Almost everybody knows that politics was responsible for all the panic around the new flu epidemic. And it is easy to imagine what the motives involved were. Yet the problem has important medical ramifications, and it cannot be allowed to be “swept under the carpet” unresolved, like it has in the past.
Why is everybody so stubbornly spreading the opinion that the virus A/H1N1 is so dangerous for human life? Is this really some new mutant virus that appeared as a result of combining swine and human flu agents? What are we not being told?
If it were truly a “swine flu” people working in agriculture would have been the first to fall victim to the pandemic. But the “swine flue,” hastily rebranded as “Californian,” proved to be an urban resident. Where has this epithet come from? This is where we encounter the first element of medical dishonesty.
The virus got its name because the American scientist Richard E. Shope isolated it from swine in 1931. Two years later it was isolated from people, and confirmed with the help of lab hamsters. In a sense, it was the first virus identified as being an agent behind the world’s most common seasonal disease. At the time they believed that this virus caused the fatal Spanish flu of 1918-20, by moving from pigs to humans. Although the level of science at that time did not allow to disprove or confirm this hypothesis, it continues to live on in some form or other even nowadays.
Flu agents are classified according to the so-called antigen landscape: the peculiarities of the surface of an atomic group’s defensive capsid (receptors), which help these “microcosm guests” penetrate living organisms by reacting with an atomic group on the cell’s surface according to the “lock-picklock” principle. The swine flu falls into the A group. The specific feature of viruses from that group is that they affect all animals on the planet, from penguins to butterflies. Thus, the H1N1 virus can be called a “horse,” “mouse,” or “cockroach” flu with the same success.
Genetic material is being scattered in the biosphere, and genetic engineering, now developing in leaps and bounds, only reflects part of what is going on around us. This is confirmed by the fact that bacteria stop reacting to antibiotics, and physicians categorically refuse to use them to treat viral diseases, although this has been common practice until quite recently. In waging war against the micro-world, the medical profession refuses to admit that our organism is doomed to interact with it, and that we have to overcome the environmental challenges generated by the flow of time. The genome of viruses and bacteria is relatively poor but very variable, and our genetic apparatus accepts the ready information produced by creatures we regard as our fierce enemies.
Is the “swine flu” the same thing as the Spanish flu? Laboratories from numerous countries, especially the US, have preserved samples from the lungs of soldiers who died in the epidemic of 1918-20, from which the virus has been isolated. However, as was to be expected, its contemporary “relatives” have undergone such fundamental changes that it is hardly possible to make any certain statements in this respect. Moreover, it remains largely unclear why the Spanish flu was so baneful, which is why the author offers her own version below.
In early 20th century the Sochi-based doctor Shults gathered 300,000 blood tests from laboratories located far from each other. He observed how, during World War I, the number of leucocytes decreased from 10,000-12,000 to 8,000-10,000 (nowadays even as little as 4,000 leucocytes does not alarm hematologists). Parallel to this, peppered moths breeding around the industrial cities were growing darker. The driving forces behind this process are clear: white-winged individuals became too visible against the sooty bark of birches, birds ate them up, and the species lived on through individuals whose previously “silent” gene became more active. This means that upon entering the epoch of scientific-technical progress, the entire biosphere underwent considerable stress, as a result of which the process of adaptation went off the beaten track. Those who were not ready for such a turn of events paid with their lives.
For all living creatures the alternation of environmental factors has an element of unpredictability. The ancient peoples understood this, correctly concluding that “you can never enter the same river twice.”
Virologists opine an epidemic caused by the H1N1 strains occurred in 1940, and was later substituted by other versions. H1N1 returned in 1977, acquiring the “Russian” and “Moscow” epithets – from the place it first broke out. Since then it lost its epidemic-like qualities.
Ladies and gentlemen, we are evolving. However, this should not be understood in the way of monkeys acquiring the status of homo sapiens (which remains an open question), but as an ongoing adjustment to the environment, where – as it has been proved by numerous experiments – every second leaves its trace on the cells of our body. Hence it follows that once our organism has such a “punched card,” a heredity DNA carrier determining the possibilities of species development, it should also have another “punched card” to adjust to acute changes. And it should incorporate a certain form of feedback from the environment. What is its mechanism?
Bringing this conceptual question closer to practice, medicine, instead of flaring up tensions – lumping together the seasonal flu, the “Californian” one, acute respiratory diseases and various forms of pneumonia – should have sought answers to the urgent questions. Is the old strain of flu able to cause recurring epidemics or only about episodic illnesses? What is the agent behind the so-called seasonal flu? Is it a genetically stable formation or a viral group, undergoing a Darwinian selection in our organisms, and thus changing its typical features according to the specificities of seasons? What is the reason behind cases of mysterious pneumonia followed by the creation of blood clots, as registered in western oblasts? Are we facing a pandemic caused by a new combination? This version cannot be excluded either.
But instead of an objective assessment of the situation we were “hunting” down the initial virus, linking it to the flu epidemics which have become an inseparable part of our lives, pretending that it is something new, and therefore especially dangerous.
Why has the swine virus flared up tensions? Unfortunately, the answer is simple: the vaccine used to prevent it was created back in the early 1980s. Even if we assume that it was effective at the time, the 25 years that have passed are simply too long a period. We have changed and so has the virus. Moreover, it is known that the vaccine caused a lot of damage in the US and was a reason for a number of resonant lawsuits.
Therefore our Ministry of Health had “to wash one’s hands of the whole affair” and allow the population to decide for themselves whether to undergo vaccination against the H1N1 virus. Thank you for this! It is as effective as a stamp in one’s passport.
Vaccination is a holy cow for medicine. Those who dare speak against it are accused of non-civilized behavior, no more, no less. At the same time the main argument for vaccines is well-known: we overcame smallpox with the help of vaccination. Can the same thing happen with the flu?
I will quote an extract from the book written by authoritative virologists, doctors of medical sciences Golubev and Soloukhin Contemplation and Debates on Viruses (Moscow, Molodaya Gvardia Publishing House, 1989): “For 50 years now we have extensively used vaccines made of flu viruses, both living and dead, and lately – split. They are prepared of separate components which make up the virion, making the reaction to vaccination milder and painless. Tens millions people, both children and adults, are vaccinated annually. What about the disease? The number of cases is not going down. On the contrary, it is growing with each passing year.”
Is the reference to the victory over smallpox relevant here, as we are dealing with an absolutely different phenomena?
The smallpox agent has a DNA composed of 200 active genes, whereas the flu virus is a ribonucleic acid with seven or eight active genes, making the difference between the two bigger than that between an elephant and a fly. Moreover, the virology expert Lev Zilber distinguished between crisis viruses (agents of smallpox, hydrophobia, poliomyelitis) and integrational ones: in the first case vaccination is efficient, while in the second one – it isn’t.
Vaccination against influenza is like a war against the past, as the agent of the most common disease has a “new face” every year. Why? Because it has a natural mechanism linked to the general vectors of a species’ ongoing development, triggered by its genome in acute situations, and which reacts to its surroundings. This idea might have seemed strange ten years ago, but not anymore since the ability of ribonucleic acid (a building material for the influenza viruses) to include and exclude the genes in the DNA, and even restore links once both chains are broken, has been discovered – there are no doubts about this. But a lot of time has to pass until the new way of thinking is confirmed, clearing the path to new medical practices.
