Survival Homestead

We are not vegetarians because the Biblical Dietary Laws require us to be vegetarian (they don’t), but we are vegetarian because the animals used for food in this industry are made to be unclean, by the methods and conditions of their “production.”  A cow becomes an unclean animal when it is fed sheep brain, no matter what form the sheep brain is converted to and, as this story demonstrates, the people who eat the unclean beef are made to be unclean as well.

Source: CNN.com

The mother of a Spanish man who died from the human form of mad cow disease has also died from the illness, Spain’s Ministry of Health says.

“It’s noteworthy that there’s a double case in the same family,” Badiola said.

Until now, Badiola added, clinical evidence that he’s seen from the United Kingdom and France — which have had the most deaths due to the human form of mad cow disease — had not recorded two cases in a single family.

The mother, in her early 60s, died last month. The government confirmed Wednesday that it was because of mad cow disease but did not, by custom, make her name public.

Her son, 41, died in February from the same disease, Badiola said.

The latest confirmed case makes a total of four deaths in Spain from mad cow disease since 2005.

Full Story…

Source: naturalnews.com

The federal government would need to quarantine infected households and ban public gatherings to contain pandemic flu, according to a computer simulation study conducted by researchers from Virginia Tech and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“You wouldn’t go out to the movies. You wouldn’t congregate with people,” said researcher Stephen Eubank. “You’d pretty much be staying home with the doors and windows battened down.”

The consensus among health experts is that a pandemic, or global epidemic, of influenza is inevitable. The last such pandemic, in 1918, killed between 40 and 100 million people.

Because of the belief that a pandemic cannot be avoided, researchers are instead looking into ways to limit its effects. In the current study, researchers used a computer to model the hypothetical spread of flu pandemic in the city of Chicago under various containment scenarios. They found that a vigorous early response could reduce the infection rate by 80 percent.

Indeed, please err on the side of caution when it comes to this issue of cancer and cell phone usage. It’s better to be safe than sorry. The only phone we have is a cell phone, but we have used less than 75 minutes on it since March.

Source: The Associated Press

The head of a prominent cancer research institute issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff Wednesday: Limit cell phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

The warning from Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, is contrary to numerous studies that don’t find a link between cancer and cell phone use, and a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Herberman is basing his alarm on early unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science and he believes people should take action now — especially when it comes to children.

“Really at the heart of my concern is that we shouldn’t wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later,” Herberman said.

No other major academic cancer research institutions have sounded such an alarm about cell phone use. But Herberman’s advice is sure to raise concern among many cell phone users and especially parents.

Source: The Independent

The world is failing to guard against the inevitable spread of a devastating flu pandemic which could kill 50 million people and wreak massive disruption around the globe, the Government has warned.

In evidence to a House of Lords committee, ministers said that early warning systems for spotting emerging diseases were “poorly co-ordinated” and lacked “vision” and “clarity”. They said that more needed to be done to improve detection and surveillance for potential pandemics and called for urgent improvement in rapid-response strategies.

The Government’s evidence appeared in a highly critical report from the Lords Intergovernmental Organisations Committee, which attacked the World Health Organisation (WHO) as “dysfunctional” and criticised the international response to the threat of an outbreak of disease which could sweep across the globe.

The Government said: “While there has not been a pandemic since 1968, another one is inevitable.” Ministers said it would could kill between two and 50 million people worldwide and that such an outbreak would leave up to 75,000 people dead in Britain and cause “massive” disruption.

Peers joined ministers calling for urgent action to build up early warning systems across the Third World that can identify and neutralise outbreaks of potentially deadly new strains of disease before they are swept across the globe by modern trade and travel. Peers also called for new action to monitor animal diseases, warning of the potentially disastrous effects of conditions such as the H5N1 bird flu virus jumping to humans and demanded that Britain step up funding for the WHO to tackle the threat.

With international tourist journeys now reaching 800 million a year, giving unprecedented potential for epidemics to spread across borders, and many cities rapidly growing in developing countries, which would provide “fertile ground” to spread disease, peers on the committee warned that conditions such as Sars, avian influenza and ebola “have the potential to cause rapid and devastating sickness and death across much of the world if they are not detected and checked in time”.

Their report said: “We have been warned that an influenza pandemic is overdue and that when – rather than if – it comes the effects could be devastating, particularly if the strain of the virus should be of the H5N1 variety that has been seen in south-east Asia in recent years.

“While much progress has been made in the past 10 years in improving global surveillance and response systems, much remains to be done if we are to detect new strains of the virus and counter them before they have had the chance to spread.”

Read the full article: The Independent
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Source: Reuters

Disease spread to wild bees from commercially bred bees used for pollination in agriculture greenhouses may be playing a role in the mysterious decline in North American bee populations, researchers said on Tuesday.

Bees pollinate numerous crops, and scientists have been expressing alarm over their falling numbers in recent years in North America. Experts warn the bee disappearance eventually could harm agriculture and the food supply.

Scientists have been struggling to understand the recent decline in various bee populations in North America. For example, a virus brought from Australia has been implicated in massive honeybee deaths last year.

Canadian researchers studied another type of bee, the bumblebee, near two large greenhouse operations in southern Ontario where commercially reared pollination bees are used in the growing of crops such as tomatoes, bell peppers and cucumbers.

The researchers first observed that the commercial bumblebees regularly flew in and out of vents in the sides of the greenhouses, escaping from the facilities.

The researchers then devised a mathematical model to predict how disease might spread from this “spillover” of runaway commercial bees to their wild cousins.

The model predicted a relatively slow build-up of infection in nearby wild bumblebee populations over weeks or months culminating in a burst of transmission generating an epidemic wave that could affect nearly all of wild bees exposed.

The model also predicted a drop-off in infection rates as you get further from the greenhouses.