Ukraine Flu Epidemic: Swine Flu, Conventional Flu, or 1918 Spanish Flu?

The number of people succumbing to the recent outbreak of a virulent form of what is thought to be flu in Ukraine, seems to be rising hourly. On Sunday, November 1st, the Ft reported that:

"....officials said more than 50 died of pneumonia and other suspected H1N1 sicknesses. More than 2,000 people were hospitalised in connection with the “epidemic” that broke out in October in western regions of the country that border the European Union." Financial Times November 1st

This morning, at 10.41GMT, that number had officially risen to 64. Tests are ongoing to ascertain the nature of the infectious agent involved, but the Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko was quoted this morning as saying that only a small number of those deaths were attributable to swine flu and that the country has an epidemic of conventional flu. M&C Health News November 2nd

A senior medical officer, Chief State Sanitary Doctor Oleksandr Bilovol, has stated that the present outbreak is due to fewer people receiving vaccination against seasonal flu. ""We have virtually stopped immunization, and the level of the disease is a consequence of the minimization of vaccination among the Ukrainian population," he said." Kyiv Post November 1st

Previous to this sudden outbreak in October, only two cases of swine flu had been confirmed in the Ukraine, earlier in the summer, with the first case being reported as confirmed on June 5th. Reuters

In May this year, Canadian CBC News published an interesting article, "Swine Flu Roots Traced To Spanish Flu," in which the writer compared the 1918 H1N1 strain of flu to the strain responsible for the current world-wide spread.

"Some strains of swine flu, including the one that has emerged recently from Mexico, are known to belong to the same subtype — H1N1 — as the Spanish flu. But the classical swine flu virus (an H1N1 subtype of type A influenza virus) wasn't isolated from a pig until 1930, so the connection between the Spanish flu and swine flu hasn't been clear.

One of the reasons the two strains of the virus were not strongly connected was because they had dramatically different impacts."

(...)

"The most recent version of the swine flu also doesn't appear to share the Spanish flu's virulence, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The CDC said Friday the new virus isn't as deadly, because it lacks the genes that made the 1918 pandemic strain so lethal."

(...)

Since then, the swine flu virus has changed substantially. The strain that has emerged recently is "quite different" from the original strain of H1N1 virus first identified in Spain in May 1918, said Weingartl.*" CBC News May 2009

(*Canadian Food Agency researcher Hana Weingartl.)

Nine Oblasts (regions) in the Ukraine have been quarantined. Recent reports:

Lviv Oblast

Five persons have died from the flue in Lviv, four men and one woman, says emergency hospital chief doctor Myron Borysevych.

Two of the dead patients were in the 22-35 age group, with 2 others over 60. He diagnosed the disease as viral pneumonia.

“We have sent the analyses to Kyiv. We don’t believe it’s the swine flue. Neither do we know what kind of pneumonia it is,
Borysevych stressed. Viral tests can last from one to two weeks. They are complicated and not done in Lviv. The course of the disease was very quick. The symptoms included very high temperature and short-wind cough.

The disease started as an ordinary chill with headache and temperature. The symptoms lasted for a week before patient condition began to aggravate." Zik.com October 29th

Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast All the six dead young people had symptoms of severe hemmorhagic pneumonia. The disease starts slowly, with temperature rising to 37.2 – 37.3 degrees, slight cough and pain in joints. Nasal catarrh developed at the end of the second or third day. Autopsy revealed that the lungs were soaked with blood, the oblast chief specialist said.(Zik.com)

Haemorrhagic pneumonia

"Oct 30, 2009 CIDRAP News – Ukranian officials today shuttered schools and banned public meeting for the next 3 weeks in the wake of a spike in pandemic flu and the country's first H1N1 deaths, which have sparked speculation that the disease has become worse in some patients or that another pathogen is circulating.

Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko announced that the spikes in virus activity were affecting three parts of western Ukraine where large number of respiratory illnesses have been reported since the middle of October, Reuters reported today.

One translated report posted on the Flutrackers message board said some of the fatalities were young people who had severe hemorrhagic pneumonia. A regional health chief was quoted in one of the translated stories as saying autopsy revealed lungs soaked with blood."

1918 Spanish flu:

Spanish Flu victims suffered massive pneumonia and fatal pulmonary complications: they literally drowned in their own body fluids. Lungs filled with fluid and their skin became markedly discolored from the lack of oxygen. Mysteriously, it killed more young than old. The death rate was greatest among ages 15 to 40.

The morgues were packed almost to the ceiling with bodies stacked one on top of another. The morticians worked day and night. You could never turn around without seeing a big red truck loaded with caskets for the train station so bodies could be sent home.

We didn’t have the time to treat them. We didn’t take temperatures; we didn’t even have time to take blood pressure.

We would give them a little hot whisky toddy; that’s about all we had time to do. They would have terrific nosebleeds with it. Sometimes the blood would just shoot across the room. You had to get out of the way or someone’s nose would bleed all over you." Spanish flu and the US Navy

At the time of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, doctors had no way to preserve tissue samples, but from a body exhumed from the Arctic permafrost, scientists, ".....painstakingly extracted the genetic material needed to work out the structure of the H1N1 virus.

"Then, in a maximum "biosafety" facility at Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory they reconstructed a fully functioning virus, and infected macaque monkeys to see what would happen."

"Writing in the journal Nature, they reported that the results were startling. Symptoms appeared within 24 hours of exposure to the virus, and the subsequent destruction of lung tissue was so widespread that, had the monkeys not been killed a few days later, they would literally have drowned in their own blood." BBC News January 2007

So, the symptoms that are being reported from the Ukraine appear to be very similar to those of the 1918 flu pandemic. This may, of course, be simply coincidence, it may point to accidental release from a research lab where the 1918 Spanish flu virus is held, or it may point to a deliberate release of this 1918 strain of the H1N1 virus. Certain bloggers and online alternative news media are suggesting the involvement of Baxter Pharmaceuticals, which has a base in the Ukraine, but without giving an opinion as to how Baxter may have effected the infection. Baxter is well known for its accidental release of viral material containing live H5N1 virus earlier this year, and for its heparin contaminated with HIV.

In August this year, The Huffington Post reported that a man called Joseph Moshe had been arrested outside the White House on suspicion of having made threats on President Obama's life. A later report on the web site The Flu Case stated that Moshe was a microbiologist and that he had not made a threat against the president. Moshe, they said, had called into a live radio show, hosted by Dr A. True Ott, and he wanted to, ".....supply evidence to a States Attorney regarding tainted H1N1 Swine flu vaccines being produced by Baxter BioPharma Solutions. He said that Baxter’s Ukrainian lab was in fact producing a bioweapon disguised as a vaccine. He claimed that the vaccine contained an adjuvant (additive) designed to weaken the immune system, and replicated RNA from the virus responsible for the 1918 pandemic Spanish flu, causing global sickness and mass death."

Professor Moshe's bio can be found on the Flu Case web site.

In August this year, Steve Quayle made this comment: "Intelligence deep background sources have also stated that they expect this to be some engineered Hemorrhagic Type Flu with Ebola-like severe internal bleeding as the likely cause of millions of deaths."

(Steve Quayle is the author of several books, including, "Breathe No Evil," on bio-terrorism.)