The Flu and the Zombie Apocalypse

                                 The Flu and the Zombie Apocalypse

A major element of this pandemic, aside from paranoia, is ignorance-induced speculation. Here is some knowledge-based speculation, at least as paranoid-inducing, from The Scientist. This fits nicely with the rumors that Big Ten athletes are showing myocarditis when infected with the Virus.


"One of the earliest links between influenza and neural dysfunction was a correlation between the 1918 Spanish flu, caused by a subtype called H1N1, and an epidemic of Parkinson’s a few decades later. In the 1940s and early 1950s, diagnoses of the neurodegenerative disease appeared to increase abruptly, from 1–2 percent of the US population to 2.5–3 percent, then fell back down to 1–2 percent, Smeyne (a neurobiologist interviewed in the article) says. “Basically, 50 percent more people in those years got Parkinson’s.”

The evidence to suggest that influenza infection caused the neurodegenerative disorder was tenuous, to say the least, but the correlation was enough for Smeyne to investigate further. With his colleagues, he shot nonlethal doses of H5N1 or H1N1 up the noses of six- to eight-week-old mice, then tracked how the viruses spread through the animals’ nervous systems. The results were startling, he says: some viruses weren’t blocked from entering the brain by the blood-brain barrier—a semipermeable layer of cells that separates the central nervous system from the body’s circulation. H5N1, for example, could easily infiltrate nerve cells in the brain and kill them, and it appeared to especially target the dopamine-producing neurons in the substantia nigra. And while the H1N1 flu strain couldn’t cross the blood-brain barrier, it still caused central nervous system immune cells called microglia to flow into the substantia nigra and the hippocampus, causing inflammation and cell death in the area.

“So these were two different flus, two different mechanisms, but the same effect in a sense,” says Smeyne, who moved to Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia in 2016. “They were inducing inflammation and death in the parts of the brain that we see degenerate in Parkinson’s disease.”

Smeyne’s experiments aren’t the only ones to suggest that viral infections can contribute to neurodegenerative disorders, and the connection is not limited to influenza. Several different viruses, including measles and herpes, can give rise to symptoms of multiple sclerosis (MS) in rodents, for example. And levels of herpesvirus are higher in the brains of people who died from Alzheimer’s than in those without the disease, while some HIV patients develop dementia that appears to be associated with the infection.

“Viruses are often ignored in relation to neurodegenerative diseases,” Yale University neurobiologist Anthony van den Pol tells The Scientist. “That’s in part because there’s no clear sign that a virus causes a neurodegenerative disease. But it might.”"

So, every bug comes with the potential of some population damage somewhere at sometime in the future, neurologic, reproductive, personality. We, from rheumatic fever to Bright's Disease to Shingles are just waiting for collateral damage to emerge. 

That should be quite concerning to a culture that has so much faith in fine-tuning Nature.