And you all ate it every day. For that matter, at the food factories, and there is no other term for the way that food was processed, it was then injected with more "stuff." In some cases it was vitamins. Preservatives. Colorations.
The U.S. was the most heavily chemicaled food on earth. Sure it had some effect. Was it a contributor to obesity? Don't know and there's no clinical evidence. Ditto "early maturation": those cute little girls that got their boobies way too soon. But it was in your bodies. If you weren't a health nut. And be glad you weren't.
One study that is roundly castigated still but pretty hard to argue showed that people who were "uncaring" in their food choices had a five percent lower mortality rate than people who were "careful" in their food choices. The language of "uncaring" vs. "caring" was explained in the codicil that "caring" meant they ate, to the greatest extent possible, organic and natural foods. Uncaring meant they stuffed whatever in their maw and didn't give a shit how it was raised or what was in it as long as it was tasty.
The problem with the study, with which I agree, is that there is no mechanism explained for the effect. Got that. But that was what the pope's Inquisition said about Galileo. Sure, he thought that the Earth revolved around the sun but he didn't have a mechanism. Gosh, he might even have evidence, but he couldn't show why that was the case whereas the "scientists" of his day had thousands of years of built-up stories about how the sun revolved around the Earth. And my answer is the same as his: "It still moves!"
In the U.S. SARS, a huge health threat everywhere else it touched, became MARS, a very bad cold.
Part of that was, unquestionably, free-market medicine vs. socialized. Absolutely. But another fraction, also as unquestionably, was that Americans had so much shit in their bodies it was amazing we decayed at all. All those chemicals had some negative effects, sure. But they also have some positive. That's the part that healthcare nuts and organic fruits don't want anyone to realize or talk about.
Fuck 'em. It still moves.
Here is another that relates purely to H5N1. It's just a hypothesis because nobody has been able to do a good clinical study on it. (Several people have tried.) And it's kind of weird.
Social distance.
First I've got to talk about, yeah, virology and binding. (Lord I was trying to avoid this.) Prepare for major MEGO.
The common "seasonal" flus are referred to as H3N2 and H1N1. Both have a binding protein that binds to specific proteins in the upper respiratory system. (Can you say sinus pain? And fever and all the rest once your good old immune system kicks in.) Then, maybe, it moves to the lungs and you get coughing and if it gets bad a secondary bacterial infection (pneumonia or bronchitis depending on how bad it is).
H5N1 in its classic "bird flu" form bound to receptors in avian intestines. (It's an intestinal flu for them.) Which was why at first only poultry workers got it. They got it from breathing in chicken poop. Because there are similar receptor proteins in human lungs. Not the same. Similar.
(By the way, on an interesting aside. Influenza, in general, may be the oldest pathogen around. The genetics indicate that it goes all the way back to intestinal flu in dinosaurs. So the next time you're sneezing and coughing, just remember: Species come and go but the flu is here to stay. Take it like a man. End aside.)
(Oh, serious technical note. The bird binding sites are referred to as alpha 2,3. Human lung receptors are alpha 2,6.)
What caused the pandemic was a switch in one little gene code. That permitted the flu to bind to the proteins in the lungs.
Which was a good thing. A "normal" flu that bound to the upper respiratory system with the same lethality as H5N1 would have been truly a world killer. What kept a lot of people alive was they just never caught the flu. Because it had to get all the way into the lungs. That required a much higher viral load.
Which gets to social distance.
Everyone knows what social distance is. "I need my space." In the U.S. it's about two and a half to three feet. Anyone who is "non-intimate" (which doesn't mean just family/lovers, get to that) coming inside that space causes a social reaction. People back up or a fight breaks out. I need my space.
Every society has a social distance. But "classic" Americans (white, black, you name it, but fully assimilated) have the largest social space on the planet. Arab social space is about sixteen inches. When they're just moving around. If it's crowded it can drop to ten or even in contact with no social issues. Asians (Orientals for the non-PC) are even closer. Standard is around ten. Africans even work closer than Americans. We're very stand-offish people. Germans get closer to each other than Americans and we probably got the social meme from the Germans.
Heavy viral load requires you to breathe somebody else's breath. In general, people don't do that much in the U.S. In Asian societies it's just everyday living.
The "in general" gets to "intimate contact." Intimate contact is getting down to less than arm's distance. People go "ain't happening" but it happens with several categories of jobs. Medical profession and early elementary teachers (K–4 more or less) being the top two. Kids, for that matter, get much closer to each other than adults do.
Guess which professions had the highest infection rates?
Probably one of the reasons that Americans just didn't infect as much as other societies is that we're grouchy, touchy SOBs. For that matter, it may be why some of the more "socially prominent" zones (San Francisco) got hit so hard. People were "accepting" of entrance to their personal space and it killed them.
The last factor is back to trust. Thought that was a big sideline, didn't you?
Let's go back to our standard family of four living in a house with a white picket fence. Mom's a teacher, dad works for a local gas distribution center and the kids are, well, kids. For this narrative we will make them twelve and nine, boy and girl respectively.
This is about to get . . . Well, those of you who were that family, you know where this is going. This isn't going to be your narrative, but most of you lived one like it.
The Plague is definitely spreading. Mommy and Daddy decide that they're going to sit it out with what they have in the house. They'd had a bad ice storm a while back and they have some preparedness. Daddy makes one more run to the store and the gas lines. He finally finds what they desperately need and comes home.
Doesn't matter. Daddy didn't bring the Plague into the house, Mommy did. She got it from one of her Hispanic kids who barely had the sniffles. She doesn't know it.
The nine year old shows the first frank symptoms. They all put on dust masks Daddy usually uses for painting and go to the doctor. The office is overrun. They do wait, probably two hours, to see a nurse. The nurse administers (at the doctor's orders as he shouts them down the corridor) an antiviral to all four. It's probably pissing in the wind but it's the best that you can do with a virus. The doctor doesn't have any immunizations; they went bad waiting for someone to figure out what to do with them. They are also given an antibiotic shot and a bottle of antibiotics for each of them. This is for the pneumonic stage so that there's a chance secondaries won't kill them. They're told the hospital is overloaded. Don't bother.