We Are All Gonna' Die

Well, we are all going to die from something, someday.

Hopefully for most of us it won't be until we are pushing 100 or more years of age. Just the same there is considerable cause for concern about a new influenza virus that has been evolving in Asia for the past few dozen years. It is now modifying itself in Egypt.

This article is about the danger presented from H5N1 Bird Flu (Influenza). Note that all Type A human flu has come from various strains of bird flu with the same basic structure, sometimes after spreading through swine. Because of that, some strains are called Swine Flu.

What is Bird Flu?

Ironically in birds the virus breeds in the intestines and is easily spread by them as they fly from tree to tree and visit areas where other birds congregate. Bird feeders are great contamination areas for birds. Humans seldom catch influenza from birds, but it does happen.

In 1918 –1919 the whole world experienced the first known serious flu pandemic of H1N1 Bird Flu/Swine Flu/Spanish Flu. Most of the American soldiers and sailors who died in World War One died from the flu instead of bullets. My maternal Grandfather was a doctor at Great Lakes Naval Training Center where nearly a thousand young boys died before they could even get to the war. I lost two aunts and one uncle on my paternal side of the family from H1N1 Spanish Flu in 1918 and 1919.

The virus was ferocious in attacking young adults. In fact the youth of the victims and the ferocity of the virus was one of the leading reasons why the Germans were so willing to sign an armistice. It had wrecked havoc in their front lines and in their cities. Riots and near riots were breaking out in Germany because of the death toll and the deprivation the people experienced during the long course of the war. The flu had one historical advantage, in that it helped stop a horrific war. It is ironic that the people conducting the war were so afraid of dying of the flu that they decided to stop killing each other.

There, certainly had been many pandemics before that time, but medical science was not advanced enough to have kept track of them by name and number based upon the area of origin and the actual physical structure of the influenza virus.

The 1918 Pandemic was called “Spanish Flu” because the world first became aware that it existed when it swept through Spain. It has been estimated that 40- 70 million (Or more! There are some estimates of 100 Million.) people died worldwide from Spanish Flu (Nobody recorded the numbers of dead for China, Indo China, India, Africa and most of Latin America where people died by the hundreds in villages and in isolated hamlets. Nobody felt it necessary to tabulate the death toll.).

American soldiers gallantly sailed off to the war in late 1917 singing the popular song of the era, “Over There.” Some of the words were as follows:

We'll be over,

We're coming over,

And we won't come back

Till it's over, Over there!

No more prophetic words were ever sung. It is commonly believed that American soldiers in WWI actually brought the virus over to Europe after an initial outbreak in Fort Riley, Kansas. From Kansas, the virus spread to the East Coast of the US where troops were staged prior to being shipped overseas. Thousands were already dying of the Flu while the American troops were on their way across the Atlantic. All we know for certain was that it became a horrible pandemic in Europe towards the end of World War One and from there it spread all over the world.

Flu is very infectious, as everybody who ever had it knows, and most of us have had it. With most recent flu infections, the morbidity is not high usually because you have immunity from a flu shot or you had a similar case of the flu a few seasons back. Your immune system successfully fights it and eventually you get healthy again. Yet, some strains are stronger than others, especially if they have not been around recently. The death rate is usually highest among the elderly and the very young with most of the current influenza viruses. My 87 year old mother died in the recent Swine Flu (also H1N1) epidemic. There is a new Swine Flu that appears to be evolving that is based upon H3N2. I expect you will hear a lot more of it in the future. As of right now, it has not yet taken off, but it will in time.

All Type A Influenza strains are RNA virus. That means it mutates readily and frequently. The flu shots are designed to accommodate the most recent mutations. That is the reason why we should get flu shots every year. Spanish Flu, Swine Flu, Russian Flu and Fiji Flu are all H1N1, but have minor differences in the surface of their protein structure. One can make you sick, but the next one can make you sicker.

When a new strain of virus shows up on the world scene it usually takes a higher toll of victims, simply because your body defenses do not recognize the new virus, and are not prepared to fight it. The Bird Flu viruses are numbered according to protein molecules (glycoproteins ) on the surface of the virus. In 1957-58 a new virus with variances in the surface protein structure evolved in Asia and it was called H2N2 “Asian Flu” (The Spanish didn’t get blamed this time!).

In 1968-69 we experienced the last major pandemic from a new strain of bird flu virus that was first reported in the British Hong Kong Colony area. We called it “Hong Kong Flu” to give it some specificity and to differentiate it from “Asian Flu.” This was the H3N2 Strain. Again, the body immunological capacity did not recognize this new strain and many people died. By the way, the “H” comes from Hemagglutinin which is the major surface glycoprotein on the virus. The N stands for Neuraminidase, another protein on the surface of the virus. Note again, ALL HUMAN INFLUENZA A VIRUSES ARE BIRD FLU!

All the human flu viruses of recent history have been H3N2 Hong Kong Flu or a re-emergent but far weaker H1N1(Spanish/Russian/Java) Bird Flu strains. Every year or so that H1N1 comes back it picks up another name. It is still H1N1 but just slightly modified from the seasons before. All of the human influenza Type A viruses have been carried by birds. Most are carried in other animals, like pigs. It was long thought that the bird viruses passed to pigs where they picked up characteristics from other viruses that were common to both man and pig and were thus able to transfer to man. When H1N1 first broke out in Fort Riley Kansas, the army base was next to a pig farm. In fact the first person believed to have become ill from “Spanish Flu” was an Army cook who purchased pork from that farm to prepare for the troops at the fort. And now we know why the ancient Jews made pigs, pork and pig raising a forbidden issue because they were “Unclean.”

H4 never crossed over from bird to man, but a new strain of bird virus has and it has been numbered H5 because it has the fifth variance found on the Hemagglutinin. H5N1 looks to be far, far worse than H1N1Spanish Flu.

It is not passed from person to person yet in any appreciable number (a few recorded instances in Asia and Egypt where it has jumped three or four times between people. When this happens it is called a “cluster.”), but when it evolves to the point that it does pass freely, it could take a good percentage of the world’s population with it. I have seen estimates as high as 1.5 Billion of the 6 Billion people on this planet. (That estimate assumes that half of the people of the world will become ill with H5N1 and that half of them will die!)

Normal flu kills about 0.008% of the people who come down with it. That means eight out of every hundred thousand people will die. Quite often their deaths are tabulated as pneumonia so the Influenza virus does not get the credit it deserves. Those nasty little virus structures eat our living cells in our nose, throat and lungs. They enter the cell and use the cell nucleus material to make baby viruses. When the baby viruses are ready to be on their way in the world they rupture the cell wall and spill out, hoping that you will cough or sneeze to send them on their way to a new host. The fact that your cells are ruptured and exploded is the reason why your throat looks red and raw. It is! The same thing can happen in your lungs. The virus destroys the cell lining of your lungs and then bacteria can set in on all that raw oozing lung tissue and grow and replicate until you can no longer effectively breathe through your lung tissue. That is what kills most elderly flu victims.

The young are usually killed by another process called a cytokine storm. Young people have strong immune systems just like all those young people in 1918. Their immune system aggressively over reacts to the presence of the virus and a great many cytokines are created. cytokines signal immune cells such as T-cells and macrophages to travel to the site of infection, such as in the lungs. This results in a pneumonia like flooding of the lungs and the young people die from lack of oxygen reaching body organs. Essentially the victims suffocate in their own fluids. Not a pleasant way to die, but you are usually too weak to care.

Thus we are now up to H5N1 Bird Flu. Almost all recorded human cases have been caught from birds, bird feathers or bird scat. It does not pass freely from human to human to human like normal Type A flu viruses do. H5N1 has been reported to make three or four jumps between humans but then it dies out. Recent reports from Egypt have it that it is trying to evolve into a human flu by recombining with H1N1. H5N1 is very lethal, killing about half of its human hosts. It remains to be seen if it will keep that high lethality once it recombines. We certainly hope that it won’t.

It is interesting to note though that the United States working in conjunction with doctors and scientists in Holland has managed to create a "Human Eradication Virus" that is based upon H5N1 recombining with H1N1 along with some swine attributes. Isn't it odd that this should be happening in 2012 with the ancient Mayan predictions of an end to the age coming up.

The ancient Chinese used to have an effective but subtle curse that went, "May you live in interesting times." Stay tuned. This should be a very interesting year.