Health ministers around the globe were sent the warning on Thursday in a report on the costs of averting a humanitarian disaster in the next few months. It comes as officials inside the World Health Organisation, the UN’s public health body, said they feared they would not be able to raise half that amount because of the global downturn.

Gregory Hartl of WHO said the report required an urgent response from rich nations. “There needs to be recognition that the whole world is affected by this pandemic and the chain is only as strong as its weakest link. We have seen how H1N1 has taken hold in richer nations and in the southern hemisphere. We have been given fair warning and must act soon,” he said.

The report was drawn up by UN officials over the last two months. It was commissioned in July after Ban ki-moon, the UN’s secretary general, expressed concern that the H1NI virus could have a severe impact on the world’s poorest countries.

Approximately $86 million

should be used to pay for the WHO and other UN-related organisations to help in these countries as well as an emergency fund for additional antiviral medicines, [the UN] argues.

Contraception advice is crucial to poor countries’ battle with climate change, and policy makers are failing their people if they continue to shy away from the issue, a leading family planning expert said on Friday.Leo Bryant, a lead researcher on a World Health Organisation study on population growth and climate change, said the stigma attached to birth control in both developing and developed countries was hindering vital progress.

“We are certainly not advocating that governments should start telling people how many children they can have,” said Bryant, an advocacy manager at the family planning group Marie Stopes International, who wrote a commentary in the Lancet medical journal on Friday.

“The ability to choose your family size…is a fundamental human right. But lack of access to family planning means millions of people in developing countries don’t have that right,” he told Reuters.

Although the report goes on to mentions the WHO’s projections for worldwide human population at 9 billion in 2050, it does not mention current data showing many countries already falling below their “replacement rate” needed to sustain populations, nor does it mention that the WHO also anticipates a decline in worldwide human population following its peak of 9 billion.

Having fewer and fewer children is just part of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals.

Last year, five per cent of the total population of the 27 EU countries was Muslim. But rising levels of immigration from Muslim countries and low birth rates among Europe’s indigenous population mean that, by 2050, the figure will be 20 per cent, according to forecasts. Data gathered from various sources indicate that Britain, Spain and Holland will have an even higher proportion of Muslims in a shorter amount of time. The UK, which currently has 20 million fewer people than Germany, is also projected to be the EU’s most populous country by 2060, with 77 million people.The findings have led to allegations that policy-makers are failing to confront the widespread challenges of the “demographic time bomb”.

Simple arithmetic, folks. Lower the birthrate of the indigenous population through abortion and contraception, and maintain a generous immigration policy. Right out of the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals, which call for increased use of contraception and greater access to abortion, worldwide.

At least three US federal laws should concern all Americans and suggest what may be coming – mandatory vaccinations for hyped, non-existant threats, like H1N1 (Swine Flu). Vaccines and drugs like Tamiflu endanger human health but are hugely profitable to drug company manufacturers.

The Project BioShield Act of 2004 (S. 15) became law on July 21, 2004 “to provide protections and countermeasures against chemical, radiological, or nuclear agents that may be used in a terrorist attack against the United States by giving the National Institutes of Health contracting flexibility, infrastructure improvements, and expediting the scientific peer review process, and streamlining the Food and Drug Administration approval process of countermeasures.”

In other words, the FDA may now recklessly approve inadequately tested, potentially dangerous vaccines and other drugs if ever the Secretaries of Health and Human Services (HHS) or Defense (DOD) declare a national emergency, whether or not one exists and regardless of whether treatments available are safe and effective. Around $6 billion or more will be spent to develop, produce, and stockpile vaccines and other drugs to counteract claimed bioterror agents.

The Public Readiness and Emergency Preparedness (PREP) Act slipped under the radar when George Bush signed it into law as part of the 2006 Defense Appropriations Act (HR 2863). It lets the HHS Secretary declare any disease an epidemic or national emergency requiring mandatory vaccinations. Nothing in the Act lists criteria that warrant a threat. Also potential penalties aren’t specified for those who balk, but very likely they’d include quarantine and possible fines.

The HHS web site also says the Secretary may “issue a declaration….that provides immunity from tort liability (except for willful misconduct) for claims of loss caused, arising out of, relating to, or resulting from administration or use of (vaccine or other pharmaceutical) countermeasures to diseases, threats and conditions determined by the Secretary to constitute a present, or credible risk of a future public health emergency….”

The teenage pregnancy strategy, which has cost taxpayers more than £300million, was meant to halve the number of conceptions among girls under 18 in England between 1998 and 2010.

Ministers have tried to slash teenage pregnancies by freely handing out contraceptives and expanding sex education.

But the fall in pregnancy rates has not met Government targets, and in 2007 the rate actually rose.

Teenage pregnancy rates are now higher than they were in 1995. Pregnancies among girls under 16 – below the age of consent – are also at the highest level since 1998.

This begs the question: When are people going to realize that, regardless if one believes in a personal, Creator God, our efforts at social engineering do not work? Free from political or sociological agenda, it would seem to me that, as a society (and not just our English cousins), we should be encouraging marriage and family, which accepts the sex drive as a given, and provides it a proper context for expression, rather than trying to re-engineer it.

The Mail also notes that more than 200,000 abortions were performed in England and Wales last year. That’s nearly a quarter of a million people.

You don’t have to believe that life begins at conception, as I do, to lament these statistics.

HT: Multimedia Pro-Life News.

‘There have been a lot of assumptions that both reduced physical activity and increased energy intake have been major drivers of the obesity epidemic. Until now, nobody has proposed how to quantify their relative contributions to the rise in obesity since the 1970s. This study demonstrates that the weight gain in the American population seems to be virtually all explained by eating more calories. It appears that changes in physical activity played a minimal role,’ said the study’s leader, Professor Boyd Swinburn, chair of population health and director of the World Health Organization Collaborating Centre for Obesity Prevention at Deakin University in Australia.