An Inconvenient Truth? Al Gore Sells Out to Big Oil

The television network Current TV was recently purchased by the international news outlet Al Jazeera. The transaction will leave $125 million in former vice-president Al Gore’s pocket. Gore, who is a green living advocate, ironically sold the company to a news outlet owned by Qatar – an oil rich country.

LAPD ‘Gun Buy-back’ Turns Up Two Rocket Launchers

Jan 1, 2013

The Los Angeles Police Department held a gun buyback in an attempt to get firearms off the streets. Law officials were a little surprised when two rocket launchers turned up.

Native American land used as toxic dump

The Wind River Reservation in Wyoming is the home to over 8,000 Native Americans and now the tribe is sharing the land with nearly a dozen oil and gas fields. For the Native Americans, the waste water from the natural resource companies has become a vital component in providing drinking water for livestock and the EPA has allowed the practice until now, but should this be allowed to continue?

Steve Hughes from Australia Pulls No Punches (watch)

Comedian Steve Hughes

21st Century Wire

99% of all comedians on the comedy circuit are too busy trying to be cute and politically correct.

So it’s quite entertaining (and informative) to see this bloke from Australia rip it up on the Apollo in London.

Watch as he hits all of the right targets…

….

Location, Location, Location: DOD Seeks ‘Small Footprint’ in Africa to Bolster AFRICOM

Editor’s Note: As we reported earlier regarding US intentions to dominate Africa through AFRICOM, it seems that the Department of Defense has made an official statement regarding their plans for a new military base there. If Obama gains a second term, look for this agenda to accelerate rapidly between now and 2016. The tiny country of Djibouti, located near the choke point on the Horn of Africa near Somalia and Sudan, has been chosen for obvious reasons, not least of all, as forward operating base to regulate US and Anglo ambitions to clean out Somalia and its surrounding neighbors of their precious resources. First off are Puntland, Somalia’s untapped oil reserves currently be divided up by the US and UK industries. Regardless of who wins the US post in November, let it be known that a new Neo-colonial race is at hand for the mineral wealth and energy riches still untapped from the planet’s most bountiful continent.

By Jim Garamone
American Forces Press Service

WASHINGTON DC – For Djibouti, location is everything.

The small African nation hosts the one forward operating base the United States maintains on the African continent, and that is due to its unique location, said Amanda J. Dory, deputy assistant secretary of defense for African affairs.

Djibouti hosts about 3,000 U.S. service members at Camp Lemonier — a former French base adjacent to the capital of Djibouti City. The U.S. service members work to build military capabilities with Djibouti and neighboring nations. The base also is a training and logistics hub.

Yet, it is not a model for how the United States will interact on the African continent, Dory said. “The DOD strategy in Africa has moved toward flexible operating concepts,” she said in a recent interview. “[We will] focus on maintaining a small footprint on the continent that is flexible and low cost.”

The U.S. military footprint will be different in each African nation, the deputy assistant secretary said.

“Each country will work with us to see what capabilities they need, how much they can commit to developing, and how fast they want to work,” she said. “They will also work with us to determine the process of working with us.”

U.S. troops, she said, will visit these nations for short periods of time for specific tasks or training cycles.

“We do not want permanent bases,” Dory said.

The U.S. military effort on the continent is being accepted by many African leaders, she said. When U.S. Africa Command first stood up, there was concern among some leaders that it signified a “militarization” of U.S. foreign policy and a sort of creeping colonialism. Those fears have subsided, she said.

“Most [African] nations welcome our contributions,” Dory said.

Djibouti is unique because it lies on the seam between U.S. Africa Command and U.S. Central Command, officials said, and it is situated at the southern entrance to the Red Sea. Vessels transiting through the Suez Canal to the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean sail close to Djibouti, which boasts a natural harbor and roads that link the interior with the coast.

The country has interest from four U.S. combatant commands — U.S. Africa Command, U.S. Special Operations Command, U.S. Central Command and U.S. Transportation Command, officials said. In addition, other nations work with the Djiboutian government to ensure security in the area.

Djibouti and Camp Lemonier represent a strategic gold mine, Dory said. But Camp Lemonier, she added, will remain an expeditionary base.

“It will remain an austere base. “We will make improvements for force protection, but you will not see a golf course at Camp Lemonier, ever,” she said.

Black gold backs Chavez vision vilified by West

He’s a hero in his homeland – but portrayed as a bogeyman by western governments. 

The election triumph for Hugo Chavez in Venezuela for a remarkable fourth time means he’ll continue to polarise opinion as President. 

And as RT’s Lucy Kafanov reports, the way he uses the nation’s oil wealth will ensure he’ll remain a thorn in the side of Washington.

GMO’s linked to aborted animals, Schmallenberg, while climate changers peddle new equine fears

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
March 2, 2012

This week has seen one of the more shocking reports to emerge so far this year, the discovery of an unexplained bio-plague which is causing birth defects in record numbers in sheep and cattle stocks throughout English farms and in parts of the continent, believed to be linked to the Schmallenberg virus.

The Independent newspaper’s environmental beat writer Michael McCarthy wrote a piece on this topic today, attempting to combine recent animal diseases in Europe to climate change. He grabbed the opportunity to patch together what are clearly two very separate real issues, and bind them with one theoretical one: the Schmallenberg virus in sheep, African horse sickness – and ‘European warming caused by climate change’.

The problem with McCarthy’s article is that the first two are real, but the last one is pure speculation – and out of pure convenience, he’s combined all three as if they one issue. There goes our mainstram media, raising the climate change alarm:

“But scientists are warning that they may be only the first of a considerable number of new infections, including some affecting humans, which are being helped to spread north through Europe by the warming climate.”

Unfortunately, this tired practice of cheap conflation will not benefit humanity any longer.

It is yet another instance where the mainstream media is falling head over heals for climate change, while a very real environmental crisis – the ongoing infusion of GMOs into our now contaminated global food supply chain – is allowed to run completely out of control. And what are the consequences of this?

This is not the first livestock crisis to hit Europe. In the 1990′s we saw CJD, or ‘Mad Cow’ disease take numerous human lives, and more famously, Britain’s catatrophic outbreak of foot and mouth disease, a plague which was originally believed to have been caused by a natural – both ravaged herds and cost the agriculture industry and the state billions by the final tally. Foot and Mouth was eventually reported to have originated in a UK bio lab and released (intentionally, or unintentionally, has yet to be proven) into the ecosystem – a highly unnatural event. Based on this past findings of man-made pathogens, it only stands to reason that the current Schmallenberg outbreak may be the result of an unintended contamination between livestock herds and madmade industrial substances.

Infowars interviewed  GMO expert Jeffery Smith recently, where he revealed that, in fact, new discoveries on how GMOs could be ruining the internal organs and digestive tracts of livestock are coming out as we speak. He highlighted cases of aborted fetal tissue caused by a new organism only visible under an electron microscope. A study was done to determine the cause of the aborted animal fetuses and showed how when animal feed was treated with Monsanto Corp’s ‘Round-up’ chemical, there were high concentrations of this new, undiscovered deadly organism.

Jeffrey M. Smith Exposes Mystery Virus Triggering Aborted Fetuses: The Alex Jones Show, February 23, 2012

This organism was then taken to a preganant chicken where it killed the fetus within 24 to 48 hrs. It looks and acts like fungus, and is found to have caused spontaneous abortions in animals. One year ago, Dr. Don Huber, Professor Emeritus at Purdue University, warned the USDA of a wild spread infertility amongst livestock due to this new GMO ‘Round-up Ready’ pathogen and declared this as nothing less than “an emergency”. 

USDA has allowed Monsanto to perform its own GMO studies, and no studies conducted on humans, the population at large has exposed itself to a potential threat whereby not only is the damage done to the our human and livestock DNA is permanent, but the cost in lives and money is almost incalulable.
 
Could the recent  Schmallenberg sheep and cow crisis in the UK be somehow linked to a possible GMO-related pathogen in our food supply chain? If it is even remotely possible, one would sincerely hope that every green journalist on staff at the Independent, Guardian, Times of London, Washington Post and the New York Times – would be looking into this and related stories right this moment.

Or they could just continue to connect every natural eco or weather event… to climate change.

Scandal after scandal has hit the UN’s elite IPCC Climate Change clique, discrediting their so-called science, that same science which we were all told was ‘certain’. Since then, the public have since  realized how this scam was constructed and how truly massive it is… including Al Gore and ’scientific concensus’ members’ ties to the global Carbon Exchanges markets. Knowing this, many in the climate camp could no longer support those old computer-modelled global warming theories. It will go down in history as one of the biggest (and most lucrative) lies ever sold.

‘Green’ journalism, or more specifically – climatist journalism, has long since infected most corporate compartments of the mainline media, exhibiting an irresistible tendency to combine any emerging crisis in nature with the liberal popular mythology of global warming and climate change. Since 2005, aplocalyptic antecdotes of rising seas and computer-modeled projections of nonexistent warming have colored the green press keeping environmental activists and scientists busy chasing a phantom menace.

Proponents of the climatist ‘precautionary principle’ should beware, because there is a very dear price that humanity may be paying as a result of this flamboyant period of mythology ushered in by the likes of the UN’s IPCC clique, Al Gore, Michael Mann and James Hansen. With all the time, talent, and hundreds of billions already wasted on trying to monetize CO2 and pushing various global warming theories, real envirnomental (and actual apocolyptic events) have been allowed to ravage the ecosystem unchecked – specifically, we are talking about Monsanto’s GMO food empire, and a very, very unregulated international nuclear power industry. In the case of GMOs, it may even be too late to undo the damage.

It’s time for the public to think seriously about what would happen if the present unregulated GMO industry were to damage not only our human food supply, but our human DNA itself.

Currently, we are the guinea pigs in this global experiment.

–

SOLARGATE: Obama’s Big Green Scandal That Won’t Go Away

Patrick Henningsen
21st Century Wire
September 16, 2011

In the first year of his presidency, George W. Bush was under siege. At that time, he had appeared to win his war in Afghanistan, only to find himself tangled in another story, a tale of corporate greed and political corruption made by the hands of a company known as Enron.

Back then, it was the new energy brokerage houses and the new energy futures market that drove the hubris, and the greed of men like Ken Lay. Today in 2011, Barrack Obama now finds himself in the midst of his own ‘Enron moment’, but this time it’s political favouritism and a seemingly bottomless pit of green government stimulus handouts that has driven his green juggernaut into a ravine.

The Enron scandal saw, among other crimes, the savings and retirement funds of tens of thousands of employees disappear when the politically connected energy giant went bankrupt overnight, but it was the cronyism- the company’s direct connections to Bush, Cheney and other insiders which left the worst taste in America’s mouth. Last week, deja vu hit the Obama White House, as his favourite green pet- solar energy firm Solyndra, managed to do an overnight disappearing act with over $500 million in taxpayer funds. What’s worse is that just like Enron, the solar energy firm’s connections go right up through Washington, and right up to the President himself.

From a policy level, it’s a complete wash out due to the fact that despite over half a billion dollars in Federal Financing Bank handouts, Solyndra did not manage to create any new ‘green jobs’. On an insider corruption level, things are looking even bleaker.

Indeed, in the Obama White House, just as it was in the Bush White House, money buys influence, and more importantly, money also buys business opportunities. Apparently, when Solyndra first applied for its green subsidies, auditors at the Department of Energy (DOE) had serious doubts about the company’s financial strength, yet, they were still fast-tracked for one the biggest green subsidies in US history. Jonathan Silver is executive director of the Loan Programs Office, and is the man who signed off on Solyndra’s loan. Will he be thrown under the bus later, if the investigation reaches Congressional hearings? The plot thickens…

The $500 million question is why this firm was allowed to win such a large handout if its fundamentals did not pass grade? The answer to that question is a man by the name of George Kaiser, an Oklahoma billionaire and a major investor in Solyndra, who also happened to be… a key fundraiser for Obama’s 2008 election campaign. But it gets worse.

When Solyndra when down under Chapter 11 bankruptcy last week, you would think that the US taxpayer would be first in line as a creditor who hoped to recoup its $500 million loss. Not so. First in line was… George Kaiser, who managed to pocket his initial $75 million investment before anyone else got to the butchers table.

In an ABC report, Kaiser, like with every inner circle Obama Democrat, moved quickly to place the blame on our far eastern neighbours.“Solyndra’s collapse saying the solar firm faced “serious challenges in the marketplace, especially the drastic decline in solar panel prices during the past two years caused in part by subsidies provided by the government of China to Chinese solar panel manufacturers”, said Kaiser.

Now there is an ethical and perhaps criminal element to Obama’s green scandal. Like with Enron, where thousands of employee retirement accounts were pilfered away by its cowboy executives, Solyndra’s employees were informed literally overnight, that their company was closed and was so broke, that there would not even be a severance cheque waiting for them. But it turns out that insiders in Washington did know the company was in trouble long before it closed its doors last week. The question now is who knew. Which Washington insiders had off-loaded their stocks and shares in the months before the solar manufacturer went down the drain?

Criminal proceeding will certainly follow should investigative authorities come up with any information pointing to gross insider trading and financial malfeasance. At the orders of the DOE’s Inspector General, the FBI have now already raided the offices of Solyndra, seizing all its files, as well as raided the homes of Solyndra executives, seizing their computers and related company documents.

The reality of Obama’s green revolution in 2011 is that, despite his pledge to handout $38.6 billion in Federal loan guarantees to companies like Solyndra, a promise to create 65,000 “green” jobs has only produced a rather pathetic 3,545 permanent jobs- this, after giving out almost half the allocated amount so far, according to the DOE.

One only needs to do the math, and you will discover what every other developed country around the globe already knew in 2008- that the cost per green job is hardly worth the financial pain and suffering.

Unquestionably, this scandal will throw into question every other ‘green jobs’ award that Obama’s White House has given out since 2008, as well as severely damage confidence in any other DOE projects on the table, or in the future.

Now, it is perhaps only a question of time before the investigation reaches the Congress hearing level, where Democrats will be hoping to push a major investigation past the election next November 2012. In the meantime, GOP opponents on Capitol Hill have already caught the scent of political blood left by Obama’s big green debacle. In a recent Washington Post article, Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn) exclaimed, “My goodness. We should be reviewing every one of these loan guarantee”.  In other words, Audit baby audit.

Early indications imply that the sheer size and scope of Obama’s “Solargate” scandal leave us with the impression that this may only be the tip of a much, much larger iceberg. It will be Obama’s first classic Pennsylvania Avenue scandal he has had to face in his first term, one in which we will discover the true quality of this President’s tephlon coating.

Above all, this scandal underlines the very same issues which were present during, and which grew out of the Enron days, because Obama’s “green economy” rides squarely on the back of some very questionable “science” which endorses a belief in Al Gore’s universal theory of man-made global warming and climate change. From this idea also sprung a vision whereby the people of the world would one day be buying and selling their carbon emissions in a carbon marketplace, a market designed by Ken Lay himself. It seems that with Solargate, the house of cards is well and truly coming down.

With Enron, it was pure hubris and greed, combined with opportunity. With Solyndra, it is green hubris and green greed, combined with opportunity. When you get right down to it, they are no different.

WARNING: CONDITIONS ARE RIPE FOR A COMING NUCLEAR WAR

By Andrew McKillop
21st Century Wire
August 19, 2011

It is perhaps difficult to understand why our leaders and mainstream media have not fully recognized and discuss openly the real and present danger that nuclear weapons and facilities pose to our communities worldwide.

 

It is possible that political elites know, but they are perhaps too stupid, or too reckless and arrogant, so they simply ignore what it all means.

 

We are currently entering the hot zone. The nuclear fuse can easily be lit now with Syria and Iran as prime NATO and Israeli targets. Just like “Mad Dog” Gaddafi suffered a trial by media, few western spectators will have much sympathy for Syria’s Basher el Assad.

 

Those in the US and Europe who are sworn to protect Israel’s ‘security’ will also have you believe that Iran does have quite long-range missiles.

ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT: Elites know, but do want to talk about the iminent danger of nuclear material and the predictable use of these weapons.

But what they will not tell you is that Iran could also take out the Dimona bomb-making factory the Zionist militarists are so terribly proud of. Any day of the week, weekends too. The same works in reverse as Israel could also target a nuclear power facility in Iran.  Who would blink first?

 

The same applies to Hezbollah. They aren’t going to like their el Assad “patron” going down the tube. In theory, they could deploy a Scud-type missiles with enough range to hit the Dimona facility.

 

The environmental and economic blow-back from any such incident would be huge, and in most cases, the regions involved would not be able to recover- ever.

 

So what are all these massive nuclear arsenals for, if not for military use? Why has depleted uranium already been sprayed via US, NATO, and Israeli munitions across the Middle East and North Africa? Still, no one in the MSM or in our halls of government seems to take the asymmetric nuclear war threat seriously – so far.

TOO LATE FOR NON-PROLIFERATION

The venerable and creaking NPT Treaty, first signed by only 3 States in March 1970 (US, USSR, UK), which now has 189 member state signatories, but even more than in 1970 the treaty- on its face, has no meaning.

Only explosive nuclear weapons, that is conventional nuclear weapons, are covered and theoretically limited by the treaty.

The treaty makes no mention of Depleted Uranium (DU) weapons, or the vast Dirty Bomb targets of civil nuclear power reactors. This in no way prevents these “Doomsday Machines” being the most daunting nuclear weapons we face, taking account of their annual nuclear waste production, their in-reactor nuclear materials, their fuel rod stores and reprocessing centres, uranium mining wastes, reactor assemblies and nuclear fuels used on the world’s 1100 submarines and surface ships powered by the atom, and the ever-growing numbers and amounts of lost or stolen nuclear equipment and materials.

Taking only the world’s presently operating 430-odd civil power reactors (about 441 before Japan’s Fukushima disaster), their annual production of nuclear wastes is around 30 000 tons per year, to be sure much of it defined as low-level, relatively low risk in radiological terms and relatively low risk in chemical toxicity terms. Although exact data is secret, Depleted Uranium weapons production is a major value-adding spinoff from civil power reactor wastes, producing weapons with proven and high carcinogenic effects, and chemical toxicity effects on both humans and animals, but as already mentioned these weapons are not covered by the NPT Treaty.

DU – YOU ARE DEAD

Annual production of Depleted Uranium weapons, mainly anti-tank ordinance but including others, is as noted secret, but estimates suggest the main producers – the USA, Russia, France, China, the UK (ironically, the five declared nuclear weapons states as defined by the NPT), Germany, India, Pakistan, Israel, North Korea and an increasing number of other countries – manufacture about 4000 tons of DU ordnance per year. Stocks are high and rising, due to low and limited use, although the two Gulf wars against Iraq (1991 and from 2003) and the war against Afghanistan (since 2001) have used an estimated 3000 to 3500 tons of DU weapons to date. Small and limited amounts of DU weapons utilisation are reported in the NATO war against the Gaddafi regime of Libya. Cancer deaths due to these radioactive and chemically toxic weapons, especially in Iraq, are estimated to be as high as 10 000 to date, and deaths will certainly continue for decades ahead.

Make no mistake: DU is a killer.

EFFECTS OF DU: Many military and medical workers can tell you first-hand the shocking effects of DU on humans.

DU weapon stocks in the USA alone are estimated to be more than 25 000 tons, and world stocks are likely well above 70 000 tons.

The so-called attractiveness of DU weapons is directly linked to their origin – wastes from so-called civil nuclear power, used to make weapons of war. The basic material, uranium alloys with various levels of radioactivity and chemical toxicity is above all cheap. Secondly, it has major technical characteristics making it almost ideal for producing anti-tank and anti-building weapons. Uranium metal is heavy and dense. It is easily machined. Being radioactive, it is easy to trace and track, for example during weapons testing and through the industrial production process. But perhaps its main trump card is its incendiary nature – that is very easily catching fire and liberating large amounts of heat, triggering secondary fires, for example in tank and armed vehicle fuel reservoirs, and wall claddings and flooring of targeted buildings.

This incendiary, heat-liberating characteristic explains the acronym for the biggest single type of DU ordnance: anti-tank shells and missiles. These are called HEAT ordnance, for High Energy Anti Tank.

The usual type of shell or missile is called “discarding sabot”, designating a machined uranium sheath or nose cone on the shell, behind which a titanium or iridium high-strength metal dart is positioned, with the explosive “military payload”, for example pentrite or TNT, placed further behind. When the shell hits the armour of the targeted tank, the uranium alloy cone or sheath explodes, liberating fine dust particles which instantly ignite. The heat liberated massively weakens the armor, through which the dart penetrates, breaching the tank hull, enabling the conventional explosive ‘stage’ of the shell to enter and explode. Typical times needed for this sequence are around 400 milliseconds (0.4 seconds).

To be sure, all kinds of other dust particles can also be incendiary – for example rice or wheat dust, able to totally explode and destroy 65 000-ton cargo ships in worst-case explosions, phosphates as used in home-made bombs, and aluminium, magnesium or iron dust and filings as used in fireworks and in weapons, but uranium is extremely incendiary. Also to be sure, generous amounts of the uranium dust do not catch fire, are transported by wind, fall to earth with rain, and enter the food chain and water table – causing decades-long cancer epidemics in most affected areas. Our democracy-loving, human rights-defending political deciders with clean finger nails and a clean conscience, who order the use of these filthy weapons would apparently be unconcerned about that.

  The image of the mushroom cloud has become part of our cultural lexicon.

CIVIL POWER REACTOR DIRTY BOMBS

As we know from the Fukushima disaster, and the Chernobyl disaster any industry standard 900 MW light water or other type of reactor using uranium fuel contains a “radiological inventory” roughly equal to 150 Hiroshima-sized atom bombs. Each reactor.

Fuel rod stores, and dumps, can radically increase this equivalence, when spent fuel rods are stored, or buried on-site, usually only a few metres under the soil. Depending on the age and type of the reactor, its operational history, and other parameters like spent fuel rod inventories on-site, one single industry standard civil power reactor can be considered equivalent to as much as 250 or 350 Hiroshima-sized bombs in its capacity to kill by radiation poisoning, and totally sterilize hundreds of square kilometres of land – becoming a Total Exclusion Zone for decades ahead.

Using HEAT ordnance, or in fact any kind of conventional military ordnance, or unconventional ordnance such as drone airplanes with stand-off missiles, or simply a 50-kilogram explosive charge, no conventional civil power reactor’s core shielding will resist. Attack also targeting the reactor’s cooling systems, and its IT and control centre, will assure almost 98% “target acquisition” as the military jargon puts it, in restricted-audience advertising and promotion of HEAT ordnance. The myth of nuclear deterrence, and the fatuous irrelevance of the NPT Treaty is shown by this. All component parts of the civil nuclear power system are equally vulnerable to conventional military attack, especially spent fuel production and reprocessing, even using 1914-1918 war ordnance, Somali “Technicals” or home-made drone bombs.  No country with conventional civil nuclear power has any meaningful national security

Of one thing we can be sure: no leading politician in any country using civil nuclear power will admit this basic truth. This curious primitive-minded and schizophrenic separation of civil nuclear power, from military nuclear weapons, is all the more hypocritical and evil when it concerns Western leaders almost proudly using DU weapons against Afghans, Iraqis, or Libyans. This is an open and permanent challenge to attacked people and nations to hit back using “asymmetric” and devastating weapons already positioned in the Oppressor’s country: their civil nuclear Dirty Bombs.

When we wake up to a successful asymmetric nuclear weapons attack – to be sure described as an industrial accident, and then later on as a terrorist attack – it will be much too late to whine “but we didn’t know”.

Both Chernobyl and Fukushima have provided all we need to know about the weapons potential of so-called civil nuclear power. Thousands of victims of DU-caused cancers in Iraq and Afghanistan can explain to the educated middle class voters of the countries producing and using DU weapons that these are genuine nuclear weapons – which kill by cancer.

Understandably, one single case of using this asymmetric nuclear weapon in the Aggressor countries will be worth millions of words and online rantings, and those who voted for producing and using these weapons – either knowingly or not – will have paid the price of their destructive democratic decision.

So when will the discussion begin? It should begin now, before it’s too late.

–

“BRAIN-EATING AMOEBA” NAEGLERIA FOWLERI CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM

By Daniel J. DeNoon
WebMD Health News
August 19, 2011

Brain-eating amoebas have killed three young Americans this summer. What is this scary bug? How does it get to the brain? Where is it, and how can you avoid it? WebMD answers these and other questions.

What Is a Brain-Eating Amoeba?

Amoebas are single-celled organisms. The so-called brain-eating amoeba is a species discovered in 1965 and formally named Naegleria fowleri. Although first identified in Australia, this amoeba is believed to have evolved in the United States.

DANGER? Many organisms can thrive in warm fresh water, including the Naegleria fowleri.

There are several species of naegleria, but only the N. fowleri species causes human disease. 

Like other amoebas, naegleria reproduce by cell division. When conditions are less than optimal, amoebas become inactive cysts. When conditions are favorable, the cysts turn into trophozoites — their feeding form. These trophozoites can also temporarily grow tails that allow them to swim. In this tailed form they cannot eat, so they soon revert to the trophozoite stage.

Where Are Brain-Eating Amoebas Found?

Naegleria love warm temperatures and are able to survive in water as hot as 113 degrees Fahrenheit.

These amoebas can be found in warm places around the globe. They are found in:

• Warm lakes, ponds, and rock pits
• Mud puddles
• Warm, slow-flowing rivers, especially those with low water levels
• Untreated swimming pools and spas
• Untreated well water or untreated municipal water
• Hot springs and other geothermal water sources
• Thermally polluted water, such as runoff from power plants
• Aquariums
• Soil, including indoor dust

Naegleria can’t live in salt water and cannot survive in properly treated swimming pools or in treated municipal water.

Most cases of N. fowleri disease occur in Southern or Southwestern states. Over half of all infections have been in Florida and Texas. However, a recent case in Minnesota suggests either that the amoebas are more common in Northern states than previously known, or that they are spreading into these states.

How Do Amoebas Get in the Brain?

The moniker “brain-eating amoeba” makes naegleria sound like tiny zombies wandering about looking for a way into your skull. But brains are accidental food for them, says Jonathan Yoder, MPH, who tracks the deadly amoeba for the CDC.

“It is normally eating bacteria in its natural environment, but for some reason it does use the brain as a food source when it gets into humans,” Yoder tells WebMD.

If you were to drink a glass of water infested with naegleria, you would not get a brain infection. Infection occurs only after water (or perhaps dust) containing the amoeba gets into the nose.

This appears to happen most often when people are diving, water skiing, or performing water sports in which water is forced into the nose. However, infections have occurred in people who dunked their heads in hot springs or who used untreated tap water to cleanse their nostrils.

Studies suggest that N. fowleri amoebas are attracted to the chemicals that nerve cells use to communicate with one another. Once in the nose, the amoebas travel through the olfactory nerve into the frontal lobe of the brain.

How Frequently Do People Get Infected by Brain-Eating Amoebas?

Even though N. fowleri amoebas are relatively common, they only rarely cause brain disease. N. fowleri disease, known as primary amoebic meningoencephalitis or PAM, occurs from zero to eight times a year, almost always from July to September.

Worldwide, there have been some 400 reported cases. There have been 35 reported cases in the U.S. since 2001. Yoder and colleagues were able to identify 111 PAM reports in the U.S. from 1962 to 2008.

However, some cases may be unreported. A study in Virginia that looked at more than16,000 autopsy records from patients who died of meningitis found five previously unreported cases of PAM…

READ FULL REPORT HERE