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doctor helps a visitor fit a face mask in the lobby of Pusan National University Hospital in the southeastern port city of Busan, Sept. 17, as part of efforts to prevent the spread of the influenza A (H1N1) virus. / Korea Times |
 By Mark D. Whitaker
It is credulous to continue to watch the strange, dangerous and misleading Korean media farce without critical comment. Stories uniformly report on mild cases of swine flu somehow causing deaths while ignoring a list of mounting medical side effects that interact negatively with patient preconditions.
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) have always indicated that swine flu is similar to a normal seasonal flu. However, the world's ``social immune reaction" (in institutions of media, medical, and state response) can open us up to greater danger if people trust misleading stories and state policies.
People will run like sheep over a cliff of fear ― medicating themselves or accepting forced medication for little purpose except to expose themselves to a greater set of dangers from medical treatment side effects.
Nevertheless, South Korea has ordered 10 million vaccinations. Seoul has an extra 50 billion won to spend on its self-proclaimed emergency as well. Institutions are overreacting and misdirecting concern since there is little or zero evidence of direct causality in the deaths from this mild swine flu in Korea.
In this season, think about three factors: first, what exactly are these people in the media stories dying of; second, what are the known, though rarely discussed, side effects of swine flu treatments that could be equally responsible for the deaths; and third, what are the known difficulties of this season's vaccines due to come out on the market very shortly?
First, let's look at the 10 ``supposed deaths from swine flu" the Korean media has reported from Aug. 15 to Sept. 22. It seems grossly negligent to call many (perhaps all?) of the deaths as ``caused" by H1N1 Influenza A (a.k.a. swine flu) instead of other factors.
Upon comparison, I suggest that many of the deaths seem to have been caused by a mixture of preconditions and medical procedures that created deadly "cytokine storms" in the patients, resulting in deaths that should have been predictable and avoided.
The first ``flu death" was noted Aug. 15. But was it a flu death? It was reported that a 56-year-old man ``died shortly after developing acute pneumonia and sepsis" (remember these two symptoms/side effects), though only after being treated with a flu vaccine. ``The government is conducting a probe to track down the exact reason for the death." Was it pneumonia, swine flu or vaccine complications that caused his ``cytokine storm"?
In a follow-up report, the swine flu angle was notably absent as the patient was "presumed" to have died of pneumonia, which was referred to in the initial report as ``a complication." The possibility that it could have been caused by other complications, including those from the choice of treatment, seems to have been ignored.
So were the deaths really caused by the flu or by complications of the flu? Or are they deaths caused by complications from the medical treatments of the flu? Such deaths can be attributed to over-aided immune reactions that cause a cytokine storm.
A cytokine storm a treatable immune over-reaction that, when untreated, causes tissue/blood breakdown. Doctors should watch for these side effects when administering treatments.
To elaborate, a cytokine storm is originally a sign of healthy immune system response. It involves many natural inflammatory mediators. There are pro-inflammatory cytokines and anti-inflammatory cytokines.
Some vaccine treatments can cause a response that is ``too healthy" from both cytokines that are elevated in the blood and tissues, resulting in an ``often lethal interplay" of pro-inflammatory and anti-inflammatory cytokines battling each other at the infection site, destroying body tissue via hemorrhaging.
A cytokine storm must be treated and suppressed or death can result. They can result from viral infections like influenza or from medically-aided healing processes that can become more deadly than the mild swine flu itself (www.cytokinestorm.com).
The storms can create the causes of death of many of the Korean ``victims of swine flu" so far: septic shock syndrome (SSS, a deadly blood colloidal collapse from bacterial toxins or other damage to blood chemical balance from medicines and vaccine ingredients that spreads to major organs/tissues later); sudden multi-organ failure, another known effect of a cytokine storm; pulmonary edema (fluid in the lungs sometimes misdiagnosed as pneumonia); and respiratory difficulties. Without special treatment, an iatrogenic cytokine storm has the potential to do significant damage to multiple body tissues, organs and blood.
Many of the swine-flu attributed deaths showed these symptoms.
Other causes of death could involve the chronic liver damage of two of the patients negatively interacting with Tamiflu ― which activates when
it passes through the liver.
Other adverse effects of Tamiflu would have further endangered the ``fourth case" on Sept. 2 ― since the treatment could have aggravated her preconditions of diabetes and internal hemorrhaging.
Don't call her death a flu death. Did she die of the flu or Tamiflu?
The latest ``10th death" on Sept. 20 was due entirely to misapplied Tamiflu and not the mild swine flu that she didn't have at all.
In conclusion, there are two clear stories that emerge when you compare
all the reported causes of death. The first is directly iatrogenic, as in the case of someone dying ``29 hours after taking the antiviral drug" when that patient didn't have swine flu in the first place.
All the other cases are indirect iatrogenic deaths because they all showed many common features of cytokine storms.
I challenge someone to show me one clear death from this mild swine flu in Korea. It looks like misleading, commercially-motivated lies to advertise for vaccines, or symbolic politics to make the government look like it is being responsible.
However, the government is being irresponsible as long as it ignores the side effects of the treatment and the fact that people aren't dying of this mild swine flu directly. The sinking feeling is that Korea and its medical establishment are creating an iatrogenic epidemic of death, creating medical deaths instead of treating the flu, and then profitably blaming them on the flu. What a corrupt racket.
The writer is a professor of environmental sociology at Ewha Womans University in Seoul, and author of ``Toward a Bioregional State" (2005) and ``Ecological Revolution" (2009). He can be reached at mwhitaker@ewha.ac.kr. The views expressed in the above article are those of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of The Korea Times.
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