Do not touch that dial!

I am not a big conspiracy buff.  People send me weird stuff and I am usually pretty skeptical. What's the old saying, never attribute to malice what can better be explained by stupidity. So when my friend Shawn sent me this link, I told him I needed corroboration. 

Number one, Shawn has lived and associated with at least two slightly paranoid folks that I know of, the late Mr. Maguire and a Mr. Perry.  Lot's of issues of Counterspy hanging around. Two, one story of elvis copulating with space aliens and the blog's credibility is p-f-f-f-f-t. So next thing I know he sends me a bunch of backup info.  Haven't gone through all of it but you are welcome to.

The upshot is that some scientists believe that the current H1N1 virus or swine flu is the result of scientists exhuming bodies in an Alaskan Cemetery in 1997.

I quote from Wayne Madsen in the Online Journal. : 

The history of the extraction of the genetic material from the corpses of victims of the 1918 Spanish influenza virus who were buried in Arctic permafrost is part “X-Files” and part “Jurassic Park.”

After an unsuccessful 1951 mission, that involved U.S. biological warfare specialists, to extract 1918 Spanish flu genetic material in 1951 from a cemetery in the Inupiat Eskimo village of Brevig Mission, Alaska, scientists made another attempt, a successful one it turns out, in 1997.

Dr. Johan Hultin, from the State University of Iowa, successfully extracted genetic material from the corpse of an obese 30-something female who died from the Spanish flu in 1918, along with 85 percent of Brevig Mission’s (called Teller Mission in 1918) villagers in a single week. The pandemic killed at least 50 million people around the world.

Once the Spanish flu genetic material was obtained from the lungs, spleen, liver, and heart of the Eskimo woman’s corpse, scientists, in a scene reminiscent of the fictional movie “Jurassic Park,” in which genetic material from extinct dinosaurs is used to bring the creatures back to life, recreated the long-since dead 1918 Spanish flu in a U.S. government-funded laboratory. The woman’s organs were cut into one-inch cubes and shipped to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Rockville, Maryland, where the virus’s genetic RNA material was identified and the 1918 Spanish flu was successfully brought back to life.

WMR has learned from a research scientist who has been working on the recreation of the 1918 flu that the genetic material has been re-engineered to synthetically create what is now known as the A/H1N1 virus, or as the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) calls it, the “novel flu.”

The A/H1N1 influenza, which contains genetic material from two strains of swine flu, two strains of human flu, and a single strain of avian flu, has, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), infected, as of May 13, a total of 4,880 people in North America: 2,059 in Mexico; 2,535 in the United States, and 286 in Canada. There have been 56 reported deaths from the flu in Mexico, three in the United States, and one in Canada.

WMR has learned from an A/H1N1 researcher that the current “novel” flu strain is mutating rapidly in humans but no animals have contracted the virus. The enzyme in A/H1N1, as with all influenza A viruses, is called a polymerase. Scientists have calculated the molecular clock of A/H1N1 form the virus’s polymerase rate. Because of the rapid mutation of the virus and the fact that, unlike 1918, rapid global transportation is now the norm, scientists are predicting that the molecular clock of the A/H1N1 virus, coupled with modern transportation, means that almost all the countries of the world will experience an A/H1N1 outbreak within the next few months.

What is different about A/H1N1 is that, unlike other new strains of viruses that rapidly mutate upon emerging and then slow down mutation and then stop entirely, the “novel” or incorrectly-named “swine flu” is showing no signs yet of slowing down its mutation rate and that, according to scientists who worry about A/H1N1 being synthetically-generated, does not happen in nature.

So there you have it - might be hooey, might be something to it.  I include some more links designed to scare you back into your igloo for a decade or two. Let me know if it's all wet. And please, burn this message.

Salud!

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4724.shtml

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/magazine/29flu.html?pagewanted=all

http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/310/5745/77

http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/83/9/4287

http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v11/n11/full/nm1105-1154.html