by Rachel Stockton

Created on: February 08, 2009   Last Updated: February 10, 2009

To a degree, the symptoms of the bird flu virus present themselves in similar fashion to the human influenza virus: chills, body aches, high fever, sore throat and cough rule the day. However, unlike the human flu virus, the bird flu virus's symptoms are not quite that clear cut.

Consider the case of two children known to have been infected with the bird flu in Vietnam in 2005. The virus manifested itself by attacking the brain and digestive tract of both children, who eventually expired. The enigmatic way the virus presented in these two instances caused the children to go unrecognized as bird flu victims for a time.

Until the last decade, it was thought that the Spanish flu of 1918 was a swine flu; however, a researcher in Washington D.C., having examined the lung tissue of two World War I soldiers who died from the illness, made a stunning discovery: the pandemic was actually instigated by a bird flu that mutated into an acutely contagious illness that spread easily from human to human.

In some regards, this isn't too surprising, as the Spanish flu has remained somewhat of an anomaly. Because of the Spanish flu's unusual symptoms, many cases of the illness were initially misdiagnosed as cholera and typhoid.

Another one of the abnormalities associated with the Spanish flu has to do with which segment of the population the majority of the fatalities occurred in.

Unlike modern flu viruses, the Spanish flu attacked relatively young, healthy adults the hardest. The very old and very young (those segments that are typically immune compromised) were not nearly as affected.

In a cruel sort of irony, the individuals with the healthiest immune systems were the ones who succumbed to the virus, which hit the patient so virulently, that the immune system in response went into overdrive, causing a cytokine storm.

A cytokine storm occurs when the immune system is so overwhelmed that it sends too many antibodies at once to the infected area of the body. The result is that the immune system itself hastens the death of the patient in these instances.

As we've learned from the Spanish flu pandemic, the mutated bird flu attacks viciously and without mercy. In 1918, many of its victims died within twenty four hours. Most of them coughed up blood that resulted from lung hemorrhaging; some of them literally drowned in their own body fluids.

Victims of the mutated flu also lost control of their bowel function, causing them to not only lose massive amounts of blood, but their entire intestinal lining.

Another ramification of the bird flu is that it morphs extremely quickly from a virus into a potentially deadly case of bacterial pneumonia. There is not time for the patient to recover from the initial infection before being stricken by a secondary infection. Many of the 1918 victims fell sick one day, then died within twenty four hours; a good number of these victims had contracted pneumonia within one day of coming down with the flu.

Such a dire epidemic is dependent on a lot of "ifs", such as whether or not the current Asian bird flu virus will cover the entire avian population. Also, there is the question of mutation; should the virus remain intact and unchanged, the only way humans could catch it would be through bird droppings. However, if a patient happens to be infected with the human flu and the bird flu simultaneously, mutation could easily occur, causing a human to human contagion. Again, this is a "what if" kind of scenario.

While the bird flu is nowhere near imminent at this point in time, the United States government, along with other countries, is diligently trying to come up with "flu plans", should such a pandemic strike the globe, yet again, one century after its first appearing.

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