By the author of Be Ready for Anything and the online course Bloom Where You’re Planted
It has been 100 years since the Spanish flu infected 500 million people around the globe and wiped out an estimated 20 million to 50 million of them. (source)
And here we are, potentially on the cusp of another influenza pandemic. H3N2, or the “Australian flu” is making the rounds this year and has spread to the UK, among other countries. This map from the UK Sun shows the spread – and the potential for a pandemic.
This flu is particularly deadly. 745 people died from it in Australia in late 2017.
The NHS says that Australian flu symptoms have rapid onset:
- a sudden fever – a temperature of 38C or above
- aching body
- feeling tired or exhausted
- dry, chesty cough
- a sore throat
- a headache
- difficulty sleeping
- loss of appetite
- diarrhea or tummy pain
- nausea and being sick
The symptoms are similar for children, but they can also have ear pain and lethargy.
As well, the “Japanese Flu” and the “French Flu” are two other strains that are running rampant, although their symptoms aren’t as severe as those of the Aussie H3N2. The Japanese Flu, also known as the Yamagata flu, is less serious but far more contagious. The French Flu is H1N1 and has been deadly for some sufferers.
The United States is having a bad year also.
Here in the US, an epidemic is rapidly becoming deadly and overwhelming hospitals.
18 people have died in Dallas, Texas from the flu and 27 have died in California. Hospital waiting rooms are jammed with flu victims, the doctors are running out of medication, ambulance services are strained and even IV bags are in short supply. Influenza is widespread in 36 states, according to the CDC.
Here’s the CDC’s map of the flu’s spread throughout the US as of the last day of 2017.
80% of the cases in the US are H3N2, although our media doesn’t seem to be calling it the Australian flu, like the British media is. As usual, although this year’s flu vaccination does NOT protect against the H3N2 strain, “experts” are still urging everyone to get a shot anyone. (Despite the fact that some numbers say it is only 10% effective.)
We can learn a lot from history.
Whether or not the Australian flu will be the “big one” that wipes out a large percentage of the population like the Spanish flu of 1918 remains to be seen. But there is a great deal we can learn from the history of pandemics that can help us to be better prepared. That outbreak killed more Americans last century than all the wars combined. A mass grave was recently uncovered in Pennsylvania that contained the remains of impoverished victims.
The Spanish flu was the H1N1 virus and was so rapidly virulent that it could kill victims in a day.
This excellent documentary is an in-depth look at the influenza outbreak that took place 100 years ago.
What can you do about the flu?
There’s no way to predict whether this will be our generation’s “Flu of 1918” or not, but the best plan is to be prepared. Pandemics have a way of growing quietly then shocking people with their virulence. It’s definitely something to watch.
Social isolation and handwashing are the best preventatives against the flu. Obviously, social isolation is not possible for adults who have to go to work and children who must attend school.
The following resources can help you to potentially prevent contracting the flu or to be better prepared, especially in the event that this year’s strain turns into a pandemic.
- The Flu Survival Guide: Kitchen Remedies and Natural Strategies to Battle the Bug
- Are You Prepped for a Pandemic?
- Forget the Flu Shot: Hand-washing and Elderberry Extract Are the Best Defenses Against the Flu
- How to Reduce Your Risk of Catching the Flu This Year
- Elderberry Extract for the Flu: Nature’s “Tamiflu”
- Prepping for a Pandemic: Life-Saving Supplies, Skills, and Plans for Surviving an Outbreak
Thank you to Angela for the link to the video!
Gut health, gut health, gut health is the first thing I try to keep in order. Most people have horrendous gut health because they are eating GMOs every day and the glyphosate destroys good gut flora. Take a good probiotic and eat fermented foods daily. Take fire cider (search online for recipes) daily; amp up your dose when sick, but take a spoon every day. It has amazing anti-cancer properties, too.
Thieves essential oil is a staple in our house, and I always have oregano oil on hand, too. We up our dose of Vitamin C during the wnter months and we take cod liver oil and supplement with Vitamin D.
One of people’s biggest downfalls is their horrible diets. Eat real food! My family has had some days where we feel less than stellar, but none of us have been knocked out for days by the flu for 10 years now because we do all of the above.
My (deceased) grandmother was a young adult during WW1 and the Spanish Flu. She said it seemed like the end of the world, what with the millions dying in the war and the millions dying from the flu. She said people would catch the flu in the morning and be dead by night. You’d see someone in the morning and hear later that they had died that evening. Crops went unharvested, streets and stores empty, businesses shuttered. What amazes me is that this devastating time is just casually blown through in history classes.
You definitely want to be prepared as possible for this. Even if the flu threat in your area is low, build up your immunity as much as possible! Definitely do not go out to eat unless it’s a necessity (it rarely is). Make sure you are not using antibacterial soap. It dries out your skin, your first defense against bacteria.
In addition, you want to use the highest quality garlic thyme supplement possible. Bee propolis of the highest quality is also essential in maintaining your immunity. I use both daily and am very healthy.
knowing is half the battle. here’s something the mainstream press hasn’t pursued.
https://www.westernherbalmedicine.com/Western-Herbal-Medicine/1918-Spanish-Influenza-and-Aspirin.html
“Farbenfabriken Bayer’s worldwide efforts had left few places lacking aspirin. In the United States, Bayer’s giant factory produced aspirin under “American” management. After Bayer executives were charged with violating the Trading with the Enemies Act in August 1918, advertisements encouraged confidence in aspirin.” Karen Starko
The world has believed for almost a century that a new and virulent virus came out of nowhere worldwide and killed millions in 1918. Two reports, one published in 2008 and the second in 2009, lay that myth to rest for good.
The first report came as a press release on August 19, 2008, from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID):
“Bacteriologic and histopathologic results from published autopsy series clearly and consistently implicated secondary bacterial pneumonia caused by common upper respiratory–tract bacteria in most influenza fatalities.”
People were killed by common bacteria found in the upper respiratory tract, according to research uncovered by F. William Engdahl:
“The 20 to 40 million deaths worldwide from the great 1918 Influenza Pandemic were NOT due to ‘flu’ or a virus, but to pneumonia caused by massive bacterial infection.”
The NIAID press release did not, however, address what caused the bacterial infections, but research by Dr. Karen Starko does. She implicates aspirin, dovetailing with the NIAID research on pneumonia from massive bacterial infection, and goes further in also explaining the extreme rapidity of death:
“Mortality was driven by 2 overlapping clinical-pathologic syndromes: an early, severe acute respiratory distress (ARDS)-like condition, which was estimated to have caused 10%-15% of deaths (sequential autopsy series are lacking); and a subsequent, aggressive bacterial pneumonia “superinfection,” which was present in the majority of deaths.”
In looking at reports of those who died, two distinct groups became readily apparent to Starko, based on a very distinctive time frame from health to death:
1. People who died of pneumonia from a bacteria infection became sick and things deteriorated at varying rates from there to death; and
2. People who died so astoundingly fast that those deaths became a classic part of the frightening legend of the 1918 “flu” – people perfectly well in the morning and dead within a matter of hours.
In both groups, aspirin is now the likely causative agent.
For the first group, the pneumonias, aspirin suppresses the immune system, allowing bacterial infections to take hold. Doctors at the time were relating pneumonias to the use of aspirin.
“I did not lose a single case of influenza; my death rate in the pneumonias was 2.1%. The salycilates, including aspirin and quinine, were almost the sole standbys of the old school and it was a common thing to hear them speaking of losing 60% of their pneumonias.”
~Dudley A. Williams, MD, Providence, Rhode Island.
“There is one drug which directly or indirectly was the cause of the loss of more lives than was influenza itself. You all know that drug. It claims to be salicylic acid. Aspirin’s history has been printed. Today you don’t know what the sedative action of salicylic acid is. It did harm in two ways. It’s indirect action came through the fact that aspirin was taken until prostration resulted and the patient developed pneumonia.”
~Frank L. Newton, MD, Somerville, Massachusetts
“Three hundred and fifty cases and lost one, a neglected pneumonia that came to me after she had taken one hundred grains of aspirin in twenty-four hours.”
~Cora Smith King, MD, Washington, DC
For the second group which died so precipitously, their symptoms are consistent with aspirin overdose, accompanied by rapid death. Starko explains:
“A report from Camp Dix noted, ‘The disease was a veritable plague. The extraordinary toxicity, the marked prostration, the extreme cyanosis and the rapidity of development stamp this disease as a distinct clinical entity heretofore not fully described.’ Salicylate toxicity is often overlooked because another condition is present, the dose is thought to be trivial, and the symptoms (hyperventilation, vomiting, sweating, headache, drowsiness, confusion, dyspnea, excitement [salicylate jag], epistaxis, vertigo, pulmonary edema, and hemorrhage) are nonspecific. In 1918, differentiating progressive salicylate intoxication from infection pathologically or clinically, ‘the dyspnea lasts from a few hours to a day…followed by respiratory failure, circulatory collapse, convulsions, and death’, was almost impossible….
“In summary, just before the 1918 death spike, aspirin was recommended in regimens now known to be potentially toxic and to cause pulmonary edema and may therefore have contributed to overall pandemic mortality and several of its mysteries. Young adult mortality may be explained by willingness to use the new, recommended therapy and the presence of youth in regimented treatment settings (military). The lower mortality of children may be a result of less aspirin use. The major pediatric text of 1918 recommended hydrotherapy for fever, not salicylate; its 1920 edition condemned the practice of giving ‘coal tar products’ in full doses for reduction of fever…. Varying aspirin use may also contribute to the differences in mortality between cities and between military camps.”
The cause of the millions of 1918 deaths is not just an historic matter. Since that time, medical authorities, international health agencies and governments have attributed the deaths to a frighteningly virulent virus. Their view of 1918 has formed the basis for a great threat — that the world faced future pandemics of equal virulence, capable of killing millions.
Agencies have been created, international plans have been developed, and pandemic emergency laws have been written with military backup included. Billions if not trillions of dollars have been devoted to finding a vaccine to protect the world from a recurrence of the 1918 Spanish flu.
Yet NIAID has said there is no evidence of a flu and that common respiratory bacteria was responsible. Starko’s work supports that and offers a scientific perspective on how aspirin was the likely cause of the two types of deaths seen during 1918, one slow and one incredibly rapid.
Meanwhile, the government, the Centers for Disease Control and the World Health Organization treat the rapid deaths as one of the frightening characteristics of a “mysterious” virus and proceed with vaccine development.
Given that the millions of 1918 deaths appear related to the pharmaceutical industry panacea of the day (aspirin) mistakenly applied, and that vaccines are the pharmaceutical industry panacea of this day, which would be mandated through pandemic laws, it is essential for the world to become aware of the facts of 1918.
And now governments, medical authorities and the pharmaceutical industry have come together again and are repeating another massive promotion of a product (vaccines) and are even mandating it.
This opens the question of whether a second pharmaceutical industry product (vaccines) poses a second monumental threat to life, rather than a flu which never did.
One of my great grandfathers, Sherman McGraw, was a pastor in South Alabama during the flu outbreak. He visited and prayed with flu victims and fortunately escaped catching the flu himself.
Luther, your great grandfather truly cared for people. What a legacy you have!
The actual history of the falsely named “Spanish Flu” continues to be misrepresented in most accounts even today. The link below from realfarmacy.com is the best description of what really happened that I’ve found. However, while the original link no longer works, it has been preserved in several different snapshots on the internet’s forever memory on Archive.org.
This is the original link, which is now only useful to insert into the search box on Archive.org to retrieve any of several preserved snapshots of that article:
https://realfarmacy.com/did-a-military-experimental-vaccine-in-1918-kill-100-million-people-blamed-as-spanish-flu/
This is just one of several preserved and working copies of that original and superbly detailed article:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190109014429/https://realfarmacy.com/did-a-military-experimental-vaccine-in-1918-kill-100-million-people-blamed-as-spanish-flu/
In a nutshell, the US Army began its mandatory vaccination system in 1911. So when the Rockefeller Institute provided the US Army at Ft Riley, Kansas with a poorly tested-in-horses vaccine in early 1918, the GIs had no choice but to accept the jab. With World War I underway, censorship of newspaper reporting blocked reporting in western countries that were part of the war. Spain was not involved so early reporting about the “flu” appeared there first. That created the convenient opportunity for our government to lie about its origin and dub it the “Spanish Flu.”
The Rockefeller Institute also supplied that same vaccine to several other countries, so the deaths from it worldwide have been estimated between 50 to 100 million, far more than any battlefield injury deaths. After the war, the Germans had suffered such horrendous “flu” deaths that they sent investigators over to this country in the early 1920 to try to find out medically what had happened. They were told by our medical people that “well, our experiments got out of hand.” We didn’t learn about those conversations until the late 1940s when our CIA interrogated the German ex-Gestapo chief who revealed those details. A record of that interrogation is preserved in book form today on Amazon.
A long gone uncle of mine was in training at Ft Riley in 1918 when the GIs began to get sick. When he came home on leave, he brought the sickness home and gave it to his mother, my grandmother. This was in the early stages before the mutations increased its severity, so both he and his mother recovered. It just nearly a century afterward before we learned what had really happened and how the government lie had lasted all this time.
–Lewis