eat fresh produce

We noted the other day some stories about bedbugs in Vancouver.

Recently, a Vancouver neighborhood saw a spike in bed bugs, MRSA, and another antibiotic-resistant strain of bacteria, VRE. Health care workers found bed bugs on three patients recently hospitalized with MRSA. They smushed the bugs, and analyzed the remains. Three of the bugs had MRSA and two had VRE. It's important to note that the bed bugs were found on infected people, and so they very well might have picked up MRSA from the humans, not given it to them. (If the bugs did pick it up, it's pretty much what they deserved.)

Bedbugs have plagued humans for centuries. Then, after a half a century of relative inactivity, the bedbugs suddenly started up again in the late 1990s. Hmm. Kind of strange. And of course, the bedbugs are harder to kill than ever. Scientists hypothesize what's up with that.

In the 1940s and ’50s, liberal use of DDT and other insecticides all but wiped out the pests. Scientists hypothesize that the few that survived proliferated—females can lay up to five eggs a day, and 500 during a lifetime—and passed along pesticide-resistant traits. Millions of bedbug generations later, scientists are finally zeroing in on how, exactly, bedbugs made their comeback.

Possibilities include:

• thicker skin repels pesticides
• faster metabolism repels pesticides
• chemical blocking repels pesticides
• Fort Detrick bio-engineered a bedbug that repels pesticides

Just kidding! The scientists didn't actually hypothesize about Fort Detrick. That was us.

However, it's interesting to note that bedbugs have become a real problem in the last decade. Bedbug infestations cause tremendous psychological suffering and can also result in people losing their possessions when they have exhausted their efforts and resources trying to eradicate the virulent bedbugs.

May 17, 2011: ABC News: Bed Bugs May Trigger 'Bedbug Psychosis'

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/bed-bugs-increase-feelings-anxiety-depression-paranoia/story?id=13616353

Researchers found that bedbug infestation, and often the media frenzy surrounding the vermin, may increase the risk of mental health problems and exacerbate pre-existing psychiatric conditions.
"Bedbugs, mice, rats roaches -- they've bothered human beings, and they have been around for many many years," Dr. Evan Rieder, a psychiatrist at New York University's Langone Medical Center and lead author of the study, told MedPage Today. "But there's something about the sanctity of the bedroom and the bed and the fact that bedbugs are attracted to warmth and attracted to blood, because that's how they feed, that really violates something that's really personal to the human experience."
Ten people, ranging in age from 21 to 75, participated in the study, but the researchers presented a detailed review of six of the 10 cases at the American Psychiatric Association meeting in Honolulu. After a bedbug infestation, some participants experienced anxiety, depression, controlled bipolar disorder and monosymptomatic delusional disorder in which one imagines that bugs are crawling all over the skin.
For other participants, it didn't take an actual infestation to trigger anxiety and symptoms of paranoia. Rieder said some of them exhibited tactile hallucinations. Even though they did not have a history of an infestation nor a history of psychosis, the participants were convinced that bedbugs were crawling on their skin. Rieder said the swirling media coverage surrounding the vermin may play a part in the paranoia that surrounds this condition.

Let's recap here:

1. Bedbugs cause sever mental health problems for a wide variety of people.
2. Bedbugs feed on blood when people sleep, causing a severe violation of an essential human function -- sleep -- in one of the most personal spaces of the home -- the bedroom. In short, they freak people out.
3. The media frenzy exacerbates the paranoia people feel about bedbugs.

Look at it this way. If you wanted to destabilize a population, bedbugs would make a really great bioweapon. Extremely effective. Completely deniable. There is that mysterious gap from the 1940s to the 1990s. Why didn't the bedbugs bother people much for millions of bedbug generations? Why did they suddenly reappear on the scene in the late 1990s, suddenly extra difficult to kill?

HMMMM??

http://www.allansgraphics.com/movies/8734/prof+marvel.html

We read about the bedbugs in Vancouver, and then we read Jennifer Lake's blog about polio and influenza. And in our research about polio and influenza we watched this video, featuring Desiree Rover (the woman in the top video), and around minute 13 she mentions cimex lectuarius, which are bedbugs. The video link will open to this slide. And we were stunned to learn that a Dr. A.R. Campbell, 1865-1931, conducted extensive research on smallpox, and he discovered that smallpox was caused by bedbugs. Furthermore, it did not spread person to person, or through the air, or through clothing, but it struck people with poor hygiene and vitamin C deficiency.

"In considering this malady, I quickly became impressed with two distinctive peculiarities of it, viz: Its being a disease of the winter and of the coldest climates, and that, as a rule, it is confined to the lower or filthy classes." Resume of Experiments on Variola, by Charles A.R. Campbell, M.D.

One would note at this link that a Russian scientist had arrived at the same conclusions as Dr. Campbell. One might also note the strong connection to poor nutrition and crop failures:

The most important observation on the medical aspect of this disease is the cachexia with which it is invariably associated and which is actually the soil requisite for its different degrees of virulence. I refer to the scorbutic cachexia. Among the lower classes of people this particular acquired constitutional perversion of nutrition is most prevalent, primarily on account of their poverty, but also because of the fact that they care little or nothing for fruits or vegetables. That a most intimate connection exists between variola and scorbutus is evidenced by the fact that it is most prevalent among the poor or filthy class of people ; that it is more prevalent in winter, when the antiscorbutics are scarce and high priced; and, finally, that the removal of this perversion of nutrition will so mitigate the virulence of this malady as positively to prevent the pitting or pocking of smallpox. A failure of the fruit crop in any particularly large area is always followed the succeeding winter by the presence of smallpox.

Very, very interesting reading.

Also see here: Infectiousness of Smallpox and here: Study test defrosted smallpox vaccine, just in case, NY Times, October 2002

The United States stopped smallpox vaccinations in 1972 because the disease had been wiped out in the Americas. Globally, it was eradicated in 1980, and most other countries also stopped vaccinating. An important part of the reason that countries willingly gave up vaccination once the disease was no longer a real threat is that the smallpox vaccine, more than any other vaccine, carries a significant risk of serious complications. For every million people vaccinate, 1 or 2 die, 15 suffer life-threatening complications and hundreds of others have serious skin rashes, infections or other problems.

One might further note the multitude of crop failures current and expected due to the many freak weather events. One might wonder just how long before one of these poor people in Vancouver or anywhere acquires smallpox from an infected bedbug, and then all hell will break loose. They would have a few different ways to play it, starting we would guess with: Everyone Must Be Vaccinated Immediately.

Who was Dr. Charles Campbell? Why has modern organized medicineforgotten his work?, by Walene James

...If Dr. Campbell and his work were common knowledge today, people would view the Bush administration's plan to vaccinate every man, woman and child in America against smallpox as the most medically illogical public health policy since blood letting.


...Even though Drs. Campbell and Watts and possibly others tried to publish their findings their work was ignored. However, it was Dr. Campbell who first called attention to the bedbug as the carrier of smallpox. I might mention that Dr. Campbell was recognized as an outstanding scientist of his generation, even being nominated for the Nobel Prize for his work on the value of bats as mosquito eradicators. Today he is all but forgotten. Few have heard of him and now smallpox is considered highly contagious and dangerous with no known cure.

Why is one doctor honored and the other ignored? When cimex lectularius was exposed as the carrier of smallpox, the manufacturing of serums had grown into a profitable industry and smallpox vaccinations had become a lucrative part of medical practice. The vaccination of every child had become an established practice. Many states had laws making vaccinations compulsory for school entrance requirements. When the cause and control of yellow fever was discovered, the vaccine for it had not been developed (It was developed in 1937).
Perhaps even more economically threatening was Dr. Campbell's assertion that a change in diet, not drugs or vaccines, could prevent the pocking or pitting of smallpox, even mitigating the severity of the disease.

 Dr. A.R. Campbell (1865 --1931)

It was called the filth disease. The invention of electricity and the washing machine was the cause for the great drop in smallpox seen in the 20th century -- not vaccination.

Vaccination is the the greatest crime against humanity. It is assault with a deadly weapon. The vaccine that the regime in Washington and the medical profession are planning to use on the American people has nothing to do with smallpox. It is probably a strain of the deadly 1918 virus that was falsely called the Spanish Flu and that killed more people than any other plague in history.