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The Media and West Nile Virus
by Robert Lederman
robert.lederman@worldnet.att.net
August 4, 2000It is not too hard to figure out why most New Yorkers are still uninformed and confused about West Nile Virus. Despite the extent of spraying increasing every day, the level of coverage is decreasing every day.
The quality of information within that coverage has likewise decreased each day. During the first week or two of this year's West Nile "panic"there were serious questions asked-although never really answered-on television, radio and in newspapers about the need for spraying, the toxicity of the chemicals used and the potential health effects of exposure.
As of this writing the daily coverage, sandwiched between the latest perp walk, sports feature and burning building story, can be summarized thus: "Today much of Manhattan, the Bronx and QueenQueens will be sprayed with the pesticide Anvil. No infected humans or mosquitoes have been found although authorities report that they now have 32 dead birds. If you have questions call the City's hotline or visit their website". The "hotline"connects you to a teenage operator in Pennsylvania who, depending on which one you get, will say, "Anvil who?".
The NYC media has now had almost an entire year to independently research this story yet they have done virtually nothing beyond regurgitating the Mayor's daily press releases. While initial reporting on the No-Spray lawsuit was fairly extensive, the media uniformly gave the impression that only a handful of hysterical environmental activists, hypocondriacs and pet-lovers question the City's spray policy.
Where for example are media references to the fact that the Journal of the American Mosquito Control Association published scientific studies which show that repeated indiscriminate spraying of pesticides-as is being done in NYC- results in a long-term increase in the number of mosquitoes (the new generation of which are immune to the spray) and a 15 fold or 1500 percent increase in the rate of mosquitoes infected with encephalitis viruses? The article, which was written by a NY State Department of Health official, also states that it seems likely that ONLY mosquitoes exposed to pesticides are vulnerable to the viral infections.
Click Here
SOURCE: Journal of the Am Mosquito Control Assoc, Dec;13(4):315-25,
1997 Howard JJ, Oliver
New York State Department of Health
SUNY-College ESF
Syracuse 13210, USA.When mindlessly quoting the Mayor and Dr. Cohen's disinformation about Anvil being, "safe, natural and non-toxic"where are the references to the fact that the National Institute of Health and the National Academy of Sciences consider chronic low-level exposure to organophosphate and pyrethyroid neurotoxicants like Anvil, Scourge and Malathion to be the most likely cause of the nation's genuine epidemic of learning disabilities, childhood cancer and asthma or that Frederica Perera, of Columbia University's Joseph L. Mailman School of Public Health, reported that air-sampling "backpacks"worn by 72 pregnant women in New York City picked up high concentrations of three neurotoxic pesticides that could cause disorders in their fetuses?
See: Cover Story, Kids At Risk 6/19/2000
US NEWS AND WORLD REPORT
Click HereClick Here
Environmental Health Perspectives Volume 107, Supplement 3, June 1999 Pesticides and Inner-City Children: Exposures, Risks, and Prevention, which found that in NY State the highest use of organophosphate and pyrethyroid pesticides was not in agricultural areas upstate but in Brooklyn and Manhattan.When you repeatedly refer to the, "mysterious WNV never seen before in North America", how is it that you fail to mention 50 years of West Nile research and experimentation in NYC area hospitals, universities and bio-warfare labs, including Rockefeller University, Sloan-Kettering and Plum Island? Is the source of all these WNV-infected birds such a mystery to you when all of these institutions deliberately infect birds and mosquitoes with WNV and experiment on them as reported in past articles in the NY Times, Newsday, ABC News etc?
Are these sources, hysterical, irresponsible environmental activists as well? How about the NYC Department of Health website or the Center for Disease Control (CDC) website? A little searching in these most mainstream of mainstream sources will uncover the facts that of the four New Yorkers who allegedly died of West Nile Virus last year three were taking immunosurpressant medications and a third was HIV-positive. The CDC determined that NYC encephalitis infections in humans had peaked and were decreasing more than a month BEFORE the spraying began.
[See: New York City Department of Health, West Nile Virus: A Briefing, City Health Information Vol. 19, No. 1 (May 2000) Click Here and
United States Centers for Disease Control, Update: West Nile Virus Encephalitis New York, 1999, fig. 1, October 22, 1999, Click Here
"The dates of onset of illness for laboratory-positive cases of WNV infection suggest that the outbreak peaked in late August. There have been no recognized cases of WNV infection with an onset date after September 22. "Are these inconvenient facts that might cause anyone who read them to question the Mayor's spray policy if not his sanity? How is it that there was a virtual media blackout on the 8/2/2000 AP story that Oravax, a company working closely with the Mayor's "experts"since the first day of the 1999 outbreak just announced getting an NIH grant to create a West Nile Virus vaccine? Could it be that in their own press release the company alluded to the fact-as I've been writing on a daily basis since last Fall-that they actually had been working on this vaccine for years before the NYC outbreak and that it was invented and patented in 1996 by the U.S. Army Bio-warfare lab at Ft. Dietrick MD? Was yet another, "cops arrest grisly murder suspect"feature more important to the public on the day they were about to be massively sprayed with poison gas?
Why are the Mayor and Dr. Cohen never asked during their daily press conferences why the City has obtained none of the required permits, violates virtually every warning on the manufacturers label, ignores AG Spitzer telling them it is illegal to call ANY pesticide safe, illegally sprays adjacent to and over water, is using untrained and unprotected spray applicators solicited by an ad in the NY Post and is spraying in humid, damp and rainy weather despite Clarke chemical itself stating that such spraying is completely useless for controlling mosquitoes?
If the media can dig up who Giuliani is sleeping with, who his father robbed in 1933, who is illegally getting welfare contracts from him and who secretly had an honest building inspector fired for fining a Giuliani contributor-can it really be that hard to go to a government website and download some actual facts on pesticides, mosquitoes and West Nile Virus? Why do you keep describing a virus that the City's own website calls very mild as, "The Deadly West Nile Virus!!!!"? Aspirin kills thousands of times more people each year. Do you preface Bayer ads with a disclaimer that aspirin kills? The CDC itself estimated that in a full-blown WNV epidemic 10-12 people might be expected to die. Bending over to pick up the Sunday Times probably kills more people per year.
How is it that the great investigative paper, the Village Voice, has not done a single article on the spraying this year and barely covered it last year? While police brutality is a very real threat to minorities, is being sprayed with poison gas that causes breast cancer, birth defects and infertility not a threat to minorities? How come independent papers like the NY Press and NY Observer have not published a single item on the spraying when even David Letterman's Late Night monologue covers it?
How is it that not one paper commented on the significance of the fact that at his press conference on 8/2/2000 the Mayor stated that the Bronx would be sprayed but not Yankee Stadium because it might, "distract the players", or that when most of Manhattan was sprayed last week Rockefeller Center was omitted because some tourists were on line to get tickets to an NBC NSync concert? If the spray is so safe, why not spray during a Yankee game or in Central Park during a Philharmonic concert? More inconvenient facts? Will the Mayor's press aide, Sunny Mindel, bar you from the Blue Room if you ask that question?
I hope you do not think I'm blaming the City's hard-working reporters for what gets into the paper. I'm sure that a love of investigative journalism is exactly what got most of you into the business.
Unfortunately, the publishers and media owners have been instructed not to go too far in covering this issue.
Their marching orders-keep feeding the panic and prepare people for the vaccine-no more no less. Keep depicting it as a deadly virus even though it is one of the mildest viruses there is which only people and animals exposed to pesticides or other immune suppressants can actually get infected by.
I can just hear them in the Mayor's strategy meeting...is it time to discover a human victim yet or do we go with a few more days of dead birds? We only have another 50 of those virus-injected birds in the freezer-let us know if we need to infect some more.
Of course, there are individual reporters who have asked these questions, some even getting them into their columns and news stories. The problem is, it's hard to write a story when the only response from the administration is, "no comment"or an attempt to get you fired for asking the question.
I'll leave you with this final thought. You caught the Mayor lying about his family, crime statistics, welfare, speeding, running for the Senate, illegal contracts, City Hall access and virtually every single issue he has ever spoken on. Some of those issues were not all that crucial to our daily lives. Don't you think it's time to express a bit of skepticism about this life and death issue?
To a Directory of Mr.Lederman's Essays
Important Note:
Mr. Lederman has explained that his articles posted here are not to be taken as official statements by the No-Spray Coalition of which he is a member or of the "No-Spray" lawsuit in which he is a plaintiff.Blue Collar Pundit Essays
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