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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
TEN-million people in S.Africa industrial heartland could die
20:31 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
South Africa's Vaal river, the sole fresh-water source for 10-million people, now is 'so polluted you can walk across the sewerage waste...' warned a top water-engineer this week.
Read Afrikaans report here:
The worst pollution is from raw human sewerage: the latest e-coli (Escherichia-coli) faecal bacterial count at the Vaal river barrage near Parys (picture here) where the faecal pollution measures a whopping 1-m units per 100mF of water. The safe international maximum is 10,000 units per 100mF of water.
Also see: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262786
Yet the Vaal river is the only fresh-water source for more than 10-million people, 20% of the SA population, living in its most densely-populated province of Gauteng -- the country's industrial heartland around the goldmines of Johannesburg.
This is the second dire warning sounded within just a week, this time by Rand Water company manager, water-purification engineer Francois van Wyk. He warns that 'a humanitarian disaster of vast proportions' was just around the corner for South Africa.
The Vaal river, warned van Wyk yesterday, has become so polluted, 'you can walk across the sewerage waste...' He aired his warnings at this week's Environ conference at Warmbaths, hosted by the government's SA Water Research Commission.
Van Wyk said he also stood 100% behind the country's top-water engineer, Dr Anthony Turton, who was 'suspended' from the country's top research institute, the Centre of Scientific and Industrial Research, for issuing identical warnings -- for the entire country. He warned that even the acquifers are now getting polluted and that the country's low rainfall simply isn't enough to wash it all away again.. Read that report here:
Van Wyk has also advised the organisers of the Emerald Challenge open-water swimming championships in the Vaal river to postpone it, only a day before it was to start this week, warning that the water was dangerously polluted and far too unsafe. He said that many people living around the Vaal river are now calling in at non-governmental environmental groups, reporting that they falling ill from gastric ailments and that many fishes also suddenly started dying this month.
read the Vaal river's details here: http://www.randwater.co.za/Education/Wi_Details.asp?ArticleId=42
Van Wyk warns that nearly all the municipalities along the river are now dumping their raw sewerage straight into the water, untreated. Added to this lethal mix of human faeces are millions of tons of salty waste-water runoff from the mines and industries along the Klipriver which feeds into the Vaal.
People and animals will soon start dying...
Van Wyk warns this week that people and animals will soon start dying from the river of sewerage.
He pointed out that more than 60% of all the country's municipalities no longer had any qualified engineers for their purification plants and that more than 3,000 engineering posts are vacant.
Van Wyk fears that animals and people were also start dying from the filthy water soon.
- "Their water-purification plants are collapsing and 63% of all the municipalities say that they are now 'uncertain about the safety' of their drinking water.
"People's health will start deteriorating very drastically if we don't intervene most urgently,' he warned. Those vacant posts needed to be filled urgently 'with qualified engineers' to stave off a major humanitarian disaster.
Even worse news came from environmentalist campaigner Thomas du Toit, who chairs the Save the Vaal Environment (SAVE). He said at the conference that his NGO and other environmental groups are being overwhelmed by calls from people living around the Vaal river barrage this week.
- "They are falling ill all the way downstream to Parys after ingesting Vaal river water from municipal sources."
The Vaal River system starts in the eastern highveld plains, in the vicinity of Ermelo where water collects in pans, vleis and streams. These streams link up into the Vaal River -- flowing westward on a long course, without rapids or waterfalls, broadening into a large but shallow river. As the Vaal River flows westward it flows into the Grootdraai Dam. This dam has a total storage capacity of 350 million cubic metres, a surface area of 39 square kilometres and an average depth of 27 metres. On its course to the Vaal Dam a number of other sidestreams join the Vaal River:
- the Little Vaal that begins in the escarpment near Ermelo;
- the Klip River that begins near Memel in the Free State;
- the Watervals River that begins in Secunda;
- the Wilge River, that used to meet the Vaal River before the Vaal Dam was built but now flows straight into the Vaal Dam. This river begins in the escarpment near Harrismith.
On its course to the Vaal Dam a number of other rivers flow into it, i.e. Nuwejaarspruit, Elands, and the Liebenbergsvlei rivers.
SOURCES:
http://www.southafrica.info/about/geography/gauteng.htm
http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Suid-Afrika/0,,3-975_2434388,00.html
http://www.wrc.org.za/
http://www.randwater.co.za/Education/Wi_Details.asp?ArticleId=42
http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/262639
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/12871450
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Have 2-million already died from XDR-TB in South Africa?
Article by Adriana Stuijt date: October 7 2007
DOKKUM, The Netherlands -- Among the World Health Organisation 's public archives, I located several little-known studies from 2003 - read here and here -- proving that at least 2-million people must already have died in South Africa by the year 2000 of something then described as "HIV-TB co-infection".
This condition has since then become officially known as Extremely-drug-resistant tuberculosis (XDR-TB), thus-named because none of the usual antibiotics against TB cures it. The SA medical authorities claim it was first diagnosed in KZN only in 2006 and that no more than 400 patients had died of it by the end of that year. And accurate 2007 and 2008 death-rate statistics for XDR-TB in SA are even harder to come by ...
XDR-TB kills patients in South Africa within 14 to 20 days. Often the SA laboratories can confirm the condition only after the XDR-TB patient has already died. In South Africa, XDR-TB is allowed to flourish mainly due to the unscientific policy of the South African regime itself - which views any enforced isolation of such highly infectious TB+HIV patients as a 'violation of human rights' and has issued a directive to its national health facilities to this effect:
Video: The world has to wake up about XDR-TB warns WHO:
One of these WHO-studies, with the catchy title of "The growing burden of tuberculosis linked to the human immunodeficiency virus " showed that by the year 2000, at least two-million so- called "co-infected HIV-TB" patients had already been diagnosed in South Africa alone, of whom some 178,540 patients had already died in the previous two years.
- 100% mortality rate: If the WHO experts who analysed these statistics were correct in their estimates, it also means that at least 2-million people must already have died in South Africa of XDR-TB alone up to the year 2003, when this study was undertaken - because such co-infected patients die very quickly: the SA epidemic shows that XDR-TB patients do not survive this infection very long. Hospitalised patients die of it within 14 to 20 days and it has a 100% mortality-rate, i.e. nobody gets cured. Some patients with a lesser form called multiple-drug resistant tuberculosis, can still be cured with one specific combination of drugs.. however what makes the present co-epidemic of AIDS plus TB in South Africa particularly worrisome is that previously healthy people now also are also being identfied with XDR-TB in South Africa, without being co-infected with the Aids-virus. In other words, the airborne, mutated XDR-TB bacteria migrates easily from the AIDS-infected population to healthy SA residents.
This 2003 study may have been WHO's first worldwide research on this subject -- in which they reviewed three-year-old medical data from official notifications of TB cases, treatment outcomes, surveys of Mycobacterium tuberculosis infections, and the HIV prevalence in patients with TB and other subgroups (such as hepatitis-and syphillis-infected patients).
- This information was collated from published literature and the databases held by the World Health Organization, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (UNAIDS), the US Census Bureau, and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Result of the 2003 WHO study:
- It showed that by 2000, at least 226,000 coinfected TB-HIV deaths had already occurred among the 1.8million registered TB deaths worldwide; and that 178,540 or 79% of these co-infected HIV-TB patients were diagnosed in 9 southern African countries -- with South Africa at its epicentre.
The 2003 WHO study also found more than 2-million co-infected TB-HIV patients in South Africa from the Year 2000 data -- and these patients must all have died since that time, because their bodies immune systems would become progressively resistant to the six TB antibiotics then in use in South Africa.
How to locate those deadly, micron-sized TB particles in the air...
WHO also addressed another major problem in another study a year later -- namely how find a quick, easy way to identify the micron-sized TB-particles in the air. TB-bacteria have always been so dangerous because they infect large groups of people very rapidly through the air.
- By 2004, studies at several scientific labs of universities had developed a way to rapidly detect single-cells of the micron-sized TB-bacteria in the air. It's not known whether these detectors now may be in widespread use -- they would be particularly useful for the airline industry, which could measure passengers' breaths with it before they board flights.
This 'bioaerosol mass specrometer' would of course also be very useful to prevent the spread of XDR-TB into the world community. The spectrometer is a rapid, stand-alone airborne TB particle detector for closed environments. The study results were published in the Applied Environmental Micriobiology magazine of October 2005.
- The model was developed by the department of chemistry, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana as a portable, low cost, laser-guided TB-aerosol particle detector which has since been patented by the John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. company.
- http://www.wiley.com/legacy/wileychi/eac/cont7.html
- http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/109582272/ABSTRACT?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0
WHO 2003 study links:
-
http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:16204525
-
International Medicine May 2003, Page 163. burden of tuberculosis: global trends and interactions with the HIV epidemic. Elizabeth L Corbett , Catherine J Watt , Neff Walker , Dermot Maher , Brian G Williams , Mario C Raviglione , Christopher Dye: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:12742799??
In South Africa, XDR TB and HIV Prove a Deadly Combination by Dr Robert Koenig - WHO http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/319/5865/894?rss=1%5D%5B%5BNEWS
2006 statistics SA health department on XDR TB: http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/0,,2-7-1442_2035020,00.html
2007 : Poor TB control in South Africa a cause for concern: http://www.health-e.org.za/news/article.php?uid=20031540&PHPSESSID=e1cd3f4d43bd9dc36b3233edda36544a
Foreign Africans, white S.Africans face genocide - expert warns
Nov 29 2008 - CAPE TOWN, South Africa 's black foreign Africans and white South Africans alike are being targetted by a renewed stream of murders, rapes, hate-speech, demonisation, terror and death threats.
22 Somalis killed in CT:
The UN news agency's IRIN news reports from the Blue Waters UN refugee camp in Cape Town this week that the millions of foreign African migrants in South Africa are facing a renewed wave of ethnic-cleansing -- similar to the vicious violence targetting them in May. Somali community leaders report that at least 20 Somalis have been murdered in greater Cape Town alone since they were urged to 'reintegrate' in the black South African communities which had expelled them so violently earlier this year.
South African authorities claim that these are 'xenophobic attacks', however the world's top expert on genocide, the American international judicial expert Dr Gregory Stanton, calls it by its real name: genocide.
WHAT IS GENOCIDE - EXACTLY?
Many people misunderstand exactly what 'genocide' entails, says Stanton. It's not just one event in which a large number of people are slaughtered within just days: it's a long drawn-out process. He also points out that usually the regimes which condone such violence targetting specific ethnic-groups, invariably deny that these are genocidal attacks, usually describing it as 'xenophobia' or 'ordinary crime' instead, exactly as the SA authorities are doing. The attacks on the foreign Africans and the Afrikaners of South Africa definitely fall under the UN definition of genocide. He already started warning about the genocide of the Afrikaners of southern Africa since 2002. Read his report here:
He explains the nature of genocide here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70d2Z9yago
Both the burgeoning foreign African communities and the rapidly-shrinking Afrikaner minority in South Africa are increasingly targetted by such genocidal attack groups. Both groups are targetted by hate-speech and threats of ethnic-cleansing. In the case of the black Africans, it's referred to as 'xenophobia'.
47 smallholders murdered in a small Pretoria region this year:
In the case of the Afrikaners, the South African government officials and so-named 'crime experts' all sing the same mantra: consistently claiming that all these vicious attacks are 'just ordinary crime'. However the Afrikaner smallholders know better: they say they are in the middle of a deliberate genocide.
The attack patterns for the foreign Africans and the Afrikaner minority both bear all the hallmarks of a genocidal campaign as described by Stanton. Leaders from both communities warn this week that the hate-speech and attacks targetting them is growing rapidly this year. Both groups fear that they will become targetted by renewed outbreaks of ethnic-cleansing and genocidal attacks.
Some hundred-thousand foreign Africans were chased out of black townships by often very cruel, black South African youth gangs from May - and in spite of official South African government statements to the contrary, the hate-speech and aggressive attacks against black foreigners has been growing increasingly worse, the refugees tell IRIN news -- the UN's news agency. Congolese Tuti refugees Aunesi Omari, her husband and their five children returned to Blue Water refugee camp this week from their room in Philippi, a working-class suburb near Cape Town -- because the family just became too terrified. Every time she dared to venture outdoors, armed Xhosa-speaking men shouted at her: "We're going to kill you because you don't want to listen." And shots were fired outside their shack each night, yet police refused to investigate, cursing them as 'foreigners'. link:
49 Afrikaners killed in Pretoria last few months alone - and 3,018 since 1994:
However, black foreign Africans aren't the only minorities being targetted. A second ethnic-cleansing campaign is also going on in South Africa - which is hardly ever reported in the foreign news media. To the north, in the country's capital city of Pretoria, 2,400 Afrikaans children walked onto a rugby field this week, bearing white crosses, and laid down on the grass in silent protest.
These white Afrikaner children said they were now too terrified to even leave their homes or go to bed at night -- because these working-class smallholders in greater Pretoria are being targetted by an unprecendented wave of armed attacks, murders and rapes. Thus far this year, 49 Afrikaners - mostly the male breadwinners - have been gunned down inside their barricaded, fortress-like homesteads in greater Pretoria. More than 1,5-million 'whites' -- mostly Afrikaners - have already fled the country to get away from this violence.
ETHNIC CLEANSING OF AFRIKANERS AND THEIR LANGUAGE FROM THE SA LANDSCAPE
I have personally recorded more than 2,000 armed attacks in the Gauteng area thus far this year which specifically targetted Afrikaner families in a very similar way: gangs of young black males, armed with AK-47s and Uzis, break into the homestead, often ask for the breadwinner/homeowner even by name, and gun him/her down execution style. Then they often also terrorise, mutilate body parts, torture with hot irons and melting plastic; or/and gang-rape the rest of the family - and steal nothing of value except a cellphone, to prevent the family from alerting authorities and neighbours. However, part of the ANC-government's genocide campaign also is the ethnic-cleansing of the Afrikaner's language rights and Afrikaner names from the South African map - and which genocidal campaign Afrikaners also are increasingly demonstrating against. (picture here: Afrikaner students protesting in November 2008 against the regime's deliberate removal of Afrikaans from their educational and religious institutions).
- Alphabetic name lists of murdered Afrikaner homesteaders since 1994: here
Countryside Afrikaners leaving in droves for Western Cape and Gauteng - Of course the SA government has also been waging a relentless campaign to ethnically-cleanse all Afrikaner farmers from their farms in their so-named foreign-funded 'redistribution of farms' project -- see report here:
AN alarming new trend has also developed this year which proves the genocidal nature of these attacks targetting the Afrikaners even more: their breadwinners are increasingly shot dead from outside their homes while seated at their computers at night or watching TV - and nothing at all is stolen in such assassinations. Thus far, at least 3,018 white rural Afrikaners have been murdered since 1994, in more than 61,000 armed attacks since 1994, according to the records maintained by Agri-SA and the Transvaal Agricultural Union, which represent SA commercial farmers. Yet the South African authorities deny that there are political motives - these are all 'just crimes of greed'...
This year, the Afrikaners of South Africa all report a rapid rise of deadly attacks targetting them on their smallholdings and in their suburban homes alike -- especially in Gauteng province but also elsewhere in the country, even in previously peaceful, small coastal resorts along the Cape coast. These families also often report the same kind of demonisation and hatespeech targetting foreign African communities. As do foreign Africans, white South Africans, English- and Afrikaans-speakers, also report that black police officers often curse them in extremely racist language, issue death threats, assault them and often refuse to respond to their emergency calls, or only show up many hours later.
You white sh*t - you are going to die here with your money...
- This week, two Afrikaner girls in Port Elizabeth were raped and told they were to blame for their black rapists being unemployed - read story here:
- And also in Johannesburg this week, a white corporate-landscaping business owner Baden Hall of Kyalami, was assaulted and cursed by a black police woman who told him: 'You white sh**, you are going to die here with your money. We will make sure you never leave this country, you will die here first'...'. He filmed her assault on his cellphone and has lodged formal charges..
And these are not isolated incidents. As do the foreign Africans, many white Afrikaners also report how, whenever they try to file criminal charges, they are often cursed with such racist language by black South African cops who often tell them to "go back where they came from'... Journalists in South Africa are placing this on public record, but report that the foreign news media is 'hesitant' to publish such reports.
I have obtained written permission from the award-winning South African journalist Susan Puren, who at great risk to her own life produced "A Bloody Harvest', her documentary on these genocidal attacks targetting Afrikaners. Dr Stanton describes here why he believes Afrikaners are being targetted for genocide. The (abbreviated) documentary can be seen on Parts One, left and Part Two, right:
Foreign news outlets such as Sky news HERE and the BBC have published brief reports HERE and HERE since 1998, but nothing about the current attacks targetting the working-class Afrikaners in genocide;
Sky news:
The attack patterns for the foreign Africans and the Afrikaner minority both bear all the hallmarks of a genocidal campaign as described by Stanton. Leaders from both communities warned again this week that the hate-speech and attacks targetting them is growing very rapidly this past year. Both groups fear that they will become targetted by renewed outbreaks of ethnic-cleansing and genocidal attacks.
While the attacks on black foreign African communities have hit the international news headlines, the genocide targetting the 3-milion Afrikaners in South Africa is hardly ever reported.Yet the Afrikaners also are being driven from their rural homes they have lived in for many generations, in a relentless campaign conducted by large groups of armed, black male attackers. And the SA government is also targetting their ability to survive in South Africa with a myriad of laws, barring them from owning farms, barring 'whites' from the entire labour market, and denying the Afrikaners all their cultural- and language-rights in a very deliberately planned way. In 1994, there still were some 85,000 Afrikaner farmers in the countryside - now mainly due to the violence but also because of the SA government's so-named 'redistribution of farms' programme, their numbers have shrunk to below 13,500.
Both stories are also being heavily spindoctored by the ANC-government - their immediate response always is to deny that there is anything wrong at all - and thus putting these families at great risk from repeated attacks by black gangs who see the government denials as a silent form of approval of their actions... • In July, the South African government claimed that all the expelled foreigners had been returned safely to their homes and would not be attacked again.read report by UN:
Afrikaners also have no place to flee to: Foreign Africans often tell the news media these days that after the repeated attacks since May, 'they have no place left to flee to.' And exactly this same sentiment is echoed by the besieged Afrikaners of South Africa -- they also have no place to flee to: they may look like northern Europeans, but South Africa has been their home since 1656, and they have no family links left in Europe at all where they could find a safe haven - they are constantly being denied political asylum abroad if they try - and only the young, best-educated Afrikaners are able to find legal employment abroad. For the rest, South Africa remains their homeland.
SOURCES
Source for report from Blue Waters refugee camp: the IRIN news agency in the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs - which is sponsored by Western taxpayers and thus its copyrights are in the public campaign.http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81618
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81618
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2E9oz4dfLs&feature=related
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/189267.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1932930.stm
http://censorbugbear-reports.blogspot.com/2008/11/alphabetic-name-lists-links-afrikaners.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B70d2Z9yago
http://www.amren.com/mtnews/archives/2008/11/open_letter_on.ph
phttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtLmJSQBiwA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2E9oz4dfLs&feature=related
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/189267.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1932930.stm
http://www.theherald.co.za/herald/news/n05_26112008.htm
http://www.genocidewatch.org/BoersSlain01.htm
http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=81618
http://www.thestar.co.za/?fSectionId=&fArticleId=vn20081128052109813C858314
Agricultural collapse and ethnic-cleansing of Afrikaners from SA countryside: The Great SA Land Scandal
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?ReportId=79217
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DtLmJSQBiwA