The Vampire, Edvard Munch

Global monetary distribution links the earnings and actions of the world’s richest 1% to mankind’s current energy and economic crisis. As a snapshot illustration, the Koch brothers, billionaire energy magnates, have spent more money than 99% of the human species will make in entire lifetimes—fifty million dollars-–to discredit the science of climate change and squash clean energy initiatives.

Consider too our most powerful industries—social forces that determine the course and priorities of medical research, the health of the planet, and the fates of billions of lives both living and yet unborn.

The world’s top ten pharmaceuticals made more profits in 2003 than the other 490 corporations in “Fortune 500″ combined. Pharma uses its gluttonous profits to fund the world’s largest and arguably most influential lobbying organization to ensure laws and regulations remain friendly to Pharma while further stuffing their coffers. And yet, monies pharmaceuticals suck from U.S. households [for 'me too' drugs that leech off human suffering while curing almost nothing] pale in comparison to energy costs.

Americans Spend More on Gas

In other words, the world’s current economic paradigm hinges on 1) maintaining the medical status quo through the continued prevalence of illness, disability, and disease, and 2) fossil fuel and nuclear industries that feed off dwindling resources that toxify the environment, seed ill-health, and wreck our planet’s climate. Both paradigms represent dead-end financial traps for individual households, national economies, and possibly human civilization—like any parasitic relationship when the parasite overruns the host—and yet both ‘make’ gobs of money for the richest 1% at the cost of spiraling hardships for everyone else.

Albert Einstein called Man’s present way of seeing its relationship to nature, reality and the environment an “optical delusion of consciousness” that must ultimately doom our species. To grasp this relationship in its most basic essence, follow the money.

Before it’s too late…

…rethink the world!

##

Twice a surrogate stem cells spokesperson for the GW Bush White House, J. Perry Kelly ended his association with the political right over its gross distortion of global warming for short-sighted political gain and fiscal profits.

~~~

Prior to becoming paralyzed in 1997, I enjoyed a 20+ year career in the rail industry—part of which I spent as a diesel electrician working on locomotive generators, motors, alternators, and control systems. My electrical background enabled me to study Heins’s designs and understand expert comments while evaluating the credibility of the former. Heins admits he’s frustrated by years of trying in vain to encourage industries entrenched in the fossil fuel paradigm to use his discoveries to break free of coal, oil, tar, and gas. I don’t blame him. The more I study his discoveries and grasp their potentials, the more I share his frustration.

Years before and during my involvement in the world’s stem cells debates, I studied the science of my condition (spinal cord injury) and came to know scientists whose work offered practical and immediate solutions for medical conditions that cause hundreds of millions to suffer annually around the globe—conditions that generate trillions of dollars (U.S.) per year in global pharmaceutical and medical revenues and tens of billions in basic research funding. Scientists whose research threatens this colossus find they’re denied funding by government agencies and non-profit review boards. Prestigious, industry-aligned journals reject their article submissions, and—if they refuse to toe the line—academic employers deny them tenure.

• One scientist whose work revealed basal metabolic impairment plays a key initiating role in multiple diseases was told by an NIH grant reviewer, “We’re not interested in panaceas.”

• Another was told by a major pharmaceutical in the presence of a senior FDA rep when she demonstrated a potentially inexpensive pharmaceutical cure for Type I Diabetes [and asked for their help], “We don’t know how to price a cure.”

• A Nobel laureate and former NIH Director told a writer for New Yorker, “Ordinary people care about the destinations of science – the answers, the miracles, the cures. But a scientist cares most deeply about the journey itself.”

• In speaking of just one of cloning’s multipe genetic hurdles, the creator of Dolly-the-Sheep told the journal Nature, “It should keep a lot of us in business for a long time.”

And yet, much of society persists in believing the goals of scientists, science, and industry are to save the dying, cure the disabled, and improve the lives of others. The sad truth is the 1980 Bagh-Dole law, which allowed scientists, drug companies, and universities to patent and thus control the results of publicly-funded research, turned basic and clinical research into lucrative extensions of Pharma, allowing drug companies to steer the course of Medicine and the priorities of Science.

To better grasp this reality, please read “The Truth About Drug Companies,” by Marcia Angell, M.D., former Editor and Chief of the New England Journal of Medicine. No example of its consequences is more glaring or tragic than the FDA’s suppression of cord blood’s non-hematopoietic medical uses (i.e., Stroke, SCI, Alzheimers, ALS, Parkinsons, or TBI) and its unique benefits for radiation sickness.

Eighty-six year old Dr. Norman Ende, cord blood pioneer and Professor of Pathology of the NJ School of Medicine and Dentistry, recently published a paper detailing the safe and critical benefits cord blood transfusions could offer U.S. Armed Services personnel who suffer spinal cord injury (SCI) or traumatic brain damage (TBI) in Afghanistan or Iraq. Along with a former Surgeon General of the Air Force, Ende urged our government repeatedly and in vain to use cord blood toward developing the only viable strategy for treating mass radiation casualties in the event of a nuclear disaster. Those charged with saving our service personnel or protecting the public from radiation say their hands are tied by the FDA…and the FDA refuses to explain or justify cord blood policies that safeguard drug profits while condemning Americans to lives of paralysis or mental impairment.

Current paradigms that ‘look’ for cures but never find them provide university researchers, administrators and department heads with generous sources of income through patent sales, royalties and licensing fees (to drug companies). Meanwhile, the world’s sick, disabled, and gullible cling to myths of ‘hope’ because it’s far more convenient to believe a comfortable lie than face or fight a daunting truth—a tragic aspect of human nature that ensures the ongoing suffering of a billion humans to feather the nests of a relative few.

In other words, there’s a reason why the top ten U.S. pharmaceuticals made more profits in 2003 than the other 490 corporations in the Fortune 500 combined.

These industries—BIO, Pharma, Medicine, and Non-Profits—feed off suffering, disability, and human nature the way Big Oil and Coal depend on their unfettered ‘right’ to ravage and pollute the earth. Both paradigms are suicidal, but of the two the second is far worse. After all, humans have been exploiting each other and causing suffering since Ug clobbered Lug to steal Lug’s wife . Whereas if we trash our planet’s climate and kill it’s seas—as we seem determined to do while denying were doing it—the game is over for everyone and everything.

If Thane Heins’s inventions (or the inventions of others) can help to avert Earth’s unfolding climatic catastrophe, as a species we cannot allow such discoveries to be brushed aside, falsely discredited, or covered up. Regarding the life our planet supports today, next year, and forever, we simply don’t have the right to sacrifice Earth’s climatic balance on the altars of greed, denial, and transient convenience.

~~~

Quotes re Thane Heins’s inventions:

Hypnotherapist Michael O’Shea Ph.D. has second thoughts about regressing his twenty-two year-old neighbor to learn the cause of a client’s death. The neighbor, environmentalist Cassandra Shavano, insists he fulfill his promise. Having programmed the Law of Attraction to reveal the psychological roots to global warming, the newlywed believes the answer lies in her spiritual past.

Alone with O’Shea in her remote house high in the Rockies, Cassandra goads him into playing a voice-activated recording of the patient’s death throes. The groans and screams of the dead woman reverberate high overhead off a faux-cedar ceiling, casting a pall on the listener’s spirits far darker than the Stygian silence outside the windows.

~~~

O’Shea’s wished he could block his ears and run from the room at the first hint of Tamantha’s moans. He resigned himself to a grim half hour. The horror had barely begun when Cassandra clicked a remote to pause the playback. At least she looked suitably shocked.

“I never dreamed…” she said. “The poor woman!”

“You haven’t heard anything yet. Maybe now you’ll listen to reason.”

She aimed the device and resumed the torture. Afterward, she fast-forwarded to a specific point and played a lively half-minute for his listening pleasure. Midway through, Tamantha’s voice grew sharp.

Cassandra said, “If I talk and my tone gets brittle, turn everything off. I’ll find my own way back.”

He wanted to shake the stubborn chit. She could be so annoying.

“You can’t be serious. This isn’t theory, Cassandra. That woman never came out of Theta. Next week while you’re hiking with your beagle, she’ll get rolled into a gas oven and roasted into ashes.”

“I’ll be fine. I’m supposed to do this, and you need me to do it.”

He shook his head. “E.R.P. inserts information into the psyche. It’s not a hypnotic ATM for making withdraws. There’s no magic in why I picked you. You just happened to be on my screen when I needed a subject.”

“Michael, what were the odds of me being on News 10 at the exact moment you were watching it when you should have been at work? Remember, you were only there because your patient died, so something linked the two events. Plus I was never on TV before, and I won’t be again.”

He smirked. “I take it you’re one of those New Age mystics who think everything happens for a reason.”

She heaved a theatrical sigh. “It’s called cause and effect. A chain of events led to your patient dying regardless what they were. Others led to my being at The Bismarck, to the FBI sending a S.W.A.T team, and to a news crew filming my arrest. You’ll concede that, right?”

He grunted rather than give her the satisfaction of a shrug.

“You can’t see a connection between my protest and her death, so you assume none exists—that random chance put me on your screen when you happened to need a guinea pig. Someone named Schopenhauer once said it best. ‘Every man takes the limits of his vision for the limits of the world’.”

She picked up the goggles and held them out.

“Come on. Hook me up. Let’s get started.”

“That wasn’t our agreement. You said we’d discuss it.”

“I did discuss it. Now I’m ready to start.”

He owed his wife an apology. He had thought Stephanie was a handful. What must Shavano go through in their marital spats? Their neighbor was a runaway freight train once she made up her mind.

While she settled on the sofa, he placed a cushion under her left hand and inserted her index finger into an analog mini-sensor. The device fed cardio feedback through a wire lead to a digital display, which he placed on the coffee table and switched on. It awoke with a loud beep.

“Don’t move,” he said, “or you’ll pull out the plug. The sensor needs to be level with your heart.”

Her eyes darted toward the readout. “What makes the alarm go off?”

Aha! Despite her bravado, she was nervous. At least she had some sense.

“Won’t happen,” he said with a re-assuring grin. “Your heart would need to stop for more than two seconds. The program’s buffer ignores arrhythmias. Ready?”

“Yes, but if…you know what I mean. If the worst happens, do me a favor and top off Caesar’s food bowl. The bag is in the pantry. I filled Homer’s when I took him outside–and make sure they have water. The police should get in touch with Greg.”

His throat constricted when he tried to offer a comforting lie. Instead, he looked away and bobbed his head while she donned the goggles. An urge to swallow made him gulp as he added three zeroes to the target date. With a finger poised on ‘play,’ he stared at her mutely while the seconds passed.

After a minute, she raised the goggles and arched her brows. “Well?”

“Umm…” He forced himself to meet her gaze. “Do you remember I said I didn’t do anything to change the regression except switch the music? I definitely did not change the settings, but she may have changed them herself.”

“I know. She pressed the buttons when she fiddled with the stems.”

“How can you…?”

“Come on, Michael. I might be Internet challenged, but I’m not an idiot. What good would it do me to regress to the reign of Queen Elizabeth? How would that teach me anything about the roots of human nature? How could that kill your patient? Her treatment must have been altered dramatically. The buttons on the stems made it obvious how.”

“You’re right,” he said in a small voice. “She added three zeroes.”

“What are they set for now? Five centuries or five-hundred thousand years?”

She smiled when he didn’t answer and dropped the goggles into place.

“Thanks,” she said. “I thought you’d admit the truth…sooner or later.”

He groped for a reply and realized it didn’t matter. The pending regression had her full attention. After a moment, he started the A/V program. Glancing at his watch, he jotted the time on a note pad, added fifteen minutes, and circled the sum. Until five after ten, when the nature CD would begin to play along with the hypnotic program, her brain rate would slow from conscious awareness to trance-like peace.

Two minutes into the session, her heart rate and blood pressure stabilized at low levels for her age group, reflecting her aerobic condition. Five minutes later, a bar graph began to creep across the laptop, indicating the regression had begun. Her brainwaves hovered at the high end of Theta while her subconscious raced backward through time.

A sharp rap jerked him upright and made him peer around the room. The cat returned his stare from balcony railing along the second floor loft. There it was again, a hard knock on the kitchen door.

Ah fuck! Now what? Perhaps they’d go away. A minute later, someone tapped on the window behind him. He scrunched down in the high-backed chair. Maybe they hadn’t seen him. Another rap, harder and more insistent. No such luck.

He gaped when he peeked around the chair. Held like a puppet by his unseen wife, their miniature Schnauzer waved with a forepaw and pointed toward the outer deck. Then it receded from view. O’Shea darted to the kitchen and cracked open the door.

He whispered, “What are you doing here?”

Clad in snug Capri’s that flattered her figure and with Freud cradled on a forearm, Stephanie whispered back, “What’s taking so long? You’ve been here half the night. We’re bored.”

He waved a hand to dispel her fumes. “You’ve been drinking.”

“Just a little. Besides…”

He waited for more in vain.

“Besides what?”

“Uhh…besides, what are we whispering for? Is it almost over?”

His wife had a point; the headphones canceled external sounds.

“She tried to back out,” he said in a normal voice. “I had to re-convince to do it. Now go home. She’s in the middle of the program, and I need to be with her.”

“Good! Let me see.”

“No! She—”

He cocked an ear toward the hallway, alarmed by a scratching noise. His guts clenched at the memory of Tamantha Weston as she flailed her chest in her dying throes.

“Move!” said Stephanie. “I’m coming in.”

She dropped the schnauzer and shoved the door. He blocked it with a foot. While she grunted and he glared, Freud squeezed through the crack and scampered through the kitchen. He lunged for the dog as his wife barreled against the door, knocking him to the floor.

“You kicked me!” He goggled in disbelief. “You actually kicked me!”

“Shut up, Mike.” In high-heeled pumps, she stepped over his torso and paused by the fridge. “I did nothing of the kind. You used your skinny ass for a doorstop.”

She surged through the hall and into the living room. When he scrambled to his feet and chased her, he found her standing by the wing chair, pointing at Caesar.

“It’s just a stupid cat…clawing the furniture.”

Above Cassandra’s head, the tabby stood on the arm of the sofa, arching his back as he howled a warning at Freud. His forepaws on the couch, the dog whined between shrill barks in his eagerness to chew up the cat. Stephanie made shooing gestures at their neighbor’s pet as she lurched toward the couch.

“Get away you little brute. How dare you talk like that to my baby.”

Caesar retreated to the sofa back. His wife loomed over their neighbor and studied her face. When she reached toward the sofa to prop herself, a feline paw shot out.

“Ouch!” she yelped and sucking her wrist. Snatching the empty case for Natural Songs: Sounds of Nature at Her Best, she hurled it at the cat like a kung fu star. Caesar leapt to the floor and raced for the stairs with Freud in hot pursuit. The case shattered against a wall.

O’Shea stared from the broken pieces to Cassandra’s placid face and finally at Stephanie.

“Are you friggin’ crazy?” he spluttered. “Get Freud and get the hell out!”

“He scratched me!” She shoved the wound under his nose. “Look! I’m bleeding. What if he has a cat disease? I don’t take that from any cat, especially hers.”

He grabbed her forearm when she bolted toward the staircase.

“Christ, Stephanie, it’s their house, not ours. I’m trying to save our future and you’re—”

“I’m twice the woman that tree-huggin’ fluff will ever be.” She snapped her free hand toward Cassandra while her features twisted in pain.

“Why…why regress her instead of me?”

He started to argue but changed his mind. Beneath her tough exterior, his wife still loved him enough to hurt. The rest didn’t matter. He clutched her in a warm embrace as a four-legged war erupted in the loft. The schnauzer barked a staccato threat against the cat’s continuous scream. A second later, the dog screeched.

“My baby!” Stephanie shoved him away and darted for the staircase.

He started to follow and froze to look at his watch. Fuck! The hypnotic program had started, and he hadn’t recorded the vital signs. He checked the display unit, noted the readings, and snatched up a note pad and pen. Quickly, he jotted the figures and went for his wife.

As O’Shea started up the staircase, his dog rocketed down the steps and leapt into his arms, whimpering with a bloody nose. He tossed the mini-schnauzer into an unlit room and slammed the sliding door. Upstairs, the cat howled and the woman screamed. A moment later, Stephanie burst from the staircase shrieking like Lady Macbeth.

“I need a weapon,” she yelled, glaring around the room. “Do these people golf? A putter would work.” She jabbed a finger at her shin. “I tried to kick the little beast, but the bastard got me good.” She lurched sideways half a step and tried to kiss him. “Hey, this is kinda fun.”

“Steph! You’re drunk! You need to…”

A flashing LED on the coffee table caught his attention. He shoved his wife aside and lunged for the cardio-display. Cassandra’s heart raced at a hundred and eighty beats per minute, three times her baseline rate in Alpha. He checked his watch. She was thirty-two minutes into the session.

Stephanie clutched his shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

“I—It’s her heart.”

The monitor revealed a blood pressure reading high enough to induce an intracerebral stroke. The rapid pulse increased resistance to arterial blood flow. Soon, if her heart didn’t slow, the cells of its muscles would start dying of hypoxia, oxygen deprivation, putting greater stress on remaining cells and speeding the process. The monitor switched back to heart rate:

“Two-zero-one.”

He grabbed the laptop with trembling fingers as their neighbor started to groan.

“Shit! S-Steph! It’s just like yesterday. There’s a phone in the kitchen. Call 911! Run!”

##

Twice a surrogate ‘stem cells’ spokesperson for the GW Bush White House, J. Perry Kelly ended his association with the political right over its distortion of global war

…so true they stabbed my heart and shaped my life

• Jackson Browne w/ Joan Baez, Before the Deluge “…and for some of them it was only the moment that mattered.”
• Loreena McKennitt, Beneath a Phrygian Sky “Our love must make us strong…the truth will set us free.”
• Simon & Garfunkel, The Sound of Silence “Silence like a cancer grows.”
• Bonnie Raitt, I Will Not Be Broken “What is living if I can’t live free? What is freedom if I can’t be me?”
• Singh Kaur, A Spark in the Night

Years roll past like boxcars at a crossing; uniform patterns dull the senses and lull the mind to wakeful sleep. A song on the radio cuts through the fog. As if they never were, the boxcars vanish, and you remember who you are, where you were going, and why it was crucial you went there.

Can you recall the artists and titles that spoke to your spirit? Would you care to share them?

“Because you have been down there, Neo, you know that road, you know exactly where it ends. And I know that’s not where you want to be.”

Neo chose to take her advice and turn aside; I took the road and crashed.

In May of 1997, I hiked with my wife to the summit of Mnt. Shavano in Central Colorado—a grueling but beautiful climb that expressed our love for mountains, nature, and outdoor sports. A month later, I lay in a Montana hospital, paralyzed for life because I let comfort and ego entice me down a road that Neo had the sense to avoid.

In 2004, scientists at Emory University used functional MRIs to discover a disturbing fact: Regardless of intelligence, profession, or worldview beliefs, humans tend to interpret reality to support their egos, ambitions, convenience or bias. Don’t I know it!

While driving across Montana, I knew I needed a cup of coffee or a nap. Instead, I bought a smoothie because I wanted a smoothie and kept driving because I wanted to drive. Ten minutes later, I fell asleep, rolled my pick-up into a gulch, and crushed my spinal cord. Regarding global warming, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce says don’t worry, keep your hands on the wheel and your foot on the gas.

“Populations can acclimatize to warmer climates,” they say, “via a range of behavior, physiological, and technical adaptations.”

In other words, don’t speak out against Federal and industry plans to expand fossil fuel usage. Don’t demand a sustainable future loudly, persistently, and now.

When I came out of a coma to discover I was paralyzed, impotent, eight-five percent deaf, blind in one eye, and diagnosed as brain damaged, my therapists insisted my life was not trashed; it was merely ‘changed.’  With an attitude adjustment and a few behavioral, physiological, and technical adaptations [they said], I’d be back on my feet—in a manner of speaking—and loving my ‘new’ existence.

Not quite.

Speaking for myself, I’d count myself lucky to trade every second of the past fourteen years and those to come for one more hike with my wife up steep mountain trails or another chance to make love with her as Nature intended. For me—because some mistakes can never be undone—my future is written regarding so many things I once treasured…things that others take for granted or treat with contempt.

Imagine the rage I’d feel if my therapists had encouraged me before my accident to ignore my danger to promote their careers…because this is precisely what the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is doing by writing off your future to safeguard their continued profits.

What technical, behavioral, or physiological adaptations will allow you to escape months of sweltering heat when only the wealthy can afford air conditioning? What attitude adjustments will make your days bearable when America’s live-for-today denial leads to poverty and wars through global resource exhaustion—when climate extremes make hurricanes, droughts, heat waves, floods, tornadoes, famine, disease and death our ‘new’ way of life?

What right does the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have to set future quality-of-life standards for all mankind under any pretext?

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Big Oil and Mining, and their political allies tell themselves what they need to believe to promote their egos, wealth and social control. They spin their self-delusions to exploit the public’s willingness to deceive itself to avoid inconvenience or change.

Don’t let them do it. They’re whispering for you to drive down that road, and we both know where it ends. Only you can free your mind by escaping the matrix of ego.

http://bit.ly/jaahMd

##

Twice a surrogate stem cells spokesperson for the GW Bush White House, J. Perry Kelly ended his association with the political right over its distortion of global warming for short-sighted political gain and fiscal profits.

As I write this, my wife is a few miles away, hiking up Pikes Peak. I’m not with her because I’m paralyzed. I’m happy she can charge up mountain trails surrounded by green forests and clean air. I hope you can too, along with your children and your future generations.

Regardless whether you believe climatic change is real, or whether it’s caused by human pollution…regardless whether you support embryonic stem cell research or oppose it, or whether you’re a Liberal, a Conservative, a Christian, or how you vote, please consider the following as a bird’s-eye view of how our socio-political system exploits human psychology.

In the stem cells debates, religious Conservatives threatened the long-range financial goals of BIO, Pharma, and Big Medicine. To enlist public support, these industries promoted a monetary agenda under a banner of “miracle cures,” a strategy that rallied the political left and enticed Conservatives to break ranks and support their cause.

Regarding climatic change, Liberal environmentalists threaten the long-range financial goals of Big Oil, Coal, and fossil fuel related industries. To enlist public support, these industries promote a monetary agenda under a banner of “economic stability and growth,” a strategy that rallies the political right and entices Democrats to break ranks and support their cause.

Those who cast climate change as worldview issues claim Big Government should have no right to determine how industry meets the market demand for energy. The catastrophic consequences of climatic change, however, are not a matter of worldview debate…no more than two trains—one loaded with chlorine gas and the other with nuclear waste—heading for a high-speed collision in the heart of a major city. After all, who complains over FRA regulations that safeguard the public from railway smash-ups?

Whenever industries and politicians cast non-philosophical issues as bones of worldview contention, I know they’re pulling my strings (1). For thousands of years, that’s the way the game’s been played: control the masses by telling them what they want to hear or what they don’t. Regarding Earth’s climatic balance and the grim future that stares us in the face, we can no longer afford to think with our egos and emotions. We need to face the truth.

1. Political Bias Affects Brain Activity, NBC January 01, 2006

##

Twice a surrogate stem cells spokesperson for the GW Bush White House, J. Perry Kelly ended his association with the political right over its distortion of global warming for short-sighted political gain and economic profits.

Suppose you’re a terrorist. While the rest of the world watched Fukushima unfold, you and your buddies watched the world.

“Imagine the attention we’d get,” you told the others, “if we could do that to New York!”

Fast forward eight months to Buchanan NY, forty miles north of NY City.

While a north wind gusts to 40 mph, you and the gang work to hijack three commercial flights, one each from Philly, Boston, and New York. Meanwhile (just in case), two lads take off from Sky Acres Airfield [in Duchess County] in a mid-sized plane packed with high explosives.

Amazingly, two hijacking attempts succeed. Both jets pulverize the Indian Point Nuclear Facility; the fuel from the second adds to the conflagration. Shattered and scattered, nuclear material emits high level radiation, which attaches to the smoke and wafts to twenty million Americans only an hour away.

Ever try to evacuate twenty million people simultaneously? Attempting to do so would ensure the public would be outdoors, exposed, and breathing heavily (from yelling and stress) just in time to inhale gobs of radiation.

Make believe or plausible?

According to a 2002 report (based on a computer model) by the Nuclear Energy Institute, which describes itself as “a policy organization of the nuclear energy and technologies industry and participates in both the national and global policy-making process,” the above scenario can’t happen. Nonetheless, Germany announced plans this April (2011) to test whether a commercial jet might wreak the damage I’ve described.

Laying aside industry denial, which bears a close resemblance to TEPCO’s former assurances that a major tsunami was highly unlikely to devastate the Fukushima Nuclear Facility [despite a tsunami expert's objections], what about the coolant? In other words, might a jumbo jet landing on reactor cooling pumps affect their performance? At the very least, the above skit would unleash a ‘Fukushima’ in New York’s backyard. The consequences, however, could be far worse. William Pentland of Forbes Online describes the risks inherent in Indian Point as “Nuclear Roulette” (see the following).

…and New York has no viable plan for treating mass casualties due to high dose exposure to radiation. The city was offered one freely by the world’s foremost expert in radiation sickness along with a former NORAD adviser regarding medical options for treating mass casualties due to a nuclear attack, former Air Force Surgeon General P.K. Carlton. The NY committee charged with developing contingency plans for responding to such attacks refused to consider their proposal.

(see elsewhere on this blog: The Tragedy of Nuclear Hope Ignored)

##

My thanks to William Pentland of Forbes Magazine for allowing me to comment in detail regarding the nuclear dangers New Yorkers face in his online article entitled, “New York City’s Deadly Game of Nuclear Roulette.” Mr. Pentland further clarified this matter through his insightful replies.

##

Twice a surrogate ‘stem cells’ spokesperson for the GW Bush White House, J. Perry Kelly ended his association with the political right over its distortion of global warming for short-sighted political and economic profit.

Prof. Ende and General Carlton have tried in vain repeatedly to encourage U.S. agencies to adopt the emergency plan this letter discusses (details presented via links that follow). Likewise, their attempts to reach Japanese leaders during the present crisis have thus far failed to produce the aggressive response needed to safeguard human casualties should a high dose radiation catastrophe occur.

The time to prepare for such a catastrophe is now, before it occurs. Ende’s research reveals unique benefits of using antibiotics and cord blood to treat radiation victims whose level of exposure (between 2 to 10 grays) results in Hematopoietic Syndrome (bone marrow suppression and the loss of immune functions).

The existing medical paradigm for cord blood usage when used to reconstitute bone marrow (for blood-based cancers) holds that a key safety factor concerns “HLA matching.”  Cord blood units (or bone marrow stem cells) that are too mismatched with recipients (regarding HLA antigens) can develop a dangerous condition known as “Graft versus Host Disease.” According to Ende, combining two or more (preferably three) HLA mis-matched units of cord blood (prior to administration) virtually eliminates the threat of Graft-vs-Host while speeding the return of immune system functions.

The only requirement regarding ‘matching’ concerns whether cord blood units match the recipient for major blood type.

The critical ‘win-win’ benefits this solution offers a mass casualty situation cannot be overstated. However, subtle details of Ende’s research and proposal must be understood beforehand and steps must be taken to have the needed pieces in place, or many who might be saved could die.

##

Dear General Carlton,

In case the military receives casualties from a nuclear explosion in Japan, we have just completed an experiment in mice with 10Gy gamma-irradiation. This was followed with antibiotics 4 hours after irradiation and the administration of human umbilical cord blood 24 hours after irradiation that resulted in 100% survival of the irradiated animals. In conclusion of this experiment there were several observations that could be made in treatments of mass casualties:

1) Victims suspected of high dose of irradiation and those known to have received high dose radiation, should receive antibiotics as soon as possible following the exposure (our recent unpublished data)

2) Irradiated patients receiving broad spectrum antibiotics would have at least 24 hours and probably longer before administering cord blood transfusion (our recent unpublished data). This allows a period of time for logistic necessary for the administration of cord blood.

3) Pooled human cord blood (blood type specific) in mice has a higher survival rate than single donor units and there is a direct relationship in mice survival with cell dosage (1, 2, recent unpublished data).

4) We would recommend radiation victims receive 3 units of cord blood (blood type specific).

5) Antibiotic therapy should be continued until intestinal lesions are healed (3).

References:

1. Ende, N., Lu, S., Alcid, M., Chen, R., Mack, R.  Pooled umbilical cord blood as a possible universal donor for marrow reconstitution and use in nuclear accidents.  Life Sciences Vol 69, No. 13, 1531-1539, 2001.

2. Ende N, Lu S, Mack R, Ponzio NM:  The feasibility of using blood bank stored (4ºC) cord blood, unmatched for HLA for marrow.   Amer Jr of Clin Path: Vol.111, No.6, June 1999.

3. Azzam EI, Yang Z, Li M, Kim S, Kovalenko OA, Khorshidi M, Ende N. The effect of human cord blood therapy on the intestinal tract of lethally irradiated mice: possible use for mass casualties. Int J Radiat Biol. 2010 Jun; 86(6):467-75.

• Treatment of Mass Casualties Based on Hiroshima & Nagasaki
• Manhattan Nuclear Scenario
• Radiation Critical Care – 2005 report to U.S. Dept. of Defense

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U.S. Withholds Radiation Hope from South Koreans

The Seoul Times, 1/22/11 by J. Perry Kelly

Two weeks ago, a former U.S. Air Force Surgeon General wanted to share a plan for treating mass radiation casualties with the South Korean military. A U.S. government liaison tried to dissuade him on the irrelevant grounds that many casualties in a nuclear blast suffer from its direct effects, burns and physical trauma, rather than hematopoietic syndrome—the loss of immune functions due to bone marrow damage through exposure to radiation.

In a letter published online in the January 2011 issue of International Journal of Radiation Biology, cord blood medical pioneer Dr. Norman Ende writes, “The current availability of advanced antibiotics and human cord blood…coupled with readily available intravenous fluids, would, in our opinion, save 80 to 90% of those who survive the first 72 hours following an accidental or intentional nuclear detonation.”

The eighty-six year old Ende first established cord blood’s medical potentials for cancer in the mid-sixties and early seventies. He supports his present claim by placing research that expands cord blood potentials for rescuing bone marrow in context with pathological reports from Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Regarding these reports, Ende says, “Most of the deaths that occurred after two weeks were the direct and indirect effect of a compromised immune system.”

For reasons presented below (See “Radiation Critical Care” and “Manhattan Nuclear Scenario“), the general’s plan—a plan based on Ende’s research—may offer the only practical hope for mass casualties who suffer radiation sickness from a nuclear attack.

South Korea might feel betrayed its long-standing ally didn’t share this medical strategy sooner—like last February when North Korea threatened the South with nuclear war. Instead, if not for the outrage and persistence of a retired Air Force general, the South Korean government might never have learned of this critical solution to a medical nightmare.

Whether South Korea plans to enact Ende’s strategy remains unclear.

U.S. law stipulates cord blood should be used “in concert with Federal programs for response to terrorist or military weapons that can damage bone marrow.” Nonetheless, despite Ende offering his plan to Washington and the City of New York in 2006, and in spite of its presentation to the White House National Security Staff  in February of 2010, America remains without a viable strategy for treating mass radiation casualties. The Peoples Republic of China, however, thought Ende’s proposal made perfect sense.

In 2002, Vice President Hu Jintao of the People’s Republic (the current Chairman of the Communist Party and President of the People’s Republic) met in New York with Ende’s associate, a Chinese national named Dr. R. Chen. Hu ordered his aides to take scrupulous notes concerning every aspect of Ende’s proposal.

Since the U.S. government chooses to allow Americans to remain without hope if they’re exposed to radiation, perhaps the peoples of the Middle East, India, Pakistan, South Korea, and South Korea’s neighbors in China and Japan—billions of humans who face the specter of nuclear threats—should not feel offended that U.S. folly endangers their lives…a reality Ende reveals in his blueprint for treating ten-thousand victims of a nuclear attack in Manhattan:

“At this point,” he said in the 2006 report, “the establishment of a logistical plan could potentially save thousands. Currently, no money is needed, simply a plan for basic communication, logistics and use of existing facilities.”

Treatment of Mass Casualties Based on Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Manhattan Nuclear Scenario

Radiation Critical Care – 2005 report to U.S. Dept. of Defense

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