Massive Flu Life Entity

The flu virus invades, attaches itself to a cell, reprograms and hijacks the cellular function, and begins spitting out bright shiny new versions of itself. Then it bursts out of the this new flu-factory cell to attack and invade another cell. In a worst-case scenario, and when the infection reaches the lungs the white blood cells arriving on the scene to combat the flu virus panic and call in a nuclear launch at the invasion site, setting off what is known as a "cytokine storm" in the infected victim's body, which can ultimately lead to death by immune system.

This scenario wherein the flu virus plays the part of a terrorist hijacker is commonly accepted by scientists in explanation of why some individuals perish during a flu epidemic or pandemic. But other experts disagree, and doubt even the reality of the "cytokine storm," believing that the sometimes bizarre symptoms of a flu infection gone wrong are due to something else entirely.

Both the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization (WHO) admit that bird flu is native to wild birds, that the virus lives in wild fowl without making them sick or killing them.

Science must then begin to consider the possibility that influenza viruses might also reside in human beings, at times, or all the time. That possibly the flu virus has a means of going dormant inside the human body. Is it possible that flu might live, or hide, inside a human body without causing its host harm? A form of hibernation?

Science understands, at a basic level, that influenza virus is comprised of eight strands of ribonucleic acid (RNA), and that RNA is more of a shoot-from-the-hip coding mechanism than deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Yes, science comprehends the action of the two viral surface proteins haemagglutinin (HA) and neuraminidase (NA), and how H1N1 has evolved differently than H5N1.

But science does not truly understand how or why any of these things work this way, only that they seem to do so. It is difficult to even establish if the influenza virus is even "alive" or not, that the RNA building blocks are only similar to "miniature chromosomes,"

It is an accepted fact that many of our worst nuisances and illnesses originated in animals, or from the proximity of animals in large numbers living among people in large numbers, and that over a period of time and antigenic shift and drift, viruses find a way to leap from their animal hosts, to human hosts. Factory farming has refined this process, almost engineering test tubes and labs for bird viruses to infect pigs, and then the pigs as perfect beakers for mixing and reassorting virus coding, pass on the illnesses to their human overlords.

Influenza is not the only illness to take this path, but mall pox, tuberculosis, Ebola and Marburg, mad cow disease, measles, bubonic and pneumonic plague and many others have found glorious success, deserting their primary host-the old country-for a much more fine and well-lighted place.

Science tends to study the minute pieces, as opposed to looking at the whole. If we were to unknowingly study a single human cell, and learn everything we could about it, there is no certainty that we will ever learn much about the complete human being, or why the human does what it does, thinks what it thinks, eat what it eats. The influenza virus might be something similar, a veritable collection of moving pieces, much as the human body is comprised of trillions of vibrating, spinning and spiraling nebulae.

The flu as a gigantic entity seems absurd. Half-baked science fiction. Much in the same way that just over a hundred years ago the "germ theory" was considered ludicrous to most scientists. Think about it, those tiny, invisible creatures that made people sick-it seemed only two steps away from believing that demons caused illness. And now science rattles of strands of DNA as if it was always the "truth," as if it were always understood and accepted fact.

In Colorado the vast aspen forests (which are strangely withering and dying) can be studied as solitary members of a whole, each individual tree. But then again, the aspen trees can be viewed as one connected entity, all linked, all affected. With science, it could just be the proverbial cliche of not being able to see the forest, because you are focusing on a solitary blot on one aspen leaf.

Influenza as a vast entity would explain simultaneous outbreaks, sometimes if vastly divergent locations that cannot be accounted for by the miracles of modern travel alone. Perhaps the flu does not have to jump from one person to two friends, and exponential progression from there until epidemic becomes pandemic. Perhaps influenza is in you, and me, right now, just the same way it is in wild birds.

Perhaps, like an aspen forest, influenza is connected. Roots intermingled. Or as Christianity envisions the "church," individual members (think body parts) that join together to form a universal "Body of Christ."

The flu sometimes seems to travel faster than droplets of fluid passing from mouth to mouth. It seems to fly faster than the wings carry migratory birds. It seems to fly faster even than jet travel. Perhaps it is because it is already there.

An entanglement of influenza.