Vitamin D, the Virus Killer

Now that bird flu is in the news again, maybe it's time to rethink some of "conventional wisdom" about the spread of virus. As this excerpt from the latest issue of the invaluable newsletter published by the non-profit Vitamin D Council shows, the belief that viruses from sick people are spread to those who are well may be a mistake. If this is the case, then avoiding the infected is not going to protect anyone. Then what does? There's a good chance that the answer to that question is vitamin D. (By the way, the Vitamin D Council is simply a group of world-class scientists from some of the most respected universities in the world who believe adequate amounts of vitamin D could prevent many of today's most common diseases. They are not selling anything. And even if they were, they would not be getting rich, since supplementing with vitamin D only costs about 10 cents a day.)

That said, here's the excerpt:

"Five controlled human studies were conducted on volunteers in the desperate days of 1919 when 50,000,000 people in the world had just died from influenza. All five attempted to show influenza is transmitted like the common cold, from the sick to the well. It gave me chills to read what the 100 Boston volunteers were willing to risk in the largest study, one published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.(Rosenau, MJ. Experiments to determine mode of spread of influenza. JAMA. 1919;73:311-313.)

In the above study, Rosenau and his six colleagues took 100 volunteers, "all of the most susceptible age," none of whom had ever had influenza. That is, "from the most careful histories that we could elicit, they gave no account of a febrile attack of any kind," during the previous year, and thus no evidence they would have had immunity to the 1918 virus. The authors took great care to select their influenza donors from patients in a "distinct focus or outbreak of influenza, sometimes an epidemic in a school with 100 cases, from which we would select typical cases, in order to prevent mistakes in diagnosis of influenza." Rosenau went on to say, "A few of the donors were in the first day of the disease. Others were in the second or third day of the disease."

Now, read this to see if you would volunteer for the experiments, knowing the lethality of the 1918 virus.

"Then we proceeded to transfer the virus obtained from cases of the disease; that is, we collected the material and mucous secretions of the mouth and nose and bronchi from cases of the disease and transferred this to our volunteers. We always obtained the material in the following way: The patients with fever, in bed, have a large, shallow, traylike arrangement before him or her, and we washed out one nostril with some sterile salt solution, using perhaps 5 c.c., which is allowed to run into this tray; and that nostril is blown vigorously into the tray. That is repeated with the other nostril. The patient then gargles the solution. Next we obtain some bronchial mucous through coughing, and then we swab the mucous surface of each nares and also the mucous membranes of the throat." Then they mixed all this "stuff" together and squirted it into the noses of the volunteers! "None of them took sick in any way."

Undaunted, Rosenau reported they conducted another experiment on 10 of these brave souls. "The volunteer was led up to the bedside of the patient; he was introduced. He sat down alongside the bed of the patients. They shook hands, and by instructions, he got as close as he conveniently could, and they talked for several minutes. At the end of five minutes, the patient breathed out as hard as he could, while the volunteer, muzzle to muzzle, received this expired breath, and at the same time was breathing in as the patient breathed out. This they repeated five times, and they did it fairly faithfully in almost all instances. After they had done this five times, the patient coughed directly into the face of the volunteer, face to face, five different times. I may say that the volunteers were perfectly splendid about carrying out the technic of these experiments. They did it with a high idealism. They were inspired with the thought that they might help others. They went through the program in a splendid spirit. After our volunteer had had this sort of contact with the patients, talking and chatting and shaking hands with him for five minutes, and receiving his breath five times, and then his cough directly in his face, he moved to the next patient whom we had selected, and repeated this, and so on, until this volunteer had had that sort of contact with ten different cases of influenza, in different stages of the disease, mostly fresh cases, none of them more than three days old. We will remember that each one of the ten volunteers had that sort of intimate contact with each one of the ten different influenza patients. They were watched carefully for seven days - and none of them took sick in any way."

Rosenau concluded, "We entered the outbreak with a notion that we knew the cause of the disease, and were quite sure we knew how it was transmitted from person-to-person. Perhaps, if we have learned anything, it is that we are not quite sure what we know about the disease."

Can you imagine volunteering for this study, the year after 50,000,000 people died in the world from influenza? Courageous volunteers who knew nothing about the evidence vitamin D protects one from influenza. I wish modern virologists would read these 1919 studies, which are the only ones that ever attempted to show human influenza is transmitted from the sick to the well. If any reader knows of any controlled human study, in any language, of any date, that proves influenza is propagated by an endless series of transmissions from the sick to the well, I invite its citation for my continuing education."