Books for Prep | |
 - Reviewers' mistakesThe reviewer "A Customer" says that the US code title 50 section 32 is about fish and wildlife, but I can't find those words in US Code Title 50 at all. Perhaps he works for a pharmaceuticial company? I find the book provocative; although I do not have insurmountable truth that it is accurate, I believe this scenario is possible. Rating:  - Masterful political analysis, terrible biologyHorowitz does a great job showing what horrible things governments and corporations are capable of, either deliberately or by accident. Unfortunately, he appears to have no understanding of the biology and evolution of viruses. He just picks snippets of information out of context from the incredibly vast volume of research, in order to support his theory. If you really want to learn about the origin of emerging viruses, and what we need to worry about for the future, read Pulitzer-winning journalist Laurie Garrett's book The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance. It gets the science right, with extensive references for further information on every point. Rating: - FishyI didn't like this book. For one thing, if it were non-fiction, then why all the dialogue between him and his wife, which was more or less fiction, since who could remember that kind of detail all that time? For another, there were significant omissions, like the biowarfare lab on Plum Island in New York, lyme disease, West Nile, mycoplasma, Royal Rife, Morgellon's, and a host of others. Not to mention the more convincing evidence that AIDS is from swine not cattle. He also totally mis-understood milieu interior, which doesn't refer to political climate but the health of the host, affecting whether or not he will catch any illness he is exposed to, which was huge in the history of vaccine development. Finally there is very convincing evidence that prion disease is environmental - copper deficiency in the face of manganese poisoning, which has been known since Andre Voisin wrote "Soil, Grass, and Cancer". Rating:  - Nice theory, too bad the sequence analyses of viral samples prove it wrongPlease read the science on this subject before becoming a "true believer" in this theory. Detailed study of the sequences of simian immunodeficiency viruses from many species of monkeys and chimps, compared to the sequences of viral samples from humans with HIV-1 or HIV-2 clearly show that Horowitz's theory is not consistent with the data. When in doubt I suggest going with the facts not speculation. When a theory does not match the data - move on. A good start point to enter the scientific literature is a review article "AIDS as a Zoonosis: Scientific and Public Health Implications", Hahn BH, Shaw GM, De Cock KM, Sharp PM, published in Science, 28 January 2000, Vol 287:607-614. Just go to the National Library of Medicine website at www.pubmed.gov and enter Hahn BH, Shaw GM, De Cock KM, Sharp PM then click on related articles to access the scientific literature. Rating: - How to easily prove the critics wrongInterestingly, the bad reviewers of this book have only convinced me of its accuracy. None of their criticisms strike me as being sound. A few of them criticize the book for scaring people, to which I would say that I only wish back in 1932, during my lifetime, someone would have, in a similar fashion, scared people about the Tuskegee Experiment. I also wish back in the 1700s someone would have scared the native americans before the British deliberately distributed smallpox infected blankets to them, killing off half of the tribes! As to the argument that man did not know how to create the ebola virus in the 50s, the critics are not appropriately answering the scenarios raised by Dr. Horowitz. Specifically, Dr, Horowitz spends a great deal of time discussing the possiblities of: 1) Careless "professionals" allowing contamination from existing virus samples. 2) An existing virus, from one host, from which another host becomes infected, with the result being that the virus mutates in the new host to a variation of the original virus, a mutated virus for which not only can we not create, we also don't have a cure for (as in the case of AIDS). 3) A criminally misguided government official, someone such as, say, a Henry Kissinger who we know touted the the benefits of population control, who might have sent signals to outfits such as the CIA whose job it is to be paranoid to the extreme and who could obtain funding for top secret virus research for which the "experts" writing reviews here would know none of the details of what man was, or was not, capable of creating in a lab. This is a must read for any sane person who recognizes the foolishness of sticking your head in the sand to avoid seeing the lion charging at your butt. In association with Amazon.com | |