Day 73: So How Do People Catch Flu? Don’t Ask!

A reader sent me some shocking quotes and allegations. At first I thought it was a hoax, but he sent links, too. He was responding to my consternation about my ex’s claim that she caught H5N1 while barricaded in my apartment. He didn’t try to explain, but it seems anything is possible—or at least, not impossible.

The first shocker was a quote from—and link to—a 2005-6 research solicitation by the CDC, wherein the Feds offered tax dollars to get scientists to conduct some pressing research:

“The biological and genetic basis of transmissibility of influenza viruses among humans, and mammalian species in general, remains poorly understood.”

Huh?

DEAR MA, TODAY A DOCTOR SWABBED LIVE KILLER FLU INTO MY NOSE AND THROAT. BUT I FEEL GREAT....Then he quoted and linked to a reprint of a paper co-authored by leading global flu researchers, including legendary flu-fighter Robert Webster, a New Zealander who was first to figure out that influenza originates in birds:

“A key feature of a potentially pandemic influenza virus is its ability to spread efficiently from infected to noninfected hosts (i.e., its transmissibility). The molecular basis of influenza virus transmissibility remains unresolved.”

The CDC and the man who helped develop the method by which flu vaccine is now created are saying that the biological, genetic, and molecular bases of flu transmission among people are not understood. Not even for seasonal flu!

And I thought it was a slam-dunk: Someone sneezes and we breathe it in, or touch the active residue. (You know, on fomites.) Nope.

I spent the day trawling deep science on the Web. Thanks to the University of Toronto’s website, I found a faint photocopy of a 599-page work about the 1918-19 pandemic. An extremely respected doctor named Edwin Oakes Jordan wrote the book for the American Medical Association’s Chicago branch, which published it in 1927, when experts were still trying to determine if the pandemic had been caused by a virus or by a bacterium.

Strangers on a Plane—Proof of Flu Transmission?

In Epidemic Influenza, A Survey, Jordan reports (pps. 441, 442, and 443) on three distinct attempts in 1918 and 1919 by the U.S. Public Health Service to transmit H1N1 from numerous sick people to healthy volunteers. They failed to demonstrate a single impeccable transmission, even after rubbing fresh, hot sputum into volunteers’ throats. And that was a fearsome flu.

In only a handful of studies have researchers claimed to have observed direct flu transmission. The most commonly cited paper dates back to 1979 and concerns an airplane stuck for four hours on the tarmac in Alaska. A very sick passenger is said to have transmitted the flu to many others while the air filtration system malfunctioned.

That, folks, is an anecdotal report. There were no controls. Ventilation was down and passengers wandered on and off the plane. I’m not saying it didn’t happen. But a decades-old cause-and-effect observation is the best they’ve come up with to prove what we all ‘know.’

As Dr. Michael Gardam, director of infectious disease prevention and control for Canada’s Ontario Agency for Health Protection & Promotion, told the Los Angeles Times: The only thing the study proves is that it was extremely unpleasant to be on that plane.

Heck, I was stuck next to a woman sneezing from Madrid to New York at the peak of last year’s flu season. I was sure she’d infect me. I could feel her fever radiating at me as I leaned away, into the window. What did I get? Nada.

I can’t explain the alleged Alaska flu carrier. I don’t disbelieve it. Maybe it was a ‘superspreader’—as happened in several cases with SARS transmission. But I’m flabbergasted that it’s all they have. I don’t understand how I failed to notice that the science of flu transmission is so incomplete.

Have you folks ever heard any of this?

I’ve been selling masks and gloves and goggles on the assumption that sick people spread the flu. I think I’ll keep at it—and continue wearing them. I’m not going to risk my life or anyone else’s on the gaps in popular flu theory. Hey, it feels better to wear a mask. Might help. Who knows?

The more I learn about bird flu, the less I know I know.

Day 74: A Libertarian Flu Blogger’s Political Devolution

I woke up to a nasty message from she who doesn’t relent. “The liberal enemy Rand puts forth in The Fountainhead is a cartoonish shinyheaded intellectual who is feminizing the man’s world with his squishy socialist tricks,” she writes. Even her italics sneer as she asks: “I always thought you were cute, but arrogant. Are you simpleminded, too?”

IN 1933 (AND 2008), AMERICAN BANKS ENTHUSIASTICALLY WALLOWED IN 'COLLECTIVIST GREED'

Boy, am I. Some of what our shadowy friend says is true, and she says it well. But who can resist Rand’s lurid tales of high principle and hot sexuality? Not I. It looks like fun to tell all those predictable mediocrities to stuff it.

I should hook our hectoring correspondent up with the devoted libertarian who wrote in to denounce Jimmy Stewart for having starred in It’s A Wonderful Life. Not because the Christmas classic is sentimental. It’s “collectivist, bank-bashing propaganda” aimed at “robbing the fruitful to enable failure.”

I’d have snapped to attention for such rhetoric until 2008, when America’s megabanks stirred up so much havoc that they extracted grand subsidies from the Feds to stay in business and charge us more. (Shades of 1933, after which they at least kept a straight face—and books—for a few decades.) In 2009, the bank Nina works for bounced a credit check it had just sent me, then charged me a bad-check fee! I wonder what Rand would have said about such an enterprise. (Sadly, she never warned that borrowing money is the ticket to credit serfdom, as too many Americans have learned.)

I see now that I must be devolving into a moderate. (Our malcontented correspondent doesn’t get it, but hey—I’m still waiting for her to finish composing the voluntarist manifesto she asked me to post.)

Mom would be thrilled that I’m mellowing (girls hate all that talk), Dad sullenly disappointed (real men don’t care what girls think). Please don’t tell them.

Day 75-6: Rough Sex—Who Objects to Ayn Rand’s Struggle?

If emails could maim, I wouldn’t be able to type. I received a very strange message from Nina, who thinks I’ve been calling her and demands that I stop. I replied, asking if she needs help. I don’t know what to do. The voice mail at her office sounds fine. Is she playing games with me?

On top of that, my friendly reader has seized on my reference to the sexuality in Rand’s novels to ask if I believe women need always surrender to the men who won’t admit defeat. She’s referring to the bottom billing embraced by Rand’s leading ladies when they encounter the Heroes Who Resist Mediocrity & Collectivization.

DONATIEN ALPHONSE DE SADE, MARQUISI confess, Madame! The first time I ever thought much about S&M, I was a 13-year-old holding a big fat book, Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Dagny Taggart was leaving Hank Reardon’s rail car the morning after with a bloody lip, some bruises, and a smile I couldn’t comprehend. Miss Railroad Princess sure didn’t seem to mind that Mr. Steel Baron was a clumsy kisser. Weeks later, reading Howard Roark’s epic rape of Dominique Francon in The Fountainhead confirmed my confusion.

Yet I survived. The books helped make me a libertarian while leaving me a gentleman, confirming the virtues of unadulterated free speech.

Our crusty commentator also ripped my um, subtle joke about the LES DIY as a ‘voluntarist’ association. They’re altruists, as she goes on to emphasize: “We help people because we believe it’s in our interest to do so. WE ARE *&@%$^ [my special code] HUMAN BEINGS.”

LEOPOLD VON SACHER-MASOCH (Jacek Proszyk)Then came another swing at your wretched blogger. “If you want your girlfriend back, maybe you shouldn’t publish reports about your public makeout sessions.”

Finally she tried to turn Gene Clark against me. She attached Death in Vegas‘ cover version of one of his greats, So You Say You Lost Your Baby. It features a booming vocal from Paul Weller of the old Jam as he taunts a guy who’s moaning about a lost love when in fact, he’s the real baby. Uh, I get it.

Clark’s versions of the song are far richer (here's one). (For Death In Vegas, Madame, I prefer Dirge, or Aisha, the serial killer song Iggy Pop recorded with them for their cd, The Contino Sessions—on sale here, of course.)

Oh heck, I get her point. I’ve been whining. I hate that, too.

She followed that with the first Web icon I’ve seen her use—a blue frowny face. Which effectively spells B-A-B-Y.

Day 77-9: Don’t Just Drift Into the Flu’s Second Wave

I finally got the residents of my building to discuss the pandemic. Representatives of a third of the apartments gathered in the laundry room. (There’s no lobby—and no way I’d invite so many vectors into my home.)

I don’t think any of them understand bird flu very well.

SEE THAT SUNNY LI'L EYE IN HURRICANE ANDREW? THAT'S US RIGHT NOW, FOLKS!

A fifth of those who came are trying to organize a rent strike, albeit for unrelated reasons (‘kill the landlord’ being a general theme around here), another fifth are so lonely they’d attend anything they don’t need to go outside to get to, and two-fifths believe bird flu embodies some kind of conspiracy, though they differ vigorously as to whether it’s a hoax or a genuine threat. One fifth nodded a lot when I spoke—-my bobble-headed peeps. A heck of a flock!

I ain’t much of a shepherd, but I got most of them to consider the likelihood of famine, riots, plague, and bedlam. New Yorkers are surprisingly open to apocalyptic visions, so long as you’re addressing the near future and you don’t invoke conventional religion.

They wouldn’t consider buying protective gear or Relenza or getting pneumonia vaccinations. We did exchange gmail and yahoo and hotmail addresses. I hope my secret—that I have … health stuff—is safe with them. I know that survivalist readers will hurl at the thought that I told neighbors about my pandemic safety stash. What was I thinking?

Nice things, I guess. I even befriended my next-door neighbor, a Ukrainian gentleman whose children live on the West Coast. Long before I moved here, he was this building’s super. He’s a vigorous old man whose immune system could tell tales. He’d probably empty a bar washing down some borscht.

I’ll try to find someone to keep an eye on him when Round Two begins. He’s agreed to get a Pneumovax 23 shot, for which he’s way overdue.

We should all make something useful of our hiatus. Don’t forget this is the first pandemic in history that followed years of warnings. The others came ‘suddenly.’ What does it say about our civilization that we’ve chosen to remain unprepared—even as H5N1 circles like a big shark, tearing into us from time to time? Just sampling, so far.

Blabber & Smoke

People are already making fun of the government for what little effort it did make. In my view, the Feds wasted billions on pre-pandemic vaccines and antivirals when what we needed were hospital beds, ventilators, and nurses. Others loudly argue the reverse. Let’s agree that, whatever we need, there ain’t enough of it.

A lot of atrocities took place in our brief first-wave crisis. We’re now hearing how people took the law into their hands—or out of the hands of others. (Some cops surrendered without much fight.) Mayors jumped to seal off their communities at any cost (not that this helped much) or deployed cops, deputies, and guards to divide their constituencies by race and class. For years we’ll be hauled off to sit on juries assessing criminal charges and civil damages from that month of uncertainty. How much hardship will three months of chaos wreak?

This is our chance to ensure that frightened citizens don’t need to steal food and medicine—or kill their neighbors—in Round Two. If a hurricane slammed into Miami, tore it up, and then froze offshore for months, would everyone just go swimming till it made landfall again? Won’t anyone prepare?

Day 80-2: Along Comes Evelyn

Mail call! My cranky correspondent says I must be drinking too much to have so miserably misunderstood her critique of Ayn Rand. “The coolest aspect of Rand’s novels is her distinctive sexuality. Her taste for antagonistic sex must have embarrassed right-wingers in the 1940s and ‘50s,” she says. “That took some guts and a sense of humor, which you [meaning me] evidently lack.”

THE NAME IS 'EVELYN,' NOT 'DOMINIQUE'Hmm. I thought I made it clear that I had nothing against Rand’s sexuality. When Rand couples her characters, she invests all of their power, to the max. The Fountainhead’s Dominque uses her newspaper column to deride Roark’s work, even as she invites him to plunder her body. She’s hardly helpless. Their violent lovemaking embodies their work, their war, their passion for so much that isn’t sexual.

 I believe in purity of expression in all dimensions (short of serious injury), as long as the doings are consensual. Dagny and Dominique are strong-willed women bent on draining the cup of life with a worthy partner. They know what they’re doing. Unlike my stalker, who’s just earned the name ‘Evelyn,’ for the character in Play Misty for Me. (Hear Orson Welles narrate the lame movie trailer!)

Rand wasn’t the first writer to say love hurts, but she primed the pain with socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues. When her leads consummate the buzz, history feeds their need. Talk about compelling unions. Compulsive might be the better word.

I do agree with Evelyn’s observation that Gary Cooper turned in a lame performance as the idealistic violator in the movie version of The Fountainhead. Cooper played the scene like a George Romero extra who’d lost his teeth. Jimmy Stewart would have been driven. (Watch him take Kim Novak shopping in Vertigo or knock Doris Day out with pills in the second Man Who Knew Too Much.)

A number of normal readers write that they’ve been organizing their communities all along, but that the public suffers from flu fatigue. “It was easy to get my neighbors excited about bird flu until it showed up,” says a Wisconsin woman. “Familiarity has bred contempt,” reports a student in San Jose. “We’ve lost them.”

I was afraid of this, and not because my personal protective equipment sales are negligible. (Fitch is never far from my thoughts.) I don’t doubt that demand will return aplenty in October, at the start of flu season, even if H5N1 is still lying low.

After all, I’m selling a solid mask technology and everyone knows we defeated bird flu with technology. Never mind that America’s hospitals locked patients out, that there were disturbances and blackouts and shortages. Who cares that Tamiflu failed frequently and that Relenza doesn’t always work—and was impossible to get when fear broke out?

It’s as if a thriller called Pandemic bombed with critics. I’m afraid the fans will wind up catching it anyway, Word-of-mouth gets around, you know.