Legionnaire's Disease is Not What You've Been Told

A study on the evil of man

“To know your enemy you must become your enemy” - Sun Tzu

There is a hidden battlefield within each and every human where the dividing line between self and non-self is continuously being decided. The truth is that we are all surrounded by entities that seek to consume us every moment of our lives. If we could actually see this microscopic realm with our eyes, I suspect many of us would succumb to crippling despair.

Ignorance truly is bliss. Yet, we are no longer ignorant, are we?

We can now, in fact, view the microscopic realm in mind-numbing high definition. Gee, thanks science.

But, all hope is not lost! There is no reason to despair. For, the spiritual person can acknowledge the grim reality of existence while simultaneously embracing hope and longing for transcendence. The spiritual person realizes that this world is a one-of-a-kind training session for turning graphite into diamond. I’m convinced that one of the most important ways we can grow spiritually is to begin taking responsibility for ourselves and each other. Such a step requires us to develop a sincere passion for recognizing and valuing truth, no matter how it may present itself to us. There is a dark side here, however, as openness to the truth also implies an openness to doubt! How can we possibly ascertain new truths about our world if we are not willing to discard some of our most deeply held assumptions?

Returning now to the task at hand - I’d ask you to indulge me in a little exercise of imagination. Imagine that you are a very powerful human being with virtually unlimited financial resources to do whatever it is you please. Imagine how lonely that must feel. You cannot identify with your fellow man. You have intentionally separated yourself from him. And, now, as you look upon all of these alien creatures scurrying about the planet you begin to dissociate from humanity altogether. You become the other - the non-self - identifying more with the multitude of microscopic entities seeking to consume man than with man himself. But, you are no mere bacterium or virus! No, you are far more than that. You are akin to a god who can marshal and direct his legions of microscopic warriors toward domination. All the better that your soldiers are invisible to the naked eye, as covert action is of utmost importance. Most humans don’t take too kindly to attempts to eradicate the self.

At first, your quest to vanquish the self is impeded by your lack of knowledge. You simply don’t have the necessary information to wage covert warfare effectively. Your vision looks something like this:

It’s just not that clear how the self is demarcated from the non-self. This makes it quite difficult to formulate effective strategies. So, you bide your time and, in the meantime, ensure that you heavily fund the research needed to improve your view of the battlefield. Sure enough, in time you reap a fantastic view, indeed:

The acuity of your vision has now improved to the point where you can understand the defensive mechanisms deployed by the self, one of the most important being the sentry posts. Without sentries to raise the alarm, a veritable army can march right in before being noticed, at which point it would already be too late for the self to mount a defense.

Do you see the genius in your approach to warfare? You do not need to attack directly with brute force, but rather, simply take out key defensive measures that allow the ever present non-self microbes to opportunistically flood in to fill the niche you have created. Such an approach obscures your involvement in the chain of causality, allowing scientists and the media (which, conveniently, you mostly own) to find and label a culprit that is not you. The benefits which accrue to you through such tactics are numerous: 1) you learn how to kill people more efficiently, 2) you frighten the people and make them easier to control, 3) you profit through drugs and medical interventions designed to treat the things that you caused, 4) you gain confidence that you are invincible, and are, in fact, a god that is learning how to create humanity in your own image.

Can you put yourself in those shoes? I can. That’s how I know there are human beings in this world who not only feel this way, but they desire such a path and have the means to pursue it.

I ask you to hold on to this thought as I tell you the version of story of Legionnaire’s disease that you have very likely never heard before.

The Official Story

First of all, I’m curious how many of you have ever really thought about (or even heard of) Legionnaire’s disease. For myself, it’s kind of funny, because I only ever think about it when I’m near a large HVAC system or fan room with stagnant pools of condensate - which is to say, very rarely. But, how strange is that, to associate water with potential death? It seems like borderline insanity to me. Bacteria are everywhere all the time. Yes, we know to avoid tepid water sources, but why worry about bacteria specifically in HVAC systems, or even in water generally?

Yet, since the discovery of the dreadful and ubiquitous freshwater bacterium Legionella pneumophila in 1977 humans have found it necessary to unnecessarily fret over the “deadliness” of plain old water. How did such a fear come about?

It’s simple enough to read the official story of Legionnaire’s disease on the state-sanctioned Wikipedia. The story begins in the bicentennial year of 1976 at the July convention of the American Legion at the Bellevue-Stratford hotel in Philadelphia.

Ok, that fact alone is cause for concern. Legionnaire’s disease just happened to begin precisely at the celebration of the nation’s bicentennial, and with a patriotic group like the American Legion, in the birthplace of the nation? Yes, yes, and yes. I will have more to say on this in a bit.

So, within a few days of the conclusion of the meeting, a couple hundred of the 10,000 Legion members who were in attendance became seriously ill and 34 died from a strange pneumonia¹. Note, Wikipedia cites a slightly lower number. Once the connection to the convention was made, the illness made headline news all over the country and caused a great deal of concern and fear about the possibility of an epidemic.

Source: The San Bernardino County Sun, Sunday, Aug 8, 1976.

After a few weeks it became clear that the illness had not spread beyond the infected Legionnaires, and the story gradually faded from the news. However, within about a year it had returned with scientists triumphing over the discovery of the putative causative agent responsible for the Legionnaires’ illness - the aforementioned bacterium Legionella pneumophila. But, how did this common freshwater bacterium end up being dispersed among the convention attendees at high enough concentrations to cause illness and death? Moreover, how did it end up infecting some people outside the hotel who never came within a city block of the locus of infection? Have no fear, scientists have the answer:

Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, Dec. 31, 1978.

As this article states, a “terrible thing” did indeed happen. This cockamamie story became forever cemented in history as the cause of Legionnaire’s disease.

In the brief period between the initial event in 1976 and 1980, there were a succession of “outbreaks” of the newly discovered Legionnaire’s disease in New York, Dallas, Memphis, Los Angeles, Bloomington, IN, and Burlington, VT².

It’s funny how once you give something a label you start seeing it everywhere. And each time you see it, the official story gets reinforced to such a degree that it is no longer questioned but accepted as gospel-truth.

The truth is that there are a lot of things that just don’t add up about Legionnaire’s disease.

The Rest of the Story

The official narrative of Legionnaire’s disease implores us to believe that the deadly pneumonia caused by the common Legionella pneumophila results from the unique conditions encountered in HVAC systems where the bacterium can readily reproduce and be dispersed as an aerosol. The fatal flaw of this explanation is that it fails to adequately explain how people outside the building can be infected, as noted by Muder et al. in their critical review on the transmission mode of L. pneumophila³.

Muder et al. cast doubt on the accepted theory of aerosol transmission of L. pneumophila.

Muder et al. go on to posit that transmission of L. pneumophila might occur through drinking water instead of aerosol transmission, and in support of their thesis, cite the remarkable fact that the 1976 outbreak almost exclusively infected Legionnaire’s, leaving hotel staff untouched:

In the original 1976 Philadelphia outbreak, the attack rate of American Legion delegates was 6.8% and hotel employees was less than 0.25%. The only parameter that could be linked statistically to acquisition of the disease was ingestion of water - an association that has been widely overlooked…it now seems plausible that acquisition of the organism occurred not via an air conditioning system as is currently believed, but via the water distribution system with aspiration of contaminated water as the mode of entry into the lungs.

Muder et al. suggest that the aging Legionnaire’s would have been more likely to aspirate drinking water than the relatively younger hotel staff, thus explaining the difference in infection rates between the two groups. I would like to offer an alternative explanation. But first, we need to establish some more facts.

It should be pointed out here that animal models of L. pneumophila infection have produced widely varied results. In 1983, Fitzgeorge et al. published the first definitive study on the matter⁴. The authors found that the only mammal they could kill with extremely high aerosol doses of the bacterium was the guinea pig. Only mild illness was induced in rhesus monkeys and marmosets, and no illness at all was detected in mice.

We should probably expect to see mammals exhibit a fairly high tolerance to such a ubiquitous pathogen, otherwise, well, I guess there would be no mammals and L. pneumophila would rule the world. Indeed, the innate immune system of most mammal species is well equipped to handle this bacterium. It has been shown that the pathogen recognition receptor (PRR) protein NAIP5 plays a pivotal role in recognizing and clearing flagellated bacteria from the body⁵. Luckily for us, natural strains of L. pneumophila all have flagella, which renders them easy targets for NAIP5. Several studies have shown that the severity of Legionnaire’s disease is governed by the immune response modulated by NAIP5⁶⁷. Importantly, strains of L. pneumophila modified to not have flagella have been shown to completely evade detection by the innate immune system⁸.

I’m now ready to present you with two alternative hypotheses to explain Legionnaire’s disease, in particular, the event that occurred in Philadelphia in 1976:

1. The potable water system was intentionally contaminated with a de-flagellated strain of L. pneumophila. Infections also occurred at downstream locations in the potable water system before the bacterium became too diluted.

2. The potable water system was intentionally contaminated with an immunosuppressant specifically targeting the activity of NAIP5. Infections by natural L. pneumophila in the surrounding environment then occurred to those exposed to sufficiently high doses of the immunosuppressant.

The basis for the first hypothesis has hopefully been sufficiently detailed above. As for the second one, I would like to draw your attention to the recent article by Lin et al. which establishes the ability of nickel-, cobalt- and nickel-cobalt nanoparticles to disrupt the NLRC4 inflammasome, for which NAIP5 is an upstream activator⁹. Why do I mention this?

Here’s why:

The Anniston Star, Thursday, Aug 26, 1976.

Wow!

This lead must have gotten buried as soon as it hit press because no mention was ever made again of nickel being a possible cause of Legionnaire’s disease. So, deactivation of NLRC4 by nickel may indeed be a primary cause to consider. We should also add another hypothesis to the list:

3. Nickel carbonyl gas was intentionally dispersed inside the convention hotel and caused immunosuppression in the attendees. Some of the gas made it outside and caused immunosuppression in people who never entered the hotel.

So, if nickel was deployed as an immunosuppressant at the convention, it might have been added to the potable water system or dispersed as an aerosol. I tend to lean towards the former due to the argument of Muder et al. above that if it was an aerosol we would expect more of the hotel staff to have become ill.

The Motive

We’ve established the possible means, but what was the motive to carry out such an attack? I think you’ll be as surprised as I was by this. There are three big reasons:

1. As I discussed earlier, the attack coincided with the bicentennial celebration of the US…in the month of our independence…in the city that gave birth to our independence…in a convention organized by a highly patriotic group of American veterans.

2. At the convention, the American Legion adopted a resolution critical of UN requesting the US government to re-examine its commitment to the organization. The National Commander of the Legion, William Rogers, stated that “the American Legion and, indeed, the American public, are deeply concerned about the course of world events and the growing inability of the United Nations to effectively mediate international problems”¹⁰.

3. The American Legion event occurred against the backdrop of the great swine flu pandemic that never was in 1976. You may recall President Gerald Ford taking decisive and swift action following a handful of swine flu infections originating at Fort Dix. Based on these few infections, the leadership of the US decided that a pandemic was imminent, and therefore, a vaccine must be produced and distributed as quickly as possible so that “every man, woman and child” in the country could be protected against impending doom.

   In March of 1976, Ford asked Congress to approve his immunization plan at a cost of $135 million (nearly $1B inflation-adjusted). Congress promptly gave their stamp of approval. But, very soon afterwards the “Warp Speed” operation hit a serious snag.

   It turned out that all of the pharmaceutical companies charged with the task of producing the swine flu vaccine were balking because they were going to have to assume all liability for potential damages caused by their vaccines. They were notified in June that their liability insurance policies were being cancelled by understandably nervous underwriters.

   The “Operation Warp Speed” masterminds frantically arranged for an indemnification bill to be introduced in Congress to remove liability from the vaccine manufacturers. There the bill sat with NO action for a whole month.

   But, then, a miracle occurred!

   

   Source: The Kansas City Star, Wednesday, Sep 29, 1976, Page 18

Conclusion

I think we’ve established both means and motive here, folks. I am left with the distinct impression that Legionnaire’s disease was nothing more than a targeted attack on a group of American veterans. I’m convinced that the very same perpetrators are still among us, if not in flesh, then in spirit. They are still seeking the same thing they have always sought - to completely consume the self. The poor souls do not realize they have stepped into the realm of the non-self, never to return to those wonderful and manifold things that make us human.

1. Democrat and Chronicle, Rochester, NY, Tues. July 20, 1982.

2. The Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, Dec. 31, 1978.

3. Muder, Robert R., L. Yu Victor, and Andrew H. Woo. "Mode of transmission of Legionella pneumophila: a critical review." Archives of internal medicine 146.8 (1986): 1607-1612.

4. Fitzgeorge, R. B., et al. "Aerosol infection of animals with strains of Legionella pneumophila of different virulence: comparison with intraperitoneal and intranasal routes of infection." Epidemiology & Infection 90.1 (1983): 81-89.

5. Yang, Xinru, et al. "Structural basis for specific flagellin recognition by the NLR protein NAIP5." Cell research 28.1 (2018): 35-47.

6. Wright, Edward K., et al. "Naip5 affects host susceptibility to the intracellular pathogen Legionella pneumophila." Current biology 13.1 (2003): 27-36.

7. Katagiri, Nanako, et al. "The human apoptosis inhibitor NAIP induces pyroptosis in macrophages infected with Legionella pneumophila." Microbes and infection 14.13 (2012): 1123-1132.

8. Ren, Tao, et al. "Flagellin-deficient Legionella mutants evade caspase-1-and Naip5-mediated macrophage immunity." PLoS pathogens 2.3 (2006): e18.

9. Lin, Jun, et al. "Nickle-cobalt alloy nanocrystals inhibit activation of inflammasomes." National Science Review 10.8 (2023): nwad179.

10. Press of Atlantic City, Saturday, Sep 11, 1976, Page 8.