H1N1: An Experiment Gone Awry?
Influenza type A is particularly interesting as the only major virus of humans which quite often and naturally appears to cross species barriers. Several mammals and numerous birds are host to many subtypes of influenza A which, particularly amongst birds, may jump species.
Reassortment of genes of an influenza virus from humans with those from another animal species, seemed to have been the source of the abrupt appearance of new sub-types which produced the pandemics of 1918, 1957, and 1968.
The unexpected appearance on 4 May 1977 in Anshan, in northern China, of the H1N1 sub-type (which had been extinct in humans for more than 20 years) with a molecular structure virtually identical to the virus which caused an influenza epidemic in 1950, has been described by scientists as mysterious.
However, several virologists postulated that the 1950 strain which, along with many others, had been kept deep-frozen in laboratories for 27 years, had escaped and the epidemic ‘resulted from a man-made event’.
According to a writer in Nature: ‘Chinese and Soviet scientists have denied (this) possibility of the origins of the … epidemics in their countries, and most authors writing after 1978 have been content to write off the event as ‘a complete mystery’. However, artificially freezing in 1950 of this rapidly evolving RNA virus, its artificial storage and subsequent release, is the only plausible explanation for its reappearance genetically unchanged 27 years later.
The only genuine remaining mysteries are precisely which laboratory the virus came from and the circumstances of its release.
- Crossing the species barrier – viruses
and the origins of AIDS in perspective.
J Seale for the Journal of the
Royal Society of Medicine
1989-09-01
There is no argument that the United States of America – and every other world power – maintained an active biological weapons program which would include live samples of every contagion at hand throughout the course of any outbreak – it would be surprisingly inept on the part of the scientists working on these programs had they failed to retain samples.
Evidence exists for the BW program at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland and numerous public acknowledgments of the United States biological weapons program are on record – by 1969 the offensive bioweapon research was supposed to have ended, though defensive bioweapon research continues.
The difference between researching offensive biological weapons and researching defense against biological weapons is a moot point when one considers that either mode of inquiry requires plenty of specimens on-hand…
… and what better way to perfect one’s protective measures than to think like the enemy and engineer new strains to defeat…
While we’re at it, freezing and thawing pathogens, let’s go ahead and re-create the nastier bugs whose time came and went before the convenience of refrigeration came into play:
An effort to recreate the 1918 flu strain (a subtype of avian strain H1N1) was a collaboration among the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City; the effort resulted in the announcement (on October 5, 2005) that the group had successfully determined the virus’s genetic sequence, using historic tissue samples recovered by pathologist Johan Hultin from a female flu victim buried in the Alaskan permafrost and samples preserved from American soldiers.
On January 18, 2007, Kobasa et al. reported that monkeys (Macaca fascicularis) infected with the recreated strain exhibited classic symptoms of the 1918 pandemic and died from a cytokine storm – an overreaction of the immune system. This may explain why the 1918 flu had its surprising effect on younger, healthier people, as a person with a stronger immune system would potentially have a stronger overreaction.
- 1918 Flu Pandemic: Spanish Flu Research
retrieved from Wikipedia.org
2009-10-17
What do you think? Is this recurring pathogen improbably reappearing every few decades without showing any signs of aging – or is it more likely that there is a human hand in the resurgence (and the suspiciously-irascible hype) which colors our most recent and hysterical PANDEMIC?
