Swine flu. Been there done that. Not to make light of a potentially serious illness but the news media seems to want to drum up panic. The shots on TV news casts of health officials in haz-mat suits encourages comparisons to the Ebola scare or the movie ET when they rightfully feared contagion by extraterrestrial pathogens.

The latest swine flu outbreak has infected people in several countires with ground zero being a small town in Mexico. Sadly, over 100 people perished of the desease in and around Mexico City.

The current outbreak has been traced to LaGloria which became a hub of activity as health care officials flooded the town to investigate the disease.

This current flu exhibits genes from hogs, birds, and humans from Europe, Asia, and America. In LaGloria, the mutated swine flu changed to a disease that can be spread by human to human contact.

People who lived in LaGloria have long complained of the presence of nearby hog farms. In the past, hogs were raised on small farms but the move to large factory productions is now the norm. Factory farms keeps up to 17,000 hogs confined indoors. The flies and resulting stench have been an annoyance to nearby residents for years.

The  Smithfield owned factory farm in LaGloria hosted a limited tour of the farm which appeared clean to health officials. However, residents claim that the factory farm instituted a hasty clean-up campaign when news of swine flu hit.

It has been suggested that the high death rate in Mexico is due to a more widespread epidemic than originally suspected. Milder symptoms may not have been noticed or reported so the spread of swine flu could be greater than health officials realize.

In 1976, an outbreak of swine flu at Fort Dix threw the United States into a near panic. The 250 cases eventually appeared confined to that restricted locale. One soldier died of the disease.

The Center for Contagious Disease and American health care officials encouraged pharmaceutical companies to rush to manufacture a vaccine which resulted in problems more serious than the disease itself. 500 cases of Guillain Barre syndrome and 25 related deaths were linked to the inoculation.

Then President Gerald Ford and congressional legislation funded the program and stockpiled vaccines. Commercials appeared on TV that highlighted how easily the flu could spread throughout the population and encouraged people to be vaccinated against swine flu.

In 2003, fear of a flu pandemic was fueled when the pharmaceutical industry stockpile of 2002 vaccines went unused. The financial loss due to the accumulation of unused vaccines sent pharmaceutical representatives to influence health officials and congress to encourage people to seek the vaccine in 2003.

Though actual mortality is unknown it has been postulated that as many as 50 million people died of the flu during the famous 1918 outbreak.

Often, flu deaths are attributed to flu related conditions like pneumonia that generally affect the very old, the very young, and people who have compromised immune systems. But in 1918, the deaths resulted from the flu itself. Mortality rates were high for young people in good health.

In 1918, a person could feel fine in the morning, become sick with Spanish flu in the afternoon and by that evening would be dead. One curious note emerged during that pandemic. The greatest mortality rate occurred in people under 50 years of age instead of people over 50. Apparently, the older population had contracted that strain of flu many years before and so were immune to that flu. You can only contract a particular strain of flu one time. After that, your body is immune.

Some studies suggest that the pandemic of 1918 was not exactly the flu.

At the time health professionals feared the spread of disease due to the movement of large groups of people around the world because of World War I. In order to stem the spread of disease, soldiers were inoculated against many diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria, malaria, and flu.

When a person contracts a contagious illness like measles, small pox, or influenza, they are protected against that disease in the future because they are immunized. True immunity comes after a body has been exposed to a particular communicable disease and so builds antibodies against it. In other words, the body now recognizes the disease so is equipped to fight it. Inoculation against a particular disease gives the patient an extremely mild case of that disease in order for the body to build antibodies against that disease. 

The symptoms associated with the flu outbreak of 1918 were first noticed at Camp Funston at Fort Riley in the USA. Soldiers there had been vaccinated against many communicable diseases. Several soldiers dropped dead on the spot immediately following inoculation.

It has been suggested that many doses of vaccines for several diseases created a conglomerate disease. In 1918, flu symptoms presented symptoms of a variety of diseases that had been inoculated against. The swollen sore throat mimicked diphtheria and an abdominal rash and intestinal problems were symptomatic of typhoid.  The flu of 1918 also had characteristics of black death, pneumonia and infantile paralysis.

Dr. Eleanor McBean claimed that people who refused the inoculations were spared the terrible illness. Some observers that non-medical facilities showed an excellent rate of cure (99%) through homeopathic remedies while areas that involved intense medical interventions showed a 33% mortality.

In general, flu follows a fairly predictable path. when a certain strain of flu appears in spring, the symptoms are fairly mild and mortality is low. but when that same flu reappears later the following fall and winter, a more virulent strain results in  more serious symptoms and complications.

In fall and winter, people cluster indoors. Doors and windows are kept closed and decreased exposure to fresh air increases contagion. That way,  the illness is more easily passed among the population. Closing schools has often slowed or halted flu outbreaks as the clustering and crowding of people increases the opportunity for flu to be passed around a community.

So far this spring outbreak of swine flu in the United States has resulted in fairly mild cases. Perhaps schools should remain open and the milder spring flu allowed to fester in order to immunize the population against a potentially serious version of the disease that could erupt in the fall and winter.