A 20-Year-Old Arizona Woman Died From The Flu [pneumonia] One Day After Getting Diagnosed

Murrieta began feeling sick last Sunday, and was sent home from her job at a warehouse to get some rest.

"My daughter called and said that Joie was sent home early on Sunday after working a few hours at the warehouse because she was really sick, and that she went home to rest," Gonzales said.

On Monday, her sister took her to an urgent care clinic, where they diagnosed Murrieta with the flu and sent her home with medicine.

"They got there in the morning and waited for a while, then they told her she had the flu and gave her a prescription for the medicine Tamiflu," Gonzales said.

Tamiflu is an antiviral medication used to treat and prevent infection with influenza A and B viruses. It is most effective when taken within 48 hours of contracting the flu.

"She was very healthy and never got sick, she worked six days a week and her job was at a warehouse so she was very active at her job," said Gonzales. Murrieta was seemingly not at a higher risk for hospitalization or death from the flu...

... Murrieta did not get a flu shot, Gonzales said, but her doctors said that there is no way to tell now whether that would've made a difference.

Murrieta leaves behind her two sons, one two-year-old and one six-month-old. "She would do anything for her sons — and it breaks my heart that the little one, who's only six months, will grow up without her," Gonzales said. "She was just a beautiful person — and we want to express our gratitude for everyone who has shown support for our family."

Nice try but that doesn’t address the OP’s claim regarding deaths from the Spanish Flu being correlated with smoking.

Read this:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/pneumonia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354204

Sure, I would agree that smoking increases one’s risk for pneumonia but there are other risk factors as well. Interestingly in the early 1900’s -1900 to 1919, cigarette smoking wasn’t all that popular although cigar smoking was along with chewing tobacco and snuff. But that doesn’t explain why that strain of influenza was so deadly.

A couple of years ago my nephew came down with the flu. He’s in his early 30’s, he eats a very healthy diet, exercise regularly and doesn’t smoke. Ironically I also contracted that same flu bug around the same time, we were both sick at Christmas, but it was one of those rare years that I hadn’t gotten a flu shot. I wish I had gotten one.

My nephew after getting the flu, developed pneumonia and was laid low for several weeks, with two trips to the doctor and one to the ER and missed a lot of time at work as a result. I was then a 2 pack a day smoker, middle-aged and overweight and ate a terrible diet – I got the same flu bug as my nephew but I didn’t get pneumonia and recovered much quicker, only missed about 4 days of work which was still more than I wanted to miss. Go figure.

As to the rest of your post above, it is plain gibberish and truly ignorant.

I do understand that there are many other causes of pneumonia. Simply put, flu can turn into pneumonia in both healthy people and those with compromised health; although it is much more common to “turn into” pneumonia in the elderly, those with asthma or other breathing issues, COPD, etc.

Whatever her situation, unless there is more at the link, other factors are unknown at this point.

I don’t think that the flu/pneumonia connection is new at all; it was connected back in the so-called Spanish flu, too.

From my arduous reading about flus on a dedicated flu forum which started at the middle or latter part of 2006, the CDC list of flu deaths is totally exaggerated, I mean way, way off, and gotten by figuring out “extra” deaths during flu season that are not attributable to obviously something else. IMHO it is to scare people into getting flu vaxes. Noteworthy is that the head of the CDC at that time (Nancy something or other) retired as head a couple of years later to work at one of the big pharmaceutical companies in their vax division. Revolving door....

The Spanish flu data I got from the CDC. The strange thing demographically about the Spanish flu is that it killed a lot of middle aged men. The army collected thousands of lung tissue samples from the dead soldiers. These samples were well preserved. A random sample of tissue selected tested for nicotine. I was shocked by the results because all of the tested samples had nicotine. Now I'm not saying that they died because of smoking, but smoking was the only thing that stood out in the stats. Smoking was the only thing we found that could explain the unusual demographics of the deaths. Normally flu kills the young, old, or sickly in the population. We found that the death rate of children was much smaller than expected. This is where the data gets bad, while the military did autopsies on all of their dead, not many civilians were given autopsies.

My research on the Spanish flu was a modified SEIRD model, my job was to estimate the parameters in the equations. The S represents anyone who can get sick. The math did not work. When I changed my model to include smoking as a factor, I was able to get a model that agreed with the empirical data that I got from the CDC. Of course I could be wrong.

IIRC, it's only been since 2009 that flu has emerged as the number one danger connected to death by pneumonia but the fact of the matter is there is a long list of pneumonia causes including STD's, specifically chlamydia.

First of all you are confusing two different infections. The STD form of chlamydia does not cause pneumonia in adults although it can cause babies born to infected mothers can get eye infections and pneumonia from chlamydia.

Chlamydophila pneumoniae

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlamydophila_pneumoniae

https://medlineplus.gov/chlamydiainfections.html

Next it has been well known for years and long before 2009 that the flu presented a higher risk of developing a secondary pneumonia infection. I don’t know where you are getting 2009 from but it is simply not supported.

2009, if that year is correct, marks the pharma industry's push to inoculate and inoculation does provide a pathway of many laboratory life forms capable of squeezing through the opening at the end of that needle.

No. No. And No. You are not going to get pneumonia from getting a flu or any other type of shot, and not from “laboratory life forms” whatever that is supposed to mean.

The subject of all the pity generated by the designing press should have stayed in mexico. As eastexsteve mentions, The only way to not get the flu is to not ingest the virus into your system. Her lifestyle as the article indicates opened her to many opportunities of life destroying pneumonia, not just the flu. To me, she's just another example of culture clash. Except in her case, she's the one that paid dearly.

Neither you nor I know if she was a natural born American citizen or was an illegal alien or legal resident alien. For what it is worth however, just because she had a “Mexican” name doesn’t mean she was a “wetback”. There are many Americans citizens of Mexican descent living in the SW who have been American citizens for many, many generations and many longer than a lot of my family who came to the US in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s from Wales and Germany. And FWIW my father was born in Norway in 1921 and came to the US as a young child and later served in the US Army during WWII even as he wasn’t yet a naturalized citizen.

Hell in the neighborhood where I grew up in in Baltimore had a large Polish population. Lots of people with Polish surnames, some whose families immigrated in the late 1900’s but some who have been here since before the American Revolution.

And I don’t see anything in the article that would indicate that her “lifestyle” was in any way to blame for her illness, unless you have information about this woman that the rest of us don’t. Yes, she was a single mom of two young kids but she also worked a full time job, sometimes working 6 days a week.

But would you not agree that sanitary hygiene and western civilization’s general understanding of how diseases can be controlled and even manipulated has come a long way since then?

Better sanitation and understanding how diseases are transmitted certainly has progressed greatly since then as have the success of vaccination programs. However better sanitation as in modern sanitation systems doesn’t prevent the spread of influenza. Although frequent hand washing helps.

The strange thing demographically about the Spanish flu is that it killed a lot of middle aged men.

No. Not according to the mortality rates not only here in the US but worldwide during the Spanish Flu pandemic. The age group most likely to die from the Spanish Flu was in the 20 to 40 age range which is the exact opposite of most influenza outbreaks where the mortality is typically in the very young and the very old or in people with already compromised immune systems. One theory was that this novel strain caused a cytokine storm immune response. In other words, if you were relatively young and healthy adult and having a robust immune system that would normally protect you against something like influenza, this particular strain caused those people with healthy immune systems to go into a type of immune over hyper drive – their own immune systems in trying to fight off the virus, actually ended up killing the host.

Why Did the 1918 Virus Kill So Many Healthy Young Adults?

The curve of influenza deaths by age at death has historically, for at least 150 years, been U-shaped (Figure 2), exhibiting mortality peaks in the very young and the very old, with a comparatively low frequency of deaths at all ages in between. In contrast, age-specific death rates in the 1918 pandemic exhibited a distinct pattern that has not been documented before or since: a "W-shaped" curve, similar to the familiar U-shaped curve but with the addition of a third (middle) distinct peak of deaths in young adults ≈20–40 years of age. Influenza and pneumonia death rates for those 15–34 years of age in 1918–1919, for example, were >20 times higher than in previous years (35). Overall, nearly half of the influenza-related deaths in the 1918 pandemic were in young adults 20–40 years of age, a phenomenon unique to that pandemic year. The 1918 pandemic is also unique among influenza pandemics in that absolute risk of influenza death was higher in those <65 years of age than in those >65; persons <65 years of age accounted for >99% of all excess influenza-related deaths in 1918–1919. In comparison, the <65-year age group accounted for 36% of all excess influenza-related deaths in the 1957 H2N2 pandemic and 48% in the 1968 H3N2 pandemic (33).

https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-0979_article

Again, I would point out that it seems you were limiting your mathematical modeling on a subset of the population – men serving in the army at the time. So among those men, what were their aveveage ages compared to the rest of the population who also died from that influenza pandemic? Did this subset have a higher rate of smoking vs. the general population? What about women, while I understand the infection and death rate of women was lower, women did die from it, what was there rate of smoking? Any of those data points could skew your results.

I recall reading a news article some years ago about a supposed statistical correlation of the use of underarm deodorant and breast cancer because of the number of women who had trace (very minute) amounts of alum in their breast tissues as found in biopsies.

But what that article left out was how many women who use underarm deodorant never get breast cancer (and of course they are not likely to get biopsies) or how many women who have never used underarm deodorant do. Then again in that same sampling how many of these same women diagnosed with breast cancer also, drove a car, owned a cell phone, has ever eaten at Chick Fil A, watched American Idol. Does ever having watched American Idol, driving a car, eating Chick Fil A or using a cell phone correlate to an increased risk of breast cancer? No of course it doesn’t

Mathematical modeling and statistic is something I am very interested in and that I’ve done in my job, creating graphs and charts and dash boards on statistical HR and Financial data. But I’ve also seen how statistics can be all to easily manipulated to result in a desired outcome.

Again, correlation does not necessarily equate to causation.

How Ice Cream Kills! Correlation vs. Causation

The danger of mixing up causality and correlation: Ionica Smeets at TEDxDelft

Junk Science Episode 10: Correlation / Causation

Unfortunately the only reliable data was the Army data. I'm not claiming causation. My job was to model the data I was given. Traditional models failed miserably. We had to guess at what rates women and men smoked. My work was not a statistical model, but a deterministic model. The data did include deaths outside of the military, but with little forensic information. The civilian data was not reliable. I was not limited to just the army data, but I don't have much faith in the civilian data. My model was a modified SEIRD model, no statistics in that model. This is also not an age structured model. Some one else was working on that problem, and he needed my model to work to solve some of his problems. By adding smoking to my model I was able to get the model to work. Of course a model is only as good as the data available. I did not manipulate any data, I just used what I was given.

The life expectancy in 1918 was estimated too be about 53, so when I said middle age men I meant men in the about 20-40 range. Which is approximately the age range for the army men who died.

I have a new SE1E2,...,EnIRD model that works great for measles, but it sucks for Scarlet fever. So I'm missing something , there is a hidden factor or factors that I need in my model. If someone has some data that hints at a factor, then I will add it to my model. If it helps fix my model great. This new variable or equation does not imply correlation or causation sense I'm not making any statistical inference. Again I could be wrong, that adding this factor helps in only a cosmetic way. When I get better data I improve my model. I have an idea how to fix the model, but the data available is not consistent. So I'll wag it until I get better data.

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