WNV - A Walk Down Memory Lane
Doctors Link Polio To West Nile Virus
Polio Virus Created From Scratch
From Patricia Doyle, PhD <dr_p_doyle@hotmail.com>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/WNVmemorylane01oct02.shtml
Oct 1, 2002
Web posted at www.rense.com
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.
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."
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.
All information posted on this web site is
the opinion of the author and is provided for educational purposes only.
It is not to be construed as medical advice. Only a licensed medical doctor
can legally offer medical advice in the United States. Consult the healer
of your choice for medical care and advice.