Recently a patient was discussing with me how the pandemic fear associated with bird flu was in the news again. A pandemic is different from an epidemic in that the infection is not isolated to one particular area or locale of people; rather it affects many different locales with infections at a higher than normal rate.
Bird flu, when present in humans, was particular worrisome because of the severity of the disease that it caused. Those with competent immune systems were affected as well and possibly more so. Part of the disease process involved a cytokine storm in the lungs, causing an excess of inflammation and fluid accumulation in the lungs. Cytokines are the messengers that the immune system uses to activate and communicate.
While bird flu is serious in those patients affected, its ability to spread amongst populations, person to person, is not present or at the best, very very weak. Thus currently the virus does not have the ability to cause widespread human infection in urban populations.
The news recently hinted that the virus may be working its way there though:
A strain of bird flu has moved a step closer to developing the traits required to create an epidemic of the disease in humans, scientists warned on Monday.
Researchers who analysed samples of recent avian flu viruses found that a strain of the virus called H7N2 had adapted slightly better to living in mammals.
Tests on ferrets proved the strain could be passed between animals but scientists said the evidence suggested that bird flu could be transmitted between humans.
The virus tested on the ferrets – a standard animal model of flu in humans – was isolated from a man in New York in 2003, where it thrived on the same sugars found in the human windpipe.
The scientists said the virus could be evolving toward the same strong sugar-binding properties of the three worldwide viral pandemics in 1918, 1957 and 1968.
Like H5N1, the H7 family of flu viruses also primarily affects birds.
Part of the ability for a virus to cause infection in humans is the ability of it to stick to the mucosa cells. The above report indicates that one strain of bird flu may be developing the ability to “stick” to the receptors in the human respiratory tract. This may increase person-to-person transmissibility.
A more well-known analogy is in females who get recurrent urinary tract infections. In many cases, E coli bacteria are able to “hook” and stick onto the wall of the urethra, and thus climb their way into the bladder to cause infection. Nutrients like cranberry extract and D-mannose bind onto these hooks of the bacteria, making them less able to “stick” and cause infection.
Prevention of pandemics is similar to preventing any infection.
This involves proper hygiene, appropriate stress response, optimal nutrition, and a low body burden of toxins. Those are fundamental naturopathic principles. Treatment of serious viral infections would most likely involve intravenous vitamin C as the main treatment, especially if excess cytokine activity (cytokine storm) was involved.
