5200 Pentagon Employees PURCHASED Child Pornography!

 Yes, why is this not a bigger story?

Authorities More Aware of Child Abuse Now

By John Gever, Senior Editor, MedPage Today Published: January 04, 2011 Reviewed by Dori F. Zaleznik, MD; Associate Clinical Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston and Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner

Action Points   Explain that a telephone survey study of children and adolescents found that exposure to violence was common, but authorities knew about at least one incident in nearly half of the cases. Note that this represented an increase in awareness of episodes compared with a similar study in the early 1990s. Medical personnel, police, and school officials appear to be learning about more incidents of violence against children and teens than they used to, but there is still substantial room for improvement in reporting, researchers said.    Among some 2,650 youths in a telephone survey who reported exposure to violence in the previous year, 45.7% said the authorities knew about at least one of the violent incidents, according to David Finkelhor, PhD, of the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and colleagues. A similar survey conducted in 1992 indicated that only about 25% of violent incidents were reported to schools or police. However, authorities' awareness in the current survey, reported in the January issue of Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, varied widely by the specific type of incident. For some, such as murders, school threats, and vandalism, awareness rates approached or surpassed 90%. But just 16.9% of the 1,600 respondents who reported peer or sibling assaults said the authorities knew about them. Finkelhor and colleagues reported rates of 25% or below for eight other types of incidents, including psychological or emotional abuse, bullying, genital assaults, dating violence, and rape. Still, even the low numbers were higher than in the 1992 survey, when only 6% of sex-related incidents were said to have been disclosed to police or other authorities. "The higher rates of victimizations known to authorities found in the current study may mean that past efforts to promote disclosure have been working and should be sustained," the researchers wrote. "However, the study also shows that a considerable portion of childhood/adolescent exposure to victimization is still unknown to authorities." In an accompanying editorial, two Yale University researchers called the overall findings "welcome news," insofar as they reflect an increase over time in authorities' awareness of violence affecting young people. But Andrea Gottsegen Asnes, MD, MSW, and John M. Leventhal, MD, also noted that the study showed just how common such violence is, with nearly 60% of respondents reporting at least one incident. The study "speaks to the enormity of the problem of victimization experienced by children and adolescents in our society," they wrote, and called on the clinical and public health communities to step up efforts to help young people cope with it. Finkelhor and colleagues analyzed results from a random, nationwide telephone survey conducted in 2008 that reached 4,549 children and teens up to age 17. The survey included oversampling of telephone exchanges with high proportions of African-American, Hispanic, and low income households to ensure adequate coverage of these subgroups. Final results were weighted to reflect national demographic distributions. Respondents were asked about their experiences in the preceding year with more than 40 types of violence. Of these, 26 involved direct victimization; the remainder included witnessing violent acts or knowing about violence against close friends or relatives. Just over 58% of respondents gave a positive response in at least one category. Peer and sibling assaults were the most common at 1,600, followed by emotional bullying (875), witnessing a weaponless assault (720), being assaulted with no weapon (573), and physical bullying (558). The survey also asked what specific categories of authorities knew about the incident: medical, school, or police. Overall, school authorities were the most likely to be aware of an episode -- 43.2% versus 12.7% and 1.8% for police and medical personnel, respectively. Medical authorities were most often in the dark, responses indicated. The highest percentage was 19.1% for sexual abuse by a nonspecific adult. Medical personnel knew about only 10% of caretaker abuse cases, 7.7% of assaults with a weapon, 7.4% of incidents of sexual abuse by a known adult, and 3.5% of rapes. Respondents indicated that most types of serious crimes they had witnessed had been reported to police in about 40% to 85% of cases. For incidents in which the respondents were the victims, participants believed police awareness was often much lower -- ranging from 3.4% of robberies to 34.4% of gang assaults. Finkelhor and colleagues also identified several factors that were associated with increased or decreased awareness by authorities. For nonsexual assaults, factors pointing to decreased awareness included a family member perpetrator, incidents away from school, assaults occurring in suburbs versus cities or rural areas, injuries considered minor, and a male victim (all P<0.05). Fewer factors were significantly associated with authorities' knowledge of sexual victimization, partly because such incidents were relatively uncommon. Only about 360 participants reported sex-related incidents, of which three-quarters involved sexual harassment, flashing, or consensual underage sex. Police awareness was enhanced (P<0.05) when sexual victims were African American and when perpetrators were adults. School officials were more likely to learn of incidents when serious injuries were involved, when incidents took place at school, and when children under 10 were the victims. It also appeared that police and school authorities tended to be unaware of sex-related incidents in which family members or peers were the perpetrators. "An important task is for authorities to persuade children and families that they have resources to help in these situations and that they can provide protection against retaliation for individuals who disclose their victimizations," Finkelhor and colleagues wrote. The study's chief limitation was its reliance on respondents for data on the number and type of incidents and on authorities' awareness of them although the same methodologies were used for previous studies. The survey was funded by the Department of Justice. Study authors and editorialists declared they had no relevant conflicts of interest.

Primary source: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Source reference: Finkelhor D, et al "School, police, and medical authority involvement with children who have experienced victimization" Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2011; 165: 9-15. Additional source: Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine Source reference: Asnes A, et al "Connecting the dots in childhood and adolescent trauma" Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med 2011; 165: 87-89.

This video REALLY gets me. Today remember children in Palestine, eh?

One can go mad trying to figure out "Why?" or one can decide to cut to the chase and DO something.  I choose the DO.

Stating the obvious about ABUSE and its repercussions

ACG: GI Docs Should Ask About Abuse

By Kristina Fiore, Staff Writer, MedPage Today Published: October 20, 2010

SAN ANTONIO -- Gastroenterologists may want to be attuned to signs of possible abuse or trauma among their patients, a researcher suggested here. Subtle signs -- a rectal exam that provokes tearfulness in a patient, for instance -- may indicate psychological issues that could complicate treatment for GI problems, said Douglas Drossman, MD, of the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. Drossman has been studying the link between abuse and GI disease for the last 20 years and summarized his work at the annual meeting of the American College of Gastroenterology. Delivering the American Journal of Gastroenterology lecture at the meeting, Drossman also offered advice on how fellow clinicians can address the issue of prior abuse and trauma to get patients the help they need to improve outcomes. "Being a gastroenterologist, it's not our responsibility to ask about abuse history in someone coming in with GERD, a GI bleed, or liver disease," he commented. "We're asking about it when we think that information would make a meaningful difference in outcome by identifying and treating it." Researchers have long known of an association between stress and gastrointestinal symptoms, but have only recently begun to understand the mechanisms at work between stressful life events like abuse or trauma and more serious GI problems. Drossman said the first line of evidence linking the two came from epidemiologic studies that found a higher-than-expected association of abuse history in patients with GI symptoms. Other epidemiological data have found an association between a history of abuse and poor health status in general, and that patients with prior trauma had more pain and a higher number of doctor visits. Over the past 10 years, researchers have been able to get a more profound understanding of this association with the help of brain imaging, Drossman said. He and his colleagues have been able to show that irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients who had a history of abuse had greater activation of the cingulate cortex, an area associated with pain processing. These IBS patients indeed reported greater pain, Drossman said. Other data from an Institute of Medicine report on Gulf War veterans also found an association between war trauma and the development of IBS, he added. "IBS may be facilitated by psychological stress," he commented. The question, Drossman said, is how to translate knowledge of this link into clinical practice -- acknowledging that asking patients about past abuse and trauma is not easy. However, he has identified factors that may reveal abuse, making it easier for clinicians to broach the subject. One clue, he said, may be a GI patient who presents with trust issues or feelings of vulnerability, shame, or loss of control during a visit. "Those kinds of feelings, the more you see of them, the more you think about it," he said, referring to a potential history or abuse. Other hints of past abuse or trauma may manifest themselves in physical problems, including chronic abdominal pain, morbid obesity, or eating disorders. Patients troubled by past traumas may also have a record of multiple procedures and hospitalizations for their symptoms, he added. But one of the biggest clues to past abuse may come from patient reactions to procedures like rectal exams or colonoscopy. "If we see an unusual response like tearfulness or agitation, we really should think about the link," he said. He cautioned that the greatest problem is figuring out how to break the ice and ask the tough questions. "It's easy to do that if you're doing a colonoscopy and the patient has an emotional and dramatic response," he said. "Then it's easy to say, 'I see you don't feel comfortable, has something like this happened before?'" Physicians can emphasize that evidence has shown that these issues can affect the way they manage their conditions. "It's about being gentle, and giving them the opportunity to tell you what they want to tell you," he said. "If they don't want to talk, you can register that information and say, 'If you want to talk about it, I'll be available.'" Physicians should have a psychiatrist colleague for patient referrals. Walter Coyle, MD, of the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, Calif., said many gastroenterologists aren't doing a good job of asking about past abuse and trauma. "If you do, you have to deal with the consequences of opening that door," he said. "It's not easy to ask, but I think you've got to, because there is so much abuse out there."

DHS, ICE out of control in Houston

U.S. Citizenship To Be Checked In Event Of Storm

Published on Friday, May 16, 2008.

Source: Houston Chronicle

BROWNSVILLE — Ending speculation about the fate of the Rio Grande Valley's undocumented immigrants during a hurricane evacuation, U.S. Customs and Border Protection has confirmed it will check the citizenship both of people boarding buses to leave the Valley and at inland traffic checkpoints.

Those determined to be in the country illegally will be taken to detention centers away from the hurricane's path and later processed for deportation.

"It's business as usual at the checkpoints," said Dan Doty, spokesman for CBP's Rio Grande Valley sector. "We'll still check everybody."

Locals responded with predictions of humanitarian disaster.a

"We can't wait to see the helicopter photos of us sitting on roofs," said the Rev. Mike Seifert, a priest and activist based in a colonia outside Brownsville. The many area families with one or more undocumented members would just refuse to evacuate, he said.

"Imagine," Seifert said. "We're all in an uproar, everybody's in an enormous hurry, there's just a narrow window of opportunity and you get to the place with the buses and the Border Patrol's checking people. You're not going to go."

In the disastrous wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita in 2005, officials in the Valley have pondered the politics of mass evacuation, illegal immigration and the checkpoints that filter northbound traffic every day.

After Hurricane Rita threatened the Houston area, clogging highways for miles, drying up gas pumps and creating chaos, emergency management officials set out to improve planning.

State Director of Homeland Security Steve McCraw in 2006 said the highway checkpoints should be closed if the Valley needed to evacuate. U.S. 77 parallels the coast and could be underwater once hurricane rains or flooding hit. Even if all the lanes on U.S. 281 are dedicated for northbound traffic, that's the main route for a population that now tops a million people.

Krista Piferrer, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said Thursday the state's stand on the issue had not changed.

"The governor's office prefers that the Border Patrol not use checkpoints during times of evacuation for obvious reasons," she said. "It will slow down traffic and create problems. ... During times of emergency our priority No. 1 is safety and we continue to hold on to the same belief."

At a recent discussion with reporters, Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said he didn't expect the Border Patrol to publicize a policy on the checkpoints for fear of inviting a free-for-all for illegal traffic.

The unofficial word, he said, was that agents recognized they'd have to be more lax amid a disaster.

But Tuesday, a reporter photographing a mock evacuation for the Rio Grande Guardian Web site saw Border Patrol agents rehearsing citizenship document checks of people boarding buses.

CBP's Doty confirmed this was the planned procedure and said those determined to be undocumented immigrants would be taken to separate shelters, likely detention centers in Laredo or San Antonio. He said the highway checkpoints would stay open.

Document checks are not mandatory at the checkpoints; it's up to an agent to assess travelers and determine whether to ask for papers. Doty said that even with the checks, 120,000 people could be evacuated within 80 hours.

"Our agents, they do it so often, they know what to look for," he said.

Doty could not say what would happen if children in a vehicle were citizens but parents were not, or if everybody but an elderly grandparent had a green card.

"We try to keep families together, but I can't put a U.S. citizen in a detention center," he said.

Cameron County Judge Carlos Cascos said locals would have to work with federal directives, but said document checks would hamper an evacuation.

Megen Meier story followup; New Era is Social Networking? Matthew Good

New Era In Social Networking?

A few months ago I talked about Megan Meier, a young girl who encountered verbal and emotional abuse from a classmate’s mother via MySpace. That abuse eventually led to Megan committing suicide, and sparked a whole series of internet debates about where the fault for something like that lies and how accountable social networks should be for the actions of their users.

Today Facebook announced that they will be implementing over 40 safeguards to help protect its users from sexual predators and online cyberbullying:

Facebook, the world’s second-largest social networking Web site, will add more than 40 safeguards to protect young users from sexual predators and cyberbullies, attorneys general from several states said Thursday.

Facebook and officials in 49 states and the District of Columbia agree to safeguards to protect young users.

The changes include banning convicted sex offenders from the site, limiting older users’ ability to search online for subscribers under 18 and building a task force seeking ways to better verify users’ ages and identities.

“The agreement marks another watershed step toward social networking safety, protecting kids from online predators and inappropriate content,” said Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who announced the agreement Thursday with his counterparts in several other states.

Obviously I think that’s a huge step forward for the internet, especially since both Facebook and MySpace have agreed to adopt the guidelines set out in the agreement. And while it’s impossible to protect everyone from harm on these networks, I definitely think it’s a move in the right direction.

About This Entry

• Author: Duane Storey
• Date: May 8th, 2008
• 
  

« ODM-Kenya is now a wounded horse heading for total colapse if nothing drastic is done to save it

President Kibaki calls on Kenyans to be ready for the coming elections »

Bishop Gilbert Deya tells Apn by Phone that ODM-K has promised him to become Kenya’s High Commissioner to London

Posted by africanpress on March 9, 2007

The offer of the job is as a result of Deya’s participation in ensuring funding of the election campaigns in Kenya.

Shocking news now coming out from the UK in connection with Deya’s involvement in ODM-Kenya’s cancelled trip and the promises he has been given if he helps the party with funding does not go down well with ODM-K leaders who say they are against corruption. Secret deal of this kind amounts to corruption. Giving away the post of High Commissioner in exchange with the money secretly raised by someone wanted by Kenya on the crime of child traffincking.

APN has managed to get in touch with Deya through the phone. He has revealed that there is a deal that has been struck between him and the ODM-Kenya leadership, adding that as a Kenyan he has a right to actively get involved in the ODM-K politics and also to use his influence in raising money for the party from his friends and his followers.

Deya says he has been offered to become Kenya’s High Commissioner to London if ODM-Kenya takes over power in Kenya after the coming elections.

Deya who has been accused of child trafficking, and is wanted in Kenya says that the ODM-K is a willing partner in the deal and he will raise a large sum of money that will be used in the campaigns in Kenya.

The man does not lack surprises to tell the Kenyans. When asked about the child trafficking case in Kenya and how he could be given such a high position when Kenya wants to prosecute him, Deya says that the new government of ODM-K has entered into a memorandum of understanding with Deya Ministries that the charges will be dropped if ODM-Kenya takes over, thereafter, his appointment will be made public on the 25th of February 2008.

When Apn told him that it did not make sense especially when he had a concrete date for his appointment, the man was insistant saying that according to the deal the appointment would have to wait for 2 months because a new ODM-K attorney general would have to process the case and have it withdrawn.

This now confirms why he was secretly involved in raising over 10 000 pounds and willing to clear all the bills that ODK-K leaders would incur in connection with the UK trip.

It has also emerged that the ODM-Kenya leaders while in London with Deya, were to discus unity and also agree on who the flag bearer will be. This is scary because ODM-K leaders are now allowing Deya to be a mediator in looking for a solution on who the flag bearer should be in the coming presidential elections.

Related stories:

• ODM-Kenya is now a wounded horse heading for total colapse if nothing drastic is done to save it
• ODM-Kenya leaders intended rush to the former colonial masters now cancels the trip fearing the electorate might drope them
• The bonding ODM-K trip to the UK is a waste of money
• ODM-K luminaries desperate to get visas from former colonial masters
• ODM-K travellers to UK for party unity talks
• ODM-Kenya to run to colonial masters in search for unity

By Korir, African Press in Norway, apn, africanpress@chello.no, tel +47 932 99 739 +47 6300 2525

Cabinet list fuels anti-Kalonzo sentiments in Ukambani
Daily Nation, Kenya - Apr 18, 2008
But the crusade flopped and Mrs Ngilu and Mr Mwau were among four candidates who defied the ODM-K sweep of the region’s 17 parliamentary seats. ...

KPLC asked to connect water firms
Daily Nation, Kenya - Apr 16, 2008
Mr Charles Kilonzo (Yatta, ODM-K) said the recent cholera outbreak in some parts of the country was a result of the power disconnections to water companies ...

Dallas compound case: more than meets the eye

First off - IF the person in charge had any obligation and sense of responsibility and knew what was happening at this "compound" - then why didn't she have one of her own relatives file a "referral" as that clearly would have been the RIGHT THING to do!!

With the provisions of the PATRIOT ACT, all suspicious activity is to be reported, so WHY NO REPORTS ??

The people in the "compound" OBVIOUSLY use many products - food is bought, kotex, just a whole host of products. Again, where are the suspicious activity reports that are filed?

This entire thing reeks from start to finish, and like WACO perhaps the entire story will never come out.

Any country that suffers under THEOCRATS is going to see plenty more of these in upcoming years. Score more points for The Patriarchy!! That which looks away from real harm done to anyone without POWER.

And like no one, no one at all, was watching Mr. Jeffs - and NO ONE filed a "referral"?

Oh, all of us who can read - we're just SO gullible.

Veeger

ps - ANYONE remember the Franklin Sex case? STILL covered up.




Update: Tensions Calmed At West Texas Polygamist Compound

Texas child welfare workers said Sunday they have now removed 219 women and children from a West Texas polygamous compound, but still have no positive identification of the 16-year-old girl whose abuse complaint led to the sweep.

“We didn’t know there would be this many [children], and we don’t know how many more there are,” said Marleigh Meisner, a spokeswoman for Child Protective Services.

On Saturday, officials had removed 183 women and children. So far, 18 juveniles are in state custody, meaning there was sufficient evidence of abuse or an immanent danger. The rest are being questioned to determine whether they will be placed in state care.

Tensions at a West Texas polygamous compound where investigators remain were calmed Sunday morning after law enforcement officials searched the retreat’s massive temple.

Authorities first entered the retreat, built by followers of polygamist leader Warren Jeffs, on Thursday night after a 16-year-old girl called to report that she had a child with a 50-year-old husband.

That girl, however, had not been found by Sunday afternoon. Ms. Meisner said the girls often go by different names and can be difficult to identify.

“We’re always concerned anytime we have a victim and we can’t find that victim,” said Ms. Meisner.

“I am confident this girl does indeed exist.”

In Eldorado, a ranching town with fewer than 2,000 residents, some struggled Sunday morning to help protect and care for the new faces in their midst, many of whom may have never left the retreat before. Of the 219 taken in, 159 are children.

“They seem very stoic, very strong,” pastor Andy Anderson of First Baptist Church said of the women. “Clearly this has been emotional, but they are great mothers.”

About 70 of the women and children, wearing old-fashioned dresses and uniform hair braids, were housed in the church’s fellowship hall until mid-day Sunday when they were whisked away in school buses flanked by state troopers. All of the women and children taken from the compound were being relocated to a San Angelo facility where they can receive therapy and medical attention, Ms. Meisner said. She said a state district judge recommended that all the children from the compound be relocated to better facilitate interviews and care.

“This has been a tense situation for all involved,” Ms. Meisner said.

“I think they’re doing remarkably well considering the circumstances.”

Mr. Anderson said cots were brought in from a nearby Air Force base and grocery store donations helped with other supplies. Buses had been taking the women and children from the church to the local high school for showers.

“That compound has put Eldorado on the map,” Mr. Anderson said. “We’re used to the scrutiny. Whenever we go out of town, that’s all that everybody seems to know about us.”

State troopers armed with a search warrant swept through the compound on Friday to look for evidence of a marriage between the 16-year-old girl, who allegedly had a baby at 15, and 50-year-old Dale Barlow. Under Texas law, girls younger than 16 cannot marry, even with parental approval.

Mr. Barlow’s probation officer told The Salt Lake Tribune that he was in Arizona.

“He said the authorities had called him [in Colorado City, Ariz.] and some girl had accused him of assaulting her and he didn’t even know who she was,” said Bill Loader, a probation officer in Arizona.

The retreat, part of the The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, was taken over by Mr. Jeffs after his father’s death in 2002. It splintered from the Mormon church more than a century ago.

Mr. Jeffs is now jailed in Kingman, Ariz., awaiting trial for four counts each of incest and sexual conduct with a minor stemming from two arranged marriages between teenage girls and their older male relatives.

In November, he was sentenced to two consecutive sentences of five years to life in prison in Utah for being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old girl who wed her cousin in an arranged marriage in 2001.

The West Texas compound, on a 1,700-acre ranch, sits down a narrow paved road and behind a hill that shields it almost entirely from view in town. Only the 80-foot-high, white temple can be seen from a distance. State troopers continued to block roads into and out of the compound on Sunday.

“CPS can only go in and do an investigation if we receive a referral,” Ms. Meisner said when asked why authorities had not acted sooner.

“This is the first referral that we’ve had.

Keeping up with our SECRETS EXPOSED meme of 2008

I could "Run" this without saying anything.

But I KNOW about these things. I've had experience with THESE Things.

And there is truly a Dark Side. And I've had people dumping information right into my "lap" for the past three weeks about Vancouver, Berlin and Portugal the truth be told.

Virginia
Sorry about the underlines - if you don't like them, go to the site.

Beyond the Dutroux Affair
The reality of protected child abuse and snuff networks
July 25, 2007 [Smaller articles will be uploaded without any announcements made on the front page]

Ever since the Dutroux affair broke in August 1996, there have been rumors that its central character was part of a wider network of child abusers. Some might remember the video
Many of these blank faces will not be so anonymous anymore after reading this article. <>tapes that were allegedly found in Dutroux's houses and about which nothing was heard anymore (this actually was an unfounded rumor); others might remember statements from Dutroux about being a "pawn" in a network protected by police and justice officials. However, these reports are not even the tip of the iceberg of what has actually been going on in Belgium. To really gain some understanding of what the Dutroux affair was all about, we need to take a step back and see all the other aspects which at least in the early years made up the Dutroux investigation. It will soon become obvious that by early 1997, Dutroux had become almost a mere footnote in scandal that really had begun to threaten the very existence of Belgium. Besides a whole range of petty criminals, secret investigations were also being opened against an ever increasing amount of politicians, bankers, police officers and magistrates.

It was only after a number of strategic changes in the investigative chain of command had been made that a beginning could be made with shutting down all the inconvenient parallel investigations which had sprung up in the weeks and months after Dutroux had been arrested. The cooperation of the vast majority of the media in this cover up has been crucial.

This article will attempt to spread the many forgotten and unreported details of the Dutroux affair to the English-speaking world, which not only in numbers, but also in terms of
percentages, is much more open to conspiracy affairs than the Dutch, Belgians or French (although things are rapidly changing here too). There are a number of important differences between this article and previous publications though: 1) In this article you can find all the names of the alleged abusers which had to be taken out of mainstream books and publications to avoid massive libel suits. 2) A leaked official document from the Dutroux investigation has been included with this article, leaving no doubt these names have actually been mentioned (often repeatedly). I recommend you download both this article		Pictures of Etienne Davignon and Maurice Lippens at Bilderberg, superimposed on extracts (and a picture) from the X-Dossiers.
and the leaked document, and put both of them on the net in case this article disappears one day. 3) Because names are mentioned in this article, together with very extensive biographies, it was far easier to describe the big picture, which might be an important thing to do.*

* Then again, I'm a largely anonymous conspiracy theorist; the ones who wrote, for example, the book 'De X-Dossiers' were respected journalists. I can get away with theorizing about the big picture; they cannot.

Daily Mail paints picture of Portugal very similar to PEHI's 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair'
Additionally: a brief state of affairs on PEHI
October 21, 2007

First of all, I want to thank everyone who read -or attempted to read- the 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' article, and especially those who commented on it and spread it around to friends, newspapers and occasionally to their favorite artists.

You might think otherwise when reading newspaper or skeptics magazine articles on these subjects, but even when faced with such extremely disturbing facts as described in this article, when it is well-referenced, the vast majority of people (tens of thousands have come across it by now) remain very open-minded.

And that's quite amazing, considering that even I, by the time I reached part 15, regularly said to myself, "How the hell did I end up discussing this? Should I really go this far?" But then you go over the facts again, and if you want to prevent self-censorship for fear of being "discredited", you just have to address the obvious possibilities, no matter how uncomfortable they sound; and that's just what has been done. And you know what, judging from all the responses, PEHI is creating far more conspiracy theorists than skeptics.

Daily Mail on Dr. Kelly
Speaking of conspiracy theorists, the latest victim of this most unfortunate mental disease appears to be The Daily Mail. I just did my routine check of Prisonplanet and came across a Daily Mail article about Dr. David Kelly, the scientist who was found dead in the woods right after criticizing the WMD dossier in the run up to the Iraq invasion.

The newspaper discusses the new book of Norman Baker, a Member of Parliament, who conducted a year long investigation into the death of Dr. Kelly. What's so interesting is that the Daily Mail doesn't take the "skeptical" approach; it just lays out the story as told by Baker (actually, Baker wrote it, apparently without a lot of editing): Kelly was assassinated in a "wet operation", likely by CIA and MI6 assets. To make matters worse, official investigators have been covering up the crime and nosy investigators were tracked down and intimidated.

This is quite an amazing article. I've recently gone through hundreds upon hundreds of British and US newspaper articles dealing with conspiracies and it is very, very rare for newspapers to not attempt to undermine the credibility of the conspiracy advocate (no matter what his or her rank) by personal attacks, one-sided reporting and deceptive arguments. It's quite amazing that Baker has been allowed to speak his mind so freely in such a major publication. Compare it for example with the article from The Independent, which offers a far more familiar approach.

Daily Mail on Casa Pia and McCann
Because of my article on the X-Dossiers, I've been asked several times about Madelaine McCann case. A summary of my opinion is contained in an email reply from September 21:

"[I hardly followed the case, but] if I had to guess, the McCann's were smeared by the Portuguese police. One of the reasons I think that is because in other cases of child abuse (Belgian) where the parents have been implicated, the parents always tried to keep a low profile. That's exactly the opposite of the McCann's. Also, in the few instances that I followed the McCann case I noticed how the Portuguese police used cherry-picked excerpts from the mother's diary which, I thought, were unjustly meant to paint the mother as someone who wanted to get rid of her daughter. But like I said, I hardly followed the case. "

Besides the David Kelly story, another highly revealing article can be found on the Daily Mail frontpage, this time about the Madelaine McCann case.

In 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair', it was described how a cabal of highest level players, including judges, lawyers, top bankers, prime ministers and aristocrats were involved in child abuse and snuff networks (going right up to Bilderberg and the Nazi Stay-Behind networks). It was also described how this cabal could place their own investigators in leading positions of the child abuse investigations and dismantle it by blocking important inquiries, putting detectives on false leads, and making carefully planned leaks to friendly newspapers.

The Daily Mail article relates the same thing, and although they largely quote someone else's opinion, it is clear they support the conspiracy point of view, for instance because they do not ridicule the victim-witnesses; at the same time they paint the worst picture possible of Goncalo Amaral, the police chief accused of manipulating the McCann investigation. A rather long excerpt (not about Amaral):

"As well as growing fears that Madeleine was abducted by a paedophile ring, they can have little hope of justice when leading Portuguese figures are allegedly involved in covering-up their own child sex scandal. Both cases [Casa Pia and McCann] - the two highest profile criminal investigations in the country since the end of the Portuguese military dictatorship in 1974 - have been riven by allegations of compromised police officers, high-level interference and vicious, virulent attacks on key witnesses.

Pedro Namora, a former Casa Pia orphan who witnessed 11 rapes on fellow orphans, during which they were tied to their beds, sympathises with the McCanns. He believes elements in the force have conspired to suppress both scandals, fearing damage to the country's reputation.

"Portugal is a paedophiles' paradise," said Mr Namora, now a lawyer campaigning on behalf of the Casa Pia victims. "If all the names come out, this will be an earthquake in Portugal. There is a massive, sophisticated network at play here - stretching from the government to the judiciary and the police.

"The network is enormous and extremely powerful. There are magistrates, ambassadors, police, politicians - all have procured children from Casa Pia. It is extremely difficult to break this down. These people cover for each other, because if one is arrested, they all are arrested. They don't want anyone to know."

Now 44, Mr Namora watched as friends sank into alcoholism, drug addiction and death after their traumatic childhood experiences at Casa Pia. "I was the only one who made it," he said. "What could I do? I couldn't keep silent."

He has received death threats and warnings about what will happen to his own children, after taking up the case when an orphan called "Joel" approached him, saying prominent paedophiles were using Casa Pia as a "supermarket for children".

Mr Namora has been threatened after fighting on behalf of the abused children he grew up with.

After being telephoned by a stranger offering to pay off his mortgage, he was told the exact movements of his own three children, and warned that they and their father would come to a grisly end unless he shut up." ...

Teresa Costa Macedo, a former secretary of state for the family, has revealed that she knew about the attacks in the early Eighties - and that she had alerted General Antonio Ramalho Eanes, the then Portuguese president, about the allegations.

Mrs Costa Macedo, who remained silent for two decades after being warned she would be killed if she spoke, now says that the caretaker "was just one element in a huge paedophile network that involved important people in our country. It wasn't just him [the caretaker]. He was a procurer of children for well-known people who range from diplomats and politicians to people linked to the media".

Although not a whole lot, in the past the British press has written very decent articles about child abuse networks in such countries as the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy and Russia. But interestingly, there has seldom been any real follow-up on these initial articles and the British press continues to fail to write in depth about the child abuse scandals in their own country. Also in this case I've gone over hundreds of British news reports about child abuse going back to the late 1980s, but only a small percentage was interesting enough to be used in the 'Beyond the Dutroux Affair' article. This new Daily Mail article is a great addition; hopefully more will follow.

State of affairs on PEHI

Several articles are being worked on, with one in particular taking up a lot of time. A lot of these articles will be published at the same time, probably somewhere in the first half of 2008. Smaller articles will be uploaded without any announcements made on the front page

William Bloom on Does Everyone Create Their Own Reality.

DOES EVERYONE "CREATE THEIR OWN REALITY"? By William Bloom

Sunday, 02 December 2007

ORIGINAL ARTICLE I wrote this for Cygnus Magazine in June 2007. The editors asked me to write something in response to some of the terrible comments around the kidnapping in Portugal of the little girl and other comments concerning Darfur and other world crises. Over the years it has been an honor for me to advance and defend new age and holistic spirituality. I love its open-mindedness, its embrace of metaphysics and the way it combines spiritual work with healthcare. But I have also despaired at times about its apparent lack of morality and compassion when faced with the realities of people’s suffering. This coldness is often explained away with half-baked ideas about how energies, karma and the laws of attraction work. This often reaches a peak of disturbing smugness when a new age ‘philosopher’ faced with cruel suffering says authoritatively: ‘People create their own reality’ or ‘Their soul chose it – its their karma’ or ‘Everything is perfect in God’s Plan – you just need to perceive it differently’. People who say such things seem to have no idea how smug and nasty they sound. Nor of the hurt they cause. Fourteen years ago I had a lower back crisis in which three disks herniated and a tendon tore. The pain was as high on the scale as it can go. I was bed-ridden, then on sticks and it took seven years to recover. Early on, as I hobbled awkwardly on sticks, a new age woman came up to me, poked her face in mine and loudly stated, ‘You know what Louise Hay says about lower back crises, don’t you!’ She was typical of many. A friend recently had a severe heart crisis, was suddenly taken to hospital and told that his life was at risk. He told me that what really frightened him was the thought of informing his spiritual friends, because they would use it as an opportunity to be self-righteous and tell him what he was getting wrong in his life. Of course in both my and his case there were good lessons to be learned, but our life or mobility were threatened and we deserved compassionate friendliness. Isn’t spiritual development about increasing compassion and love? It does not help to have someone chiming, ‘You asked for it. Told you so.’ Even if we did create those illnesses, kindness and support are needed so that we can begin to understand the process.. These minor examples of personal distress are nothing compared to the more dramatic tragedies being endured on the world stage. What follows is recent testimony from a woman at the centre of the Darfur crisis (New Internationalist, June 2007): ‘My baby boy was thrown on the fire in front of me. My daughter was older. They thought she was a boy so they slaughtered her too – they snapped her neck like a chicken. Some of the children they threw down a well …. After they raped the women they cut off their breasts to make them suffer. They used those of us who were left as donkeys.’ Her experience is not unique. Recently too there has been the incident of the little girl kidnapped in Portugal, the tip of an iceberg of the sexual abuse faced by hundreds of thousands of children every day, not to mention the thirty thousand children who daily die of starvation. In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart. ~ Anne Frank. Surely all this suffering can only be approached with stillness, humility and wisdom of the heart. Not with half-baked metaphysics and denial. It is pure ignorance, shameful and cold-hearted emotional cruelty to suggest that these women and children asked for this destiny, deserved it, chose it or created their own reality. It completely misunderstands karma and the laws of attraction. There is a frequent error of assuming that souls have complete control and choice over their incarnations. New souls entering for the first time, for example, may simply be drawn to where there is a newly conceived fetus. They may have no choice but to participate in the collective rhythm and cycle. There are more dynamics in incarnation than simple choice. Equally we do not create our lives in isolation. We pass through collective historical and karmic events over which we may have little individual power. We are participants as souls and as biological creatures in a constellation of relationships that includes our species, our gender, our family, our ancestors, our ethnicity and faith. Our parents and children, for example, are within us, as we are also within them. We are not just individual souls creating our own individual lives and futures. We are also subjects of the group soul and our histories and futures are entwined. As a species we have created a shared karma of suffering, and it is as a collective that we experience, redeem and heal it. The collective affects even the most forceful individual. The redemption of all this lies in the fact that each of us has the freedom and power to adopt our own inner attitude regardless of circumstances. I am inspired, for example, by the Catholic priests who chose the way of self-sacrifice and walked with their Jewish parishioners into the Nazi gas chambers. The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. ~ Edmund Burke It is also completely banal and naïve to suggest that everything in God’s world is good and that it is all a matter of perception. Faced with the reality of a three-year old child being sexually abused, it is simply not possible to make such a statement and be moral. It is in facing reality, not denying it, being in our hearts, that we grow and become wiser. At the same time I fully appreciate how difficult it is to be fully present to suffering. For some people it is overwhelming because it triggers their own pain. But sooner or later on the spiritual path we have to develop the courage and strength to stay stable and loving when faced with these horrors. In the words of Carl Jung: One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.

The 51st State in the Union: PTSD

Murder, madness, mayhem. Incest, child abuse, spouse abuse. Treason, perjury, malfeasance.

Americans are consuming an increasing diet of emotional toxic waste, which grows more poisonous with each new technological advance in communications. If the psychological damage on American citizens gets any worse, we'll have to add Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome as the 51st State in the Union.

More than ever, we are exposed to violence on a never before seen scale. Because of this overwhelming exposure to violence and mayhem, Americans are becoming twitchier than ever before. The result of this exposure to family violence, neighborhood violence, school and workplace violence, and now, the violence of war, is generating an increasing cycle of trauma, drug use, alcohol use, escapism, and, yes, more violence.

A mile across town, in the heart of the ‘Hood, an out of control crack head throws a tantrum in front of her teenaged relatives, and conducts a three way conversation with the imaginary people who live inside her head. She airs a litany of complaints, and blames her addiction and out of control lifestyle on everything from a purported rape attack in childhood by one her mother’s boyfriends, to a recent out of town pistol- whipping.

No one, but no one, she claims, can understand what she has gone through. Her situation is unique and her selfish family isn’t giving her proper attention. To punish them, she punishes herself. Or threatens to.

For years, she made allegations that one of her mother’s boyfriends raped her when she was a child. Her mother slid from the addiction of nightclubs, to the addiction of “the church”, with the ease of a seasoned emotional escape artist. A love affair with the powerful dynamics of the herd mentality in the nightclub soon transformed itself into a toxic addiction to "church".

After being left alone and ignored as small children now the addict and her brothers and sisters suffered the consequences of being the offspring of the ‘barfly cum church fly’, leaving her children to fend for themselves as children, and live with the consequences of her emotional abandonment as adults.

Some became sexually promiscuous. Others acted out, turned to both sex and drugs as escapes. And one, turned to promiscuity, drug use, theft, prostitution, emotional blackmail and attempted suicide.

For more than 20 years she has slid in and out of sobriety and dependency, building a nest of chaos and confusion in her wake. In many ways, her claim of rape is validated by her behavior. She’s almost a pattern card for post-rape Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD).

Psychiatric authorities point to a number of causes and consequences of PTSD, including rape, sexual and physical abuse, repeated trauma, lack of social and parental support, fires and being in a war zone. Consequences include disassociation, acting out, substance abuse, eating disorders and promiscuity. (Roy Lubit, MD, PhD, Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Children). Lubit says another consequence of PTSD “is the multiple emotional and behavioral problems that can arise…substance abuse, aggression, eating disorders, sexual acting out…”

For children, the anxiety associated with PTSD often keeps them unable to adequately deal with normal childhood experiences such as school. Some authorities believe that PTSD symptom may often be confused with various types of attention deficit disorders. Hence, many children who are doped up on drugs for hyperactivity may be suffering from PTSD.

As is probably the case of the out of control crack head, whose relatives have gotten so many late night suicide prevention calls from the police that they no longer answer her calls. Relatives are raising her children as best as they can, trying to fend off her dangerous attempts at “motherhood” and “aunthood”, both ineffective attempts may be causing additional PTSD problems with her children, nieces and nephews.

Unable to sustain employment, other than selling sex on the street, she has stolen from family and friends, and isn’t shy about lifting the occasional item from a drug store or grocery, if she thinks she can get away with it. Degradation is in her bones, and she wears her madness like an unwashed second skin.

She courts death like a child playing with a favorite toy, intimately and with abandon. The only thing that annoys the snot out of her is that her family no longer wants to play the game. She lost her “control” over her relatives and long-gone friends a long time ago.

They simply got tired of being at the mercy of an emotional vampire, whose out of control street stories and tales of being gang raped, robbed and beaten brought the filth of the streets into their living rooms. The sympathy button has been turned off and her relatives have long since tired of the aborted attempts at detox, and the twitchy, out of control behavior, which takes far too much energy to deal with. They have their own lives and their own children—and they’ll kick her to the curb in a hot minute if it means protecting the children.

Her presence, her conversation, everything to do with her is toxic and is capable of contaminating others in its wake. Her family protects itself as much as possible but the entire situation is a prime example of the delayed effect of childhood sexual abuse.

A medical journal notes that “Studies of adults who were sexually or physically abused as children demonstrate significantly higher rates of emotional problems (72-100%)” than they do as children, leaving many to conclude that childhood abuse may present problems more in later life than in childhood. In short, the adult madness that the crack addict is displaying has exploded more in adulthood than in childhood.

Like this family, too many of today’s children and their care givers are caught up in a maelstrom of malicious events over which neither they have control. Farm children see their parents, grandparents and relatives hauled off their farms in chains. The children of crime suspects are given over to over-burdened Child Welfare Authorities, and are often abused more in the foster home than the “abusive” home from which they were taken. Little old ladies die of heart attacks when drug agents kick in the wrong apartment door—theirs. Children huddle against one another in classrooms, as another out of control child with an assault rifle mows down their fellow students and teaches. And, dangerously estranged boyfriends and husbands gun women down in their workplaces or right on the courthouse lawn.

We can run, but we cannot hide. The 24-hour news cycle won’t let us. Usually, there is enough madness in the US to keep the channels spewing fear and madness, but if the crazies in America go on vacation, there’s always the war to fall back on.

The old saying is still true. Violence begets violence. And madness, too. So, if your neurotic, alcoholic, crack head or meth freak relative is getting on your nerves, just turn on the television, or head to the computer and wallow in somebody else’s misery. It’s all there. And, best of all: it belongs to somebody else.

Diabetes and other diseases of OPPRESSION

I realize that this is a very long post. The New York Times makes you enter a password to read it. So I decided, ho hum, I'll have to post it in its entirety here. This is a very upsetting scenario indeed. Twenty thousand hours watching TV ads for junk (read: crap) food. Meanwhile, fees are charged for exercise and athletic programs at schools.

I pointed out to the NYT that alot of this had to do with Big Pharma prescriptions. I think that they are SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWly catching on.

Diseases of oppression and the working poor must be ERADICATED.

January 9, 2006

Bad Blood
Diabetes and Its Awful Toll Quietly Emerge as a Crisis

By N. R. KLEINFIELD
Begin on the sixth floor, third room from the end, swathed in fluorescence: a 60-year-old woman was having two toes sawed off. One floor up, corner room: a middle-aged man sprawled, recuperating from a kidney transplant. Next door: nerve damage. Eighth floor, first room to the left: stroke. Two doors down: more toes being removed. Next room: a flawed heart.

As always, the beds at Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx were filled with a universe of afflictions. In truth, these assorted burdens were all the work of a single illness: diabetes. Room after room, floor after floor, diabetes. On any given day, hospital officials say, nearly half the patients are there for some trouble precipitated by the disease.

An estimated 800,000 adult New Yorkers - more than one in every eight - now have diabetes, and city health officials describe the problem as a bona fide epidemic. Diabetes is the only major disease in the city that is growing, both in the number of new cases and the number of people it kills. And it is growing quickly, even as other scourges like heart disease and cancers are stable or in decline.

Already, diabetes has swept through families, entire neighborhoods in the Bronx and broad slices of Brooklyn, where it is such a fact of life that people describe it casually, almost comfortably, as "getting the sugar" or having "the sweet blood."

But as alarmed as health officials are about the present, they worry more about what is to come.
Within a generation or so, doctors fear, a huge wave of new cases could overwhelm the public health system and engulf growing numbers of the young, creating a city where hospitals are swamped by the disease's handiwork, schools scramble for resources as they accommodate diabetic children, and the work force abounds with the blind and the halt.

The prospect is frightening, but it has gone largely unnoticed outside public health circles. As epidemics go, diabetes has been a quiet one, provoking little of the fear or the prevention efforts inspired by AIDS or lung cancer.

In its most common form, diabetes, which allows excess sugar to build up in the blood and exact ferocious damage throughout the body, retains an outdated reputation as a relatively benign sickness of the old. Those who get it do not usually suffer any symptoms for years, and many have a hard time believing that they are truly ill.

Yet a close look at its surge in New York offers a disturbing glimpse of where the city, and the rest of the world, may be headed if diabetes remains unchecked.

The percentage of diabetics in the city is nearly a third higher than in the nation. New cases have been cropping up close to twice as fast as cases nationally. And of adults believed to have the illness, health officials estimate, nearly one-third do not know it.

One in three children born in the United States five years ago are expected to become diabetic in their lifetimes, according to a projection by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forecast is even bleaker for Latinos: one in every two.

New York, perhaps more than any other big city, harbors all the ingredients for a continued epidemic. It has large numbers of the poor and obese, who are at higher risk. It has a growing population of Latinos, who get the disease in disproportionate numbers, and of Asians, who can develop it at much lower weights than people of other races.

It is a city of immigrants, where newcomers eating American diets for the first time are especially vulnerable. It is also yielding to the same forces that have driven diabetes nationally: an aging population, a food supply spiked with sugars and fats, and a culture that promotes overeating and discourages exercise.

Diabetes has no cure. It is progressive and often fatal, and while the patient lives, the welter of medical complications it sets off can attack every major organ. As many war veterans lost lower limbs last year to the disease as American soldiers did to combat injuries in the entire Vietnam War. Diabetes is the principal reason adults go blind.

So-called Type 2 diabetes, the predominant form and the focus of this series, is creeping into children, something almost unheard of two decades ago. The American Diabetes Association says the disease could actually lower the average life expectancy of Americans for the first time in more than a century.

Even those who do not get diabetes will eventually feel it, experts say - in time spent caring for relatives, in higher taxes and insurance premiums, and in public spending diverted to this single illness.

"Either we fall apart or we stop this," said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, commissioner of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Yet he and other public health officials acknowledge that their ability to slow the disease is limited. Type 2 can often be postponed and possibly prevented by eating less and exercising more. But getting millions of people to change their behavior, he said, will require some kind of national crusade.

The disease can be controlled through careful monitoring, lifestyle changes and medication that is constantly improving, and plenty of people live with diabetes for years without serious symptoms. But managing it takes enormous effort. Even among Americans who know they have the disease, about two-thirds are not doing enough to treat it.

Nearly 21 million Americans are believed to be diabetic, according to the Centers for Disease Control, and 41 million more are prediabetic; their blood sugar is high, and could reach the diabetic level if they do not alter their living habits.

In this sedentary nation, New York is often seen as an island of thin people who walk everywhere. But as the ranks of American diabetics have swelled by a distressing 80 percent in the last decade, New York has seen an explosion of cases: 140 percent more, according to the city's health department. The proportion of diabetics in its adult population is higher than that of Los Angeles or Chicago, and more than double that of Boston.

There was a pronounced increase in diagnosed cases nationwide in 1997, part of which was undoubtedly due to changes in the definition of diabetes and in the way data was collected, though there has continued to be a marked rise ever since.

Yet for years, public health authorities around the country have all but ignored chronic illnesses like diabetes, focusing instead on communicable diseases, which kill far fewer people. New York, with its ambitious and highly praised public health system, has just three people and a $950,000 budget to outwit diabetes, a disease soon expected to afflict more than a million people in the city.

Tuberculosis, which infected about 1,000 New Yorkers last year, gets $27 million and a staff of almost 400.

Diabetes is "the Rodney Dangerfield of diseases," said Dr. James L. Rosenzweig, the director of disease management at the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston. As fresh cases and their medical complications pile up, the health care system tinkers with new models of dispensing care and then forsakes them, unable to wring out profits. Insurers shun diabetics as too expensive. In Albany, bills aimed at the problem go nowhere.

"I will go out on a limb," said Dr. Frieden, the health commissioner, "and say, 20 years from now people will look back and say: 'What were they thinking? They're in the middle of an epidemic and kids are watching 20,000 hours of commercials for junk food.' "

Of course, revolutionary new treatments or a cure could change everything. Otherwise, the price will be steep. Nationwide, the disease's cost just for 2002 - from medical bills to disability payments and lost workdays - was conservatively put by the American Diabetes Association at $132 billion. All cancers, taken together, cost the country an estimated $171 billion a year.

"How bad is the diabetes epidemic?"

asked Frank Vinicor, associate director for public health practice at the Centers for Disease Control. "There are several ways of telling. One might be how many different occurrences in a 24-hour period of time, between when you wake up in the morning and when you go to sleep. So, 4,100 people diagnosed with diabetes, 230 amputations in people with diabetes, 120 people who enter end-stage kidney disease programs and 55 people who go blind.

"That's going to happen every day, on the weekends and on the Fourth of July," he said. "That's diabetes."

One Day in the Trenches

The rounds began on the seventh floor with Iris Robles. She was 26, young for this, supine in bed. She wore a pink "Chicks Rule" T-shirt; an IV line protruded from her arm. For more than a year, she had had a recurrent skin infection. The pain overwhelmed her. Then came extreme thirst and the loss of 50 pounds in six weeks. In the emergency room, she found out she had diabetes.

She was out of work, wanted to be an R & B singer, had no insurance. It was her fourth day in Montefiore Medical Center. Her grandmother, aunt and two cousins have diabetes.
"I'm scared," she said. "I'm still adjusting to it."

Next came Richard Dul, watching news chatter on a compact TV. Now 64, he has had diabetes since he was 22. A month before, he had a blockage in his heart and needed open-heart surgery. He was home a few days, but an infection arose and he was back. Postoperative infections are more common with diabetes. This was his 21st straight day in the hospital.

Here, then, was the price of diabetes, not just the dollars and cents but the high cost in quality of life.

Simply put, diabetes is a condition in which the body has trouble turning food into energy. All bodies break down digested food into a sugar called glucose, their main source of fuel. In a healthy person, the hormone insulin helps glucose enter the cells. But in a diabetic, the pancreas fails to produce enough insulin, or the body does not properly use it. Cells starve while glucose builds up in the blood.

There are two predominant types of diabetes. In Type 1, the immune system destroys the cells in the pancreas that make insulin. In Type 2, which accounts for an estimated 90 percent to 95 percent of all cases, the body's cells are not sufficiently receptive to insulin, or the pancreas makes too little of it, or both.

Type 1 used to be called "juvenile diabetes" and Type 2 "adult-onset diabetes." By 1997, so many children had developed Type 2 that the Diabetes Association changed the names.
What is especially disturbing about the rise of Type 2 is that it can be delayed and perhaps prevented with changes in diet and exercise. For although both types are believed to stem in part from genetic factors, Type 2 is also spurred by obesity and inactivity. This is particularly true in those prone to the illness. Plenty of fat, slothful people do not get diabetes. And some thin, vigorous people do.

The health care system is good at dispensing pills and opening up bodies, and with diabetes it had better be, because it has proved ineffectual at stopping the disease. People typically have it for 7 to 10 years before it is even diagnosed, and by that time it will often have begun to set off grievous consequences. Thus, most treatment is simply triage, doctors coping with the poisonous complications of patients who return again and again.

Diabetics are two to four times more likely than others to develop heart disease or have a stroke, and three times more likely to die of complications from flu or pneumonia, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Most diabetics suffer nervous-system damage and poor circulation, which can lead to amputations of toes, feet and entire legs; even a tiny cut on the foot can lead to gangrene because it will not be seen or felt.

Women with diabetes are at higher risk for complications in pregnancy, including miscarriages and birth defects. Men run a higher risk of impotence. Young adults have twice the chance of getting gum disease and losing teeth.

And people with Type 2 are often hounded by parallel problems - high blood pressure and high cholesterol, among others - brought on not by the diabetes, but by the behavior that led to it, or by genetics.

Dr. Monica Sweeney, medical director of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Family Health Center, offered an analogy: "It's like bad kids. If you have one bad kid, not so bad. Two bad kids, it's worse. Put five bad kids together and it's unmanageable. Diabetes is like five bad kids together. You want to scream."

The Caro Research Institute, a consulting firm that evaluates the burden of diseases, estimates that a diabetic without complications will incur medical costs of $1,600 a year - unpleasant, but not especially punishing. But the price tag ratchets up quickly as related ailments set in: an average $30,400 for a heart attack or amputation, $40,200 for a stroke, $37,000 for end-stage kidney disease.

One of the most horrific consequences is losing a leg. According to the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, some 70 percent of lower-limb amputations in 2003 were performed on diabetics. Sometimes, the subtraction is cumulative. One toe goes. Two more. The ankle. Everything to the knee. The other leg. Studies suggest that as many as 70 percent of amputees die within five years.

Yet medical experts believe that most diabetes-related amputations are preventable with scrupulous care, and that is why the offices of conscientious doctors post signs like this: "All patients with diabetes: Don't forget to bare your feet each visit."

To witness the pitiless course that diabetes can take, simply continue on the hospital tour. This one day will do. Dr. Rita Louard, an endocrinologist, and Anne Levine, a nurse diabetes educator, were making their way through the rooms at Montefiore.

Here was Julius Rivers, 58, on the sixth floor. Three years with diabetes. He had been at home in bed when he saw a light like a starburst and told his wife to take him to the emergency room. His blood sugar was 1,400, beyond the pale. (A fasting level of 126 milligrams per deciliter is the demarcation point of diabetes.)

This was his third trip to the hospital in seven months. At the moment, he had a blood clot in his left leg. He had a heart attack a few years ago. He was on dialysis. "Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday," he said.

On the sixth floor was Mauri Stein, 58, a guidance counselor, a diabetic for 20 years. She had been at a party recently and "zoned out." Her words slurred. Foam appeared on her mouth. She had had a mild stroke.

Now she tried to control her emotions, tried not to cry. She had had repeated laser surgery on her eyes, and was effectively blind in one. She had recovered from the stroke, but doctors had also found a tumor on her heart and said it would need surgery.

"My feet burn," she said. "My toes burn all the time. My days of wearing my pumps are over. I've gotten more cortisone shots in my feet than I'm sure are legal."

She mentioned her brother, who lived in California. Diabetes had ransacked his body - an amputation, kidney dialysis, heart disease, blindness in one eye. He now resided in an assisted-living center. He was 53.

Ms. Stein's husband walked in and sat on the bed. Six months ago, he found out the same truth: he had diabetes.

This was one day in one hospital.

Inside the Incubator

Little about diabetes is straightforward, and to comprehend why New York is such an incubator for the disease, it is necessary to grasp that diabetes is as much a sociological and anthropological story as a medical one. While it assaults all classes, ages and ethnic groups, it is inextricably bound up with race and money.

Diabetes bears an inverse relationship to income, for poverty usually means less access to fresh food, exercise and health care. New York's poverty rate, 20.3 percent, is much higher than the nation's, 12.7 percent.

African-Americans and Latinos, particularly Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans, incur diabetes at close to twice the rate of whites. More than half of all New Yorkers are black or Hispanic, and the Hispanic population is growing rapidly, as it is around the nation.

Some Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders also appear more prone, and they can develop the disease at much lower weights. Asians constitute one-tenth of New York's population, more than twice their proportion nationwide.

The nature of these groups' susceptibility remains under study, but researchers generally blame an interplay of genetic and socioeconomic forces. Many researchers believe that higher proportions of these groups have a "thrifty gene" that enabled ancestors who farmed and hunted to stockpile fat during times of plenty so they would not starve during periods of want. In modern America, with food beckoning on every corner, the gene works perversely, causing them to accumulate unhealthy quantities of fat.

But the velocity of new cases among all races has accelerated significantly from just a few decades ago. Genetics cannot explain this surge, because the human gene pool does not change that fast. Instead, the culprit is thought to be behavior: faulty diet and inactivity. Dr. Vinicor, of the Centers for Disease Control, likes to use this expression: "Genetics may load the cannon, but human behavior pulls the trigger."

Of the country's spike in diabetes cases over the last two decades, C.D.C. studies suggest that about 60 percent stem from demographic changes: a population increasingly comprising older people and ethnic groups with a higher risk.

The studies ascribe the other 40 percent to lifestyle changes: the fundamental shift that has people eating jumbo meals and shunning exercise as if it were illegal. At every turn, technology has made physical activity unnecessary or unappealing. Gym class has largely been deleted from schools. Fewer than a third of junior high schools require physical education at all, the C.D.C. says.

On the whole, New York's corpulence is below the national average, with 20 percent of adults qualifying as obese, compared with 30 percent for the country, the C.D.C. says. But the figure is much higher in poor areas like the South Bronx and East Harlem.

When the health department studied diabetes in the city's 34 major neighborhoods, the distribution echoed demographic patterns: Diabetes left only a light imprint on more affluent, white areas like the Upper West Side and Brooklyn Heights. The prevalence was about average in working-class Ridgewood, Queens, and almost nil on the Upper East Side.

But that apparent immunity is weakening. Of those 34 neighborhoods, 22 already have diabetes rates above the national average, and the numbers are rising all over as the city continually remakes itself.

"New York is switching from a mom-and-pop type of environment to a chain-store type of environment, a proliferation of fast food, even in high-rent neighborhoods they haven't had access to before, like the East Village and Lower Manhattan," said Peter Muennig, an assistant professor of health policy and management at Columbia.

If changes in daily living can bring on diabetes, they can also delay it, though it is uncertain for how long.

A federal program studied people around the country at high risk of getting diabetes, and concluded that 58 percent of new cases could be postponed by shifts in behavior - most notably, shedding pounds.

But Dr. Frieden, New York's health commissioner, says meaningful prevention cannot be achieved at the city level. "I can urge people until I'm blue in the face to walk and take the stairs and eat less, and it won't make much difference," he said.

His emphasis is on trying to better treat those who already have diabetes, an ambitious goal in its own right. Most primary care doctors treat too many patients to provide the attention that diabetics need, or to check for the disease, he said. Specialists are scarce. And compliance among patients is notoriously poor.

Even the most basic step in controlling the disease - watching one's blood sugar - is too much for many diabetics. Doctors recommend that two to four times a year, patients take a so-called A1c test, which gauges the average sugar level over the prior 90 days and is more revealing than daily at-home measurements.

But in 2002 , the health department found that 89 percent of diabetics did not know their A1c levels. Of those who did, presumably the most conscientious, four out of five had readings over the level the American Diabetes Association says separates well-controlled from poorly controlled diabetes.

The patients in the survey were not much better at knowing their blood pressure and cholesterol, which are also crucial for diabetics to control.

"Diabetes is an interesting beast," said Dr. Diana K. Berger, who heads the diabetes division at the health department. "It's probably one of the easier conditions to diagnose but one of the hardest to manage."

Shortages and Shipwrecks

There is an underappreciated truth about disease: it will harm you even if you never get it.

Disease reverberates outward, and if the illness gets big enough, it brushes everyone. Diabetes is big enough.

Predicting the path of a disease is always speculative, but without bold intervention diabetes threatens to hamper some of society's most basic functions.

For instance, no one with diabetes can join the military, though service members whose disease is diagnosed after enlisting can sometimes stay. No insulin-dependent diabetic can become a commercial pilot.

Shereen Arent, director of legal advocacy for the American Diabetes Association, says she already fields 150 calls a month from diabetics who complain that they are being discriminated against in the workplace, double the number just a couple of years ago. She mentioned a typical case, a man rejected for a job at a baked-bean factory in Texas as a safety risk. "If this continues," she said, "we're in big trouble."

Dr. Daniel Lorber is an endocrinologist in Queens who thinks a lot about the disease's present and future. "The work force 50 years from now is going to look fat, one-legged, blind, a diminution of able-bodied workers at every level," he said, presuming that current trends persist.

As more women contract diabetes in their reproductive years, Dr. Lorber said, more babies will be born with birth defects. Those needy babies will be raised by parents increasingly crippled by their diabetes.

"At a time when we are trying to shift health care out of hospitals, with diabetics you don't have a choice," he said. "Nursing homes are going to be crammed to the gills with amputees in rehab. Kidney dialysis centers will multiply like rabbits. We will have a tremendous amount of people not blind but with low vision. And we have lousy facilities in this country for low-vision problems. These people will not be able to function in society without significant aid."

Cost pressures have been slashing the number of hospital beds, and some exasperated doctors are known to denigrate advanced diabetics as "shipwrecks," because they have so many health problems and virtually live in the hospital.

Not only will the future mean too few beds and unsupportable drains on Medicaid and Medicare, Mr. Muennig said, but if an emergency strikes - a terrorist attack, an earthquake - the city health system's ability to respond may be compromised because all the beds will be full of diabetics.

Most schools do not have full-time nurses. Some public schools, Ms. Arent said, try to turn away children with diabetes, even though that is illegal. Others ban them from field trips and sports teams. And this is now, when diabetes is still relatively rare among children.

If trends continue, people will live through years blighted by disability, then die too young. Diabetes is thought to shave 5 to 10 years off a life.

"Life expectancy usually decreases because there's a plague or there's a massive economic trauma," Mr. Muennig said.

"In this case, we will see a decline in life expectancy due to a chronic condition."

In 2003, diabetes vaulted past stroke and AIDS from the sixth-leading cause of death in New York to the fourth. It was fifth, slightly behind stroke, in 2004. But the health department says it believes the actual toll is much worse because doctors who fill out death certificates may ascribe the death to a complication rather than to the diabetes at its root. Lorna Thorpe, deputy health commissioner, combed through medical charts and concluded that diabetes should be third, trailing cardiovascular disease and cancer.

Laurie Raps is a claims representative for Social Security on Staten Island, 31 years on the job. From her perspective, interviewing people embarking on full-time disability, she has seen the disease's long tentacles. When she started, she saw people in their 50's and 60's, hobbled by the usual problems of age: arthritis, herniated discs, heart conditions. Now, every week, she gets diabetic after diabetic, people as young as 30.

In fact, a 2004 study by UnumProvident, a major provider of disability insurance, found that the number of workers filing claims for Type 2 diabetes doubled between 2001 and 2003.

"It's a double whammy," Ms. Raps said. "You don't have these people working and paying into the system, and then you have these people collecting from the system."

Ten years ago, Ms. Raps developed diabetes. Her husband has it. Both her parents have it, their lives being washed away.

"When I look at the people who sit before me with disability claims, I have to check the birth date in their records," she said. "They look 10 or 20 years older. Diabetes does that. It wears you down and wears you down. We're looking at a future of people 10 or 20 years older in sickness than they are. What kind of future is that?"

'A 15-Year-Old Is Immortal'

"I'm Linda and I've had diabetes for 13 years."
"I'm Dominique and I've had diabetes for seven years."
"I'm Joseph and I've had diabetes for two months."
The brisk introductions went on, the ritual start to the monthly meeting of a support group called Sugar Babes Place. All the members had diabetes. All were children.
Sugar Babes is the idea of Dr. Yolaine St. Louis, chief of pediatric endocrinology at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital Center. When she started practicing medicine 16 years ago, the only children she saw with diabetes had Type 1.
Now, of Sugar Babes' 90 official members, roughly 40 percent have Type 2. One is 8. Another is 7.

It scares Dr. St. Louis. It scares many doctors who see the same thing, because they know it does not have to be. Type 2 was supposed to be an old person's disease. Diabetes still increases with age in an almost linear fashion - today, one in five New Yorkers age 65 and older have it - but the starting point used to be mostly in their 50's.

Dr. Alan Shapiro, a pediatrician with the Children's Health Fund and Montefiore Medical Center who has spent 13 years ministering to children in the South Bronx, said there was an easy way to illustrate the change. When he began, there was a "failure-to-thrive" clinic, meant to address the undernourished, because so many children were dangerously thin and small.

"Now I don't think we hardly ever see a failure-to-thrive case," he said.

In the clinic's place is an obesity program. Dr. Shapiro never saw children with Type 2 diabetes in his early years in medicine. Now, the program has about 10 cases.

One concern he and fellow doctors have is the surge in children who take antipsychotic drugs for anxiety and conditions like autism. Some newer drugs can promote weight gain and thus elevate the risk of diabetes. Dr. Shapiro has an autistic patient who he feels needs the new medication. But since taking it, the young man has markedly put on weight and, at 18, developed diabetes.
This extension of the disease to the young is where health care professionals feel society and public policy have most glaringly failed. Diabetes, they say, should never have gotten there.
There has been little research into the long-term impact of Type 2 diabetes on children. But doctors have a rough idea. The harsh consequences that can accompany diabetes tend to arrive 10 to 15 years after onset.

If people contract diabetes when they are 15, 10 or even 5, they may well start developing complications, not on the cusp of retirement but in the prime of their lives.

There is a big difference between losing a limb at 21 and at 70. There is a big difference between going on dialysis at 30 and at 65.

"I heard a horror story a few weeks ago," Dr. Lorber said, "of a girl who was born deaf, got diabetes at 11 or 12 and went blind from diabetes at 30."

The C.D.C. has projected that a child found to have Type 2 diabetes at age 10 will see his life shortened by 19 years.

"Imagine if kids were showing up at emergency rooms in cardiac arrest," said Dr. David L. Katz, director of the Prevention Research Center at the Yale University School of Medicine. "Frankly, I think that's the next big thing. It's that dramatic. If diabetes doesn't respect age, why should coronary disease? Lord knows, I hope this never happens. But this is what keeps me up at night."

Yet children can be the most reluctant to accept the truths of their condition.

"A lot of them are in denial," Dr. St. Louis said. "They have blood sugars of 300, 400, and they tell me right to my face they don't have diabetes. 'You're wrong,' they say. 'I don't feel anything.' I tell them what can happen down the road, and they shrug. A 15-year-old doesn't care what's going to happen at 35 or 45. A 15-year-old is immortal."

The doctor was telling the Sugar Babes that everyone should have two compact blood-sugar meters, one for home and one for school. Then she warned them, "If your sugar is bad and you don't do anything, you're going to be dropping down all over the Bronx."

Interest was tepid. Some children couldn't keep their eyes off the waiting dinner arranged at a buffet table by the wall. No rapt attention from Joseph, 12, who had begged not to come, until his mother put her foot down. He moaned that he had schoolwork.

"Look at that," said Dorothy Morris-Swaby, a diabetes nurse educator who worked with Dr. St. Louis, nodding at a girl who was talking on her phone. "We're educating about diabetes, and she's on her cellphone. Typical teenager."

As time ran out, hula hoops were brought out. Dr. St. Louis was trying to identify activities other than video games and TV that the children might try. Last meeting, they held a jump-rope contest.

"They have 10,000 excuses why they can't do something," the doctor said. "So you have to give them ideas and then hope."

The meeting wound up. The hoops were stashed away. Some of the children stepped toward the buffet table and began to eat.

Copyright 2006The New York Times Company