by an influenza virus in any given year. More than 200 known viruses and other pathogens can cause the suite of symptoms known as “influenza-like illness”; respiratory syncytial virus, bocavirus, coronavirus, and rhinovirus are just a few of the bugs that can make a person feel rotten. And depending on the season, in up to two-thirds of the cases of flu-like illness, no cause at all can be found.

Flu comes and goes with the seasons, and often it does not kill people directly, but rather contributes to death by making the body more susceptible to secondary infections like pneumonia or bronchitis. For this reason, researchers studying the impact of flu vaccination typically look at deaths from all causes during flu season, and compare the vaccinated and unvaccinated populations. Such comparisons have shown a dramatic difference in mortality between these two groups: study after study has found that people who get a flu shot in the fall are about half as likely to die that winter—from any cause—as people who do not. Get your flu shot each year, the literature suggests, and you will dramatically reduce your chance of dying during flu season.

So how could flu vaccine possibly reduce total deaths by half? Tom Jefferson, a physician based in Rome and the head of the Vaccines Field at the Cochrane Collaboration, a highly respected international network of researchers who appraise medical evidence, says: “For a vaccine to reduce mortality by 50 percent and up to 90 percent in some studies means it has to prevent deaths not just from influenza, but also from falls, fires, heart disease, strokes, and car accidents. That’s not a vaccine, that’s a miracle.”

Yet....

The estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction is based on “cohort studies,” which compare death rates in large groups, or cohorts, of people who choose to be vaccinated, against death rates in groups who don’t. But people who choose to be vaccinated may differ in many important respects from people who go unvaccinated—and those differences can influence the chance of death during flu season. Education, lifestyle, income, and many other “confounding” factors can come into play, and as a result, cohort studies are notoriously prone to bias. When researchers crunch the numbers, they typically try to factor out variables that could bias the results, but, as Jefferson remarks, “you can adjust for the confounders you know about, not for the ones you don’t,” and researchers can’t always anticipate what factors are likely to be important to whether a patient dies from flu. There is always the chance that they might miss some critical confounder that renders their results entirely wrong.

When Lisa Jackson, a physician and senior investigator with the Group Health Research Center, in Seattle, began wondering aloud to colleagues if maybe something was amiss with the estimate of 50 percent mortality reduction for people who get flu vaccine, the response she got sounded more like doctrine than science. “People told me, ‘No good can come of [asking] this,’” she says. “‘Potentially a lot of bad could happen’ for me professionally by raising any criticism that might dissuade people from getting vaccinated, because of course, ‘We know that vaccine works.’ This was the prevailing wisdom.”

Nonetheless, in 2004, Jackson and three colleagues set out to determine whether the mortality difference between the vaccinated and the unvaccinated might be caused by a phenomenon known as the “healthy user effect.” They hypothesized that on average, people who get vaccinated are simply healthier than those who don’t, and thus less liable to die over the short term. People who don’t get vaccinated may be bedridden or otherwise too sick to go get a shot. They may also be more likely to succumb to flu or any other illness, because they are generally older and sicker. To test their thesis, Jackson and her colleagues combed through eight years of medical data on more than 72,000 people 65 and older. They looked at who got flu shots and who didn’t. Then they examined which group’s members were more likely to die of any cause when it was not flu season.

Jackson’s findings showed that outside of flu season, the baseline risk of death among people who did not get vaccinated was approximately 60 percent higher than among those who did, lending support to the hypothesis that on average, healthy people chose to get the vaccine, while the “frail elderly” didn’t or couldn’t. In fact, the healthy-user effect explained the entire benefit that other researchers were attributing to flu vaccine, suggesting that the vaccine itself might not reduce mortality at all. Jackson’s papers “are beautiful,” says Lone Simonsen, who is a professor of global health at George Washington University, in Washington, D.C., and an internationally recognized expert in influenza and vaccine epidemiology. “They are classic studies in epidemiology, they are so carefully done.”

The results were also so unexpected that many experts simply refused to believe them. Jackson’s papers were turned down for publication in the top-ranked medical journals. One flu expert who reviewed her studies for the Journal of the American Medical Association wrote, “To accept these results would be to say that the earth is flat!” When the papers were finally published in 2006, in the less prominent International Journal of Epidemiology, they were largely ignored by doctors and public-health officials. “The answer I got,” says Jackson, “was not the right answer.”

Like I said, read the rest at the link as this is less then one third of the article.

Israel getting ready to attack Lebanon?

It seems that way....

Lebanon readies for attack by Israel

Fighters rearm and reinforce positions in valleys amid fears that Israel is about to launch attack.
In dramatic further evidence of growing tensions, the Observer has learned that Hezbollah fighters have been busy reinforcing fixed defence positions north of the Litani river.

Why, you may ask?
It would seem to be warm up for the attack on Iran....
Less Lebanon come to Iran's aid?

Israel and the United States have long assumed that any military action against Iran's nuclear programme would draw a muscular response from its close allies in Hezbollah. According to Israeli military and intelligence analysts, any move against Iran would require a move first against (Lebanon) Hezbollah's capability to disrupt life in northern Israel with its rockets.

Activists in Britian are now "domestic extremists"

Therefore, we need that big budget to grow and grow and grow...... I mean, look at all the "domestic extremists" we have to contend with?
This is how more criminals are created. Create new laws, that criminalize more people equals a justification for increased police budgets. Resulting in increased government tyranny.

Police in £9m scheme to log 'domestic extremists'

Police are gathering the personal details of thousands of activists who attend political meetings and protests, and storing their data on a network of nationwide intelligence databases.

The hidden apparatus has been constructed to monitor "domestic extremists", the Guardian can reveal in the first of a three-day series into the policing of protests. Detailed information about the political activities of campaigners is being stored on a number of overlapping IT systems, even if they have not committed a crime.

Senior officers say domestic extremism, a term coined by police that has no legal basis, can include activists suspected of minor public order offences such as peaceful direct action and civil disobedience.

Three national police units responsible for combating domestic extremism are run by the "terrorism and allied matters" committee of the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo). In total, it receives £9m in public funding, from police forces and the Home Office, and employs a staff of 100.

Long article but worth the read.

Dear John: Film Screenings and news updates

Some of you may remember way back a post on the closure of John Deere in Welland, ON.

The closing of just this one operation in this city has affected 800 families. Not to mention the spin off effect that will be felt through other business's in the local community.
Besides the hardship it brings to the city of Welland, the devastation caused by another closure of a manufacturing facility, it is symbolic of a much larger issue. That is the issue of globalization and the effects of this ill-conceived ideology on far to many people.

Globalization and the movement towards it, from where I sit, has done nothing for the vast majority of persons on this planet. It has served to enrich the very few and subject the masses equally to increased exploitation on a global scale, devastate work forces, impoverish people, loot their savings, put at risk people's pensions....well you get the idea.


That said, the producer of Dear John has asked me to help out, and I am more then glad to do so.

Hi Penny!

Just wanted to let you know, that our trailers (thanks to your help and the help of like-minded bloggers) have reached over 25,000 Hits on Youtube. www.youtube.com/dearjohnfilm

We've also been accepted into the Canadian Labour International Film Festival which will be screening all across Canada (and even parts of the U.S.) our film will be premiered at one of the venues in Toronto on November 28th at the Bloor Cinema. http://bloorcinema.com/movies/?movie_id=87 We will also be screened in Victoria BC, Cowichan BC, and Sudbury Ontario. More locations and venues will be announced by the end of this week at the official CLiFF website. (http://labourfilms.ca/cliff/locations/)

Can't thank you enough Penny it's been a fantastic journey and I know the workers appreciate kindness and interest like yours. I'll let you know more information when I can. And thanks again!


Best,

--
Charles Smith

If you are near any of these places go see the film.
Here is their website "Dear John" , where I am certain they will keep everyone interested, up to date on info regarding showings in their area.