War Spin
The BBC series Correspondent broadcast an amazing documentary called WAR SPIN (rebroadcast on CBC TV’s ‘The Passionate Eye), which reveals the orchestrated PR fakery behind the ‘rescue’ of Jessica Lynch. It turns out that the Iraqi doctors at the unguarded hospital to which Lynch had been brought had donated their own blood to Ms. Lynch and tried to bring her back to the US side, but the driver of the ambulance had been shot by American soldiers, nearly killing Lynch as well.
On the SARS front, yesterday’s New York Times reports that the virus was found in wild animals being sold for food in Guangdong’s Province’s markets, notably the Masked palm civet. A number of the earliest SARS cases involved food handlers in these markets, where threatened and endangered species are frequently sold for human consumption. If this connection can be corroborated, it will be one more disease, like the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus- HIV link, where viruses jump to human hosts during the consumption of endangered wildlife in biodiversity hotspots.
Wildlife markets are particularly hard on turtles (my favorite) animals, with several species facing extinction because of their exploitation for traditional medicine, the pet trade and the gourmet food market. While the eradication of turtles may not rank in the forefront of the present global ‘state of emergency’ for most people, it seems a shame that these remarkable creatures, which predate even the dinosaurs, are getting wiped off the map. Jim Hubbard’s 1999 film ‘The turtle hunter’ (shown at the 2001 Margaret Mead film festival) was achingly beautiful. Originally shot in 1961, this B & W film documents the life of tell the story of Otis Terrell Overland, who made his living stalking the giant alligator snapping turtle in the swamps and bayous of Mississippi. The alligator snapper is the largest freshwater turtle on earth and is now threatened with extinction.
