Last Updated 2010-07-27
30 days. One-twelfth of one year. A fraction of time.
What can happen in 30 days? Let’s recount one 30 day fraction in the history of one American city. You are welcome to call this discussion a precautionary tale, but only if you distinguish this precautionary tale as relying strictly on factual data.
Picture a stadium filled with families, over 12,000 souls . . . men, women and children, even a few strapping soldiers. But you don’t hear an orchestra playing or the vociferous clatter of youngsters cheering after their favorite player scores a point. No one is selling food or those great hats emblazoned with the local mascot because no one in any seat has reason to eat or to celebrate. Mothers’ eyes search the rows, praying that none of their children have entered the gates. Suffering children long for the tender mercies of their mother’s care, wondering why no one is helping them.
No one willingly came to this stadium; not a single ticket was purchased for the event. What we find is an entirely different scene. Slumped against each colorful backrest is an expression-less human being with no voice, suffocating under the weight of lungs being destroyed by disease. 12,000 human souls with no uncertain outcome. A stadium packed to capacity.
Let’s begin on September 11th, but not in New York City and not in this century.
In an early review of a text many years ago, we were struck by the speed that a modern pandemic may blindside not only the public, but the leaders and the leading medical “authorities”. Most who follow epidemiology understand that wars and military transport frequently describe the arc of disease movement. This particular matter at hand appears to have been sparked by one such situation.
What can happen in 30 days?
“Shock and Awe” as a military incursion terminology palls in usage to the documented fatal and maiming effects of a rapidly spreading viral outbreak in a populated area. A transmittable, novel influenza virus reservoir is an ongoing, bottomless battery of unguided missiles striking the helpless. The citizens, often relying on the “experts”, are generally guided into their least optimal health position, parked and left there while the public health “authorities” scramble, building press releases touting the success of this campaign or that hygiene program.
We will see the parallels between 1918 and today in this discussion.
Those purported “successes” are typically a paper chase used to advertise the idea of practical progress when little more than “more of the same” has actually occurred. Deftness and agility will not be found as hallmarks of bureaucratic institutions, then or now. But the survivors write the history and the dead speak little. Self-applause is extensive among survivors and is only rarely merited. However, those traces left by our dead may inform us if we measure the events carefully and impartially, if we refuse the cleverly crafted ambassadorial missives and inspect the funding and intentions of the “post”-action situation reports, in short, if we study the factual data, data from 1918 and data from 2009.
Let’s talk about today for a moment. Each of you has at least a hint of the nagging feeling that something is amiss, that the full report is yet to be published. Even in July 2010, activity that does not solve, that cannot work scientifically, has been somehow transformed by diplomatic public health advertisements into progress against the foe. Vaccination campaigns, originally admitted as failed due to low public participation (in a move for sympathy), have recently been widely touted as defeating the virus.
Manipulation of public perception is rife in this arena. Short public attention spans allow for that type of zero to hero transformation by the social messengers, all with the ease of flipping a press release to the mass media or slotting a thinly veiled, corporate position paper under the guise of a “scientific” study into a major academic publication.
As you have seen, a viral reservoir has no eyes for press releases, nor is a novel and rapidly emerging viral reservoir at all interested in “tried and true” solutions. The virus is unaffected by “All Clear” social messaging campaigns, even those geared to alternative media such as blogs, websites and other social networks that have been quietly funded and fueled by the bureaucrats. More of the same is rarely a solution when a novel problem presents.
Not even a monolith of messaging will create gravity, though the campaigns certainly impress a particular perception of gravity upon any but the most particular reader.
A novel viral reservoir like ΣPF11, also known as pH1N1, attacks and waits, then attacks and waits. Smoulder and spark; spark and smoulder until PF11Ω is achieved. Is this a matter of conjecture or hypothesis? Not at all.
In this matter, the history collected by Gina Kolata allows us to hear the important voices of those lost in 1918, guiding us to reform our systems of thought and action. History affords us the luxury of mistake avoidance, but only if we give way to logic and fact.
Because the clues to today’s mysteries are frequently discovered in a careful reading of the past, historical facts are evaluated as input to our system of discovery. We’d like to thank Gina Kolata for her insightful historical research which she developed into book form in 1999 and published under the title of Flu: The Story of the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 and the Search for the Virus That Caused It. The dates reconstructed in this narrative are well documented in Chapter 1, “The Plague Year” and are fact-checked against the Philadelphia Department of Health's review of the 1918 Pandemic in 1976.
What happened prior to the 30 days?
A recap of the 1918 Pandemic is in order. 1917 smouldered, but was not closely tracked. The first wave was officially noted from a tourist area of Spain in February 1918 and spread throughout Europe for the next 4 months. That wave affected the war effort on both sides. The young and healthy were disproportionately ill generally 2 days after exposure with many suffering 3 to 7 days in bed and then a 7-14 malaise thereafter. Deaths occurred, but apparently not in a fashion that obliged officials to carefully count. In the US, a similar pattern occurred throughout late winter and spring.
The notation of a conspicuous prequel to the 30 days may well enlighten those following the course of the current pandemic. Specific attribution may not be made to any particular disease because records were not kept. However, Kolata does cite a detailed retrospective study completed by Gerald Pyle at the University of North Carolina concerning excess fatalities among young adults during 1918 across the globe. The study corroborates the second wave onset with a virus that continued to be contagious and then potentiated to a higher fatality rate. By statistical appearances, the virus genetically self-modified and became more pathogenic. Many died.
Of special interest is the fact that by August of 1918, the disease had caused substantial fatality in areas less affected in the first wave including a severe epidemic in India. Does that season parallel 2010? Today, we stand at 2010-07-26 with reports from India indicating a profound upswing in case count and fatality level. In a recent count of two days (July 21st and 22nd) within Pune, India, officials went to the expense of testing 7,800 people and placing 1,286 on Tami-Flu.
One city, two days. Late July 2010. India demonstrates current genetic sequences that suggest accumulation of pathogenic traits. Those same genetic markers appear across the United States and other parts of the world today.
On July 22, 1918, the Department of Public Health and Charities warned US health officials of the upcoming influenza spread into American cities from the strong waves in the Southern Hemisphere.
What happened next in 1918 is the basis of our precautionary tale, a tale of one city that was multiplied nationwide in the ensuing months.
In their official publication just prior to September 1918, JAMA (The Journal of the American Medical Association) got caught in their bed clothes when they proclaimed the Spanish Flu to be of no more concern than ordinary influenza. For lack of a solution, they advertised that no problem existed.
September 11, 1918: Several members of the US Navy reported ill from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Naval Yard. Influenza began to spread in the city. On September 18, officials began a public campaign against “coughing, spitting and sneezing”. The Philadelphia Inquirer ran an article on page 4 entitled, “Spanish Influenza Sends 600 Sailors to Hospital Here, No Concern Felt,” on September 19th directly communicating from the officials that the public should not fear, “spread to any great degree among citizens.”
Two days later, September 21, the city made influenza a reportable disease and the local newspaper ran a story undoubtedly inspiring public confidence. Scientists had declared that Pfeiffer’s bacillus was the causative agent of influenza, encouraging the idea that medicine was progressing rapidly to a solution.
Then, as now, printed declarations were not effective against disease spread and disease mortality. In a show of mis-guided patriotism, local and federal officials invited the public to gather for a Liberty Loan Drive. 200,000 people attended that parade on September 28.
October 1, 1918. Three days after the parade and ten days after the proclamation of scientific progress, doctors reported 635 new cases of influenza in Philadelphia, a very serious case count for a disease phrased as “ordinary” by JAMA. Additionally, the count was very likely an understatement due to capacity situations throughout the city. Medical staffs were over-burdened with care at that point and could not accurately report. In a “too little, too late” effort, officials banned all public gatherings on October 3rd.
All the wild horses had exited all the corrals in the city, but the authorities busied themselves with closing the gates and issuing more mollifying proclamations. Those proclamations not only fell on deaf ears, the words toppled into the mortuaries and graveyards onto the dead ears of the citizens that these authorities had been trusted to protect.
In the seven days ending October 5, 1918, Philadelphia reported at least 2,600 deaths. Students were recruited to serve as medical corps. On October 9th, over 4,000 new cases were counted in 24 hours. The city arranged 10 emergency hospitals. For the week ending October 12, 1918, the city reported 9,500 more deaths. The 250 strong nursing staff of Philadelphia General Hospital reported totals of 125 ill with 15 dead. A record 759 deaths of citizens were reported in one day on October 10, 1918.
What did happen in 30 days?
In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania during late 1918, the equivalent count of a packed stadium died of an influenza disease wave in one month. Over 12,000 people on official record suffered and left this world, most in the final two weeks of the period. The Case Fatality Rate for those who received medical care at a hospital was roughly 33%. During that pandemic influenza wave from September 1918 to March 1919, approximately 16,000 people died in Philadelphia.
What have we learned from those deaths in 1918, from the deaths in 2009? Was 2009 the parallel to 1917 and the first wave of 1918?
At GeneWurx, we have documented the persistent hyper-morphic behaviour of the pandemic reservoir since April 2009 and the recent concentration of Avian Influenza genetic changes onto the human influenza strains. The present series of accumulated changes demonstrate that this virus is far from stable and is positioned for additional waves with genetics predictive of higher mortality and long-term sequelae.
For additional background on the clinical and epidemiological observational facts concerning Pandemic Influenza H1N1, please refer to the Table of Contents for PF11 Trends & Issues, Mid-Term.
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