Virus Mania by Torsten Engelbrecht; Köhnlein Claus

Author:Torsten Engelbrecht; Köhnlein Claus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Books on Demand GmbH
Published: 2020-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Failed Infection Attempts

In order to be able to better assess the puzzling mass disease, an attempt to simulate infection was undertaken with volunteers in Boston in November 1918. These were 62 healthy sailors charged with delinquency and sent to prison. They had been promised a pardon under the condition that they take part in an experiment. 39 of them had not had influenza, so the theory was that they would be particularly susceptible to infection and illness.1062 But the results proved nothing of the sort, as American scientific journalist Gina Kolata describes in her book Influenza:

“Navy doctors collected the mucus from men who were desperately ill from the flu, gathering thick viscous secretions from their noses and throats. They sprayed mucus from flu patients into the noses and throats of some men and dropped it into other men’s eyes. In one attempt, they swabbed mucus from the back of the nose of a man with the flu and then directly swabbed one patient’s nasal septum and rubbed it directly onto the nasal septum of one of the volunteers.

“Trying to simulate what happens naturally when people are exposed to flu victims, the doctors took ten of the volunteers onto the hospital ward where men were dying of the disease. The sick men lay huddled on their narrow beds, burning with fever, drifting in and out of sleep in a delirium. The ten healthy men were given their instructions: each was to walk up to the bed of a sick man and draw near him, lean into his face, breathe in his fetid breath, and chat with him for five minutes. To be sure that the healthy man had had a full exposure to the sick man’s disease, the sick man was to exhale deeply while the healthy man drew the sick man’s breath directly into his own lungs. Finally, the flu victim coughed five times in the volunteer’s face.

“Each healthy volunteer repeated these actions with ten different flu patients. Each flu patient had been seriously ill for no more than three days—a period when the virus or whatever it was that was causing the flu should still be around in his mucus, in his nose, in his lungs.

“But not a single healthy man got sick.”1063

A comparable experiment, carried out under much stricter conditions, took place in San Francisco, with 50 imprisoned sailors. But, once again, the results did not correspond with what the doctors had expected:

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