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... GLOBAL NEWS. ... NEWS NEW STUDY LINKS HORMONE US SHADOW GOVERNMENT THERAPY TO BREAST CANCER BUNKERS DOWN IN SECRET lhe suspected breast cancer risk associ- Awww government has been in place ated with postmenopausal hormone and living underground since replacement therapy may involve a type of September 11, 2001, in case Washington is tumour that can be hard to detect, accord- wiped out by a nuclear attack by terrorists, ing to a report from the Fred Hutchinson the White House confirmed on March Ist. Cancer Research Center, the Group Health About 100 senior civil servants were dis- Cooperative and the University of patched to two secret locations in the east- Washington in Seattle, USA. em United States after September 11 to The study looked at 705 women between ensure continuity of government in the the ages of fifty and seventy-four. Itfound event that Washington was attacked. that the incidence of all types of breast can- Teams have remained there on a rotational cer in the group was increased by 60 to 85 __ basis ever since. per cent by hormone replacement therapy The publicly disclosed element was that and that long-term users had a higher risk Vice-President Dick Cheney was reputedly for lobular breast cancer. in a "secure, undisclosed location", meeting "We found an elevated risk of invasive President George Bush only rarely. breast cancer among postmenopausal It turns out that the Cheney plan was women who were long-term, recent users only part of a "Continuity of Operations of oral estrogen, either alone or in combi- Plan" to keep the country running in any nation with progestin," said the study conceivable contingency. The plan was report, just published in the Journal of the drawn up nearly half a century ago, during American Medical Association (vol. 287). the Eisenhower administration, when the "These results are generally consistent United States was guarding against the pos- with the results from other case-control and sibility of a nuclear strike from the Soviet cohort studies and [a] recent collaborative Union. It was never activated until analysis," it added. President George W. Bush ordered it to be "Two prior studies have observed a two- put into operation, hours after the attacks to threefold increased risk of lobular breast on New York, Washington and over cancer associated with current combination Pennsylvania. therapy, and we found similarly large risks The existence of the shadow government of lobular cancer associated with current was reported by the Washington Post yes- combination therapy and longer duration of _ terday after the paper did a deal with the all formulations of hormone replacement administration that it would not disclose therapy," it said. the location of the sites. (Source: Reuters, February 11, 2002) (Source: The Guardian, March 2, 2002) NORTH ATLANTIC FISHERY EXPECTED TO COLLAPSE BY 2010 he entire North Atlantic is being so severely overfished that it may com- letely collapse by 2010, reveals the first comprehensive survey of the entire ocean's ‘ishery. North Atlantic catches have fallen by alf since 1950, despite a tripling of the effort put into catching the fish. The total number of fish in the ocean has fallen even urther, they say, with just one-sixth as many high-quality "table fish" like cod and tuna as there were in 1900. Fish prices ave risen sixfold in real terms in 50 years. The shortage of table fish has forced a switch to other species "The jellyfish sandwich is not a metaphor: jellyfish is being exported from the US," says Daniel Pauly at the University of British Columbia, Canada. "In the Gulf of Maine, people were catch- ing cod a few decades ago. Now they're catching sea cucumber. By earlier stan- dards, these things are repulsive," he says. The only hope for the fishery is to drasti- cally limit fishing—for instance, by declar- ing large portions of the ocean off limits and at the same time reducing the number of fishing ships. Piecemeal efforts to pro- tect certain fisheries have only caused the fishing fleet to overfish somewhere else, such as West Africa. (Source: New Scientist, February 18, 2002, http:/www.newscientist.com) NO GULF WAR SYNDROME FOR VACCINE-FREE FRENCH FORCES lhe US Congress has heard that French forces who served in the Gulf War were not given the vaccines and anti-biological warfare measures administered to British and American veterans and are free from the Gulf War syndrome (GWS) illnesses that plague UK and US personnel. Evidence to the Subcommittee on National Security, Veterans Affairs and International Relations shows that the effort made to protect service personnel from biological and chemical weapons is most likely to have damaged their health. The French personnel were given protec- tive suits, but not the cocktail of drugs that British and American forces took. Only 140 of the 25,000 French veterans have reported illnesses related to Gulf War ser- vice, compared with more than 5,000 of the 52,000 British troops deployed and 137,862 of the 697,000 US personnel. "A two-year research project claims television is the most glib form of media, or some such garbage." 8 ¢ NEXUS APRIL — MAY 2002 WWW.NeXU smagazi ne.com