Influenza Quotes

“in a letter to the New York Times, Dr. Hans Neumann from the New Haven Department of Health noted that based on the projected scale of the immunizations, within two days of getting a flu shot, about 2,300 people would have a stroke and 7,000 would have a heart attack. “Why?” he asked. “Because that is the number statistically expected, flu shots or no flu shots.” Likewise, in the week following a flu vaccine, another 9,000 people would contract pneumonia, of whom 900 would die. These would certainly occur after a flu shot, but not as a consequence of it. “Yet,” wrote Neumann, “can one expect a person who received a flu shot at noon and who that same night had a stroke not to associate somehow the two in his mind?” Grandma got the flu vaccine in the morning, and she was dead in the afternoon. Although association does not equal causation, this thinking could lead to a public backlash against vaccinations that would threaten future programs.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“All this tinkering was creating superviruses that did not exist outside the lab and that might be more easily transmissible between different species, or more virulent, or more resistant to any influenza vaccine. Most researchers were insistent that these “gain of function” studies were needed to better understand how the flu virus might evolve, but the federal government saw things differently. These experiments were a security risk.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The National Institutes of Health in Maryland keeps samples of the 1918 flu virus in a freezer at an undisclosed location. It’s not easy to get anywhere near that locked freezer, let alone inside it. First, you have to get onto the campus of the NIH, which requires identification, a reason to be admitted, and a PhD, preferably in one of the life sciences. Once you get through and find the building, a guard has to buzz you in via an airlocked entrance with double doors. Inside, you will pass through a metal detector and then be firmly guided toward a locker, where your cell phone, thumb drive, computer, pager, and camera must be deposited. Then, and only then, will you be escorted farther into the building.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The 2009 “pandemic,” which was not really a pandemic at all, taught us that language is both a weapon and a handicap when waging a campaign against influenza.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The history of the 1918 influenza pandemic is depressing reading. It’s like watching a horror movie that you have seen before. You know who the killer is, but you can’t jump in and save the victim.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“Today, influenza kills fewer than 0.1 percent of those who catch it. Nearly everyone recovers. In the 1918 pandemic most still recovered, but the death rate was twenty-five times greater. So many died in the U.S. that the average life expectancy in 1918 fell from fifty-one to thirty-nine years.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The third explanation for 1918’s lethality is that the flu virus triggered an overreactive immune response that turned the body against itself.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“We now think that the majority of deaths in the 1918 pandemic resulted from these secondary infections, not from the flu virus itself.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“The most useful definition we have is that an epidemic is a severe local outbreak, while a pandemic is a global outbreak that makes people very sick, and spreads rapidly from a point of origin.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“Today, we know that viruses are submicroscopic entities twenty times smaller than a bacterium. They contain a core of genetic material covered by a protein capsule, and they reproduce exclusively within living cells.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“If it is hot enough to barbecue,” a patient of mine once told me as I sutured the knife wounds on his chest, “it’s hot enough to stab someone.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“Hopkirk, like many physicians of his day, also prescribed quinine to treat the flu. “In quinine,” he wrote with great certainty, “we have a drug that not only controls fever-producing processes allied to fermentations, but also exerts a definite anti-toxic action on the specific virus of influenza itself.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“In addition to antigenic drift, there is a larger change that the flu virus can undergo, antigenic shift, and that’s how we get our flu pandemics. During this shift, viral proteins assume an entirely new structure, and the virus is said to be “novel.” These novel viruses—which most often arise when animal and human viruses share and swap their genes—are like entirely new criminals, not old ones in disguise. This makes them sneakier, more prolific, and perhaps more deadly. Antigenic shift generated the deadly 1918 influenza virus and the swine flu outbreak of 2009.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic

“Since the body does a better job of fighting infection when it is a few degrees hotter, might reducing the fever lead to a worse outcome for the patient? A group from McMaster University in Canada looked at what happens in a large group of people when some of them—infected with, say, influenza—take medicine to reduce their fever. Once they feel better, patients with the flu get out of bed and start to socialize, spreading the virus. On a population level the effect is rather drastic. The McMaster group concluded that the practice of frequently treating fevers with medication enhances the transmission of influenza by at least 1 percent. I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, but remember that as many as 49,000 people die from the flu each year in the United States. If you plug the McMaster estimates into these flu numbers, almost 500 deaths per year in the U.S. (and perhaps many more elsewhere) could be prevented by avoiding fever medication during the treatment of influenza.”
― Jeremy Brown, Influenza: The Hundred-Year Hunt to Cure the 1918 Spanish Flu Pandemic