1918 “Spanish Flu” follow-up

(from conversations around “Gassed.”)

Tim says: And we were the ones who brought Spanish Flu on over to Europe. The first strain was in an American military base and it was relatively mild. It mutated when it got to Europe.

Romie: The more recent origin theory is that it started in Shanxi Province, China, at that time a British colony, from whence laborers were hauled to Canada and France to dig trenches and stuff for essentially no money.

The earliest outbreaks in the U.S. (on military bases in Kanas and Massachusetts) in 1918 aren’t so much the first worldwide cases as they are the most emphatically documented, partly because it’s easier to monitor that stuff on a military base than among a transient population in a war zone, where doctors have other priorities and governments want to cover up signs of weakness, and partly because of racism (i.e. who cares about these Chinese people who have been dying since 1917).

Although it doesn’t provide any answers, I am also a fan this earlier “we just don’t know” paper written in 2006 by a couple of medical detectives from the NIH and the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology. I didn’t even know we had an Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, and now think it should feature heavily in a lot of science fiction stories.

Lungs Make Blood

Before I get too excited, I want to note that this is from a MOUSE STUDY of mouse lungs. That’s important, because we constantly generalize things from mouse studies that turn out to be not at all true in humans. I would say it is the most common error in biomedical reporting and/or extrapolation by futurists.

However, the scientists “strongly suggest” this is also true in humans [skeptical look at the scientists, who may be mice in disguise].

Study says: Around 50% of platelets may be made in the lungs instead of bone marrow. Stem cells go back and forth between the two places, making blood.

If it is true, treating blood clotting problems might get a lot easier and cheaper sometime soon, both because we’d have a better idea of what we were doing, and because we can get to our lungs without having to drill through our skeletons.

Nice return on “wild idea random experiment” NIH funding, right?

Part two: I am now in a full-on body horror hallucination where my lungs are clotting and become red jello.