http://www.nap.edu/books/0309095042/html/61.html
Camp Devens was a nightmare of rasping blue death.
Lines of men clutching blankets stood outside the hospital in the rain. Inside, cots overflowed into hallways and onto porches. Many patients had the deadly hue of cyanosis, a blue so deep that many observers misjudged this for the return of “black death.” In the morgue, Welch and Cole had to step over and around piles of corpses to observe an autopsy.
Cole later recalled: “When the chest was opened and the blue swollen lungs were removed and opened, and Dr. Welch saw the wet, foamy surfaces with real consolidation, he turned and said, ‘This must be some new kind of infection or plague,’ and he was quite excited and obviously very nervous... It was not surprising that the rest of us were disturbed, but it shocked me to find that the situation, momentarily at least, was too much even for Dr. Welch.”
The physicians quickly recovered their equilibrium. Welch called in an expert from Harvard to perform autopsies. He ordered a Rockefeller lab scientist to drop everything and make a vaccine. He told the army to order camp hospitals expanded and to impose quarantine measures.
It was too little, too late. Flu victims were contagious for several days before showing symptoms, and soldiers had been flowing in and out of Devens daily, as had civilian staff and volunteers. The influenza virus soon appeared in Boston, in Philadelphia, in New York and in New Orleans.
Most victims recovered, and their experience generally was a more intense version of the expected weeklong course of fever, aches, chills and nausea. But a substantial minority endured much worse. They were utterly incapacitated by exhaustion, able to summon up the energy only to cry out constantly in the face of excruciating earaches and headaches.
As the disease progressed and pneumonia set in, they began to bleed profusely—from the nose, the ear and the mouth. Some still recovered. Hopkins physician Harvey Cushing was one such case. But if cyanosis appeared, physicians treated patients as terminal. Autopsies would show a disease that ravaged almost every internal organ.
http://www.jhsph.edu/publichealthnews/Mag_Fall04/prologues/
I cannot thank you enough for your post. The historic evidence is that overwhelming sepsis, viral OR bacterial, causes a condition called DIC which has a clear and alarming hemorrhagic presentation.
Although some reports say that Ebola (an RNA virus) has recombined with H5N1 (also an RNA virus) in patients "unlucky enough to have both", I also sincerely doubt there is much of an Ebola presence in China, or Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever, either.
I actually think 99% of the "mystery illnesses" in China at varying locations at present are the myriad symptoms of overwhelming H5N1 infection, along with whatever pathogen the Avian Flu patient also happens to be carrying at the moment.
In other words, a patient could have an asymptomatic Strep suis infection, then get Avian Flu on top of it. As you have said, doctors in 1918 mistook the flu for various othe diseases, including dengue and typhoid, WITH GOOD REASON--they didn't look like ordinary flu.
If a Chinese has a mild case of Ebola or Crimean fever (don't laugh, there is such a thing) then it is possible that a superimposed infection with Avian Flu could bring about a recombination event.
Who knows? But I suspect STRONGLY that there are far fewer diseases than it looks like at present, and that it will all likely sort out to be Avian Flu with maybe a few really dangerous genes added to some strains...
Just my opinion.