- Hello Jeff...
-
- Perhaps these three pieces of information might help
us to understand the 'who' of the current outbreak with NY 99 isolate of
WNV RECOMBINANT... yes, there is reason to believe that WNV NY99 is a recomibant,
manufactured virus.
-
- I have theorized that the WNV RECOMBINANT in the US is
NOT a naturally-occurring outbreak. Furthermore, I now suspecct that the
virus itself has had its "genetic" information "programmed"
to trigger "polio-like" disease.
-
- At this time, I have not seen the lab results of blood
tests on the 6 WNV/Polio cases and cannot state that we have actually isolated
polio virus (aka: picornovirus of the genus enterovirus) but I do realize
that we are seeing WNV trigger a polio-like sequalae or syndrome.
-
- All of the anomolies that we are seeing in the US regarding
the WNV outbreak have NOT OCCURRED in other areas of the world where WNV
is endemic and ingrained in the environment. KEEP THAT IN MIND.
-
- In 1990, the US Government commissioned a study to research
the invesitagion of a WNV vaccine. A couple of years later, the Government
stated that a WNV vaccine was not needed as WNV had not been a problem
during the Gulf War.
-
- Many arbroviruses - i.e. mosquito borne illnesses (in
many cases) - vectored by birds have been endemic in the US. However, these
viruses have been pretty essentially confined to various areas of the country
and have not proceeded to spread coast-to-coast, border-to-border, year-after-year,
mutating and changing as they go.
-
- As is the case with other viruses, like St. Louis Encephalitis,
we might see a few cases of SLE, localized to an area, one year, and then,
no cases for several subsequent years. The same goes for other arbroviruses.
-
- I do not pretend to understand the mechanism by which
WNV Y99 triggers polio-like syndrome, but I do understand that it is NOT
a natural evolution and has all of the indication of man-created virus.
-
- I have heard the theories that either Iraq or Cuba had
released this WNV on the US. Fidel Castro has not remained in power all
of these years by being stupid. If he were to create a synthetic, weaponized
virus, release it by infecting migratory birds, I am sure that he would
know that it would find its way back to Cuba to infect Cuba.
-
- No, I think that we need to look closer to home for the
developer of WNV NY99. I also want people to remember that a synthetic
polio virus was created, from scratch, in a lab at Rockefeller University.
-
- Patricia Doyle
-
- A walk down memory lane:
-
- From the Promed website http://www.promedmail.org West
Nile Virus Update
-
- 1950'S Experiments Using West Nile Virus Carried Out
At Sloan Kettering, NYC
-
- In the 1950's, experiments with WNV were carried out
on human volunteers at the Sloan- Kettering Institute of the Memorial Center
for Cancer and Allied Diseases, New York. A total of 95 patients with neoplastic
disease were inoculated intramuscularly with the WNV topotype strain Eg-101
in an effort to achieve therapeutic pyrexia and oncolysis in them.<
-
-
- From Newsday 09-29-1999 page A28
-
- Area Labs Have Long Studied Virus - Yale And Rockefeller
Began Test In The '50s
-
- "Epidemiologists suspect that the West Nile virus
has for the first time been isolated in humans or animals in the Western
Hemisphere, but the virus has for decades made its home in several U.S.
research laboratories, including Rockefeller University in Manhattan and
Yale University in New Haven, Conn. In fact, investigators there were the
first to grow and study the West Nile virus in the United States. The work
began in the 1950s when unidentified viral samples from around the world
arrived at Rockefeller on a steady basis."
-
- __________
-
-
- Doctors Link Polio To West Nile Virus
-
- By Stephen Smith
Boston Globe Staff
9-24-2
-
- Mosquito-borne West Nile virus is causing a medical condition
rarely seen by US physicians since the 1950s: polio.
-
- In case reports released yesterday, stunned neurologists
in Mississippi and Georgia describe the conditions of four patients suffering
from the hobbled limbs, impaired breathing, and fevers that are the hallmark
of polio, a disease essentially eradicated in the United States.
-
- Just like the polio patients of the first half of the
20th century, the West Nile victims seen this summer by the Southern doctors
are also enduring prolonged muscle weakness and respiratory ailments that
will require months of treatment and probably will disable some of the
patients permanently.
-
- ''I teach this as a historical thing to the residents,''
said Dr. Jonathan D. Glass, director of the neuromuscular program at Emory
University in Atlanta and one of the physicians who treated the polio patients.
''We simply don't see it today. That's why I didn't believe it at first.''
-
- The strain of polio that was so widely feared in the
20th century, and now prevented by vaccines, is caused by a different virus
than West Nile. In fact, West Nile comes from a different family than viruses
known to cause the disease. However, the devastating effects are the same.
-
- In polio, the virus attacks the gray matter of the patients'
spinal cord, which contains the neurons responsible for carrying information
to the muscles. As the attack frays the neuron fibers, muscles turn limp,
often producing uneven results - a leg gone weak on the right side, an
arm on the left. It also results in bladder and bowel dysfunction, along
with respiratory complications that can leave patients tethered to breathing
machines.
-
- According to the Centers for Disease Control, the West
Nile virus has killed 94 people nationwide this year, including two in
Massachusetts, and sickened 1,963, by far the largest outbreak since it
was first reported in the United States three years ago. Although other
viral illnesses kill vastly more people - the flu is blamed for 20,000
deaths annually - public-health authorities are concerned about West Nile
because it has spread from coast to coast so quickly and produced unexpected
symptoms, with polio being the most recent example.
-
- ''We obviously have to learn a lot more about this virus,''
said Dr. Alfred DeMaria, director of communicable disease control for the
Massachusetts Department of Public Health. ''This is another aspect that's
worrisome about West Nile.''
-
- The New England Journal of Medicine released the articles
on the polio link nearly a month before their scheduled publication, an
unusual step reserved for reports of urgent medical importance. The doctors
who wrote the articles said yesterday they believe it is vital that their
findings circulate among physicians because some of the patients they treated
had been misdiagnosed and prescribed treatments that could have been life-threatening.
-
- And they suspect - strongly - that other cases of West
Nile-induced polio have gone untreated and unreported. After discovering
polio in their own West Nile patients, the physicians in Mississippi and
Georgia decided to review previous outbreaks. In examining autopsy results
from New York City in 1999, the first time West Nile was identified in
the nation, the doctors uncovered symptoms that struck them as remarkably
similar to the cases they had seen this summer.
-
- Dr. A. Arturo Leis, a neurologist at Methodist Rehabilitation
Center in Jackson, Miss., saw such a patient in late July or early August.
He recalled walking into an exam room and witnessing a 56-year-old man
who had been referred to him because of muscle weakness. In reviewing the
patient's medical chart, Leis discovered that the man had been diagnosed
weeks earlier with early signs of a stroke and prescribed blood-thinning
medication. The same man also was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome,
a disorder in which the body's immune system attacks part of the nervous
system.
-
- Only after running blood tests, observing symptoms similar
to polio, and performing a battery of electrically activated tests that
record activity in nerves and in spinal cord cells, did the Mississippi
physicians reach their diagnosis: polio, caused by West Nile virus.
-
- Previously, severe cases of West Nile had been characterized
by meningitis and encephalitis, the brain swelling that is regarded as
the most serious consequence of the virus. But the muscle weakness and
other problems associated with polio were not evident.
-
- ''I thought, `This is extremely unusual - this can't
be,''' Leis said. ''How can a virus, in this case West Nile, change its
clinical properties to such a marked degree? It had typically not presented
this way.''
-
- The medications the man had received initially, Leis
said, could have killed him. The stroke drug could have caused a hemorrhage,
and the medicine initially given to treat his misdiagnosed case of Guillain-Barre
had the potential to result in a stroke. That's why the Mississippi and
Georgia researchers became so determined to share their findings on the
link between polio and West Nile.
-
- Leis has now seen four cases of West Nile-related polio,
one additional since he wrote his journal article. In Atlanta, Glass received
a call from a suburban physician one Saturday night in July. That doctor
was confounded by the symptoms of a patient he was seeing. She had muscle
weakness, along with fever and meningitis. The kind of muscle fatigue she
was experiencing was consistent with Guillain-Barre, but that disease does
not typically produce fever and meningitis.
-
- ''The guy called me and said, `Help. I don't know what
I'm looking at,''' Glass said. ''And I said, `I don't know what you're
looking at either.'''
-
- The 50-year-old woman, who lives in Louisiana, which
was hard hit by West Nile and was in Georgia visiting grandchildren, was
transferred to the university hospital in Atlanta. There, a neurology resident,
Dr. William Hewitt, examined her and confirmed the presence of an unusual
constellation of symptoms.
-
- Glass spent the night poring over old medical textbooks
and epidemiology reports on the New York cases. All evidence began pointing
toward polio.
-
- The woman treated by Glass is expected to survive but
remains in a rehabilitation hospital. The four patients in Mississippi
also will live, their doctor said, although three will probably have permanent
disabilities.
-
- Stephen Smith can be reached at stsmith@globe.com.
-
- This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 9/24/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
-
- __________
-
- Synthetic Polio Virus Created
-
- As part of a program to develop biowarfare countermeasures,
scientists synthesize live virus from chemicals and PUBLICLY-available
genetic information.
-
- By Jessica Rappaport
Tech Live TechTV.com July 12, 2002
-
- Creating a deadly virus is easier than you think. Tonight's
"Tech Live" reports on controversial research that's causing
a stir in the medical community.
-
- A majority of us don't recall the big polio scare that
plagued the world at the beginning of the 20th century. Nobody worries
about it now because there's a vaccine, plus the virus is practically extinct.
Or so we thought.
-
- Dr. Eckard Wimmer, head of a biomedical research team
at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, re-created the virus
as part of a research project funded by the Pentagon to combat biowarfare.
The research was published in the journal Science on Friday.
-
- Downloading virus info
-
- What's more disturbing is that his team was able to re-create
the virus by using the Internet, downloading the virus' genome sequence
from one of a number of databases.
-
- "There are databases that have the numbers for certain
viruses," Wimmer said. "And you plot in the number in a computer."
-
- His team purchased the genetic material from a company
that makes made-to-order DNA.
-
- It took his team almost three years to re-create it,
securing research grants, including $300,000 from the Department of Defense,
and performing the actual lab work.
-
- "We were wondering for a long time if you can treat
a virus as something that is retractable from the Internet," Wimmer
said. "We decided to design an experiment by which we take the info
out of public domain and convert it into an entity -- in this case DNA,
which we can then synthesize. So we would start in part with something
that's on paper, in part not even that, on a computer, and create and re-create
the virus."
-
- Why polio?
-
- He chose the polio virus because he has worked with the
virus for over 30 years. He says it's a relatively simple virus. Re-creating
a virus like smallpox would be much more complicated.
-
- "If you were to ask me, 'Would you be able to do
this with other viruses?' the answer would be with small viruses, yes you
could. However, if you were to ask me, 'Could you do this with the smallpox
virus?' the answer is no. The smallpox virus is much too large to re-create
it in a test tube. However, technologies [will] progress in the coming
decades and biotech progresses very fast. One can anticipate their putting
together the precursors for a large virus. Like Ebola is going to be a
possibility," he said.
-
- Even when viruses are extinct, people will still have
to be inoculated. "We better be prepared," Wimmer said, "We
would want to stockpile, for example, vaccines. And we would want to control
maybe the production of these precursors."
-
- With terrorism at the forefront of most people's minds
these days, TechTV asked Wimmer why he chose to make his study public.
-
- Going public
-
- "I have always said that secrecy breeds suspicion
and if we had done this work and word had leaked out [that] some guy somewhere
had produced a virus in a test tube, people would say, 'Good Lord! Can
you imagine?' The press would be all over the place," he said.
-
- But members of the scientific community say the ability
isn't new.
-
- "This was an example that has been anticipated about
a little over a year," said Dr. C.J. Peters, director for the Center
for Biodefense at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston.
"There was a meeting at the National Academy of Sciences talking about
these very same issues. The conclusion was yes, the polio virus can be
synthesized. Other viruses can be constructed from their particular genes
and eventually we will be able to synthesize those genes and put them all
together." Peters added that he didn't think there was a great scientific
achievement from that research.
-
- Furthermore, Peters disagreed with the way in which the
research was presented to the public.
-
- "I think science is something that belongs in its
own sphere. I think making public warnings and social statements is pushing
things, particularly if it is done through the scientific medium,"
he said. Peters is on a National Academy of Science committee that's looking
into bridging the gap between the public and the scientific community.
He says the public, the government, and ethicists need to be on the same
page and discuss how to handle this information in a way that provides
more security to the global community without compromising the scientific
data.
-
- Wimmer was surprised that the study galvanized this much
attention, but he understood how unsettling it is to learn how easy one
can re-create a deadly virus.
-
- "I think the research has to be done because we
have to do these things rather than one day be surprised when some person
uses that to attack us," he said. "But it is better to do it
now when there is not a problem."
-
- Posted July 12, 2002
- http://www.techtv.com/news/scitech/story/0,24195,3391655,00.html
-
- See also: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2122619.stm
-
- __________
-
- A Final Note -
-
- The WNV that has broken out in the US has already taken
a massive toll on our birds. Each month we learn of new species of birds,
raptors and water fowl now infected. Many raptors, such as our eagles,
some species of owl, and hawks are already endangered. This virus could,
very easily and quickly, wipe out the small numbers of these threatened
species.
-
- Please, if possible, feed the birds during the coming
winter. I suggest putting up suet, and/or bird feeders or simply sprinkle
bird seed on the ground...but whatever you do, please feed them. If possible,
and if you are able to change bird water daily, please water them as well.
Some of the birds may be ill or left with other impediments that will prevent
them from the ability to find food.
-
- To some, I understand a bird may be considered a pest.
Please remember birds have a critical place in the balance of our ecosystem.
If we loose many of our birds, will may end up with terrible pestilence
as mentioned in the Bible. Insects, especially mosquitos will thrive if
our bird numbers are drastically lowered.
-
- Thank you for your kindness,
-
- Patricia Doyle, PhD
-
- Please visit my Emerging Diseases message board at http://www.clickitnews.com/emergingdiseases/index.shtml
-
- Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa Go with God and in Good
Health
-
-
- Patricia A. Doyle, PhD Please visit my "Emerging
Diseases" message board at: http://www.clickitnews.com/emergingdiseases/index.shtml
Zhan le Devlesa tai sastimasa Go with God and in Good Health
-
-
- Comment
-
- From Joseph Ehrlich
- Senderberl@aol.com
- 10-2-2
-
- SenderBerl: This article shows the value of the Internet
site Rense.com - and supports our perception that WNV represents a damaging
platform of bioterrorim traceabe to the new world order crew. However,
these two facets prove to our minds that the hidden link is China. What
the Bush administration fails to recognize is that China operates so that
the U.S. can never prove it - unless it first admits to its own culpabilities,
and that the more the US acts pursuant to the National Security Strategy,
the more China is compelled to put the squeeze on the US through covert
bioterrorism. Ipso facto, Bush pushes on Saddam and the WNV will escalate
(or another alternative thereto) to redirect resources domestically. The
U.S. and the world will see only a connection to Saddam and China will
thank the US for creating that link itself.
-
- Read every word of this material because you won't find
it in the mainstream press and media and it's important.
-
- Sender, Berl & Sons Inc.
|
