Gabriel Cousens
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 From 1981 [to] 1987, soy dust from grain silo unloading in the harbor caused 26 epidemics of asthma in Barcelona, seriously affecting 687 people and leading to 1,155 hospitalizations. No further epidemics occurred after filters were installed, but a minor outbreak in 1994 established the need for monitoring of preventive measures. Reports of the epidemic in Barcelona led epidemiologists in New Orleans to investigate cases of epidemic asthma that occurred from 1957 [to] 1968, when more than 200 people sought treatment at a Charily Hospital. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 When future historians examine today's epidemics of obesity and diabetes, they will no doubt scrutinize the role of companies like PepsiCo and Coca-Cola, both of which are partly to blame for modern disease epidemics. Both companies, by the way, continue to engage in routine marketing of junk foods and sodas to children.
Pepsico is a corporation that won't even list the acrylamide content in their fried foods. Nor will it publicly admit that high-fructose corn syrup has any link whatsoever to obesity. |
Michael J. Panzner
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 Deteriorating health, sanitation, and pest control will lay the groundwork for tuberculosis and other epidemics, as well as virulent pandemics like SARS. These diseases will not only endanger the lives of millions but will also create a sense of isolation and uncertainty that will add to the downward spiral.
Feeling trapped and desperate, countless ordinary Americans will be wracked with feelings of bitterness, resentment, guilt, and frustration as they find it hard to come to grips with the pervasive fallout of a full-scale economic disaster. |
Andreas Moritz
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 The world is not only experiencing a vast number of new man-made epidemics, but old diseases, too, are making a comeback. In 1978, the United Nations adopted a "Health for All, 2000" resolution, setting goals for eradicating infectious disease by the century's end. But the germs didn't co-operate. Apart from at least 29 previously unknown diseases, 20 well-known ones have re-emerged, including malaria, tuberculosis, pneumonia, cholera, yellow fever and dysentery. The germs causing the diseases are rapidly mutating to forms beyond the reach of today's antibiotics. |
| If live viruses used as a vaccine can cause polio today when hygiene is generally high, it may well be that the polio epidemics 40 to 50 years ago were also caused by immunization against polio while hygiene, sanitation, housing, and nutritional standards were still very low. In the United States, cases of polio increased by 50 percent between 1957 and 1958, and by 80 percent from 1958 to 1959 after the introduction of mass immunization. In five states, cases of polio doubled after the polio vaccine was given to large numbers of the population. |
| This pandemic, however, wasn't a natural cleansing event so typical for the now yearly flu epidemics. The 1918 outbreak was directly linked with the Great War (World War 1). The influenza A virus strain of subtype H1N1 behind the flu pandemic was unusually severe and deadly. What made it that way? At no time in history was the world exposed to such massive and 24-hour pollution created by the fumes and smoke resulting from continuous bomb and grenade explosions, the burning of entire cities, the effects of mustard gases and other biological weapons by Germans. |
Alex Steffen
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 With new potential epidemics emerging more rapidly as our planet grows more tightly interwoven, this is madness. With billions around the world in need of better. care, it is unjust. With all our public-health expertise, medical technology, and wealth, it is patently unnecessary.
We need to bolster our global public-health system, and extend the benefits to everyone. But we can also learn a lot from the efforts of those who have had to fight epidemics and medical injustice with nothing but good ideas and collaboration within communities. |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
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 There's a curious correlation between these sunspot peaks and flu epidemics. In the twentieth century, six of the nine sunspot peaks occurred in tandem with massive flu outbreaks. In fact, the worst outbreaks of the century, killing millions in 1918 and 1919, followed a sun-spot peak in 1917. This might just be coincidence, of course.
Or it might not. Outbreaks and pandemics are thought to be caused by antigenic drift, when a mutation occurs in the DNA of a virus, or antigenic shift, when a virus acquires new genes from a related strain. |
Jack Challem
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 The sad fact is that both prediabetes and overweight are out-of-control modern epidemics. Two-thirds of North Americans are now overweight, and almost as many people have some early signs of prediabetes. Although overweight and prediabetes don't always overlap, they do much of the time.
1
If you happen to be thin, don't count your blessings just yet. That's because one-fourth of thin people are also prediabetic.
What's the cause? The dual afflictions of prediabetes and overweight result from slamming your body too many times with unhealthy foods. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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 Nonetheless, since the authorities allowed the religious orders to ship without paying duty, cacao was a lucrative crop for the Jesuits, and continued to be the dominant export commodity of the Amazon until trade was interrupted by the smallpox and measles epidemics of the 1740s and 1750s, which decimated the Indian gatherers.
Quite naturally, these Jesuit commercial triumphs, as well as suspicions which non-Jesuits held about the Order, aroused a great deal of antipathy to them in both hemispheres. |
Mark Sircus
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 Public health officials, medical organizations and doctors moan and groan about epidemics of chronic diseases like dia-Jk ML, betes, cancer, heart disease, autism and other neurological diseases, voicing their frustrations and their helplessness to do anything about it.
Inflammation and systemic stress are central attributes of many pathological conditions. Thus if we find a way to directly and safely reduce inflammation and systemic stress we have found a potent medical approach that would be effective across a wide range of pathologies. |
Andreas Moritz
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| Yet no scientist in the world would use these facts to announce a mass outbreak of viral epidemics. Every experienced virologist knows that all these viruses are dormant, i.e., have been neutralized by the immune system. He also knows that this makes the infected people immune against re-infection, unless of course the immune system is damaged or suppressed through other factors.
If HIV, herpes, and all the other types of viruses that are latent in humans and animals living on the planet were capable of killing people, there would hardly be anyone left to treat the billions of sufferers. |
Devra Davis
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 If medicine didn't vanquish lethal epidemics of the past, surely today the story is more nuanced. New medications and fast-paced information technology undoubtedly afford us the capacity to confront new ailments, like looming pandemics of bird flu, providing that governments don't lie or cover up early reports.
But what about cancer? Can modern medicine, with its reliance on finding and treating diseases one at a time, alter the ways that the disease presents itself? We know how to cure relatively rare cancers, like those of children. |
Kaayla T. Daniel, PhD, CCN
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 From 1981-1987, soy dust from grain silo unloading in the harbor of Barcelona, Spain, caused 26 epidemics of asthma, seriously jeopardizing 687 people and leading to 1,155 hospitalizations. No further epidemics occurred after filters were installed, but a minor outbreak in 1994 established the need for diligent monitoring of preventive measures.4243
Reports of the epidemic in Barcelona led epidemiologists in New Orleans to investigate cases of epidemic asthma that occurred from 1957-1968 when more than 200 people sought treatment at Charity Hospital. |
Mark Lynas
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 What eradicated the epidemics was not a change in the climate, but a change in material circumstances: economic growth and better healthcare. Hence, future projections of malaria transmission depend crucially not just on rainfall and temperature but economic and population scenarios. This explains the rather counter-intuitive result obtained by one 2004 study which found that hundreds of millions more people would be at risk of contracting malaria in a future scenario with lower greenhouse gas emissions. |
Lester A. Mitscher and Victoria Toews
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 Carcinogens are all around us; without a watchdog system (including antioxidants) for identifying and deactivating these carcinogens, the human species would probably have died out long ago from cancer epidemics.
Although there are signs and symptoms indicating the presence of cancer, the earliest cancer symptoms—those that appear when there is the best chance of combating the disease—are often minor and vague. Consult a physician if any of the following cancer warning signs persist over several days or more:
• sudden or unexplained weight loss.
• change in bowel or bladder habits. |
Roberta Bivins
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 Plague was also used by the Government to snatch back hard-won pockets of'native agency'—to reduce the degree of self-governance attained in preceding decades by Indian cities, on the grounds that Indian-controlled municipal bodies were not acting strongly enough to control the epidemics. Unsurprisingly these astonishingly harsh and confrontational policies contained the seeds of their own demise. Indian civil unrest and protest rapidly reached alarming levels, while mass resistance to the measures rendered them ineffective. |
| In part because of such conciliatory and educational approaches, even during the plague epidemics not all protests were directed at government action. Government inaction, too, was becoming a source of concern among the Indian middle classes. This concern would only become more intense as the status and authority of scientific medicine grew. Members of the Indian middle class and elites began to call for higher levels of government investment in the public health and sanitary state of India, and particularly Indian cities. |
| Popular, medical, and administrative responses to the plague epidemics at the close of the nineteenth century illustrate the next phase of the interaction between medicine and empire. Unlike cholera, with its mysterious and much-contested aetiology, the western medical community in India rapidly reached a consensus that plague was contagious, caused by a micro-organism, and therefore that its dangers were embedded in and spread by the individual sick body. |
| At the 1866 International Sanitary Conference at Constantinople, Britain was pointedly reminded of its special responsibility to fight cholera, based on its stewardship of India and its 'armies' of contagious pilgrims, then seen as 'the most powerful of all causes which conduce to the development and to the propagation of epidemics of cholera.'11 A subsequent essayist spelled it out even more clearly: 'The squalid pilgrim army... |
Devra Davis
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| In fact, the decline of epidemics in the nineteenth century had nothing to do with breathtaking scientific advances; all of these came much later. Deaths from germ-fed contagious diseases began to ebb long before microscopes or drugs could find or kill them. This decline happened because dirty water, crowded housing, rotten food and dangerous jobs became much less common in developed nations. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 According to Arpad Pusztai, an allowance of 5% variability is the norm in food experiments and a 10% rise in blood sugar has serious ramifications, given the epidemics of obesity and diabetes. He said, "It is almost impossible to imagine that major lesions in important organs (kidneys, liver, etc.) or changes in blood parameters (lymphocytes, granulocytes, blood glucose, etc.) that occurred in GM corn-fed rats, is incidental and due to simple biological variability."
3. |
Shannon Brownlee
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 The problem seemed newsworthy to at least two dozen papers, which ran stories about the twin epidemics of insomnia and no sex that were gripping the nation.
The National Sleep Foundation has an obvious interest in inflating the number of people suffering from insomnia. The more widespread sleeplessness seems, the more seriously the press will take the foundation, and the more likely it is that the public will pay attention to its health message. |
Sophie D. Coe and Michael D. Coe
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| No one had any real idea of disease etiology—what caused infections, epidemics, and plagues, why women often died of childbed fever, and so forth. Knowledge of anatomy and physiology was just beginning, but had little effect so fat on medical practice. Surgery was carried out without anesthesia ot antiseptics, necessarily at great speed, and if patients failed to succumb to loss of blood or from shock, at least half of them latet fell victim to septicemia and gangrene. |
| By the end of the 19th century, the Amazonian cacao plantations had disappeated, as slavery was finally abolished in Brazil, and as epidemics killed off what labot there was. Cacao survived as an industry in Brazil, but the commercial centet of gravity had moved out of the Amazon, to the coastal tegion of Bahia, south of the great river's delta. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Result: Massive malnutrition, liver damage, and the beginnings of the diabetes and obesity epidemics that would sweep the nation over the next generation.
1970's
Place mercury into the mouths of your little children by having their cavities filled with "silver" fillings (made with 40% mercury, a potent neurotoxin). Result: Widespread mercury toxicity in children, resulting in a sharp increase in neurological conditions, including behavioral disorders, infertility and autism. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Do not ever think that the disease epidemics sweeping our nation don't have solutions. We already know how to prevent and cure cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression and most other degenerative diseases. The reason they are not prevented and cured is because it is not in the interests of those in power to have a healthy population. And current law, of course, unambiguously demonstrates that. The laws surrounding food, medicine, advertising, health insurance and health care are designed to keep you and your children in a continued state of disease. |
Paul D. Blanc, M.D.
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 Sculpted" fingernails, a product whose application and removal require dangerous household toxins, also turn out to be such a breeding ground for bacterial infection that several hospital epidemics have been traced to the artificial nails of health care personnel. |
| These pathogen war rooms are intended to address both bioterror threats and spontaneous epidemics of disease, yet these defenses may be little more than a Maginot Line for microbes. Amid all the heightened vigilance against infectious agents, this system ignores emerging chemical toxins on the home front, a major strategic oversight.
As these agents slip in under the radar of a public health early warning system geared up almost exclusively to detect contagions, not poisons, workers on the job are the group at greatest risk. |
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