... there has NEVER been a seriously dangerous global pandemic in the post antibiotic era. there have barely been any that even warranted notice and pretty much no one living can recollect a shred of the last one.
and the odds on bet appears to be that had we not swerved around covid as though it were a tyrannosaur in the road instead of a squirrel, covid would almost certainly not have been one either.
let’s unpack.
... as was the case in the spanish flu, perhaps the last truly high excess death global pandemic to bedevil humanity, much of the damage was done by horrible reactions. and the parallels may be more poignant than people realize.
one of the enduring causes of fear during the 1918 flu was the way that it seemed to be killing otherwise young and healthy people (especially soldiers) in a matter of days. they would be a bit sick then suddenly die of massive organ failure and “wet hemorrhagic lungs.” the progression was incredibly fast, seemingly irreversible, and was stacking people who really ought to have been low risk in mortuaries like cordwood. this made risk, CFR, and IFR look horrifying and fear near universal.
if it could do this to a solider in his prime in a matter of days, every last one of us should be terrified.
but this is simply not a realistic outcome. in a modern society (even pre-antibiotics) it basically doesn’t happen. these are not the pre-sanitation/most people do not get enough calories days of the black death.
diseases that kill at high percentages tend not to spread because killing the host is evolutionarily maladaptive. it’s like trying to conquer the world by burning down your own house and car. even the really nasty historical killers like smallpox were only infecting ~400k people a year by the late 1800’s and excursions above 1 death/year per 1,000 population during outbreaks were very rare not in spite of, but because the fatality rate was so high.
but respiratory diseases are different and tend to spread far more. fatality rates are low. claimed spanish flu CFR was always suspicious in this regard. and there may be a reason:
there is actually quite a lot of convincing evidence that many of the “young, healthy deaths” in spanish flu were iatrogenic.
this is a word that’s going to come up a lot and a topic that’s going to be the big field of debate around covid going forward. it’s probably one of the most important scientific questions in the world right now. so let’s define it:
loosely put, iatrogenic death is when the doctor kills you. and there is a long and unpleasant history on that one from benjamin rush bleeding george washington to death to killing “witchy” cats to stop a plague carried by the fleas of the very rats they were eating to (and especially) new “wonder drugs” that are poorly understood but that rapidly go into widespread use.
and one of those drugs was aspirin.
aspirin had just come into widespread availability in 1918 (and bayer was rushing it to market for the pandemic). it was the new wowie-zowie drug and doctors (and especially militaries) all over the world fell in love with it. they prescribed it widely to those with spanish flu. in doses ranging from 8 to 31 grams per day. oopsie.
a typical aspirin today is 325mg and max dosing per day is ~4 grams.
a toxic dose is 200-300mg/kg of weight. that’s about 20g for a 180 pound person.
31g is “you’re going to die really, really fast and there is not a damn thing anyone can do to stop it once you take that dose.”
this is why incredible caution should be exercised around large departures from tested and true medical practice and new pharma modalities and products.
stop me if any of this starts to sound familiar. (study HERE)
GO READ THE WHOLE THING.
No comments:
Post a Comment