Bird flu, influenza and 1918: The case for mutant Avian tuberculosis

Lawrence Broxmeyer MD, Bird flu, influenza and 1918: The case for mutant Avian tuberculosis. Med Hypotheses. 2006;67(5):1006-15. For Epub 2006 click here.
Reprint: Lawrence Broxmeyer.Bird Flu, Influenza and 1918: The case for mutant Avian tuberculosis. Journal of Chinese Clinical Medicine,2007,2(2):83-93.

Influenza is Italian for ‘‘influence’’, Latin: influentia. It utilised to be thought that the disease was caused by a bad impact from the heavens. Influenza was called a virus long, long before it was proven to be one. In 2005, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that a recurrence of the 1918 influenza epidemic could kill between 180 meg and 360 meg people worldwide.

A super conception of the current bird-flu hysteria is fostered by a distrust among the lay and scientific community regarding the actual state of our knowledge regarding the bird flu or H5N1 and the killer ‘‘Influenza’’ Pandemic of 1918 that it is compared to. And this distrust is not completely unfounded. Traditionally, ‘‘flu’’ does not kill. Experts, including Peter Palese of the Mount School of Medicine in Manhattan, inform us that modify in 1992, millions in China already had antibodies to H5N1, message that they had contracted it and that their immune system had little trouble fending it off.

Dr. Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne, UC Berkely demographers, reportable in 2000 disenchanting statistics showing that undetected T.B. may hit been the real killer in the 1918 flu epidemic. Aware of recent attempts to isolate the â€˜â€˜Influenza virus’’ on human cadavers and their specimens, Noymer and Garenne summed that: ‘‘Frustratingly, these findings hit not answered the discourse ground the 1918 virus was so virulent, nor do they substance an explanation for the unusual age strikingness of deaths’’. Bird flu would sure be diagnosed in the hospital today as Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS). Roger and others favor suspecting T.B. in every cases of acute respiratory unfortunate of unknown origin.

By 1918, it could be said, in so farther as T.B. was concerned, that the world was a supersaturated sponge ready to combust and that among its most vulnerable parts was the rattling Midwest where the 1918 unknown pandemic began. It is theorized that the lethal pig epidemic that began in Kansas meet prior to the first human outbreaks was a disease of avian and human T.B. genetically combined through mycobacteriophage interchange, with the pig, susceptible to both, as its involuntary living society medium. What are the implications of mistaking a virus such as Influenza A for what mycobacterial disease is actually causing? They would be disastrous, with junked treatment and preventative stockpiles.  The obvious need for further enquiry is presently imminent and pressing.
2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Frequency Foundation investigate findings indicate deaths from Swine flu are likely cod to a viral T.B. co-infection, consistent with the concept in the paper above.