Posts Tagged ‘flu’
Chinese flu remedies have antiviral powers
Chinese doctors have researched 472 herbs for antiviral activity, and 10 have antiviral activity. Patinia villosa, is one of the active herbs in Eurocel, a Korean product distributed by Allegry Research Group. Eurocel is to be taken twice a day, 2-3 capsules in each dose.
In his book Viral Immunity, doctor J.E. Williams reports that the active ingredient in Patrinia is a wild perennial plant used in Japan and Korea to reduce liver toxicity. Williams treated a patient with Eurocel and said the patient’s levels of ALT (Alanine aminotransferase) were reduced by 50 percent. In healthy bodies, ALT levels in the blood are low. When the liver is damaged, ALT is released into the bloodstream. The liver, of course, is the body’s engine for eliminating toxins.
Williams’ book is one of the dozens of volumes that make up the medical foundations of Viral Times. It’s one that bears some of the most numerous colored tabs, marking significant remedies. (The Little Book of Germs is another well-thumbed guidebook I’ve used.) In the viral times of 2020 — with pharma remedies just as ineffective as ever against viruses — more affordable compounds like Eurocel (about $4 a day) are a part of the healthcare regimen for the uninsured masses. With widespread demand for these compounds, prices may drop even further during a long-term pandemic. Patents don’t exist for natural remedies, so prices are lower. But the PharmAlliance combine keeps working to discredit and block such natural remedies.
There’s plenty of groundwork for PharmAlliance in our current day. Tamiflu, one of the trade names best-known to describe oseltamivir, is controlled via patent (and so much more expensive) by Gilead Sciences. Wikipedia reports
The patent held by Gilead Sciences and is valid at least until 2016. Gilead licensed the exclusive rights to Roche in 1996. The drug does not enjoy patent protection in Thailand, the Philippines, Indonesia and several other countries.Gilead is politically well connected: Donald Rumsfeld served as chairman from 1997 until he became U.S. Secretary of Defense in 2001; former Secretary of State George Shultz and the wife of former California Governor Pete Wilson serve on the board.
No matter how you look at it, these board members have a proven history of waging wars in the name of defense and protecting the interests of commercial investors. Given enough of a public emergency, the potential for monopoly drug ownership during a wartime against viruses will skyrocket. And so can be born the PharmAlliance, a combine of pharma and insurers.
Bird flu goes airborne after modification
A story in the New York Times reports that scientists are learning that avian flu has acquired airborne transmission ability after it was modified for increased strength. The experiments were part of studies to learn how the virus behaves. Now this virus can survive in the nose of ferrets, mammals whose nostril temperature is 4 degrees C cooler than a bird’s gut, where H5N1 usually grows.
The article points out that there’s a difference in ferret noses and those of us higher order mammals. One point cannot be smoothed out, however. The crossover point of animal to human is a step closer after this discovery. That kind of crossover is a prospect for triggering a pandemic.
Humans wait at the end of the virus growth chain
Flu has been with humans for thousands of years, but the rise of arboviruses sparks an era of desperate disease, a battle we are losing. These arboviruses—named after the arthropod mosquitoes, fleas and ticks bearing them—have skipped the virus trademark of preserving a human host. The arboviruses prefer reservoir hosts, birds which don’t catch the virus and only carry it. They enter the bird, whose blood kicks up the virulence a notch. The bird then offers up a more deadly virus to the bug’s next vector, the mosquito. Once a human is infected, the virulence is turned up beyond our natural immunity. This is one spark that heats up the world of 2018, when the trouble begins in Viral Times.
Viral Times 