>>12257735In the final experiment, 10 healthy volunteers were taken in to the infectious disease wards where 30 sick febrile patients were being hospitalized. The healthy volunteers shook hands with all of the sick individuals and spoke for 5 minutes with each of them, as close as they physically could. The healthy participants then put their mouths over the mouths of the sick individuals and breathed in as the sick individual breathed out, with as much force as they could muster. This was repeated 5 times. The same process was repeated again, except this time, they coughed directly in to each other’s mouths, as hard as they could. The healthy participants were closely monitored by a medical team in a military grade quarantine facility for one week. To the dismay of the doctors, not a single participant fell sick. Two additional experiments, with similar methodology, were conducted in the following months in over 50 healthy participants, but once again, not a single person ever became ill.
How is it possible that such a virulent, highly contagious and lethal disease such as the Spanish flu did not infect any of the 150+ healthy participants involved in this study? It is illogical to think that all 150 men were immune, or that the virus was not spread through any of the means used in this study. What it may suggest is that the pandemic was not caused by a contagion. What were the other factors at play? One such example of an alternative factor that contributed to the high mortality rates in sick patients, is aspirin overdose. During the 1918 pandemic, patients were prescribed anywhere from 8 – 31.2 grams per day. We now know that the safe recommended dose of aspirin is 4 grams per day and that overdose can cause bacterial pneumonia, pulmonary oedema and death, all of which were symptoms of the Spanish flu.
