The Editor
Letters
Western Daily Press

Dear Editor,

As a veteran of all of the recessions of the last 40 years or so; as are very many of us now, I would like to offer my thoughts as to what I believe will be necessary for us to get through the next few years. .We may all still get a little bruised, but would come through it relatively unscathed I feel.

The main difference now to previous recessions is the lack of any real inflation in WAGES and PENSIONS that now seems to be pegged to the previously artificially held LOW inflation number. Giving sureties as insurance to Banks will restore some confidence, but I believe ‘Quantitative Easing’ will still be necessary to create a ‘Driver’. . Though instead of the treasury printing money and just handing it to the Bank of England to lend to other Banks, it should go directly to people and into the economy, ultimately through the banking system and so create some real ‘feel-good factor’ and a stimulus.

The main advantage of this I believe, would be to get the property market moving again, which has always been necessary to keep the cash from our biggest asset moving around the market place. . . When there was 10% overall inflation, whenever property booms ended and recession threatened, it just meant that the REAL VALUE was dropping annually by that amount. . . People understood they were getting poorer on paper, but continued to sell their houses/property, albeit a bit more slowly. . .

There is now an absolute reluctance to accept the drop in sale price that will probably be necessary to get everything moving again, particularly because of people’s current mortgage burden. So in turn all this would return buoyancy to the motor industry and many other business. . When there is inflation, there is then a built in expectation that most; even if not all products will be more expensive to buy in the future, but without taking away any competitive tendering and pricing. . . Your (say) £30,000 motorcar stood on your driveway, though clearly more expensive and more up-to-date to buy new next time, will not be the depreciating asset taking a ‘vertical-drop’ as it is at the moment. .

If there was 10% inflation, a 10% interest rate would be far easier to live on than the 1.5% with 1.5% inflation even if your major asset was losing its real value at that higher rate. . . Similarly mortgages are easier to deal with without the fantasy bubble of rising prices. . The low value of the £pound on the world currency market would also eventually become the realistic value rather than the devalued one it now clearly is, and as markets returned would even regain its strength.

I offer these thoughts without any allegiance to any particular political party at this time, knowing that inflation has always been perceived as The Big Evil. . I have always believed that people should fully understand the REAL interest rate (set against the true inflation number) that they are paying or receiving.

Yours

Charles Henry

On line comment.

Since Gold was virtually abandoned, money is no longer backed by a physical commodity. . Instead, the only thing that gives the money value is its relative scarcity and the faith placed in it by the people that use it. . This is a ‘Fiat’ system.

In a fiat monetary system, there is no restrain on the amount of money that can actually be created. . This allows unlimited credit creation. . Initially, a rapid growth in the availability of credit is often mistaken for economic growth, as spending and business profits grow and frequently there is a rapid growth in equity prices. In the long run, however, the economy tends to suffer much more by the following contraction than it gained from the expansion in credit. . . That’s where we are now.(Thank you Gordon) . We exchanged Vaults full of Gold for the Land Registry Computer. . . The last thing anyone needs now is a closure of any of those trading corridors. . Have I explained AG?

Editor
Letters
Western Daily Press

Published in 2006

Dear Editor,

Many contributors still seem to be determined to allow bigotry and sentiment to cloud the serious situation with Bovine tuberculosis, and confuse the issue. Anyone in any doubt that the badger population needs to be seriously culled, and maybe yet many other specious like Roe Deer, needs only to research the subject themselves. The very nature of TB with its protracted effects, make it a particularly insidious disease that can be very difficult and sometimes impossible to cure.

Simple research will tell you that Bovine tuberculosis is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium bovis, and is different from the normal strain Mycobacterium tuberculosis that usually affects humans. Its primary host appeared to be cattle, but the organism has been isolated from a wide range of species, including deer, pigs, sheep, horses, dogs, cats, badgers and humans. However, humans and most other species are normally only spill over hosts in which infection is not self-maintaining.

Transmission of M. bovis within and between species is thought to be mainly by the airborne route, but animals may also become infected if they ingest large numbers of the bacterium. Infected cattle are considered the main source of M. bovis infection for other susceptible cattle. However, in recent years, the badger has emerged as a significant source of M. bovis infection for cattle in the UK and Ireland.

May I be allowed to draw everybody’s attention to some quite prophetic quotes from Dr. Jerome Harms. University of Wisconsin-Madison back in 1997.

Mycobacterium bovis the cause of Bovine Tuberculosis;

“In contrast (to 1 in 10 immunocompetent humans), nearly all cattle infected with M. bovis develop active disease and can transmit the organism to other animals or humans.”

“Recently, there have been many outbreaks of M.bovis caused tuberculosis in humans especially HIV+ patients. Most have occurred in countries where M.bovis is endemic in the animal agriculture population. Multi-drug resistant strains of M. bovis are now appearing as well. The significance of this TB threat from M. bovis has not been taken as seriously as the threat from Mycobacterium TB.”

“However, the scientific and medical community must not ignore the potential of an M.bovis TB epidemic.”

My own assessment is that there is absolutely no point at all in culling cattle, if we do not first radically reduce the invasion of their pasture by other infected species.

Yours

Charles Henry

Tuberculosis: Not just a bad cough!

David G. Russell. . College of Veterinary Medicine, Cornell University

“What obstacles stand in the way of disease control?

The economic status of the ‘reservoir’ population places considerable constraints on the traditional, commerce-based approach to infectious disease treatment and prevention. On paper, vaccination is probably the more desirable approach because it is cheap to administer and involves limited contact with the patient population. However, vaccines are extremely expensive to develop and pharmaceutical companies are loathe to invest resources in the development of a vaccine that the target population could not afford and that would likely have limited patient protection.

(Note this) In addition, we already have a vaccine, BCG, although it is under constant criticism for its limited efficacy; this raises the question of what sort of vaccine we need. Can subunit vaccines generate a response that is sufficiently strong and broad, or do we need an attenuated M. tuberculosis? If we use the attenuated bacteria, how avirulent, and, in consequence, asymptomatic, can the attenuated bacterium be, yet still induce protective immunity? It may not be possible to realize a ‘zero-risk’ live vaccine against tuberculosis. Finally, because natural infections with M. tuberculosis result more often in latency rather than in sterile immunity, it is unclear how to promote protective immunity using an attenuated strain of M. tuberculosis.” . . cond.

“Regardless of the avenue explored, our attitude toward tuberculosis must evolve a more global rather than national or commercial perspective. Smallpox was a more vulnerable microbe than tuberculosis because it did not cause latent infections, and protective immunity by vaccination was clearly obtainable. . Nonetheless, it was only eradicated when developed countries appreciated that improving the health of one’s weakest ‘neighbor’ was the best route to protection of one’s own population. The ‘leper colony approach’ to infectious disease management has outlived its usefulness.

The articles in this issue of Nature Medicine explore these matters in greater depth and report on recent advances in both our understanding of the complex biology of this pathogen, and in our attempts to limit its spread within the human population.”

David G. Russell, PhD
Microbiology and Immunology,
College of Veterinary Medicine,
Cornell University,
Ithaca, NY 14853

If we are to protect the human population from Mycobacterium bovis; there will no alternative to a policy of radically reducing and restricting any infected species until a successful vaccine for wildlife has been developed and can be successfully applied.

Charles Henry

Nature Medicine is an academic journal publishing research articles, reviews, news and commentaries in the biomedical area, including both basic research and early-phase clinical research. Topics covered include cancer, cardiovascular disease, gene therapy, immunology, vaccines and neuroscience. The journal seeks to publish research papers that ‘demonstrate novel insight into disease processes, with direct evidence of the physiological relevance of the results.

Founded in 1995, Nature Medicine is published by the Nature Publishing Group, a division of Macmillan Publishers Ltd, and is one of the rapidly expanding stable of Nature journals. Like other Nature journals, there is no external Editorial Board, with editorial decisions being made by an in-house team, although peer review by external expert referees forms a part of the review process.

Its 2006 impact factor was 28.588, making it the highest cited research journal in preclinical medicine. It is also among the highest impact of primary (non-review) scientific journals. By comparison, the impact factors of general science journals Science and Nature were 30.927 and 29.273, respectively, in 2005. . . Wikipedia

Listen to our farmers’ concerns.

Western Morning News. Badgers ‘likely source’ of woman’s TB

Mr.Hilary Benn’s total incompetence as Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is just not acceptable. . This government virtually declared war on the countryside on the first day they took power, and the appointment of this man to a position he is totally unqualified for was a gross dereliction. . If the government do not resolve this issue and take the measures necessary, the farmers will, as they are already doing in Wales. . The prisons are not going to be big enough. . This government is in complete crisis and should immediately call a General Election.

Charles Henry

Charles, if you were Minister of Health and had spent £50m of public money finding out that a particular drug was largely ineffective and that, if taken under certain conditions, might even make the condition worse, would you then spend millions more providing the drug to sufferers of the relevant disease because most of them believed it would cure them?

FWK, Crediton

This Government will be lucky not to find itself before the European Court on criminal charges before this is all over FWK.. . The £millions they have so far wasted has just compounded the problem, and the £20million they have just allocated will be like ’spitting in the wind’. . . Tuberculosis is not just ‘a bad cough’ and wildlife is now being infected at an alarming rate.. ‘Rome is burning’. . Insult me all you wish, but I certainly wouldn’t be so arrogant as to contradict the opinion of former Chief Scientist Sir David King and hundreds of highly respected veterinary surgeons.

Sir David King’s conclusions

1. Badgers are a clear source of infection for cattle. Reducing the density of badgers in those areas of England where there is a significant level of TB in cattle reduces the incidence of TB in cattle in the same area;

2. Removal of badgers should take place alongside the continued application of controls on cattle. Genuine commitment by all interested parties to the overall TB strategy is needed if TB is to be successfully controlled;

3. Removal of badgers is the best option available at the moment to reduce the reservoir of infection in wildlife. But in the longer term, alternative or additional means of controlling TB in badgers, such as vaccination, may become available. Research into these should continue;

4. Removal of badgers should only take place in those areas of the country where there is a high and persistent incidence of TB in cattle. It is not an appropriate measure in other areas.

5. The minimum overall area within which badger removal should take place is 100 km2, although increasing the area would increase the overall benefit;

6. Where there is inaccessible land within the overall removal area, badgers should be removed on the accessible land bordering it;

The full report, including an expanded list of conclusions, can be viewed at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills website.

Hilary Benn has caved in to an hysterical minority interest and has put the value and life of a badger above that of livestock born and bred into a controlled environment and all those in the population who may inadvertently come in contact with any activated latent infection as apparently did the veterinary nurse in Cornwall.

Charles Henry 1945-(diuturnity)

TB ORIGINATED WITH HUMANS, NOT CATTLE, DNA ANALYSES OF ANCIENT SKELETONS DEMONSTRATE.

By Thomas H. Clarke, Jr., J.D., M.S., is Chair of the Ropers Majeski Kohn & Bentley Environmental Practice Group and has over 30 years of environmental consulting and litigation experience. RMKB has offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, San Jose, & Redwood City.

Many diseases that have impacted humans for much of the last 7+ thousand years are thought to have originated with the domestication of animals; one of the penalties of switching from a hunter-gatherer existence to an agrarian society was that infectious organisms jumped species to infect humans. However, as frequently happens with science, some givens pass away as new research sheds light of what had been accepted doctrine.

PART OF THAT ACCEPTED WISDOM WAS THAT TB ORIGINATED WITH CATTLE.

In a recent report, researchers examined the ancient village of Atlit-Yam, which has been covered by water for the past several thousand years, and which has yielded skeletons and some of the earliest evidence for agriculture and for cattle domestication. According to one longstanding hypothesis, tuberculosis initially infected people who drank the milk of domesticated cattle that carried a unique strain of the TB bacterium. However, new DNA data from the two Atlit-Yam skeletons provides evidence that in a community with domesticated animals but before dairying, the infecting strain of tuberculosis was actually the human pathogen. The researchers estimate that human tuberculosis first evolved around 10,000 years ago, when agriculture’s emergence led to densely populated settlements that acted as petri dishes for infection. Tuberculosis may have infected small numbers of people before that, but the bacteria could not have spread widely in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers.

One of the pleasures of science is that nothing remains certain forever. The report can be found here.

Economics is not rocket science. by Darryl Robert Schoon

Depressions are monetary phenomena caused by central bank issuance of excessive credit. In 1913, the newly created US central bank, the Federal Reserve, began issuing credit-based money in the US. Within ten years, the central bank flow of credit ignited the 1920s US stock market bubble; and shortly thereafter, following the collapse of the bubble in 1929, the world entered its first Great Depression in 1933.

Investment banks are the undoing of central banking. While all banks, central, commercial and investment, view credit as the opportunity to exploit society’s growth and productivity, investment bank exploitation of growth and productivity exposes society to extreme risks; for investment banks use society’s savings to make their volatile and speculative bets.

The speculative risks undertaken by investment banks is done by leveraging the savings of society; and, when investment bank bets are sufficiently large enough and the bets go bad; as they inevitably do as the luck of investment bankers is due more to their proximity to credit than to their ability to foresee the future; it is society that will bear the brunt of the pain in the loss of its savings.

Inevitably, investment bankers cannot resist the temptations of excessive credit and, like the buyers of teaser-rate home mortgages, they will always overreach themselves; an overreaching that will have disastrous consequences for the society whose savings they bet.

The leveraged overreaching by investment banks in the 1920s caused the Great Depression of the 1930s and their more recent overreaching in this decade, the 2000s, is about to cause another Great Depression in the next, the 2010s.

It is the proximity of investment banks to the pools of savings that allows investment banks to profit. By their access to society’s savings, investment banks use society’s wealth as the foundation of their highly leveraged bets in financial markets; and in so doing, they have now placed all of us in harm’s way.

George Osborne on Gordon Brown

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated the activities of commercial banks, which take deposits, from investment banks, which invest money. It was repealed in 1999.

(more…)

An Historic event, not to be missed.

The Britannia Alliance

I do wish you would desist from using those expletives ‘Errol’.

. . Charles Henry 1945-(diuturnity)

1967: Wilson defends ‘pound in your pocket’

The Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, has defended his decision to devalue the pound saying it will tackle the “root cause” of Britain’s economic problems.

The government announced last night it was lowering the exchange rate so the pound is now worth $2.40, down from $2.80, a cut of just over 14%.

The decision came after weeks of increasingly feverish speculation and a day in which the Bank of England spent £200m trying to shore up the pound from its gold and dollar reserves.

In a radio and television broadcast this evening, the Prime Minister said devaluation would enable Britain to ” break out from the straitjacket” of boom and bust economics.

Of course , now with a floating currency and supposedly no longer a need to worry about our balance of payments, Socialism has once more reared its ugly incompetent head.

You couldn’t make all this up!

. . Charles Henry 1945-(diuturnity)

January 2009

Copyright by Charles Henry 2009

‘Appy nu yer! . . It can’t get no bleedin’ werse! . . An if diss is still global warmin’ I wish some bugger uld ‘urry an’ tell God! . . . Cos my God iss bleedin’ cawd out yer! . . . I bet iss dey bleedin ‘Russians turnin’ da gas off agen! . .