Emerging Viruses 2°
A new virus among the emerging ones is certainly the one that in Japan and precisely at Chitose, 30 kilometres far from Sapporo, affected 2,000 people with symtoms which were very much alike the ones of cholera and diphtheria. The announcement was made by the sanitary authorities of the northern island of Okkaido.
At this point let’s leave, momentarily, our coversation about emerging viruses in nature to be involved in the experimental studies on viruses. What is strange is that whenever an unknown epidemic breaks out people wrongly appeal to genetic engineering. The fact is that we often know about experiments and incidents in this field only when they have already happened. So, for example, in Birmingham, Prof Philip Gallimore was forbidden to go on with his researches on the coldAdenovirus. By inserting an oncogenous gene in the virus nucleic acid the English scholar had created a microorganism who was capable to spread like the one of the cold but could cause the carcinogenicity of the infected cells. The order of suspending the experiments was based on the lack of sufficient safety measures. Maybe the memory of the nurse who was killed in 1978 by the smallpox virus escaped from a lab,still lives in Birmingham.
Another accident, this time without any consequences, informed us very infectious and lethal viruses are kept at Yale University(Connecticut). One of these, belonging to the Arenavirus family, because of a break in a centrifuge for experiments, in August 1994, infected a scientist, even though the scholar was wearing gloves, a mask and a protective suit. Only a case prevented an epidemic from breaking out because the victim realized, after some days, he had been infected.
This virus, called Sand after the name of the Brazilian town where it appeared for the first time, isn’t so contageous as the one of the flu, but causes serious hemorrages in the affected subject who dies because he oozes blood from his body orifices and all his skin pores.
If we remember what happened in Austrlia with the Mixoma virus and the local population of rabbits, nothing prevents us from thinking viruses that are lethal for man, may be used for homicidal purposes, perhaps to free the world, for ever, from ideological opponents and leave a population that may be entirely lined up with those who made use of these extermination means.
On the other hand we cannot feel quiet when we hear a man with three test tubes containing bacilli of bubonic plague was arrested in Ohio.
The man, a Larry Wayne Harris of forty-three years of age, had got the test tubes from a Maryland lab after presenting some false credentials of a microbiologist.
Some scientists are thinking of reviving the virus of the 1918 terrible flu by thawing out it together with the bodies of some miners who died of that disease in the Norwegian isle of Spitsbergen. A member of the expedition, Peter Lewin, a Canadian paedriatician, asserted: if the virus is still active it runs the risk of spreading in all directions.
Back again to emerging viruses Filoviruses deserve a separate discussion. At the end of April 1995 Italian mass media reported the piece of news about the death of two nuns from Bergamo who had been killed at Kikwit, 500 kilometres from Kinshasa, the capital city of Zaire, by one of the new emerging viruses: Ebola.
These first deaths were followed by many others in an epidemic which caused much more sensation because just in those days the movie”Virus letale”( the original title is “Outbreak”) starring Dustin Hoffman was released in Italy. This movie is basewd on a book”Aria di contagio”[1] (the original title is “The hot zone” by Richard Preston.
The virus Ebola is the real protagonist of the book and the movie.
The various strains of Ebola together with Marburg have been included in the only family of Filoviruses[2].
While studying this kind of pathogens I realized the history of their appearance and of the epidemics they caused, is a sort of practical summary of all the theses I’ve supported till now.
First of all there is again a double almost contemporaneous trans-species jump: in 1976 both the strains Ebola-Zaire and Ebola-Sudan appear in two epidemic focuses respectively in Zaire and Sudan at a distance of 800 kilometres one from the other. The Zaire variety is decidedly more violent than the Sudan one, therefore we soon notice a certain similitude with what happens with HIV-1 and HIV-2 and so it’s more difficult to consider a phenomenon like the one of the trans-species jump which often recurs as if it came about only by accident.
We remember that, according to Burnet, nearly all the viruses that have adapted themselves to invade man come, at the beginning of civilization, from animal reserves[3]. This transfer is still going on and always Burnet, in the fifties, gives us many examples: St. Louis encephalitis, equina encephalomyelitis, paralytic rabies in Trinidad, Q fever in Queensland and in the western United States[4].
[1] Preston R. Area di contagio RCS Libri and Grandi Opere Milano 1994.
[2] Kiley M P, Bowen E T, Eddy G A,Isaacson M, Johonson K M, Mc Cornich J B, Murphy F A, Pattin S R, Peters Prosesky Q W, Regmery R L, Simpson D I, Slenczka W, Svreau P, Vander Der Groen G, Webb P A and Wuff H. Filoviridae: taxonomic home for Marburg and Ebola Virus Intervirology 18:24-23 1982.
[3] Mac Farlane Burnet F. Virus as organism. Pag.32 Harvard University Press 1950.
Macfarlane Burnet
[4] Macfarlane Burnet F. Op. cit pag.32-3.
Translated from “Il Virus Intelligente” by Enrica Narducci
To be continued in:
3)Emerging Viruses 3°
4)Emerging Viruses 4°
5)Emerging Viruses 5°
6)Emerging Viruses 6°
See also:
Ferdinando Gargiulo offers you a new perspective on why new viral epidemics, assaults, infanticides, suicide epidemics and even environmental catastrophes. Always engaged in his research decides to create a blog to offer his readers content of high value.