Oct 9, 2012

Brain-Eating Amoeba was not Resistant to Brainwashing Media

      The mass media in the whole world have dramatically reported that a brain-eating amoeba is responsible for recent killing of at least ten people in the Pakistani city of Karachi. The causative agent, amoeba Naegleria fowleri, is known to grow in warm waters and enter via nose to the brain, where it destroys the tissue and causes death within a week [1].
      Surprisingly, the most serious case occurred in a European country: 16 young people died in Czechoslovakia between 1962
and 1965 as a consequence of bathing in an indoor swimming pool infected by the amoeba [2]. But the case was not headlined in the whole world, and even in Czechoslovakia nobody heard about the cases, because communist authorities never liked bad news. Spreading bad news was called either “spreading lies” or “spreading panics”, depending on how many facts were generally known about the event, and it was punishable by many years in prison. Only in 1968, when a short liberal season called Prague Spring started in Czechoslovakia, the cases were allowed for publication, even though only abroad, in journal Science [3]. It was reported that “Within 4 years between 1962 and 1965, 16 otherwise healthy persons between 8 and 25 years of age died in a district in northern Bohemia…. Epidemiologic investigation revealed that the only possible source of the infection agent was a modern indoor swimming pool…. At the end of 1967 we obtained the histologic materials from the deceased for parasitologic examination. In all brain tissues we identified large numbers of amoebas…”. The article promised that further details would follow, but the next article appeared in Science [4] only after ten years. It was reported that “in an indoor swimming pool in northern Bohemia proved to be the source of the infectious agent in four repeated outbreaks of primary amoebic meningoencephalitis (PAME) between 1962 and 1965.….The system of water recirculation and technology was improved, and neither Naegleria fowleri nor further cases of PAME occurred in the following years… Renewed danger appeared later in 1977, and the source was located in the wall which is suggested to be fixed”.
      A person experienced in the communist double speak would have read the passages from Science as follows: Between 1962 and 1965, at least 16 youngsters died due to the exposure to contaminated water. Although it was clear that all the victims were infected in one swimming pool (called “modern” because of censorship), which had poor recirculation and technology (“recirculation and technology was improved”), but nobody was warned in order not to cause panic, and the swimming pool continued to be handled with the same sloppiness for many years, despite repeated death outbreaks. Only in 1967, at the beginning of Prague Spring, the authorities allowed to pass brain specimens of the dead children to scientists, who identified the causative factor and published some results during 1968. But during the much stricter period of the direct Russian occupation after 1968, it took ten years to publish further results about the source of the infection. The swimming pool was neither closed nor fixed, and people were probably dying till 1977 ("renewed danger appeared later in 1977)", but the facts were entirely suppressed.
      The case is only a minor example of many industrial, environmental, and even natural catastrophes concealed by Czechoslovakian communists during their rule between 1948 and 1989. Covered up were train accidents, explosions in the ammunition factories and in coal mines, natural floods, and various epidemics – without headlines which would spoil the religion of Western admirers of socialism, called “useful idiots” by Lenin.


[1]Jawetz, Melnick & Adelberg’s Medical Mcrobiology, 20th Ed., 1995, Appleton & Lange, p. 573
[2]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naegleria_fowleri
[3] Červa L and Novák K: Science, 5 Apr 1968, 160(3823) 92
[4] Kadlec V, Cerva L, and Skvárová J: Science, 15 Sep 1978, 201(4360) 1025