Dr. Hildegarde Staniger on Morgellans and Chemtrails

Strange things coming from the sky. (Not by accident)

Shocking Photos Of Rainwater

By Lesa Jones

Please forward to as many as possibleto find out what these bizarre items are in the rainfall. See Photos Below

Numerous states are reporting veryyellow fallout from the skies in the rain over the past few days. Images of thousands of strange things...and 'elements'...arebeing foundin this precipatation all across theglobe.

Here in the Western US, cobweb type fallout and these two different 'micro bug' things in the photos below are among many others bizarre 'creatures' I have documented over the last 8 months. If anyone can get this material analyzed it would be a great service to our planet. I have numerous samples ready to go.

We have got to get this out in the open. All these different things in the rainwater DO NOT disappear when it evaporates. These items then starts to degrade plastics and grows on glass surfaces.

I have video of the one bug 'spider' types and it is seen moving around and making egg shaped little masses. Please we have got to have a united front on this issue before it gets so out of hand that there is no way to save us from these particulate pollutants and whatever else is falling from the skies.

Look at all the rain and storms in recent days...they could be coating every inch of every space on the ground. Wake up and gather your own samples and see for yourself.

Speak UP, this is a big an issue as global warming and war...Just because we can't see it easily with the naked DOESN'T mean it won't hurt all of us and our children and our Pets. These things are on all of them. They're also in ourhair and on our skin.

Thanks for your time and I thank you from all the little people who are afraid to speak up or are too sick to make their voices loud enough to be heard.

The Bumble Bees are just loaded with the web like structures and the yellow round fallout from the last few days...

Sincerely,

A proud American who loves her country and what is left of her freedoms...which are slowly being stolen from us as is the clean air which we used to breathe...

More pics if you would like to see them:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/coloradomtnmamma/445761115/

Original article posted here.

Petition for Morgellans Action

Congress - Force the CDC to investigate Morgellons Disease

• petition text
• signatures
• email friends

The petition

The undersigned citizens of the United States urgently request a U.S. government oversight hearing to determine why the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is taking so long to investigate the cause of Morgellons Disease. The CDC has admitted that it has been receiving citizen
complaints of symptoms of this disease for over a decade. Letters from senators from a number of states to the CDC calling for action on this apparently infectious condition that now affects about 9000 families have resulted in NO apparent investigation thus far by the CDC.

Recently, a government oversight hearing was called for to investigate complaints of contaminated pet food and determined that there was system wide failure by the FDA to protect pets from contaminated foods. We believe ill and suffering individuals are at least as important as sick pets. There were a number of pet deaths attributable to tainted pet
food. At least 15 persons have died directly or indirectly after being affected by Morgellons disease and thousands more are suffering and becoming disabled.

Most were misdiagnosed as being delusional by dermatologists, largely untrained in psychiatric conditions, using badly flawed inaccurate and unsupportable assertions in the literature. Scientists have identified some of the physical manifestations of this disease using dermatoscopes, microscopes, DNA analysis and chromatography. The manifestations of this disease are real, multisystemic and progressive, not delusional. However the etiologic agent has so far not matched any known human pathogen. There is no cure. Time is of the essence since one half of the 9000 people identifying themselves as ill with this disease have done so within in the past six months. This may represent an emerging epidemic. In our opinion, the CDC is failing in its obligation of "controlling the introduction and spread of infectious diseases," and
we, the taxpayers have a right to know why this is happening and to have the current apparent failure of the CDC addressed immediately.

Sign the petition Click here.

Know thy enemy: The denial machine and how pretty credentials obsure idiotic, unfounded ideas

Internet helps spread delusion that Morgellons a disease

By EDWARD McSWEEGAN, For The Capital

I thought the following might be an interesting experiment: Invent a disease and a set of vague symptoms. Build a Web site and start a tax-exempt charity for the disease. Send out press releases about the newly discovered disease and its disturbing symptoms and provide a link to the Web site. Then sit back and see how many people come to the site or call the foundation claiming to have the disease.
Such an experiment probably would reveal quite a bit about the powers of suggestion, hypochondria and the expanding reach of the Internet.

Unfortunately, someone has done my experiment.

A South Carolina housewife came up with a disease she calls Morgellons and a set up a tax-exempt charity called the Morgellons Research Foundation. Apparently, her son had a rash and, instead of going to the doctor, she started snooping around the Internet for a possible cause. She came across some medical references (from the 17th century) that may have described something similar to her son's "condition" and she latched onto the name. She now has about 7,000 fellow Morgellons sufferers. That's an impressive number of hypochondriacs with online access.

In 2006, Hillary Rhodes, a reporter in Ohio did a story on the Morgellons Research Foundation. She wrote, "Don't visit that (Web) site, though. You might get swept up in what some people believe is a case of mass hysteria. If that's what Morgellons is, it would be the first apparent case to spring from the Internet."

So what exactly is Morgellons disease? From the patient perspective, it's a bizarre skin condition in which worm-like fibers of various colors emerge from lesions on the skin.

"I was feeling things moving under my skin," one patient reported.

From the perspective of most physicians, Morgellons is just another form of delusional parasitosis. Delusional parasitosis is a well-known psychiatric condition in which patients believe they are infested by bugs, worms or parasites crawling on them or under their skin.

To be fair, there are a variety of fleas, bedbugs, lice, mites and ticks that bite and feed on skin. They often leave bite marks that swell and itch, and which may become infected if scratched repeatedly.

But in the absence of obvious bite marks from insects and arthropods, or allergic reactions, many physicians are forced to consider a psychiatric origin for the patient's complaints.

"The patient is intensely anxious, is obsessively focused on his or her symptoms, brings "specimens" of the offending agent … and is unshakable in his or her belief as to the cause," University of Pennsylvania professor Caroline Koblenzer wrote last November. "Elderly women living alone are the most common demographic. Psychiatric co-morbidity, such as depression, anxiety or personality disorder, can usually be uncovered during a careful interview."

Interestingly, delusions, such as contagious diseases, can be spread from one susceptible person to another susceptible person. This is how the Internet can serve as a "vector" or transmitter of illness.

Sociologist Robert Batholomew recently suggested the "World Wide Web has become the incubator for mass delusion and it (Morgellons) seems to be a socially transmitted disease over the Internet."

Such beliefs also are reinforced by a handful of doctors who claim Morgellons is real and treat patients with a variety of antibiotics and expensive supplements. (These are the same doctors who treat people for chronic fatigue, chronic Lyme disease, Gulf War Syndrome, Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and other poorly defined syndromes and symptoms.)

Connected and contaminated by the Internet, Morgellons patients have spread the effects of their shared delusions at least as far as Capital Hill, where Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., urged the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to investigate the matter, and to the CDC where self-diagnosed Morgellons patients were telephoning 20 times a day demanding help.

So now the CDC is investigating Morgellons disease. Last summer, a 12-person task force assembled to review patient data, and develop a case definition for Morgellons disease in order to distinguish its symptoms from those of other well-known diseases. It's not clear how much time and money will be spent investigating a disease imagined in a South Carolina suburb and propagated through the Web.

"There really is no scientific basis at this point to believe that this is real. Many patients with symptoms similar to Morgellons respond well to antipsychotics," Stephen Stone, president of the American Academy of Dermatology told Nature Medicine magazine last summer.

"Seinfeld" character George Costanza nicely summed up the problems of dermatology and skin when he declared, "Wash it, dry it, move on!" Today, in the Internet Age, he probably would say, "Wash it, dry it, log off!"


Dr. Edward McSweegan has a Ph.D. in microbiology and lives in Crofton. He works on and writes about infectious disease issues. He may be contacted at emcsweegan@nasw.org

Original article posted here.

SilentSuperbugs.com and Morgellons Video: Deconstructing Propaganda and Misinformation

Silentsuperbug.com, appears to be a typical "honeypot" and has produced two videos that are slickly produced, with nice pictures, but says nearly nothing. When following the video, ask the following questions as the issues arise:




What laboratory? Where?

Quorum sensing? How many people are expected to understand what this means?

From this point on, it is just a series of interesting pictures, buzzwords, and few explanations.

The end lists many supposed aspects of condition, but makes no reference to research that confirms or supports these claims. How would someone confirm the accuracy. Are we supposed to understand this from a slide show of cells? Hardly.

The site says you can "Contact Us" and then only asks you for information.

The site allows you to register, but doesn't have any features that would make registration beneficial.

When you click on Silent Superbug reference site, you find a "communication" that is as incoherent as longer videos, advertisements for Barak Obama, 1993 reports about leukemia from the Air Force Medical Center, a 1997 article about "Fusarium", and article from a range of ailments and issues. However, this information is scattered and nearly incomprehensible. This is hardly supportive of the film, other than as continuing to sow confusion.

And the final proof of the fraud is that the archives section lists 50 articles in January 2007, but if you click on any one it takes to back to the same front page. No articles. Complete bullshit. This is our intelligence operations. Completely unintelligent.

Fraudulent research site accessible here.

Yeah, but who's the enemy?

Federal Funding for Biological Weapons Defense Nears $50 Billion since 2001

WASHINGTON - JUNE 7 - In a new analysis released today, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation reports that the U.S. government has spent or allocated over $40 billion to address the threat of biological weapons since September 2001. For FY2008, the Bush administration is proposing an additional $6.77 billion in bioweapons-related spending, approximately $550 million (or 9%) more than the amount Congress appropriated in FY2007. If the FY2008 request is fully funded, total bioweapons-related funding since FY2001 will exceed $48 billion.

Funding continues to focus primarily on research, development, acquisition, and stockpiling of medical countermeasures and protective equipment, with over $31 billion devoted to these functions through FY2008. Medical surveillance and environmental detection of biological weapons agents totals over $3 billion, and improving state, local, and hospital preparedness totals over $9 billion through FY2008. Less than 2% (or $875 million) of all federal bioweapons-related funding through FY2008 is devoted to efforts to prevent the development, acquisition, and use of biological weapons by states and non-state terrorist actors. DR. ALAN PEARSON, Director of the Biological and Chemical Weapons Program at the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation, explained that “Prevention is inherently less expensive than preparedness and response, but the Administration’s particularly low level of funding for prevention reflects the low priority it accords bioweapons prevention efforts in general.” DR. PEARSON concluded: “The proposed increase in funding for the Defense Department’s Biological Threat Reduction Program is a step forward. Now the State Department and other federal agencies need to step up their prevention efforts. A strong commitment to cooperative international action against the development and use of biological weapons is essential for improving this nation’s security.” The complete analysis is available online:

http://www.armscontrolcenter.org/resources/fy2008_bw_budget.pdf

Founded in 1980, the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation is a leading advocate for prudent measures to prevent the spread of nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons. Visit the Center online at http://armscontrolcenter.org.

Original article posted here.

(AN OLDER ARTICLE THAT PROVIDES IMPORTANT CONTEXT FOR PROLIFERATION)


CRG STATEMENT ON U.S. BIO-WEAPONS INITIATIVES

February 21, 2003

The United States renounced the “development, production and stockpiling” of biological weapons by signing the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) in 1972. This treaty has been ratified by 144 nations and, despite its widely discussed loopholes and ambiguities (1), represents an important first step towards biological disarmament.

The US military has only recently begun to revive investment in biological weapons research and development. In 1981, the Army’s Biological Defense Research Program was a mere $15 million initiative. Under the Bush Sr. Administration, this number reached $80 million in 1991, still a minor investment relative to an overall $316 billion military budget (2). Throughout this period, the Department of Defense provided an annual list of all military laboratories and private contractors conducting defense-related biological research. Although the results of these projects remained classified, their nature and location were provided in detailed accounts to Congress (3).

Today, the country is facing a new and dangerous set of defense priorities. President Bush has proposed a massive budget to build new laboratories for research on disease-inducing organisms (4). In 2003 alone, the US will spend an estimated $2.9 billion on “counter-terrorism research and development” (R&D), most of which will focus on bio-terrorism (5). In addition, under Project BioShield, the US will allocate $5.9 billion over the next decade to public health infrastructure, military and civilian response preparedness, and work in public and private laboratories with the stated purpose of defending our nation against a biological weapons attack (6).

Meanwhile, the US has progressively undermined international efforts to abolish biological weapons. In November 2001, at the Fifth Review Conference of the BWC in Geneva, the US rejected a verification protocol for legally binding international inspections and investigations of all parties (7). Under pressure from pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, the US this September called for all negotiations over treaty enforcement to be indefinitely halted.

The present political climate has produced a widely accepted rationale for a number of defensive and preventive measures. To respond to a possible biological weapons attack, the United States and other nations need to improve systems of healthcare delivery and global disease surveillance. The ability to rapidly detect disease outbreaks when they occur will enhance the preparedness of our clinics and hospitals (8). But government and news sources tend to focus only on the initiatives that have a clear defensive justification in terms of protecting public health. Much less attention has been paid to the expanding programs of research on biological weapons themselves, which are “dual use” by their very nature—that is, offensive capabilities are necessarily produced in the process of testing or creating defensive measures. For example, to create vaccines or anti-viral agents against many of the most dangerous pathogens and toxins, researchers must first produce such agents in sizable quantities (9). In the name of vaccine development, as many as twenty laboratories in the United States handle, manipulate, and in some cases weaponize, one of the most lethal strains of anthrax. Prominent among these are the Dugway Proving Ground in Salt Lake City, Utah; the US Army Medical Research Unit in Fort Detrick, Maryland; the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC; the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia; and the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Aberdeen, Maryland. A recent genetic analysis published in Science concluded decisively that one of these bio-defense labs was the source of the anthrax spores used in the September 2001 mail attacks that resulted in five deaths and several billion dollars in damage to the US economy (10).

Research on pathogens, regardless of its purpose, poses a clear danger to public safety and domestic security. Deadly biological agents can escape into the environment through at least three mechanisms. First, there are breakdowns in security. In December, a three-hour total power failure undermined the containment systems at an infectious disease laboratory at Plum Island, New York. Workers had to resort to sealing the doors with duct tape, as the air compressors failed (11). Second, there can be accidental infection of workers, who subsequently spread disease through outside contact. For example, two microbiologists at the Center for Disease Control died in 2001 after being exposed to strains of meningitis bacteria they were researching. Third, there is the obvious risk of intentional release, a prospect the anthrax mailings have made impossible to ignore. Laboratories are filled with disgruntled workers. As MIT biologist Jonathan King recently pointed out, “there are people like me who are paid well, and then there are people … in the basement getting minimum wage, taking care of the dead animals (12).” The fact that there are still no federal “requirements for rigorous background or security clearance checks for those who work in such facilities” (13) is not reassuring. As the expansion of facilities further stretches the capacity to ensure adequate safety and security provisions, we can expect these risks to intensify.

Disclosures by the New York Times of three previously classified bio-weapons projects--including the production of a genetically engineered anthrax strain resistant to existing vaccines and the development of a model bio-weapons delivery system—raise crucial questions about the peaceful or “defensive” intent of the United States (14). By pushing the boundary between defense and offense, whether in purpose or application, these initiatives undermine biological arms control (15). The fears and suspicions generated by high-level research on pathogens and mechanisms for their delivery are likely to fuel global proliferation.

With these concerns and interests in mind, the Council for Responsible Genetics has created a
Working Group—composed of specialists in the fields of public health, genetics, and arms control—to investigate the implications of the growing US biological defense industry. This group proposes to examine such issues as: the size and scope of various bio-terrorism and bio-defense initiatives, and the changing role of genetic and genomic technologies in these programs; the new relationships and commercial contracts between government agencies and university and corporate laboratories in bio-defense research; and the limits of public access to information on government-funded bio-defense activities.

What most concerns the Council for Responsible Genetics is the degree of secrecy, and lack of public or Congressional oversight, with which these recent R&D activities have been conducted. Resistance to public disclosure of research on biological weapons sends a signal to the rest of the world that the United States has something to hide. The US has made it clear that it will not provide the same transparency on weapons of mass destruction that it expects from Iraq and other so-called “outlaw nations.” This double standard undermines US credibility and standing in the international community. Its elimination requires that all facilities conducting research related to biological weapons or bio-preparedness be declared to the United Nations, with their purposes clarified. The Council for Responsible Genetics therefore calls on the US to open its facilities to international inspection, and to honor its disarmament obligations under the BWC, the Chemical Weapons Convention, and the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The Council also calls on the United States to initiate a review of all of its biological warfare programs with the goal of ending those that, in the name of defense, undermine the BWC and open the door to a biological arms race.



CITATIONS

(1) Article 1, for example, permits work on dangerous biological agents for “prophylactic, protective, or other peaceful purposes.” The lack of consensus on a precise definition of what constitutes such permissible has left the door open for offensive germ warfare programs to be carried out under the cover of a purportedly defensive purpose.

(2) Center for Defense Information (http://www.cdi.org), Federation of American Scientists (http://www.fas.org/bwc/usbiodefense.htm)

(3) Barbara Hatch Rosenberg, “Defending Against Biodefence: The Need for Limits,” Disarmament Diplomacy, No. 70, February/March 2003, p. 1-6.

(4) Eileen Choffnes, “Bioweapons: New Labs, More Terror?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2002, p. 29-32.

(5) Kei Koizumi, “An Overview of Federal Funding of Biodefense Research for FY 2003,” Presentation to the AAAS Conference on Federal Biodefense Research, December 3, 2002.

(6) Eunice Moscoso, “Bush Pushes Vaccine Plan for Bioterror; ‘BioShield’ Would Cost $6 billion,” Atlanta Journal and Constitution, February 4, 2003, p. A3.

(7) Peter Slevin, “US Drops Bid to Strengthen Germ Warfare Accord,” Washington Post, September 19, 2002, p. A1.

(8) For a discussion of prevention and public health measures, see Victor Sidel, “Defense Against Biological Weapons: Can Immunization and Secondary Prevention Succeed?” in Susan Wright, ed. Biological Warfare and Disarmament (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 77-101.

(9) See Laura Reed and Seth Shulman, “A Perilous Path to Security?: Weighing U.S. “Biodefense” against Qualitative Proliferation,” in Susan Wright, ed. Biological Warfare and Disarmament (Rowman & Littlefield, 2002), pp. 57-76.

(10) Timoty D. Read, et al, “Comparative Genomic Sequencing for Discovery of Novel Polymorphisms in Bacillus anthracis,” Science, June 14, 2002, Vol. 296, p. 2028-2033.

(11) Marc Santora, “Power Fails for Three Hours at Plum Island Infectious Disease Lab,” New York Times, December 20, 2002, p. B1.

(12) Jonathan King, “Biological Defense is Just Another Name for Offensive Weapons,” GeneWatch, March 2002, p. 8.

(13) ibid 4, at 32.

(14) Judith Miller, Stephen Engleberg & William J. Broad, “US Germ Warfare Research Pushes Treaty Limits,” New York Times, September 4, 2001, p. A1.

(15) See discussion by former government lawyers in Judith Miller, “When Is Bomb Not a Bomb? Germ Experts Confront US,” New York Times, September 5, 2001, p. A5CRG

Original article posted here.

Time to start brushing up on the science (and a little background vid for context)

FAR-INFRARED RADIANT HEAT (FIR RH) TYPE REMEDIATON for MOLD and OTHER UNIQUE DISEASES

Dr. Hildegarde Staninger,
RIET-1, Industrial Toxicologist/IH & Doctor of Integrative Medicine.
Integrative Health International, LLC,
12235 E. Centralia St., Lakewood, CA 90715
Phone: 562-402-7300 Fax: 562-402-7308

ABSTRACT

Far-Infrared Radiant Heat (FIR RH) has many known names, such as the bridge of Terra Hertz and many others. It is made up of no photons and only 1/2 electron spin that gives it its unique qualities to aid oneself in the remediation of the contamination within one’s own body and in one’s indoor environment. We naturally acquire it from the sun with all the other spectrum specific wavelengths of visible and invisible light. It is the grounding rod of the life force of a single cell, just as it is the universal remedial means for purifying many different items that have a common molecule of water in them. A detailed account of its applications in environmental health and engineering will be discussed in its application of mold and other unique diseases that have affected our bodies, homes, workplaces and environment.

What is Far-Infrared?

It is hard to explain something that one cannot see with the naked eye, but every evening, every one of us looks up into the heavens to see the twinkling stars that make up our universe. We called the first stars born in the galaxies the “heavens.” That beginning emerged in a specific range of radiant heat as a luminous speck of dust and energy called “Infrared.” Infrared is usually divided into 3 spectral regions: near, mid and far-infrared. The boundaries between the near, mid, and far-infrared regions are not agreed upon and can vary, but all create radiant heat. ¹

Any object that has a temperature (i.e. radiates heat) emits infrared energy or IR. Therefore, basically all celestial objects and other living organisms emit some infrared. The wavelength at which an object radiates most intensely depends on its temperature. When a person is ill, they will lose radiant heat within their body. The electromagnetic spectrum is composed of three segments of wavelength: near, mid and far- infrared. They are measured in microns or micrometers (a micron = 1/1,000,000 or 0.000,001).¹

It is interesting to note that this process may be viewed as losing light within one’s body as seen in chemical luminescence tests, which are currently being used to aid in the treatment of chronic diseases, such as cancer, diabetes, liver and polycystic kidney disease. In general, as the temperature of an object cools, it shows up more prominently at farther infrared wavelengths. This means that some infrared wavelengths are better suited for studying certain objects than others, such as far-infrared.¹

The far-infrared segment of the electromagnetic spectrum occurs just below, or “infra” to red light as the next lowest energy band. This band of light is not visible to human eyes but can be seen by special cameras that translate infrared into visible colors, such as the way thermal cameras do.^{2, 3} We can, however, feel this type of light, which we perceive as heat. The sun produces most of its energy in the infrared segment of the spectrum. Our atmosphere has a “window” in it that allows infrared rays in the 7 to 14 micron ranges to safely reach the earth’s surface. When warmed, the earth radiates infrared rays in the 7-14 micron bands, with peak output at 10 microns.

Our tissues normally produce infrared energy for warmth and tissue repair. Tissue production of infrared energy is associated with a variety of healing responses. At times, the infrared energy in our tissues may require a boost to a higher level to ensure the fullest healing possible for tissue repair.

Body tissues that need an infrared boost selectively absorb infrared rays. The tissue will only use the infrared rays in the areas where it is needed. After boosting a tissue’s infrared energy, the remaining rays pass on harmlessly. This phenomenon is called “resonant absorption.” Our bodies radiate infrared energy through the skin at 3 to 50 microns, with most of the output at 9.4 microns. Our palms emit infrared energy in the level of 8 to 14 microns. If you put your hands on top of each other, but do not allow them to touch, and spin them fast like a tumble weed in a western movie, then stop them and bring the palms near each other but do not let them touch, you will feel a radiant heat. This is infrared energy. Palm healing, an ancient tradition in China, has used the healing properties of infrared rays for 3,000 years. Yogis in India also employ palm healing and recommend it, especially for relieving eyestrain.

Astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute, the COBE/DIRBE Science Team and NASA have determined that in the far-infrared range, the stars have all vanished. Instead we now see very cold matter (140 Kelvin or less). Huge, cold clouds of gas and dust in our own galaxy, as well as in nearby galaxies, glow in far-infrared light. In some of these clouds, new stars are just beginning to form. Far-infrared observations can detect these first stars called protostars long before they “turn on” visibly by sensing the heat they radiate as they contract. And maybe this far–infrared light of the cosmos is the simple speck of luminous dust that was used to create all living matter eons of years ago from the pulsation of divine love.⁴


FDA, EPA and Nanotechnology

Nanotechnlogy is the ability to control things at an atomic and molecular scale of between one and 100 nanometers and has been met with enthusiasm across a variety of industries. Critics highlight the murky area of how nanoparticles affect toxicity and say nanoparticles should be treated as new, potentially harmful materials and tested for safety accordingly.⁵

Unlike pharmaceuticals, which must go through a series of pre-market approvals, finished dietary supplements need no pre-market approval. Under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act (DSHEA), which is part of the Food and Cosmetic Act, only ingredients not marketed in the US before October 1994 must be approved by FDA before use in consumer products. Thus, as it stands, pre-market regulation of nanotechnology in dietary supplements, biological pesticides, and other man made nanotechnology does not fall under FDA, EPA, OSHA, FIFRA and other regulatory agencies in the USA, just for the simple reason that the nanotechnology is so small that the conventional regulatory laboratory methods do not have equipment to measure at 9 decimals below the zero and are only addressing 3 and 4 decimals (ppm, ppb, and ppt).

In 2005, the Woodrow Wilson International Center stated that more than $30 billion in manufactured goods, according to Lux Research, almost doubled the previous year. The market analyst projects that by 2014, 15 % of all globally manufactured goods will incorporate nanotechnology. So, as environmentalists, engineers and scientists, how do we monitor and keep our bodies, workplace and environment safe from its own self?⁶

Transcending Global Economy by Protecting the Land, Air and Sea

“If there is magic in this planet, it is water,” wrote Loren Eisely. Covering 70% of the earth’s surface and making up two-thirds or more of the weight of living organisms, water is indispensable to life. Not only does it affect humans, animals, and plants, but also the earth’s life force.

Throughout history, the quality of drinking water has been a major factor in determining human welfare.⁷ Pollutants can range from toxic chemicals, bacteria, mold, virus, parasites, mineral fibers, radon, metals, and even the new nanotechnology products (biological pesticides and viral protein envelope technology).^{8, 9} The association of cause and effect for lead is attributed to Hippocrates about 400 B.C. Georgius Agricola in the sixteenth century knew enough about the occupational and environmental occurrences of certain diseases and substances encountered to write books on occupational diseases. Ever since, the list of toxicants has grown longer.¹⁰ And it will be the synthesizing minded environmental professional who will have to address diseases like Morgellons and other unique diseases that went environmentally wrong in the reality of the world nanotechnology. It’s not a quick fix. Many of the collective engineering, scientific, industrial hygiene, and occupational physicians have had to take care of the mycotoxins and biofilms created from simple mold infestation in the workplace and in the home. The city of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina is just one mold spore time bomb, causing its residents arthritis, Crohns disease, diabetes, and other diseases, to name just a few.¹¹

Water pollution is any physical or chemical change in water that may adversely offset organisms. It is global in scope, but the types of pollution vary according to a country’s level of development and economic stature. In the poorer nations, water pollution is predominantly caused by human and animal wastes, pathogens (bacteria, fungi, and virus), parasites from their waste, and sediment from unsound farming and timbering practices. The rich nations also suffer from these problems, but with their more extravagant lifestyles and widespread industry, they create an additional assortment of potentially hazardous pollutants: heat, toxic metals, acids, pesticides, endocrine disruptors in waste water from medications/chemo, and new nano biological sensors for illegal drug monitoring and biological pesticides.^{12, 13}

The use of the biological pesticide Bacillus Thuringiensis for mosquito control alone in Santa Monica, California left a tale of illogic. If you use a biological agent that is now called a biological pesticide that is made up of the DNA of a Bacillus bacteria from soil and the other half from the DNA of syphilis then it is only logical that 6 months after spraying you would get an outbreak of syphilis in individuals who had some blood generational relative in the past and have an epidemic of this disease. It is simple homeopathic logic to the synthesizing minded environmentalist.

Our EPA air permits only regulate 6 pollutants, with the watchful eye on others on the horizon. None address the use of electronic, psychotronic and information weaponry; high altitude ultra low frequency weapons; plasma, electromagnetic, sonic and ultrasonic weapons, laser weapons, strategic, theater, tactical or extraterrestrial weapons, chemical biological, environmental climate or tectonic weapons. Chemtrails will be part of the environmental professionals’ monitoring programs of the near future to prove it was not industries’ pollution nor a work- place exposure that cause the new diseases of nano and beyond technology.¹⁴ The way to protect the environment from these new environmental factors is only by maintaining one’s own health, environment and food sources to be as sound as the cry of a newborn baby through the universe.

Mold and Other Unique Diseases

Mycotoxin is a highly toxic principle produced by molds or fungi. One type, the aflatoxins, is a member of tricothecene group produced by the fusarium fungus. This has been identified in samples of the so called “yellow rain” in Southeast Asia, where it is said to have been the cause of many deaths among war refugees. Its presence there is subject to some conjecture, since the Fusarium fungus cannot germinate in the humid environment of that area unless it is altered through genetic manipulations by man. There is substantial evidence (blood tests, autopsies and contaminated gas masks) that the former U.S.S.R. has used such lethal agents in Afghanistan, just as many other countries have used these lethal agents since the dawn of history. The human body, once exposed to a mycotoxin, runs a triple risk to its toxic effects. The triple risk factors are direct toxic effects of the myctoxins, acquisition of mutated RNAi from the myctoxin’s parent fungus and creation of an internal biofilm, which will harbor a toxic soup of disease.¹⁵

Fungi grow all over this planet. They are found in the soil, on trees and in water. Their spores travel throughout the lands by the winds from the four corners of our world. Biosensor testing conducted by the U.S. military has resulted in an increased population of Aspergillus niger on homes, trees and other materials in various areas of the United States of America.¹⁶

Over the last decade, starting in the 1990’s, research has implicated many toxin-producing fungi, such as Stachybotrys, Penicillim, Aspergillus, and Fusarium species, to indoor air quality problems and building-related illnesses. Inhalation of mycotoxins, producing fungi in contaminated buildings, is the most significant exposure, however, dermal contact from handling contaminated materials and the chance of ingesting toxin-containing spores through eating, drinking and smoking is likely to increase exposure in a contaminated environment. Recent advances in technology have given laboratories the ability to test for specific mycotoxins without employing cost-prohibitive gas chromatography or high performance liquid chromatography techniques. Currently, surface, bulk food and feeds, and air samples can be analyzed relatively inexpensively for mycotoxins.

During exponential growth, many fungi release low molecular weight, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) as products of secondary metabolism with a melting point of 81 degrees C or less. These compounds comprise a great diversity of chemical structure, including ketones, aldehydes, and alcohols, as well as moderately to highly modified aromatics and aliphatics. Cultural studies of some common household molds suggest that the composition of VOCs remains quantitatively stable over a range of growth media and conditions. Furthermore, the presence of certain marker compounds common to multiple species, such as 3-melthylfuran, may be monitored as a proxy for the presence of a fungal amplifier.¹⁷ This method has been suggested as a means of monitoring fungal contamination in grain storage facilities. Limited evidence suggests that exposure to low concentrations of VOCs may induce respiratory irritation independent of exposure to allergenic particulate. Volatile organic compounds may also arise through indirect metabolic effects. A well-known example of this is the fungal degradation of urea formaldehyde foam insulation. Fungal colonization of this material results in the cleavage of urea from the polymer, presumably to serve as a carbon or nitrogen source of primary metabolism. During this process formaldehyde is evolved as a derivative, contributing to a decline in indoor quality.¹⁸

Many fungi, mycotoxins, and their VOC’s are at a level of detection within the human body that is very hard to determine at relatively low costs. Tissue samples of blood, urine and even direct organ/tissue biopsy will determine the presence of a fungi, mycotoxin and/or their VOC’s To kill fungi and remove other substances, it is necessary to look at a variety of treatment modalities. Current anti-fungal formulations have been developed to address specific fungal infections. In many cases, it is very hard for the healthcare provider and physician to determine what species of fungi was present that created which specific mycotoxin, which is a billion dollar revenue to the pharmaceutical industry.

Fungal infections in AIDS patients have been observed in tissue biopsy reports to be growing within the tissue, and this causes great health risks to the patient and the environmental engineers who have to monitor HVAC systems within a hospital or hospice setting. The use of far-infrared as a treating modality can address the electromagnetic spectrum in micron and micrometers (nano level), which would be an ideal choice in treating fungal infected and other unique, diseased patients, HVAC surfaces (walls, ceilings, floors) and water. The far-infrared segment of the electromagnetic spectrum occurs just below, or “infra” to, red light as the next lowest energy band, as previously discussed.

Our tissues normally produce infrared energy for warmth and tissue repair. Tissue production of infrared energy is associated with a variety of healing responses. The Far-infrared travels the path of fresh water between the cells thus correcting the water molecules bond angle to a perfect hexagonal shape that then collects a total of 6 water molecules to form a collective microtubule of water. The microtubule then creates a fiber optic response that aligns all the molecules to respond to the correct mechanisms of the blueprint of the DNA. Once far-infrared is within the body at its total capacity, it is repealed. This occurs in all living forms of life and in any material that has moisture or a water molecule within its pores, such as cement which becomes 4-5 times stronger.¹⁹

Body tissues that need an infrared boost selectively absorb infrared rays after boosting a tissue’s infrared energy: The remaining rays pass onward harmlessly. This phenomenon is called “resonant absorption.” Our bodies radiate infrared energy from 8 to 14 microns. Palm healing, an ancient tradition in China, has used the healing properties of infrared rays for 3,000 years. Yogis in India also employ palm healing and recommended it especially for relieving eye strain.

The use of high performance carbon fiber that is made from the filaments of man- made diamonds (zirconium), which is crystalline in structure, has been developed by MPS Global, Inc. in panels for FIR Therapy Rooms, and individual use Capsule DIMA. All panels create a steady stream of pure far-infrared radiant heat that is from 4 to 16 microns. There are no photons and 1/2 electron spin, which is the basic definition of FIR in any CRC Press Handbook of Physics text. The use of these panels will create a temperature of 16521 degrees C, which does not cause any burning of the skin or ill effects upon its surfaces. They are the environmental answer to new nanotechnology-created diseases the next generation of environmentalists will have to correct. The melting point of many mycotoxin VOC’s is 81 degrees C and when using FIR radiant heat at 165 degrees C the compounds are evaporated off, or out of the body or surface area, for environmental remedial activity.

Some other diseases that have come into play for workplace and environmental exposures are the following: Morgellons - A disease in which individuals have the growth of fibers from their skin that burn at 1,700 degrees F and do not melt.20 A private study to determine the chemical and biological composition of these fibers has shown that the fibers’ outer casing is made up of high density polyethylene fiber (HDPE). The fiber material is used commonly in the manufacture of fiber optics. There is no history of the individual in that industry or coming into contact with this material. It was further determined that this material is used throughout the bio nanotechnology world as a compound to encapsulate a viral protein envelope, which is composed of a viron (1/150th times smaller than a virus) with DNA, RNA, RNAi (mutated RNA) or RNAsi linear or ring plasmids for specific functions.21, 22 Toxicological pathology identification of tissue biopsies from an individual diagnosed with Morgellons revealed the presence of continual silica or glass tubules with the presence of silicone.23 It must be noted that the core toxicological effects of silicone alone have been demonstrated throughout the breast implant industry and litigation cases.24, 25 Furthermore, silicone cannot make silica, but silica or silica bicarbonate can make silicone through natural cellular interaction in a biological system. The subject did not have breast implants or any other implant or silicon glue injections. Second Generation Dioxin - Children born of the second generation of offspring from the Vietnam War are experiencing severe birth defects as seen in an article of Vanity Fair this year. It shows specific birth defects of keeping the bones in reverse positions, which again, is a result of the improper alignment of the water molecule upon the developmental embryo’s cellular signaling system and sensing. Parasitic Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) - 63 % of the patients diagnosed with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) had a hidden lung worm, Cryptostronylus pulmoni cultured from their sputum. This species of worm is a nematode. Its male measures 250 nanometers, while the female measures between 750-100 namometers in length.26 Currently, biological pesticide manufacturers are using nematode eggs as delivery systems of viral protein envelopes to corn, potatoes, and other agricultural feed materials that are used as feed for poultry, beef and domestic animals (cats and dogs). Conclusion The last 30 years of the birth of OSHA and EPA has given us 3 decades of professionals in the field of environmental health and science. All of us have been dedicated to reducing the risk of exposure to hazardous materials in the workplace, environment and home. We came from a generation of creating a Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS) and telling the world of industry that it must comply but little did we know that mankind was on its own mission of creating nanotechnology that would never be ruled by an MSDS or hazardous material incident report. It would go as a silent plague into the DNA of every living creature on this planet to reveal its true face in the generations to come. Or, will it be one that never shows its face because the world may become infertile due to its own demise? REFERENCES 1. Staninger, Ph.D., Hildegarde. What is Far-Infrared? Healthy Life USA Magazine. Los Angeles, California. Volume 2, March 2004. 2. Zybron Optical Electronics, Inc. Our Unique Sensors and Their Innovative Fusion Systems. Beaver Creek, Ohio. © August 2006. 3. Integrative Thermal Intelligent Products. Tri-Tracker: Detector of DNA, RNA and Viral Protein Envelops. Dayton, Ohio © October 2006. 4. Markarian, Ph.D., Mark. Work in progress on the light bond and its universal applications to love. The Human Enterprise, Palisades, New York © 2001 – present. 5. Dousaud, Clarisse. FDA not “nano-ready”, says report. http://www/cosmeticsdesign.com/news/ng.asp?n=71078-fda-woodrow-w... © October 8, 2006. 6. Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, DC. 7. Sacarello, Ph.D., Hildegarde L.A. International Water Quality Challenges: Their Recognition, Evaluation and Remediation. World Safety Organization Conference Proceedings: WOSAPEC 1994. WSO Journal. © September 1994. pgs. 23-26. 8. Chanlett, Emil T. Environmental Protection: Second Edition. MacGraw-Hill Book Company. New York, New York. © 1991. pgs 145-146. 9. U.S. Patent and Trademarks. Entomopathogenic Pesticides, Bayer Corporation. Washington, D.C. © 1986. 10. Science. “Global Water Scare.” Volume 262. Nov. 12, 1993. pg. 987. 11. Staninger, Ph.D, Hildegarde. Mycotoxins: Their Toxicological Effects on the Human Being. World Safety Organization. 17th International Environmental Safety and Health Conference and Exposition. November 3-5th, 2003. Denver, Colorado. pgs. 21 – 25. 12. DARPA. Development of Biosensor for Detection of Illegal Drugs in a joint initiative between U.S. Army and Mexico Federalizes. © 2005. SITCOM 13. U.S. EPA Biological Pesticides for Mosquitoes. Bacillus Thuringiensis controlled spraying Santa Monica, California. © 2004 14. Worthington, Amy. Aerosol and Electromagnetic Weapons in the Age of Nuclear War. http://www.Globalairesearch.ca and http://www.rense.com/general59/aerosolandelectromag.htm © November 21, 2004. 15. Fungalbionics, http://www.mold-hlep.org/definiton of ungalbionics.htm. (c) 7/16/2002. 16. Chemtrails and Barium. http://www.inchem.org/documents http://www.carnicom.com/precip1.htm http://www.carnicom.com/spectra2.htm http://www.carnicom.com/spectra1.htm 17. Johnson, Ph.D., Douglas E. Principal. IE3, International Consultant on HVAC Remediation and Sick Buildings, Branden, Florida. 18. http://www.mold-survivor.com/hidden mold.htm © 7/16/2002 19. MPS Global, Inc. and Daiugin Research on Far-Infrared Radiant Heat. Remediation and Industrial Applications. Pomona, CA. © 2004 20. Twietmeyer, Ted. Is Morgellons Disease Caused by Chemtrail Spraying? http://www.rense.com/general71/mmor.htm © May 14, 2006. 21. Staninger, Ph.D., Hildegarde. Private Funded Independent Study on the Identification of Chemical and Biological Composition of Fibers from Moregellon Diagnosed Patients. Integrative Health International, LLC. Lakewood, CA © October 5, 2006. Laboratory Report: Fiber made of High Density Polyethylene (HDPE). 22. Leicester. Virus Replication. Microbiology @ Leicester: virology: Virus replication. Updated: October 22, 2004. http://www-micro.msb.le.ac.uk/3035/3035Replication.html 23. Karjoo, M.D., Rahim and Hildegarde Staninger, Ph.D. Toxicological Pathology Evaluation of Tissue Biopsy Specimens of a Moregellon Patient. Pending publication American College of Pathology. © 2006-2007. 24. Kendell, Pamela. Torn Illusions: One Woman’s Tragic Experience with the Silicone Conspiracy. New Horizon Press. Far Hills, New Jersey. © 1994 25. Karjoo, M.D., Rahim. U.S. Silicon Breast Implant Studies. American Medical Diagnostic Laboratories, Inc. Santa Ana, CA. © 1994 26. Kalpow, Ph.D., Lawrence A. Suspected New Species of Nematode Parasite in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (CFS) Cryptostrongylus pulmoni (provisional) “ The Hidden Lung Worm.” http://memmber.tripod.com/lak123/ © 1999

« Last Edit: Nov 16, 2006, 12:49pm by Dr. Hildegarde Staninger »

Original article posted here.

Creating Superbugs: The WIRED report about our continuing Iraq disaster

The Invisible Enemy in Iraq

A homemade bomb exploded under a Humvee in Anbar province, Iraq, on August 21, 2004. The blast flipped the vehicle into the air, killing two US marines and wounding another - a soft-spoken 20-year-old named Jonathan Gadsden who was near the end of his second tour of duty. In previous wars, he would have died within hours. His skull and ribs were fractured, his neck was broken, his back was badly burned, and his stomach had been perforated by shrapnel and debris.

Gadsden got out of the war zone alive because of the Department of Defense's network of frontline trauma care and rapid air transport known as the evacuation chain. Minutes after the attack, a helicopter touched down in the desert. Combat medics stanched the marine's bleeding, inflated his collapsed lung, and eased his pain. He was airlifted to the 31st Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad, located in an old health care facility called the Ibn Sina, which had formerly catered to the Baathist elite. Army surgeons there repaired Gadsden's cranium, removed his injured spleen, and pumped him full of broad-spectrum antibiotics to ward off infection.

Three days later, he was flown to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, the largest American military hospital in Europe. He was treated for his burns, and his spine was stabilized for the 18-hour flight to the US. Just a week after nearly dying in the desert, Gadsden was recuperating at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother, Zeada, at his bedside.

The surgeons, nurses, medics, and pilots of the evacuation chain have saved thousands of lives. Soldiers wounded in Vietnam were six weeks of transit time away from US hospitals, and one out of every four of them died. By contrast, a soldier's odds of surviving battle injuries in Iraq are nine out of 10. Unfortunately, this remarkable advance in battlefield logistics has also resulted in an increase in the number of traumatically injured patients who are particularly susceptible to infections during their recovery. In Gadsden's case, from the moment he was carried into the Ibn Sina, the injured marine was in the crosshairs of an enemy he didn't even know was there.

An in-depth investigation by the Veterans Administration of the death of a Marine named Jonathan Gadsden who acquired an acinetobacter infection while being evacuated from Iraq. He later died of meningitis caused by another organism called Nocardia. His mother, Zeada, was told at first that her son had died of his wounds.

At first, he did quite well. By early September, Gadsden was weaned off his ventilator and breathing on his own. For weeks he gradually improved. His buddies took him to a Washington Redskins game in his wheelchair, and the next day he navigated 50 feet with a walker. Soon Gadsden was transferred to a veterans' hospital in Florida called the James A. Haley Medical Center, where he offered to serve as the eyes of a fellow marine blinded in an ambush. The doctors told Zeada that her son might be able to go home by the end of October.

But he still had mysterious symptoms that he couldn't shake, like headaches, rashes, and intermittent fevers. His doctors gave him CT scans, laxatives, methadone, beta-blockers, Xanax, more surgery, and more antibiotics. An accurate evaluation of his case was difficult, however, because portions of his medical records never arrived from Bethesda. If they had, they would have shown a positive test for a kind of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii.

In the taxonomy of bad bugs, acinetobacter is classified as an opportunistic pathogen. Healthy people can carry the bacteria on their skin with no ill effects - a process known as colonization. But in newborns, the elderly, burn victims, patients with depressed immune systems, and those on ventilators, acinetobacter infections can kill. The removal of Gadsden's spleen and the traumatic nature of his wounds made him a prime target.

On October 17, the marine was given a day pass to accompany his mother to Wal-Mart, where he bought her a purse. Hours after returning to the hospital, his condition deteriorated abruptly. His heart rate and blood pressure were elevated, and his white blood cell count was spiking. Nurses noted in his chart that he had become "disoriented to place, time, and people - thinking he is at home - sitting up thinks he's lying down." He struggled through occupational therapy the following morning, shivering and complaining of the cold.

Gadsden had a seizure and a heart attack the next day. The neurology team discovered that his cerebrum and cerebellum had swelled up overnight; he was clinically brain-dead. His family and minister were called to the hospital, and on October 22 he was taken off life support.

The Marine Corps public affairs office sent out the customary press release attributing Gadsden's death to "injuries as a result of enemy action." But then a few weeks later, Zeada's dentist told her a Florida newspaper was reporting that her son had died of bacterial meningitis. Aided by US representative Bill Young, Zeada - who works as a cardiac-care technician in South Carolina - demanded an investigation.

She discovered that an autopsy was performed shortly after her son's death. The coroner recorded the "manner of death" as "homicide (explosion during war operation)" but determined the actual cause of death to be a bacterial infection. The organism that killed Gadsden, called Nocardia, had clogged the blood vessels leading to his brain. But the acinetobacter had been steadily draining his vital resources when he could least afford it. For weeks, it had been flourishing in his body, undetected by the doctors at Haley, resisting a constant assault by the most potent antibiotics in the medical arsenal.

"No one said that my son had anything like that," Zeada says. "I never had to wear gloves or a mask, and none of the nurses did either. No one had any information."

Since OPERATION Iraqi Freedom began in 2003, more than 700 US soldiers have been infected or colonized with Acinetobacter baumannii. A significant number of additional cases have been found in the Canadian and British armed forces, and among wounded Iraqi civilians. The Armed Forces Institute of Pathology has recorded seven deaths caused by the bacteria in US hospitals along the evacuation chain. Four were unlucky civilians who picked up the bug at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, while undergoing treatment for other life-threatening conditions. Another was a 63-year-old woman, also chronically ill, who shared a ward at Landstuhl with infected coalition troops.

Behind the scenes, the spread of a pathogen that targets wounded GIs has triggered broad reforms in both combat medical care and the Pentagon's networks for tracking bacterial threats within the ranks. Interviews with current and former military physicians, recent articles in medical journals, and internal reports reveal that the Department of Defense has been waging a secret war within the larger mission in Iraq and Afghanistan - a war against antibiotic-resistant pathogens.

Acinetobacter is only one of many bacterial nemeses prowling around in ICUs and neonatal units in hospitals all over the world. A particularly fierce organism known as MRSA - methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus - infects healthy people, spreads easily, and accounts for many of the 90,000 fatal infections picked up in US hospitals each year. Another drug-resistant germ on the rise in health care facilities, Clostridium difficile, moves in for the kill when long courses of antibiotics have wiped out normal intestinal flora.

Forerunners of the bug causing the military infections have been making deadly incursions into civilian hospitals for more than a decade. In the early 1990s, 1,400 people were infected or colonized at a single facility in Spain. A few years later, particularly virulent strains of the bacteria spread through three Israeli hospitals, killing half of the infected patients. Death by acinetobacter can take many forms: catastrophic fevers, pneumonia, meningitis, infections of the spine, and sepsis of the blood. Patients who survive face longer hospital stays, more surgery, and severe complications.

Nevertheless, the bug makes an unlikely candidate for the next mass plague. It preys exclusively on the weakest of the weak and the sickest of the sick, slipping into the body through open wounds, catheters, and breathing tubes. Colonization poses no threat to people who aren't already ill, but colonized health care workers and hospital visitors can carry the bacteria into neighboring wards and other medical facilities. Epidemiologist Roberta Carey at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calls acinetobacter the Rodney Dangerfield of microorganisms: "It doesn't get a lot of respect because it's not out there bumping off normal, healthy people." But lately the bacteria has been getting its due, because it is rapidly evolving resistance to all of the antibiotics that used to keep it in check.

Until a few years ago, most strains could be dispatched with a wide variety of drugs. For the most tenacious infections, doctors could rely on a family of ultrabroad spectrum antibiotics called carbapenems. But strains of acinetobacter are emerging now that are immune to every known remedy. Multidrug - resistant pathogens are an epidemiologist's nightmare - reminders of the dark ages when millions of people died every year of runaway infections.

"We've been looking at acinetobacter in real time for years and years in our lab," says John Quinn, scientific director of the Chicago Infectious Disease Research Institute. "Then all of a sudden in 2005, we started seeing more bugs that were resistant to the carbapenems. First one out of 10 bugs, then four out of 10, and then almost all of the bugs. So there's a new sheriff in town. That's a clinical disaster."

To battle these new strains, clinicians are being forced to dust off a World War II-era relic called colistin, which is so toxic that it causes kidney damage in as many as one in four patients who take it. In 2004, the Infectious Diseases Society of America included acinetobacter on its "bad bugs, no drugs" short list of pathogens that are "raising significant public health concerns." According to a recent CDC study, the new multidrug-resistant organisms are almost four times more deadly than older strains.

And they're spreading fast. A major outbreak in Chicago two years ago infected 81 patients, killing at least 14. Arizona health officials tracked more than 200 infections in state hospitals early last year. Doctors at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Tennessee used to see an infection or two every year; now it's one or more a month. "These bacteria are developing very, very quickly," says CDC epidemiologist Arjun Srinivasan, who has been consulting with the DOD about the military outbreak. "The bad news is that we're many years away from having new drugs to treat them. It should be a call to arms."

I VISITED WALTER REED in 2004 to write about anesthesia on the front lines. As I spoke with an Army sergeant who had survived a brutal attack in Najaf, US senator John McCain and talk-radio host Don Imus came into the room to thank him for his service. When we walked out, McCain's assistant whipped out a bottle of sanitizing gel and passed it around. A nurse explained to me, "It's this bug that grows in the soil over there and gets blown into their wounds by IEDs. These poor guys are covered with it. Around here we call it Iraqibacter." Rumors were circulating at the hospital that insurgents dosed their homemade bombs with the flesh of dead animals.

Nearly four years into the war, the notion that deadly bacteria is lurking in the Iraqi dirt is still proposed by DOD officials as the most likely explanation for the military infections. In November, Duane Hospenthal, an infectious-disease expert at Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas and a consultant to the Army Surgeon General, said, "The question really has been: Is it coming from these old facilities we're using in Iraq? Is it coming from some of the Iraqi patients we have? Is it normal flora for our deployed soldiers who have been there for a while? Or is it being blown into them from shrapnel, dirt, and other materials by these explosive devices?"

Hospenthal added that he believes there is little cause for concern. "It's a low-grade, low-virulence pathogen that can be recovered from soil and water. Without having it blasted into you or your being immunocompromised, it's not going to hurt you. We still see acinetobacter, but now that it's been recognized, people are less excited about it here. It's hard for me to even understand if this is a big issue."

It's true that many species of acinetobacter flourish widely in the environment. Thriving colonies have been recovered from soil, cell phones, frozen chicken, wastewater treatment plants, Formica countertops, and even irradiated food all over the world. But the particular species causing the military infections, baumannii, is almost always found in just one environment - hospitals.

Lenie Dijkshoorn, a senior researcher at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands, has studied the bug since 1984. "My colleagues and I have been looking for Acinetobacter baumannii in soil samples for years, and we haven't found it," she says. "These organisms are quite rare outside of hospitals."

In fact, they are supremely adapted to life in critical-care facilities. They can survive for weeks on a stethoscope, a blood-pressure cuff, a mattress, or a computer keyboard. The short, plump, rod-shaped bacilli are so adept at mining nutrients from recalcitrant sources that Israeli geneticists have engineered strains to bio-degrade oil spills. Even before the bug evolved resistance to multiple antibiotics, it knew its way around a sponge and bucket. A Norwegian microbiologist noted in 1973 that disinfectant used to clean catheters in a gynecologist's lab contained "a veritable culture of the strain."

Hospenthal also told me that the acinetobacter has been recovered from the skin of those who have never been to war: "We've swabbed nondeployed soldiers and found the bacteria in their toe webs and other parts of their bodies." The study he was referring to, however, published last July in the journal Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology, pointed out that those organisms were genetically very different from the bacteria infecting men and women evacuated from Iraq. The Acinetobacter baumannii colonizing new enlistees in Texas was still susceptible to antibiotics; the organisms infecting veterans are highly resistant.

In Europe, multidrug-resistant acinetobacter is spreading through civilian hospitals, precipitating a public health crisis. A 2003-2004 epidemic hit more than 50 hospitals and long-term care facilities in France, making scores of patients sick and killing 34 people. Thirty-nine infected patients died at St. Mary's Hospital in London two years ago.

British health care officials are deeply concerned about a possible link between the civilian outbreaks and coalition troops carrying the bacteria home from Iraq. The UK's Health Protection Agency sent out a notice in 2003 asking doctors to submit samples of acinetobacter - from patients known to have returned from Iraq, or from patients on a ward where there have been Iraq returnees - to a lab for genotyping. Three months ago, a health official in England told The Independent that the same strain of bacteria infecting troops had been implicated in at least three civilian outbreaks. Prime minister Tony Blair recently announced that a major civilian hospital will open a ward just for military patients.

Bacteria that know how to disable or block the efficacy of multiple drugs are highly educated organisms. They're typically the product of an environment where antibiotics are in frequent use, and they have downloaded genetic cheat codes from other resistant bacteria into their own DNA. Multidrug-resistant staph, for example, hijacked genes from a bug called Enterococcus that have made it resistant to vancomycin - the drug of last resort. Once a strain acquires these upgrades, Darwin's selective pressure weeds out the late adopters.

So where are these highly educated military bugs coming from? "It would be very interesting," Dijkshoorn says, "to investigate the routing of these patients."

THE FIRST NEWS that US troops had engaged an unforeseen enemy in Iraq appeared on a physicians' email list called ProMED on April 17, 2003. A communicable-disease expert in the Navy named Kyle Petersen posted a request for information about unusual infections he was seeing aboard the USNS Comfort, a 1,000-bed hospital ship off the coast of Kuwait.

The Comfort was taking in 50 new patients a day by helicopter, many of them Iraqi civilians and prisoners of war. Petersen told the ProMED list that he had seen "several cases of [multidrug-resistant] acinetobacter amongst Iraqi natives wounded by gunshots, shrapnel, burns or motor vehicle accidents." Reviewing the literature, he found reports of an outbreak in Turkish hospitals after an earthquake in 1999, which suggested to him that "acinetobacter species are fairly common pathogens in traumatic wounds, especially if they are dirty." The bugs on the Comfort, however, were more resistant than the Turkish strains. He continued: "Can anyone familiar with the soil biology of Iraq or the drug prescribing practices of the pre-regime medical system explain the severe drug resistance pattern we are seeing among our trauma victims medevaced from Iraq" Any comments would be greatly appreciated."

The bug's emergence on the Comfort made a tough job even tougher. In infected burn victims, skin grafts failed. Two Iraqi patients died. Luckily, the acinetobacter on the Comfort was still susceptible to imipenem, one of the carbapenem-based "magic bullets" kept in reserve for the day when nothing else works. The staff quickly ran through its stock of the drug, firing off urgent requests for more. By isolating carriers in an area of the ship nicknamed Acinetobacter Alley and maxing out the imipenem, the medics finally brought the spread of the bacteria under control.

Soon, however, the bug started popping up in other hospitals along the evacuation chain. More than 70 patients at Walter Reed eventually contracted acinetobacter infections of the blood. Other infected patients and carriers surfaced at Landstuhl, Bethesda, and Balad Air Base, the embarkation point for troops on their way out of Iraq. By early 2005, nearly one-third of the wounded soldiers admitted to the National Naval Medical Center had been colonized by the bacteria. Only a handful of the early cases could be traced directly to the bugs on the Comfort, because the ship steamed out of the Gulf three months into the war. But almost all of the infected patients and carriers had received medical care at field hospitals in Iraq.

Known as combat support hospitals or CSHs, these facilities had been hastily erected in tents and other temporary structures, in keeping with the Pentagon's goal of a lean and mobile fighting force. Maintaining sterile conditions in the desert required creative efforts. Sand blew through every available opening in the walls, and the 130-degree days took their toll on drugs, power supplies, and diagnostic equipment. To move trauma care closer to the action, the DOD deployed modified shipping containers called ISO boxes as portable operating rooms. It was standard procedure to have a dozen nurses, surgeons, and anesthesiologists in each box crowded around two patients undergoing surgery simultaneously - an infection risk in any hospital.

At the 28th CSH near Camp Dogwood - home to more than 4,000 US and British soldiers - there was only one washer and dryer to launder all of the linen, including the surgical scrubs. Army nurses reported to the DOD that "sheets were more often than not soaked with blood and other body fluids - linen that covered the patients who were transferred back to Germany was not replaced." When hospital-grade disinfectants ran low, which was often, the supply crew stocked up on bleach from a local bazaar.

The derelict infrastructure of the Ibn Sina, where Jonathan Gadsden was treated during his evacuation, bedeviled the staff's best infection-control efforts. Rainwater dripped into operating rooms and supply closets, and pigeons roosted in the ventilation system, wafting the smell of droppings into the surgical suites. (A request was filed to the Iraqi Ministry of Health in September 2003 to "eliminate bird feces" from the air ducts.) Clean sheets and scrubs were scarce at the Ibn Sina as well, because the civilian laundry contractor was apparently selling them on the black market.

"When you're interested in immediate lifesaving, you can't be thinking about every infection-control nuance," says microbiologist Roberta Carey, branch chief of epidemiology at the CDC. "In any emergency room that deals with trauma patients, there's a limit - if they get too many patients from a car crash, they put the others on bypass and send them to another institution. But there is no bypass in a war zone."

The most effective way to curtail the development of multidrug-resistant bacteria is to limit the use of broad-spectrum antibiotics. But these drugs were dispensed widely in the CSHs. For wounded soldiers en route to Germany, they were employed as a kind of antimicrobial body armor to forestall future infection. But injured Iraqis would linger on antibiotic IV drips for weeks because the local medical facilities were overwhelmed or under rubble.

In the summer of 2003, civilian patients started getting sick at the Saarland University Hospital, one of the German facilities that admitted US troops evacuated from Iraq. A few months later, an elderly woman being treated for chronic lung disease at Landstuhl died suddenly of antibiotic-resistant acinetobacter pneumonia and bacteremia. DOD investigators found a perfect genetic match between the bug that caused her death and one infecting a military patient down the hall. Eventually, more than 30 civilian patients picked up acinetobacter infections at Walter Reed.

The bacteria was spreading beyond the theater of war.

Meanwhile, families of wounded US and British troops were being told -often in haphazard ways - that their loved ones were infected with an obscure organism they had somehow picked up in the desert.

A contractor named Merlin Clark was clearing mines near Baghdad for a company called Ronco Consulting when an IED took off the front of his left leg and severed a nerve in his right arm. When he first arrived at Walter Reed, his wife, Marcie, says, "They told us they had found bacteria, which you would expect from a dirty wound. We were more concerned that he might lose his leg."

Just before Marcie put her husband on a medevac to a hospital in Orlando, Florida, a nurse handed her a folder, which she put in her purse. "I went down to get Merlin's bags," Marcie recalls, "and the soldier who brought me to the van told me, 'Put everything in the laundry right away. Don't touch this stuff. Don't breathe around it. It's got that bug the guys are bringing back from Iraq.'"

She tossed the dusty clothes in a hotel washing machine and checked the folder, where she saw the words Acinetobacter baumannii for the first time. Frantic for more information about her husband's infection, she found little advice on sites for Iraq war veterans. "We felt so alone, having to figure out everything for ourselves," she says. (When PDHealth.mil, a Web site for doctors who treat vets, finally added an acinetobacter FAQ in 2005, it became one of the two most popular pages on the site.)

A veterans' activist named Kirt Love helped Marcie create a Web site to raise public awareness of the outbreak, which launched in 2004 at www.acinetobacter.org. Email started pouring in. "After speaking with other family members at Brooke, I discovered that almost all of their sons and daughters, husbands and wives, had tested positive," wrote the mother of one infected soldier. Another message read: "An apparently healthy civilian registered nurse working in the ICU at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda has a life-threatening acinetobacter infection - Are other workers within the same environment equally at risk?"

As the bacteria spread through hospitals in the US and Europe, the DOD worked overtime to keep a lid on the rumors. In a PowerPoint presentation about acinetobacter and pneumonia delivered at the US Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, a slide labeled "How to handle the press" read: "Don't lie. Don't obfuscate. Don't tell them any more than you absolutely have to."

Quietly, in spring 2004, a group of military doctors, infectious-disease specialists, and microbiologists decided to find out what was really going on with this bug. "My concern was that we were changing the bacterial environment in our hospitals, and I wasn't seeing a whole lot being done about it," says Tim Endy, the former communicable-disease research director at Walter Reed. "And now there were infections in patients who had never been to Iraq. The potential consequences to health care and to the cost of health care are huge."

The bills for imipenem use were soaring at Walter Reed, and each dose of the drug contributed to the snowballing resistance of the bacteria. Endy drafted a paper that became the catalyst for a full-fledged epidemiological consultation (an epicon, in military-speak) under the authority of the Army Surgeon General. Dozens of infectious-disease experts joined the investigation, along with academic researchers and epidemiologists from the CDC.

The task force sent field teams into Iraq and Kuwait to gather soil samples, swipe stretcher handles, and scour chow halls. When a storm dumped sand onto the decks of the Comfort, they swabbed the gunwale. To put the IED theory to the test, they took samples of bacteria from the dirty wounds of soldiers as they were admitted to the Ibn Sina. They also analyzed soil archived by the DOD before the war began.

The investigators did find acinetobacter in Iraq. It wasn't in the dirt - except for a few bugs under a dripping air conditioner outside a health care facility in Mosul - or in the fresh wounds, either. But multidrug - resistant Acinetobacter baumannii was thriving in the emergency rooms, ICUs, and operating rooms of the combat support hospitals. As Paul Scott, one of the lead investigators, told a meeting of civilian epidemiologists in Chicago last spring, "This appeared to be a hospital-associated outbreak throughout our entire health care system."

The wounded soldiers were not smuggling bacteria from the desert into military hospitals after all. Instead, they were picking it up there. The evacuation chain itself had become the primary source of infection. By creating the most heroic and efficient means of saving lives in the history of warfare, the Pentagon had accidentally invented a machine for accelerating bacterial evolution and was airlifting the pathogens halfway around the world.

To stem the outbreak at its source, the epicon team proposed sweeping reforms throughout the combat zone. The CSHs had to be run more like real hospitals, with frequent scrub-downs, stringent hand-washing, and HEPA filters to clean the air. The dead tissue surrounding "frag" wounds turned out to be an ideal colonization site for the bugs, so it had to be removed more aggressively up front. "If you don't have that necrotic tissue, your own innate defenses help keep the wound clean," says Kim Moran, a tropical-disease specialist who assisted the investigation when she worked at Walter Reed. Wound dressings needed to be changed less often, so bacteria from the hospital environ-ment had less opportunity to get in. And the broad-spectrum anti-biotics had to be reserved for the treatment of identified bugs.

At first, these reforms ran into a major obstacle: Each link in the evacuation chain was owned by a different branch of the DOD. "There was no coordination among the services about infection-control policy," Endy says. "No coordination about what kinds of antibiotics to use, no communication within the services about infectious disease problems. So it was almost impossible to coordinate any kind of broad policy changes." But then the task force phoned Donald Jenkins, a quick-thinking trauma surgeon at Balad who had already taken stock of the situation and tightened infection control in his own hospital. Jenkins briefed Elder Granger, head of the medical command throughout the region. "We basically tried to initiate a policy change from the bottom up, rather than the top down," Endy recalls. "And it worked."

Back in Washington, the DOD ramped up its medical surveillance networks to track the enemy as it moved instead of waiting for reports of full-blown infections. Epidemiological data across the armed services was logged in a central database for the first time. To pinpoint the particular strains causing the military infections, the investigators shipped more than 200 samples of acinetobacter to a biotech firm called Isis Pharmaceuticals, which has developed a new system for genetically fingerprinting unknown pathogens. For purposes of comparison, the Institut Pasteur in France also sent samples gathered during outbreaks in European hospitals years before the war.

"Lo and behold, most of the bacteria from the military hospitals were the same as the isolates from Europe - the same molecular signatures, the same patterns of antibiotic resistance," says Isis microbiologist David Ecker. "So my hypothesis became that there was a contamination of the US military health care system from organisms circulating in Europe, which happened somewhere along the path of the wounded soldiers."

The task force concluded that Camp Dogwood and Ibn Sina Hospital were likely the first links in the chain where the bugs took hold. At the epidemiologists' meeting in Chicago last spring, Paul Scott said that some of the medical equipment used at the two facilities was originally packed in Germany and may have been contaminated before it was shipped to Iraq. But the "index case" that set the whole process in motion may never be known.

It's not over. Acinetobacter is now a difficult part of daily life in many military hospitals, as it is in civilian ICUs and burn wards worldwide. And the rise of many other types of multidrug-resistant bacteria will make things even more difficult in the next few years, because there are few new antibiotics coming down the pipeline.

"The bugs are outpacing us, and these drugs are not the kind that bring in incredible profits," says Robert Guidos, director of public policy for the Infectious Diseases Society of America. "We're planning for bioterrorism and pandemic influenza, but what about the hundreds of thousands of people dying each year from nontheoretical situations? We need to think in longer terms."

One of the most unsettling long-term questions about the military outbreak is how far the bugs of war will proliferate now that thousands of Iraq veterans have entered the VA hospital system. Many of the older vets who are already there - struggling with chronic conditions for decades, in and out of nursing homes - fall into the bacteria's target demographic.

Duane Hospenthal of the DOD downplays the possibility that acinetobacter could become a problem in the wider population. "Mom comes to visit her son," he says, "and everybody's dressed up in gowns and gloves and hats and masks, and she wants to know, 'Is this something I'm going to drag home to my 4-year-old?'" Those are the misconceptions I have to deal with from day to day. I can easily tell the family, "No, this is something we do to keep it from passing from patient to patient. If you have it on your hands, it's not going to cause any disease.'"

Once acinetobacter makes itself at home in a health care facility, however, it's hard to get rid of and easy to pass along. Before Roberta Carey started working for the CDC, she spent months trying unsuccessfully to eradicate the bug from a university hospital in Illinois. "This organism requires many different assaults to get rid of," she says. "We see the bacteria metastasizing to neighboring institutions because medical personnel, students, families, and patients go back and forth into the community and to other medical centers. So we have to be vigilant."

When a team of geneticists unlocked the secret of the bug's rapid evolution in 2005, they found that one strain of multidrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii carries the largest collection of genetic upgrades ever discovered in a single organism. Out of its 52 genes dedicated to defeating antibiotics, radiation, and other weapons of mass bacterial destruction, nearly all have been bootlegged from other bad bugs like Salmonella, Pseudomonas, and Escherichia coli.

In the open source world of bacteria, everyone is working for the resistance. Ramping up the immunity of any single organism, while dramatically increasing the size of the population most susceptible to infection, only helps the enemy. To an aspiring superbug, war is anything but hell.

Original article posted here.