Common Sense for Preventing the Bird Flu

By Dr. Lon Jones

Everyone is worried about the coming epidemic of bird flu. We wait helplessly while our pharmaceutical companies work on drugs to treat it better or immunizations to prevent it. But we are not altogether helpless.

Dr. Lon Jones & Jerry Bozeman

The great flu pandemic that followed the First World War killed millions of people. The mortality rate of those contracting the flu in the U.S. was about 25 per thousand, but those treated by Osteopathic physicians had a mortality rate of less than 5 per thousand. The only difference was the Osteopathic focus on maintaining their patients' defenses in good working order. We can do the same today.

When threatened with an epidemic there are several things to remember, but they all focus on one thing: making it harder for the germ to get from one person to another. When we do this it not only means that fewer people will get sick; but it puts pressure on the germ to find better ways to spread and that effort usually takes away from how dangerous they are. Let's look at how to do this with what we have today, without having to wait for the pharmaceutical industry.

First let's assume you have contracted the flu, or for that matter, any illness. Today when a person is not feeling well they are expected to take a pill, buck up, and get to work. Children are given a Tylenol or Motrin and sent to school. If we are serious about limiting the spread of the bird flu, or of any epidemic, we need to rethink this conventional wisdom. Going to work or school when one is sick makes it much easier for the germ to get into someone new, and allow it to focus on the things that make for serious disease. Illnesses that are easily spread always cause more problems. Cholera killed thousands when contamination with sewage was a problem. We cleaned up the sewage and cholera epidemics went away. It's easy to see the problem when sewage is the means of transmission, but a lot harder when we ourselves are the culprits.

Illnesses that are allowed to spread rapidly with our help, or by insects carrying them around, like malaria, are always more deadly. In some places around the world where crowded conditions prevailed the mortality from the flu in 1918-19 was close to 20%. So avoid crowds and stay home if you are sick.

Now let's see how we can help prevent getting sick in the first place. The first thing to remember is to keep your hands clean. Hand washing is easy and well accepted, but not done as often as it needs to be. Latex gloves, like doctors and nurses use, are available at your local drug store. If birds in your area are known to be infected make sure and use gloves like these or others that protect your hands when you are working in your yard.

The critical part of this activity is to keep your hands, gloved or not, away from your face. Bacteria and viruses don't get into our bodies through our hands. But we rub our nose, or our eyes, or hold the food we eat, and germs from our hands get into our bodies. And their first foothold is most often in the back of the nose.
So the second thing to do is keep your nose clean. The vast majority of germs get into the body through the nose and throat. If we swallow them they can cause gastroenteritis, but mostly that is short lived and not a major problem. More serious problems occur when they hang on to the surfaces of our airways. From there they multiply and spread to sinuses, middle ears, the bronchi and lungs. Viruses are able from here to get inside of the cells which is where they do their damage. So how do we stop this process?

David Edwards from Harvard was involved in some research a few years ago that showed some people breathe out lots of bacteria and viruses, and mostly they come from the nose. The range was terrific with some people only breathing out one or two germs while the worst breathed out as many as 10,000—with each breath. Those exhaling more than 500 were called high producers. Dr. Edwards' research was funded by an outfit making steam using salt water. He found that after inhaling this steam for a few minutes the high producers no longer put out as many germ particles. Their average reduction was more than 70%.

Dr. Edwards' study was in contrast to many older studies that showed no decrease with inhaling steam. The older studies, however, just lumped everyone together while Dr. Edwards separated out the high producers. There are not a lot of them, but they are a real problem when they get sick because they can spread it to so many other people.

The best way to see why these studies worked is to look at what happens in the nose. If we were able to look with a microscope into the back of a healthy nose we would see all of the bacteria, viruses, toxins, dust--whatever, stuck to the mucus. If we looked for a while we would see that the mucus was moving to the back of the nose. It takes about 15 minutes to move the mucus from the front to the back where it drains into our stomachs. This is the primary way the body cleans the nose. It's like sweeping the floor. It happens all of the time.

If we wish to avoid upper respiratory problems like the flu and other illnesses we need to help this defense work as well as possible. Cigarette smoke, both for the smoker and those breathing their secondary smoke, damages the small hairs lining the airway that do the sweeping... so stop smoking. If that is not an option at least don't smoke around children who are far more susceptible to the harmful effects of cigarette smoke.

Another factor that hampers this cleaning is dry mucus. Dry mucus doesn't travel as easily, nor is it as sticky. Some of the moisture for wetting it comes from the air we breathe, which is why we have more respiratory problems in the winter when the air is drier. But most of the water comes from the tissues in our noses and depends a lot on how much we drink. In the winter we seem to have less of a sensation of thirst than we do in the summer. So both the humidity and our own fluid levels are less in the winter; and both contribute to the increases in upper respiratory illness that we see every winter. If it is flu season make sure and drink extra, even when you are not thirsty.

The decreased stickiness also means that germs are able to break off of dry mucus easier, which is the most likely reason for Dr. Edwards high producers as well as the benefits of the steam that he found in his studies. Wet mucus holds on to more germs. We need to keep our noses wet.

The best way to help these natural processes is to use Xlear (pronounced "clear") regularly. One of the major actions of xylitol in the back of the nose is to pull water from the tissues lining the nose so that the mucus is wetter and easier to move; and it does this even when we haven't been drinking enough water and the air is dry. Another action of xylitol is to block the ability of many bacteria to hang on to the cells in our noses in the first place.

A clean and healthy nose is our most important defense when it comes to staying healthy during flu season, and that includes the bird flu. So KEEP YOUR NOSE XLEAR!

About Dr. Jones

Dr. Lon Jones, a 30-year veteran in healthcare, is an Osteopathic Board certified Family Physician at the Hi-Plains Hospital and Clinic in Hale Center, Texas. An expert in family medicine, Dr. Jones is internationally known for his initiatory work in nasal xylitol in the upper airways.

You can also learn more about Dr. Jones at his Web site: http://www.nasal-xylitol.com/.