US Swine Outbreak is an "Influenza"? Not so fast, says Lawrence Broxmeyer MD

    WHITESTONE, NY, May 05, 2009 /24-7PressRelease/ -- The CDC has a short memory. There was much the same "Influenza" talk when in 1990, a new multi-drug-resistant (MDR) tuberculosis outbreak took place in a large Miami municipal hospital. Soon thereafter, similar outbreaks in three New York City hospitals left many sufferers dying within weeks. By 1992, approximately two years later, drug-resistant tuberculosis had spread to seventeen US states, with mini-epidemics in Florida, Michigan, New York, California, Texas, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania and was reported, by the international media, as out of control. Viral forms of swine, avian and human TB can be transmitted from one species to another.

Furthermore, at this moment, both to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control, are aware of a far more serious and ongoing tuberculosis Pandemic in the world. Yet they choose to downplay the link, despite similar flu-like symptoms tuberculosis often begins with. With regards to this present TB Pandemic, WHO freely admits that there were more than 9 million new cases of TB worldwide, and approximately 1.8 million deaths from the disease in 2007, the most recent year for which data are available. An infectious disease, TB has been on the rise since the 1980s About one-third of the world's population, or two billion people, carry the TB bacteria.

"There have been about three influenza pandemics in each century for the last 300 years", points out Lawrence Broxmeyer MD . "Yet when the horrendous H1N1 1918 pandemic first got national attention in America in April, 1918, authorities didn't even considered Influenza or "the Flu" lethal enough to be a reportable disease."

Yet ironically, this very 1918 "Influenza" strain itself held clinical and epidemiologic similarities to the influenza pandemics of 1889, 1847, and even earlier. So it can be easily understood why some experts, from 1918 to the present, validly question how such an explosively fatal disease could have been or is presently caused by "Influenza".

Even Lancet, one of the most prominent medical journals in the world, calls the Mexican epidemic "flu-like" because frankly we do not have enough facts or verification in to call it anything else.

No one can deny the similarities between the onset of the 1918 epidemic and that of today. Yet a Press Release, issued on August 19, 2008, by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), contains a striking finding and conclusion: The 20 to 40 million deaths worldwide from the great 1918 Influenza ("Flu") Pandemic were NOT due to "flu" or a virus, but to pneumonia caused by massive bacterial infection.

Subsequently, a study published in JAMA by Talbot and Moore in 2000 showed that Mexican immigrants to the US have the highest case rates for tuberculosis among foreign born persons.

The research of Lawrence Broxmeyer MD, first proclaimed that the 1918 pandemic was due to bacteria, particularly mutant forms of flu-like fowl, swine, bovine, and human tuberculosis (TB) bacteria. These forms of tuberculosis are often viral-like, mutate frequently and can "skip" from one species to another. Moreover the antibodies from such viral TB forms react in the compliment fixation and later "viral" assays. They also grow on cultures which are supposed to grow only viruses.

In 2006 Medline paper published in Elsevier's Medical Hypothesis, Lawrence Broxmeyer, MD wrote: "Influenza is Italian for "influence", Latin: influentia. It used to be thought that the disease was caused by a bad influence from the heavens. Influenza was called a virus long, long before it was proven to be one." Elsevier is a major medical publisher which also publishes The Lancet.

In 2005, an article in the New England Journal of Medicine estimated that a recurrence of the 1918 influenza epidemic could kill between 180 million and 360 million people worldwide. It is yet to be seen whether the present pandemic will be what that journal had in mind. Yet similar to the present Swine episode, a large part of the previous bird-flu hysteria was fostered by a distrust among the lay and scientific community regarding the actual state of our knowledge regarding the bird flu or H5N1 and the killer "Influenza" Pandemic of 1918 that it was compared to. Such distrust was not completely unfounded. Traditionally, "flu" does not kill. Experts, including Peter Palese of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in Manhattan, remind us that even in 1992, millions in China already had antibodies to the Bird Flu H5N1, meaning that they had contracted it and that their immune system had little trouble fending it off.

In 2000 Dr. Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne, UC Berkeley demographers, reported convincing statistics showing that undetected tuberculosis may have been the real killer in the 1918 flu epidemic. Although scientists have recently spun that a "new" strain of "Influenza" strikes healthy young people, flu traditionally attacks the old and the infirm. The 1918 killer, on the other hand, went after men and women in their prime, between 20-40, prime ages for a TB onslaught. Flu didn't traditionally show the male preference recorded in 1918. TB did. With TB routinely, there was extremely low mortality between the ages of 5 and 15, also reflected in 1918. Besides, Noymer pointed out, Influenza typically came in the winter, this one began in the late spring and summer. The first autopsy of a 1918 pandemic victim occurred in Chicago in April, the very same month that the Mexican swine "flu" came to our attention .This mystery 1918 disease would subside, but come back in the fall with a vengeance.

Yet, Gorgas, Head of the US Army Medical Corp. at that time, insisted on referencing it as ''Influenza'', an old and heretofore not that deadly disease. Furthermore, argued Noymer, flu traditionally gave mild to moderate fever, but in the 1918 pandemic, patients could spike to 105 or 106 degrees, not uncharacteristic for an acute attack of tuberculosis.

And so, Noymer and Garenne, aware of recent attempts to isolate the "Influenza virus" on human cadavers and their specimens, nevertheless concluded that: "Frustratingly, these findings 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".

"By 1918", Lawrence Broxmeyer, MD continued, "it could be said, in so far as tuberculosis was concerned, that the world was a supersaturated sponge ready to ignite and that among its most vulnerable parts was the very Midwest where the 1918 unknown pandemic began. A critical mass, much like the Mexican experience, had been reached. It is theorized that the lethal pig epidemic that began in 1918 Kansas just prior to the first human outbreak was a disease of avian and human tuberculosis genetically combined through mycobacteriophage interchange, with the pig susceptible to both, and as its involuntary living culture medium." This to is much like the inception of the Mexican epidemic.

In commenting on the NIAID report, Lawrence Broxmeyer MD writes that euphemisms like "pneumonia", "bronchitis" , "chest ailment", "the flu" etc. have been with us since time immemorial to describe tubercular involvement. This was noted in 1944 in pathologist Arnold Rich's classic test, "The Pathogenesis of Tuberculosis." It is also well known that bacterial secondary infection in TB cases is common. And since NIAD's 2008 report there can be little doubt that bacterial infection was the cutting edge of death in 1918.

Whatever the "connection" between TB bacteria , influenza, and a virus-caused "flu" epidemic, the August, 2008 report by the NIAID is a reminder that epidemics and pandemics are complex disease processes, which should not simply be assumed to be due merely to a "virus" of great ferocity.
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Reference: Broxmeyer L. Bird flu, influenza and 1918: The case for mutant Avian tuberculosis. Med Hypotheses. 2006;67(5):1006-15. Epub 2006 Jun 27. http://drbroxmeyer.netfirms.com/PDF%20001%20Bird%20Flu%20Editorial.pdf

Readers interested in the subject of Influenza/TB can also go to Dr. Ron Paul, MD's take at: http://informationclearinghouse.info/article22507.htm

This and other papers regarding Lawrence Broxmeyer MD's ongoing research can be viewed by going to Http://drbroxmeyer.netfirms.com

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