Re: Avian Flu and "The Black Death" of the Middle Ages


"Lucky" <LuckyHoodoo@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1138462031.059725.103580@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> >None. They usually rely on experienced observations by doctors at the
time.
>
>
> You made a large reply, but unfortunately it is flawed. You claim that
> the people alive in the middle ages were sophisticated enough to be
> able to specificly identify and diagnose the Flu from other said
> diseases, even when said "experts" of the time had no clue that
> pathogens existed and believed illness to be caused by "bad air",
> bathing, and the negative influence of the stars (Influenza "Influence"

You are confusing their beliefs in the origins with disease with their
detailed descriptions of disease. They did not know the origins of malaria
and called it "bad air" but they obviously knew the symtoms.

"Cocoliztli was a swift and highly lethal disease. Francisco Hernandez, the
Proto-Medico of New Spain, former personal physician of King Phillip II and
one of the most qualified physicians of the day, witnessed the symptoms of
the 1576 cocoliztli infections. Hernandez described the gruesome cocoliztli
symptoms with clinical accuracy (4,5). The symptoms included high fever,
severe headache, vertigo, black tongue, dark urine, dysentery, severe
abdominal and thoracic pain, large nodules behind the ears that often
invaded the neck and face, acute neurologic disorders, and profuse bleeding
from the nose, eyes, and mouth with death frequently occurring in 3 to 4
days. These symptoms are not consistent with known European or African
diseases present in Mexico during the 16th century."

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no4/01-0175.htm

Dr Hernandez did not call it the black death.

> in Latin). You even claim that these same people would interprett the
> different symptoms associated with a Flu pandemic as being associated
> with the ordinary Flu,

They observed symptoms and wrote them down and detailed enough for present
scientists to be able to call them the flu and what the people at the time
called it is not relevent.
There were doctors at the time who looked at signs and symtoms.

even though the symptoms are so widely different
> from any of those experienced with the yearly Flu.

The 1918 flu was a bird flu like no other or your super flu that you
interpret to mean it would have completely different symptoms for one not to
be able to diagnose it as the flu. That is not the case. People had
suspected it was a lethal flu and probably bird in origin and so they
searched for evidence.

None of this makes
> sense.

People are making guess as to what the detailed descriptions mean noted in
the past. Are those observations accurate is a valid question. Granted it's
difficult to study something that is not with us but centuries later. There
was a plague outbreak in India and the signs and symptoms were not identical
to the past infections of record, but if you read the accounts in the last
century in which the last outbreak occured they were stating that it was
being cured and one doctor even said he success rate was 50%. There was a
wipe out of populations of the most susceptible and those that lived had a
genetic advantage making them less susceptible.
The disease was already changing back then.
There are people immune to HIV and the origins of that is in the genes that
seem to have spread greatly during the years of the plaque.
You couple that with the infectious agent toning down it's virulence. A good
parasite is one that does not kill it's host in order to be able to
transmitted to others. A poor parasite is one in which it kills it's host
swiftly and not allow transmission.
We now have a problem on trying to figure out what happened back then.

I recieved a reply from the HMMI (Howard Memorial Medical
> Institute) on this topic. I was told that my theory was interesting
> and they admitted that their is technicaly no proof what pathogen was
> responsible for "The Black Death". Of course they are of conservative
> opinion and therefore would not embrace my theory without sufficient
> proof, but at least they did not shoot it down entirely.
>
> -Jason
>

I am not really sure where you get descriptions that the plague was
hemorrhagic or that Ebola has a prominent lymphadopathy.

Histologic Findings: Although capable of involving many tissues, the virus
has a predilection for endothelial cells, hepatocytes, and mononuclear
phagocytes. Viral replication is associated with extensive focal necrosis
and is most severe in the liver, spleen, lymph nodes, kidney, lung, and
gonads. In the liver, councilmanlike bodies of focal necrosis similar to
those seen in yellow fever are prevalent. However, the focal necrosis
associated with Ebola replication results in a minimal effective
inflammatory response. Late in the disease, the intestinal mucosa may
separate from the lamina propria and slough.

http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic626.htm

Ebola-Poe: A Modern-Day Parallel of the Red Death?


Possible Models for the Red Death
Even though a fictional product of Poe's fertile and bizarre imagination,
the red death is likely modeled after a disease within the author's lifetime
and experience. Some have speculated that Poe's family history of
tuberculosis (his mother, his adoptive mother, his wife, and possibly his
brother died of the disease) may have prompted him to write about a similar
disease in Life in Death-a story about a painter and his dying wife, who
incidentally resembled Poe's wife (5). Along the same lines, Poe's
experience of nursing his wife through her bouts of exsanguinating
hemoptysis, cradling her head for hours, and wiping away the blood from her
face may well have been on his mind when he mused about "the scarlet stains
upon the face" of the afflicted in Masque of the Red Death.

As described by Poe, the red death seems to be some type of a viral
hemorrhagic fever. Epidemics of yellow fever killed 100,000-150,000 in the
United States from 1693 to 1905 (6). Northern ports (Boston, New York,
Philadelphia, Baltimore), where Poe lived at various times in his life, were
affected by yellow fever until 1822. He could have been inspired by a
nationwide, severe epidemic of yellow fever in 1841 (a year before he wrote
The Masque of Red Death), but yellow fever was a commonplace disease without
any mystery attached to it. Like red death, yellow fever causes high body
temperatures; body ache; damage to capillaries, which can result in bleeding
from the nose and mouth; stools stained dark with blood; and (the most
dreaded symptom) copious black vomit caused by gastric bleeding. Poe's red
death, however, has a much higher death rate and communicability. Besides,
the eponymous jaundice of yellow fever is not described as a feature of red
death. Poe named his fictional disease "red" death, probably to
differentiate it from "black" death, otherwise known as the plague. "Red"
death is also descriptive of the profuse bleeding characteristic of this
fictional disease. Poe maximizes the horror of the disease by intentionally
making it mysterious and universally fatal. By alluding to the black death,
he invokes memories of the vast plague epidemics that ravaged the world.

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol8no12/02-0176.htm


.

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