Baxter Working On Swine Flu Vaccine

Deerfield-based medical product giant Baxter International Inc. is working with the World Health Organization on a potential vaccine to curb the spread of the swine flu outbreak in Mexico, the company confirmed today.

Baxter, which has a growing vaccine business, has worked with foreign countries in the past to develop vaccines for the H5N1 virus commonly known as bird flu. Baxter has a cell-based technology that allows the company to more rapidly produce vaccines in the event of a pandemic than a decades-old method that uses eggs to process vaccines and can take weeks or even months longer.

“Upon learning about the swine flu outbreak in Mexico yesterday, Baxter requested a virus sample from WHO to do laboratory testing for potentially developing an experimental vaccine,” company spokesman Christopher Bona told the Tribune this afternoon. “Baxter has research and development and manufacturing pandemic planning expertise to rapidly develop candidate vaccines against potentially emerging influenza viruses.”

Air Jamaica Soaring Barbados Way Again

 From July 2 to August 30, 2009, Air Jamaica will operate twice weekly service between New York and Barbados which the airline says is in response to the expected demand by Barbadian nationals in the tri-state area travelling home for the summer.

“We are of course very happy that Air Jamaica has made the commitment of these flights,” Barbadian Minister of Tourism, Richard Sealy, told JIS News.

“Barbadians who live outside of the island look forward to vacationing at home. We are thrilled at Air Jamaica’s move in making it easy for them and all visitors to our island to travel during this period,” he added.

The flights will depart John F Kennedy Airport (JFK) on Thursday and Sunday at 12:50 am and arrive in Barbados at 5:00 am. The return flight will depart Barbados at 6:30 am and arrive at JFK at 11:30 am.

Source: www.jamaicaobserver.com

• Debt Ridden Air Jamaica To Cut Barbados Route Next Month

Oink Oink Swine Flu Label Here To Stay – WHO

The influenza strain linked to 152 deaths in Mexico should be called “swine flu,” the World Health Organization said, rejecting calls from pork producers and an animal-health group to rename the virus.

The flu strain that has sickened people in Mexico, the U.S., Canada, Spain, New Zealand and Scotland hasn’t been observed in pigs and appears to advance through human-to-human transmission, Bernard Vallat, the head of the World Organization for Animal Health, said in an interview yesterday.

The nominal link to pigs has prompted Russia and China to ban pork imports from Mexico and parts of the U.S., while Indonesia plans to destroy imported pork and other swine products. Thailand has told officials to call the strain “Mexican flu.” At the World Health Organization, the malady is called “swine flu” because the virus is of the type that affects pigs, said Keiji Fukuda, the WHO’s assistant director general for health security and environment.

Swine Flu Label Angers Pig Farmers

A Mexican woman and her child wear masks as she walks inside of a metro station in Mexico City April 25, 2009. (REUTERS/Jorge Dan Lopez)

The top agency for health in farm animals said Mexico’s outbreak of deadly influenza was unleashed by a pathogen mixed from bird, human and hog viruses and branded the term “swine flu” as wrong and harmful to pig farmers.

The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said the pathogen was “not a classic human virus… but a virus which includes (in) its characteristics swine, avian and human virus components.”

“The virus has not been isolated in animals to date. Therefore, it is not justified to name this disease swine influenza,” the Paris-based OIE said.

It said that science would show whether the virus was circulating among farm animals and the outcome should determine whether countries were justified in banning pig imports.

Barbados On Swine Flu Alert!

Health authorities announced the implementation of a national action plan to mitigate the deadly virus that has claimed several lives in Mexico and spread to other countries including two of Barbados’ key tourist markets – the United States and Canada.

Officials were also monitoring the situation with two local sports teams – football and polo – who are set to return from Mexico “in the near future”, indicating they would have to report to port health officials on their arrival back home.

The island’s heightened state of action was announced by Minister of Health, Donville Inniss, and Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr. Joy St. John, following an emergency meeting of all major public sector agencies and some private bodies at the Pan-American Health Organisation’s Dayrell’s Road, Christ Church headquarters.

Key provisions of the national plan, influenced by the World Health Organisation’s decision to deem the current swine flu outbreak “a public health emergency of international concern” included:

Regional Governments To Rescue Ailing CLICO & British America Companies

   The Barbados government has agreed to pitch in US$5 million contribution to the establishment of a “Liquidity Support Fund”, which is to be used to provide financial support to the Eastern Caribbean territories that are at risk following the meltdown of several CL Financial firms like British America Insurance in the region.

The Eastern Caribbean will spend US$10 million and regional and international institutions have agreed to inject US15 million in financial support according to a document of a meeting held in Antigua on April 2, attended by Central Bank Governors of Barbados, Trinidad, Eastern Caribbean and Guyana, Barbados Prime Minister David Thompson with representatives of the OECS Secretariat and chaired by St.Vincent Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves. Some Trinidad’s Ministry Of Finance officials also attended.

The Antigua agreement also indicates that Trinidad and Tobago has agreed to inject an initial $312 million (US$50m) to support the policyholders of Caribbean countries where British America and CLICO companies are on the brink of collapse.

Source: www.trinidadexpress.com

Pirates:The $80m Gulf Connection

Organised piracy syndicates operating in Dubai and other Gulf states are laundering vast sums of money taken in ransom from vessels hijacked off the Horn of Africa.

 Investigators hired by the shipping industry have told The Independent that around $80m (£56m) has been paid out in the past year alone – far more than has previously been admitted. But while some of this money has ended up in the pirate havens of Somalia, millions have been laundered through bank accounts in the United Arab Emirates and other parts of the Middle East.

The so-called “godfathers” of the illicit operations, according to investigators, include businessmen from Somalia and the Middle East, as well as other nationalities on the Indian sub-continent. There have also been reports that some of the money from piracy ransoms has gone to Islamist militants.

Microchip Tells Doc If You Have Taken Your Pills!

Microchips in pills could soon allow doctors to find out whether a patient has taken their medication.

The digestible sensors, just 1mm wide, would mean GPs and surgeons could monitor patients outside the hospital or surgery.

Developers say the technology could be particularly useful for psychiatric or elderly patients who rely on a complicated regime of drugs – and are at risk if they miss a dose or take it at the wrong time.  It could also be used for the chronically ill, such as people with heart disease, to establish whether costly drugs are working or whether they are causing potentially dangerous side effects.

Humans Not Cause For Global Warming

An Adelaide professor says climate change is unavoidable – but that humans are not the cause of it.

University of Adelaide Professor of Mining Geology Ian Plimer this week launches his seventh book, Heaven and Earth, Global Warming: The Missing Science, which aims to refute every scientific argument that humans are responsible for global warming.

Professor Plimer embarked on the project after being incensed by increasing public acceptance of the idea that humans have caused global warming. Many scientists worldwide agree that high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have caused global temperatures to rise. Professor Plimer said his book would “knock out every single argument we hear about climate change”, to prove that global warming is a cycle of the Earth.

“It’s got nothing to do with the atmosphere, it’s about what happens in the galaxy.

The G-20 Is The New UN

World markets loved the result of last Thursday’s G-20 summit in London. Stocks soared as the group vowed to regulate hedge funds, agreed to require banks to build capital and promised to provide $1.1 trillion to the International Monetary Fund and other multilateral institutions.

 President Obama and George Soros both called the meeting a “turning point.” Analysts concurred: They told us that, as a result of the gathering, the world had changed “forever,” capitalism would never be the same again and a new era had begun.

Is that so? There was no deal on coordinating economic stimulus plans, the major pre-summit issue, and agreements reached were pale versions of earlier proposals. The post-summit communiqué, the product of months of work by officials from around the world, was both empty and vague.

Sir Allen Stanford: Ponzi Scheme Baloney

   The billionaire financier Allen Stanford has broken his silence to declare that the $8bn fraud accusations levied against him by US prosecutors are “baloney” and he will “die and go to hell” if his business empire is a Ponzi scheme.

During an eccentric performance outside a Houston restaurant in which he appeared close to tears and at one point threatened to punch his interviewer, Stanford admitted to ABC News that he expected to be indicted by a federal jury on criminal charges within two weeks.

But the founder of cricket’s Twenty20 international tournaments cast himself as an ordinary man and insisted that account holders at his network of Stanford banks have not lost a penny.

“I’m the maverick rich Texan where they can put the moose head on the wall. And that’s the only reason they went after me,” said Stanford. “I’m fighting for my survival and for my integrity.”

Trinidad & Tobago Eyes Ghana’s Gas

Victoria Mendez-Charles, Trinidad & Tobago’s High Commissioner to Ghana, said her country has expressed interest in assisting Ghana to build a vibrant gas and energy sector. She further stated that her country’s economy, primarily industrial-based, thrives mainly on the oil and petrochemical industry.

She said Trinidad & Tobago which is into the production of natural gas, chemicals, steel products and fertiliser, “possesses sizeable oil and gas reserves and its prosperity is linked directly to the petroleum and petrochemicals industry apart from its tourist industry”.

Mentioning the country’s GDP per capita income currently as $14,000, she indicated that Trinidad & Tobago has been operating on fiscal surpluses for the past five years.

The G20 Moves The World A Step Closer To A Global Currency

A single clause in Point 19 of the communiqué issued by the G20 leaders amounts to revolution in the global financial order.

“We have agreed to support a general SDR allocation which will inject $250bn (£170bn) into the world economy and increase global liquidity,” it said. SDRs are Special Drawing Rights, a synthetic paper currency issued by the International Monetary Fund that has lain dormant for half a century

In effect, the G20 leaders have activated the IMF’s power to create money and begin global “quantitative easing”. In doing so, they are putting a de facto world currency into play. It is outside the control of any sovereign body. Conspiracy theorists will love it.

The world is a step closer to a global currency, backed by a global central bank, running monetary policy for all humanity.

It has been a good summit for the IMF. Its fighting fund for crises is to be tripled overnight to $750bn. This is real money.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the managing director, said in February that the world was “already in Depression” and risked a slide into social disorder and military conflict unless political leaders resorted to massive stimulus.

Riot Cops Fly In For Summit Of Americas

Seven Scotland Yard police officers have been brought in to prep and train local security forces who will be interfacing with the public and possible protesters when this country (Trinidad) hosts the Fifth Summit of the Americas in ten days.

FULL ARTICLE

• Trinidad Major Security Lapse For  Summit Of The Americas

Barbados Made ‘A’ list But Blacklisting Still Lurking In Background

Barbadians and their supporters who followed the signals coming from the G20 leaders in the weeks preceding their April 2, conference in London, would have been waiting with baited breath to see what measures aimed at shutting down tax or secrecy havens, emerged from the deliberations.

That anxiety was not because Barbados is either a tax or secrecy haven, of course, because those in the know argue that we are patently not so and that we are a well respected, well regulated, transparent treaty-based jurisdiction, and of our 18 tax treaties, ten are with OECD countries – and OECD countries do not generally negotiate tax treaties with tax or secrecy havens.

Rather, it’s because bitter experience has taught that sometimes the emotion of dealing with severe crises can make politicians try to share blame, and Barbados’ inclusion on a blacklist of tax havens might have occurred despite empirical evidence to the contrary as was the case in 1998-2000, and is the case with the ‘Stop Tax Haven Abuse’ bill introduced to congress a couple of weeks ago.

Rocket Fuel Found In Infant Formula

Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have reported that 15 brands of powdered infant formula are contaminated with perchlorate, a rocket fuel component detected in drinking water in 28 states and territories.

The two most contaminated brands, made from cow’s milk, accounted for 87 percent of the U.S. powdered formula market in 2000, the scientists said. The CDC scientists did not identify the formula brands they tested. The little-noticed CDC findings, published in the March 2009 edition of the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology, raise new concerns about perchlorate pollution, a legacy of Cold War rocket and missile tests. Studies have established that the chemical is a potent thyroid toxin that may interfere with fetal and infant brain development (Kirk 2006). The CDC team warned that mixing perchlorate-tainted formula powder with tap water containing “even minimal amounts” of the chemical could boost the resulting mixture’s toxin content above the level the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) considers safe.

Concern about perchlorate pollution has intensified as a series of studies have found perchlorate in the urine of every American tested by the CDC and in breast milk (Blount et al 2006b, Pearce et al 2007).