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GlaxoSmithKline Released 45 Liters of Live Polio Virus
ferespo sends this news out of Belgium: As reported to ECDC by Belgian authorities, on 2 September 2014, following a human error, 45 liters of concentrated live polio virus solution were released into the environment by the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in Rixensart city, Belgium. The liquid was conducted directly to a water-treatment plant (Rosieres) and released after treatment in river Lasne affluent of river Dyle which is affluent of the Escaut/Scheldt river. Belgium's High Council of Public Health conducted a risk assessment that concluded that the risk of infection for the population exposed to the contaminated water is extremely low due to the high level of dilution and the high vaccination coverage (95%) in Belgium.
And see what happens ...
How the fuck does this even happen? What were they doing with a ANY number of liters of polio near the water?
You're thinking of smallpox. Polio is still endemic in pakistan/afghanistan/india.
That Wolf Blitzer has at the moment.
I KNOW, RIGHT?!?!?!!! teehee hee hee giggle giggle *SNORT*
Signed,
Anderson Cooper
We have not eradicated polio; in fact, there's an outbreak now in Syria because of poor conditions and missed vaccinations. The vaccine is manufactured from the virus, hence why a drug company had a supply of active virus.
They flushed it and then it went to a water treatment facility, like regular sewage...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
45 liters, even concentrated, of polio virus does not pose great danger, especially since it went into a modern sewage treatment facility. I am a polio victim myself, got it in 1966, 10 years after Salk released the vaccine in USA, but I was in rural South India with very very poor sanitary conditions. All through high school in every class I had another polio victim, typical class sizes are 50 to 60 in India at that time. So it works out to some 4% of the sample population (account for survivor bias, the dead victims did not make it into this sample). I was lucky, lost just part functionality in one leg. Right now in the slums of India, Pakisan and Bangladesh people are living constantly exposed to polio and still the infection rate is not all that high. So we need not go hyperbolic with this news.
Let us not underreact
We are giving more and more rights to the corporations, equating money with speech and even religious beliefs to corporations. But when it comes to criminal penalties they get to use limited liability corporation laws. Do not go after the underlings. Top management should not be able to create policy documents on one hand, then create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, "Well, that employee violated our own established policy. It is her fault. Don't you think of touching my bonus!". Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed. Their performance review policies should be reviewed, and if they have practices that create perverse incentives to violate their own corporate policies, even harsher penalties are in order.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Homeopaths claim that a very diluted concentration of something harmful can actually be used to treat the symptoms it causes. So GlaxoSmithKline has just created the most potent homeopathic remedy for polio known to man!
Would have been useful to takeout all the mindless celebrities who don't vaccinate their children and thus assure a healthier society for us all.
You're talking about the same Europe where people have actually been put on trial for 2 different genocides, which is the only continent where anyone has ever done that?
Because, I'm pretty sure that they threw Milosevic in jail until the day he died. And Nuremberg didn't go great for the Nazis either.
They flushed it down the drain by mistake.
Drains lead to water treatment facilities (by design).
Treated and released into the river.
Shouldn't be a problem but there are some religious nutters who don't vaccinate downstream so if it wasn't treated adequately, they could get infected.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
... palace guard. Some sort of possibly armed unit that literally controls who has the virus from one moment to the next.
Right. Because this expensive and complicated solution would have prevented all zero of the infections that resulted from this release.
It appears that someone accidentally dumped the wrong bucket down the drain .
From that, you infer:
> create incentive systems that encourage the violation of the same policies, and claim immunity, ... Nominal financial penalties for those who were negligent are in order. But extraordinary penalties, amounting to all the pay and bonuses collected by the upper management in the last five or ten years should be assessed.
At this point, we have no idea what policies were in place, what the incentives were, or how upper management is going to respond.
As far as we know, upper management could have had monthly safety audits, with large bonuses to staff every time they got a perfect score on the audit, and clear penalties for any infraction. As far as we know, while management was doing a superb job, one of the staff scientists came in with a horrible hangover and the first thing they did was clean up their work area by dumping out the "cleaning solution " they had been using the day before. Or maybe it was the opposite. We don't know. We really have no idea what happened at this point. In many workplaces I'm familiar with , the most likely cause would be that management chose policies that involved being so extremely careful that it got to be a pain in the ass, so staff started to ignore some of the policies because it was annoying to spend so much time on it, with 30 minutes of safety procedures required to perform a two minute task.
Okay, now it would be extremely risky for a pharmaceutical company to do this on purpose, but I can't help wondering what this did to their sales of polio vaccine booster shots...
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
You're talking about the same Europe where people have actually been put on trial for 2 different genocides, which is the only continent where anyone has ever done that?
Nonsense. There is a long history of "victor's justice" on every continent. I'll only be impressed when the winners put their own people on trial. Lt William Calley got off with the "Nuremberg defense" that he was only following orders, while his superiors got off with the defense that "Hey, I was just giving orders, I didn't actually shoot anyone myself."
Killing millions of people due to a virus release is not genocide as it it not targeted at a specific ethnic or national group.
It would be targeted at those too stupid to get vaccinated.
What's crap? The ECDC is linked in the summary.
Why do we always conflate "not perfect" with "completely incomparably bad".
I'm just saying that Europe has actually demonstrated a history of attempting to punish institutional mass murder on some occasions.
What bad stuff happened?
The solution to pollution is dilution.
Yup. Close but no cigar yet. Cool graph at Wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Not that much of an issue really in western europe or even europe.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Kind of. He died during his trial. That is the true European way: not harsh prison sentences, but Kafkaesque trials that last until the defendant dies, freeing Europe of the necessity of feeling bad for having imposed a sentence.
We are regularly told that advanced Western nations shouldn't worry about Ebola, because we have advanced Western medicine, and aren't like those poor and primitive African nations. And then things like this happen. Or the recent CDC biohazard scandals. Or the hospital in Texas, just trained about Ebola, sends a recent arrival from Liberia who is showing symptoms back to his relatives with some antibiotics. And then, after he vomits on the sidewalk on the way back to the hospital, people without protective gear "clean it up" with a pressure hose, while a sandal-wearing woman walks by . And they reuse the ambulance before they decontaminate it. And the family violates their quarantine.
So when Top Men tell us there's no danger of an outbreak here, I am not reassured.
Q: What does the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for? A: Benoit B. Mandelbrot
And those unfortunate enough not to be able to be vaccinated.
Not that much of an issue really in western europe or even europe.
So many responses are like "meh, polio, who cares."
The devastating effects of this virus are obviously forgotten by this generation. It results in paralysis that is fatal when it hits things like lungs and hearts, and results in sometimes temporary, sometimes life-long paralysis in many victims. I knew people who permanently lost their ability to talk, others with one paralyzed leg, others who lost an arm, others with distorted facial muscles and other ugly effects. In the early 1960s when it was released people lined up for the vaccine, they would lie, cheat, and steal to get the vaccine when supplies were still limited.
In you're case, you're basically discounting anyone under age 6? Polio is a 4-dose vaccination where the last dose usually isn't until age 4-6. Google says that is a half million people in Belgium. That's "not much of an issue"?
Anyone who has had a reaction to one of the components and cannot have the series, they also are irrelevant? It's probably a million or so of the population. Again, you're okay with them getting a permanently disabling disease?
The vaccines are not 100% effective, many people who were vaccinated according to schedule are still able to become sick. No idea what the percentage is, but anything other than 0 is too much. Are they really not that important?
What would you think if it was YOU or a loved one in the hospital bed, hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs were paralyzed, hoping that the paralysis is temporary in your case.
Now, if we could limit the infections just to anti-vaxers (not the innocent children of anti-vaxers) that would be something else entirely. Anti-vax for chicken pox or milder diseases are not that bad, but anti-vax for polio and other seriously ravaging diseases is just stupid.
Polio is so close to global eradication. I applaud those like the Gates Foundation that are funding killing off the last few known wild cases.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Point one, it's deactivated, not diluted.
Point two, it isn't diluted to the point where it's statistically pure water.
But apart from that, you're 100% correct.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wait - that's still an issue, vaccine are not 100% efficient, so some people take the shot and are not vaccinated. Some people are too weak despite being vaccinated, very young babies are not yet vaccinated, some people think they are vaccinated but they were not ( after all you were like 2 to 6 months old when that happened, all the proof you have is a note in a book - mistake happen ).
It is very nearly eradicated globally. Good thing too.
The paralysis aspect is horrible. Those who got the disease didn't know if they would be hit by the paralysis. Those who were hit with the paralysis didn't know if it would become permanent.
Some people who had the paralysis hit lungs or heart and didn't make it to the hospital quickly enough were occasionally considered lucky. Some very unfortunate people were condemned to spend the rest of their lives on a ventilator. I knew several people (most are dead today) who had deformed faces, arms, and legs from the virus resulting in permanent paralysis. I knew several older folks with a gravely whispered voice as a result of the paralysis. I heard horror stories about people fighting in lines as the vaccine became available in the 1960s.
Last year the WHO declared a surge in polio as a world health emergency, it had jumped from below 200 globally known cases to over 400.
They track the progress and update it weekly. the web site says there are 209 year to date with a new outbreak in Syria.
It is a horrible, destructive disease. The Gates Foundation has made enormous donations, $1.8B last year. This year the Larry Ellison foundation threw in another $100M. The disease is so incredibly close to global eradication, it just needs that one final little nudge to the finish line.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
Calley was convicted. Nixon pardoned him.
I live ze unknown. I love ze unknown. I am ze unknown.
It was very nearly eradicated. Then the CIA had stooges in Pakistan take DNA samples during polio vaccinations to "track down bin laden", and (reasonably) there is now a suspicion that vaccines are some kind of american evil project there, and resistance. derp.
They could have buried a fake corpse at sea a few years earlier and saved a lot of lives and disability-years of life instead. I'd like to have heard the logic that came up with that plan.
Sent from my PDP-11
Explain how my concept doesn't solve the problem please.
Because there's no problem. This article is mostly clickbait.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Since this happened a month ago, you should have included the followup story about possible infected shellfish...
You obviously don't work with too many security guards, it's the kind of job a lot of people take after being fired from Walmart or McDonalds. Introduce one of these bozos into the mix and you've just quintupled the likelihood of a catastrophic release.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Explain how my concept doesn't solve the problem please.
Because giving a bunch of humans a boring,monotonous job doesn't solve the problem of humans making errors, which is what caused this release in the first place.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
all the proof you have is a note in a book - mistake happen ).
Not anymore, at least not in Belgium. The doctor peels the label off the exact shot you got and puts it into the book. After the fourth shot (around 14 months), they fill out a form that you then have to return to the municipality to prove that your kid had their basic Polio vaccinations (there's one more around 6 yrs), which ones and when, so there are at least three separate registrations.
Polio is the only mandatory vaccination in Belgium and they take it fairly seriously. Personally, we take all vaccinations seriously, especially for our kids, but that's mostly because we sometimes hang out with alternative types (Waldorf education tends to also be pretty anti-vax; they are actually the biggest risk of non-vaccination here) and reformed Christians, so we are not counting on herd immunity there...
I will keep an eye on this, though...
yawn... so many morons.
Agreed!