Pestilence, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse....

Pestilence, one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

There will be great earthquakes, famines, and plagues in various places, and there will be fearful events and awful signs from heaven." Luke 21:11



The Next Pandemic: Not a question of if, but when
Posted on May 12, 2013 by The Extinction Protocol



May 12, 2013 – HEALTH - Terrible new forms of infectious disease make headlines, but not at the start. Every pandemic begins small. Early indicators can be subtle and ambiguous. When the Next Big One arrives, spreading across oceans and continents like the sweep of nightfall, causing illness and fear, killing thousands or maybe millions of people, it will be signaled first by quiet, puzzling reports from faraway places — reports to which disease scientists and public health officials, but few of the rest of us, pay close attention. Such reports have been coming in recent months from two countries, China and Saudi Arabia. You may have seen the news about H7N9, a new strain of avian flu claiming victims in Shanghai and other Chinese locales. Influenzas always draw notice, and always deserve it, because of their great potential to catch hold, spread fast, circle the world and kill lots of people. But even if you’ve been tracking that bird-flu story, you may not have noticed the little items about a “novel coronavirus” on the Arabian Peninsula. This came into view last September, when the Saudi Ministry of Health announced that such a virus — new to science and medicine — had been detected in three patients, two of whom had already died. By the end of the year, a total of nine cases had been confirmed, with five fatalities. As of Thursday, there have been 18 deaths, 33 cases total, including one patient now hospitalized in France after a trip to the United Arab Emirates. Those numbers are tiny by the standards of global pandemics, but here’s one that’s huge: the case fatality rate is 55 percent. The thing seems to be almost as lethal as Ebola. Coronaviruses are a genus of bugs that cause respiratory and gastrointestinal infections, sometimes mild and sometimes fierce, in humans, other mammals and birds. They became infamous by association in 2003 because the agent for severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, is a coronavirus. That one emerged suddenly in southern China, passed from person to person and from Guangzhou to Hong Kong, then went swiftly onward by airplane to Toronto, Singapore and elsewhere. Eventually it sickened about 8,000 people, of whom nearly 10 percent died. If not for fast scientific work to identify the virus and rigorous public health measures to contain it, the total case count and death toll could have been much higher. One authority at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an expert on nasty viruses, told me that the SARS outbreak was the scariest such episode he’d ever seen. That cautionary experience is one reason this novel coronavirus in the Middle East has attracted such concern. Another reason is that coronaviruses as a group are very changeable, very protean, because of their high rates of mutation and their proclivity for recombination: when the viruses replicate, their genetic material is continually being inaccurately copied — and when two virus strains infect a single host cell, it is often intermixed. Such rich genetic variation gives them what one expert has called an “intrinsic evolvability,” a capacity to adapt quickly to new circumstances within new hosts. But hold on. I said that the SARS virus “emerged” in southern China, and that raises the question: emerged from where? Every new disease outbreak starts as a mystery, and among the first things to be solved is the question of source. In most cases, the answer is wildlife. Sixty percent of our infectious diseases fall within this category, caused by viruses or other microbes known as zoonoses. A zoonosis is an animal infection transmissible to humans. Another bit of special lingo: reservoir host. That’s the animal species in which the zoonotic bug resides endemically, inconspicuously, over time. Some unsuspecting person comes in contact with an infected monkey, ape, rodent or wild goose — or maybe just with a domestic duck that has fed around the same pond as the wild goose — and a virus achieves transcendence, passing from one species of host into another. The disease experts call that event a spillover. Researchers have established that the SARS virus emerged from a bat. The virus may have passed through an intermediate species — another animal, perhaps infected by cage-to-cage contact in one of the crowded live-animal markets of the region — before getting into a person. And while SARS hasn’t recurred, we can assume that the virus still abides in southern China within its reservoir hosts: one or more kinds of bat. –NY Times

France confirms second case of new SARS-like coronavirus infection
Posted on May 12, 2013 by The Extinction Protocol



May 12, 2013 – FRANCE – A second diagnosis of the new SARS-like coronavirus has been confirmed in France, the Health Ministry said on Sunday, in what appeared to be a case of human-to-human transmission. The new infection was found in a 50-year-old man who had shared a hospital room with France’s only other known sufferer, the ministry said in a statement. Health experts are concerned about clusters of the new coronavirus strain, nCoV, which was first spotted in the Gulf and has spread to France, Britain and Germany. There has so far been little evidence of direct and sustained human-to-human transmission of nCoV – in contrast to the pattern seen in the related Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) virus, which killed 775 people in 2003. The first nCoV case in France, confirmed on May 8, is a 65-year-old man who fell ill after returning from Dubai late last month. Both French patients are in hospital in the northern city of Lille, where the younger man was transferred to intensive care on Sunday as his breathing deteriorated. His case suggests that airborne transmission of the virus is possible, though still unusual, said Professor Benoit Guery, head of the Lille hospital’s infectious diseases unit. “Fortunately, this remains a virus that is not easily transmitted,” Guery told the BFMTV channel. “I don’t think the public should be concerned – it has been out there for a year and we have 34 cases globally.” He said the second French case had occurred because the first patient presented “quite atypical” symptoms and had not been isolated immediately. Health officials screened 124 people who had come into contact with him and carried out laboratory tests on at least five, including three medical staff. All came back negative except the fellow patient, who had been in “close and prolonged contact” when they shared a hospital room in nearby Valenciennes between April 27 and 29, the ministry said. French authorities are now broadening the screening effort to include anyone who has been in contact with the second confirmed case. –Reuters

There will be great earthquakes, famines, and plagues in various places, and there will be fearful events and awful signs from heaven." Luke 21:11

Signs from Heaven!!!