Self-learning EOI Coruña

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Is the swine flu a scam?

The Council of Europe is set to decide whether the World Health Organization colluded with drug companies to exaggerate the threat from swine flu.

The WHO declared the disease a "pandemic", allegedly after advice from doctors with close links to pharmaceutical companies.

The Council is looking into whether the threat was blown out of proportion. An estimated US$18 billion was spent worldwide on vaccinations and drugs to fight the flu.

The German doctor behind the accusation says this has been one of the greatest medical scams of the century. An expert from the Russian Academy of Sciences says the H1N1 flu is a non-disease.

“The recent flu has been described as a made-up disease or a non-disease. In other words, the main goal of everything surrounding it is to make money. SARS, bird flu and chronic fatigue are all in that category, along with nearly 200 other illnesses. One can make up anything – a goat flu or a fish flu. And we are easily convinced about the threat of infections,” Pavel Vorobyov says. “One such example is what happened after the Chernobyl catastrophe, when people were persuaded to buy devices to measure radioactivity. So a disease doesn’t even have to be infectious for companies to make money from the panic.”

UK Swine Flu Ad - Catch It, Bin it, Kill It

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Catherine Tate Show - The Aga Saga woman

An Aga Saga is a kind of novel about the lives of middle-class women living in British country villages. The name comes from Aga, a type of oven that these women would typically own.

Catherine Tate plays Mrs Montgomery, an upper class English woman who goes into a state of shock in various, seemingly harmless, situations. For example, in Series 1 she receives a phone call from her husband's business associate and has to tell her children that "daddy hasn't been able to find any good brie" on his business trip to France. They fear that the other children will make fun of them at the Parisian picnic at school because they don't have the right cheese.

In Series 2, the Aga Saga woman goes into a state of shocked terror when a Northern nanny has to look after her children. She does forewarn the children that the agency arranged for a temporary nanny (as Alice was ill), and that she feared that the nanny may come from as far north as Sunderland.

A Geordie is a person from Newcastle in the north of the UK.