Italy. Double Coronavirus-Conspiracy Twist from Space

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published here: Italy. Double Coronavirus-Conspiracy Twist from Space


Colonel Luca Parmitano, Italian Air Force officer with 25 years of service and 6 space missions behind him, engineer and astronaut of the European Astronaut Corps for the European Space Agency (ESA) since 2009, said he was aware of the pandemic danger posed by the new coronavirus as early as November. Parmitano, who is the commander of the International Space Station (ISS) since 2 October 2019, stated in a 25 April interview:

I already knew since November while I was in space. On board we have a daily connection with the events on Earth, we also have access to the internet and as early as November we had started to follow the first infections, initially only in Asian countries, then after my return the first contagions in Europe.

A couple of weeks later, in a second interview, Colonel Parmitano confirmed what he had already revealed:

Already in November we were aware of this probable pandemic and above all its seriousness that was spreading like wildfire in Europe just before my return.

These declarations have started a number of speculations, casting doubts and shadows on Italy's Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte (pictured above with Trump): how is it possible, then, that Giuseppe Conte, who also has privileged access to secret services' intelligence, knew nothing about it?

David Rossi on defenseonline.it posed this rhetorical question, explaining that the Prime Minister in November couldn't possibly know less than the ISS commander.

How, therefore, did Mr Conte find himself so unprepared, even though he knew of the epidemic over three months before the moment it erupted in Italy? Why has he not taken precautionary measures, such as subjecting the soldiers who participated in the Wuhan games on 18-27 October to a medical examination? If he did, what were the results? If he didn't, why not?

All this fuelled in Italy the conspiracy theories - which, despite the common narrative that wants them to be fruit of mad or evil imagination, like all theories may be good or bad, true or untrue until further investigation - that knowledge of the coronavirus threat was kept secret.

Fast forward to the 25 May, when the ESA Italia Twitter account posted a "clarification by ESA astronaut @astro_luca regarding the recent media reports concerning him". In it Parmitano admitted to an error in his time reporting, due to the fact that on board the ISS they don't use a calendar. So, he confused months and what he thought was November was in fact February.

Immediately all the "fact-checking" websites, conspiracy-theory hunters and the general Left-wing brigade screamed: "Fake news!".

Not so fast. David Rossi on Difesaonline again pointed out something that didn't seem right in this explanation, for example:

Since 1965 Omega, now owned by the Swatch Group, has put on the wrist of astronauts in human participation missions the masterpieces of Swiss watchmaking excellence. One of them is the Speedmaster Skywalker X-33, especially designed for space explorers and tested and qualified by the European Space Agency (ESA).

It was developed to satisfy those who, like astronauts, use special functions such as: three different time zones, chronograph, timer, MET (Mission Elapsed Time), PET (Phase Elapsed Time), three alarm clocks and, last but not least, the perpetual calendar. The watch is clearly visible on the wrist of Colonel Luca Parmitano on the occasion of at least three interviews from space during the Expedition 61 mission.

The officer, however, in the ESA release (see link) states that "on board the ISS we do not use the calendar, but the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). The year starts with day 1 and ends with day 365, and events are performed according to this schedule. Consequently, it is possible to confuse one month with another since we never refer to it, but we use the UTC day". Does it mean that he never looked and did not use the functions of his watch developed specifically for the needs of astronauts?

Colonel Luca Parmitano then says that on board the ISS he had access to "news agencies and large television networks". Did he really never notice that these brought him the news by indicating, in a corner, so-to-speak terrestrial dates and times, allowing him at every broadcast to easily link events to specific months?

Add to it that, while it's relatively easy to confuse days, it's much more difficult to confuse months; that he posted on Facebook as many as 35 times in November and 41 in December and it's hard to believe he never once noticed the date; that through all this there were the Christmas holidays, if he needed a reminder of the period of the year. Add all this, and the plot thickens.

David Rossi again:

How can one forget the wishes for a Happy Christmas and the thoughts "for those who are away from their family", expressed on board the ISS just before the Festivity? And the greeting video call to the singer Jovanotti at the end of December? And before that, didn't he get excited when talking to a big star like Paul McCartney in early December?

Maybe he did not get excited but surely he was proud when, at the beginning of NOVEMBER, he had a contact with our President who is also someone from his same region [Sicily], Sergio Mattarella?

SOURCES AND PHOTO CREDIT
Libero Quotidiano
Difesaonline: Is It Possible Conte Didn't Know?
Too Many Things Don't Seem Right
Services Warned USA, NATO Allies and Israel

Globalisation and Multiculturalism in Coronavirus Times

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Many European countries have been seriously affected by Covid-19.

The idea that the movement of great masses of people from their places of origin to new countries could not give rise to critical, not to say disastrous, consequences has now, with the new pandemic, been put to the test more than ever. And we know it has miserably failed the test.

First of all, without globalisation the spread of a virus or another kind of epidemic could have remained localised. The globalisation that is sought after by economic and political powers has made the current pandemic of Coronavirus possible.

Immigration between continents has macroscopically and starkly displayed all its risks and dangers - and not just for the migrants - even to those who’ve been obstinately refusing to see them.

But that’s not all. The response to a pandemic requires the fabric of a society to be compact: everyone is asked to impose restrictions on himself for the collective good, as well as his own.

What’s been happening in these days in Italy, France, Spain and Germany is showing that a society with large numbers of unassimilated, unintegrated migrants is not such a collective body that can count on reciprocal ties and a sense of belonging to the same community and sharing a sense of responsibility towards it.

In all the afore-mentioned countries, which have strict containment and isolation regulations for the whole population, there have been cases of immigrant neighbourhoods or groups who have rebelled against these rules, behaved as if norms of home confinement and of keeping at least one-metre distance between people when out of doors didn’t exist, and who finally became aggressive towards authorities who asked them to comply with the quarantine order, thus endangering everybody.

French commentator Eric Zemmour reported that his country’s migrant neighbourhoods have responded to the Coronavirus crisis by rioting and looting supermarkets, and he talks about addressing “the migrant community’s dangerous and violent refusal to cooperate voluntarily with measures to control the spread of contagion”.

Something similar is happening in Italy, where migrants have been seen crowding the streets deserted by Italians, who force themselves to remain indoors.

In Spain, migrants at the Immigration Centre of Aluche, Madrid, rioted against the confinement of Coronavirus. They climbed on the roof crying "freedom, freedom" and announcing the start of a hunger strike.

In Germany on 16 March, 10-20 residents of the centre for asylum seekers in Suhl in the state of Thuringia rioted, climbed over the perimeter fence, threw missiles at emergency services and police. They also removed manhole covers in an effort to escape and reach the city through the sewer system, and threatened to burn down the asylum seekers centre.

The next day, about 30 residents gathered near the main gate waving ISIS flags and tried to break down the gate, while they used children as human shields by placing them in the first row.

The over 500 residents of the facility as well as all staff had been quarantined since Friday 13 after a man in the centre tested positive for Coronavirus. The measures have led to several days of disturbances, according to the RTL broadcaster.

In Italy too there have been cases of migrants with Coronavirus infection in asylum seekers centres, for example in Milan and Bologna. In these areas many complaints have been recorded about migrants who, much more regularly than Italians, did not respect the confinement and quarantine regulations.

The current, unforeseen crisis also paints a clear picture: our European societies are not as strong, indestructible as we and the people who came here from the Third World thought. We may now discover that we don't have the resources to cope with this pandemic created by globalisation and worsened by uncontrolled and illegal immigration with all the social chaos that it involves.

SOURCES
France and Germany Coronavirus Norms Migrants Defiance
France Immigrant Districts Not Complying with Coronavirus Norms and Measures
Coronavirus Spanish migrants riot
Germany Immigrant Centre Riot
Police Video Conference of Germany Immigrant Centre Riot
Italy Bologna Migrants Centres Coping with Coronavirus
Italy Milan Infection in Migrant Centre
PHOTO CREDIT
RAIR Foundation

Coronavirus, Meningitis Tell Us Without Borders We Die

By Enza Ferreri


This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


While all the attention is on Coronavirus, there is another illness that has been on the increase in Italy: meningitis, a disease of generally infectious origin.

Meningitis Risk from African Migration to Italy

Italian doctor Alessandro Meluzzi, while speaking on the topic of coronavirus, also said:

I want to remind everyone present of something that nobody remembers: the very strong growth of meningitis in Italy, especially in Tuscany, is related to the fact that the type C meningococcus [meningococcal type C bacterium], which almost did not exist in Italy, comes from the meningococcus belt. That is the Sahel, from which 90% of African migration to Italy originates.

He concluded by saying: “Let's try to tell that to the President of the Tuscany region. What I mean is that boundaries, like cell membranes, serve to survive.

"It is not a question of racism, this is not the problem, but that of stopping viruses and bacteria, otherwise we are delirious.

"Without borders we die. As cells need membranes and the immune system needs antibodies, borders are necessary for survival."

Meningitis Belt, in Africa

Like Other Parts of the Natural World, We Are Not Interchangeable

Doctor Meluzzi is right.

The idea of a globalised, borderless world is a dystopian view, totally unrealistic and, if tried to put into practice - as many forces are trying at the moment, against people's will - it will lead to chaos and highly destructive consequences.

There is a reason why the various peoples, nations, ethnic groups have spontaneously formed and united themselves into separate societies.

Smaller polities are always easier to manage. This is why larger states are divided into federal states, then counties, provinces, regions and so on.

This is the way men naturally organise themselves, it is an organic process, not one dictated from above like the "one world" idea.

Nature doesn't exist just outside of us. It exists inside of us too.

We worry not to break the balance of non-human nature, what is generally known as the environment or the ecosystem.

But then, paradoxically or at least unreasonably, our culture's dominant ideology (although not shared by most people) holds that human beings are flexible and pliable to a fantastic point, for example holds that a person's sex can be chosen or changed.

Similarly, this powerful ideology maintains that the naturally-developed, organic human societies that have grown out of family and blood ties, together with a shared history, culture and, more importantly, religion, are not necessary and can be replaced by a global society with a world government.

In this view, humans are seen as pawns in a game of draughts or chess, which, being all the same, can move or be moved from one part of the world to another without any serious consequence.

A hypothesis that we are now experimenting on ourselves with disastrous effects.

---

SOURCE
Meluzzi: I confini servono a sopravvivere
PHOTO CREDIT
Streets of Italy Deserted

Italy: How a Coronavirus Crisis Became a Disaster

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published on Italy Travel Ideas


Italy early in the coronavirus crisis was the first country in the world for number of Covid-19 cases, with its number of confirmed infections increasing very rapidly day by day, and the whole country was placed under lockdown, as is well known. It is important to understand what happened to provoke this exceptional crisis.

In a previous article we saw that, for fear of labels of racism, by not having quarantined all people coming from China, a measure recommended by the World Health Organisation and followed by many nations, the Centre-Left Italian government has opened the door to the epidemic.

Then we saw that the uncontrolled immigration that for a long time has particularly hit and shaken Italy among the countries of Europe, in addition to bringing security and crime risks posed by undocumented migrants' free circulation, has now turned into another possible dynamite waiting to explode: due to China-Africa close trade ties and the vast presence of Chinese in the continent, Africa can become an incubation venue and transmission channel for coronavirus, which means that lots of African immigrants to Italy may be carrying Coronavirus.

The migrants arriving in Italian ports may have the coronavirus without their knowledge - and without ours. And still without their knowledge they could contribute to spread it throughout Europe.

The consequences, in that case, would be potentially lethal given the absence of sanitary bulwarks in almost all African states.

The infection might spread to Europe through Africa perhaps via Italy.

African Countries at Risk

The director general of the World Health Organization (WHO), Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, was very clear when he said that the "biggest concern", in addition to the epidemic itself, is that the virus may reach "countries with weaker health systems" least able to contain it, and the whole of Africa undoubtedly falls into that category.

Although, when news of the epidemic from China first started spreading, there were no confirmed cases of Coronavirus in Africa, there are now, and escalating fairly quickly.

Doctor Giovanni Rezza, specialised in hygiene and in infectious diseases, senior scientist at the Istituto Superiore di Sanita' (ISS) in Rome, and Director of the Department of Infectious, Parasitic and Immune-mediated Diseases, has confirmed that Africa could represent a problem: it is a very populous continent, he said, and has fragile and weak points in the health chain:

African states do not have the same network as European laboratories. And the various types of fever that people can get could be confused with other infections and not be recognised as Coronavirus. This is why international organisations should be on the alert.

Africa, except for a few specialised centres, does not even have the means to recognize this new virus.

Health authorities and researchers fear that the Coronavirus could circulate undetected in Africa, where less advanced health systems could quickly be overwhelmed by a local outbreak.

It's therefore necessary to close the Italian ports to migration.

PHOTO CREDIT
La Gazzetta di Reggio

Coronavirus Exposes Open Ports to Africa Danger

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas and is our second post on the subject, here's the first on Coronavirus and Italy.

Italian physician and psychiatrist Alessandro Meluzzi rightly described as paradoxical Italy's current policy of "closed schools and open ports", letting in migrants at such a time of emergency for Coronavirus (whose official name, which initially and temporarily was 2019-nCoV, has from early February become Sars-CoV-2, also adopted by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC), while the disease it causes is called COVID-19).

If we don't close our borders others close theirs, Dr Meluzzi added.

This happened, in fact, and China itself was among the countries isolating Italy.

Dr Meluzzi was making correct predictions as early as 31 January, when he said in an interview:

"My feeling is that the Italian situation is already totally out of control".

He added that he considered with great concern the hypothesis of the spread of Coronavirus on the African continent:

"When the virus arrives in Africa, where countries do not have adequate health coverage to deal with the epidemic, this could spread in a potentially catastrophic way".

He referred to the great number of Chinese workers and companies in Africa, "which create a large flow of trade with China, especially with the industrial area from which the epidemic originated", concluding: "I dare not imagine what could happen in Africa."

From China to Europe via Africa

The African "bomb" became a later alarm about Coronavirus and its further spread in the world.

There are two factors that greatly elevate the potential risk of contagion: one is the thriving trade relations between China and Africa, the other is the uncontrolled immigration that from Africa regularly arrives in European countries overlooking the Mediterranean Sea, particularly Italy.

Let's be frank: when we say "uncontrolled", it is very literal. We know nothing of many, indeed probably the great majority, of people landing on our shores from smugglers' boats and NGO ships, since they have no documents or false documents. In a very high number of cases we don't even know their name, let alone their past history, criminal record and health status. The newspaper Il Giornale wrote:

Italy hosts immigrants at its own expense without having the slightest idea who they are. To know their stories, we rely on the stories given by them in front of the various commissions.

For their personal identities, we are satisfied with having them put their name and surname in writing the moment they disembark...

In Italy, in fact, thousands of people arrive who can carry with them cell phones but never a shred of an identification document.

Hardly Any of the Arrivals Are Refugees

There have been cases of fake refugees who disclosed to the media that they paid thousands of euros to obtain ways to claim asylum status.

For a long time Italy has been literally overwhelmed by would-be asylum seekers and migrants. A Nigerian interpreter and "cultural mediator", calling himself Uchenna, has explained how it works:

To judge asylum seekers there should be 4 people for each commission [called 'territorial commission'], who include representatives for the UNHCR (UN Refugee Agency), Italian police and local authorities. Now, there are only 1 or 2 left to follow the interview because there are several organisational problems... so many requests arrive that if they were all present at each interview, it would never end. The system is practically collapsing.

This means that in some cases the waiting times for obtaining the opinion of the commission can be extremely long. Meanwhile, Italy hosts many immigrants at its own expense, who will then never obtain refugee status. And they are a very high number. Says Uchenna: "The majority of those who are arriving on the Italian coast from Nigeria certainly do not run away from dangers: they are looking for money and success to be able to return home one day and strut the wealth achieved".

He explained that to do this, therefore, many times they invent stories of suffering and persecutions that they have never undergone: "I often hear the same identical story told by different immigrants".

Asked why everyone coming to Italy on the migrants' boats is undocumented, the interpreter answered: "Those who land in Italy say they never had a document or lost it in Libya. In Nigeria, falsifying documents and changing identity several times is normal. They do the same during recognition in Lampedusa".

But in Italy, he says, the 'poor thing' rule applies, explaining: "In the commissions we hear them say of every tale: 'Oh, what a poor man'. Yet these people often only tell lies."

Migrants, particularly those who seek asylum under false pretence, are also known for cutting, abrading and burning their fingertips to prevent identification.

Anna Bono, former University of Turin researcher in Africa's History and Institutions, who has long lived in Africa and has worked with the Italian Foreign Ministry, sums up the situation:

We now know with certainty that 95% of the foreigners who land in Italy are not refugees: they are not people exhausted from extreme poverty, they are not people who have escaped death threats, torture, deprivation of human rights.

They come from southern Nigeria, Senegal, Ivory Coast ... they are illegal immigrants. In 2016, 181,045 arrived, 123,482 of whom applied for asylum. The territorial commissions examined 90,473 requests, accepting 4,940 of them, namely 5.4% of the applications examined, 3.9% of those submitted and 2.7% of the total landings.

Prof Bono says that the vast majority of asylum seekers do not get asylum because they are not persecuted at home, nor are they fleeing wars.

However, not all applicants rejected over the years have left Italy. Many of both fake asylum seekers and illegal immigrants remained in Italy, escaping the control of the authorities and often disappearing. With the "residence permit for humanitarian reasons" many have been allowed to live in Italy in hiding, doing illegal jobs or illegal activities.

Therefore it's not surprising to know that 1 in 3 inmates in Italian prisons is foreign. This gives some indication of a serious problem of security in the country, a danger that has been in existence for a long time.

Yet again, it should come as no surprise that people with no official identity, no ties with the larger community that hosts them, generally no family (they are mostly young men of military age) and few opportunities for legal jobs should be enormously overrepresented in crime statistics.

Incidentally, this statistic is similar in other European countries. In Germany, for example, as reported by Free West Media: "In a sample of the 3930 prison population of Berlin 31 March 2018, 51 percent had no German citizenship. Of the individuals in pre-trial detention facilities, 75 percent had foreign nationality, the Berliner Morgenpost reported."

The epidemic of the new virus simply adds to this grave risk, and, paradoxically, it seems almost to offer an opportunity to examine it.

It's terrible, though: it shouldn't have been necessary to face a dangerous epidemic to be allowed to more openly discuss it.

We must also mention a well-known illegal trafficking of identity documents among immigrants across various European countries, including Italy, Germany, Greece, involving even people who have been recognised as refugees.

This Migration Phenomenon Is Not Good for African Countries Either

As we've described in this previous article “Young People, Don’t Emigrate” Say African Bishops, Italy, with 1 in 3 youths unemployed, has nothing to offer to migrants. African Cardinals and Bishops themselves have repeatedly and constantly exhorted their flocks to stay at home and help their countries.

Those who emigrate are usually the best equipped and qualified to help their own economies. They are richer, otherwise they wouldn't be able to pay the expensive people smugglers, younger, stronger, more skilled, with more initiative than the rest of their population that they leave behind.

And no-one in his right mind can seriously think that Africa's poverty problems - which have nevertheless diminished over the last few decades - can be solved by transferring the 1.2 billion Africans (rapidly increasing as we are counting) to the continent of Europe, the world's smallest.

And why don't we ever hear the same people who, for self-declared humanitarian reasons, worry so much about illegal immigrants equally condemn the most atrocious persecution of Christians all over the world? Why don't they beat their chest, similarly, for those Italians who commit suicide because their business failed and they can't support their families? While Italy is paying to host and keep thousands and thousands of fake refugees and illegal immigrants, what about the Italians who also need help?

The series of articles on Italy and Coronavirus continues.

SOURCES
Stop Censura
Researchgate: Fingerprint Alteration
Il Giornale: Gli immigrati raccontano bugie
Dei profughi non sappiamo nulla
La NuovaBQ: Io, falsa rifugiata
Un detenuto su tre e' straniero
Free West Media
Traffico di identita'

PHOTO CREDIT
Il Primato Nazionale

Italy: Racism Fear Stops Coronavirus Vital Quarantine

By Enza Ferreri

This article was published in Italy Travel Ideas

Italy has been one of the world's most affected countries for the number of infections caused by the novel coronavirus.

Walter Ricciardi, Italy's representative at the World Health Organization and Professor of Hygiene and Public Health at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Rome, very clearly stated: "We [Italy] pay the consequences of not having immediately quarantined people who landed from China. We banned direct flights, a decision that has no scientific basis, and which did not allow us to trace the arrivals, because people were able to stop over and arrive from other places."

Professor Ricciardi was referring to the possibility left open to travellers of, for example, taking a flight from Beijing to Dubai, changing tickets and then heading to Rome or Milan.

Another authority on the subject, famous virologist Roberto Burioni, as early as 7 February was writing:

"The virus in China might be out of control, but it is not here yet. The only chance we have for not letting it in is only, and I repeat only, the quarantine of those who return. All, without distinction. It is not racism, but a simple and elementary measure of self-protection, which costs a little discomfort to the people who are isolated and provides us with infinite security, while avoiding hateful and unnecessary discrimination."

Dr Burioni later declared in an interview to Il Corriere della Sera:

Oh, I know, they called me an alarmist, even a fascist leghista [supporter of the centre-right Lega party], because from the beginning I claimed that isolating people from China was the only effective way to avoid the spread of the virus. I stress: people, not Chinese.

As you may have already noticed, the political climate in Italy has over time become excessively, paranoidly fixated against any supposed "fascism" or "racism", even when there is none, to the point of neglecting basic considerations of, as in this case, health and self-preservation.

Something similar happened in many other Western countries: see the example of the street distribution in Canada of bottles of hand sanitiser bearing the message 'Stop the Spread', referring not to Coronavirus but to xenophobia and intolerance. However, such attitudes of "the stigma is worse than the virus" in Italy have had more devastating consequences, due to the actions of the current government, which has been described as "the most unfit in the history of the Italian Republic".

On 31 January, the day after two Chinese tourists who had arrived from Wuhan to Milan Malpensa Airport were discovered as Italy's first two cases of the virus, the leader of the Lega party himself, Matteo Salvini, wrote on Twitter:

"Let me understand … The first two cases of Coronavirus in Italy apparently have quietly landed at Malpensa on 23 January and, without any control, travelled for days across half of Italy, until checking into a hotel in the centre of Rome.

"Is this how the government protects the health and safety of Italians? The Lega for days has been calling for quarantines, checks, blocks and information, but for Leftist politicians and journalists we were 'speculators' and jackals. Let us pray to God that there will be no disaster, but whoever has done wrong must pay."

He also tweeted: “Check every single entry. By sea, by air, by land. While other countries took immediate action, in Italy there was the impression that someone has been wasting time. And you can't play with the health of citizens."

Salvini's words, like Dr Burioni's, were welcomed by insults as well as totally ignored by the government.

Instead, a much more reasonable response came from a Chinese in self-isolation, married and mother-of-three Xia Weihong, 48: the Lega is right, she said to the Libero newspaper.

Italy's Centre-Left government was busy in fighting not an all-too-real virus but an imaginary risk of anti-Chinese racism, as if the highly-justified fear of contagion had been a symptom of dangerous xenophobia.

So we saw the President of the Republic Mattarella visiting a Rome's school attended by Chinese children to show his solidarity; initiatives like "embrace a Chinese" launched by Florence mayor Nardella; politicians and media people eating spring rolls in Chinese restaurants.

Except that, when a few cases of the virus were found in some parts of northern Italy, none of these personages went to embrace inhabitants of the Italian affected area.

Other posts on the subject will follow.



SOURCES
La Stampa
Medical Facts of Dr Roberto Burioni
Il Corriere della Sera
Malpensa 24
Matteo Salvini tweets
Libero
Canadian Hand Sanitiser

Covid-19 Fake News Is Real: a Direct Personal Experience

Fake news is real, especially in the mainstream media.

The tabloids may be the worst offenders, but are not the only ones.

And, in these times of coronavirus pandemic and great confusion about something new and not well understood, we need to be particularly careful about what the big newspapers and magazines, on which many rely for their news, information and opinions, publish.

This life experience reported by writer Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review well illustrates it.

After writing an article in which he advanced a few hypotheses, making it clear that they were only his layman's (not a doctor's) conjectures, on why California a month ago had not experienced the same level of Covid-19 cases as New York, he was "hit" by media as well as private enquiries about his ongoing “coronavirus antibody testing studies.”

Despite the fact that he never claimed to be a medical expert in his article or in any enquiry following it, and that he explained he never conducted a coronavirus study, he was repeatedly pursued for medical advice, even by Chinese media who were in search of "lab" confirmation that the virus spread started in the US (some Chinese go as far as saying that the origin of the disease was in Italy).

Hanson adds that the more he was denying any expert knowledge the more the media, including American ones, ignored his correction and continued asking him the same questions regardless.

He concludes that fake news is real, and it's interesting to hear it from someone who has experienced personally how easily and quickly it spreads.

A book could be written on how efficiently, without difficulty and terrifyingly the mass media can manipulate consciences.

UK, Coronavirus Lockdown Good for the Heart, Rest, Exercise

The lockdown is good for the heart.

In the UK there’s been a reduction of hospital admissions for cardiovascular problems, and not because of fear of coronavirus contagion. If someone has serious heart trouble, he is unlikely not to report it and to bypass hospital referral.

Staying at home, not worrying about going to work the next day, sleeping well are relaxing and therefore beneficial for cardiac activity.

It has a similar effect as having a holiday.

People working from home are more likely to take breaks and not sit for long hours without interruption.

In addition, more people, if for no other reason than just to have an excuse to go out, are taking more regular exercise, walking and cycling, and entire families do it together.

 

Coronavirus Lockdown Effectiveness, Other Doubts

One of the few certainties about this novel virus and the pandemic it is spreading is that, being new (or at least new to us, namely newly discovered), we don't know very much about it, and we are constantly learning about it all the time.

But, being human and not liking uncertainty in a similar way in which nature abhors vacuum, we try to jump to conclusions, any conclusion, in fact, just to avoid doubt, chaos and disorder (a very natural feeling). So we grab at many different explanatory theories, whether supported a lot, a little or not at all.

This is The Times of Israel reporting on the theory held by someone the newspaper describes as a top Israeli mathematician:

"I have no explanation but the numbers speak for themselves."

Top Israeli prof claims simple stats show virus plays itself out after 70 days.

Isaac Ben-Israel, who is not a medical expert, says analysis worldwide shows new cases peaking after about 40 days, slams economic closures; leading doctor dismisses his claims.

So, according to Professor Ben-Israel, head of the Security Studies program in Tel Aviv University and the chairman of the National Council for Research and Development, "simple statistical analysis demonstrates that the spread of COVID-19 peaks after about 40 days and declines to almost zero after 70 days — no matter where it strikes, and no matter what measures governments impose to try to thwart it."

What is intriguing is that, minus the mathematical and statistical calculations, a similar view, at least in its practical conclusions, is supported by another person in the news, who has been accused of "anti-Semitism", ie David Icke:

On Wednesday night Icke shared his unsubstantiated views in an edited interview for London Real: COVID-19, and shared baseless claims on coronavirus including that mandatory vaccination for the virus would be 'fascism' and include 'nanotechnology microchips'.

… he appeared to justify attacks on 5G masts around the UK, adding 'human life as we know it is over' if the construction continued.

The 5G theory has been discredited by experts, with Public Health England stating that 'the overall exposure is expected to remain low relative to guidelines and, as such, there should be no consequences for public health.' The new coronavirus is also spreading in places without 5G networks, including in Iran.

Strange bedfellows as they may be, Icke shares with Professor Ben-Israel the hypothesis that the lockdown doesn't help to limit the spread of Covid-19, as shown on this tweet of his with a diagram comparing countries with and without lockdown measures:

Compare this image, though, with the one pictured above this post and you'll see how focusing only on deaths per million and removing cases per million gives a very different picture: this should provide an indication of the complexity of the issue, which doesn't lend itself to over-simplifications, much as we would love to rely on them.

Icke is not the only one to believe in the uselessness of lockdowns, there are many, especially among conservative and Right-oriented people, who are sceptical of their government's policies and think the same.

Now, I am in no position to categorically declare that this idea is right or wrong. As I said at the beginning, we don't have enough information.

I do have some doubts about using pure mathematics to arrive at conclusions like those of Ben-Israel on this. Correlation doesn't mean and doesn't necessarily involve causation. In Latin, this supremely logical and succinct language, it's better: post hoc ergo propter hoc is a fallacy.

For example, is it possible that countries with less contact with the rest of the world and therefore fewer opportunities for contagion (ah, the joys of globalisation! we have finally discovered them in their full glory) have had lower numbers of cases of Covid-19 and therefore had a comparable smaller need for lockdown than those with more international traffic and Coronavirus spread which as a consequence resorted more to lockdown, inverting the cause-effect direction?

Has this been considered as a contributing factor, anyway?

At least we have a glimmer of hope, though: it's the prediction on the progress of the disease in Israel made by Professor Ben-Israel on last 12 April on Facebook, which I have to reproduce in its online translation:

It turns out that the expansion of the expansion [meaning, I presume, the peak] has been behind us for about a week, and apparently it will fade almost completely in about two weeks.

Assuming the translation is accurate, we can wait about two weeks to see if his prediction for Israel materialises and test whether his theory might be correct.

Ebola and Immigration, a Deadly Combination



The Ebola virus epidemic reminds us that global travel and international communications are not always a good thing.

Furthermore, since epidemics of this kind often originate in the same Third World countries that routinely send us thousands of people - call this phenomenon "immigration" or more appropriately "invasion" -, the infectious diseases emigrate to richer nations with their carriers.

Last year, for example, a report by the UK's All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Tuberculosis, Drug-resistant tuberculosis: old disease—new threat, said:

The majority of UK cases are likely as a result from the reactivation of latent TB infection in people who were born in high incidence areas outside the UK.

While cases of tuberculosis, especially drug-resistant, are increasing in the world and - according to The Lancet - "the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history" largely thanks to the spread of HIV, in developed countries like the UK immigration is the first culprit of the rise in incidence.

The above-mentioned study by the All-Party Parliamentary Group reported that TB rates increased in only three of the 21 countries under investigation: the United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden. In all of them, about three quarters of cases were foreign-born. The UK had the third highest number of foreign nationals overall, but the highest number from a country with a very high TB incidence.

In the USA, last month Fox News disclosed that tuberculosis had spread and become a dangerous issue at both its southern border and the refugee centres housing thousands of illegal immigrants:

Dr. Marc Siegel, a professor of medicine at New York University's Langone Medical Center and a Fox News A Team medical contributor, said tuberculosis appears to be spreading through several counties in southern Texas. He told me that some counties are reporting twice the usual average number of cases.

"Some of the tuberculosis that comes from Central America is drug resistant," he told me. "It's not easier to spread but it is harder to treat. I'm concerned about that."

And while TB is not that easy to spread, he warned that all those children living in close quarters could be a ticking time bomb.

"It is a disease that needs to be carefully monitored and screened for -- something that is not possible under the current circumstances," Siegel said.

An earlier article had given a similar warning.

In the video above this article, a map of the United States showing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention quarantine stations is compared with another map of the country showing the places to which the illegal immigrants have been sent. They are almost completely identical.

It's not conclusive evidence, of course, but it provides a good working hypothesis to research on.

Now, the Ebola virus is spreading in West Africa. Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone are among the most afflicted countries of what the World Health Organisation has called the worst outbreak of Ebola virus in history, with 932 deaths so far.

To put that into context, in the biggest previous outbreak of the disease 224 died out of 425 cases, and all previous outbreaks resulted in just 2,300 deaths. This epidemic, increasing since January, concerns the deadliest form of the Ebola virus, Zaire ebolavirus.

This means that one third of all the fatalities caused by Ebola since it was recognised as a disease 40 years ago have taken place in the current outbreak. And the number is increasing.

Some nations try to confine the population, but the countries in that region, as nearly all African states, have porous borders with large uncontrolled tracts - which explains why Boko Haram terrorists can cross the border with Cameroon, where they have created several bases, and return home for new attacks. After Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, the first case of death due to Ebola was identified in Nigeria, a country located 2,000 km from the epicentre of the epidemic.

According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Ebola virus disease causes high fever, diarrhea, bleeding, vomiting, chills, muscle aches, headache, joint pain, damage to the nervous system and other symptoms. The disease is transmitted through contact with the bodily fluid of an infected person directly or indirectly - e.g. by touching needles which have come into contact with infected bodily fluid.

The CDC has moved its operations to Level 1, with increased deployment of staff and resources. This is the first time the agency has invoked its highest level alert since 2009, then over a lethal influenza epidemic.

Christian doctors and missionaries treating Ebola patients for Christian charities - not many atheist charities involved in such task, as Dawkins' "rationality" doesn't seem to work in these cases - have died. But then we know that many of today's medical facilities were originally founded by Christians who acted out of a humanitarian impulse inspired by Jesus Christ.

In the UK, according to a union leader, border, customs and immigration staff feel unprepared to deal with people coming to the country with possible cases of the Ebola virus.

If you think that the USA is off the hook due to the provenance of its immigrants from Mexico and Central America, think again:

What’s more alarming, however, are reports confirmed by the National Border Patrol Council, or NBPC, and United Nations that some of the detainees apprehended attempting to enter the U.S. illegally are from Africa – where the Ebola outbreak is thriving...

In 2012, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime released a report confirming, “Central Americans are not the only ones being smuggled through Mexico to the United States. Irregular migrants from the Horn of Africa (Eritrea, Somalia, and Ethiopia), as well as South Asia (Bangladesh, Nepal, India), China, and other African and Asian states are being smuggled through Central America.”

“Border Patrol agents in our sector have in the past apprehended aliens from Iraq, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Israel and from many other nations,” Spratte continued. “People think this is just about Mexico and Central America, but it isn’t. People from all over the world are trying to sneak into the United States.

What is happening in Africa due to the Ebola is terrible. But what is there to gain from importing the virus to our countries?

ObamaCare: A Word of Warning from Britain

First published on FrontPage Magazine.

By Enza Ferreri


In light of the ongoing ObamaCare debacle, it can be interesting to see how a state-run national health system free for all, like Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) – Obama’s favourite model -, has failed to deliver.

The UK is one of the few countries in the world – mostly concentrated in Europe - to have completely free universal health provision. It sounds cuddly and comfy, but, like in all utopias and fairy tales, reality is a different matter.

The NHS is Britain's sacred cow. No party, if it wants to be elected, can scrap it or reform it in any real sense. All parties have to recite the mantra: "The NHS is safe with us. We are ring-fencing the NHS".

In 2009, British Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan, interviewed on Fox News (see above video) about the impending Obamacare, warned Americans that the NHS is a “60-year-old relic” and claimed he “would not wish it on anyone”. Hannan was then condemned back home as “evil”, “unpatriotric” and “a traitor”.

Former Chancellor Nigel Lawson said that the NHS is “the closest thing that the British have to a religion”. And Labour politicians managed to create a climate in which this institution was considered sacrosanct, untouchable by criticism.

But it’s becoming increasingly impossible now to keep that pretence.

The NHS, born on 5 July 1948, is the first system of free universal medical care ever established. The 1942 Beveridge Report, influential in founding the UK’s modern welfare state of which the NHS is part, was conceived and implemented during a special time, when the population was not only ethnically and culturally homogenous, but also feeling like a great family, bound together by the heroic struggle of WW2.

The fundamental principles of the NHS, then as now, have been: 1) services provided free at the point of use; 2) services financed from central taxation; 3) everyone eligible for care (even people temporarily resident or visiting the country).

According to Treasury figures, NHS spending almost doubled in real terms from £57 billion in 2002/03 to £109 billion in 2012/13, and is forecast for £129 billion in 2014.

Britain spends 18.5% of its annual budget on health, the second highest expenditure.

The NHS has always been beleaguered by problems and cash crises, and needing reform.

All “reforms” attempted through the years have only amounted to internal changes and restructurings - giving similar bodies different names. The current “reform” is no exception. Crisis has always been the NHS’s permanent condition.

Its original ideal is too expensive even in the best conditions and, with health care becoming more costly and population ageing, the conditions are going to worsen.

But more money doesn’t mean better care. Department of Health reports admit that, despite significant and consistent increases in funding, hospital productivity has fallen.

A study in the prestigious Lancet of health data over 20 years in 19 countries shows Britain lagging behind in 12th place.

The BBC reported on the research:

Many deaths happen because the NHS is not good enough at preventing people getting sick or because treatment does not rival that seen elsewhere in Europe, says Mr Hunt who is responsible for health policy in England.

By cancer survival rate comparisons, the NHS is one of the worst health systems in the Western world, even overtaken by former European communist countries.

The remedies are worse than the ills. After having created problems and produced terrible results, governments, to save their face and not risk losing votes, try to find band-aid solutions that make things even worse.

One instance of that is setting targets, which has led to patients being neglected to meet them:

Another example occurred at Mid-Staffordshire NHS Trust, where over three years from 2005 between 400 and 1,200 patients died needlessly as managers ruthlessly cut costs — particularly nursing numbers — to meet targets the Labour government laid down to win ‘foundation’ hospital status.

Doctors were diverted from critically-ill patients in order to deal with less serious cases to meet the target of discharging all patients from Accident & Emergency units within four hours of admission.

Vulnerable patients were left starving, in soiled bedsheets or screaming in pain. Some became so dehydrated they drank from flower vases…

Apparently, the [Francis] report will damn not just the Mid-Staffordshire management but a ‘culture of fear’ from Whitehall down to the wards, as managers became fixated on meeting targets and protecting ministers from political criticism.

Countless families in Mid-Staffordshire have been left grieving for loved ones who were, in effect, killed by the National Health Service.

This is by no means an exceptional case. Inquiries follow scandals and are followed by new horror stories.

Top public health officials, from the Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt down to Medical Director of NHS England Sir Bruce Keogh, have acknowledged that in many cases patients were abused, neglected and bullied, and have expressed serious concerns about the service at some NHS trusts.

In July of this year, 14 trusts were found to have unusually high mortality rates. In August, up to 42,000 deaths a year due to kidney failure were linked to dehydration in patients who were not given water by NHS staff. In September, it was discovered that 13,000 every year die of sepsis because of delays in diagnosis and treatment – negligence which also costs the NHS more money. In October, we had: the previous Labour government was accused of a pre-election cover-up about hospitals with higher-than-normal death rates, “with inspectors finding blood stains on floors and curtains and badly soiled mattresses”; NHS doctors were discovered to have been routinely giving performance-enhancing drugs to patients to “enhance their recovery rates”; and NHS managers getting hundreds of thousands of pounds in redundancy just before being given other NHS jobs – this was due to the latest NHS “reform”, which is simply a reshuffling. In November, it was found that NHS dementia patients were left hungry for hours and not given medication at the right time; a £200 million NHS fraud scandal was uncovered, with patients illegally claiming free services, and dentists, agencies and firms working for the NHS committing fraud and sending false invoices; 19 more hospitals were investigated over their links to allegations of sexual abuse by late TV celebrity Jimmy Savile, making a total of 32; it was discovered that the NHS spent nearly a fifth of its budget for maternity services on clinical negligence insurance in England in 2012, nearly £500m; there was news that Colchester hospital has been fiddling with patient records to improve its waiting times for cancer treatment, with potentially life-threatening consequences. In December, it’s been disclosed that up to 170 operations are cancelled at the last minute each day by NHS hospitals for bed shortages, faulty equipment and lack of staff.

This is just a sample, in no way a complete record. Not bad for less than a half year’s work.

A former London correspondent for Time sounds very reassuring:

Health care was more psychically seamless in the U.K. Nobody worried about going bankrupt if they got sick.

Nobody goes bankrupt individually, but everybody will go bankrupt with the rest of the country because the NHS and the whole welfare state are taking Britain to the verge of economic collapse, with an unsustainable and growing national debt.

Tim Kelsey, a director at NHS England, the central body in charge of the health service, warned in July:

We are about to run out of cash in a very serious fashion... our analysis will disclose that by 2020 there will be a £30bn funding gap in the healthcare system. [Emphasis added]

Senior NHS doctors and managers said that up to 20 hospitals across the country may have to close to save the NHS from financial ruin.

Although the American system of employer-provided medical care is different from the British system, comparisons of the latter with Medicare, Medicaid and Obama’s “vision” for public healthcare can be made. When healthcare is mostly paid by a third party, there’s little incentive to economize on it, and as a consequence expenditures rise dramatically. Late US economist Milton Friedman would call the NHS a plan for the “socialisation of medicine”, flawed like all government programmes to control social fields.

Two weeks ago, during a visit to Vladimir Bukovsky, I asked him if he thought that looking after the health of a whole country is a task a government can be efficient at. He replied: "There are very few things that governments are efficient at".

Interestingly, the US has always been used as a bogeyman to scare Europeans into believing that they need universal healthcare. Look at what happens in America, where there is no state-run health system, Leftists and media say.

However, that the question "Are you insured?" asked in US hospitals is caused by lack of free healthcare for all, European-style, is far from the truth. It was free medical care provided by employers during the war - to attract workers at a time of price and wage controls - that led to the current situation in the US. Most Europeans have never heard of the existence of Medicare and Medicaid, and believe that Americans who can’t afford insurance are practically left to die.

What Is Natural, and Is It Better?

The word “natural” is treated in a way peculiar in the extreme. This perhaps reflects our confused ideas about nature, or perhaps darker, more sinister misconceptions are at work.

There is a strange dichotomy between the positive connotation of “natural” in one realm (that encompassing health, food, medicine, environmental management, and the like) and the negative connotation of “natural” in another realm (social and political organization).

If you use the adjective “natural” in conjunction with objects of the first group, eg natural remedies, natural substances, natural environment, it is almost invariably taken as a virtue, a good qualitative appreciation.

If, on the other hand, you use “natural” in discussions of the second group of subjects, for example regarding differences between sexes, sexual orientation or a thorny question such as war, its use is at best controversial, and at worst considered a threat against the march of progress.

In expressions like "natural foods" or "natural medicines", "natural" is taken to mean, among other things, "good" and "not harmful". In the case of remedies or drugs of natural source, the idea is that they shouldn't have the nasty side effects of other drugs.

In fact, there have been cases of harmful side effects of so-called natural and herbal remedies, much the same as the risk exists with all medicines.

And, if you think about it, there's no reason why it should be otherwise. Poisonous mushrooms are natural, and so is snakes' venom.

The idea that substances occcurring naturally should necessarily be good is a fantasy, but a widespread one. “Nature knows best” is the dogmatic slogan in this field of thought.

But, when we discuss sexual roles, the natural, biologically determined forces moulding the behaviours of men and women are treated as demonic entities to be fought tooth and nail. Something similar applies to many explanations of social facts, events and behaviour in terms of nature, including class differences, race differences, sexual orientation, violence, war.

In all these areas “we know better” than nature, we can improve on it, or this is the received wisdom.

We don’t know whether our view of social organization is indeed better than a more natural one. Of course, the dispute is often about what is natural, but frequently that simply shifts the question, because the sort of people who have utopias and are certain about what the best society would be are also people who defy the most compelling scientific data and reject the most overwhelming empirical evidence when these don’t conform with their own pet theories.

I think that both attitudes are wrong, or rather that this dichotomic attitude, which expresses itself in the two faces of the same coin, is wrong. There should not be an a priori value judgement about nature and what is natural, in either direction.

Each situation where we compare something “natural” with something artificial, or created by human individuals and societies, should be considered according to the particular circumstances of the case and judged accordingly.

Is Homosexuality as Harmless and Healthy as Political Correctness Dictates?

In psychology and psychiatry, a condition is considered pathological when it results in behaviours or states of mind which are harmful to oneself and/or others.

Sometimes it is a question of degree. All of us, for example, have little insignificant rituals, or irrational beliefs, or acts of superstition that serve no purpose but are harmless enough. When these come to dominate somebody's life and seriously interfere with normal everyday functioning, they are deemed a disorder, specifically Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD).

We all generally keep objects that only occupy space without any use or function, but it is only when the house becomes a suffocating repository of towering piles of junk and old newspapers that this behaviour is called "hoarding" and treated as a disease.

So, it is the consequences that signal pathology.

Paedophilia is considered an illness because it is believed that children and young people under the age of consent will be harmed by sexual relationships, especially with adults.

Incidentally, the very fact that the age of consent, even in the Western world alone, varies considerably and can be as low as 13 in Spain and as high as 18 in the USA shows how unclear and uncertain many of our notions about sex ethics are.

Therefore, so the current consensus goes, paedophilia is an abnormality and homosexuality, for example, is not purely because of the consequences, harmful in the former and innocuous in the latter.

This is the received wisdom, the present-day orthodoxy and dogma which, interestingly enough, is very different from that of not just 100, or 50, but even a few years ago, when same-sex marriage, for instance, was still generally regarded as, well, queer.

So, if we think that our ideas were so terribly wrong then, they might as well be wrong now, and maybe in a decade or two from today they will have changed all over again, in the same or in the opposite direction.

"Homosexuality" can refer to two things: homosexual tendency and homosexual behaviour. As in many other cases in psychology and psychiatry, it is the acting on the tendency, namely the behaviour, that can more appropriately be considered pathological or not.

If we look at homosexual behaviour in men, we see persons who are prepared to take extraordinary, lethal health risks in order to satisfy their tendency.

Male homosexuals are at very high risk of contracting the AIDS virus and other sexually transmitted diseases, disproportionately high in comparison to the heterosexual population:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services published in 2010 a study conducted in 21 American cities, showing that one in five MSM (men who have sex with men) had HIV...

A coincidence, you say? No, the way HIV, the AIDS virus, spreads has a lot to do with homosexual behaviour.

Before looking into the evidence of brain, genes or hormones we need to recognise that the male body is not designed to be penetrated during sexual intercourse. The lining of the anus is much thinner than the vagina and tears very easily. The lining of the anus, compared to the lining of the vagina, is also designed for nutrients to pass through it - where a healthy vagina will stop sperm entering any part of the body except the reproductive system the anus will allow semen (and any disease it carries) into the blood stream. Also the anal sphincter muscle is designed to expel not accept objects which can lead to problems in later life...

So biologically the male and female bodies are compatible with each other not bodies of the same gender.

This is from the website of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), a federal government agency:

The Surgeon General (C. Everett Koop, Surgeon General 1982-1989) has said, "Condoms provide some protection, but anal intercourse is simply too dangerous to practice".

Condoms may be more likely to break during anal intercourse than during other types of sex because of the greater amount of friction and other stresses involved.

Even if the condom doesn't break, anal intercourse is very risky because it can cause tissue in the rectum to tear and bleed. These tears allow disease germs to pass more easily from one partner to the other.

The often-repeated wishful thinking "panacea" of the use of condom is just that, a wishful thinking myth.

Male homosexual behaviour may reduce life expectancy up to 3 times more than smoking. This is what "Modelling the impact of HIV disease on mortality in gay and bisexual men", a peer-reviewed study published in the Oxford Journal of Epidemiology, says:

In a major Canadian centre, life expectancy at age 20 years for gay and bisexual men is 8 to 20 years less than for all men [for smokers is 7 years less]. If the same pattern of mortality were to continue, we estimate that nearly half of gay and bisexual men currently aged 20 years will not reach their 65th birthday. Under even the most liberal assumptions, gay and bisexual men in this urban centre are now experiencing a life expectancy similar to that experienced by all men in Canada in the year 1871.

Are men engaging in sex with other men only harming themselves, although that in itself would be sufficient to recognize this behaviour as psychologically pathological?

Actually no, the risk spreads to society at large. Tuberculosis is increasing in the world, "and 'the worldwide number of new cases (more than 9 million) is higher than at any other time in history' largely, as the authoritative medical journal The Lancet explains, thanks to the spread of HIV: 'Due to the devastating effect of HIV on susceptibility to tuberculosis'."

All this shows that male homosexual behaviour has consequences that, if political correctness and fears of being ostracized as a "homophobe" - things that have nothing to do with medical or psychological considerations - did not stand in the way, would rightly make it classified as pathological.

Why I Did not Attend Breast Screening

Breast cancer screening causes more damage than previously thought, headlines The Guardian, and Breast Cancer Screening Comes at a Cost, says Sci-Tech Today.

I had made an extensive research on mass breast screening of asymptomatic women like me, to make up my mind about whether to undergo the test that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) was offering me.

I had concluded that it was not a good idea and decided against it.

You can see the published results of my research here:

Mammogram

Mammography Benefits and Risks

DCIS | Ductal Carcinoma In Situ

Breast Screening


Excerpts from the Guardian article:

Around 4,000 women have unnecessary treatment for a disease that will never threaten their health, though tests should continue.

Breast cancer screening causes more harm than has previously been recognised, even though it saves lives, according to an independent review set up following years of scientific controversy surrounding the NHS programme.

Around 1,300 lives are saved every year by mammography, which women are invited to undergo between the ages of 50 to 70, said the review, which recommends that screenings should continue.

But 4,000 women will undergo unnecessary treatment, including surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, for a cancer they would not otherwise have known about and which would have done them no harm in their lifetime. Some breast cancers are so tiny and slow growing that they would never be a threat to a woman's health, the review says.

The government is embarking on an immediate revision of the leaflet which invites women for screening, said national cancer director Sir Mike Richards, so that women can weigh up the benefits against potential harm and make their own decision as to whether to be screened.

While he welcomed the review panel's support for screening, he added: "The key thing is that we communicate this new information to women so they can make an informed choice for themselves.

And the Sci-Tech Today article begins:

A British panel says life-saving breast cancer screening has a cost: For every life saved, three other women were overdiagnosed, meaning they were unnecessarily treated for cancer that would never have threatened their lives. The British program has been slammed for focusing on the benefits of mammograms and downplaying the risks.

Breast cancer screening for women over 50 saves lives, an independent panel in Britain has concluded, confirming findings in U.S. and other studies.

But that screening comes with a cost: The review found that for every life saved, roughly three other women were overdiagnosed, meaning they were unnecessarily treated for a cancer that would never have threatened their lives.

The expert panel was commissioned by Cancer Research U.K. and Britain's department of health and analyzed evidence from 11 trials in Canada, Sweden, the U.K. and the U.S.