The Next Pandemic

Think Ebola is alarming? Scientists expect a much deadlier virus to emerge in the not-distant future.

Epidemiologists believe we're statistically overdue for a global viral outbreak, which occurs every generation or so. This year's Ebola crisis is probably just a dress rehearsal: Though the virus has killed at least 1,420 people in Africa in the last five months, Ebola is transmitted only through intimate contact with bodily fluids and doesn't have the global reach of a true pandemic, such as Spanish influenza in 1918. Humanity had no prior exposure or immunity to the Spanish flu, which is believed to have incubated in birds and pigs. So it spread like wildfire, infecting about 500 million people and killing about 50 million of them. The next pandemic is most likely to emerge in a remote region of Asia or Africa, from contact between people and poultry, rats, bats, pigs, monkeys, or some other animal. If that virus can be spread through the air or by touch, the way the common cold is, it will sweep from village to city, and air travel will allow it to hop continents within hours. A vaccine will take at least months of frantic work to develop, and in the meantime, millions will die. "The three deadliest events in human history were all infectious diseases," says medical historian David Morens: the Spanish flu, the Black Death (bubonic plague), and AIDS. "There are lots of reasons to think more will be coming."

Why are animals the likely source? About 60 percent of the roughly 400 emerging infectious diseases identified since 1940 are "zoonotic" — originating in animals. Ebola is believed to have originated in bats, and HIV in monkeys,

Not necessarily true for the typical cold or flu.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/07/070718002136.htm

If you are looking for a prophylaxis, Vitamin D would probably be more useful, as it has about a half dozen known antiviral actions.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0011088

However, this is in the normal virus realm. H5N1 influenza is anything but normal.

To start with, it is a novel virus, so there is no immunity or partial immunity to it. This also means that it takes only a fraction of the amount of active virus to cause infection. Plus a very large pool of animal vectors, some with radically different immune systems.

It was the first real proof of the cytokine storm in which the immune system overreacts so violently that it kills the host. The later virulent H1N1 epidemic in Ukraine further proved its effects, the lungs of deceased victims looking black and burned.

Because of the lethality of H5N1, a lot of research went into finding an OTC chemical blend to lessen the Acute Respiratory Distress (ARD) associated with it as well as the virus itself.

The best approach to the virus was to hit it at all levels: keeping it out of the body; taking colloidal metals to inhibit viral reproduction; making cells ‘slick’ against the virus Hemagglutinin (the ‘H’ factor in H5N1), so they cannot attach and penetrate the cells; inhibiting viral reproduction within cells; inhibiting the viral Neuraminidase (the ‘N’ factor in H5N1), so the reproduced viruses cannot break out of the dying cell; having a vitamin D breakdown product in the blood that erodes the viral coat; having the proper immune response pathways open, again via Vitamin D; and Vitamin D as an ACE inhibitor to moderate the immune response.

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