Fact check: Influenza is caused by a viral infection, contrary to post

Isabella Fertel, USA TODAY
·4 min read
21

The claim: Influenza is an ‘electrical disease,’ past pandemics result of ‘new electric rollouts’

A March 2 Instagram post (direct link, archive link) includes several images of technological equipment developed in the last 150 years including radio, radar and satellite.

“Influenza is an electrical disease,” reads the text in the post. “Past pandemics followed after new electric rollouts, such as electric power lines, radio, radar, and satellite technology. That implies drastic and rapid changes in Earth’s electromagnetic field can cause illness.”

The post’s caption also states “the flu is not contagious. No flu has ever been contagious.”

The post garnered more than 70 likes in two weeks.

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Our rating: False

Infectious disease experts say influenza, also known as "the flu," is a contagious viral respiratory infection of the nose, throat and lungs. A geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey said the technologies mentioned in the post were developed over decades, not years, and do not correlate with influenza outbreaks.

The flu is a contagious infection caused by a virus, say health experts

There is no truth to the post's claims, according to Dr. John Swartzberg, a clinical professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health.

“Influenza is caused by a virus,” Swartzberg said. “We’ve known this now for a little less than a century. And we know that viruses cannot survive without getting into a human being and replicating in their cells.”

Most people catch the flu by breathing in airborne droplets from the coughs and sneezes of someone infected with the virus, according to Penn Medicine. Individuals can also be infected by touching a surface with the virus on it and then touching their eyes, mouth or nose.

The post attempts to link several historical influenza pandemics to various electrical and communications technologies. However, scientists have been able to use specific antibodies produced by the immune system in response to an infection to identify the specific strains of influenza behind the pandemics in 1918, 1957 and 1968.

The virus responsible for the 1889 influenza pandemic, what the post calls the “Russian flu,” is still debated in the scientific community. But it is generally accepted the virus behind the 1889 pandemic was an influenza virus, according to an article in the journal La Presse Médicale.

Fact check: Influenza virus is still active, hasn't 'disappeared'

Post wrong about technologies and Earth’s magnetic field

The post includes images of electric power lines, radio, radar and satellite technologies, as well as the dates of their purported introduction to mainstream society.

But the proposed correlation between those technologies and notable epidemics of the past is “highly inaccurate,” said Anna Kelbert, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey.

The technologies mentioned in the post were “continuously developed throughout the last couple of centuries, as humans were able to better harness electromagnetic waves for societal needs,” Kelbert wrote in an email. The timeline of the technologies' development shows "no correlation with human disease outbursts,” she said.

The caption of the post also claims that seasonal variations in solar radiation are connected to the flu.

Seasonal variations in the amount of solar radiation that reaches the Earth’s surface can affect human health “through exposing our skin to higher amounts of electromagnetic radiation in the summer,” Kelbert said. But Kelbert said those health risks are “unrelated to flu epidemics,” which tend to occur during colder months.

Fact check: No, a massive solar storm is not approaching Earth any time soon

The post is also wrong about electromagnetic fields playing a role. Substantial changes in Earth’s electromagnetic field happen over thousands of years, according to Kelbert. The variations that scientists can observe are “not drastic or rapid, in fact, they are very gradual and barely noticeable on the human time scale,” Kelbert said.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Fact check: False claim the flu is caused by electronic technologies