There's been a nasty flu outbreak in Mexico, with a few scattered cases in Texas, California, Kansas, and New York.
If you don't have two weeks' worth of food in your house, as the US government advises, now might be a good time to lay in the necessary supplies. This virus, similar to pandemic flu viruses in previous decades, appears to be most lethal in young adults (20's and 30's), but is less dangerous in the young or elderly. Mexico City has closed all schools, museums, theaters, etc.
It could be... y'know... the real thing.
I say this as a person who got obsessed with H5N1 news and read flu forums for months, before finally tiring of the always-impending avian flu pandemic. So I'm not trying to freak anyone out... we've been on the verge of flu pandemic for years now. I'm just saying: hey, man-- dried beans are cheap, and don't forget the coffee and vodka. Just in case.
I read Gina Kolata's book Flu and various articles on the 1918 flu (here's an example) some years back. The story of the 1918 flu and how it got into humans (killing between 2 and 4 percent of all humans alive on Earth in less than a year) is a bit foggy. For one thing, Establishment Science did not like the little army pathologist who first began genotyping the 1918 flu, so they refused to publish his work-- humankind be damned!! He wasn't in the club! Hell, he wasn't even in academia!! [More details at this old 2005 post.]
Once we got past that hurdle, it turned out that the 1918 flu wasn't quite what most people had thought. Pandemic flus tend to contain avian flu genes, but the thinking had been that avian flu would have a hard time jumping straight into humans. Pigs, however, can be a breeding ground for both bird flus and human flus. And if a pig happens to be infected with both sorts of flu at the same time, it's singles night at the Roman bathhouse-- the viruses swap genes and the genes get mixed. And then emerges a nasty bird/swine/human flu, one that humans don't have immunities against, and we're screwed.
The problem was, there wasn't so much evidence of swine flu genes. Possibly the 1918 flu went straight from birds to humans, which no one can exactly explain (after all, it hasn't happened very successfully with the H5N1 bird flu that's been around since 1997). Maybe it made a brief stop in pigs, but... there isn't too much swine influence, so it wasn't percolating in pigs for very long, if at all.
Secondly, nobody to this day seems to be able to understand why it was quite so virulent, quite so contagious, quite so deadly-- and especially in young, healthy adults.
There's an explanation, but it simply MUST be wrong because it has definitely not been endorsed by NPR and it qualifies as tinfoil hat. The theory goes:
- In 1918 we were inoculating army soldiers against typhoid.
- In 1918 we didn't know what in the hell we were doing, re: viruses.
- We incubated the vaccine in chicken eggs.
- We had no ability to test for avian viruses in the finished vaccine.
- We inoculated thousands of soldiers while they were living near a hog farm in Kansas.
- The virus began in soldiers.
- Conclusion: the virus came from avian-flu-infected typhoid vaccine. We gave it to ourselves.
The first wave of the flu, in the spring of 1918, was not nearly so deadly. But it provided ample opportunity for mutation of the virus to become more contagious and lethal in humans. Rather than assuming that the flu mutated inside pigs, one has to wonder whether soldiers in Fort Riley, Kansas contracted both low-pathogenic swine flu (which most livestock veterinarians and hog farmers have antibodies against) and avian flu from infected typhoid vaccine. Quite possibly, humans were the 'swinging singles bar' of flu viruses which led to the pandemic flu strain-- not pigs.
The worst hit city in the US was probably Philadelphia, where they were unable even to bury their dead for some time due to massive fatalities. The Philadelphia outbreak, though it was spread by a war fundraising parade (at which, one can assume, soldiers were present), actually originated in a Navy shipyard.
Fast-forward to today, Mexico City. Keep in mind that outbreaks of polio, chicken pox, flu, and foot-and-mouth disease in livestock have all been traced to vaccination or accidental releases of materials used in making vaccines.
The Mexico City H1N1 flu strain has elements of North American swine flu, Europe / Asian swine flu, North American avian flu, and North American human flu (New York Times). The assumption, as with the 1918 pandemic, is that these viruses mingled together and mutated inside pigs. Overcrowded hog farms near Mexico City have been blamed over at HuffPo, and certainly this is one reason not to have insanely contagious and horribly unhealthy pig farms (beyond the obvious moral reasons, as pigs are likely as intelligent as dogs).
That being said, this four-viruses-in-one combination, never seen before, and found in 19 Americans in 4 states, none of whom have had contact with pigs, suggests that perhaps the viruses had a bit of help in recombining. Consider, as a bit of context, the article "Baxter: Product contained live bird flu virus":
The company that released contaminated flu virus material from a plant in Austria confirmed Friday that the experimental product contained live H5N1 avian flu viruses....
The contamination incident, which is being investigated by the four European countries, came to light when the subcontractor in the Czech Republic inoculated ferrets with the product and they died. Ferrets shouldn’t die from exposure to human H3N2 flu viruses.
Public health authorities concerned about what has been described as a “serious error” on Baxter’s part have assumed the death of the ferrets meant the H5N1 virus in the product was live....
On Friday, the company’s director of global bioscience communications confirmed what scientists have suspected.
“It was live,” Christopher Bona said in an email....
Baxter makes its flu vaccine — including a human H5N1 vaccine for which a licence is expected shortly — at a facility in the Czech Republic.
To recap: a European vaccine manufacturer contaminated materials (to be used to make human flu vaccine) with live H5N1 avian flu. Whooops!
And then there's this debacle:
Three Polish doctors and six nurses are facing criminal prosecution after a number of homeless people died following medical trials for a vaccine to the H5N1 bird-flu virus.
The medical staff, from the northern town of Grudziadz, are being investigated over medical trials on as many as 350 homeless and poor people last year, which prosecutors say involved an untried vaccine to the highly-contagious virus.
Had any of these homeless people had human flu at the same time they were injected (apparently) with live avian flu virus, the necessary mutations to cause pandemic could have occurred. What in the hell are they doing injecting live H5N1 into people? Trying to give the pandemic bug a leg up?
Flu vaccination in general contains serious risks, even when it's only for human flu, because the genes contained in the vaccine itself may provide genetic material to other circulating flu viruses, accelerating the rate of mutation. It may also provide for an emptier "playing field" for flu strains that would have had competition... except that the competition was kept down by vaccination. In short, flu vaccination may result in more dangerous flu strains over time.
The Mexican government is rushing forward with a mass swine flu vaccination program, which is likely to exacerbate the problem. [UPDATE: It isn't a swine flu vaccine, it's the regular seasonal flu vaccine-- utterly pointless.] The vaccine they have does not match the flu virus currently infecting Mexicans and is unlikely to be effective. To create a vaccine that matches would take months, and that's the whole issue with the flu-- months from now, it's always a very different virus, because influenza mutates quickly. This is also why the regular flu vaccine usually does not work (it totally fails, most years). The swine flu vaccine will, however, provide interesting new genes which may or may not be picked up by the current flu virus. Mind you, the vaccine necessarily contains genes that make swine flu contagious in humans. That should be obvious, since they would hardly bother with a vaccine against a variety of swine flu that was not contagious in humans, now would they? Therefore, quite possibly, this flu is about to get a whole lot more contagious, after a helpful boost from a futile swine flu vaccine campaign.
On the other hand, perhaps flu-infected pigs in Europe spread the virus to migrating birds, who combined the swine and avian flu genes and then infected pigs in North America, who then passed along all three kinds of flu genes to humans in North America. Yeah, it's possible. But if this thing goes pandemic, my money is on human intervention as a major cause.
Mexico has shut down schools, libraries, and other public places. Of roughly 1,000 people infected (surely an underestimate) about 60 have died, which suggests a 6% fatality rate. That's unlikely, in my opinion. Lots of people caught this who did not know they had this particular flu, or have not been recorded among the infected. The real fatality rate is more likely 1-2% or less, in keeping with the 1918 flu and considering improved nutrition and medical science.
All the same, some boxed spaghetti and N95 masks wouldn't go amiss.
Why were they putting live H5N1 into the homeless people? Will have to look up how the doctors fared during the prosecution.
Posted by: Pandemic Flu Masks | August 10, 2009 at 02:27 PM