Nexus - 1806 - New Times Magazine-pages

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INFLUENZA AND THE TUBERCULOSIS CONNECTION INFLUENZA AND THE CONNECTION TUBERCULOSIS An influenza virus was not the real culprit in the 1918-19 flu pandemic. More likely, hidden tuberculosis was to blame for the devastating secondary infections and huge death toll. Part 1 of 2 everal Medline studies have shown that inoculating with influenza vaccine is also protective against tuberculosis. New evidence and older historical findings which explain this phenomenon bring up the possibility that influenza doesn't originate from a virus. How a Microbe was Repackaged and Sold as a Virus Pfeiffer's influenza bacillus, a bacterium, was heavily isolated at one time or another in victims of the 1918-19 pandemic by practically all major research centres in the United States. It was therefore considered, by most, to be the cause of influenza until at least 1933. And Bradford, Bashford and Wilson's influenza isolates, although called "viruses" because they easily passed through a filter, were obviously minute bacteria, isolated from the blood, sputum and spinal fluid in a number of pandemic cases.' Bradford never named the bacteria that he and his colleagues had found. But his description of them was not inconsistent with Lohnis's minute forms of the mycobacteria, the precise name originally given to Pfeiffer's influenza bacillus, which was classified Mycobacterium influenzae soon after its discovery. The nearest competitor of Pfeiffer's bacillus was a vague, filterable "virus". Although the term virus has existed since 1898, the infectious agent it was attempting to describe was so unclear and mysterious that for many decades scientists considered it purely theoretical. Certainly, even by 1917, "influenza" was still not felt to be serious enough to be a reportable disease, and no doctor had to report it to state or local health officials. Most cases were self- imiting and gone in 10 days. Yet the great "influenza" pandemic that swept he world in 1918-19 may have been the most virulent outbreak in history, at east in terms of the swiftness of its devastation. It killed more than 20 million persons around the world, including some 550,000 in the United States—all within two years. By 2000, Dr Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne, demographers from the University of California, Berkeley, thought they knew just why this perceived discrepancy existed, reporting convincing statistics showing that undetected uberculosis (TB) may have been the real killer in the 1918 flu epidemic. Aware of recent attempts to isolate the "influenza virus" from human cadavers and their specimens, Noymer and Garenne concluded: "Frustratingly, these indings have not answered the question why the 1918 virus was so virulent, nor do they offer an explanation for the unusual age profile of deaths."’ Somehow overlooked in today's revisionist history of the flu, the influenza bacillus or Pfeiffer's bacillus, discovered by Pfeiffer and Canon in 1892, was originally named Mycobacterium influenzae because it was thought to be related o Mycobacterium tuberculosis. Both mycobacteria stained best with carbolfuchsin and methylene blue—bacterial stains that Robert Koch himself used in the discovery of tuberculosis. Also, Grassberger’ observed the same branching fungal forms in Pfeiffer's influenza mycobacteria as Metchnikoff* by Lawrence Broxmeyer, MD © 2011 The NY Institute of Medical Research, New York, USA Email: nyinstituteofmedical research@yahoo.com Website: http://drbroxmeyernetfirms.com NEXUS ° 17 OCTOBER - NOVEMBER 2011 www.nexusmagazine.com