Influenza and Resonance

What causes flu? It is clearly seasonal but is not correlated with local levels of light or temperature.

The population is not responding instantaneously to local environmental factors but rather is resonating to subtle annual influences and has, over the years, become ‘entrained’ to geophysical cycles.


This first chart shows deaths from influenza peaking almost exactly on the shortest day of the year, every year. Flu cannot be triggered by shorter day lengths or else populations up near the arctic circle would start to experience outbreaks in late October, say, but they don’t. Furthermore, it is not uncommon to have either two weeks of either continuous sunshine or heavy cloud cover around mid-winter which should skew the figures somewhat. The pattern for hospital admissions and deaths is the same for all sufficiently northern latitudes.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm4909a1.htm

The second chart shows that hospital admissions also follow a strict annual cycle but with peaks in week 50 ie two weeks before the deaths around solstice. (The chart says week 40 but this is surely a typo?).

So how can this be? How can the body ‘know’ that the shortest day is in two weeks time and why do people tend to actually die on the ‘worst’ day of the year rather than getting ill on that particular day and holding on for a bit before succumbing to whatever it is a few weeks later.

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/annual-flu-reports/surveillance-of-influenza-and-other-seasonal-respiratory-viruses-in-winter-2021-to-2022


A model based on resonant biorhythms

What can possibly even describe such precisely organised synchrony with the seasons?


Hypothesis The body operates on a scale of harmonic cycles (bio-rhythms) and these internal cycles are coupled to external rhythms by light and temperature levels, geo-magnetic field intensity, humidity levels etc.

Over the years, the internal cycles become entrained to the external geophysical cycles, both diurnal and annual and possibly lunar as well. This happens through subtle external influences such as light, temperature and magnetic field strength as well as internal conditioning by sleep and dietary habits.

Let us assume that these cycles induce similar cycles in the availability of certain essential ‘resources’. We will not attempt to define these resources at first but will assume that they then follow their own sinusoidal cycle and will reach an annual low at the shortest part of the year by the phenomenon of resonance.

Most people will be OK with this but for some, their body will respond dramatically typically two weeks before the lowest point. A critical threshold is crossed and some in-built emergency protocol is initiated which will normally resolve this crisis by releasing, generating, or substituting for, the depleted ‘resource’.

So the cycles are due to reach a ‘low’ at solstice and it is the internal cycle of depletion that is effectively the same in anyone regardless of latitude that is responsible for triggering the fever state.

So what is the missing resource?
Biological systems are regulated via a system of coupled harmonic oscillators from peta-herz frequencies to annual rhythms, with tera-hertz (visible light) frequencies in particular being used to organise and regulate cellular maintenance and repair.

It takes continual energy and resources to maintain these vibrations and a missing frequency or incoherent signalling is going to cause trouble. There are many ways that the body maintains the circuits, resonant energy transfer between harmonically related cycles being one obvious candidate and another being signal transduction via organised water domains. These latter exist in their own right but will also self-organise in and around proteins DNA and mitochondria.

These organelles have the ability to input energy via infra-red light or the random vibrations of heat and accumulate it until there is enough to output a photon of ultra-violet (say) light which has enough energy to do useful ‘work’ within the cellular environment.

So if we are low on essential vibrational frequencies, a fever state is ideal for the generation of copious amounts of intra-cellular heat which can be transduced to the missing energy and harmony (literally) is thus restored.

In this scenario then, the symptoms are not the disease but rather a mechanism of restoration. The problem is the missing energies which may manifest as low energy or some sort of tissue degeneration but the fever is the necessary heat production to restore normality,



Dynamical resonance can account for seasonality of influenza epidemics

Authors: Jonathan Dushoff, Joshua B. Plotkin, Simon A. Levin, and David J. D. Earn
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407293101

In this paper the authors essentially agree with this idea but instead of proposing individual bio-rhythms as creating the population harmonics, they suggest that natural cycles of influenza incidence are caused by pandemic ‘boom and bust’ ie infection followed by immunity followed again by viral mutation, loss of immunity and another outbreak. This cycle is then entrained by external factors that are ‘too weak to measure’.

So the mechanism of disease is incorrect but the underlying mathematical model to explain seasonality is the same: coupled harmonic oscillators. The fact that two completely different approaches converge upon the same idea, namely that of ‘resonance’, lends weight to the claim that this is in fact the predominant causal pattern.


References:

Dynamical resonance can account for seasonality of influenza epidemics
Authors: Jonathan Dushoff, Joshua B. Plotkin, Simon A. Levin, and David J. D. Earn
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0407293101

The human body frequency – Khaled Hamlaoui
A very brief summary of the work of Bruce Tainio
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/340232697_The_human_body_frequency

The Kuramoto model of resonant synchronisation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuramoto_model

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *