November 29, 2003 - How to scare a US marine - American troops in Liberia refused to take malaria pills, because they fear the side effects more than bullets.  Brendan O'Neill on the undermining of morale - The Spectator

November 27, 2003 - Congress passes sweeping changes - Republican victories spur partisan animosity - AP via The Daily Camera - "With wide bipartisan support, Congress approved a five-year, $15 billion bill proposed by the president to combat AIDS in 14 African and Caribbean nations. Another $5.6 billion over 10 years was set aside to research and stockpile vaccines in response to the threat of bioterrorist attacks."

November 28, 2003 - Scientists warn of coming flu pandemic - Experts recommend world health authorities stockpile vaccine to be ready for new strains of influenza - Knight-Ridder via The Wichita Eagle

November 28, 2003 - Child , 2 seniors, die as flu bug spreads - The Globe and Mail - "Children are particularly vulnerable because flu was mild for several years, not allowing them to build immunity, and because one of the strains is new and particularly virulent...The notion of a universal flu vaccination is recent and immunizing children has not been routine."

November 29, 2003 - Critic of large malpractice awards ordered to pay $800,000 in damages - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

November 27, 2003 - Ignorance Hampers AIDS Fight in Asia - AP via www.heraldsun.com - "A doctor from Afghanistan stunned a conference on AIDS this month by revealing that he didn't know what the symptoms of the disease were."

Comment:  Maybe the reason this good doctor doesn't know what the symptoms are is because there is not a definitive thing called "AIDS".  Here's what Professor Peter Duesberg had to say about AIDS in his book Inventing the AIDS Virus: "This war has been fought in the name of the virus-AIDS hypothesis, which holds that HIV, the AIDS virus, is a new cause of thirty old diseases, including Kaposi's sarcoma, tuberculosis, dementia, pneumonia, weight loss, diarrhea, leukemia, and twenty-three others (see chapter 6).  If any of these previously known diseases now occurs in a patient who has antibodies against HIV (but rarely ever any HIV), then his or her disease is diagnosed as AIDS and blamed on HIV.  If the same disease occurs in a patient without HIV-antibodies, his or her diseases is diagnosed by its old name and blamed on conventional chemical or microbial causes."

November 26, 2003 - New Study Shows Overall Increase in HIV Diagnoses - African Americans, Latinos, Gay and Bisexual Men most affected - CDC Press release

Comment: But what if, as some believe, HIV has nothing to do with AIDS? 

November 17, 2003 - CDC News Conference Transcript - Update on Current Influenza Season - CDC - "The strain that we're most concerned about, that is a drift version of H3N2 is called the Fujian strain. It's very similar, it's just drifted a little bit from the Panama strain, and our animal studies suggest that the vaccine will provide cross-protection against this strain. In the past this has happened. It's a very common thing."

Comment: It’s a shame that prior to deciding to use animal cell cultures in the production of vaccines that the question of cross-species transfer was not investigated.   As we have learned, just in the case of the polio vaccine and SV40 alone, the assumption that such transfer would not occur may well have been mistaken.

For more on the problem of SV40 contamination of the polio vaccine, go to Scandals: The Institute of Medicine Review Of SV40 Contamination of Polio Vaccine and Cancer.