The Advocate, Issue 18 - Feb. 22, 2018

Independent Student Voice of MHCC

Volume 52, Issue 18 FEBRUARY 23, 2018 advocate-online.net

You and the flu: history of the virus PAGE 2

Curling?

Spare me PAGE 2

Edgy author shares writing tips PAGE 4

Saints basketball update PAGE 4

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OPINION | NEWS

A D V O C AT E - O N L I N E . N E T

MODERN MEDS HELP CURB THE FLU

ARE THE OLYMPICS WORTH THE COST?

Instructors compare today’s flu with the past Greg Leonov the advocate

Kyle Venooker the advocate

Ah, the Winter Olympics.

A chance to see the whole world set aside its petty squabbles, its ideological differences, its trade disputes, all so that we can come together in unity and take in the sheer athletic prowess of men and women who have trained their entire life for events like… sledding. Cross-country skiing.

Curling.

Okay, so, yes, the whole thing is faintly ridiculous, but the spirit of the Olympic Games is still alive and well, right? That spirit of camaraderie, of humanity, of a world so typically torn apart by strife able to come together, if only for a few weeks?

Yes and no.

It’s significant that this year’s Olympics are taking place in PyeongChang, South Korea: partly because it kicks off a triplet of Olympic Games taking place in East Asia (to be followed by Tokyo in 2020 and Beijing in 2022), illustrating a global shift to Eastern Asia in general, but primarily because even amidst the military tensions which have existed between North and South Korea since before America fought a war there, and which have if anything escalated since Kim Jong Un’s ascension to power, the world still watched representatives of both nations march together in the opening ceremonies as a united country, styled simply as “Korea.”

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Editor-in-Chief Matana McIntire Associate Editor/ News Editor Greg Leonov Associate News Editor & Copy Editor Bethany McCurley Arts & Entertainment Editor Ryan Moore Associate Arts & Entertainment/ Social Media Manager Cassie Wilson

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A century later, the “Spanish Flu” remains a chilling, cautionary tale about the potential deadly threat of viruses.

On Feb. 14, Mt. Hood history instructor Elizabeth Milliken and Carl Eckrode, MHCC Respiratory Care program director, talked about the historical impact of influenza (flu) and the mechanics of how a virus works and infects.

The instructors compared this season’s, aggressive strain of the flu – which has killed many otherwise healthy persons – with the pandemic of 1918-19.

Milliken described the word pandemic as an “epidemic on a very large scale; either continental, or even global.” During the pandemic of 1918-19, approximately 500 million people were infected and between 50 million and 100 million people died from influenza.

The episode was largely lost to history until the 1990s, according to Milliken.

“There was really not a whole lot of attention paid to it, and it used to be called the forgotten epidemic,” she said. Instead, historians tended to focus on events related to World War I, which ended just as the flu spiked.

Mobilization triggers outbreak According to Milliken, the flu can be traced back to the 1500s, and spread more broadly as human transportation developed. “You start to see more and more major outbreaks of influenza as global connections become more prevalent,” she said.

One of the first major influenza epidemics was in the 1760s, right about the time of the Seven Years War, she explained. At this time, Great Britain was moving troops all across the Atlantic Ocean. This mass mobilization created a perfect opportunity for the flu to travel between continents.

Another mass mobilization happened during World War I, once the U.S. entered

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the war in 1917 to fight with the Allies.

“There was a big mobilization of troops, kind of an unusual circumstance for the United States that has not been in a really major military conflict since the Civil War,” Milliken explained. “What you had (in) January and February of 1918 are the first really solidly documented cases of influenza that is going to be part of this pandemic.” During those winter months, the first soldiers at Fort Riley in Kansas started reporting sick. Within a week, 500 soldiers were ill. The flu spread from there, she said.

However, there are alternative theories of the flu’s origins in WWI. There are reports of the flu as far back as 1916 in France, plus an outbreak in France that coincided with that at Fort Riley. A possible outbreak also happened in China in 1915 and 1916, which was thought to be “pneumatic (airborne) form of a plague,” but in hindsight, researchers say could have been flu, said Milliken.

Deadly impact “You have at least three possible areas where this particular strain of influenza seems to take hold and begin to spread.

Then you have whole conflicts of World War I where you have large-scale troop movements, you have men being put together into barracks,” she said. “Once they’re sick, they’re put together into large facilities.”

The flu spread throughout U.S. military camps and beyond, with two waves, the first being relatively mild, “then, in the fall of 1918, the second, much more lethal wave spread,” said Milliken. “It swept again around the globe... as much as 80 percent of the people who died in the pandemic died in (those) 10 weeks – mortality rates were much higher, symptoms were much more severe.”

Rather than targeting only infants and elderly individuals, the flu infected high numbers of young people who began dy-

ing.

The flu was looked at it the same manner as the Black Plague that had ravaged the world in the 14th century: People wore ineffective face masks and stopped congregating in public spaces, said Milliken. Bars and saloons were packed with people who believed alcohol and tobacco smoke killed the flu.

U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was said to have suffered from the flu, recovering only to suffer a debilitating stroke which led to his wife effectively running the White House for the last few months of his presidency.

‘Vulnerable’ targets Eckrode, a trained epidemiologist, discussed the other pandemics people lived through in the 20th, and early 21st, centuries. The 1918-19 flu is the same H1N1 virus that was called the “Swine Flu” in 2009.

The swine flu didn’t cause as much of a pandemic, because 90 years earlier “We did not understand a virus at the time; we didn’t even know there was a virus– viruses had not been identified,” said Eckrode.

Back then, there were no antibiotics or immunizations. The drafted military members were mostly poor farmers experiencing relocation and drastic changes in diet and living conditions. They were placed “in concentrated settings (and) put under stress,” he said.

“If you do that to any animal... when you put too many animals in a pen, don’t feed them adequately and stress them – they turn on each other, but they also become vulnerable to disease,” he said.

Over time, the H1N1 virus emerged. It was never seen by anyone, never infected anything. The conditions were ideal for the virus to start spreading. Then, in 2009, it was first isolated on a cruise ship off the coast of Mexico.

Logan Hertner Kente Bates

Contact us!

E-mail: advocatt@mhcc.edu Phone: 503-491-7250 Website: advocate-online.net Twitter: @MHCCAdvocate Facebook: facebook.com/TheAdvocateOnline Instagram: @MHCCAdvocate #MHCCAdvocate Mt. Hood Community College 26000 SE Stark Street Gresham, Oregon 97030 Room AC1369

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NEWS | SPORTS

A D V O C AT E - O N L I N E . N E T

MT. HOOD INVITES 'KILLER' TO CAMPUS chloroformed, and get put in a trunk,” she said.

Cain said she had a pet cemetery when she was a child.

She was the one who “all of the other kids came to when a pet died...

There would be a knock at the door and there would be a kid from down the street

Greg Leonov the advocate

Once in a while, instructors at Mt. Hood invite intriguing, diverse characters to speak with students.

Most recently, they invited a murderer: Chelsea Cain is a killer – literarily, at least.

On Feb. 15, thriller author Chelsea Cain visited the college through the Humanities d e p a r t m e nt’s RIP Mouths of Others speaker

RIP

Fluff y

Graphic by Sheila Embers // the Advocate

series, which features writers and other storytellers from various backgrounds who discuss their latest work and their process.

The New York Times-labeled best-selling author of “The Hippie Handbook,” “One Kick,” “Does This Cape Make Me Look Fat?” and the “Heartsick” series explained her quirky background.

Upon being introduced to the Visual Arts Theatre crowd, Cain said she liked to kill people for a living. “I kill them in books,” she explained. On car trips, she keeps a lookout for good places to dump a body. She grew up reading the “Nancy Drew” mystery series.

When her friends wanted to play “Family,” she wanted to play “Get

with a goldfish in a bag, or a hamster that would be just a dried husk that got dug out of a radiator.

“I had a bunch of funeral hats, and I put on a really good service that often the whole neighborhood would come to, and I’d bury the animals in the front yard.”

To Cain, having a pet funeral business was normal. She realized she had an unconventional attitude toward morbidity when she published her first thriller, a “twisted love story between a cop and a serial killer,” she said. An editor mentioned that the plot was ‘twisted,’ and Cain thought it was a funny thing to say.

Capturing the ‘good stuff ’ While at college at the

University of California-Irvine, Cain had to take a computer science class. The class included mandatory lab hours. She decided she would skip the lab and instead curry favor from her professor by sitting in the front row and being highly visible. One day, before the class started, the professor needed to make some notes, but he didn’t have a pen.

“I saw him do that pen tap thing, and I thought ‘This is my chance,’ ” she said. She handed him a pen, and he began the lecture. It didn’t take her long to realize she had handed him a tampon. The entire class started to murmur. “I start to hear this wave of recognition go up rowby-row behind me – of just ‘Is that a what?’ in this weird hush that rumbled up through 500 students,” she recalled.

“He catches it out of the corner of his eye, and he puts it in his vest pocket, and continues his lecture.

And after that, I sat in the back row of that class.”

Cain said she was happy to have an embarrassing story of her own: That feeling is something she uses in her writing, she told the audience.

“It is something that I chase when I’m writing – that feeling in my body when I remember that story,” she said. “If I’m laughing a little nervously as I write it, that’s how I know it’s good. The stuff that you’re certain someone will have the sense to edit (out) is always the best stuff, and so

'FLU' CONTINUED CONTINUED FROM PAGE 2

Lower pandemic threat today Eckrode said that a mass pandemic is possible today, but isn’t likely.

“We can type the virus, we know what a virus is. We have electron microscopes, we have pictures of this little bad boy,” he said. “We have vaccinations.”

Even if a vaccine today has a low rate of effectiveness, “it works a lot better than the one they didn’t have in 1918,” he added.

Influenza is drawn to the exterior of our respiratory tract, Eckrode said.

It strips the outer layer of a cell so it can enter that cell, then take over and reproduce itself.

In 1918, soldiers were often not far from where mustard gas was being stored. “If somebody had a sub-clinical PA G E 4

exposure to a noxious agent like mustard gas, or some blistering agent that works by stripping a cell wall and causing release of cellular fluids – that could in fact predispose the individual to infection,” said Eckrode.

The H1N1 has an “infectivity rate” of four, meaning anyone infected will likely pass it on to four people. The current 2017-18 seasonal flu has a rate of 15, while the regular infectivity rate of a flu is 1.5, said Eckrode – which could explain this season’s greater impact.

Shots, and soap Flu is constant in our world, yet is constantly changing. It’s normally present in various birds, including chickens. On farms, the flu moves from chickens to pigs, mutating on its way. “It undergoes a genetic ‘re-

assortment’ in the pig and then it can be given to us,” said Eckrode. It also can infect pet dogs and cats, and is “like a Rubik’s cube of DNA reassorting itself so it can infect you.”

Viruses don’t necessarily “live” and so don’t need to feed to stay alive. “(Flu is) a machine to make more machines; a highly pathogenic one like this burns through a susceptible host, it burns through all its resources,” said Eckrode. “Flu is constantly evolving, shifting and drifting to evade your immune system.”

What’s our best way to avoid it?

Eckrode recommends that people wash hands often, and engage in “social distancing” during the flu season. He also recommends getting a flu vaccine: “Vaccinations are one of the great miracles of public health.”

unpack in the moment, will make that scene more tense.”

To demonstrate her approach, Cain read from her published story about a mother killing her child. The child returns to torment the mother. The only way to get the baby quiet is to turn on the television.

Most of Cain’s work is what she described as “commercial fiction,” books that are available almost anywhere, including airports and get translated into various languages. Her first work, “Dharma Girl,” described her early life in which she was raised on commune by hippie parents.

always put that in.”

Slow it down In her thrillers, during fastpaced scenes, Cain said she slows the action down. “It is very tempting, as a writer, when you write a scene of somebody chasing after somebody else with a knife to unfold very quickly – to describe it very quickly because it’s very fast paced,” she said.

To better create tension in a scene, Cain suggests to slow it down. “The more details you can unpack, the more tense it will seem... that means very practical sensory details,” she said. “Any kind of weird details you can

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Mt. Hood

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Graphic by Prisma Flores, Jonathan Zacarias // the Advocate