As headlines get more and more shrill about the spreading new influenza strain, it is time to step back and take a sober look at this through the eys of a physician. What is an antigenic shift or a cytokine storm? How strong are the chances that this will become a pandemic, and are politicians, starting with Obama, and health officials blowing smoke when they tell us that they have things under control?

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The first bridges that were constructed by the Phoenicians and the Egyptians for Xerxes were made from white flax and papyrus. The bridges were complete, but quickly enough a violent storm broke out that destroyed them. Xerxes, upon learning of the disaster, became enraged and acted to place blame upon two entities: the Hellespont itself, and the persons who constructed the bridge. He ordered the Hellespont to be lashed three-hundred times, making the lashers recite words condemning what had been done to the bridge by the Hellespont. This action, and specifically the words said to the Hellespont, were condemned as "barbarous and impious" by Herodotus. Xerxes must have looked as if making himself a God by lashing a force of nature, and to Herodotus this was impiety. (source)

 

INCREASINGLY DIRE HEADLINES

 

You just have to read the headlines, such as this past weekend's "Global race is on to contain swine flu outbreak" or Monday, April 27^th evening's "WHO raises pandemic alert to phase 4" to realize that health officials around the world are deeply concerned. Phase 4, however, is somewhat spurious to announce, because that simply means the virus can pass from human to human, but everybody already knows that anyway. What officials are loathe to do is announce that this is close to becoming a pandemic.

Authorities are telling us not to panic, but it seems like there is a little panic going on behind closed doors at the CDC, the WHO and other health bodies. The Obama Administration already declared a national health emergency this past Sunday, April 26, calling it a cautionary, preventive move, again "Don't panic", and is taking vigorous steps, or so they think and say, to limit its spread. If only the virus would morph into terrorists, we could order preemptive predator strikes on them and the problem would be solved, just as it is in Afghanistan, right?

 

There is definitely a lot of alarmism on the Internet already, and we are seeing some pretty startling charges surface, some of them right on our very own OpEdNews.com website. Several articles are stating that this is some kind of biowar virus strain that has been released by blunder or evil intent. What gives credence to this are statements attributed to the CDC that this new virus is composed of a combination of virus strains, at least according to an Associated Press report reprinted by the Arizona Daily Star online, to wit:

 

CDC officials detected a virus with a unique combination of gene segments that have not been seen in people or pigs before. The bug contains a human virus, an avian virus from North America and pig viruses from North America, Europe and Asia.

 

Health officials have seen mixes of bird, pig and human virus before, but never such an intercontinental combination with more than one pig virus in the mix. (source)

 

I went to the CDC website to try to find further confirmation on this, but was unable to find any report on the genetic footprint of this new virus, other than to state that, yes, it is an A (H1N1) swine flu strain and that this is being investigated, so whatever was revealed to AP the other day is not being posted, at least as far as I have looked.

 

A NEEDED PERSPECTIVE

 

At the prompting of an associate, I will now undertake to steer between the ongoing media sensationalism, the charges of a biowar manufactured virus and the often Pollyanna statements of public officials that we needn't worry - they have things under control. I am going to present you with the results of a telephone interview with a medical doctor. I did not have any kind of recording equipment to tape his voice and then transcribe the results, so I will be paraphrasing much of what he said.

 

I was referred to one Brett Paul Nienaber, MD, a longtime family practitioner and ER doctor, who has seen his fair share of flu cases in clinics and emergency rooms over the years, and although not an epidemiologist, is pretty well-versed on the subject of viruses. He currently practices medicine in Brainerd, Minnesota and shares his professional time with Brainerd Emergency Room at St. Joseph's Medical Center as well.

 

Brett - I will use his first name to keep things on a personal level - had much to say about the evolving influenza crisis that is flashing across our television screens regularly now. He was already frustrated with what he considered the public posturing of politicians and health officials that they somehow have things under control. His basic response is, "The cat is out of the bag!" meaning that he believes this thing, designated right now as an A (H1N1) swine flu, is unstoppable.

 

So that I could understand why he felt so, he went on to explain the entire phenomenon of what is known as an "antigenic shift" (or major mutation) wherein the virus's proteins, or antigens, undergo a major transformation. To get technical about it, "an antigenic shift occurs due to reassortment of RNA segments from two different viral strains infecting the same cell." (source)

 

A major mutation, he went on, normally occurs twice a century. Since the last dramatic antigenic shift was in 1918 with the Spanish Flu, which scientists now say emerged from avian populations, we are long, long overdue. The key vector forces are an animal/bird flu virus and human flu virus meshing with each other to form a new hybrid, the central medical nightmare arising from this being a brand new mutation that no one will have a built-in immunity to. That is the other overarching factor in a major mutation – there is no immunity against it. When a person is exposed to it, his or her immune system will be up against it for the first time.

 

Because of this lack of evolved immunity within masses of people, an antigenic shift always has the potential to go pandemic, or global. And Bret believes it will likely do so because of the instantaneous nature of world travel, communication and contact. One infected individual can go through crowds and crowds of people just in airports from one end of the planet to another in less than a day.

 

For your historical information, note as well that there have been two other pandemics since the great Spanish Flu pandemic, the Asian Flu pandemic in 1957 and the Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968. However, these were actually slight mutations in existing human flu DNA foot prints and less likely to completely traumatize one's immune system.

 

DISPELLING MISCONCEPTIONS

 

Brett wants to dispel some major misconceptions about viruses. First of all, this virus was not directly transmitted from a pig (or bird since indications are that there is an avian strain in the DNA too.) Although humans can contract a virus from a swine (or bird), that same flu bug cannot then jump from human to human. Someone else must go back and interface with the same pig. The swine strain must mutate first after combining with a human virus, so the fact that there is no obvious contact between those already infected with this new virus with farm pigs, or any epidemic of sick pigs, does not ipso facto mean that it was manufactured in a laboratory. The original pig/human contact leading to the mutation could have been some time ago.

 

Brett also cautions that it is a serious mental error to equate the virulence of a flu strain with its contagiousness. This A (H1N1) strain may be highly contagious, yet moderately virulent. The jury is still out on that right now. Yes there have been a number of deaths in Mexico, but have they really reported the full number of individuals who have become infected? If we go with the official tallies Mexican authorities have released, it would appear that one out of ten stricken have died, which is scary, but it is possible that many more people have been infected with the strain than were reported. What if the actual ratio is one in a hundred? There are some 20,000,000 people in Mexico City, so the number of fatalities is rather small thus far in relation to that huge number. Meanwhile in other parts of the world, the severity of illness has been considerably less, at least so far. This could, however, change.

 

As to charges that this is a weaponized bio-virus, Brett considers this extremely unlikely. If it was, say, accidently released from the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) lab at Fort Detrick, Maryland, then why is its epicenter in Mexico? If it was purposely released in Mexico, then what would be the exact goal and why would such a disease that would be certain to boomerang back into America even be contemplated, possibly infecting the very infectors themselves. In other words, why would you employ a bio-weapon that you cannot control?

 

Brett also points out that complicated strains with multiple animal/bird virus components can indeed occur in Nature, and not only in a lab. So in Brett's mind, the idea that this is a bio-weapon, as opposed to the reality that we are long overdue for a naturally occurring dramatic antigenic shift, is not very strong. Further investigation will hopefully get to the bottom of this.

 

TWO WAYS THIS CAN GO

 

Brett basically posits that this can go two ways. Either way he believes we are still very likely facing a pandemic, particularly in the Third World, where urban living conditions are often overcrowded and unhygienic, and with frequently rundown health facilities often few and far between.

 

Moreover, even in this country, emergency rooms and clinics are ill-equipped to handle anything approaching a pandemic. They would be overwhelmed. They already have problems enough, as it is, treating everyday people, so Brett can imagine how nightmarish it will be in our ERs with large sectors of the population sick and panicked.

 

Brett also points out that the incubation period of swine flu is rather short, one to three days, which means this only increases the potential for exponential growth of the virus around the world, especially in Asia and Africa. This is what leads him to say that "Nothing will stop it regardless of what governments and doctors do."

 

But the bigger question is, how virulent will the virus get? Right now Brett is optimistic that it will play itself out as a mild infection, based on the cases that have been treated in the US and elsewhere beyond Mexico. Mexico, however, is the big question mark, because it has, apparently, been rather virulent there. There is also the possibility that this can evolve into something more deadly, especially in the Third World, where villagers often live with their pigs and fowl, which creates new opportunities for the virus to recombine with other bird or swine flu strains. The Third World, to put it bluntly, is a brewing pot for mutations.

 

So on the one hand any global influenza can run its course without being overly lethal, but on the other hand it can also go the way of the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which wiped out, depending upon whose statistics you care to believe, anywhere from 50 million to 100 million people. The Spanish Flu, also an A(H1N1) virus, came on the tail end of World War I, spreading rapidly throughout the world, probably aided by the large population migrations going on at that time and possibly introduced into Europe by American troops from the Deep South. The unique thing about that flu, though, was that it devastated the young and the healthy much more than the old and infirm, the exact opposite of the way victim statistics usually go during a normal flu season, and this was because no one, especially the young, had built up immunity to it. Consequently we had what is called a "cytokine storm", whereby a person's own healthy immune system will go into some kind of hyperdrive in response to this new invader and begin to attack even the body's own healthy cells.

That Mexican officials are reporting that a significant number of their flu dead are young to middle-aged citizens should give us cause to ask if cytokine storms were detected in their deaths. If so, this would not be a good omen.  

Brett also has his doubts about the effectiveness of the two current drugs being offered for relief and recovery, oseltamivir (Tamiflu) and zanamivir (Relenza), which were not even designed for this new strain. Worse still, to paraphrase Brett, these expensive drugs are not available to the majority of third world populations.

 

Meanwhile it takes time, of course, to develop and manufacture a new vaccine, so, to quote Brett, "(they are) unlikely to develop one fast enough and in volume enough to head off a pandemic." If and when this mutation does goes pandemic and becomes unstoppable without a viable vaccine, it will simply runs its course, however destructive, and then gradually weaken over time until "herd immunity develops", a sort of collective, species-wide immune response to a threatening disease.

 

Brett also recalls how the swine flu vaccine of 1976 became an embarrassing fiasco after a national panic set in when 19-year-old Pvt. David Lewis died of swine flu at Ford Dix, New Jersey. A hefty marketing campaign was then launched to inveigle Americans to get inoculated and some 46,000,000 people, according to Brett, were given the vaccine before the flu scare fizzled out. Only Pvt. David Lewis died of the disease, but scores died from the side effects of the vaccine, which apparently even included Guillain-Barre Syndrome, although this was not officially confirmed statistically. This is a disease that can leave a person paralyzed for days or weeks.

At this point it is too early to tell which way this new A (H1N1) strain will go, or whether it will even become a pandemic. The news so far is not encouraging. We will just have to wait and see. I want to thank Dr. Nienaber for sharing his knowledge with us and ask all of us to stay calm, cool and collected.

Authors Bio:
I am a student of history, religion, exoteric and esoteric, the Humanities in general and a tempered advocate for the ultimate manifestation of peace, justice and the unity of humankind through self-realization and mutual respect, although I am not a pacifist, nor do I believe in peace at any price, which is no peace at all but only delays inevitable conflict. There are times when the world must act. Planetary consciousness is evolving, but there are many retrograde forces that would drag us back down.

I have also written one book, a combination of poetry, photography and essays entitled "Post Katrina Blues", my reflections on the Gulf Coast and New Orleans two years after Katrina struck. Go to the store at http://sanfranciscobaypress.com/ to purchase. And I also have a blog called Plutonian Mac.