Bayer pattern ping.
Interesting ping.
Could be plausible as asprin was touted as an “Everything Medicine” back then and we didn’t have any really good cold/flu drugs in 1918.
The US was largely rural during this time. There weren’t a lot of doctors or hospitals or aspirin, period. I doubt aspirin had much to do with mortality.
| The last thing a person with hemorrhagic bleeding - such as was present with the 1918 "Spanish Flu" - should do is take a drug that acts as a blood thinner. Stay away from aspirin if H1N1 mutates into something like H5N1.
Symptoms in 1918 were so unusual that initially influenza was misdiagnosed as dengue, as cholera, as typhoid. Wrote one observer, “One of the most striking of the complications was hemorrhage from mucous membranes, especially from the nose, stomach, and intestine. Bleeding from the ears and petechial hemorrhages in the skin also occurred.” A German investigator recorded “hemorrhages occurring in different parts of the interior of the eye” with great frequency. An American pathologist noted: “Fifty cases of soft subconjunctival hemorrhage were counted. Twelve had true hemotosis, bright red blood with no admixture of mucus. Three cases had hemorrhage”. The New York City Health Department's chief pathologist said “Cases with pain look and act like cases of dengue...hemorrhage from nose or bronchi... paresis or paralysis of either cerebral or spinal origin... impairment of motion may be severe or mild, permanent or temporary... physical and mental depression. Intense and protracted prostration led to hysteria, melancholia, and insanity with suicidal intent.” |
My father, who started medical practice in 1935, always said that until antibiotics came out in the early 1950s about the only effective drug available was aspirin.
bump & a micro ping
The source links the abstract.
Does it work that way with everyday type flu?
Anything is possible, it seems.
aspirin use and pulmonary edema:
http://www.japi.org/april2007/Corr2.pdf
It’s not just a question of hemorrhaging being worsened by blood-thinning aspirin.
The other issue with aspirin is that it lowers fever. In the early stages of viral infection the virus replicates extremely rapidly (in geometric fashion). The main way the body fights against the replication of the virus initially is by increasing body temperature, so that viral replication is shut down, and so that Natural Killer cells and other immune system components travel faster in the bloodstream to attack the virus.
Taking something for the fever during the early stages of a viral infection only gives the virus more chance to get a stronger foothold, and when the body has manufactured enough antibodies to kill the virus it could already be overwhelmed.
Plus, the more of the virus that is killed by antibodies, the more waste products tend to build up in mucus membranes, including in the lungs. This is what causes the “Cytokine Storm” that makes people susceptible to secondary lung infections. Secondary infections are what kills people with flu infections, not the original virus.
ping