H7N9, Precious Metals Shortages and a May 1st Warning

I don’t know whether to be impressed or disturbed that a city the size of Boston could be put into an undeclared form of martial law while Federal. State and local law enforcement hunt for a 19 year old….. but while all media outlets were watching Boston, some rather important events were going on in China.

The number of H7N9 influenza cases continues to rise. We’ll stop calling it bird flu for now since about 40% of the current cases apparently have had no known contact with poultry or other birds for that matter. Confirmed cases have almost doubled over the last week and it’s showing about a 18% mortality rate at this point. There is conflicting information about human to human transmission of this virus. WHO says there’s no indication that it’s being transmitted from human-to-human but, at the same time, they are advising clinics outside of China to be watchful for any cases that may show up for treatment. The CDC has also advised US doctors to do the same. If you are interested in what is worrying the medical community, we found this article quoting Dutch virologists about the ability of H7N9 to mutate quickly.

I know that some sort of flu emergency develops every few years and it never seems to really become a true global pandemic but we should not that reduce our vigilance to prepare. Some folks feel that it’s impossible to prepare for an event like this but I disagree since hospitals have been doing it for years. We have placed links to several pdf files concerning pandemic preparedness at the top of this blog’s main page. Please take a minute to download and read them.

The second story coming out of China concerns the possible unintended consequences of the recent gold and silver price drop (which some experts feel was nothing more than market manipulation). There’s been some news that the supply of actual physical gold is dwindling to the point that bullion sellers and banks are out of inventory. I’m not totally sure what this means for the US Dollar in the long term but I suspect that all currencies will suffer because of this. We have a sponsor here on the blog that specializes in precious metal sales and they may be able to explain why this is all happening, so if you have the urge to invest in bullion, please contact JM Bullion. I am in know way suggesting that anyone run out and purchase gold or silver without understanding what is really going on, but I feel that they would be a good source of information about this.

And by-the-way, I ran into this video that is calling on everyone in the US to purchase silver bullion on May 1st as an act of civil disobedience…. This is simply a heads-up for our readers, who knows what or if this will have any impact on our economy but anyway here’s the video for you to check it out….

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