The short answer of how highly pathogenic viruses kill people is, they deplete selenium from the cells and organs of the immune system. That eventually can cause multiorgan failure and death. Killer viruses do this by genetically encoding the selenium proteins they themselves need to replicate and depleting human cells and organs of that vital mineral element. This is comparable to how the sun can kill a person if they try to cross a desert with no water. The sun kills by gradually depleting water from a person’s body. Killer viruses kill by depleting the essential selenium that cells, organs, and the human body need to function. The same principle applies. However, most viruses that infect humans are not highly deadly. Only a few are.             Adults harbor more than a hundred viruses in their body. Most people are infected by at least one of several herpes viruses. They remain ...

Covid-19 has killed over 1.23 million Americans - 47,500 in 2024. That is more than in all U.S. wars. H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) potentially could kill ten or twenty times that many. Chances are it will kill far more than Covid did, especially if health authorities continue to ignore the science.    Far less likely, as Donald Trump predicted for Covid-19 in early 2020, “It will all go away by Easter.”  Tens of millions of Americans could die of H5N1. Or not. Viruses are tricky. Today, the only thing we know for sure is that American health authorities are almost totally unprepared to meet the immense historic challenge of a potential H5N1 pandemic that most epidemiologists believe eventually will strike – perhaps soon.  How unprepared are we? The Trump administration is extremely unprepared. What can we do to fix that? Besides physically protective barriers including masks, shields, social distancing, quarantines, shutdowns and hand sanit...