A Moroccan citizen in Barcelona linked to ISIS was arrested in the district of Cuitat Vella, Barcelona, He had shown signs of radicalization and an affinity for the Islamic State for at least four years.

The police blocked traffic in the street where he resides, and agents searched the residence. According to the Civil Guard, that the radicalization of the individual was activated in a “highly noticeable and concerning manner”.

In addition, he was observed avoiding confinement [lockdown] in a habitual manner and without justification, in a possible search for targets.

According to the Civil Guard, the investigation, directed by Central Court of Investigation and the Public Prosecutor of the National Court, was carried out with the collaboration of the US FBI and General Directorate of Security of Morocco (DGST).

freewestmedia.com/2020/05/10/profoundly-radicalized-jihadist-arrested-in-barcelona/

A few days after China had announced it was sending medical supplies to Italy, Chinese state media aired pictures of Italians on balconies and streets applauding the Chinese national anthem. “In Rome, with the Chinese anthem playing, some Italians chanted ‘Grazie, Cina!’ on their balconies, & their neighbors applauded along”, wrote Zhao Lijian, the spokesman for China’s foreign ministry who shamefully and wrongly suggested that the U.S. military had brought the Covid-19 to Wuhan.

China presented itself in the role of the savior, willing to rush to the bedside of the sick patient Italy.

Now a Financial Times investigation reveals that those videos were manipulated as part of Beijing’s coronavirus propaganda. Hashtags #ThanksChina and #GoChina&Italy were further generated by bots. A report by the Carnegie Endowment called Italy “a target destination for China’s propaganda”.

An article called, “Why the Covid-19 epidemic is so politicized” and posted on the Chinese embassy website in Paris, said, “Some Westerners are beginning to lose confidence in liberal democracy” and “some [Western countries] have become psychologically weak”.

Antoine Bondaz, a researcher at France’s Foundation for Strategic Research, toldPolitico:

“China considers Europe the soft belly of the West. In their logic, there is the West, and in it the U.S. that will oppose China for structural and ideological reasons, and their European allies that need to be neutral in case of conflict between China and the U.S.”

According to Lt. Gen. (ret.) H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, in his new book Battlegrounds: The Fight to Defend the Free World, Chinese leaders “believe they have a narrow window of strategic opportunity to strengthen their rule and revise the international order in their favor”.

There is now a huge risk that Italy is becoming “China’s Trojan horse into Europe“.

A leading French official, Pierre-Henri d’Argenson, wrote in Le Figaro that “Europe has now become the buffer zone for the confrontation between China and the United States”. Beijing chose Italy as its soft belly in Europe and is following its script.

In April 2019, the Italian government of Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte was the first G7 country to sign a Memorandum of Understanding on China’s “Belt and Road Initiative” during a state visit by President Xi Jinping. According to an analysis by The Economist, the Chinese Belt and Road plan could surpass the Marshall Plan, by which the US revived Europe’s war ravaged economies.

Italy has a government coalition led by the Five Star Movement, an extremely pro-Chinese party, whose founder Beppe Grillo has been spotted frequently at the Chinese embassy in Rome. As the European Council on Foreign Relations reported, “in Italy business and political lobbies for China have been on the rise”. The former PM Matteo Renzi has visited Beijing for conferences.

Five years ago, China National Chemical Corp bought Pirelli, a 143-year-old Italian company, and the world’s fifth-largest tire maker. A study published by KPMG before the Pirelli deal revealed Chinese acquisitions in Italy have totaled 10 billion euros in five years (in a total of 13 billion euros investments). A third of foreign purchases in Italy are Chinese. The goal is to turn Italy into “Europe’s top destination for highly coveted investment from China”.

Now, China is trying to dominate southern Europe’s infrastructure. China was already granted a license to run Greece’s largest seaport, Athens’ Piraeus harbor, which Beijing plans to turn into Europe’s biggest commercial harbor. Then China started to project its expansion in Italy’s ports, where four major ports are also in line for Chinese investments. Zeno D’Agostino, the president of Trieste’s northern port, says that “China is opening because it feels strong”.

Italy’s political appeasement of China was on display during the fatal early days of the coronavirus crisis.

On January 21, Italy’s culture and tourism minister hosted a Chinese delegation for a concert at the National Academy of Santa Cecilia to inaugurate the year of Italy-China Culture and Tourism. Michele Geraci, Italy’s former undersecretary for development, was not sure that was his place. “Are we sure we want to do this?”, Geraci said looking at his colleagues. “Should we be here today?”. A few days later, in many Italian cities, such as Florence and Prato, where there is a Chinese manufacturing stronghold, mayors and local communities promoted the initiative, “hug a Chinese” to fight xenophobia and racism.

In Rome, Italy’s President, Sergio Mattarella, visited a school that has a high percentage of Chinese students to counter “discrimination” and Nicola Zingaretti, the leader of the Democratic Party, met the Chinese ambassador in Rome. Meanwhile, Italian televisions organized live tastings of Chinese products. That was Italy’s fatal initial mistake: fighting racism instead of the virus, which only a few days later would devastate the country.

China has been able to brainwash Italian public opinion. In a poll published April 17, 50% of Italians consider China a “friend” (just 17% of Italians think as much of the United States). And in the race for the global power to which Italy should be allied China is ahead of the US, 36% to 30%.

Italy’s foreign minister, Luigi Di Maio, welcomed a plane-load of Chinese medical supplies on March 12. “We will remember those who were close to us in this difficult period”, Di Maio said. It is not necessary, China will remind them.

Walter Ricciardi, an advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Italian government, tweeted: “Thanks China!”.

We know now that while the Chinese regime misled the world about the contagiousness of Covid-19, it stockpiled medical supplies. As the editor of the German BILD wrote in a letter to Chinese president Xi:

“I suppose you consider it a great ‘friendship’ when you now generously send masks around the world. This isn’t friendship, I would call it imperialism hidden behind a smile – a Trojan Horse”.

Not a single Italian minister or official blamed China for the cover up of the epidemic or causing witnesses to “disappear“.

“For the first time in many years, Western countries united behind the request to China for clarifications on how Covid-19 was born and then spread”, Paolo Mieli wrote in a front-page editorial for Italy’s largest newspaper, Il Corriere della Sera. Mieli mentioned the United States, Australia, United Kingdom, France and Germany.

“Who is missing? Italy, the only country in the Western world to have welcomed half a million masks sent to us (for a fee) from China with a truly excessive blaze”.

The world-renowned Italian textile industry was one of the major victims of a globalization expansion led by Chinese dishonest economic dumping. China is now reducing Italy to a setting to help spread and implement its propaganda and will to power. As Italian analyst Francesco Galietti wrote, Italy is going to become “the target of a Chinese ‘charm offensive’, a combination of hard cash and ‘soft power’, money and influence”. He notes as an example the People’s Bank of China:

“It has steadily amassed stakes above 2 percent (the disclosure threshold in Italy) in a slew of Italy’s largest shareholder-owned companies, including FCA (the Fiat Chrysler group), Telecom Italia, and Generali Group, Italy’s largest insurer”.

China has also invested in strategic Italian energy entities such as Eni and Eneland Italian oil services group Saipem.

This economic penetration will also have immense security consequences. During the first days of the Covid-19 epidemic, Italy, which is being lured by the promise of a $3 billion Huawei investment in its telecommunications system, announcedthat it has no plans to stop Chinese telecom firms playing a role in the country’s future 5G network. It is a project that US Attorney General William P. Barr defined a “monumental danger“.

“The geopolitical effects of the pandemic could be significant,” said NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg. “Some allies (are) more vulnerable for situations where critical infrastructure can be sold out” in a Chinese “buying spree”. US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper has also warned that China will exploit the virus “to further their own interests and try to sow division in the Alliance and in Europe”.

Italy is most vulnerable to this Chinese offensive. It is one of the most indebtedcountries in the world and has an economic growth close to zero. It is also one of Europe’s most unstable and fragile governments and had one of Europe’s highest coronavirus death tolls — an experience that an Italian nurse compared to a “world war“.

Italy is now Europe’s sick man. Due to the Chinese coronavirus crisis, the country will see a collapse of its GDP (-9.5%) and the explosion of its public debt which is set to 160% of gross domestic product — the highest since World War II. Beijing knows this and claims that “Italy has many economic problems, Europe is in crisis and the Belt and Road Initiative is the only major global investment plan”.

“The possibility that Europe will become a museum or a cultural amusement park for the nouveau riche of globalization is not completely out of the question”, saidthe late historian Walter Laqueur. Rome’s dramatic fall could mean Beijing’s equally dramatic rise. It is a huge warning for the West.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15999/italy-china-trojan-horse

Importing massive numbers of migrants from regions where primitive cultures prevail has brought the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation to Germany. 

Worldwide around 200 million of women have been the victims of this cruel practice. Among other ruthless and inhumane practices like breast ironing, genital mutilation is widely practiced in Africa and certain Middle Eastern countries. 

Between September 2018 and September 2019, the number of women treated for FGM increased considerably in Germany. In that period of time, genital mutilation was identified as the main diagnoses in 176 cases, according to information released by the Berlin Senate at the request of the AfD parliamentary group. In 2016, there were only 12 cases of FGM and in 2017 the number went down to six.

The Senate believes the increasing numbers are due to migration from African and some Arabic countries where  FGM is widely practiced, German newspaper Die Welt reports.

“Due to immigration from areas where genital mutilation practice is widespread, it is assumed that there is an increasing need for advice, education and medical care.”

To deal with the problem, a coordination office will be set up during the summer time to expand education, counseling services, and medical care for women who’ve suffered from FGM.

Berlin wants teachers and educators in touch with girls who are in danger of this practice to raise awareness of the importance of physical integrity of the girls within the immigrant communities.  

It is estimated that around 70,000 women who’ve been subjected to FGM currently live in Germany. Additionally, around 17,700 girls, mainly in large cities like Berlin, are currently in danger of having the barbarous procedure done to them, nearly twice as many as there were three years ago.

voiceofeurope.com/2020/05/increasing-number-of-women-with-genital-mutilations-in-berlin-clinics/

With each passing day, as we learn more about coronavirus it’s less and less sure that we should have shut down so much. The mortality rates skew strongly toward older individuals with underlying conditions and presence in nursing homes. Hindsight isn’t quite 20/20, not with a virus we still do not understand well, but locking people inside and forbidding them to surf, skate and go for walks in the park may create vitamin D deficiencies and amp up the danger of COVID infection.

Led by Northwestern University, the research team conducted a statistical analysis of data from hospitals and clinics across China, France, Germany, Italy, Iran, South Korea, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom (UK) and the United States.

The researchers noted that patients from countries with high COVID-19 mortality rates, such as Italy, Spain and the UK, had lower levels of vitamin D compared to patients in countries that were not as severely affected.

The researchers say this isn’t a call to start taking supplements if you don’t have a known deficiency. But locking people indoors, when there’s usually a brilliant source of vitamin D up in the sky outside, just seems ill-advised now.

Not only does vitamin D enhance our innate immune systems, it also prevents our immune systems from becoming dangerously overactive. This means that having healthy levels of vitamin D could protect patients against severe complications, including death, from COVID-19.

“Our analysis shows that it might be as high as cutting the mortality rate in half,” Backman said. “It will not prevent a patient from contracting the virus, but it may reduce complications and prevent death in those who are infected.”

Some research suggests that the virus doesn’t live long in warm weather, though that’s not a slam dunk just yet. And it’s very likely that UV light kills virii.

So go outside.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/bryan-preston/2020/05/09/vitamin-d-may-help-you-fight-coronavirus-n389531

An illegal migrant from Senegal who is suspected of raping a nurse at a bus stop in Naples has been arrested by Italian authorities.

The brutal attack, which took place in the middle of the day as the nurse waited to go home after finishing a shift at the hospital, lasted nearly 45 minutes, Italian newspaper La Repubblica reports.

The 48-year-old victim said that she was waiting at the deserted Corso Arnaldo Lucci Metropark bus station, behind the Naples’ main train station at about 3pm, when the Senegalese migrant jumped over a fence and came running towards her.

Thinking she was about to be robbed, the nurse said that she had offered the African migrant her purse but quickly realized that money was not what he had intended to take from her. The attacker then proceeded to throw her to the ground and covered her mouth while she attempted wrestle herself away from his grip.

“He would put his hands everywhere and get angry because I was defending myself,” the nurse said, adding that “He keep repeating: ‘Let me do what I want or I’ll kill you. Stand still and don’t scream.’”

“He was double my size and all his weight was on my back. He got angry because my jeans were too tight and he couldn’t take them off.”

Despite the victim telling the attacker that she was pregnant, couldn’t breathe, and needed water, he continued choking her while having his way with her. The horrifying, 45 minute-long ordeal finally came to an end when the nurse’s bus finally showed up and security forces arrived on scene.

“They use drones to find people who go to the beach despite the Covid emergency. Why don’t they use them to prevent these and other attacks?” the nurse said.

When asked how her life has been since the attack, the 47-year-old victim said: “Bad. I didn’t go back to work, I have to live with the pain of my daughter who feels hurt as a woman and as my daughter. And that of my husband who feels guilty and helpless for not being able to protect me. They are traumas that overwhelm all the family. But the thing that hurts me most is the fear that I had of death and that now prevents me from smiling.”

voiceofeurope.com/2020/05/italy-senegalese-migrant-arrested-for-raping-italian-nurse-in-the-broad-daylight/

While the chairman of the Islamic Religious Community of Austria (IGGÖ), Ümit Vural, uses social networks primarily to collect donations for his mosques, his religion teachers quite unabashedly spread their real ideas to the public.

Selçuk Ö., an Islamic religion teacher appointed by IGGÖ, posts his views on the Internet without any timidity:In addition to the hateful comments against the alleged “Nazi Austria” and the fear that Muslims “are the next ones to die in Hitler’s gas chambers and end up as soap”, there are a lot of anti-Semitic postings on the page of the self-proclaimed “dialogue appointee”.Selçuk Ö. took the cake ten years ago with a cartoon in which a man with a crooked nose, Star of David and sidelocks rubs his hands in front of a smoking gas chamber, apparently full of Palestinians.The teacher comments below: “The Gaz(a) Chamber continues its incessant work, a fascinating caricature!”

Even during the attempted coup d’état in Turkey Selçuk Ö. leaves no doubt about his convictions: Under a call to restrict the opposition’s freedom of expression and to expel all those involved, the declared Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPÖ) voter demands to go one step further and “let the traitors hang”. It is also particularly embarrassing that all this is happening in front of dozens of IGGÖ officials: In addition to several IGGÖ school inspectors, several teachers of Islam who teach at Austria’s public schools, as well as his head, the IGGÖ chairman Ümit Vural himself, can be found in his Facebook friends list.

Ö.s Facebook account also brings together the local Islam celebrities: Besides “racism expert” Sonia Zaafrani, politicians such as Hakan Gördü, Turgay Taskiran and SPÖ councillor Omar Al-Rawi are among the Facebook friends of the Turk, who are otherwise particularly sensitive to possible discrimination when it is voiced by Europeans.

Maximilian Weinzierl, deputy chairman of the ” Free Students Vienna”, demands the resignation of IGGÖ boss Vural:

If it is true that such posts have been posted for years with the knowledge of half of the IGGÖ officials, anything but a resignation of those responsible is out of the question. Furthermore, until the actual circumstances are clarified, the Ministry of Education should be responsible for the teaching of Islam and the appointment of teachers.

Unzensuriert.at inquired at the IGGÖ and wanted to know whether the teacher’s Facebook postings glorifying violence were known and whether something would be done about it. We have not received an answer so far.

The question that remains:

For years, a teacher at an Austrian school, financed by the Austrian taxpayer, posted articles that were subject to criminal law. And no one cares: not the mainstream media, which otherwise brand every slightest expression of displeasure by a native as a hate crime, not the honorary and full-time racism and extremism “experts”, not the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution and Counter-Terrorism. All these unsavory postings were noticed by dozens of IGGÖ officials. There too: no reply. Which is why it must be assumed that at least a certain sympathy for the statements could be there. Which leads to the question to what extent the religious community is suitable to continue to appoint the teaching staff at Austrian schools.

unzensuriert.at

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently described Sweden as a “model” for battling the coronavirus. “I think if we are to reach a new normal, I think in many ways Sweden represents a future model of — if we wish to get back to a society in which we don’t have lockdowns,” Dr. Mike Ryan, executive director of WHO’s Emergencies Program, said. “They’ve been doing the testing, they’ve ramped up their capacity to do intensive care quite significantly,” he added.

“And their health system has always remained within its capacity to respond to the number of cases that they’ve been experiencing… Sweden has put in place a very strong public policy around social distancing, around caring and protecting for people in long term care facilities and many other things,”.

“What it has done differently” he added, “is it has very much relied on its relationship with its citizenry and the ability and willingness of citizens to implement physical distancing and to self-regulate.”

As noted by Professor of Genetic Epidemiology at the Swedish Lund University:

“The Swedish approach to COVID-19 could not be more different from its neighbours’, placing much of the responsibility for delaying the spread of the virus and protecting the vulnerable in the hands of the public… Swedish bars, restaurants and schools remain open. Under the blue skies and blazing sun Sweden has enjoyed lately, people have flocked to parks and beaches, bars and cafes. Nevertheless, Sweden has a high number of people living in single households, and citizens are generally respectful of public health advice and guidelines”.

Is Sweden, however, really a “model” to the rest of the world? Several of Dr. Ryan’s assumptions seem to be, at the very least, questionable.

As of May 6, Sweden, which has a population of 10.18 million people, had 2,854 deaths, which corresponds to 280.27 deaths per million people. In comparison, the other countries of the Nordic region, Denmark, Norway and Finland, which all went on lockdown, had 503, 215 and 246 deaths respectively, corresponding to 86.76, 40.46 and 44.58 deaths per million people, respectively.

Besides refusing to close down businesses, restaurants and schools, Sweden also has refused to close its borders, even to travelers from countries with large and uncontrollable outbreaks, such as Iran.

“Historically, it has not been a great idea to stop flights. The latest example is probably Italy. There they canceled all flights to China, but they still got a big outbreak,” said state epidemiologist and bureaucrat Anders Tegnell in late February. Tegnell has since become the face of Sweden’s coronavirus strategy. Tegnell stressed that stopping flights from Iran would complicate helping the country with its outbreak. “If you shut down [flights from] Iran, you cannot help the country with protective materials and such,” he said.

As late as February 29, for example, 11 planes from Northern Italy and 1 plane from Iran landed in Arlanda airport in Stockholm, but no measures were taken to check people for the virus or put them in quarantine. Flights from Iran were only stopped on March 2 and as late as March 5, Tegnell criticized the Scandinavian Airline SAS for stopping all flights to Italy, a decision that he said, “lacked medical and scientific basis”. Only on March 17, when the EU made its recommendation, did Sweden stop all non-essential travel to its airports. Despite that, 40 planes have landed every day at Arlanda airport in Stockholm, where travelers have not been tested for Coronavirus upon landing or asked to go into quarantine.

In late February, Minister of Social Affairs, Lena Hallengreen, said that she believed that Sweden’s readiness for the pandemic was “good”. Two months later, she told Aftonbladet that the strategy had been “a failure” with regard to the most vulnerable population group, the elderly. On May 5, the Sweden Democrats called for a special debate to be held in parliament regarding the deaths during the corona crisis in Sweden’s nursing homes.

“Sweden has twice the death toll as our Nordic neighbors combined. One of the reasons is that the government has failed to protect the elderly,” said the party’s group leader Henrik Vinge in a press release.

“The fact that Sweden has not been able to protect vulnerable groups from infection has been identified as a failure by government officials. The development has been particularly devastating in nursing homes in the Stockholm region, which first suffered from widespread infection… 123 [nursing homes] out of 227 in the region had already been infected… by Easter weekend, according to a new survey. The fact that Sweden, unlike other countries, has had too limited testing… and that personnel have not been provided with the necessary protective equipment has probably contributed to the deaths in Swedish nursing homes. Witnesses also allege that there have been cases of staff working despite symptoms… and that it has been difficult to make [nursing home] employees follow basic hygiene practices.”

Sweden used to have a storage of seven million respiratory masks, as well as protective suits for adults and children during the Cold War. “The various types of respiratory protection were collected in emergency storages around the country with up to 250,000 pieces in each. The number varied depending on the size of the municipality. In the first decade of the 21st century, the stock was considered redundant and obsolete and everything was burnt,” states a brief text on the website of the Army Museum in Sweden. Although several of the masks were no longer functioning, 2.2 million respiratory masks were still adequate, but were burned anyway.

On March 28, realizing that Sweden was facing a shortage of protective equipment for medical personnel, Swedish regional authorities appeared simply to have lowered the protection requirements.

“Healthcare workers are worried that the country’s regions have lowered the requirements for personal protective equipment — for example, mouth protection will not be the standard”, noted Swedish Radio. According to Mia Lehtonen, a nurse at Karolinska’s staffing center and elected representative for the Healthcare Association:

“Back then [at the beginning of the outbreak] we would have mouth protection with HEPA filter, a cap… long-sleeved protective coat, rubber boots, gloves that were taped to the long-sleeved coat, and now – just a few weeks later – we are supposed to work according to just basic hygiene routines.”

In some hospitals health care personnel had to resort to protecting themselves with rain ponchos.

Despite the spread of the pandemic outside of Sweden — and neighboring countries such as Denmark and Norway locking down offices, businesses and schools — Tegnell opined that Swedish employees should not be allowed to work from home due to “equality” concerns:

“There is an equality aspect in this. There are certain groups in society that can [work from home], but not all, and how will we see to it so that we continue to have equality in society and that everyone has the same chance to stay healthy?”

Five days later, in mid-March, he encouraged people to think about working from home.

Even before mid-March, Sweden stopped testing how many people had been infected by the virus. “Now it is no longer important to know exactly how many people are infected in Sweden”, said Tegnell. Instead, authorities would look at how many people were committed to a hospital.

Some Swedish municipalities have even kept the number of infected elderly in their care a secret, according to Svt nyheter:

“For a long time, Sörmlands Media has tried to get information from all the county’s municipalities on how the spread of infection in elderly care looks, how extensive it is and where it is located. The municipalities have replied that they lack knowledge about the extent of the spread of infection and have said that it is also not possible to find out. Sörmland Media’s review, however, shows that the information is not correct and that the municipalities actively concealed the information… Some municipalities have also failed to report the number of infected persons to the National Board of Health and Welfare’s national reporting tool for orders for protective clothing. Something that, according to Sörmlands Media, may have affected the safety of the infection prevention work”.

Criticism of the government’s strategy has been articulated by 22 scientists, who wrote that the pandemic was being handled by “officials without talent”. One of the scientists behind the criticism, Dr. Stefan Hanson, a Swedish infectious disease expert, told the Canadian Globe and Mail:

“I think it’s a risky business and we don’t know anything about herd immunity. The only thing we know is that a lot of people have died. These are human beings, not just figures. And if we would have chosen another approach, this number would have been much smaller.”

According to the Globe and Mail:

“Dr. Hanson believes Dr. Tegnell deliberately pushed herd immunity and he should have followed the Norwegian, Danish and Finnish approach and introduced a lockdown. ‘You cannot take risks with people’s lives if you don’t know what risks you are taking'”.

“The COVID-19 death rate [in Sweden] is nine times higher than in Finland, nearly five times higher than in Norway, and more than twice as high as in Denmark,” where there were lockdowns, Hans Bergstrom, former editor-in-chief of Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s leading daily newspaper, wrote in April.

Despite not going into lockdown, Sweden’s economy is still taking a hit, although less severe than other European countries. Many Swedes, particularly those who are older, are limiting social interaction, travelling less and therefore consuming less in shops and restaurants. Sweden has also been exporting less because of the lockdowns in other countries. “Sweden’s government estimates… a 6% contraction in domestic consumption this year. Combined with a forecast 10% drop in exports, Swedish authorities predict, the result will be a 7% decline in overall 2020 economic output” according to The Wall Street Journal.

WHO – and the media — might wish to reconsider using Sweden as a model.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15984/coronavirus-swedish-model

A new study that examines the transmission of the novel Coronavirus by the University of Stirling in the UK noted that there was a “risk with waste water”.

Initially the discovery had not raised alarms, since it had been said that there was no risk of contagion.

But after the result of her research conducted on 8 wastewater samples collected from February 3 to 28 in the city of Milan and from March 31 to April 2 in Rome, Dr. Giuseppina La Rosa of the Environment and Health Department of the Higher Institute of Health, said: “In 2 samples collected in the sewerage system of the western and central-eastern area of Milan, the presence of RNA of the new Coronavirus was confirmed. In the case of Rome, the same positive result was found in all the samples taken in the eastern area of the city.”

Her claims, however, had not caused alarmism. “The result reinforces the prospects of using urban sewer water control as a non-invasive tool to detect the presence of infections in the population early,” responded the director of the ISS water quality and health department Luca Lucentini.

However, a more recent British study has completely overturned the initial belief, confronting the world with a new problem. In an article published in the journal Environment International, environmental biologists from the University of Stirling have advised governments not to overlook the phenomenon of a possible transmission of Coronavirus in wastewater.

Even infected water, therefore, can pose a risk of transmission. Dr. Richard Quilliam, who committed himself to the study, asked the British government to spend additional resources on investigating the case.

“Even if the sewage system could reveal useful information on the spread of the epidemic, it could also involve a fair risk of transmission,” said the scientist. “We know that Sars-CoV-2 is transmitted via objects or genetic material that carries the infection, it is not yet known whether the virus can be transmitted via the fecal-oral route, but recent studies have shown the presence of Covid-19 in feces, and the viral shedding of the digestive system can last longer than that of the respiratory tract.”

The researcher Manfred Weidmann and Dr. Vanessa Moresco also collaborated with Quilliam to carry out the study. “The main problem is that a significant percentage of patients with Coronavirus are asymptomatic, or exhibit very mild symptoms, for this there is a high risk of contagion. Lack of testing also makes it difficult to predict the scale of potential dissemination and the implications for public health,” said Weidmann. “The conformation of the virus also seems to suggest a different behavior of the disease in an aqueous environment. Some Coronaviruses can remain active in wastewater for about 14 days, depending on the environmental conditions,” added the scientist.

Of particular concern, are those areas where adequate hygienic conditions do not exist. In that case, the risk would even be very high. Experts have been urging countries to act quickly.

“At a time when the world is so concentrated on intervening on the respiratory tract, since it is a respiratory virus, one should not overlook the possibility that Sars-Cov-2 can also spread through the fecal-oral route,” they concluded.

freewestmedia.com/2020/05/09/covid-19-in-the-water/