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Viruses and Diseases

Viruses and Diseases We are there food. Those germs of the past that best converted our bodies into their own propagation are the germs of the present. Those germs of the present that best convert our bodies into their own propagation will be the germs of the future. Why should we care about the prospects of one particular germ over another? Aren’t they all just plain bad? The answer is no. We can never get rid of them all. Their future is our future. If their future goes one way, we will be relatively healthy; if it goes another, we will be sick or even dead. Neglect of the germ’s-eye view of the world is not restricted to the average person; it extends to medicine as a whole for most of its history (Ewald 9). Scientists have proven that some viruses are to blame for certain diseases not the genes that have been inherited. Artherosclerosis is characterized by fatty deposits that develop as streaks inside the lining of arteries and some streaking can be found in teenagers and then by an increasing proportion of the population from then on. If you were to ask the experts what causes arteriosclerosis the answer would depend on the expert. Researchers do not agree on the causation but they have agreed on possible risk factors such as smoking, a high fat diet, high cholesterol levels, high blood pressure, high iron levels, inflammation and bad genes. None of which appear to be the primary cause because if you were to eliminate one possible cause you should eliminate the disease. Many researchers have begun to think that many diseases including cancers originate as a composite of risk factors and that approach does not make sense because it suggests that Human arteries are so fragile that any one or combination of these risk factors can cause life threating damage to it. Such a weakness would have been breed out or caused the extinction of the human species long ago. Besides the fact that half of the people that come down with the disease don’t have any of the risk factors (Ewald 157). In Finland incendance of heart disease is ranked highest in the world that is why many labs there are working cooperatively on that problem. To assess the presence of infection after heart attacks a large sample of blood serum was collected by the University of Helsinki and distributed to several labs. When Maia Leinonan of the National Public Health Institute of Helsinki analyzed the samples for Chlamydia she found that 70% had antibodies for it which was significantly higher than the serum from the control group that had not had heart attacks. And the only species of Chlamydia that could produce such a high antibody rate was Chlamydia Pneumoniae it is a bacteria that is responsible for 1 of every 5 incidence of pneumonia and there were no recent incidence of infection in any of the patients. The response of the scientific community to the hypothetical possibility that the organism at the site of arthersclerotic damage in the artery is actually doing the damage or triggering an immunological response that does the damage was met with mild fascination to strong ridicule (Ewald Evolution 178). In 1992 while studding sections of arthersclerotic plaques from arteries removed during bypass operations the South African researcher Alan Shor found the bacteria Chlamydia Pneumoniae. He then sent samples to the lab at the University of Washington in Seattle. And after performing several tests confirmed that it was indeed Chlamydia Pneumoniae. But such evidence was not enough to satisfy the many critics in the scientific community who prefer to side with the alternative hypothetical research involving diet or genetics the two sides that most researchers have taken (Ewald 109). After several decades and billons of dollars a common gene has not been found. And the researchers that favor the good diet hypothesis have yet to make up their minds. First they have stated a low fat and low cholesterol diet was the answer. Later stating that fats are necessary, that there are good fats and bad fats as well as good cholesterol and bad cholesterol. All the while people who follow these strict diet and exercise regimens for many years and are apparently in excellent health are still dropping dead of heart attacks and strokes. The closest the consensus can come to a cause is the concept of risk factors. Studies can show that certain aspects of people’s lifestyle and biology are statistically associated with increased risk of artherosclerosis. When such an association occurs by chance it is accepted as a risk factor for the disease. But still none of the risk factors for the disease appear to be the primary cause of the disease. Because for each of these risk factors, many people can be found who do not have one risk factor, but still have the disease. With that fact at hand many researchers have begun to think that such diseases originate as a composite sum of the various risk factors. Yet if all of the risk factors are combined they explain only half of the cases of people with the disease (Ewald 65). In 1979 the fifteenth edition of the Cecil Textbook of Medicine, peptic ulcers were attributed to many risk factors: gastric acidity, stress, smoking, alcohol consumption and genetic predisposition. A belief that continued for several years after Australian internist Barry Marshall introduced his theory of an infectious causation the bacterium Helicobacter Pylori. The medical community dismissed his research and added to their lists of risk factors many possible mental conditions. Marshall’s research wasn’t accepted until the late 1990’sThe curing of his patients with a lengthy course of antibiotics showed the irrefutable evidence, that it was indeed an infectious cause. This seemingly backwards attitude of medicine appears primitive in today’s apparently advanced society. Perhaps the admission of an infectious cause for diseases such as in the case of artherosclerosis would amount to decades of dead end research and the end to the cash cow of grants many researchers in that field have come accustomed to (Ewald 101). How could what appears to be the obvious, as in Barry Marshall’s research .The causation of chronic diseases be so easily dismissed even there was evidence of curing peptic ulcers with antibiotics in the late 1940’s at Mount Sinai and Manhattans New York Hospital. It may be attributed to the fact that an infectious cause for disease was being considered to be old school medicine with the discovery of DNA in 1953. Medical Researchers now believed that unravel the mystery of Human disease by studying the human biological building blocks. Indeed genes that cause human disease were found. This information at first was misleading, often the genes found among human DNA that caused chronic disease were not human genes at all. The structures that these genes encoded were not human building blocks but molecular devices of manipulation used by invading organisms (Ewald 105). Virologist Robert Yolken of john Hopkins Medical School and Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey of the National Alliance of the Mentally Ill Research Institute sampled cerebrospinal fluid from individuals with recent onset Schizophrenia, 29%exhibited signs of a particular family of retrovirus known as Human Endogenous Retrovirus W, the same was found in the brain tissue of deceased schizophrenics, and in the control group of healthy individuals. Torrey believes that the HERV-W may lie dormant in all humans but somehow is triggered by another viral infection and when triggered leads to schizophrenia (Gewolb). The list of diseases, cancers, epilepsy and mental disorders that are believed to be caused by infections keeps growing every year and the scientific and medical communities are slowly accepting the research as fact. But what appears to be moving even more slowly is research that would involve a cure or possibly vaccines to the most deadly or most taxing of ailments. If the medical community could stop being so eager to dismiss their colleges research before reviewing all the facts then maybe research could move forward to cures then children would not have to die of cancer anymore or another family would not have to bear the anguish of caring for a family member severe mental illness or disability. Death may never be remedied but suffering may. Ewald, Paul W. Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause CANCERS, HEART DISEASE, and Other DEADLY AILMENTS. New York: The free Press, 2000. Ewald, Paul W. Evolution of Infectious Diseases. New York: Oxford University Press, Gewolb, Josh. “Viral Link to Schizophrenia”. Science Now 4334273 (2001): p4, 1p. Bibliography: Works Cited Ewald, Paul W. Plague Time: How Stealth Infections Cause CANCERS, HEART DISEASE, and Other DEADLY AILMENTS. New York: The free Press, 2000. Ewald, Paul W. Evolution of Infectious Diseases. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Gewolb, Josh. “Viral Link to Schizophrenia”. Science Now 4334273 (2001): p4, 1p.

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