They can't be trusted. 'They' are the government, the pharmaceutical industry, the courts, the bankers, the Bilderberg group, a secretive annual meeting of influential people, or the freemasons.

'They' have impregnated wooden fences with poisonous arsenic, routinely charge 6 percent extra on top of everyone's gas bill and invented H1N1 to make a lot of money off the vaccines. Or to decimate the world population. Or both.

Concerned mothers

Party centre 't Leeuwke in Nijnsel, a village in North Brabant, on Saturday on Sunday was the venue for a symposium on the swine flu, or Mexican flu as it is called in the Netherlands. Anneke Bleeker, who runs a web site named verontrustemoeders.nl (concerned mothers), was there to talk about her new book Vaccinations, what the government doesn't want you to know.

The audience of around fifty people is part of a growing group of people who believe the established order - science, government, politics - are out to get them. They prefer to get their information from the internet rather than listen to official statements. Concerned parents, they say, are more reliable than so-called government scientists. So they kept their kids at home when it was time for the cervical cancer vaccination that was introduced for 12-year-old girls this year, and they did the same for the H1N1 shot.

It is unknown how many children missed getting vaccinated in last week's H1N1 flu drive because of the anti-movement. Distrust of the government is hard to measure, and even harder to fight. But this hasn't kept health minister Ab Klink from launching a campaign against scare stories about the flu on the internet.

'Dirty lies'

Loes Pasterkamp, a nurse from Urk, is one of the sceptics. She has embarked on a campaign against the provincial authorities who want to sanitise the soil in front of her house. The soil is toxic and can't simply be excavated, she said. Everybody in the neighbourhood is sick. Her first husband got cancer, as did the neighbour and the local hair dresser. Two of her daughters are unable to have children, and her second husband has a brain tumour.

The link between the toxic soil and the flu seems strenuous at best, Pasterkamp admited, but for her it is all part of the "dirty lies" being spread by the government. Pasterkamp has refused to get a flu shot and she has convinced half her colleagues to follow her example.

Amy Rhoter-Baars (86) heard from her son that there is a small group of rich people who have decided there are too many people on the planet, and the flu vaccine is their way of bringing that number down. She is worried. Children were never given flu vaccines before, were they?

Islam critic Silvia Videler was present to explain that the new world order has decided planet earth cannot sustain more than half a billion people. Ad Van Rooij, a former safety manager at Philips and now a campaigner against impregnated wood, told the audience that vaccinating employees against the flu is against the law.

Nobody was contradicted. When someone claimed EU officials have immunity from prosecution, or LED lights are bad for your health, no critical questions were asked. People enthusiastically finished each other's stories. The mood was pleasant: there was piano music, beer and wine, and nobody minded talking to a reporter.

Including Anneke Bleeker. After it was announced that children in the Netherlands would be given the H1N1 shot, her concerned mothers web site got 140,000 visitors in the space of a few days. Doesn't she mind being associated with conspiracy theories about a new world order? "That doesn't concern me," she said. "I'm worried about the children being vaccinated. Thirty percent of them have high fever now. The local health authorities have admitted as much."

Bleeker only talks about the vaccine at these venues, she said. But she agreed that higher interests are at stake. "Health minister Klink is nothing but a pawn. The government is the prisoner of the pharmaceutical industry."