Will Pandemic H5N1 Kill Humans In This Way?

1918 : The Horrifically Gruesome Death Of 'Spanish Flu' Victims

An horrifically gruesome, descriptive passage of what happens when a human dies from bird flu, from Michael Greger's extraordinary online book about H5N1, and the likelihood of a re-occurence of the 1918-1919 Spanish Flu pandemic :

What started for millions around the globe as muscle aches and a fever ended days later with many victims bleeding from their nostrils, ears, and eye sockets. Some bled inside their eyes; some bled around them. They vomited blood and coughed it up. Purple blood blisters appeared on their skin.

The Chief of the Medical Services, Major Walter V. Brem, described the horror at the time in the Journal of the American Medical Association. He wrote that “often blood was seen to gush from a patient’s nose and mouth.” In some cases, blood reportedly spurted with such force as to squirt several feet. “When pneumonia appeared,” Major Brem recounted, “the patients often spat quantities of almost pure blood.” They were bleeding into their lungs.

As victims struggled to clear their airways of the bloody froth that poured from their lungs, their bodies started to turn blue from the lack of oxygen, a condition known as violaceous heliotrope cyanosis. “They’re as blue as huckleberries and spitting blood,” one New York City physician told a colleague. U.S. Army medics noted that this was “not the dusky pallid blueness that one is accustomed to in failing pneumonia, but rather [a] deep blueness…an indigo blue color.” The hue was so dark that one physician confessed that “it is hard to distinguish the colored men from the white.” “It is only a matter of a few hours then until death comes,” recalled another physician, “and it is simply a struggle for air until they suffocate.” They drowned in their own bloody secretions.

“It wasn’t always that quick, either,” one historian adds. “And along the way, you had symptoms like fingers and genitals turning black, and people reporting being able to literally smell the body decaying before the patient died.” “When you’re ill like that you don’t care,” recalls one flu survivor, now 100 years old. “You don’t care if you live or die.”

Major Brem described an autopsy: “Frothy, bloody serum poured from the nose and mouth when the body was moved, or the head lowered…. Pus streamed from the trachea when the lungs were removed.” Fellow autopsy surgeons discussed what they called a “pathological nightmare,” with lungs up to six times their normal weight, looking “like melted red currant jelly.” An account published by the National Academies of Science describes the lungs taken from victims as “hideously transformed” from light, buoyant, air-filled structures to dense sacks of bloody fluid.

There was one autopsy finding physicians reported having never seen before. As people choked to death, violently coughing up as much as two pints of yellow-green pus per day, their lungs would sometimes burst internally, forcing air under pressure up underneath their skin. In the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Medicine, a British physician noted “one thing that I have never seen before—namely the occurrence of subcutaneous emphysema”—pockets of air accumulating just beneath the skin—“beginning in the neck and spreading sometimes over the whole body.”

These pockets of air leaking from ruptured lungs made patients crackle when they rolled onto their sides. In an unaired interview filmed for a PBS American Experience documentary on the 1918 pandemic, one Navy nurse compared the sound to a bowl of Rice Krispies. The memory of that sound—the sound of air bubbles moving under people’s skin—remained so vivid that for the rest of her life, she couldn’t be in a room with anyone eating that popping cereal.

There seems to be limited information, online at least, about whether the hundreds of people who have already died of bird flu suffered deaths in any way similar to those detailed above.

Insights Into How American Towns And Cities Fought The 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

The New York Times story we linked to in our last post, about the US government's new categorisation system for flu pandemics, also contains some fascinating insights into how the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic was fought in towns and cities across the United States.

The Centre For Disease Control and the University of Michigan's medical school conducted a study into how 44 American cities coped with the Spanish Flu outbreaks. Newspaper clippings form the era, and hospital records, were examined, to find out why some American cities were devastated by the outbreaks, and others managed to control them.

From the New York Times :

While a few tiny towns escaped the epidemic entirely by cutting off all contact with outside, most cities took less drastic measures.

These included isolating the sick and quarantining homes and rooming houses, closing schools, churches, bars and other gathering places, canceling parades, ball games, theaters and other public events, staggering factory hours, barring door-to-door sales, discouraging the use of public transport and encouraging the use of face masks.

The most effective measure seemed to be moving early and quickly.

For example, said Dr. Howard Markel, a medical historian and one of the study’s leaders, Philadelphia, the worst-hit city, had nearly three times as many sick and dead per capita as St. Louis, which had was hit weeks later by the virus moving inland from the Eastern Seaboard and had time to react as soon as flu cases rose above averages.

“No matter how you set up the model,” Dr. Markel said, “the cities that acted earlier and with more layered protective measures fared better.”

Resurrecting The Most Deadly Virus In Human History

To Stop It From Killing Tens Of Millions Again

"The Immune Response Is Contributing To The Lethality Of The Virus"

Another report on the ressurection of the 1918 'Spanish Flu' virus, and how experiments on infecting monkeys with the 'reborn' H1N1 virus have revealed the truth lethality of the flu that killed 40 to 60 million people in 1918-1919.

Basically, the researchers now assume that the way the monkeys were consumed by the virus is pretty close to how humans succumbed to it.

The first signs of infection appear within 24 hours of exposure, the immune system goes into overdrive to fight the virus, but end up filling the lungs with blood and fluid. On top of all the other terrible ways the H1N1 destroys the human body, the victim ends up, literally, drowning on their own blood.

The mainstream media has been unusually quiet on the results of the 'Spanish Flu Ressurection' experiments, even though the actual discovery of a frozen victim of the 1918-19 pandemic recieved enormous global media coverage, as did the early days of the research to recreate the original virus from tissue cultures drawn from the frozen corpse.

Perhaps the reality of how tens or hundreds of millions of people will die should the current H5N1 virus mutate into a pandemic flu strain is just far too gruesome.

From Madison.com (excerpts) :

The deadly 1918 flu virus harms monkeys the same way today's bird flu strikes some people, says a new study led by a UW-Madison researcher.

Both viruses inflict an unusual immune response that kills instead of protects, the study found.

The discovery could encourage doctors to treat bird flu with immune-suppressing drugs such as steroids in addition to the antiviral medications now used, said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a UW-Madison virologist and lead author of the study.

In the study, published in today's issue of the journal Nature, scientists infected cynomolgus macaque monkeys with the 1918 virus. The monkeys virtually drowned in their own inflammatory fluid that poured into their lungs, as many people reportedly did during the 1918 pandemic.

The finding could quicken officials' response to a new pandemic by enabling doctors to treat an immune reaction along with the flu itself, Kawaoka said.

"We may be able to reduce the symptoms by coping with that immune response," he said.

Kawaoka worked on the study with researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle and Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory in Winnipeg, Manitoba.

The monkeys were infected in a tightly-controlled part of the Canadian lab. It is designated biosafety level 4, or BSL- 4, meaning it is equipped to handle the most dangerous germs.

Ten monkeys were infected with the 1918 virus. Three were given a routine flu virus from 2001.

The monkeys that received the routine flu had strong immune reactions that subsided as the monkeys recovered from the infection.

The immune reactions in the monkeys that got the 1918 virus were weaker initially - but failed to go away. As the virus continued to grow in their bodies, their immune systems unleashed "profuse watery and bloody liquid" into their lungs, causing deadly disease, the researchers reported.

"The immune response is actually contributing to the lethality of the virus," said co-author Michael Katze, a University of Washington microbiologist.

Drowning On Your Own Blood

Recreating The 1918 Bird Flu Virus That Killed 60 Million People Reveals Ways To Fight Our Future Pandemic


After numerous books and movies, and television shows, depicting the aftermath of a letahl virus escaping from a bioresearch lab, it must be near impossible for scientists and researchers to to not think about, and perhaps joke about, how they would feel if the lehal virus they were working on somehow escaped from their lab.

I don't mean to be flippant about the importance of such research, or killer viruses, but many of these researchers and scientists must have read some of the fiction, such as Stephen King's 'The Stand' and watched some of the movies that depict such scenarios, if only to debunk them.

"Look at that. We'd never do that in our lab. Did they actually have someone who knows what they're doing to advise on making that lab scene authentic?"

I only raise this because it was exactly the first thing that crossed my mind when I read the following stories, excerpted below.

Because the researchers in the story aren't just working on any one of the numerous lethal viruses and baterium that fill research labs around the world today.

They had recreated The Big One. .The 1918-1919 Bird Flu pandemic virus, otherwise known as Spanish Flu, which killed 40 to 60 million people around the world in less than nine months.

Consider that World War 1 lasted for four years, had battles where 20,000 men died in one morning, and less people died during that War then died the year after it was over.

What these researchers witnessed must have chilled them to the bone. The full fury of human history's most lethal virus, and it was under their control.

So just how tight is that lab security anyway?

From the BBC :

Scientists who recreated "Spanish flu" - the 1918 virus which killed up to 50m people - have witnessed its remarkable killing power first hand.

The lungs of infected monkeys were destroyed in just days as their immune systems went into overdrive after a Canadian laboratory rebuilt the virus.

...the results were startling. Symptoms appeared within 24 hours of exposure to the virus, and the subsequent destruction of lung tissue was so widespread that, had the monkeys not been killed a few days later, they would literally have drowned in their own blood.

The results match those seen when mice were infected in an earlier study and are very similar to those described in human patients at the time the virus was at its height.

Darwyn Kobasa, a research scientist with the Public Health Agency of Canada, and lead author of the research, defended the decision to recreate one of the most dangerous viruses in history.

He said: "This research provides an important piece in the puzzle of the 1918 virus, helping us to better understand influenza viruses and their potential to cause pandemics."

However, it is not the virus that is directly causing the damage to the lungs - it is the body's own response to infection.

Immune system proteins that can damage infected tissue were found at much higher levels following H1N1 infection compared with other viral infections.

Analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UW) revealed that a key component of the immune system, a gene called RIG-1 appeared to be involved.

Levels of the protein produced by the gene were lower in tissue infected with the 1918 virus, suggesting it had a method of switching it off, causing immune defences to run wild.

This ability to alter the body's immune response is shared with the most recent candidate for mutation into a pandemic strain, the H5N1 avian flu.

Experts are worried that if the virus changes so that it can infect humans easily, it could again be far more lethal than normal seasonal flu.

Dr Ronald Cutler, an infectious diseases researcher at the University of East London, said: "Knowing how that over stimulation takes place could lead to the development of new methods to treat these diseases so we are better prepared for any future pandemic."