Stranger Every Day

I Guess This Is Why I'm A Dog Person

I knew it! I knew it! Check out this headline from The Guardian newspaper in the U.K.

Sound Effect: How cats exploit the human need to nurture

That's right. Our feline "friends" sucker people all the time into taking care of them. Researchers at the University of Sussex found that when a cat desires to be fed, it embeds in its purr a high frequency "solicitation" frequency that human find irritating, but one that also arouses a sense of urgency, like when a baby is crying -- but it is perceived as less obnoxious that overt meowing. This purring leads the human to quickly fulfill the feline's felonious plot for immediate attention.

You mean the solicitation purr is even more annoying than when they rub themselves on your leg, leaving god-knows-what debris, scent, etc. on your clothing? Yes, that's exactly what I mean.

Interestingly, according to the research, this combo purr occurs only in cat's that live in single-person households. In essence, the cat's are exercising undue influence over these poor people.

Kinda gives you sympathy for the "cat lady" living down the street, doesn't it?
(Run, Cat Lady, run! For the love of God, run!!! -- Right after you feed them, of course)

. . . To Get Baxter's New Vaccine!!

Yesterday, I wrote about the contamination found in flu vaccines shipped to several European countries. H5N1 (bird flu) was found in the vaccine. For full details, see yesterday's post.

So, snooping around the internet today, what did I find? Well, it seems that Baxter (the offending vaccine manufacturer) developed a vaccine against bird flu last year (you can read about it  here), and the vaccine was issued a positive opinion by the "Committee for Medicinal Products for Human Use" of the European Medicines Agency in December, 2008. Such an endorsement is usually a prelude for acceptance by the European Union, and eventually by the USA. This certainly gave Baxter something to crow about. (pause for groan in response to bad pun)

Countries that had been stockpiling the unapproved vaccine have breathed a sigh of relief in the wake of this step toward full acceptance of the vaccine by government health agencies. According to Baxter, their tests show that the vaccine, called Celvapan, is 76% effective against the most common Vietnamese and Hong Kong strains, and 45% effective against a related, Indonesian strain of the bug. Vaccine proudly made in the USA, too.

Now, the fact that a vaccine shows promise is nice. I don't take issue with that (the whole vaccine safety debate isn't something I want to get into here). My concern lies in the coincidental release of H5N1 in ordinary flu vaccines manufactured by the same company that has a bird flu vaccine in the wings, so to speak. (pause for groan in response to bad pun number two).

Warning: Seemingly wacky stuff ahead. Feel free to skip the next paragraph if reading such things will cause you to lose all respect for this poor author.

Those of a conspiracy mindset (full disclosure: including yours truly) see this as just another case of a corporation unscrupulously pushing its agenda forward. Nothing gets approval for a new drug rolling faster than a rapid manifestation of the threat for which the drug is intended. Some have even said that certain health threats (West Nile virus springs to mind) have been manufactured in a lab and surreptitiously released onto an unsuspecting public who then demand a cure, usually from the very scoundrels who started the problem in the first place. For some fun reading in this vein, check out the works of Dr. Len Horowitz. Follow the twists and turns of the story as only he can describe. You'll laugh! You'll cry! You'll want to dig a bunker in your backyard!

From a holistic perspective, elderberry extract (sambucus nigra) has been shown to have activity against H5N1, while many pharmaceutical anti-virals, such as Tamiflu, have proved ineffective. Not that I'm trying to tell you what to do - just giving information. Yep, "Information" is my middle name. I just don't spell it that way. You see, like all good Sicilian males, I was named after my two grandfathers. Sadly, neither was named "Information" and there was nothing I could do about it. But I digress . . .

An informed person is a powerful, thinking person. I hope you feel a little more powerful, not less, after reading this.

Back to more weird and arcane stuff next time. However, I thought it was important to move into weird and scientific stuff for a couple of days. Some advice: Cover your mouth and nose when you sneeze; or, more importantly, when a bird sneezes near you.

Why Did The (Diseased) Chicken Cross The Road?

In keeping with the title of this blog, I want to write about something that makes it seem like things are getting stranger every day. I haven't seen any mention of this yet in the American mainstream media, but it looks like there was a big "oops!" in the vaccine world lately. The Czech company Biotest near Prague got a test batch of flu vaccine last month from Austria. They discovered that it was contaminated with H5N1 ("bird flu") after all of their test animals (poor ferrets) died from an injection of the vaccine. Normally, these test animals do just fine with ordinary flu shots.

Problem - H5N1 has approximately a 60% mortality rate by some estimates. That's among humans, by the way. Fortunately, the lab animal tests prevented the vaccine from being administered to people.

When tainted vaccine was found in a number of other countries, including Austria, Slovenia, and Germany, the source was traced to Baxter laboratories of Chicago. Baxter had produced the contaminated vaccine for the company AVIR Green Hills and distributed by the Austrian company Ortha. Even though caught dead-to-rights, Baxter at first evoked "trade secret" when asked about how this could have happened, and refused to comment on how the H5N1 virus got into the vaccine. But when there was no way they could squirm free of the facts, their representative confirmed that the problem vaccine was theirs.

This should never have happened, as there are theoretical safeguards to "keep the streams from crossing," to use a line from Ghost Busters. H5N1, in theory, is kept separate from other viral strains in facilities like Baxter, which happens to be researching a vaccine against H5N1.

Far be it from me to suggest that there's anything amiss in the "accidental" release of bird flu by a company that could profit vastly from the need for an immediate vaccine. Well, maybe not so far . . .

Anyway, the Czechs are now thinking about prosecution and the Wold Health Organization (WHO) is looking at tighter controls in the transport of biohazard materials. All fine and dandy, but what happens if (when?) H5N1 becomes easily transmissible between humans? How do we cope?

Next time, gentle reader, next time.

Old Tools

Fascinating news lately of the discovery of 13,000 year old tools in Colorado (the associated press story can be found here with the accompanying photo below). These have been attributed to the so-called Clovis people, who some experts believe were the first residents of this continent.

[Now, you DaVinci Code fans out there, don't get carried away. I know that Clovis was the name of the Merovingian king that united all of Gaul in the 5th century, and the Merovingians were the "keepers of the Grail" and all that. And eventually that ties into the Knights Templar, who blah, blah, blah -- but to paraphrase my favorite quote from Umberto Eco: One sure sign of a lunatic is that, sooner or later, he mentions the Templars. Don't get me wrong. I'm a serious conspiracy fan myself. However, there are times . . .

But I digress. Back to the Clovis people.]

The Clovis people were named after the town of Clovis, New Mexico, where the first artifacts of this particular culture were found. While this culture was old, whether they were the oldest culture in North America has been debated for nearly a century. Were there people in North America before the Clovis culture? Questions like this bring up the theory of cycles of civilization.

One popular author in this area, Graham Hancock, talks about these ideas in his book Fingerprints of the Gods. In fact, he postulates that the remains of such an earlier civilization can be found in Antarctica, if we dig long enough and deep enough. The presence of this civilization was made possible due to the drifting of continents and pole shifts. Evidence in this area seems to imply that Antarctica was once a very temperate place; in other words, a great place to raise a family.

And this doesn't even begin to consider the myths of Atlantis and Mu, the ancient continents that were destroyed in some great cataclysm (natural or man-made). According to the story, the survivors spread throughout the globe, bringing their knowledge, if not their technology, with them.

I guess this explains the look of the tools found in Colorado. They certainly aren't exactly the quartz crystal death-rays that we've seen in popular depictions of these mythic civilizations.

Sadly for them, the peoples of 13,000 years ago had the distinct disadvantage of not having a storehouse of technology like ours to draw upon, even though they, by all evidence, had the same brain capacity as we do now. Of course, if there was TV then, they probably wouldn't even have carved the tools that were found. Too busy watching "Clovis Idol."

Curiosities

A couple of things that I've been pondering . . .

I heard recently that epinephrine (adrenaline) helps cement neural connections in very efficiently, like when someone is in crisis. This makes the memory of that event more easily retrievable when needed. I assume it's to spark the survival response. I've also heard that in emergency situations, or when facing death, many people report feeling more alive than usual. This is probably due to the epinephrine - and the fact that the entire being is focused on what is occurring. No distractions to spread the energy too thin, I guess.

Here's a thought. Are hormones the molecules of spirit? That is, are they the chemicals that transmit to the physical the wishes and needs of spirit? They are powerful and pervasive in their effects. Not sure about it, but I think there's something to it. I'll give it some further thought. Any comments on this would be welcome.