CAN VITAMIN D HELP PREVENT H1N1 SWINE FLU FROM SPREADING?

By Byron J. Richards, CCN
October 14, 2009
NewsWithViews.com

It seems simple enough to understand. A well person contracts swine flu from a sick person, who, once sick, passes it along to another. In the case of H1N1 swine flu, most of the population is not familiar with the virus, thus it has the potential to readily spread from sick to well. Sick people are supposed to quarantine themselves to prevent transmission. Everyone else is supposed to get a vaccine. One small problem – what if the sick people aren’t really the ones spreading the infection? At first glance that sounds preposterous. A second look may cause you to pause and ponder.

Take a journey back almost a hundred years to the last swine flu epidemic, a true killer infection that preyed on young people. An experiment was conducted, one that would not be allowed today. A hundred Navy personnel volunteered. None of them had demonstrated any signs of the flu in the year prior to the experiment. The goal was to prove the swine flu spread from sick to well. The sickest of the sick coughed and sneezed onto some of the volunteers. Others were directly exposed to the mucosal secretions and viral-laden droplets of these very sick people. Surprise – not one of the volunteers fell ill.

While there are many viral illnesses that have been proven to spread from sick to well, such as the measles, the flu is not one of them. In fact, every time scientists try to prove the point, they can’t. Epidemiologists can’t show it either. Rather, science points in the direction that a susceptible population of well people, possibly those deficient in vitamin D, are responsible for the rapid spreading of the flu each year.

A 2008 article published in the Virology Journal by John Cannell, et al., titled On the Epidemiology of Influenza reviews the above Navy study and dives into the data that fails to add up to a clear picture of sick-to-well viral spreading of the flu – flying in the face of public health dogma. You can click on the above link to read the full study. Here are a few of its keys points.

To prove sick-to-well transmission there must be a documented period of time for the transmission to take place, resulting in a chain of sick-to-well events. The flu does not follow such a pattern. In fact, family members who do get sick are often become sick at the same time and the spreading to other family members once isolated in the family unit is low (less than 20%). These are mathematical factors that weigh heavily against the required sick-to-well transmission rates needed to explain the rate of transmission taking place in a typical seasonal flu outbreak.

Other factors about the flu are equally puzzling. Why is it mostly seasonal? Why does an outbreak end abruptly? Where does the flu virus go between seasons? If true sick-to-well transmission were the key then it would support a never-ending sequence of transmitted infection, not seasonal patterns. Animal studies show that “wellâ€