Especially, times of great uncertainty and panic give way to thousands of confusing mirror images that make it impossible to find our feet. How to choose among all the information, messages, words, texts, images, experts, politicians around us? Whom and what should we select that could contribute to our own decision-making process. In the case of swine flu: it is our decision, our risk, our life!

View out of a window into a window out of a window ... ?

got it? Sometimes it is difficult for ourselves to have full awareness of our own standpoint and even more sophisticated it becomes to recognize the starting point of others from which they may eventually take off perceiving and assessing the world, building up their arguments. Swine flu is a good example for the wild mess of views that makes orientation so hard, bushwhacking is more the word to use for the process of gaining more information or knowledge than elucidation.

Yesterday before I decided to upload this video, I knew that it would cause controversial reactions and eventually antagonize people. I made the decision to publish this video anyhow, because it shows the problem we currently face with the swine flu in a very charming way. In times where you hear voices that even want to forbid a friendly handshake or the grabbing hold of the handle in a bus the most different perspectives through which we see the world are disclosed, and may eventually roughly collide.

Since years the notion that hygiene is the solution for the increasing number of virus infections or allergies is under scientific scrutiny. The huge amount of data indicates that hygiene is very likely leading us up the garden path.  (more…)

Since my telephone conversation with Chris about the swine flu hysteria in South East Asia only a few days have passed. But it was this talk and the fact that we have got this colostrum flu study that made me decide to jump on this subject and work on a little series. This starts with a search, of course. And this is what I did or better currently do. Since then I am afraid to drown … in articles. The data is massive, the conclusions not conclusive and the whole subject under drift, shift or flux, one name it.
The topic is extremely interesting because it turns out to be a densely intertwined mixture of science and politics, views, facts and fictions. A mold of this kind is prone to raise panic.

First, I thought I need to have an idea about the virus as such. What is the role of the swine in this game? We have the bird flu, we have the swine flu, the Spanish one, the one from Hong Kong. Influenza infections are always around out there but it becomes an issue, if they become pandemic and lethal. The terminology for us who are not familiar with this virus family is definitely confusing. We think we get bird flu from birds and swine flu from pigs. Wrong, so it seems. (more…)

How can a biological system like biestmilch eventually break ground? How can hypotheses, speculations, scientific data turn just for a sudden into unquestioned facts? Is it all about “street” credibility and alliances, about networking and communication flow? After so many years of grass root work and collecting experience from zero with biestmilch I think data become the vehicles for carrying facts later in the day, when trust evolved through time.

A concept has turned into a real thing – Chris McCormack leaving Frankfurt

Facts are facts when a consensus among a larger crowd finally was achieved. Now, obviously the time has come when biology cannot avoid to pick up the subject of complexity, of systems, networks and interrelations anymore. Regulatory aspects are suddenly of concern. The regulation of a system by positive and negative feedback loops, downstream and upstream regulation processes become “socially” accepted. One name the various terms borrowed from various thought worlds indicating the drift of thinking – one may even call it a paradigm shift, a big word I don’t like, it is simply too big, and pretends an easy way out with one straightforward conclusion. I don’t like this either.
Biology has not developed its own new identity yet, it may be on the way … Data put more and more pressure on biologists and change is therefore imminent. Modern experimental tools force them into a world of different metaphors that are more apt to interpret the experiments as the formerly given ones dominated by Waston and Crick’s dogma of unidirectionality. We hope that biestmilch so old and so modern in the same breath is prospering from this development.