'And the Search for the Virus That Caused It' by Gina Kolata
The fascinating, true story of the world's deadliest disease. In 1918, the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the epidemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. As many American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu as were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra were sickened and killed by the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out. Scientists have recently rediscovered shards of the flu virus frozen in Alaska and preserved in scraps of tissue in a government warehouse.
Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for The New York Times, unravels the mystery of this lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. Delving into the history of the flu and previous epidemics, detailing the science and the latest understanding of this mortal disease, Kolata addresses the prospects for a great epidemic recurring, and, most important, what can be done to prevent it.
"Chronicling the harrowing effects of the 1918 flu epidemic which wiped out tens of millions, this scientific detective story offers compelling and plausible evidence on how it could happen again and sound advice on how to ward off such a disaster in the future." - The Reader's Catalog
"This book will undoubtedly be popular - it has all the ingredients for success." - Wall Street Journal
"It was a plague so deadly that if a similar virus were to strike today, it would kill more people in a single year than heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS and Alzheimer's disease combined." Between 20 million and 100 million people worldwide died in the 1918 flu pandemic, but for years afterward this deadliest plague in history was almost completely forgotten. Histories and even medical texts rarely mentioned it. This disconnect between the flu's devastation and its obscurity is the starting point for Kolata's incisive history. She explains how the plague spread, covers the various speculations about its causes and origins and gives an account of the search to retrieve a specimen of the virus strain once genetic science had advanced enough to unravel the virus's mysteries. Tissue samples--from an obese woman buried in the permafrost of Alaska and from two soldiers who died in army camps--preserved by the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in thumb-sized bits of paraffin prove to be the last remaining sources of the 1918 strain. Kolata, a science writer for the New York Times and author of Clone, profiles the scientists who tracked down these samples, follows their investigations and explains their conclusions. Could such a deadly flu appear again? Many scientists fear it could, hence their quick response to the 1997 outbreak of chicken flu in Hong Kong, which led to the slaughter of 1.2 million birds and, Kolata argues, averted another worldwide disaster. Clearly explaining both the science and the social toll of the pandemic, Kolata writes an admirable history and soberly spells out how the U.S. government is prepared - or unprepared - for a similar public health threat today." - Publishers Weekly
"A still-unsolved medical mystery, expertly told: What caused the influenza pandemic of 1918, a disaster that dwarfs every other epidemic in this century? And could it happen again? New York Times science reporter Kolata [Clone: The Road to Dolly, 1998, etc.] was a microbiology major in college when the scope of the 1918 flu deaths first hit home for her: "It was a plague so deadly that if a similar virus were to strike today, it would kill more people in a single year than heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease combined." In spite of the illness's devastating toll, the origin of the 1918 flu remains a mystery. Was it a mutation in an ordinary human flu virus that caused a transformation into a global killer? Or was it a crossover from an animal disease, like the variant of swine flu that has been investigated as a possible culprit? An especially perplexing aspect of the disease is its W-shaped death curve: There were peaks for children under five years, and for the elderly ages 70 to 74 years - but also a middle peak for 20-to-40-year-olds, a surprisingly vulnerable group. Those trying to determine the mode of transmission were unable to devise any method (and Kolata relates in revolting detail a number of failed attempts) to infect healthy subjects with the disease. Throughout, she provides a number of hair-raising descriptions of the disease, which eventually afflicted more than 25 percent of the US population. Along the way, readers also get a picture of the research world: At one point, many of those studying the elusive influenza viruses dropped that work to go after HIV. "Every virologist loves a new virus," confesses English scientist John Oxford, and they mistakenly thought HIV was an easy cure. Kolata's is a knowledgeable voice, and her enthusiasm for the chase draws us into the intrigue. Her frightening conclusion? It could happen again, at any time." - Kirkus Reviews
"As well as its intrinsic excitement, Kolata's narrative offers a number of insights into the workings of science." - The New York Times Book Review
"The 1918 flu epidemic puts every other epidemic of this century to shame," Kolata writes.- The New York Times Book Review
"It was a plague so deadly that if a similar virus were to strike today, it would kill more people in a single year than heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease combined." It is also "one of history's great conundrums," she says, in that despite its profound impact, little is said or known about it today. But a determined band of researchers has searched for and found the deadly virus in tissues preserved from victims. It is their story that Kolata (a science writer for the New York Times) tells, skillfully weaving into it an account of the epidemic's devastating effects and the pathology of the disease. Although the search for the causative virus has succeeded, she says, the effort to understand why the 1918 flu was such a killer has not. "We definitely have the right suspect," molecular pathologist Jeffery Taubenberger told Kolata, "but we do not yet know how the murder was committed." - Scientific American
"A luminous, impressive debut."- Publishers Weekly
"Quirky and believable...consistently compelling." - The Los Angeles Times
"The flu that swept the world in 1918-19, killing 40 million people, is only vaguely familiar today. Kolata's fact-filled book will correct that situation, thanks to its fascinating accounting of the scientists, politicians, and sufferers involved in the epidemic. Kolata vividly describes the spreading of the great flu and the helpless feelings of the civilians and the military personnel who were swept up in it. She draws on popular and scientific resources and her own interviews with many scientists and laypersons to combine descriptions of the pandemic as it raged with accounts of important related work done during the past 25 years. Her reports of recent investigators who have sought to find the virus responsible for the pandemic in frozen bodies read like detective stories, and even the swine flu scare of 1976 receives detailed coverage. Ingeniously, Kolata makes Flu not only a history but also an instructive warning to heed in preparation for future epidemics." - Booklist
"When we think of plagues, we think of AIDS, Ebola, anthrax spores, and, of course, the Black Death. Influenza never makes the list. But in 1918 the Great Flu Epidemic felled the young and healthy virtually overnight. An estimated forty million people died as the pandemic raged. Children were left orphaned and families were devastated. More American soldiers were killed by the 1918 flu than were killed in battle during World War I. And no area of the globe was safe. Eskimos living in remote outposts in the frozen tundra succumbed to the flu in such numbers that entire villages were wiped out. If such a plague returned today, taking a comparable percentage of the U.S. population with it, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number killed in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's combined.Scientists have recently discovered shards of the flu virus in human remains frozen in the Arctic tundra and in scraps of tissue preserved in a government warehouse. In Flu, Gina Kolata, an acclaimed reporter for the New York Times, unravels the mystery of this lethal virus with the high drama of a great adventure story. From Alaska to Norway, from the streets of Hong Kong to the corridors of the White House, Kolata tracks the race to recover the live pathogen and probes the fear that has impelled government policy. She delves into the history of the flu and previous epidemics, profiles the experts hot on the trail and the amateurs woefully misguided, and details the science and the latest understanding of this mortal disease." - from the book's inside flap.
Read this fascinating excerpt from the book....
The Plague Year
"This is a detective story. Here was a mass murderer that was around 80 years ago and who's never been brought to justice. And what we're trying to do is find the murderer." - Jeffery Taubenberger, molecular pathologistWhen the plague came, on those chilly days of autumn, some said it was a terrible new weapon of war. The plague germs were inserted into aspirin made by the German drug company Bayer. Take an aspirin for a headache and the germs will creep through your body. Then your fate is sealed.No, the plague came in on a camouflaged German ship that had crept into Boston Harbor under cover of darkness and released the germs that seeded the city. Boston, after all, was where the plague started. There was an eyewitness, an old woman who said she saw a greasy-looking cloud that floated over the harbor and wafted over the docks.
No, it was started by Germans who slipped into Boston Harbor on U-boats and then sneaked ashore, carrying vials of the plague germs with them. They let the germs loose in theaters and among crowds gathered for those interminable Liberty Bond rallies. Lieutenant Colonel Philip S. Doane, head of the Health Sanitation Section of the Emergency Fleet Corporation, said so, and he certainly was in a position to know. It was on page one of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
Soon the plague was everywhere. And no one was safe.
The sickness preyed on the young and healthy. One day you are fine, strong, and invulnerable. You might be busy at work in your office. Or maybe you are knitting a scarf for the brave troops fighting the war to end all wars. Or maybe you are a soldier reporting for basic training, your first time away from home and family.
You might notice a dull headache. Your eyes might start to burn. You start to shiver and you will take to your bed, curling up in a ball. But no amount of blankets can keep you warm. You fall into a restless sleep, dreaming the distorted nightmares of delirium as your fever climbs. And when you drift out of sleep, into a sort of semi-consciousness, your muscles will ache and your head will throb and you will somehow know that, step by step, as your body feebly cries out "no," you are moving steadily toward death.
It may take a few days, it may take a few hours, but there is nothing that can stop the disease's progress. Doctors and nurses have learned to spot the signs. Your face turns a dark brownish purple. You start to cough up blood. Your feet turn black. Finally, as the end nears, you frantically gasp for breath. A blood-tinged saliva bubbles out of your mouth. You die - by drowning, actually - as your lungs fill with a reddish fluid.
And when a doctor does an autopsy, he will observe your lungs lying heavy and sodden in your chest, engorged with a thin bloody liquid, useless, like slabs of liver.
They called the plague of 1918 influenza, but it was like no influenza ever seen before. It was more like a biblical prophecy come true, something from Revelations that predicted that first the world was to be struck by war, then famine, and then, with the breaking of the fourth seal of the scroll foretelling the future, the appearance of a horse, "deathly pale, and its rider was called Plague, and Hades followed at its heels."
The plague took off in September of that year, and when it was over, half a million Americans would lie dead. The illness spread to the most remote parts of the globe. Some Eskimo villages were decimated, nearly eliminated from the face of the earth. Twenty percent of Western Samoans perished. And no matter where it struck, the virus went after an unusual group--young adults who generally are spared the ravages of infectious diseases. The death curves were W-shaped, with peaks for the babies and toddlers under age 5, the elderly who were aged 70 to 74, and people aged 20 to 40.
Children were orphaned, families destroyed. Some who lived through it said it was so horrible that they would not even talk about it. Others tried to put it behind them as another wartime nightmare, somehow conflating it with the horrors of trench warfare and mustard gas. It came when the world was weary of war. It swept the globe in months, ending when the war did. It went away as mysteriously as it appeared. And when it was over, humanity had been struck by a disease that killed more people in a few months' time than any other illness in the history of the world.
When we think of plagues we think of strange and terrible illnesses. AIDS. Ebola. Anthrax spores. And, of course, the Black Death. We worry about horrifying symptom - pustules, or fountains of blood gushing from every orifice. Or young men, who had had the bodies of gods, reduced to skeletal figures, hobbling down the street on withered limbs, leaning on canes, shivering with cold. Today we worry about germ warfare - a new virus made of a combination of smallpox and anthrax or smallpox and Ebola. Or we worry that a terrifying new disease is brewing somewhere, in a hot zone, and that it is poised, prepared, with the disruption of ancient forests, to break out and kill us all.
But influenza never makes the list of deadly plagues. It seems so innocuous. It comes around every winter and everyone gets it sooner or later. There is no good treatment once a person becomes ill, but no matter. Nearly everyone gets over it, few are the worse for the experience. It is just an inconvenient illness that inflicts, at most, a week or so of misery. Influenza is not supposed to be deadly, at least for young adults, who have little reason to fear death or disease.
Even its name, "influenza," hints at its usual pattern of coming around each winter. "Influenza" is an Italian word that, one hypothesis has it, was coined by the disease's Italian victims in the middle of the eighteenth century. Influenza di freddo means "influence of the cold."
Flu also, however, seems unavoidable. It is spread through the air and there is little that can be done to prevent being infected. "I know how not to get AIDS," says Alfred W Crosby, a historian of the 1918 flu. "I don't know how not to get the flu."
And yet perhaps because the flu is so familiar, its terrors in 1918 were all the more dreadful. It is like a macabre science fiction tale in which the mundane becomes the monstrous.
When the illness was first observed, doctors were reluctant even to call it the flu. It seemed to be a new disease, they said. Some called it bronchopneumonia, others called it epidemic respiratory infection. Doctors suggested it might be cholera or typhus, or perhaps it was dengue fever or botulism. Still others said it was simply an unidentified pandemic disease. Those who used the term "influenza" insisted on enclosing it in quotation marks.
One way to tell the story of the 1918 flu is through facts and figures, a collection of data whose impact is numbing and whose magnitude is almost inconceivable.
How many became ill? More than 25 percent of the U.S. population.
What about servicemen, the very young and healthy who were the virus's favorite targets? The Navy said that 40 percent of its members got the flu in 1918. The Army estimated that about 36 percent of its members were stricken.
How many died worldwide? Estimates range from 20 million to more than 100 million, but the true number can never be known. Many places that were bludgeoned by the flu did not keep mortality statistics, and even in countries such as the United States, efforts at tabulating flu deaths were complicated by the fact that there was no definitive test in those days to show that a person actually had the flu. But still, the low end of the mortality estimates is stunning. In comparison, AIDS had killed 11.7 million people through 1997. World War I was responsible for 9.2 million combat deaths and around 15 million total deaths. World War II for 15.9 combat deaths. Historian Crosby remarks that whatever the exact number felled by the 1918 flu, one thing is indisputable: the virus "killed more humans than any other disease in a period of similar duration in the history of the world."
How lethal was it? It was twenty-five times more deadly than ordinary influenzas. This flu killed 2.5 percent of its victims. Normally, just one-tenth of 1 percent of people who get the flu die. And since a fifth of the world's population got the flu that year, including 28 percent of Americans, the number of deaths was stunning. So many died, in fact, that the average life span in the United States fell by twelve years in 1918. If such a plague came today, killing a similar fraction of the U.S. population, 1.5 million Americans would die, which is more than the number felled in a single year by heart disease, cancers, strokes, chronic pulmonary disease, AIDS, and Alzheimer's disease combined.
But the raw numbers cannot convey the scenes of horror and misery that swept the world in 1918, which became part of everyday life in every nation, in the largest cities and remotest hamlets.
Some tell of their personal epiphanies. Historian Crosby, a friendly bear of a man with snow-white hair and a short bushy beard, was at Washington State University one day, gazing at a wall of world almanacs. On a whim, he picked up an almanac from 1917 and looked up the U.S. life expectancy. It was, he recalls, about fifty-one years. He then turned to the almanac from 1919. The life expectancy was about the same. Then he looked at the 1918 almanac. The life expectancy was thirty-nine years, he says
."What the hell happened? The life expectancy had dropped to what it had been fifty years before."Then he realized what the explanation must be. It was the influenza epidemic, the flu his own father had lived through but had not spoken about to Crosby. "When you talk to people who lived through it, they think it was just their block or just their neighborhood," Crosby noted. The flu's enormous, almost unthinkable impact somehow had escaped attention. Crosby applied for a grant from the National Institutes of Health to study the 1918 flu and soon became the world's expert on that almost forgotten period of history.No one knows for sure where the 1918 flu came from or how it turned into such a killer strain. All that is known is that it began as an ordinary flu but then it changed. It infected people in the spring of 1918, sickening its victims for about three days with chills and fever, but rarely killing them. Then it disappeared, returning in the fall with the power of a juggernaut.
In retrospect, medical experts talk of the two waves of the 1918 flu. The first was banal, and easily forgotten. No one mentioned plagues or germ warfare when the influenza epidemic first arrived. But when it came back, in the second wave, it had become something monstrous, bearing little resemblance to what is ordinarily thought of as the flu.
The earliest traces of the first wave of the 1918 flu are lost in the sands of time, a warning that only afterward seemed dire. The disease seemed trivial at the time, coming as it did in the midst of the disruptions and terrors of war. But for one of the first towns to be hit by the flu, the disease was not easily dismissed--not because it was so deadly but because it was so infectious.
It was February and the tourist season was in full swing in San Sebastián. The sunny town on the northern coast of Spain seemed a world apart from the dismal, dreary fighting just over the border in France. San Sebastián in the winter of 1918 was a place where you might forget the trenches and the wet, cold, muddy battles. You could escape the talk of mustard gas, that deadly green haze, that horrible new German weapon of war. You could find respite in a country that was still unaligned, where the days were warm and the nights soft and fragrant. You might forget that the rest of Europe was bogged down in an exhausting war to end all wars.
Then the flu came to town. It was nothing alarming - just three days or so of fever, aches, and pains. But it certainly was contagious. It seemed that nearly everyone who was exposed to the disease became ill about two days later. And the disease seemed to strike young, healthy adults, often sparing the old people and the children, who usually are the first to be felled by influenza.
What to do? If the world knew about the flu in San Sebastián, the tourist season would be finished. Who would want to go on vacation only to be laid up with the flu? Maybe the illness could be hushed up, the town's officials reasoned. Yet the word spread--San Sebastián was a place to be avoided.
At nearly the same time, some soldiers were becoming ill, although there was as yet no clear pattern of the disease's spread. Influenza arrived in March in the 15th U.S. Cavalry traveling to Europe.
Two months later, it seemed that everyone was getting sick. In Spain, eight million people were ill, including King Alfonso XIII. One-third of Madrid was sick with the flu, forcing some government offices to close. Even the trams stopped running. And this time, Spain was not alone - the first wave of the flu had spread widely.
The troops called it "three-day fever," according to some who suffered from it. One, Sergeant John C. Acker of the 107th Ammunition Train, 32nd Division, American Expeditionary Force, writing from France that April, said: "They started calling it the 'three-day fever' here, but couldn't camouflage it with a name when it runs its course in a week or more. It hits suddenly and one's temperature nearly chases the mercury thru the top of the M.D.'s thermometer, face gets red, every bone in the body aches and the head splits wide open. This continues for three or four days and then disappears after considerable perspiration, but the 'hangover' clings for a week or two."
But in the rest of the world, the illness came to be called the Spanish flu, to Spain's consternation. After all, the other countries of Europe, as well as the United States and countries in Asia, were hit too in that spring of 1918. Maybe the name stuck because Spain, still unaligned, did not censor its news reports, unlike other European countries. And so Spain's flu was no secret, unlike the flu elsewhere.
Nonetheless, the scope of the epidemic remains unclear. There were no requirements in those days to report cases of influenza - that became a practice in the United States only after, and as a consequence of, the second wave of the 1918 flu. And there was no reason in those days of war to keep track of what seemed like a minor illness. Reports on the flu's reaches were sporadic, reflecting mostly the practices of organizations such as prisons, the military, and some industries, which simply recorded absentees. There was no systematic attempt to track an epidemic.
There are records noting that at the Ford Motor Company more than 1,000 workers called in sick with the flu in March. In San Quentin prison, 500 of 1,900 prisoners became ill in April and May. On March 4, the flu came to Camp Funston (now Fort Riley) in Kansas, a training camp for 20,000 recruits. That month and the next, it also arrived at more than a dozen other Army camps, but no eyebrows were raised. After all, colds and flu were to be expected in training camps where thousands of men were brought together, mingling and passing viruses among themselves.
In April 1918, the epidemic appeared in France, laying waste to British, American, and French troops stationed there, as well as the civilian population. The next month, it was in England, where King George V got the flu. The epidemic crested in England in June; at the same time, it cropped up in China and Japan. In Asia, it also was called the "three-day fever" or, sometimes, "wrestler's fever."
Not surprisingly, the epidemic affected the war effort. Soldiers trying to fight in World War I were laid up by the flu in such numbers that some commanders complained that the disease was hindering their ability to fight.
King George's Grand Fleet could not even put to sea for three weeks in May, with 10,313 men sick. The British Army's 29th Division had planned to attack La Becque on June 30, but had to put off the operation because so many of its men were sick with the flu.
German General Erich von Ludendorff, the leader of the country's acclaimed offense, complained that the flu, or the Flanders fever, as the Germans called it, was thwarting his battle plans. It was not enough that the fighting men were hungry and cold and wet, trying to slog their way through fields of mud that could swallow a tank. Now there was this flu which, Ludendorff said, was weakening his men and lowering their morale. The flu, he added, contributed to the failure of his July offensive, a battle plan that nearly won the war for Germany.
He also groused about his staffs complaints about the flu. "It was a grievous business having to listen every morning to the Chiefs of Staff's recital of the number of influenza cases, and their complaints about the weakness of their troops."
Yet although much of the world fell ill that spring, there remained large areas that were untouched. Most of Africa and almost all of South America and Canada had no flu epidemic. And as summer arrived, even the countries that were hardest hit had a reprieve. The flu seemed to vanish without a trace.
This interesting exchange on the 1918 flu and SARS, which appeared recently on a number of newsgroups, and which cited this page, is worth reproducing here:Sydney Morning Herald
September 8th, 2001.Cold as ice
A team of Australian scientists has traced the origins of the deadly flu virus that killed up to 40 million people less than 100 years ago. Deborah Smith reports.
Few places on Earth were left untouched by the 1918 influenza pandemic. In Alaska, the small mission town of Brevig was all but wiped out by the virus. Within a week, it lost about 85 per cent of its population. The dead were buried in a mass grave in the permafrost. And it was there that a retired American pathologist, Dr Johan Hultin, went looking for the killer in 1997.
Armed with a pair of pruning clippers, he exhumed four bodies, one of them an obese Inuit woman. Her fat had kept her insulated, even in death, and from her well-preserved lungs Hultin was able to extract tissue that contained the virus.
In Norway, a year later, another team dug up the bodies of six young men who had set off to the small island of Svalbard in 1918 to make their fortunes as miners.
The Norwegians had ended up going straight from the boat to the hospital. Within days, influenza had claimed their lives, too. Their frozen bodies turned out to be more decayed than the scientists had hoped, but the team also managed to obtain some bits of virus from the remains.
These macabre quests are vital for the safety of the world. At any time a new strain of deadly flu could arise. International travel has made the world a much smaller place.
Working out what turned the 1918 strain into the world's most virulent killer - able to destroy healthy young soldiers within a day - may help prevent future devastation.
"Unfortunately, until the basis of influenza virulence is understood, the human population will be defenceless against similar outbreaks," says the leading flu expert, Dr Robert Webster, of St Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.
When Hultin obtained his Inuit lung sample he took it to Dr Jeffery Taubenberger, of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington. Taubenberger had already extracted virus from stored autopsy samples from a young private in the US Army who had died in 1918. He later obtained virus from a second soldier.
From the three samples, Taubenberger has been able to painstakingly work out the sequence of three of the virus's 10 genes. His genetic reconstruction work immediately put an end to the leading theory about the origins of the 1918 flu: that it had jumped straight from birds to humans, like the flu outbreak in Hong Kong in 1997.
Taubenberger's team found instead that the 1918 virus was more closely related to the flu that infects pigs. But the mystery of what made it so severe remained unsolved.
At the Australian National University in Canberra, plant virologist Professor Adrian Gibbs read about the flu gene research in a popular science magazine last year.
It was just what he and his colleagues, John Armstrong and Dr Mark Gibbs, had been looking for. For the previous four years, in their spare time, they had been studying a rare genetic event called recombination, which they believe can make viruses become very virulent.
In a recombinant virus, a new gene is created by splicing together bits of two or more genes from other viruses. The Australian team had developed sophisticated computer software for analysing gene sequences and detecting this recombination. And Taubenberger's 1918 flu virus genes were perfect for trying out their analysis.
The answer came very quickly, recalls Mark Gibbs. "After only a few hours we had found the signal in the 1918 sequence that suggested it was a recombinant."
Months more work led to the conclusion they reported yesterday in the journal Science: that one part of a crucial gene in the 1918 virus had come from flu virus that probably infected pigs, and the other part had come from flu virus that probably infected people. The gene in question is crucial because it makes a protein, called haemagglutinin, that sticks out like a spike from the flu virus and helps it penetrate the cells of the people it infects.
Changes in this gene have resulted in other pandemics. The 1957 Asian flu and 1968 Hong Kong flu outbreaks that killed 6 million were caused by viruses that had acquired new haemagglutinin genes from bird flu viruses.
The Australian team's analysis shows that the gene splicing in the 1918 flu virus, which would have made it unrecognisable to the immune system, occurred at the start, or immediately before, the outbreak.
"This timing and the fact that it was a significant change in a crucial gene strongly suggests that it triggered the pandemic," Gibbs says. It is also possible that the gene splicing event explains why the virus became so virulent, he says.
In the world of flu researchers, the Australian team are outsiders. And Webster describes their virulence explanation as "unorthodox" in commentary in the journal.
It "is definitely a stretch for influenza virologists because recombination is a rare event among RNA viruses and many influenza virologists are not convinced that it even occurs," he says. But he concedes that "unorthodox proposals like this can make everyone stop and reconsider the evidence".
What the Australian researchers would dearly love to have is samples of different flu viruses that were around before 1918, so they could work out the history of the killer.
It has recently been discovered from long-secret military documents that many soldiers died in military camps in France in 1916 from flu. It was a milder strain, but the bluish-purple discolouration of the victim's lips and skin suggests it was related to the 1918 flu, which caused similar symptoms.
Scientists hope flu-infected birds, pigs and other animals preserved in the permafrost will also be found. Projects are under way to try to collect frozen penguin and gull droppings from ancient nesting sites in the Antarctic permafrost.
Webster argues that the cause of the virulence of the 1918 flu will not be resolved until all its genes have been worked out, and that remains "a huge challenge", he says.
Knowing its secret would be a great advantage in spotting any similar dangerous changes in existing strains, and in the development of specific drugs and vaccines.
The flu virus is a formidable foe because it is constantly mutating. Another paper in Science shows that the tiniest genetic change is enough to turn a flu virus deadly. In 1997 in Hong Kong, 18 people became infected with a new strain of bird flu that killed six of them - a very high proportion. They most probably contracted it in the bustling live poultry markets, where many chickens, ducks, quail and geese were found to be infected. An estimated 1.4 million birds were destroyed to prevent the virus spreading.
American researchers have recently developed ways to build and genetically engineer influenza viruses from scratch. And it was this technology a team at the University of Wisconsin in Madison used to find out the difference between the killer Hong Kong strain, which spread to the heart and brain, and the non-lethal version.
They systematically swapped genes from the harmful and benign viruses, then tested the effects of the engineered versions on mice. This way they discovered that a gene known as PB2 was responsible for the harmful virus's potency. The gene is thought to make a protein that forces an infected cell to make more virus.
With further testing they narrowed down the culprit to a change in just one "letter" in the genetic code of PB2.
The finding means "we should assume that an outbreak of any new strain or subtype is potentially dangerous to humans," the team warns.
The new ability to create and manipulate influenza viruses in the lab will help in the battle against this ancient enemy, particularly in the speedy development of vaccines against new strains.
But there are also big risks of accidental escape or use by bioterrorists.
"When the complete sequence of the 1918 virus is obtained, it may be possible to create the virus anew," Webster warns.
The flu expert Professor Graeme Laver, of the Australian National University, believes the next pandemic, which "could occur at any time", is likely to start in China.
"With today's crowded conditions and rapid transportation, the epidemic is expected to reach every corner of the globe. Millions of people will become ill and many will die," he writes with Dr Elspeth Garman, of Oxford University, in Science.
Vaccines would take too long to develop, Laver says. We will need rapid, simple, cheap tests, available from the pharmacist, to identify flu as soon as symptoms arise so treatment can begin immediately. Some tests are under development.
But the world also needs to be stockpiling huge quantities of anti-flu drugs, such as Relenza (which Laver helped invent) and Tamiflu, he says.
"Supplies of these drugs at the moment are woefully inadequate," he says. "The cost of making the drugs, as opposed to the prices the pharmaceutical companies charge consumers, would not be exorbitant. Such an expenditure by governments would be a worthwhile investment in their defence against this debilitating and often deadly illness."
Webster also says it is "gravely disquieting" that there is no stockpile of drugs.
Globalcheckup@yahoo.ca (globalcheckup@yahoo.ca)On which a respondent commented:
Subject: 'RETURN OF THE KILLER FLU' - 1918 Horror To Sweep World Again?
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean, soc.culture.china, can.politics, uk.politics.misc, talk.politics.misc
Date: 2004-03-25 11:58:02 PSTLast night, WNED in New York (a PBS member-supported TV station) broadcast a gripping documentary: "Secrets Of The Dead: The Killer Flu".
A number of experts working in the field said clearly that they expected the return of the horrific 1918 Spanish Influeza vrus, or a variant of it - one British expert predicted that event as occurring within the next 5 or 10 years.
When you reflect on the fact that the 1918 flu pandemic swept away 40-60 million people arounf the globe in three separate waves over just six months and THAT before the dawning of mass air travel!), you can envisage both the scale of the potential calamity and how utterly unprepared we are to deal with it. Every continent would be visited with the same deadly scythe - Europe, the Americas, Asia and Australia.
The anguish would probably also be accentuated by the resulting collapse of the world economy (a very real possibility: the 1918 Flu almost had that effect in England and Germany, but disappeared just before their conomies and production went over the brink because of deaths, disruption and sickness absenteeism).
One intriguing note, though: the documentary appeared to state clearly that NO samples of the 1918 flu had been recovered from the bodies of victims buried in the permafrost. But if you go to the news reports on the excellent '1918 Flu' page at http://www.mimico-by-the-lake.com/1918FLU.HTM, they appear to state exactly the opposite - and that, furthermore, the samples thus obtained were sent to the US Army's Biological Warfare section (now re-named) at Fort Detrick and to the equivalent British biological warfare centre! That appears to be a puzzling and potentially disturbing discrepancy, since the expedition which apparently recovered the tissue samples from Svarlbard Island, in Arctic Norway, was mounted thre or four years ago at least.
...For balance, though, be sure to read through the varied reports on the 1918 Flu and on SARS (which, interestly enough, two Russian experts are quoted as asserting to be a 'biological warfare' weapon!) on the http://www.smimico-by-the-lake.com/1918FLU.HTM page cited above.
SARS was a disease with that kind of potential. Fortunately it was detected quickly enough so containment measures could be effective and a vaccine could start being developed. Ten or twenty years ago, SARS would have been the new "Killer Flu".Which drew this intriguing response from the original poster:In a strange way, the 9-11 scare had some good aspects. It motivated many nations to start keeping a close watch for 'new' diseases and to put money into rapid diagnostic and vaccine-development methods.
So, a Spanish flu variant MAY emerge any time, but we'll be more READY for it than ever before.
ourfreedomandliberty@lycos.com (ourfreedomandliberty@lycos.com)And if you're thinking what we're thinking...
Subject: Re: 'RETURN OF THE KILLER FLU' - 1918 Horror To Sweep World Again?
Newsgroups: soc.culture.asean, soc.culture.china, can.politics, uk.politics.misc, talk.politics.misc
Date: 2004-03-25 21:28:41 PSTInteresting observation.
However, the 1918 Spanish Flu appeared and disappered twice in a matter of months, each time becoming more virulent, before finally erupting in one vast cataclysm of death simultaneously around the globe six months after it first appered. At the end of each of those outbreaks, it was felt that the disease had gone for good - few suspected that it would return repeatedly - and be more deadly with each visit!
So your analogy with SARS is in actual fact turned into a strange and discomforting potentia; parallel.
To make it even more unnerving, it now seems that the 1916 Flu was actually the '1916 Flu' - that is, that it had first appered in 1916, claimed victims, and then 'disappeared' while its unsuspecting and surviving hosts took it with them back to their own countries around the globe (this makes the parallel with the recent initial outbreak of SARS even more unnerving!).
For a previously little-known article in The Lancet (the British medical journal), July14, 1917 edition, describes a virulent outbreak with exactly the same symptoms, speed and mortality rate in the huge British troop 'tent city' at Etables, France - where Empire and Commonwealth troops from many of the countries later afflicted were living cheek-by-jowl in vast numbers. And live duck and pigs were kept there in equally large numbers, as foodstocks, too (and, unwittingly, to complete the transmission cycle). So, if you parallel is correct, we may just have seen the FIRST visit of SARS, and - if so - its retreat may just be temporary. We still have no capability to respond to the vast numbers that would be afflicted, nor does it appear that modern anti-viral drugs would help much if the genetic makeup of the vrus was equivalent to that of the 1918 flu.
The material on the 'SARS and 1918 Flu' page, at http://www.suyrvivalistskills.com/1918FLU.HTM, appears to bear that out, too, drawn as it is from a wide range of sources. As far as pandemics go, if this assessment is correct, in the case of a re-occurrence of the 1918 Flu there'd be little reason to hope for an optimistic outcome.
This possibility had certainly occurred to us, too, as we tracked the earlier CDC expedition to recover samples of the 1918 flu virus from the bodies of victims buried under the Norwegian permafrost...SARS a Rerun of the Deadly 1918-19 Flu Epidemic?
Phil Brennan,
NewsMax.com
Tuesday, April 8, 2003Severe acute respiratory syndrome bears an eerie resemblance to the Spanish flu pandemic that ravaged the world in 1918-19.
- SARS is spreading like wildfire, striking about 20 nations since first appearing in China’s Guangdong Province on Nov. 16.
- Its flu-like symptoms, accompanied by fevers of 100 degrees or higher, pneumonia or pneumonia-like symptoms, breathing difficulties coughing and shortness of breath, are about identical to those seen in the WWI-era pandemic.
- The nature of the disease baffles health officials today, just as the Spanish flu disorder did back in 1918.
- No universally effective remedy has been found for SARS, just as none was found in the last pandemic.
- Health officials believe the strain of the flu-like virus is a mutation of known viruses, which was the case with the Spanish flu.
At least 103 people have died worldwide from SARS, and 2,750 have been infected, nearly half of them in China.
Unlike SARS, which first surfaced in China, the 1918-19 health disaster began in the United States.
The influenza pandemic of 1918-1919 killed more people than World War I - somewhere between 20 and 40 million people. It has been cited as the most devastating epidemic in recorded world history. More people died of influenza in a single year than in four years of the Black Death bubonic plague from 1347 to 1351. Known as Spanish flu or "la grippe," the influenza of 1918-1919 was a global disaster.
Here’s how it began at Fort Reilly, Kans., Monday, March 11, 1918:
It was still dark when Mess Sgt. Albert Gitchell woke up. He felt terrible, and the thought of making breakfast for hundreds of hungry soldiers at Fort Reilly’s Camp Funston in the predawn hours made him feel even worse.
He hadn’t slept well. He’d gone to bed feeling miserable. He thought he was coming down with a cold and hoped a good night’s sleep would make him feel better. It hadn’t. After a night of tossing and turning, he felt worse than he had the night before.
His head throbbed, he was burning with fever, he had the mother of all sore throats and every muscle in his body ached.
He wouldn’t be cooking breakfast for anybody this Monday morning, Gitchell thought, as he struggled out of his bunk and put on his fatigues. His tortured muscles protested every movement. His head pounded every time he took a step. He felt as if he hadn’t slept in a week, and his body was on fire.
Without stopping to shave or shower, he left his barracks on this damp cold March morning headed for the camp hospital - and walked into the pages of medical history.
At Hospital Building 91, part of a sprawling Army medical complex that predated the Spanish-American War, the duty sergeant took Gitchell’s temperature, noted it was 103 degrees, listened to the cook describe his symptoms and, as a precaution, ordered him to bed in the ward reserved for men suffering from any ailment that might prove contagious.
With Gitchell out of the way, the medic turned his attention to Cpl. Lee W. Drake, the next man in line. Drake, a truck driver assigned to the Headquarters Transportation Detachment’s First Battalion, reported the same symptoms Gitchell described. The duty medic sent him to the same ward.
Right behind Drake came Sgt. Adolph Hurby. He was coughing, and his temperature was sky-high. His complaints echoed those of the two previous soldiers. His temperature hovered around 104 degrees, his pulse was low, he was drowsy, and he winced with pain every time his eyes were exposed to bright light. His throat, nasal passages and bronchial tubes were inflamed and badly congested with mucous. He was one sick soldier.
The medic was alarmed. Three men with identical symptoms arriving at the hospital within minutes of each other spelled trouble on any military base. But on a base packed with 26,000 men it could mean disaster. The last thing anyone on this huge Army base wanted in these waning days of World War I was an outbreak of contagious disease, and here was a clear warning that something very unpleasant might be loose and rapidly spreading.
It was more than the harried medic could deal with. He picked up the phone and alerted Lt. Elizabeth Harding, the chief nurse.
Within minutes Harding arrived at the building, one of a series of aging limestone structures with a combined capacity of 3,068 beds. She was immediately confronted with two more soldiers with symptoms matching Gitchell’s.
Harding wasted no time. She grabbed the wall phone and called her commanding officer, Col. Edward R. Schreiner, a 45-year-old Army surgeon, rousing the sleeping doctor from his bed.
Schreiner listened to Harding with growing alarm. He had been dreading an outbreak of infectious disease at the overcrowded base, and what he was hearing from Harding sounded ominous.
He put the phone down, jumped out of bed, dressed hurriedly, and raced to the hospital in the sidecar of a motorcycle driven by his orderly.
Within minutes he saw his worst nightmares coming true. Soldiers were arriving in droves, all of them suffering from what he recognized as some form of flu that appeared to be highly contagious.
By noon, the list of men stricken with the mysterious illness had grown to 107. Before the week was over, 522 men had been felled by it.
Albert Gitchell, Army cook, had served as the advance guard for one of the deadliest epidemics in recorded history.
The Spanish influenza had made its 20th-century debut.
In a mere eight months it would kill between 20 million and 40 million people worldwide. In the United States alone, it would hit 20 million Americans, and kill a staggering 675,000 Americans, as many as died on both sides in the Civil War.
It would sweep across continents, leap over vast oceans, ravage whole villages, wiping out every single inhabitant in some of them. In the U.S., few families escaped its fury. Steadily mutating into more deadly forms as it spread, it would reach its zenith in October, killing with a fury that outmatched the worst of the war’s carnage.
During the first week of November, it would kill 14,000 Londoners. Then, a week later, the war was over. And along with it, the worst of the epidemic.
History is filled with epidemics and plagues, outbreaks of disease that sweep across nations and continents leaving hordes of dead in their wake and then vanish as quickly as they appeared.
The more exotic are the best remembered - bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera, typhus, polio, and the latest scourge, Ebola Zaire - mainly because they are exotic.
Influenza, the flu virus, seems commonplace and less frightening than something as horrific as Ebola. The flu bug hits everybody at one time or another. And some winters, mini-epidemics cut a wide swath across whole areas of the nation.
We get it, we suffer its symptoms, sometimes for no more than a day or two, and then we recover.
It seems just too prosaic to qualify as a menace.
But in its more robust forms, it’s a killer, as deadly as anything lurking in the swamps and jungles of equatorial Africa, and far more contagious.
The Spanish influenza (the word means influence in Spanish) is one of the lethal flu viruses. Its appearance in 1918 was a rerun. It has appeared and disappeared throughout recorded history under other names, or under no names at all. And every hundred years or so it has swept through large areas of the world, leaving piles of corpses behind, and the world’s population markedly depleted.
More than 400 years before the birth of Christ, Hippocrates described an epidemic of a disease strikingly similar in its symptoms to the 1918 influenza strain. He wrote that it slaughtered an entire Athenian army.
Noah Webster identified 44 instances of deadly flu epidemics that hit Europe in the past 500 years.
In 1852, Dr. Theophilus Thompson, a London physician, noted that the deadly variety of flu virus never seems far away. "Influenza," he wrote, "does not, like the plague, desert for ages a country that which it has once afflicted."
Time and again the common flu bug has proven that it is capable of mutating into more violent forms. The bugs we’re most familiar with - those that make us miserable for brief periods - are perfectly capable of turning into wildly contagious homicidal monsters. And that’s what makes them far more frightening than the more exotic forms of contagion.
Coming seemingly out of nowhere, they can emerge as full-blown epidemics, do their deadly worst, and then go into hiding, sometimes for a century or more.
In the 1950s, the director of the World Influenza Center in London, Dr. Andrewes, said: "I believe that the virus goes underground and perhaps does so all over the world ..."
It is, he warned, still possible that a pandemic could return at any time "and kill its millions as happened in 1918-19."
Added Australian microbiologist Sir Frank Burnet: "Of all the virus diseases, influenza is probably that in which mutational changes in the virus are of greatest human importance. We can only guess what type of virus was responsible in 1918-19 and what changes took place during the pandemic."
Burnet noted that since the human flu virus was first isolated in 1933 and two strains, Influenza A and Influenza B identified, both have undergone striking changes in makeup.
"Some of us believe that the influenza virus chief means of survival is its constant mutation to new serological patterns ..." he wrote.
In 1918, the flu virus that felled Albert Gitchell and his fellow doughboys perfectly illustrated Dr. Burnet’s point.
In five weeks it hit 1,127 soldiers at Fort Reilly. It killed a mere 46 of its victims and then seemed to burn itself out.
But it wasn’t finished. It was just lying low. It next struck in early May, ravaging soldiers in two divisions that had just arrived in Europe from Fort Reilly. In a matter of days it had spread to AEF Headquarters and in a mere 12 days infected 132 soldiers stationed there. By July it was rampaging across the globe, slowly mutating into a more lethal form and killing more and more of its victims.
By October it had become a homicidal maniac, butchering its victims by the millions in every corner of the globe.
And then it gradually crept away and went into seclusion, waiting patiently for its next opportunity to kill a few million people.
In 1960, a virus similar to the 1918 Spanish flu made a brief appearance in Canada, perhaps to remind us that it’s still out there, waiting patiently for another Albert Gitchell to come along.
If we’re lucky, the first victim of the SARS outbreak in China wasn’t the new Gitchell.
Dead men might tell tale of 1918 flu
By Doug Mellgren,
Associated Press,
August 19, 1998LONGYEARBYEN, Norway - Hoping to learn the secrets of one of the deadliest viruses ever known, scientists will dig into the permafrost on a desolate Arctic island to unearth the bodies of six young coal miners killed by the Spanish Flu decades ago.
The Spanish Flu killed at least 20 million people in a 1918-19 global epidemic, and the scientists who begin exhuming the corpses today believe more knowledge of the virus could help fight future epidemics.
"If we know the genetic structure of the virus, it can help us produce a vaccine," Tom Bergan, a Norwegian physician and professor at the University of Oslo, said as he arrived at Norway's remote and frigid Svalbard Islands on Sunday.
It is not without qualms that the 15 experts from four countries will begin digging into the permafrost, which has preserved the bodies in graves marked by white wooden crosses in Longyearbyen. The village is the main town on the largely glacier-covered Svalbard Archipelago, a mining outpost north of mainland Norway just 600 miles from the North Pole.
"Death is a very private thing," team leader Kristy Duncan, a medical geographer from the University of Windsor in Canada, said in an interview. "We did not want to disturb a cemetery unless there was a good chance of learning the secrets of the Spanish Flu."
Duncan said she was deeply moved that the families of the men would give their permission to dig up the graves in hopes of benefiting humanity.
The young men were working as coal miners on these islands, when they died of the flu in October 1918. Like many of the victims they were young -- 18 to 29 -- suggesting that older people may have built up at least some immunity from a similar virus years earlier.
Victims of the Spanish Flu suffered a sudden fever, chills, headache, malaise, muscle pain, pneumonia and rapid death. It killed more people than all the fighting in World War I, and scientists still don't have a good understanding of the virus.
The research team, which includes experts from Norway, Canada, Britain and the United States, hopes the viral material that may have been frozen in the bodies will permit the construction of a genetic profile of the virus. According to Duncan, that could help explain how the 1918 virus killed so many people and then disappeared.
Other scientists, including a team that took samples from a frozen corpse in Alaska this year, still have only a partial genetic picture of the virus.
Last year, the team studied the Svalbard graves with radar and determined that the bodies of the miners were well below the permafrost. That made them excellent subjects for study.
On Tuesday, the team plans to assure Svalbard residents that opening the graves will not expose them to a risk of disease. Flu viruses deteriorate rapidly, which has been a problem in studying the Spanish Flu.
"There is no chance in the world that there is a viable virus in there," said Bergan, the Norwegian doctor.
Nevertheless, he said access to a tent over the graves will be strictly limited, and all researchers inside will wear protective clothing and oxygen masks.
The excavation, sample-taking and restoration of the graves is expected to take about three weeks. Analysis of the samples will take much longer.
Duncan, the team leader, said no trace will be left of the exhumations.
And...
And, interestingly enough, it seems that others are now reaching similar conclusions...Gravediggers begin 1918 flu bodies Arctic search
By Alister Doyle,
ReutersOSLO, Aug 22, 1998 (Reuters) - Gravediggers began work on exhuming the bodies of six Norwegian miners from an Arctic cemetery on Saturday in the hope of trapping a frozen 1918 flu virus that caused this century's worst pandemic.
Local priest Jan Hoeifoedt took the first shovelful from above the graves in the barren Longyearbyen cemetery on Spitzbergen island after blessing a start to the excavation by Britain's Necropolis Company on Saturday evening.
"The digging will take several days," said Tom Bergan, a Norwegian scientist helping coordinate the project of Canadian, American, British and Norwegian scientists. The gravediggers will use picks, shovels and drills.
Scientists believe the men are buried in permafrost about 2.0 to 2.5 metres (yards) down in a pit probably blown out by dynamite on the hillside above the town of Longyearbyen, about 800 miles (1,300 km) from the North Pole.
The team aims to take samples from the lungs and other organs of the corpses in hopes of finding fragments of the "Spanish flu" and developing vaccines to prevent any future flu pandemics.
"We hope to reach about one metre (yard) down by the end of the weekend," Bergan told Reuters. Work on Sunday would only resume in the afternoon after religious services on the island.
Seven Norwegian men, aged 18 to 29, are believed to be buried in a row of coffins after dying of the flu in late 1918. Relatives of one have refused to allow the scientists to take samples.
The 1918 flu swept the globe like a modern Black Death, its scope partly hidden by governments unwilling to admit vast non-military casualties at the end of World War One.
In total, scientists estimate it killed perhaps 20 to 40 million people, far above the estimated 13 million battlefield deaths in the war.
The scientists say that chances of the virus thawing out and somehow escaping to infect anew are very small. But they say they are taking no chances.
Equipped with high-tech gear including special radars, the scientists will wear space suits with special breathing masks once they get to within 20 cms (eight inches) of the corpses.
"This is both for protection and to ensure that we do not contaminate any samples," Bergan said. "If one of the scientists had a flu we might get samples of the wrong, 1998 virus."
Bodies have to be buried deep in the Arctic because shifts in the ground as it thaws and refreezes can carry corpses to the surface years later. In August, the Arctic ground thaws to the deepest of the year.
Workers on Saturday cut clods of turf from above the graves and laid them onto plywood boards.
"We want to restore everything exactly as it was to show respect for those who died," Kirsty Duncan, the Canadian professor leading the project, told Reuters.
Scientists have hauled more than eight tonnes of equipment into the cemetery, including power generators and the blue and white tents. The white wooden crosses have been wrapped and stored.
The scientists' samples will be flown to laboratories in Canada, Britain, America and Norway. It will take several months before the results are clear.
We were therefore more than intrigued to see this thought-provoking item appear on the always-interesting Rense.com site....Sars biological weapon?
News24.Com.
South Africa,
11th March, 2003Moscow - The deadly pneumonia that has killed more than 100 people around the world may be a man-made biological weapon, Russian experts said on Friday.
Nikolai Filatov, head of Moscow's epidemiological services, told the Gazeta daily that he thought the pneumonia was man-made because "there is no vaccine for this virus, its make-up is unclear, it has not been very widespread and the population is not immune to it."
Yet he had some reservations, since the virus has a low mortality rate - so far killing 4% of those infected -, and because it is relatively difficult to pass on - through direct contact or inhalation.
The virus, according to academy of medecine member Sergei Kolesnikov, is a cocktail of mumps and measles, whose mix could never appear in nature.
"We can only get that in a laboratory," he told a conference in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, quoted by RIA Novosti news agency.
It may have spread because of an "accidental leak" from a lab, he added.
More than 100 people have died and some 3 000 others have been infected by Severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), which is believed to have originated in China's southern Guangdong province.
So, as you can imagine, we weren't too happy to then read this...The Predictions And Strange Death Of 'Dr Flu'
AJ Investigates
18th March, 2003Steven Mostow, 63, known as Dr. Flu for his expertise in treating influenza, and a noted expert in bioterrorism, died when the airplane he was piloting crashed near Denver.
Investigators returned to the scene of the plane crash to try to figure out why the twin-engine Cessna 340 went down.
The plane was headed to Centennial from Gunnison when Mostow reported engine trouble around 4:30 p.m., Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Jerry Snyder said.
The plane crashed near mile marker 190 in unincorporated Douglas County.
On March 24, 2002, at 1631 mountain standard time, a Cessna 340, N341DM, was destroyed when it collided with terrain while on final approach to Centennial Airport, Englewood, Colorado. The airplane was being operated by Lear 171 Inc., of Billings, Montana.
The tower controller at Centennial Airport said that the pilot had been cleared to land on runway 35 right. He said that approximately 90 seconds later the pilot reported he had lost an engine. Radar data from Denver Air Route Traffic Control Center (ARTCC) indicates that the airplane made a left 180 degree turn to the south, and then radar contact was lost.
Dr Flu....
The following was posted to the internet in January 2000:
"We are very worried we will have a worldwide pandemic of influenza that will affect probably 40 percent of the world's population," said Dr. Steven Mostow of the University of Colorado. Mostow said the number of people killed from such a wave of influenza could rival some of the worst outbreaks in modern times.Normally, the tracking of a strain begins in China, where scientists believe influenza outbreaks begin. Flu pops up in areas where humans and animals live in close contact, with birds passing an avian form of the flu to pigs. Elements of that strain are eventually passed to people. The flu commonly moves from China east across Asia to Alaska, where it works its way south into the heart of North America.Influenza Has Deadly History
In the late 19th century, more than 20 million people worldwide died as a result of the flu. In 1917, flu outbreaks killed more people than those who died during World War I. In 1968, a wave of the Hong Kong flu claimed some 700,000 lives.
"We will never be able to control the flu like we control polio, like we control smallpox," said Mostow. "Because the flu virus isn't stable. It mutates. And it is smarter than we are."
Following the World Wide Flu Alert - Do you think the above plane crash was an accident ?
Note...Dr Flu's death was one of 13 reported microbiologists' deaths between Nov 2001 and March 2002.
And you can be pretty sure that we weren't exactly ecstatic when we saw this report...Asian battle with SARS will be long, MD says
Toronto Star,
Panic beginning to take hold near region where mystery illness emerged
March 8th, 2003,Dirk Beveridge,
Associated PressHONG KONG - The new flu-like illness known as severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, has shown no signs of letting up in Hong Kong, where health officials warned today the crisis could worsen even as new infections in China's Guangdong province have tapered off.
The global death toll climbed to at least 104 with new fatalities announced today in Hong Kong and Singapore from SARS and public worries were also on the rise.
Panicky Thai residents and some medical personnel blocked the cremation of a Hong Kong man who had died of SARS in Thailand, fearing the deadly virus would spread through the smoke.
A health official in the southern town of Hat Yai, Dr. Wichien Kaenploy, said he was "100 per cent, even 1,000 per cent sure" the cremation posed no risks of spreading the disease. But neighbours, doctors and nurses were scared, and the body was placed in a mortuary freezer until a solution could be found.
More than 2,600 people have now been infected worldwide with SARS, most of them in mainland China and Hong Kong. More than 200 people have been infected in Canada, where there have been at least 10 deaths, and possibly as many as 11.
A scientist from the World Health Organization visiting Guangdong said the hunt for the cause of SARS was progressing, but it wasn't clear when - or if - it would be identified.
Dr. Samson Wong, a microbiologist at the University of Hong Kong, warned SARS might infect 80 per cent of the population within two years, and eventually everyone could be infected.
Hong Kong has been reporting double-digit increases daily in the numbers of people infected. It reported two new deaths today, bringing the toll to 25; there were 45 new cases of infection for a total of 928. Hospitals have braced for a worst-case scenario of 3,000 patients, about four times the current number, by the end of the month.
"It's looking like it's going to be a long, long, drawn-out battle," said Dr. Gavin Joynt, director of the intensive care unit at the hard-hit Prince of Wales Hospital. "We don't know where the end is going to be. One of the major stresses that we are dealing with is not knowing where this is going to go."
Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra warned SARS is sowing mistrust among Asian countries and hampering economic recovery by choking off regional tourism. Thailand, with 11 suspected SARS cases and two deaths, has imposed strict measures, including a 14-day stay-at-home quarantine for Thais returning from affected areas.
Hoping to calm nervous travellers, Thaksin refused to wear a protective mask when he visited a checkpoint at the Bangkok airport where medics screen arriving passengers.
Hong Kong's government leader, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, wears a respiratory mask during staff meetings, but not in public, unlike thousands of this city's residents.
"He is a very hygienic person and he puts it on during meetings or whenever it's crowded," spokesperson Florence Wong said.
Singapore Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong, who cancelled a trip to China because of the outbreak, estimated today that the effect on growth "would be anywhere between half a per cent and one per cent for the economies of China, Hong Kong, Singapore and the others who are affected."
China's southern province of Guangdong, where the first SARS case was reported, said this month it has 21 new cases and three deaths. But the number of new cases has dropped significantly since February, a health official said. Fifty-three people from the mainland have died, according to Chinese health officials, who have been much criticized about the slow release of information.
In Singapore, which reported a ninth death Tuesday, residents are drinking Chinese tea, eating more fruit and vegetables, and taking Vitamin C, according to a Gallup Poll out Tuesday. The poll said only 16 per cent of Singaporeans had not taken any precautions against SARS. Its margin of error was plus or minus four percentage points.
UPI added, in its report on this warning to the Senate, some additional disturbing insights...CDC to brace for mystery illness 'epidemic'
Amy Fagan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
April 8, 2003Top world health care officials yesterday told a Senate panel that the public should not panic over the global "epidemic" of a mystery respiratory illness but stressed that the medical community must prepare for the worst.
"What we have here is an epidemic ... causing problems in virtually every corner of the globe," Dr. Julie L. Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. "We're taking it very seriously. We have to be prepared for this to continue to spread."
As of yesterday, 2,301 cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) had been reported internationally. An additional 148 cases were suspected in the United States, involving 30 states, she said. The disease - which has flulike symptoms of fever, aches, dry cough and breathing trouble - has been blamed for 98 deaths worldwide since November, the World Health Organization said. No deaths have been reported in the United States.
The disease has hit hardest in China with 76 deaths, 23 of them in Hong Kong. Chinese officials said yesterday that SARS had hit more of its provinces than previously reported, and Hong Kong officials were preparing for up to 3,000 cases.
Nine SARS deaths have been reported in Canada. Authorities in India reported that country's first suspected case yesterday, saying a U.S. citizen had become sick after traveling to Bombay from China.
President Bush issued an executive order Friday listing SARS as a communicable disease and authorizing a quarantine if necessary. The CDC has alerted people not to travel to the affected areas and has issued 300,000 yellow health alert notices on SARS to passengers returning to the United States from overseas.
The NIH is working on a vaccine for the virus, but the process is lengthy, said Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at NIH. He predicted that by this time next year researchers probably would have proof that a vaccine for the disease had worked in animals and theoretically could work in humans.
Researchers believe SARS is caused by the coronavirus, which causes common colds, but is apparently a new form of the virus. Scientists are likely to have the entire genome of the virus sequence this week, Dr. Gerberding said.
Dr. David L. Heymann, executive director of communicable diseases at WHO, said researchers do not know whether the virus will continue spreading at the same rate or whether it will lose strength.
Although the disease has a low death rate of 3.5 percent to 4 percent, health care specialists are concerned about its rapid spread.
"It's a disease which may not be high as far as mortality, but it certainly is high as far as concerns transmission around the world," Dr. Heymann told the senators.
The disease is found primarily in people who have traveled to the affected areas, health care workers and their family members. It is being diagnosed by its symptoms combined with a connection to one of these three groups. But Dr. Gerberding said the CDC is working on specific tests for doctors to detect the virus.
Dr. Gerberding said Americans should not worry but should be aware of the disease. Information is available on the CDC's Web site, www.cdc.gov.
Some in Asia have taken to wearing surgical masks in public places as a preventive measure. Dr. Gerberding said those masks do not block the smaller droplets released when people cough or sneeze. The masks usually are given to those infected with SARS, and sometimes to immediate family members. "Beyond that, we're not recommending masks," she said.
The specialists have not made any recommendations for congressional action, but the Senate has included an extra $16 million for the CDC to fight SARS as part of the war supplemental.
Sen. Judd Gregg, New Hampshire Republican, expressed concern about the ability of the research community to develop and manufacture vaccines for emerging diseases, such as SARS. He plans to highlight legislation on this topic at a press conference today.
Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, Connecticut Democrat, was particularly interested in steps Congress could take to encourage other countries to cooperate with WHO on infectious diseases. Dr. Heymann said China's initial reluctance to recognize the problem might have contributed to the rapid spread of SARS.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, said she would introduce legislation to set a national standard for air quality on planes and require routine testing of cabins. Yesterday, CNN reported that Continental Airlines had suspended flights to Hong Kong because of the disease.
Reports of a mysterious respiratory illness in a Chinese province first appeared in November. By February, cases of a new type of pneumonia had been well-documented in Hong Kong. By March 12, the WHO recognized that SARS was spreading rapidly through Hong Kong and Hanoi and issued a global health alert.
Medical specialists from the United States, Canada and Singapore held their own meeting on the disease yesterday. Mark Loeb, an infectious-disease specialist and microbiologist from Ontario, spoke by speaker phone because he was quarantined at home. He was exposed to the disease while treating patients in Toronto.
Mr. Loeb said Canadian health specialists are watching for suspected cases in people who do not fall under the high-risk categories of medical personnel, travelers or family members. If SARS starts appearing in the general population, he said, "it's a different ballgame."
•This article is based in part on wire service reports.
We were further saddened by this moving account....CDC: SARS 'the beginning of a problem'
By Steve Mitchell
UPI Medical Correspondent
March 7th, 2003.WASHINGTON, April 7 (UPI) -- Federal health officials Monday testified before a Senate committee that severe acute respiratory syndrome could be further spread in the United States and said they are working rapidly to develop treatments against it, as the number of SARS cases continued to mount worldwide.
Since it first surfaced in China in November, the new pneumonia-like illness known as SARS has spread quickly around the globe, infecting more than 2,600 people and killing 98. The United States Monday increased its number of cases to 148 but no deaths have been reported in the country.
"This is the beginning of a problem," Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said as she testified before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee.
"We may see further spread of the disease in this country," Gerberding added.
This is in part because of so-called "superspreaders," or people who appear to be especially contagious after contracting the illness and could infect several other people, she said.
The future course of SARS is uncertain, Gerberding said. It could turn out to be a seasonal illness similar to West Nile virus or there could be a leveling off after the initial cases of infection.
"We don't know where this is going to go," she said.
Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases -- a component of the National Institutes of Health -- agreed the future of the disease was unpredictable.
"For that reason, we have to take this very, very seriously," Fauci said.
His agency already has begun initial work on developing vaccines and other treatments against SARS, which is believed to be caused by a new form of coronavirus. Known members of this family of viruses cause conditions such as the common cold and generally mild respiratory illnesses.
Researchers plan to have finished sequencing the entire genome of the new virus by this weekend, Gerberding said. That could aid attempts at finding drugs effective against it.
They also are developing diagnostic tests that will detect the presence of the virus and help identify those who have contracted it.
So far, no currently available medications have shown much promise for treating the disease. Some reports have indicated the antiviral drug ribavirin might be beneficial, Gerberding said, adding, "Increasingly, we are a little pessimistic that it's going to be an effective drug."
Officials now have a better picture of how the disease progresses. After exposure, it could take two to 12 days to develop symptoms. At first, people feel tired and have muscle aches, sore throat, fever and a headache, Gerberding explained. Then the fever goes away and is followed by coughing, chest pain and difficulty breathing.
Most people will recover, some might have to be put on mechanical ventilation and a small number -- about 4 percent -- will die.
Those developing early symptoms who have traveled or had close contact with travelers should see a physician, Gerberding advised.
Other steps people can take to protect themselves include avoiding travel to affected areas, particularly Hong Kong, Hanoi, Singapore and China, she said. "Unless you have to go, defer your trip," she said.
Health officials have the greatest concern about China and Hong Kong, said Dr. David Heymann, executive director of communicable diseases for the World Health Organization.
Hong Kong continues to report the most new cases, and in China the number of infected continues to increase in the Guangdong province - where SARS is thought to have originated last November - and there are indications other provinces likewise are affected, he said.
Last week, the Chinese government, which initially resisted help from outside health officials, pledged to be more cooperative. If they had implemented measures last November to control the spread of the disease, Heymann said, "the disease might never have spread."
Although in some of the Asian countries hardest hit by the virus, people now are wearing surgical masks, Gerberding said the precaution probably is unnecessary. The masks might help limit the spread of the disease from an infected person to a close household contact but, "beyond that, we are not recommending masks for anybody at this time," she said.
Commenting on the executive order issued by President Bush last week adding SARS to the list of diseases for which health officials can forcibly quarantine people, Gerberding said, "Right now, we're not quarantining anybody in the United States, and we're not planning to."
She added, "It is a precautionary, a 'just in case' kind of executive order."
Then we saw this, from Agence France-Press, which made us feel much better...Life and death in the time of SARS
by Tanya Talaga, Ann Perry, and Nicolaas Van Rijn,
Staff Reporters, Toronto Star,
March 8th, 2003.One is in tears, unable to understand why kids are throwing rocks and icy snowballs at her house.
Another became so weak she couldn't turn over in bed, and began to wonder whether she was "going to die."
And a third thinks back to the fever and chills she felt as she drove herself, masked and alone, to an isolation room at Mount Sinai Hospital.
All SARS patients. All confident they'll beat Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome and, in time, get better.
But all are traumatized by the mystery illness that has so far claimed the lives of 10 victims in Ontario, and a possible 11th. By yesterday, public health officials said, the number of probable and suspect SARS cases in the province stood at 188, and totalled 226 nationwide.
Medical officials are warning Ontarians that the numbers - at least in the near term - will keep on climbing.
"I would not be surprised to have a few more deaths," said Dr. Colin D'Cunha, Ontario's chief medical officer, adding some patients remain in critical condition.
The peak, whenever it comes, can't come soon enough for nurse Susan Sorrenti, who spoke with the Star about her illness yesterday from her isolation room in Mount Sinai Hospital.
Sorrenti, who normally works at Mount Sinai as an intensive care unit nurse, has developed a bad cough and her x-rays show something in her lungs.
"At that point I was confirmed," Sorrenti said, talking about a "pneumonia-type cough" that turns her blue and forces her to her knees.
But Sorrenti began crying as she talked about the travails faced by her husband and two young daughters, struggling at home without Mom and facing the ignorance of a world itself struggling to come to grips with SARS.
"I feel very upset that people would be so cruel," Sorrenti said, talking about the rocks and icy snowballs that some kids are throwing at her house. Dr. Allison McGeer, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai, and one of the first doctors to get involved in the health crisis, has been sick with SARS and in isolation since the end of March.
"I'm feeling well, I'm one of the fortunate ones who hasn't had it too severely," she said yesterday. "I don't want to get too cocky about it, but I think I'm over the worst," she said. "It's just a matter of waiting it out now."
Another SARS victim, known only as Miss Tse, doesn't have to look beyond her own family to see the devastating effects of SARS.
Her mother, Sui-Chu Kwan, 78, was Toronto's first SARS victim and died in her Scarborough apartment March 5. Her older brother Chi Kwai Tse, 44, was the second to die here of SARS, passing away of respiratory failure March 13.
"He was on an oxygen mask, but he looked so tired," Miss Tse told CBC Radio's The Current yesterday, recalling the early stages of her brother's disease. "At that time a light bulb went on and I started questioning whether something unusual was happening."
But when he died five days later, and after a younger brother had been rushed to hospital with symptoms of the same deadly respiratory disease, and after a doctor summoned the rest of the family to Mount Sinai, Miss Tse was no longer in doubt.
"That day is really critical and really sad," she said. "I do believe that day I changed from being sad to worried."
In fact, she admitted, there was a time she was afraid that she was "going to die." Placed in isolation, too sick to make arrangements for her brother's funeral, Miss Tse became so weak she couldn't turn over in bed.
For Miss Tse, the ordeal had started weeks earlier, when her parents visited Hong Kong for Chinese New Year. After staying with family, they booked into the Metropole Hotel, where experts believe her mother contracted SARS.
Miss Tse and her family finally buried her elder brother last week.
McGeer, the Mount Sinai doctor who was infected through her close contact with SARS patients, is philosophical about her brush with the world's newest health threat.
"One tries very hard to not make this a hazard of the job," she said. "But there is no denying, when you are involved in working on something where you don't know what the rules are, sometimes it doesn't matter how careful you are."
McGeer says she became infected after touring Scarborough Grace on the weekend of March 22. At that time, the hospital was still open and dozens of nurses, doctors and other hospital staff weren't - as they are now - in voluntary isolation.
"That was the weekend of the original investigation at Scarborough Grace, when we began to recognize there were health-care workers who were ill and we needed to understand what had gone wrong and what we needed to do to stop it," McGeer recalled.
A team of infectious disease experts spent much of that weekend interviewing staff, combing through records and figuring out transmission modes.
At the time, all McGeer heard about was reports of three health-care workers who had "some illness. We didn't know it was real. We didn't know it was clearly associated with Hong Kong," she said. "It's now become blindingly obvious. But at the time, the issues looked a lot more limited than they've turned out to be."
They weren't wearing masks to prevent disease because they weren't dealing with any infected patients, she said. But there were unrecognized cases of illness in patients and staff.
Kwan's son Chi Kwai Tse went to the emergency ward at Scarborough Grace on March 7, complaining of fever and breathing problems. He was placed in an observation room along with an elderly man suffering heart problems. Since it wasn't known at the time by physicians that Tse had contracted SARS from his mother, no precautions were taken and he also infected the man sharing the room with him.
That man, in turn, infected some members of his family.
By Monday morning, McGeer was confident there had been "substantial exposure throughout the institution.... Everybody was at risk and that included me," she said.
She put herself under voluntary home quarantine. She took her temperature twice a day. On Monday evening, Scarborough Grace was ordered closed and thousands of people connected to the hospital went on voluntary quarantine for 10 days.
By the next weekend, McGeer had a temperature, felt achy and had the chills. She called Mount Sinai and told them to get an isolation room ready, she was coming in. She put her mask on and drove to the emergency department. "This is a very simple illness. You get fever and the respiratory symptoms start four or five days later," she said.
McGeer has been treated with ribavirin, a hepatitis C drug. She hopes to be let out in a few days. However, since doctors still don't know how long someone is infectious, she'll go home to spend a few more days in quarantine.
Sorrenti knows she was infected because of the direct contact she had with her ICU patient.
"We have direct contact. It's plain and simple," she said.
The patient was transferred to her ward on Sunday, March 23. A transfer from Scarborough Grace, the patient had a respiratory ailment but was thought to be SARS-free, she said.
But doctors were wrong.
Once it was discovered the patient was ill, Sorrenti ended up in voluntary quarantine along with her two daughters, husband and other health-care providers from ICU. As a result, the ICU was shut down.
Which was promptly followed by this, which made us feel much worse...Chinese Official - SARS 'Can Be Prevented And Treated'
(AFP) 8th March 2003-- The top health official in southern China's Guangdong province said the mysterious SARS virus could be stopped and could be treated, citing data from his province, the worst affected area in the world.Average daily new cases reported in Guangdong have dropped from 17.43 in the first week of March to 7.57 cases in the first week of April, said Huang Qingdao, director of Guangdong's health department.
"New cases are steadily decreasing ... Our measures are effective in preventing its spread and a majority of the patients can be treated," Huang said at a press conference for foreign journalists, the first since the disease surfaced in Guangdong in November.
"So even though the disease source hasn't been found, the disease can be prevented and treated." Huang's assurances were made as he revealed that three foreigners in Guangdong were infected -- an overseas Chinese couple from Canada who were treated in the capital Guangzhou and released in late March, and an American teacher in Shenzhen who is being treated.
Huang said the number of cases of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) in the province has dropped significantly after a peak in February when there were 688 patients.
In March, the province had 364 cases and in April it saw only 53 cases. Cases had decreased from a peak of 51 a day to just one on Monday, Huang said, adding that the number of deaths also fell sharply.
In February, 28 people in the province died, in March nine died, and so far this month just three people have perished.
Most -- 82.3 percent -- of the total number of patients hospitalized as of Monday have been treated and released -- further evidence the disease can be reigned in, Huang said.
Measures Huang said were effective in helping Guangdong curb the spread of the disease were simple. They included ensuring proper air circulation in hospitals, requiring nurses and doctors to wear 12-14 layer gauze protective masks and disinfecting patient rooms three to four times a day.
Hospitals that were well ventilated had fewer infections than others, he said.
Treatments that have proven to be effective include early use of hormones, which caused patients' fevers to quickly drop, and respirators, which helped patients rapidly recover, Huang said.
Most of the victims in Guangdong were not average people, but family members or hospital workers who had close contact with people infected.
The press conference was held on the last day of a World Health Organisation team of experts' six-day visit to Guangzhou to probe the source of the virus and how it is transmitted.
It comes as the province, and China, faces international criticism for its foot-dragging in dealing with the outbreak.
The country is also looking at massive potential economic losses with the tourism industry badly affected and many international conferences and high profile visits, such as first-ever gigs in China by the Rolling Stones, being cancelled.
The WHO last week issued an unprecedented advisory warning people against travel to Guangdong and Hong Kong.
Huang stressed there was no evidence the disease originated in Guangdong even though the first case was found there.
"AIDS was first found in the United States, but it originated in Africa. So just because the disease has been discovered here doesn't mean it is spreading from Guangdong to elsewhere," Huang said.
"Personally, I feel it's very unfair that the WHO put a travel advisory on Guangdong without first coming here." China is the worst affected nation in the global health crisis which has affected some 32 countries. Total cases in the country reached 1,268 with 53 deaths. Most cases, 1,206, and deaths, 43, came from Guangdong.
And this certainly didn't make us feel any better....MYSTERY SUPERFLU: No SARS testing at U.S. airports
By Paul Sperry
Inspectors told to admit even Asian passengers with virus symptoms
April 8th, 2003,
© 2003 WorldNetDaily.comWASHINGTON – U.S. health officials have advised airport immigration inspectors to admit foreign travelers from Asian countries hit hard by a deadly new pneumonia bug – even if they show symptoms of infection, U.S. inspectors complain.
"A good 90 percent of all passengers arriving from Asia are wearing face masks during the flights that arrive here," said a Bureau of Customs and Border Protection inspector at Los Angeles International Airport, which gets heavy Asian traffic. "Yet there are basically no safeguards set up at the airport to safeguard against the spread of germs here."
He told WorldNetDaily that LAX, the nation's fourth-busiest airport, has no quarantine area set up at any of its four international terminals to detain and isolate passengers with symptoms related to Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or SARS, which has now killed more than 100 people and infected some 2,600 in 20 countries. China's southern Guangdong province, which includes Hong Kong, is believed to be the source of the virus, which has about an eight-to-10-day incubation period.
"We are not detaining any persons and requiring them to submit to any test prior to being admitted to the United States," said the officer. In a meeting last week, he and other inspectors were briefed about the fast-spreading virus by Health and Human Services Department officials assigned to LAX.
Travelers from Asia with signs of the illness, such as fever or breathing difficulties, are asked by federal health officials at the airport to fill out a form with their name and the address where they will be staying, as well as other information, he explains. They are then simply advised to see a doctor for testing, and allowed to enter the U.S.
The information is forwarded to the federal Centers for Disease Control.
"They are doing a numbers game only," the LAX inspector said.
CDC personnel have inspected certain flights from Asia after passengers have deplaned, he says.
"But there has been no instance where anyone has been detained or isolated due to any symptoms," he said.
An HHS spokeswoman here referred questions to the CDC in Atlanta, which did not immediately return phone calls.
A U.S. immigration officer at O'Hare International Airport in Chicago, the nation's busiest, says a Chinese passenger recently was detained there after exhibiting signs of SARS, but was released after health officials determined that she was not infected with the virus. O'Hare over the past year has seen a surge in undocumented nationals from mainland China.
"She apparently just had a cold," the officer told WorldNetDaily.
He says public health officials have met Asian passengers at the gates to quiz them about symptoms they may be experiencing, while handing out information about SARS and local clinics.
Authorities in Thailand, in contrast, have subjected all foreign travelers, including Americans, to medical examinations upon entering airports there, while imposing strict quarantines on travelers diagnosed with SARS.
Airport authorities there and in other Asian countries have started wearing surgical gloves and masks.
Federal inspectors at O'Hare are wearing neither protective gear, but LAX inspectors have been advised by federal health officials to wear gloves while handling passports and other documents.
"We were told to wash our hands frequently and to wear gloves in the handling of documents," he said.
However, "we are not allowed to wear face masks during an inspection," based on orders from immigration supervisors, he added.
The SARS virus is believed to be spread by air, through coughing and sneezing, as well as by contact.
"We were told under no circumstances would we be allowed to wear face masks while in uniform," he said. "If someone coughs or spits up, we were told to call the floor rover or supervisor and have that person escorted to Public Health."
In lieu of the masks, a few inspectors have purchased small table fans to direct air away from their booths, he says.
Though still a medical mystery, SARS so far has a relatively low death rate of 4 percent.
So you'll understand why we found these paragraphs from 'TIME Magazine', May 5th, 2003, more than sobering...Rumours Abound Of SARS Link To BioWeapons
The Straits Times,
Singapore
1st May, 2003BEIJING (AFP) -- The mounting death toll exacted by Sars in China has triggered speculation that the virus could ultimately be traced back to a leak from military bio-weapon programmes.
Although most reports favour a natural origin for Sars, a bio-weapon link should not be ruled out, according to Mr Richard Fisher, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington-based think-tank.
"While there is no reported evidence that Sars is indeed a weapon, there are plenty of ways that a real weapon with the properties of Sars could prove decisive in a military conflict, he said.
Chinese dissident Wei Jingsheng, in an opinion piece published in the International Herald Tribune this week, cited rumours circulating in China such as the idea "that Sars emanated from China's biological weapons research facilities."
Many analysts consider a link between Sars and bio-weapons far-fetched.
Ms Stephanie Lieggi, an East Asia expert at the California-based Centre for Nonproliferation Studies, said: "I have seen nothing in recent reports that would support any connection between Sars and biological weapons."
Another argument against the theory is the low kill ratio associated with Sars. And although it is transmitted relatively easily, it seems to be less contagious than most known viral bio-weapons, according to experts.
But it is exactly the innocuous nature of Sars that could make it militarily useful for someone wanting to sow panic and prompt political instability, Mr Fisher argued.
"A seemingly 'natural' epidemic would lessen suspicion of the main 'enemy state' by the target country and its main allies," he said.
The theory that Sars was a leaked weapon would depend on the existence of an offensive biological weapon programme in China.
According to US intelligence sources, the People's Liberation Army does have an offensive programme, although it appears to have been scaled down over the past two decades.
The Institute of Military Medicine near Beijing has been engaged in, at the minimum, defensive research.
But overseas analysts do not know for sure whether China envisages the use of biological weapons in future wars.
We'll leave you to reflect on this contribution from Dr. Len Horowitz...The Truth About SARS
It's deadly, infectious and not going away. What we've learned about the virus and how scared we should be
With fewer than 300 known SARS deaths so far, the worldwide toll is tiny compared with, say, the 3 million people who died of AIDS last year. But if SARS continues to spread, its numbers could skyrocket. Its overall death rate of about 6% is far lower than that of AIDS, Ebola or malaria, but if enough people catch the illness, even a low rate could cause a catastrophe. The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19 had a death rate of less than 3%, but so many people became infected that it killed more than 20 million people in just 18 months...And nobody can forecast how much worse it could get. The more victims there are, the greater the chance that SARS will spread - and there may be a lot more cases in China than anyone realizes. It's hard to gather information in such a vast country under the best of circumstances, but the actions of Chinese officials have made the situation worse. In April the government finally grudgingly admitted that SARS is a problem and belatedly allowed in a WHO team to investigate. Soon doctors at Beijing hospitals began leaking word of a massive cover-up. The country's Health Minister and the mayor of Beijing were dismissed last week from their jobs and their Communist Party posts. Chinese officials have revised their numbers, but they are still not telling WHO about patterns of spread. "Right now," says Jeffrey McFarland, a member of the Beijing WHO team,"we're getting exactly the same information as the press."
SARS - A Great Global SCAM
By Leonard G. Horowitz, DMD, MA, MPHAuthor of thirteen books including the national bestseller, 'Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?' and 'Death in the Air: Globalism, Terrorism and Toxic Warfare'
Abstract:
Rather than a public health emergency, the "Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome," generally called SARS, is best diagnosed as a "Sickening and Repulsive Scam." This article argues that this unprecedented viral attack is, alternatively, an ingenious social experiment featuring institutionalized bioterrorism for widespread psycho-social control. The outcome of this experiment, whether it leads to population reduction or not, depends on you.Background:
You are about to read much neglected truths pertaining to this bizarre new pneumonia-like illness called SARS. Authorities explain this acronym for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome as simply the latest threat in an ongoing series of attacks on humanity by mysteriously mutating "supergerms." Yet, a careful study of this multi-disciplinary subjectÊ reveals something amiss far more insidious and deadly than SARS. This spreading scourge of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome stretching from Asia to North America has all the earmarks of a novel social experiment in population manipulation aimed to culture the mass mind for the arrival of "the Big One"-a biological agent that will facilitate decimation of approximately a third to half of the world's population, in keeping with current official population reduction objectives.
Naturally you would be disinclined to believe the above sentence. Open-mindedness in this domain threatens exposure to a "Twilight Zone" of knowledge in which reality is far stranger than fiction. Your first instinct, therefore, might be to close this page in favor of the next SARS site that promises more of the standard treatments broadcast on every official news page and government report on this subject. But, if you choose to have your worldview shattered by considering the little known truths surrounding Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, then continue reading...
"No great epidemic has ever evolved divorced from major socio-political upheaval." - Leonard G. Horowitz, D.M.D., M.A., M.P.H., 'Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola-Nature, Accident or Intentional?' presentation, 1996.Introduction:My name is Dr. Leonard Horowitz, and I will be your SARS tour guide...As a Harvard graduate in public health, and expert in the fields of medical sociology, behavioral science, and emerging diseases, I am best known for my work exposing the man-made origin of HIV/AIDS in the national bestselling book, 'Emerging Viruses: AIDS & Ebola - Nature, Accident or Intentional?' [Note: you can order this book from our Global Pandemics And Epidemics web page, as well as Dr. Horowitz's best-selling follow-up, 'Death In The Air'] This was my tenth book that American grassroots activists, medical physicians and scientists included, made a national bestseller. U.S. Government documents that I reprinted for the first time for the world to see were strong endorsements for this work. Included here are stunning and tragic contracts under which numerous AIDS-like and Ebola-like viruses were bioengineered by the U.S. Army's 6th leading biological weapons contractor-Litton Bionetics-a medical subsidiary of the mega-military weapons contractor called Litton Industries...Here I focus your attention on SARS, and what mainstream sources of information are withholding about this new pandemic.
This narrative was written immediately following my return from Total Health 2003 - an alternative medical conference in Toronto, Canada, held March 27-30, 2003. I landed in Toronto the day that SARS began dominating front page headlines in every major newspaper in the country. Five consecutive days of unprecedented media blitz in Canada's largest city over the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome left the entire population frightened and bewildered.
Having been well-trained in media health promotion and persuasion methods from my behavioral science studies at Harvard University, I concluded that something akin to a social experiment was underway. With SARS, people were being frightened beyond reason, I realized. The classic definition of phobia was being manifested on a social, if not global, scale.
Surely the SARS death rate, approximately 3%, was insufficient cause for such widespread panic. The media successfully whipped the Canadian population into a trembling mass of masked and quarantined "sheeple." Officials were forced to direct the closing of hospitals, restaurants, schools, and workplaces with only two deaths reported at the onset of the media onslaught. Within a few days, more than a thousand healthcare workers volunteered for home quarantine because of SARS. Otherwise, they faced legal arrest and incarceration as advised by the World Health Organization. You will find many of these reports from Canada's daily newspapers, documenting these facts, as well as incoming American press reports, in the archive files of this website.
Mission
I have dedicated [my] website to examining the social and political implications, as well as the correlates (i.e., things related to) and antecedents (i.e., factors or events