By Sally Fallon Morell
NourishingTraditions.com
This is the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question. The premise that coronavirus is highly contagious and can cause disease provides the justification for putting entire nations on lockdown, destroying the global economy and throwing hundreds of thousands out of work. But is it contagious? Does it even cause disease?
As early as 1799, researchers puzzled over the cause of influenza, which appeared suddenly, often in diverse places at the same time, and could not be explained by any theory of contagion. In 1836, Heinrich Schweich, author of a book on influenza, noted that all physiological processes produce electricity and offered the theory that an electrical disturbance of the atmosphere may prevent the body from discharging it. He repeated the then-common belief that the accumulation of electricity in the body causes the symptoms of influenza and that outbreaks were due to atmospheric “influences”—hence the name influenza.
Now that we know about the electrical nature of the sun, we can make some interesting observations. The years 1645-1715 was a period that astronomers call the Maunder minimum, when the sun was very quiet; astronomers observed no sunspots during the time span and the northern lights were nonexistent; then in 1715, sunspots reappeared, as did the northern lights. Sunspot activity then increased, reaching a high in 1727, and in 1728, influenza appeared in waves on every continent. Sunspot activities became more violent until they peaked in1738 when physicians reported flu in both man and animals, including dogs, horses and birds, especially sparrows. By some estimates, two million people perished during the ten-year pandemic.
These and other facts about the relationship of influenza to disturbances in electricity come from a remarkable book, The Invisible Rainbow, by Arthur Firstenberg. Firstenberg chronicles the history of electricity in the U.S. and throughout the world, and the outbreaks of illness that accompanied each step towards greater electrification. The first stage involved the installation of telegraph lines—by 1875, these formed a spider web over the whole earth totaling seven hundred thousand miles, with enough copper wire to encircle the globe almost thirty times.
With it came a new disease called neurasthenia. Outside of the U.S., scientists recognized electricity as one of its causes. Like those suffering today from “chronic fatigue,” patients felt weak and exhausted, unable to concentrate. They had headaches, dizziness, tinnitus, floaters in the eyes, racing pulse, pains in the heart region and palpitations; they were depressed and had anxiety attacks. Dr. George Miller Beard noted that the disease spread along the routes of railroads and telegraph lines; it often resembled the common cold or influenza and commonly seized people in the prime of life.
1889 marks the beginning of the modern electrical era and also of a deadly flu pandemic, which followed the advent of electricity throughout the globe. Says Firstenberg, “Influenza struck explosively and unpredictably, over and over in waves until early 1894. It was as if something fundamental had changed in the atmosphere. . .”