Creepy Disclosures Weblog

Creepy Disclosures Weblog- Archive#40

  • British Publisher Robert Maxwell Was Mossad Spy New Claim On Tycoon's Mystery Death
    By Gordon Thomas And Martin Dillon
    The Mirror - UK
    12-6-2
    Eleven years after former Daily Mirror owner Robert Maxwell plunged from his luxury yacht to a watery grave, his death still arouses intense interest.
    Many different theories have circulated about what really happened on board the Lady Ghislaine that night in May 1991. Some believe the
    67-year-old tycoon simply slipped into the sea, perhaps after a few drinks.
    Others think Maxwell took his own life amid increasing troubles in his business empire - after his death investigators discovered he had been secretly diverting millions of pounds from two of his companies and from employee pension funds in an effort to keep solvent.
    But now, after two and a half years of investigative journalism, we believe we have unearthed the true story of Maxwell's death and can reveal how he was murdered by the Israeli secret service, Mossad.
    Our work, supported by documents, including FBI reports and secret intelligence files from behind the Iron Curtain, shows Maxwell had
    worked as a secret super spy for Mossad for six years.
    The Jewish millionaire and former Labour MP [born Ludvik Hoch
    in Czechoslovakia] died the way he had lived - threatening.
    He had threatened his wife. Threatened his children. Threatened the staff of this newspaper.
    But finally he issued one threat too many - he threatened Mossad.
    He told them that unless they gave him £400million to save his crumbling empire, he would expose all he had done for them.
    In that time, he had free access to Margaret Thatcher's Downing Street, to Ronald Reagan's White House, to the Kremlin and to the corridors of power throughout Europe.
    On top of that he had built himself a position of power within the crime families of eastern Europe, teaching them how to funnel their vast wealth from drugs, arms smuggling and prostitution to banks in safe havens around the globe.
    Maxwell passed on all the secrets he learned to Mossad in Tel Aviv. In turn, they tolerated his excesses, vanities and insatiable appetite for a luxurious lifestyle and women.
    He told his controllers who they should target and how they should do it. He appointed himself as Israel's unofficial ambassador to the Soviet Bloc. Mossad saw the advantage in that.
    Having learned many of the key secrets of the Soviet empire, Maxwell was given his greatest chance to be a super spy.
    Mossad had stolen from America the most important piece of software in the US arsenal. Maxwell was given the job of marketing the stolen software, called Promis.
    Mossad had reconstructed the software and inserted into it a device which enabled them to track the use any purchaser made of the it. Sitting in Israel, Mossad would know exactly what was going on inside all the intelligence services that bought it. In all, Maxwell sold it to 42 countries, including China and Soviet Bloc nations. But his greatest triumph was selling it to Los Alamos, the very heart of the US nuclear defence system.
    The more successful Maxwell became the more risks he took and the more dangerous he was to Mossad. At the same time, the very public side of Maxwell, who then owned 400 companies, began to unwind.
    He spent lavishly and lost money on deals. The more he lost, the more he tried to claw money from the banks. Then he saw a way out of his problems.
    He was approached by Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB. Spymaster and tycoon met in the utmost secrecy in the Kremlin.
    Kryuchkov had an extraordinary proposal. He wanted Maxwell to help orchestrate the overthrow of Mikhail Gorbachev, the reformist Soviet leader. That would bring to an end a fledgling democracy and a return to the Cold War days.
    In return, Maxwell's massive debts would be wiped out by a grateful Kryuchkov, who planned to replace Gorbachev. The KGB chief wanted Maxwell to use the Lady Ghislaine, named after Maxwell's daughter, as a meeting place between the Russian plotters, Mossad chiefs and Israel's top politicians.
    The plan was for the Israelis to go to Washington and say that democracy could not work in Russia and that it was better to allow the country to return to a modified form of communism, which America could help to control. In return, Kryuchkov would guarantee to free hundreds of thousands of Jews and dissidents in the Soviet republics.
    Kryuchkov told Maxwell that he would be seen as a saviour of all those Jews. It was a proposal he could not refuse. But when he put it to his Mossad controllers they were horrified. They said Israel would have no part in such a madcap plan.
    For the first time, Maxwell had failed to get his own way. He started to threaten and bluster. He then demanded that, for past services, he should receive immediately a quick fix of £400million to bale him out of his financial difficulties.
    Instead of providing the money, a small group of Mossad officers set about planning his murder. They feared that he was going to publicly expose all Mossad had done in the time he worked for them. They knew that he was gradually becoming mentally unstable and paranoid. He was taking a cocktail of drugs - Halcion and Zanax - which had serious side effects.
    The group of Mossad plotters sensed, like Solomon, he could bring their temple tumbling down and cause incalculable harm to Israel. The plan to kill him was prepared in the utmost secrecy. A four-man squad was briefed.
    Then Maxwell was contacted. He was told to fly to Gibraltar, go aboard the Lady Ghislaine and sail to the Canary Islands. There at sea he would receive his £400million quick fix in the form of a banker's draft. Maxwell did as he was told.
    On the night of November 4, 1991, the Lady Ghislaine, one of the world's biggest yachts, was at sea. Unknown to its crew, the death squad had cast an electronic net over the yacht to block all radio transmissions. The security cameras on board had been switched off.
    After midnight there were only two men on the bridge. One hundred and twenty feet behind them, Maxwell appeared on deck.
    He had been instructed to do so in a previous message from Mossad.
    A small boat came alongside. On board were four black-suited men. Three scrambled on to the yacht. In a second it was all over.
    Two held Maxwell. The third plunged a syringe into his neck behind his ear. A measured dose of nerve agent was injected. Robert Maxwell was immobilised. He was lowered off the deck into the water.
    As Victor Ostrovsky, a former Mossad agent told us: "On that cold night Mossad's problems with Robert Maxwell were over."
    The incontrovertible facts about his murder are contained in a previously-unseen autopsy report by Britain's then-leading forensic pathologist Dr Iain West and Israel State Pathologist Dr Yehuda Hiss. Of all the documents in our possession, these reports confirm the truth about Maxwell's death.
    Gordon Thomas & Martin Dillon are authors of The Assassination of Robert Maxwell: Israel's Super Spy, published by Robson Books.
    http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/allnews/page.cfm?objectid=12419168&method=full&siteid=50143

  • Deadly spiders found in grapes
    AFP
    (Mon, 02 Dec 2002)

    A drive by British supermarket giant Tesco to reduce the amount of pesticides used on fruit could increase the chances of customers being confronted by deadly black widow spiders, newspapers reported on Wednesday.
    Three British women were shocked when the lethal arachnid was found in their grapes in separate incidents.
    Tesco spokesman Jonathan Church admitted it was possible that moves to introduce natural predators, including harmless spiders, on crops to replace pesticides could have allowed the spiders access to the fruit.
    But he denied the black widow, whose venom is 15 times more potent than a rattlesnake, was deliberately used by farmers in the US who supply the store.
    "The idea is to reduce pesticide use by introducing natural predators instead, but we do not use black widow spiders," Church said.
    He added that suppliers had now been told to step up checks on products before being exported.
    In one case a woman is reported to have discovered a black widow, which has distinctive red markings on its back, climbing up the side of a colander as she was rinsing grapes in her sink, the Daily Telegraph reported.
    Last week a dead black widow was said to have been found in another bunch of Tesco grapes, while last month the same type of spider was allegedly found alive among grapes in a fridge.

  • PHOTO:A huge dust cloud rolls over the Australian town of Griffith

    Sat Nov 30, 1:25 AM ET
    A huge dust cloud rolls over the Australian town of Griffith, 400 kilometers (248 miles) southwest of Sydney, Friday, Nov. 29, 2002, after high winds whipped up top soil dried from a prolonged drought. Australia is in the grips of a devestating drought, one of the worst on record, slashing agricultural production across the country. (AP Photo/Jamie Alexander)

  • Scheme to create human-rodent hybrid
    (AP)
    Dec 2 2002
    A panel of US and Canadian scientists raised the possibility of creating a human-mouse hybrid during talks this month on the future of stem cell research, The New York Times said on Thursday.
    The goal would be to test embryonic stem cells, which are touted as the potential material for treatment to banish a host of inherited human diseases.
    But several experts at the meeting warned such an experiment was unethical, premature and could dangerously backfire, it said.
    The meeting at New York Academy of Sciences on November 13 gathered nine researchers with the purpose of setting down quality guidelines for lines of stem cells that are being developed around the world.
    In one test that was discussed, human stem cells would be injected into an early mouse embryo when it was still a small ball of cells called the blastocyst, the report said.
    Scientists would then see whether the human stem cells showed up in all the mouse's tissues. That ability, known as pluripotentiality, is the hallmark of a true embryonic stem cell.
    If the human cells survived and developed, that could provide a useful lab tool. A mouse that had human cells in it could be exposed to human diseases, to understand exactly how these ailments develop and can be braked or reversed.
    Although the creatures would probably be mice with a few human cells and which would behave like rodents, the outcome of the experiment could be unpredictable, some said.
    One participant, Janet Rossant of Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, told the newspaper she did not consider the test necessary.
    If the injected human cells radically changed the mouse, it would be "something that most people would find unacceptable," she warned.
    Irving Weissman, an expert on stem cells at Stanford University, gave as an extreme example the possibility that a mouse making human sperm might accidentally be allowed to mate with a mouse that had created its eggs from human cells.
    But he also told the Time undesirable outcomes, like a mouse with a brain made of human cells or a mouse that generated human sperm, could be avoided by deleting certain genes from the human cells before injecting them into the animal.
    Stem cell research has been a controversial issue in the United States because the source for them comes from human embryos at the earliest stages of development.
    Federally financed researchers have only been allowed to work with so-called "presidential cell lines" that existed before an August 9, 2001 cutoff date set down by President George W. Bush.

  • Two unexplained “spikes” in the seismic record from Sept. 11 indicate huge bursts of energy shook the ground beneath the World Trade Center’s twin towers immediately prior to the collapse.
    (American Free Press)
    American Free Press has learned of pools of “molten steel” found at the base of the collapsed twin towers weeks after the collapse. Although the energy source for these incredibly hot areas has yet to be explained, New York seismometers recorded huge bursts of energy, which caused unexplained seismic “spikes” at the beginning of each collapse.
    These spikes suggest that massive underground explosions may have literally knocked the towers off their foundations, causing them to collapse.
    In the basements of the collapsed towers, where the 47 central support columns connected with the bedrock, hot spots of “literally molten steel” were discovered more than a month after the collapse. Such persistent and intense residual heat, 70 feet below the surface, in an oxygen starved environment, could explain how these crucial structural supports failed.
    Peter Tully, president of Tully Construction of Flushing, N.Y., told AFP that he saw pools of “literally molten steel” at the World Trade Center.
    Tully was contracted after the Sept. 11 tragedy to re move the debris from the site.
    Tully called Mark Loizeaux, president of Controlled Demolition, Inc. (CDI) of Phoenix, Md., for consultation about removing the debris. CDI calls itself “the innovator and global leader in the controlled demolition and implosion of structures.”
    Loizeaux, who cleaned up the bombed Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, arrived at the WTC site two days later and wrote the clean-up plan for the entire operation.
    AFP asked Loizeaux about the report of molten steel on the site.
    “Yes,” he said, “hot spots of molten steel in the basements.”
    These incredibly hot areas were found “at the bottoms of the elevator shafts of the main towers, down seven [basement] levels,” Loizeaux said.
    The molten steel was found “three, four, and five weeks later, when the rubble was being removed,” Loizeaux said. He said molten steel was also found at 7 WTC, which collapsed mysteriously in the late afternoon.
    Construction steel has an extremely high melting point of about 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit.
    Asked what could have caused such extreme heat, Tully said, “Think of the jet fuel.”
    Loizeaux told AFP that the steel-melting fires were fueled by “paper, carpet and other combustibles packed down the elevator shafts by the tower floors as they ‘pancaked’ into the basement.”
    However, some independent investigators dispute this claim, saying kerosene-based jet fuel, paper, or the other combustibles normally found in the towers, cannot generate the heat required to melt steel, especially in an oxygen-poor environment like a deep basement.
    Eric Hufschmid, author of a book about the WTC collapse, Painful Questions,* told AFP that due to the lack of oxygen, paper and other combustibles packed down at the bottom of elevator shafts would probably be “a smoky smoldering pile.”
    Experts disagree that jet-fuel or paper could generate such heat.
    This is impossible, they say, because the maximum temperature that can be reached by hydrocarbons like jet-fuel burning in air is 1,520 degrees F. Because the WTC fires were fuel rich, as evidenced by the thick black smoke, it is argued that they did not reach this upper limit.
    The hottest spots at the surface of the rubble, where abundant oxygen was available, were much cooler than the molten steel found in the basements.
    Five days after the collapse, on Sept. 16, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) used an Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS) to locate and measure the site’s hot spots.
    Dozens of hot spots were mapped, the hottest being in the east corner of the South Tower where a temperature of 1,377 degrees F was recorded.
    This is, however, less than half as hot at the molten steel in the basement.
    The foundations of the twin towers were 70 feet deep. At that level, 47 huge box columns, connected to the bedrock, supported the entire gravity load of the structures. The steel walls of these lower box columns were four inches thick.
    Videos of the North Tower collapse show its communication mast falling first, indicating that the central support columns must have failed at the very beginning of the collapse. Loizeaux told AFP, “Everything went simultaneously.”
    “At 10:29 the entire top section of the North Tower had been severed from the base and began falling down,” Hufschmid writes. “If the first event was the falling of a floor, how did that progress to the severing of hundreds of columns?”
    Asked if the vertical support columns gave way before the connections between the floors and the columns, Ron Hamburger, a structural engineer with the FEMA assessment team said, “That’s the $64,000 question.”
    Loizeaux said, “If I were to bring the towers down, I would put explosives in the basement to get the weight of the building to help collapse the structure.”
    SEISMIC ‘SPIKES’
    Seismographs at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y., 21 miles north of the WTC, recorded strange seismic activity on Sept. 11 that has still not been explained.
    While the aircraft crashes caused minimal earth shaking, significant earthquakes with unusual spikes occurred at the beginning of each collapse.
    The Palisades seismic data recorded a 2.1 magnitude earthquake during the 10-second collapse of the South Tower at 9:59:04 and a 2.3 quake during the 8-second collapse of the North Tower at 10:28:31.
    However, the Palisades seismic record shows that—as the collapses began—a huge seismic “spike” marked the moment the greatest energy went into the ground. The strongest jolts were all registered at the beginning of the collapses, well before the falling debris struck the Earth.
    These unexplained “spikes” in the seismic data lend credence to the theory that massive explosions at the base of the towers caused the collapses.
    A “sharp spike of short duration” is how seismologist Thorne Lay of University of California at Santa Cruz told AFP an underground nuclear explosion appears on a seismograph.
    The two unexplained spikes are more than 20 times the amplitude of the other seismic waves associated with the collapses and occurred in the East-West seismic recording as the buildings began to fall.
    Experts cannot explain why the seismic waves peaked before the towers actually hit the ground.
    Asked about these spikes, seismologist Arthur Lerner-Lam, director of Columbia University’s Center for Hazards and Risk Research told AFP, “This is an element of current research and discussion. It is still being investigated.”
    Lerner-Lam told AFP that a 10-fold increase in wave amplitude indicates a 100-fold increase in energy released. These “short-period surface waves,” reflect “the interaction between the ground and the building foundation,” according to a report from Columbia Earth Institute.
    “The seismic effects of the collapses are comparable to the explosions at a gasoline tank farm near Newark on Jan. 7, 1983,” the Palisades Seismology Group reported on Sept. 14, 2001.
    One of the seismologists, Won-Young Kim, told AFP that the Palisades seismographs register daily underground explosions from a quarry 20 miles away.
    These blasts are caused by 80,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate and cause local earthquakes between Magnitude 1 and 2. Kim said the 1993 truck-bomb at the WTC did not register on the seismographs because it was “not coupled” to the ground.
    “Only a small fraction of the energy from the collapsing towers was converted into ground motion,” Lerner-Lam said. “The ground shaking that resulted from the collapse of the towers was extremely small.”
    Last November, Lerner-Lam said: “During the collapse, most of the energy of the falling debris was absorbed by the towers and the neighboring structures, converting them into rubble and dust or causing other damage—but not causing significant ground shaking.”
    Evidently, the energy source that shook the ground beneath the towers was many times more powerful than the total potential energy released by the falling mass of the towers. The question is: What was that energy source?
    While steel is often tested for evidence of explosions, despite numerous eyewitness reports of explosions in the towers, the engineers involved in the FEMA-sponsored building assessment did no such tests.
    Dr. W. Gene Corley, who investigated for the government the cause of the fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and the Oklahoma City bombing, headed the FEMA-sponsored engineering assessment of the WTC collapse.
    Corley told AFP that while some tests had been done on the 80 pieces of steel saved from the site, he said he did not know about tests that show if an explosion had affected the steel.
    “I am not a metallurgist,” Corley said.
    Much of the structural steel from the WTC was sold to Alan D. Ratner of Metal Management of Newark, N.J., and the New York-based company Hugo Neu Schnitzer East.
    Ratner, who heads the New Jersey branch of the Chi ca go-based company, sold the WTC steel to overseas companies, reportedly selling more than 50,000 tons of steel to a Shanghai steel company known as Baosteel for $120 per ton. Ratner paid about $70 per ton for the steel.
    Other shipments of steel from the WTC went to India and other Asian ports.
    Ratner came to Metal Management after spending years with a metal trading firm known as SimsMetal based out of Sydney, Australia.
     * Painful Questions (Item# 1051, $20, 160 pages, softcover) Is available from First Amendment Books, 645 Pennsylvania Avenue SE, Suite 100, Washington D.C. 20003. Call 1-888-699-6397 to order by Visa or MasterCard.

  • When Parents Say No to Child Vaccinations
    By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
    November 30, 2002
    (NYT)
    VASHON ISLAND, Wash. — Kate Packard, the school nurse here, has a nightmare she sums up in five words: "measles coming across the water."
    If measles did make the 20-minute ferry ride across Puget Sound from Seattle — hardly unthinkable, since a case occurred last year near a ferry terminal in West Seattle — public health officers say the whole Vashon Island school district could be shut down until the island's last case disappeared or an emergency vaccination drive took effect.
    Eighteen percent of Vashon Island's 1,600 primary school students have legally opted out of vaccination against childhood diseases, including polio, measles, mumps, rubella, diphtheria, whooping cough, tetanus, hepatitis B and chicken pox. The island is a counterculture haven where therapies like homeopathy and acupuncture are popular, and where some cite health problems among neighbors' children that they attribute to vaccinations.
    Most families opting out of vaccination here have obtained "philosophical exemptions" from normal vaccination requirements — exemptions that in Washington and several other states, including California and Colorado, can be claimed simply by signing a school form.
    Across the country, about 1 percent of all children are exempt from vaccination, said Dr. Walter A. Orenstein, director of the National Immunization Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The agency's surveys suggest that more than 90 percent of all American children have had most shots, except for the new chicken-pox vaccine.
    But from Vashon Island to Boulder, Colo., to towns in Missouri and Massachusetts, there are "hot spots" where many children go unprotected. In a 1999 survey, 11 states reported increases in exemptions.
    Clusters of unvaccinated children are not only in potential danger themselves, health officials say, but are also a threat to the "herd immunity" that walls out epidemics, sheltering fetuses, infants too young to be immunized, old people with weakened immune systems and even vaccinated classmates who remain at risk because no vaccine is 100 percent effective.
    When only a few parents use "herd immunity" to let their children escape the small risks of vaccination, the system still works.
    But health officials become concerned in states like California, where it is easier for a parent to sign the waiver form than to have a child vaccinated. "People take the path of least resistance," said Daniel A. Salmon, a vaccination expert at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "What I do to my child can put other children at risk." In 1989-90, measles broke out among unimmunized immigrant children in Southern California, causing 43,000 cases and 101 deaths.
    Vaccine resisters cite an array of reasons. "Sometimes it's distrust in government, feeling it's in bed with the vaccine industry and `everyone's making money off our kids,' " Mr. Salmon said. Sometimes the objections are religious, as among Christian Scientists and some Amish congregations. Sometimes a community is scared when a child is truly harmed by side effects; the live polio vaccine, for example, is thought to cause about eight deaths a year.
    Some parents are upset at the sheer number of injections a child must get — usually about 20 by age 2. Others are convinced — despite evidence to the contrary — that vaccines are highly likely to cause severe health problems, like seizures and autism.
    Here on Vashon Island, a community of 10,000, word spread quickly when the 10-month-old baby of Gail O'Grady, a midwife who also works at Minglement Natural Foods, died unexpectedly in his crib in 1984 two weeks after his first immunization; when Pam Beck's daughter Rachel suffered four years of seizures that began minutes after her first whooping-cough shot; when Nancy Soriano's son, Alex, developed autism after tetanus and polio vaccinations.
    Some doctors they consulted disagreed, but all three mothers were sure vaccines were to blame.
    Alex, Ms. Soriano said, changed from "a bright-eyed, happy, beautiful kid" to a severely autistic 4-year-old who "lived curled up in a ball, screaming and screaming and screaming." She says she has nearly cured him by removing milk and glutens from his diet.
    Public health specialists suggest that the resistance to vaccines is a consequence of the success of vaccinations: People, they say, no longer fear diseases they have never seen.
    "I remember how the fear of polio changed our lives — not going to the swimming pool in summer, not going to the movies, not getting involved with crowds," said Dr. Edward P. Rothstein, 60, a Pennsylvania pediatrician who helps the American Academy of Pediatrics make immunization recommendations. "I remember pictures of wards full of iron lungs, hundreds in a room, with kids who couldn't breathe in them. It affected daily life more than AIDS does today."
    Now, with the rare side effects of the live vaccine, "there's a risk of about eight kids a year dying, so people don't want to be vaccinated," he said, adding, "When polio was around, people gladly took that risk."
    Rubella, Dr. Rothstein went on, "is, for the most part, a nothing disease" — the reason to keep vaccinating against it is to protect fetuses. "In the 1960's," he said, "50,000 to 60,000 babies were born with small heads, or deaf, or blind or with cataracts" because their pregnant mothers had been exposed to rubella.
    All 50 states allow medical exemptions for children who are immuno-compromised or allergic to vaccines; 47 states — all but Arkansas, Mississippi and West Virginia — allow religious exemptions; and 17 allow personal or philosophical ones. But how many children receive the exemptions depends partly on how much red tape is involved, a study in the American Journal of Public Health found. In states where parents must go to a state office for exemption forms, get their signatures notarized or produce letters from a religious authority, exemption rates tend to be lower.
    The only states with exemption rates greater than 2 percent, the disease center said, are Michigan, Washington and Wisconsin.
    Still, health officials say that in recent years public sentiment has often run against vaccination. The news media publicize stories of autism, seizures and crib death that followed vaccination. More than a dozen Internet sites specialize in describing the dangers of vaccines.
    Vashon Island is both a commuters' haven served by high-speed ferries to Seattle and a home to the counterculture — a place where the telephone company's garage features a mural of a Frisbee-catching dog. Millionaires have shore homes while the self-named Rainbow People live in tents in the woods.
    In interviews, parents who have signed forms to exempt their children from vaccination appeared to be educated, attuned to their children's health and full of opinions about vaccines, though some cited "facts" that the disease center disputes. Most parents mixed unconventional therapies like homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic, and conventional medicines like antibiotics and painkillers, Most said they were suspicious of the vaccine industry.
    "I consider well-baby care to be a capitalist plot," Maryam Steffen, a mother of four said only half-kidding.
    If anyone would seem to be a living argument for tetanus vaccination, it is Camille Borst, 25. When she was 12, she stepped on a nail. Her mother, who opposes vaccination, did not take her to a hospital until her foot was so inflamed she could not stand on it. But Ms. Borst says proudly that she has not immunized her own children, Deven, 9, or Casper, 4.
    Her mother, Adrienne Forest, 47, who is home-schooling her grandchildren in a neat, shingled mobile home in a clearing of fir and alder trees, said she was sorry she let the hospital give Camille other vaccines. "It was a moment of weakness," she said. The nurses who angrily told her that Camille could have died "totally freaked me out," she said.
    From 1995 to 1999, said Ms. Packard, the school nurse, an epidemic here of whooping cough, which can be fatal in infants, hospitalized some infants and left some children with chronic asthma. Ms. Forest's grandson Deven had whooping cough two years ago and, she conceded, probably passed the disease to 10 other children, including an infant.
    "Yeah, that bothered me," Ms. Forest said. "But I called everybody and we studied up on what you can do to build up the immune system."
    The baby "did just fine," she said. "On Vashon Island, you have middle-class people who eat healthy and keep warm. If everyone was poor-poor, not breast-fed, not eating right — that might be a reason to vaccinate." But she and her daughter remain steadfastly opposed.
    Meg White, 45, though, now somewhat regrets not vaccinating. Three years ago, her whole family, including her infant son Julian, had whooping cough "really, really bad" for more than three months.
    "My son would turn all shades of purple," she said. "He stopped breathing several times and we took him to the hospital. My daughter was terrified of going to sleep because then it got worse. She would vomit all over the place. My husband cracked ribs from coughing."
    Now, Ms. White said, she would advise other mothers to vaccinate against whooping cough, polio and tetanus, but only with the newest vaccines. She still has not vaccinated Julian, now 3, against measles, mumps, rubella or chicken pox.
    Julian is in nursery school at Puddlestompers, whose director, Tressa Aspiri, also changed her mind about not vaccinating after her older children got whooping cough.
    She makes no recommendations to parents when they fill out the school's vaccination form, she said, though she feels that vaccines are safer than they were when her children were born in the mid-1980's.
    "I still feel strongly that it's the parents' choice," Ms. Aspiri said.

  • Vaccine Renaissance Outpaces Sickly Drug Industry
    LONDON (Reuters) - Vaccines, until recently a sleepy backwater in the global healthcare industry, are now outpacing drugs in terms of sales growth, the world's two largest vaccine makers said on Thursday.
    GlaxoSmithKline Plc and Aventis Pasteur, who both claim a 24-percent share of the $6.5 billion-a-year global vaccine market, said demand was being driven by new products, including combination jabs and new adult treatments.
    The infant sector currently accounts for two-thirds of vaccine sales but market dynamics are changing, helped by growing demand for flu shots among the elderly and increased use of vaccines by tourists visiting tropical countries.
    At the same time, the threat of bioterrorism in the wake of September 11, 2001, has spawned a new business in supplying vaccines against smallpox following fears that the deadly virus might be used as a weapon.
    The result has been the birth of a new generation of niche vaccine companies, typified by Britain's PowderJect Pharmaceuticals Plc and Acambis Plc, both of which will make their first profit this year.
    Jean Stephenne, vaccines head at GlaxoSmithKline Plc, told an ABN AMRO conference that global vaccine sales would rise by more than a fifth to about $8 billion by 2005, underlying a long-term trend which has seen a tenfold increase in sales since 1980, while drug sales have risen only five times.
    Both GSK and Aventis expect to clock up vaccine sales of around $1.6 billion this year.
    Adrian Howd, biotechnology analyst at ABN AMRO, said vaccines were now one of the fastest-growing areas of healthcare, with demand for new products outweighing supply, and the total market set to top $10 billion by 2010.
    Consolidation within the sector is likely, Howd says. The industry at present is highly fragmented, with more than 60 companies, but firms will seek critical mass to compete effectively.
    NEW PHASE
    "You're seeing the launch of a new phase in the industry today," said Paul Kirkconnell, corporate vice president of business development of Aventis Pasteur.
    He predicted the global vaccine market would double over the next decade after 14 percent compound annual growth in the 1990s. That compares with global drug sales of just eight percent in the year to September, according to healthcare information firm IMS Health. The revival of the vaccine industry, which was once dismissed as a low-margin and commoditized business by many big drugmakers, reflects a series of innovations ranging from new pediatric combinations to novel disease targets.
    Among new disease targets, Stephenne said he was particularly excited by experimental vaccines to prevent infection by the human papilloma virus (HPV) that causes cervical cancer.
    Both Merck and GSK have HPV vaccines in development that will compete in a market that Stephenne estimated would eventually be worth some $3 billion pounds a year.
    Professor George Dougan, director of the Center for Molecular Microbiology and Infection at Imperial College, London, said recent scientific progress had opened many new opportunities.
    These include the development of innovative drug delivery mechanisms and the use of new adjuvants, substances that are added to vaccines to enhance their effectiveness.
    Ultimately, vaccine developers could move to using DNA to trigger an immune response. Such DNA vaccines, if successful, would be simple to use and store, and might have therapeutic applications in treating patients already suffering from diseases, including cancer. ($1=.6364 Pound)

  • Retailers Use Hidden Cameras and One-Way Mirrors to Study How We Shop
    (ABCNEWS)
    Dec. 12 2002— Market researchers have studied Americans' shopping habits for years, but at one store in a downtown Minneapolis office building, they are taking it to a new level.
    As shoppers browse the furniture, clothing and gifts on sale at a store called Once Famous, researchers study them from behind one-way mirrors, tracking their movements through the store and their reaction to the products on display. Hidden cameras and microphones record shoppers' behavior for further study.
    The store functions as a regular retail outlet and turns a small profit, but it is in fact a state-of-the-art retail laboratory for a retail brand agency called FAME. The agency, which has its offices behind the one-way mirrors, uses social science techniques to study consumers' shopping habits for major retailers including Minneapolis-based Target and its Marshall Fields division.
    "Retail is all about anthropology. It's about customers in their natural environment," says FAME's president and founder, Tina Wilcox. "We're trying to get as close to reality as possible with a customer."
    Willing Guinea Pigs
    A blinking light at the entrance warns customers that they are being monitored for research purposes, but Wilcox says few customers object. "The comments we get from customers are, 'We're glad somebody finally asked us our opinion,'" she says.
    According to the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, 70 percent of all purchases are impulse buys, meaning that the shopping environment can be as important a factor for retailers as a product's price and construction. If a retailer can increase a shopper's "dwell time" even by a minute or two, it boosts the chance that they will make a purchase, according to Wilcox.
    Conquering the ‘Dead Zone’
    In two recent tests, for instance, FAME researchers explored ways of drawing shoppers into "dead zones," areas of a store that customers tend to stay away from. In one case, they found that collecting various objects of the same color — red, in their experiment — into a single, bold display succeeded in drawing shoppers to the back of the store, a common dead zone.
    The bright red display succeeded in meeting what Wilcox calls the "squint test" — "If you squint your eyes, whatever you pick up in that squint is pretty much what registers when they're shopping." The items in the display had sales that were 15 percent to 20 percent higher than when they were scattered through the store.
    In another case, Wilcox's team found that placing a flickering electronic fireplace on the left side of the store successfully overcame shoppers' natural tendency to start shopping on the right. (In Britain, shoppers generally gravitate to the left side of a store. Researchers speculate that that might be because they drive on the left.)
    Men Are From Brookstone, Women Are From Victoria's Secret
    In a test designed to show how the two sexes shop differently, men and women acted very differently around an oversized, green, black and gold "throne chair." The men mostly kept their distance from the chair, asking questions about its construction and features and not sitting in it unless invited to by a salesperson. "They kind of look at furniture the way they would shop for a car," Wilcox said.
    Women, on the other hand, would touch the chair immediately, "almost to the point of caressing it," according to Wilcox. And they would sit in it. "Women get comfortable right away. They cross their legs. They sort of live in the chair," Wilcox said. One female visitor sat down and said to her friend, "OK, bring the wine."
    Wilcox says that women shop emotionally, and need "a more creative approach" than men. "They want the setting to be something that really intrigues them."
    Another phenomenon the FAME researchers have documented is that women often "visit" products they like three or four times before finally buying them — something seldom seen with men. Repeat visits give retailers the chance to sell women other, less expensive items in the meantime.
    Sometimes shoppers defy what would appear to be conventional expectations. For a major nationwide chain, Wilcox's team recently tested a line of teenage girls' T-shirts with slogans like "Prince of Wails," "Countess of Cranky" — and "Queen of Farts." Shoppers were divided over the Queen of Farts shirt, with some calling it "tacky." But in overall sales, it came in fifth out of 12, meaning that it will be on shelves next spring.
    Orange Juice and Cold Medicine
    Another company, Virginia-based Brickstream, uses advanced image-recognition software to allow retailers to track the movements of individual customers in their stores.
    The technology, which is in use in more than 100 stores nationwide, plots each customer's route on a floor plan of the store, recording how long they spend in each section, how long they wait on line, and what they buy. The company says it does not store information that allows the identification of individuals.
    For one client, Brickstream learned that people often buy orange juice — a low-profit item — and cold medicine — a high-profit item — in the same trip. The client moved the cold medicine next to the orange juice to encourage more sales.
    From the stores it has studied, Brickstream also found that the top reason people leave a store without making a purchase is the length of the checkout line when they get there — regardless of how fast it is moving. The number of people abandoning a line increases significantly after three minutes, the company has found.
    Going Inside the Home
    Other researchers focus on how consumers use products in their own homes. Believing that conventional focus groups are artificial and prone to influence by peer pressure, Bill Abrams left his job as a creative director at an ad agency in 1983 and formed a company specializing in "retail ethnography." The approach is based on ethnography, a scientific technique in which researchers study a small social group using close observation, ideally from inside the group.
    "People on their own turf tend to tell more of the truth and to reveal more, because they feel safer in their own surroundings," Abrams says. His firm, Housecalls Inc., goes into American's bedrooms and bathrooms to film them using personal products like dentures, hearing aids and cosmetics.
    For a recent study for Colgate-Palmolive, Abrams sent researchers into the homes of teenage girls in New Rochelle, N.Y., a suburb of New York City, to explore their relationship with their underarm deodorant — a $1 billion-a-year market.
    The researchers and their camera operators — all women — sought out the most popular girls and paid them a fee to let them into their homes. They then filmed the girls using their deodorant — how many swipes, for instance — and talking about them. They recorded what deodorant the girls used, where they kept them and whether they took them in their bag when they went out. They even asked whether the girls thought the products should be labeled "antiperspirant/deodorant" or "deodorant/antiperspirant."
    The New Rochelle interviews suggested a few things about teenage girls' attitudes to deodorant:
      That they see deodorant as something that can differentiate them from adults. One girl called her mother's brand "an older woman's" deodorant.
      That they talk to each other about what brand of deodorant to use, in a way that adults do not. "I got a lot of my friends hooked on Dove," one teen said.
      That a deodorant's scent is critical. "I don't change brands. I change scents," one girl said. "I think adults want what works best and kids want what smells best," said another.
    Abrams always cautions clients that his research based on small numbers and that they should test his findings in broader studies. But he said he would advise Colgate to bring out "a wardrobe of scents" for teens, so they could buy the same deodorant in three different scents, which they could use depending on how they felt on a given day.
     

  • After mild winters, a possible sea change
    Sun, Dec. 08, 2002
    (PhilapdelphiaInquirer)
    Some say a freshwater crimp in the Gulf Stream could bring a sudden shift to biting cold.
    By Anthony R. Wood
    Inquirer Staff Writer
    Scientists have been warning that the Earth is slowly heating up, that the recent run of gentle winters in the United States is no fluke, but the warm-up to the big meltdown.
    Now, however, comes a chilling prediction from some of the same experts. Before the climate gets balmier, they say, it could take a sudden turn toward the frigid - and stay that way for decades, if not centuries.
    In the Northeast, subzero temperatures could become standard winter fare, filling rivers with ice chunks, cutting short the growing season, and altering bird migrations. The cold and snow of the last week would feel like spring break.
    Behind that brutal scenario is a baffling ocean phenomenon that experts have watched with rising angst: an expanding mass of freshwater in the usually salty North Atlantic that has spread alarmingly in the last seven years. It now reaches south from Greenland to just off the coast of the Carolinas, an area of 15 million square miles.
    If the buildup continues, they say, it could impede the Gulf Stream, a major climate-maker that transports warm air to northern latitudes in winter. Were that critical current to be slowed by the freshwater, let alone stopped, average winter temperatures in the Northeastern United States and in Western Europe could abruptly plummet 10 degrees - a change not experienced by anyone alive today. A five-degree drop would be in store for the rest of the States.
    Exactly when it might occur, scientists generally are loath to speculate.
    "None of us could tell you whether that event happens next year or 100 years from now," said Raymond W. Schmitt Jr., senior scientist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, which has taken the lead in studying the freshwater pool.
    Researchers find themselves toeing a fine line between informing the public and setting off a panic, Schmitt added. The U.N. committee on global warming has put out the reassuring word that "such a shutdown is unlikely by 2100." But John Gagosian, head of Woods Hole, had not even cold comfort to offer in a recent paper.
    "In just the past year, we have seen ominous signs that we may be headed toward a potentially dangerous threshold," Gagosian wrote. "If we cross it, Earth's climate could switch gears and jump very rapidly - not gradually - into a completely different mode of operation."
    One climate scientist suspects the Gulf Stream already is slowing down. At a time when other glaciers around the world are in retreat, the Scandinavian glacier has been growing. Andrew Weaver, of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, says it may be the result of less warm air reaching that far corner of the North Atlantic.
    The prospect of a deep freeze, whether sooner or later, so concerns the British government that it is sinking $30 million into figuring out what's going on in The Pond. For while no one disputes the freshening is real, no one is sure why it is happening.
    Some researchers believe that, ironically, global warming could be to blame, that melting Greenland glaciers and Arctic sea ice could be diluting the salt water of the North Atlantic. Others theorize it could be a phase in a natural cycle, one that ice-core evidence suggests might have happened several times in the last 100,000 years - and perhaps as recently as America's colonial era.
    Oceans are turbulent, chaotic places, and their circulation is at least as complex as the atmosphere's.
    The Gulf Stream, which originates in the Caribbean, is no exception. Oceanographers typically describe it as part of a "conveyor belt," because in order to keep the current moving, the cold, salty water in the North Atlantic must sink beneath it. That creates a void that is filled by the rush of more Gulf Stream water. And so it moves north-northeast toward Iceland at about 5 m.p.h., warming the overlying atmosphere for more than 2,000 miles.
    The heated air moderates the frigid blasts out of Canada before they can reach London, Paris or Rome. Without the Gulf Stream, London would feel like Montreal, but gloomier.
    Fresher water is a threat to the conveyor because it is lighter and sinks so slowly that the Gulf Stream could sputter and even stop.
    "If you don't sink that [cold] water and move it into the south, there's no reason for the Gulf Stream to move the warm water to the north," said James Wright, a Rutgers University paleoceanographer. The current "would turn toward Portugal and go to the Canary Islands."
    Even subtle changes in salinity can have a substantial effect on the rate at which water sinks, said Weaver, of the University of Victoria. On average, a gallon of seawater contains 4.7 ounces of salt. Even the freshest water in the ocean still has about 4.2 ounces per gallon - far from potable, but fresh enough to potentially affect the Gulf Stream.
    Conveyor-belt disruptions and sudden climate changes are nothing new - only the realization that they have occurred, says Richard B. Alley, a professor of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University.
    Conventional wisdom used to hold that climate change, like aging, happened gradually. In the last 15 years, however, researchers studying ice cores dating back 100,000 years have documented sudden shifts.
    "Large, abrupt and widespread climate changes occurred repeatedly in the past across most of the Earth, and many followed closely after freshening of the North Atlantic," said Alley, who is also chairman of the National Research Council's Committee on Abrupt Climate Change, which published a report last spring.
    Perhaps the most famous of these was the "Younger Dryas" event, so named for the Arctic shrub that appeared in temperate European climes during a dramatic cooldown about 12,000 years ago, 6,000 years after the last Ice Age. And it happened in a hurry, a matter of just a few years.
    Changes in the Gulf Stream also are suspect in the onset of the so-called Little Ice Age, which began in the 15th century and ended about 1850. That coincided with Gen. George Washington's encampment at Valley Forge during the fatally frigid winter of 1777-78; the winter of 1779-80 was even worse. It also encompassed the era of Washington Irving and frosty images of skaters on the lower Hudson in December. No one skates there these days.
    While abrupt shifts may be nothing new, this one would be unprecedented in one important respect: Science is trying to get to the bottom of it. But even as researchers measure the freshwater mass by dropping instrument packs into the ocean, one thing is certain: They won't be able to stop it.
    Any human effort to control the buildup, Weaver said, would be "like one person standing on a railroad track trying to stop a train."
     

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