Saturday, August 30, 2014

5 Billion Bq of Strontium-90 flows to the sea every single day


From Fukushima Diary:

5 Billion Bq of Strontium-90 flows to the Pacific on the daily basis in 2014. Tepco announced in the press conference of 8/25/2014. This is due to the contaminated water overflowing from the seaside of Reactor 1 ~ 4 to Fukushima plant port.

They also announced 2 Billion Bq of Cesium-137 and 1 Billion Bq of Tritium flow to the sea every single day as well. Fukushima plant port is not separated from the Pacific. Discharged nuclide naturally spreads to the sea.
http://www.tepco.co.jp/tepconews/library/archive-j.html
You read this now because we’ve been surviving until today.

Saturday, August 23, 2014

Which is Which?


US Sailors Prepare For Fresh Legal Challenge Over Fukushima Radiation

Sailors scrub the deck of the USS Ronald Reagan to remove potential radiation contamination following the Fukushima nuclear disaster. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images.




Suzanne Goldenberg in San Diego
The Guardian, Wednesday 20 August 2014 08.00 EDT 

 
The first time it occurred to James Jackson that there could be lasting damage from his US Navy service during Japan’s tsunami and nuclear disaster came when his eldest son, Darius, was diagnosed with leukaemia.

Darius, now 15, spent a month in hospital in early 2013, soon after his diagnosis. “I thought I was going to have to bury him,” Jackson recalled. The teenager who aspired to play college basketball now has a catheter in his chest and is too frail to run the length of the court.
Jackson, a navy information technologist, was stationed with his family at Yokosuka, Japan, when an earthquake and tsunami knocked out the cooling systems at the Fukushima nuclear plant in March 2011, causing a triple meltdown.

He acknowledges he can’t know for sure why Darius got leukaemia – but Jackson remains convinced there is a connection to the radiation escape from the Fukushima disaster and he blames the Japanese electric company, Tepco.

On 25 August, a district court judge in San Diego will decide whether the Jacksons – and around 110 other US navy sailors and marines – can proceed with a $1bn lawsuit that accuses Tepco of failing to avoid the accident and of lying about the levels of radiation from the stricken reactors, putting US personnel at risk.
“I don’t think the navy or the United States government would have let us stay there in the region. They would have gotten us out of there probably within the first 48, or 72 hours if they knew then what they know now,” Jackson said. “The issue is that we have this large company, this large enterprise, feeding the Japanese government and the rest of the world bad information. They could have come to the forefront and said: ‘hey we need help’, instead of trying to put a blanket over it.”

Relief effort

Some 77,000 US navy sailors and marines took part in the huge relief effort after Japan’s cascading disasters, called Operation Tomodachi, or friend.
The 110 sailors suing Tepco represent only a small fraction of that number, and the lawsuit does not have the support of the US navy establishment. The navy maintains US sailors serving in Japan received only small, non-harmful doses of radiation. Medical experts also say radiation levels were too low to harm those involved.

“Radiation exposure to US personnel supporting Operation Tomodachi did not present any risks greater than risks normally accepted during everyday life,” Lieutenant Chika Onyekanne said in an email.
But the lawsuit – and a number of unexplained illnesses among veterans of Operation Tomodachi – have attracted attention in the US, especially among anti-nuclear activists.

The lawsuit alleges a number of the sailors and their children suffered thyroid and other cancers, leukaemia, birth defects, and a variety of medical conditions including infertility after they were exposed to dangerous levels of radiation. Some of the sailors were also diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). One of the sailors named in the lawsuit, helicopter mechanic Theodor Holcomb, who served on the USS Reagan aircraft carrier, died of a rare cancer on 24 April. The lawsuit seeks $1bn for a medical monitoring and treatment fund.
The case is one of a number of lawsuits brought against Tepco in US and Japanese courts after the accident on 11 March 2011.

An earlier suit brought by the sailors was dismissed in April. Tepco said: “It is wholly implausible … to posit that military commanders in charge of thousands of personnel and armed with some of the world’s most expensive equipment relied instead only on the press releases and public statements of a foreign electric utility company.”

A judicial panel in Japan on 31 July said three former Tepco executives should face criminal charges for the disaster, finding they overlooked the risk of an earthquake or tsunami, and failed to take adequate measures to prevent an accident.

Several investigations since the accident have found that Tepco and Japan’s nuclear regulator failed to bring the Fukushima plant up to international safety standards.

Researchers at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in 2012 found that Tepco and the regulatory agency failed to plan for major earthquakes or tsunamis and that the meltdown could have been prevented if the company had taken steps to protect an emergency power supply for the reactor’s cooling system.
An investigating commission appointed by the Japanese parliament found Tepco and government regulator were over-confident and failed to invest adequate time and money to prepare for earthquake or a nuclear meltdown. The 2012 commission report rejected Tepco’s argument that the tsunami was impossible to predict, saying this was based on a “safety myth”. The commission also said Tepco tried to hide data regarding damage to the reactors.

The current case hinges on whether the court in San Diego agrees that Tepco should have done more to avoid a meltdown, according to their lawyer, Charles Bonner.
“This case to do with the fact that Tepco, this multi-trillion dollar company … did not do enough to eliminate the foreseeable risk to anyone of dealing with the hazards of a nuclear meltdown,” Bonner told the Guardian.
The sailors and marines suing Tepco also have to prove that radiation exposure was a substantive factor in their illness, Bonner said. Lawyers for Tepco refused to comment on the case.

 

Radioactive cloud

When the 9.0 earthquake struck Japan, unleashing a 14 metre tsunami, the US Navy immediately mobilised the US aircraft carrier, USS Ronald Reagan, and sailors at its bases in Japan, for a relief effort.
As the Reagan neared the coast of Japan, it was enveloped in a radioactive cloud. The commander put the ship in lockdown, advising sailors not to drink or shower in the water, and ordering them to stay below deck.
At the time, Lieutenant Steve Simmons was in peak physical condition. He spent his off-duty hours on the Reagan doing P90X insanity workouts. He said he initially accepted his commanders’ assurances that there was no threat from the radiation. “I could say I was foolish and pushed the ‘I believe’ button, because those who were telling us that were supposed to know what they were doing,” he said. “I later found just a couple of months ago that they were picking up radiation levels on the ship 30 times higher than what Tepco had reported.”

By late 2011, Simmons, now 36, was back in the US, with his wife and three children, and driving to work in the northern Virginia suburbs when he experienced a blackout. The episode – accompanied by high fevers, swollen lymph nodes and muscle spasms – was the start of a physical deterioration that, by the time of his retirement from the navy last month, left Simmons confined to a wheelchair.
Military doctors have yet to reach a diagnosis on his deteriorating condition, Simmons said. But he and his wife, Summer, are convinced it was caused by radiation poisoning. “Nobody can change the fact of what happened but they can change how people are taken care of,” he said. “A lot of the marines and sailors suffering from ailments, they were young. They don’t have the privilege of having 10 plus years in the service, fighting different bureaucracies, trying to get help with their medical bills.”
On shore, sailors like Jackson and Mike Sebourn, an aviation maintenance chief based in Atsugi, Japan, were also mobilised for the relief effort. In early April, Sebourn was promoted to radiation decontamination officer, issued with a handheld radiation device, Tyvek suit and respirator, and charged with cleaning up helicopters flying relief missions into the tsunami zone. “I was the guy on the ground taking the background readings every day.”

He felt no ill effects at the time, Sebourn said. But his son Kimi, who was then eight, went through bouts of extreme nausea and severe nose bleeds, missing a month of school. “The kid could not stop throwing up, over and over and over. It happened every single day, at least once a day, and sometimes twice a day,” he said. “Not knowing what was wrong with my son was absolutely heartbreaking and just tore me up inside.”
By the time Sebourn left the navy in December 2012, his own health had started to decline. He was diagnosed with PTSD. He also had unexplained muscle loss that left his right arm and leg much smaller than his left.

Sebourn admits his ailments may have nothing to do with the nuclear disaster, but he can’t help thinking a connection could emerge over time. “My biggest concern is what the future holds,” he said. “What I worry about is 10 or 15 years down the road, do I come down with radiation sickness, or do I come down with cancer, or does my son come down with cancer? I certainly hope not, but what happens?” he said. “If the worst does happen, am I going to be taken care of?”
But the sailors and marines have a difficult challenge ahead. A peer-reviewed US navy medical study, conducted at the request of Congress, concluded there was no evidence that the sailors aboard the Reagan or at other US navy sites in Japan had received radiation doses that would put them at higher risk of cancer and other diseases.
Indeed, the study found incidence of some cancers was lower among sailors aboard the Reagan than in the general population.

“There is no objective evidence that the Ronald Reagan sailors experienced radiation exposures during [the operation] that would result in an increase in the expected numbers of radiogenic diseases over time,” the study said. “The estimated radiation doses for all individuals …were very small and well below levels associated with the occurrence of adverse medical conditions.”
Two independent radiation experts who reviewed the study for the Guardian said they agreed with the conclusions.

Jonathan Links, an environmental health sciences professor at Johns Hopkins University and a consultation on radiation terrorism to the city of Baltimore, said the average eight millirem (mrem) radiation dose received by the sailors was equivalent to eight chest X-rays with modern equipment. “By way of comparison, all of us in Baltimore receive a yearly dose from background radiation of over 300 mrem,” he wrote in an email.
He also said the elapsed time between exposure to a carcinogen and development of cancers was generally far longer - at least five years for leukaemia - than that experienced by the US sailors.
Paddy Regan, professor of nuclear physics at the University of Surrey and an expert witness for nuclear test victims against the UK government, said he had the greatest sympathy for the sailors.
It was clear some were suffering, he said. But the number of cancers among USS Reagan sailors did not in themselves indicate dangerous levels of radiation during the disaster.
“If all of these sailors were exposed to a similar amount of radioactivity and it was above the threshold that definitely causes cancer, you would expect there to be a statistically significant spike,” he said. “It wouldn’t just be one or two people who had cancer.”
The sailors, for their part, say they are prepared for a long hard fight – and for the prospects of a backlash from some of their former shipmates.

For Darius, however, he just wants his illness to be over, and for ordinary life to resume. He is still undergoing treatment for leukaemia, still stuck in hospital instead of spending time with his friends. “I just want to get through all of this so I can start playing sports for high school,” he said. “I want this just to go away, and to just fast forward the next four years so I can play all the sports I want.”

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Nuclear Watch: Fukushima rice exports to resume (0818/2014)

                       

Horses Skin Melt Off in California- Fukushima? People Are Next?


From: (Before It's News)


“Nuclear Fallout is the residual radioactive material propelled into the upper atmosphere following a nuclear blast or a nuclear reaction conducted in an unshielded facility, so called because it “falls out” of the sky after the explosion and shock wave have passed. It commonly refers to the radioactive dust and ash created when a nuclear weapon explodes, but this dust can also be originated in a damaged nuclear plant. This radioactive dust, consisting of material either directly vaporized by a nuclear blast or charged by exposure, is a highly dangerous kind of radioactive contamination….It can lead to the contamination of aquifers or soil and devastate the affected ecosystems years after the initial exposure…. A wide range of biological changes may follow the irradiation of animals. These vary from rapid death following high doses of penetrating whole-body radiation, to essentially normal lives for a variable period of time UNTIL the development of delayed radiation effects, in a portion of the exposed population, following low dose exposures.“ Wikipedia (Nuclear Fallout)

There you have it! Years later the effects of nuclear fallout from Fukushima will have diverse effects on the population and animals following a series of low dose exposures. I believe it’s likely we may be experiencing this and the animals are showing effects before humans.

Horses and other animals have been dropping dead in Japan and now animals here in America are displaying similar effects. While experts suggest this is some type of “mystery illness” affecting our horses, they are not 100% sure of the cause, but Fukushima radiation hasn’t even been thrown on the table due to the extent of cover-up from this major disaster. (More photos. Continue reading...)

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Southpark All Grown Up


Everything Men Know About Women


Look Away


Cucumber Found Glowing in Blue Near Fukushima


 From Fukushima Diary:

A Japanese citizen posted on an internet forum that his pickled cucumber was found glowing in blue on 7/30/2014. The person doesn’t specify the location but states it’s in a prefecture near Fukushima. It looks glowing in the dark as well. The cucumber was purchased 4 days before the posting.






Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Why are massive numbers of sea creatures dying along the west coast right now?

Michael Snyder
Activist Post

Never before have we seen so much death along the west coast of North America.  Massive numbers of sea stars, bluefin tuna, sardines, anchovies, herring, oysters, salmon, marine mammals and marine birds are dying, and experts are puzzled.  We are being told that we could even see “local extinctions” of some of these sea creatures.  So are all of these deaths related?  If so, what in the world could be causing this to happen?  What has changed so dramatically that it would cause massive numbers of sea creatures to die along the west coast?

The following are 15 examples of this phenomenon.  Most scientists do not believe that these incidents are related.  But when you put them all together, it paints quite a disturbing picture

#1 A “mystery plague” is turning sea stars all along the west coast of the United States and Canada into piles of goo…
Sea stars, commonly referred to as starfish, have been dying off in alarming numbers along the entire West Coast, from Baja, Mexico, to Alaska. According to reports from the Seattle Aquarium, some parts of Puget Sound and the San Juan Islands have seen population declines of up to 80 percent.
On the Oregon coast, according to CoastWatch Volunteer Coordinator Fawn Custer, “Last December, we had less than 1 percent of sea star wasting. By May 1, more than 5 percent of sea stars were affected. Now, I would say, in some areas, it is up to 90 percent.”


A marine epidemiologist at Cornell University says that this is "the largest mortality event for marine diseases we’ve seen".

#2 The population of bluefin tuna in the Pacific Ocean has declined by 95 percent.  Mexico has already banned fishing for bluefin tuna for the rest of the year, and the U.S. government is considering doing the same thing.

#3 Sardine, anchovy and herring populations have dropped dramatically along the west coast in recent years…
Pacific sardine populations have shown an alarming decline in recent years, and some evidence suggests anchovy and herring populations may be dropping as well.
The declines could push fishermen toward other currently unmanaged “forage fish,” such as saury, smelt and sand lance, stealing a critical food source relied on by salmon and other economically important predators.
In response, the Pacific Fishery Management Council is considering an ecosystem-based management approach that recognizes the fundamental role of forage fish in the Pacific marine food web. Tiny, but abundant, these small schooling fish feed on plankton and, in turn, fill the bellies of Oregon’s iconic marine species, including salmon, sharks, whales, sea lions and sea birds.
#4Record numbers of distressed sea lions have washed ashore in California” for the second year in a row.  One news report described these distressed sea lions as “malnourished and dehydrated, too weak to find food on their own".

#5 Marine birds are “disappearing” in the Pacific northwest…
From white-winged scoters and surf scoters to long-tailed ducks, murres, loons and some seagulls, the number of everyday marine birds here has plummeted dramatically in recent decades.
Scoters are down more than 75 percent from what they were in the late 1970s. Murres have dropped even more. Western grebes have mostly vanished, falling from several hundred thousand birds to about 20,000.
#6 Those that work in the seafood industry on the west coast are noticing some very “unusual” mutations.  For example, a red king crab that was recently caught in Alaska was colored bright blue.

#7 Pelicans along the California coastline are "refusing to mate".  This is being blamed on a lack of fish for the pelicans to eat.  As a result, we are seeing less than one percent of the usual number of baby pelicans.

#8 The oyster population in the Pacific is falling so fast that it is being called "the great American oyster collapse".

#9 The population of sockeye salmon along the coast of Alaska is at a "historic low".

#10 Something is causing herring off the coast of British Columbia to bleed from their gills, bellies and eyeballs.

#11 Scientists have discovered very high levels of cesium-137 in plankton living in the waters of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and the west coast.

#12 Back in May, more than six tons of anchovies died in Marina Del Ray over a single weekend.

#13 Just a few days ago, thousands of dead fish were found on Capitola Beach.  Authorities are trying to figure out what caused this.

#14 Earlier this month, thousands of dead fish were found on Manresa Beach.

#15 According to a study conducted by researchers at Oregon State University, radiation levels in tuna caught off the coast of Oregon approximately tripled in the aftermath of the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Could it be possible that at least some of these deaths are related to what has been happening at Fukushima?

We do know that fish caught just off the shore from Fukushima have been tested to have radioactive cesium that is up to 124 times above the level that is considered to be safe.

And we also know that a study conducted at the University of South Wales concluded that the main radioactive plume of water from Fukushima would reach our shores at some point during 2014.

Is it so unreasonable to think that the greatest nuclear disaster in human history could have something to do with the death of all of these sea creatures?

Just consider what one very experienced Australian boat captain discovered when he crossed the Pacific last year.  According to him, it felt as though "the ocean itself was dead"…
The next leg of the long voyage was from Osaka to San Francisco and for most of that trip the desolation was tinged with nauseous horror and a degree of fear.
“After we left Japan, it felt as if the ocean itself was dead,” Macfadyen said.
“We hardly saw any living things. We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head. It was pretty sickening.
“I’ve done a lot of miles on the ocean in my life and I’m used to seeing turtles, dolphins, sharks and big flurries of feeding birds. But this time, for 3000 nautical miles there was nothing alive to be seen.”
In place of the missing life was garbage in astounding volumes.
“Part of it was the aftermath of the tsunami that hit Japan a couple of years ago. The wave came in over the land, picked up an unbelievable load of stuff and carried it out to sea. And it’s still out there, everywhere you look.”
What do you think?

Is Fukushima to blame, or do you think that something else is causing massive numbers of sea creatures to die?

Please feel free to share what you think by posting a comment below…

This article first appeared here at the American Dream.  Michael Snyder is a writer, speaker and activist who writes and edits his own blogs The American Dream and Economic Collapse Blog. Follow him on Twitter here.

Scientist Working on Gov't Ebola Drug Joked About Culling Population with GMO Virus

                           

Extremist



Natural Treatments for Ebola Virus Exist, Research Suggests

 Saturday, August 2, 2014

Sayer Ji
Activist Post

Fear of infection with the Ebola virus is becoming as contagious as the virus itself, with mainstream media outlets like CNN reporting, 'Ebola outbreak could have 'catastrophic' consequences.'

Given the prevailing mortality statistics, perhaps the fear is, at least partially, justified, with the most virulent form of the virus – the Zaire Ebola virus – observed to have a fatality rate of about 83%,[1] and with no officially recognized conventional or natural therapy found capable of mitigating morbidity and mortality associated with infection from it.

There are actually five Ebola viruses in the Ebolavirus genus,[2] with four of them known to infect humans causing Ebola virus disease, a highly lethal form of hemorrhagic fever. Ebola virus infection is believed to originate from either monkeys or fruit bats, and once a human is infected, transmission can occur through blood or bodily fluids, sexual intercourse,[3] and as a recent concerning investigative report revealed, through the air.

While the conventional medical system reflexively puts its faith and money into drug and vaccine development, with NIH recently announcing it will begin an early trial on Ebola vaccines this September, very little research has been performed on reducing risk, or mitigating post-infection harm, with the use of time-tested, natural immune-boosting and/or plant-based approaches. Given the low safety risk and cost of botanical- and food-based interventions, this is where we should be looking first for viable, and immediately accessible solutions. Indeed, a recent study published in 2012 holds great promise as far as identifying a natural way to mitigate the virulence – and therefore also widespread fear – associated with Ebola virus.

Published in the journal Archives of Virology and titled, "Inhibition of Lassa virus and Ebola virus infection in host cells treated with the kinase inhibitors genistein and tyrphostin," researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch, investigated the potential therapeutic role of two so-called 'kinase inhibitors' in interfering with Ebola virus: 1) the plant compound genistein 2) the pharmaceutical drug tyrophostin.


The authors reference a previous animal study showing genistein was able to reduce harm from infection from a virus that causes an Ebola-like viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) in hamsters (namely, Pichinde ́virus (PICV)), reporting the results as follows:
Infection of hamsters with PIRV produces VHF manifestations, including inflammation/lesions in various organs, core temperature increase, weight loss, viremia, petechial rash, hemorrhage, and mortality. Treating the animals with the kinase inhibitor genistein led to a significant increase in survival and to the amelioration of VHF disease signs [9]. None of the treated mock-infected animals had any adverse signs of disease associated with the treatment. Therefore, this study served as a proof-of-concept for using a kinase inhibitor as a therapeutic or prophylactic in an animal model. [emphasis added]
The researchers sought to identify genistein and tyrophostin's ability to inhibit viral entry of various viruses known to cause hemorrhagic fever, including Ebola, Marburg virus (MARV), Vesicular Stomatis virus (VSV) and Lassa virus (LASV). Proteins from these four viruses were engineered to be expressed by a special type of virus, known as vesicular stomatitis virus (VSV).

The study found both genistein and tyrophostin individually inhibit the entry of these viruses into the cells, both through interfering with endocytosis (the process by which a cell pulls in a virus) and uncoating proteins (the process by which a virus alters proteins on the surface of the host cell to gain entry). It was also observed that a synergistic effect occurred when genistein and tyrophostin were added together.

The researchers discussed their findings:
In all, these data demonstrate that infection of host cells with the filoviruses MARV and EBOV and the arenavirus LASV is inhibited when cells are pretreated with genistein or tyrphostin AG1478. In both cases, the inhibition was found to be concentration dependent. Although the inhibition of EBOV in cells pre-treated with 100 lM genistein appeared to differ slightly, the addition of increasing concentrations of tyrphostin AG1478 led to a synergistic antiviral effect. In all, these data demonstrate that a kinase inhibitor cocktail consisting of genistein and tyrphostin AG1478 may act as a broad antiviral against EBOV, MARV, and LASV in vitro.
Where Does Genistein Come From?

While primarily found in soy products, especially fermented soy foods, wherein beneficial microbes cause the biotransformation of the precursor phytocompound genistin into genistein, it is also found in fava beans, kudzu, coffee and red clover, and many other lesser known medicinal plants.

What Else Does Genistein Do?

At Greenmedinfo.com we have indexed over 150 health benefits of genistein, across 50 mapped physiological pathways, that have been identified in the biomedical literature. You can view them here: Evidence-Based Genistein Benefits. It is interesting to note that genistein's wide spectrum antiviral properties have already been identified. A 2009 review,[4] in fact, stated:
Genistein is, by far, the most studied soy isoflavone in this regard, and it has been shown to inhibit the infectivity of enveloped or nonenveloped viruses, as well as single-stranded or double-stranded RNA or DNA viruses. At concentrations ranging from physiological to supraphysiological (3.7-370 muM), flavonoids, including genistein, have been shown to reduce the infectivity of a variety of viruses affecting humans and animals, including adenovirus, herpes simplex virus, human immunodeficiency virus, porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome virus, and rotavirus.
What are Other Potential Natural Therapeutics for Ebola?

First, it must be pointed out that, historically, Ebola virus outbreaks occur in some of the most impoverished places on Earth (primarily the poorest regions of Africa), among populations chronically malnourished, traumatized by sociopolitical unrest and wars, and where modern day sanitation, hygiene practices, and adequate nutrition, are available suboptimally, to say the least.  In other words, the mainstream media's prediction of a so-called 'catastrophic' outbreak in the US and other wealthier countries does not seem to take into account the differing contexts that makes infections like these possible to begin with, with the 'inner terrain,' i.e. immune status of the host, fundamental in determining the degree to which an individual becomes susceptible to infection.

With that said, Ebola does appear to be a uniquely pathogenic virus to which the human body has yet had adequate time to properly adapt, and therefore it is instructive to point other potential natural therapies that have been studied in the past:
  • Garcinia kola: As reported in 1999, extracts from the seeds of this traditional African medicinal herb were found to"...inhibit this virus [Ebola] in cell culture at non-toxic concentrations."
  • Homeopathic interventions: A study published in 1999 explored the therapeutic potential of a homeopathic preparation of the six-eyed spider venom (Sicarius) at treating symptoms associated with Ebolavirus infection.[5]
  • Estradiol: A 2013 analysis, titled "A systematic screen of FDA-approved drugs for inhibitors of biological threat agents," found that estradiol exhibited anti-Ebola virus activity in vitro, indicating the relevance of hormonal factors and perhaps gender in susceptibility to the disease – as well as a possible therapeutic role for estradiol if future clinical research confirms bears these findings out.
This is only a small sampling, and the fact is that very little research has been performed in this area. There are a wide range of natural compounds that have yet to be evaluated for their direct anti-Ebola activity and/or immune boosting properties, and that may be highly relevant to the goal of preventing and curing it. The most important consideration is that no infection – including highly lethal ones like Ebola – occurs in a vacuum. Psychological, biological, environmental and sociopolitical factors all determine the incidence, spread and virulence of viral infections.

Therefore, in the absence of any known drug- or vaccine-based method to prevent or reduce harm from Ebola infection, the aforementioned research and 'environmental' considerations may provide future hope and direction for addressing epidemics of this kind. This is especially important considering how profoundly fearful folks have become at the specter of diseases they do not understand -- fears which contribute to immunosuppression and therefore may contribute to the self-fulfilling prophecy associated with belief in Ebola's extreme lethality. 

References:

[1] Isaacson, M; Sureau, P; Courteille, G; Pattyn, SR;. Clinical Aspects of Ebola Virus Disease at the Ngaliema Hospital, Kinshasa, Zaire, 1976. Retrieved 2009-07-08.
[2] Kuhn, J. H.; Becker, S.; Ebihara, H.; Geisbert, T. W.; Johnson, K. M.; Kawaoka, Y.; Lipkin, W. I.; Negredo, A. I.; Netesov, S. V.; Nichol, S. T.; Palacios, G.; Peters, C. J.; Tenorio, A.; Volchkov, V. E.; Jahrling, P. B. (2010). "Proposal for a revised taxonomy of the family Filoviridae: Classification, names of taxa and viruses, and virus abbreviations". Archives of Virology 155 (12): 2083–2103. doi:10.1007/s00705-010-0814-x. PMC 3074192. PMID 21046175.
[3] "Ebola virus disease Fact sheet N°103". World Health Organization. March 2014. Retrieved 12 April 2014.
[4] Aline Andres, Sharon M Donovan, Mark S Kuhlenschmidt. Soy isoflavones and virus infections. J Nutr Biochem. 2009 Aug;20(8):563-9. PMID: 19596314

Huge Increase in Dead and Sick Sea Mammals on California Coast

From ENE News

Huge increase in dead and sick sea mammals on California coast — Unprecedented numbers, annual record broken in 7 months — Starving, drooling, brain damaged, suffering seizures — Sea lions ‘mysteriously’ vanishing on other side of Pacific — Experts: We don’t know what’s happening. (Continue reading...)