Onions, onions the magical flu food
the flu hq editorial - BY Douglas Christian Larsen - November 8, 2009
Colorado Springs - "Onions are the answer" is the birdshot splattered around the world via the modern carrier pigeons of e-mail. The story goes, at e-mail IQ level, that a country doctor in 1918 was amazed by the health of his patients, as well as their old wives, including their old wives' tales.
The tale in question is that during the Great Pandemic of 1918-1919 people placed sliced onions near ill patients, and the patients recovered! The country doctor examined the onion beneath a microcope, and lo and behold, his eyes filled with tears, not because onions make you cry, but because the onion was chock full of the flu virus!
Isn't that an amazing story? The sad reality, however, is that in 1918-1919, people didn't really know about viruses, let alone country doctors. Okay, people knew about country doctors, but sadly country doctors didn't know about flu viruses. Not even city-slicker doctors knew a lick about 'em.
The notion that influenza was caused by a filterable virus was a new thought, twinkling in the minds of only a few scientists. It would be many years after the last sputtering deaths of 1918-1919 passed into a memory that most people actively chose to forget, that scientists would return to the possibility of an influenza virus.
All the great minds of the times were looking for a special bacteria, a mysterious bacteria they called "bacillus influenzae," or "Pfeiffer's bacillus," after Dr. Richard Pfeiffer who discovered, via the simple microscope of the time, a sneaky little bacteria that seemed to be present whenever the killer flu was diagnosed.
Time told the tale differently of course, as the flu is not caused by bacteria, even though it would almost appear that the influenza virus purposefully opens the door and rings the triangle for all good little bacteria to line up and enter the human host. Human, it's what's for dinner.
As most sensational Internet e-mails prove (remember the classic booby prize that attempted to prove that butter is healthier than margarine?), most are sent out as gags, or at best the well-intentioned produce of simple minded relatives and office friends (pass this along to seven people and Microsoft will send you a crate of onions that cures the flu).
But onions, a flu cure?
There might be a little glimmer of truth in the Magical Onions (not to be confused with Magic Mushrooms) e-mail; however, it is not the sliced onion standing in the room (right next to that ever-silent elephant) that will prove beneficial, but the onions that you consume. Onions, along with garlic, ginger, oregano, and elderberries, have been used by country doctors, wise women, early physicians, and far back into the folklore of the ages. Think about it, that is why ginger is big around Christmas. Onions, eat 'em up, yum.
Perhaps those old wives knew more than we are willing to give them credit?
