This thread bounces off TB and infectious pandemics - but also applies to the current NCD Pandemic. And the main questions and points remain:
If the Constitution protects people from infection and ensures the right to a safe environment - then why aren't they going after the corporate
industries that create and spread the disease, instead of planning to imprison the victims?
Public discussion about how factory farming, industrial pollution and the resulting environmental changes create disease is kept separate from
dialogue about pandemic prevention and response - another kind of forced isolation, sometimes called censorship or "sanitization" of the issue.
The science is clear: Most emerging diseases are potentially virulent, deadly, incurable - and man-made. Factory farming, industrial activities, drug
manufacturing, food processing, global travel and trade - all play a role in breeding and spreading these new diseases.
But authorities want us to misunderstand the issue - to measure individual rights against society's rights - and ignore the fact that international
corporate rights override both individual and society's rights, and threaten our lives.
The question of corporate rights will not be addressed in the global debate. Authorities will not acknowledge the fact that the corporate right to
profit effectively promotes creating deadly diseases, and pits corporate rights against individual and society's rights.
The important questions will not be asked. The real issues will not be addressed. The impacts of "corporate rights to profit" on public health will
not be evaluated.
Numerous diseases are set to go pandemic, not just XDR-TB and H5N1 bird flu. It's not a question of if a pandemic will happen, but when.
And when the pandemic does hit, if a policy of forced isolation until death has been enforced in South Africa for XDR-TB, then the same policy will be
the pandemic response-of-choice worldwide.
In fact, quarantine never works if you don't clean the barn, as any farmer can tell you. In this case, the barn is the whole planet. Many new and
deadly diseases are now airborne, not just XDR-TB and H5N1 bird flu - and they can be spread around the world by atmospheric winds. Never mind
international travel and trade.
So how do you quarantine the wind?
Rather than isolating and quarantining select human victims, it would be far more effective to change the industrial practices that create new
diseases, and the trade systems that spread them.
Yet instead of tackling the most significant factors and looking at prevention - authorities are focusing solely on person-to-person transmission, and
planning forced human isolation and quarantines. Which a) won't work, and b) will curtail civil liberties. One needs to wonder why.
NOTE: The NCD Pandemic finally is being acknowledged - and the first response of euthanasia already is being implemented. The next steps are not
far off.
Sick People, Not Corporate Greed, Causing Financial Crisis?
