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New Antiviral May Cure Common Cold
Max Karpiak writes "CNN is reporting on a new antiviral which may cure the common cold as well as many other viral infections. What's especially cool is the way this drug was created: it was designed specifically to counter viruses, not just discovered in a hit-or-miss fashon. Geeks designing molecules to attack viruses? Awesome!" Neat stuff. So, what other "fantastic" science applications are on the verge of actually entering the market?
Interesting moderation well deserved !
... just a point of vocabulary. You said :
... you are CNN, you have a drug, viola!
;-)
Yet
That's inexact. It should be voila !, the french for there it is !.
According to the Webster, viola stands for :
1 : A musical instrument of the violin family that is intermediate in size and compass between the violin and cello and is tuned a fifth below the violin.
2 : Any of various garden hybrids with solitary white, yellow, or purple often variegated flowers resembling but smaller than typical pansies.
Just being pesky
Foolhardy autocrats like _________ must die !
People who use idiotic words (and may or may not be idiots) can make web pages, too. I hope that was your point.
Stop replying to your own posts 14 year old boy with no life.
3133t h4Ck37z ar3 th3 0n1Y 1's VVh0 u53 "V1r11" CuZ 7h3Y c4N 0VVN Ur Py00t3r W1Th Th3M!!!!!
No pages on biological viruses turned up when I searched for "virii."
I agree, in America intelligence is respected but ignorance is enthroned. Most people I know or encounter have a deep seated contempt for dwelling on or caring about intellectual issues. Like yourself I refuse to wear the mantle of geek or nerd just because I think or care about the world around me.
>They operate in a specific range of temperatures. Considering that the one's we're worried about (human-infecting viruses) have to operate at OUR body temperature (30-odd degrees extremities to 37 degrees core), we should be particularly worried about global warming enabling viruses to survive better outside of our bodies! Imagine if you could catch (say) HIV through sneezing!
:-)
:-)
:-).
:-)
Sure but you body temperature will always be about 30-37 degrees, unless you are dead.
And you can catch HIV, Colds, etc... in the summer and winter. Viruses don't care about ambient temperature (unless you burn them up or freeze them, but at those temperatures, we'd be dead also), as long as the host is the right temperature - and that won't change.
And, to the best of my knowledge, viruses aren't any more communicable when it is warm outside, or when it isn't. But that is just my guess. I suppose a comparison of viral sickness in the Sahara Desert to viral sickness in Siberia might be in order. But I don't have the stats for those places.
And besides, our destruction or non-destruction of the environment by moving still doesn't affect viruses. There are many ways to destruct the environment without making any difference to viruses (unless they run out of people and animals to feed off of).
I might agree that the mingling of different peoples has spread viruses, but I don't necessarialy agree that our moving around the planet ruins it. Ruining the planet and viruses are two different points and don't meet (unless you want to ruin the planet with a Doomsday Boms...
I'm not trying to pick at stones, but this is how I see it:
If I take a trip alone to the African rainforest, look around, pick up a virus and return, and give others this virus to which none of us have immunity I haven't likely affected the environment. I have, however spread the virus to people without immunity.
I just don't want another touchy feely save the environment tone added to this discussion. There are enough nuts (and my definition of a nut is someone who believes blindly in anything that supports their cause - whether it is true or not) out there that willing to introduce the death of humanity thru the ruining of the environment into everything that I don't need to hear it ever again. No, I don't hate (or particularly dislike) groups like Greenpeace and other environmental groups out there, but I do dislike reading crap about global warming when I haven't seen a SINGLE article on it that leaves me with enough info to make an informed decision.
And the CFC crap just totally did me in on a lot of environmentalist theories - a company wants to keep their patent so they manipulate the gullible (environmentalists) to the point where they believe their now freed from patent chemical (freon) is dangerous so everyone should use their new patented product (can't remember the name - I think it was DowCorning who made freon). A bunch of real lame claims later written in newspapers and even the public believes.
But, you do have a point. In a small way, the environment you are currently in affects your chances of catching certain viruses, so I suppose, in an even smaller way, our treatment of the environment has a little to do with it.
But only in a real small way.
I know, but I'm too afraid to speak out. Let's just say your "worst case" is an extreme parody of the crimes they already commit.
Fascist rubbish. Maybe you should read "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" by Richard Milton. And no he's not religious.
Both of those new flu drugs are neuraminidase inhibitors, but this drug apparently is not. I never found a good description of the mechanism for pleconaril. If fits into a groove on the capsid. As best I could infer, it prevents the capsid from opening.
For the record, I looked up neuraminidase inhibitors. Then my computer crashed before I got my message posted. Neuraminidase molecules stick out from the flu virus particles like spikes. In general, a neuraminidase cleaves glycoproteins (IIRC). I think the new flu drugs keep the virus from binding receptors on lung cells and lead to the formation of weaker virus offspring with unstable capsids.
You morons scare me, really!
Hey, guy, not all right-wingers are homicidal maniacs, just like all "East-coast liberals" are tree-hugging, touchy-feely wimps! See, the brainless insult game is easy to play. It also is completely meaningless as far as this discussion goes. (attempting a radical procedure, he injects 50cc of common sense and sanity) - Diplomat
Virus colds are caused by we humans heating our homes to 90 degrees and then entering nature which has it freezing. We rely too much on technology and nature can't natural select a better human body. No other animal gets viral colds but the weakened un-natural human animal. We need a clear plastic bubble helmet to avoid nature completely and our polluted lives. A great consumer tech item for all geeks everywhere!
After working as a sysadmin in both the pharmasutical and agrochemical industry I've met and know several people who's lives' work is nothing more than plunking down in front of an ass-kicking SGI and working on generating various molecules and chemicals to fight disease, insects, or plant fungii. Geeks using chemical/molecular simulations to fight evil isn't anything new. It's good to see that it brings forth great strides forward in medicine and agribusiness.
So what happens now is that the drug gets abused like antibiotics have, ("What, no antibiotics for my headache? Okay, I'll go and see another doctor!") and as a result the bugs get stronger and better.
:)
I haven't had a flu for ages. I take multivitamin supplements and huge doses of vitamin C and drink about a pot of coffee a day. Now that I've said that, I'll probably end up sick tomorrow
The drug will kill off the viruses that are susceptible and leave behind the ones that are resistant and we will be right where we are right now.
I love all you people who bitch and moan about patents. You whine and complain about not being able to use someone elses intellectual property, while ignoring the fact that without the patent system in place, these advances wouldn't be happening. Drug companies are not charities, they develop these great new products because they know they can make money off of them. Without the patent system in place to protect their huge R&D development costs, they would not be producing these new drugs.
Not to sound like an ass or worse, but think about what you said... "be a godsend for people with immune system problems " "It's not going to make us "soft and useless"" Well I happen to disagree. I mean if we start feeding this stuff to people with immune system problems just think of the immplications to society as a whole. We will be slowly corroding the foundation of our immune system until the only thing keeping us alive is the damn medication. I don't think people with immune system problems should be subjected to death when there is a medicine that can save them. But in order for our race to surive and not be dependent on technology these people should not be given this type of drug. I know this post is ethically questionable, but before you reply really think of the implications. Not to you but for your great great grand children and beyond. Do we really want to create a society with no immune system. This boarders on the line of Genetic Enginering.
OK, I guess we're going pretty off topic here and I'm late replying to you, so to reduce noise I'm posting as an AC - however this is crush replying to you.
Automobiles seem like a good example to me. Effectively, we kill one another just so we can get somewhere fast. Electricity kills people
I would agree that this is a parallel example. And the number of people killed by automobiles is far higher than are killed by the flu!. If you factor in the results of respiratory diseases from particulate emissions on top of plain old meat grinding then it becomes a major health problem.
I'm strongly in favour of removal of the automobile on the grounds of it's being a public health problem (let's also not forget the concommitant heart disease problems due to a lack of exercise caused by our lifestyle).
I guess the reason that I am debating this with you is that I see your argument as being a case of "arguing from ought to is". Just because we do things doesn't mean that we should. Just because we have insane public policy doesn't mean that new public policy should base itself on that alone. If you would argue to the contrary then we are left with no chance of improvement.
So, back to whether we ever have a chance of eliminating viruses. Possibly. It seems highly unlikely though. The feeling that I got from my undergrad micro and evo courses was that there is just such a diversity of life that has the potential to harm us, and in the case of viruses are able to evolve so fast, that unless we have really co-ordinated planned strategies, such as the one that you suggest in this post, then we are doomed to failure.
Piecemeal application of prophylactics to the population without considering evolution and epidemiology can only result in creating resistant strains (for info on the power of Nat.Sel. see "Natural Selection: The Factor in Evolution"by Graham Bell", a good journal for the epidemiology side of things is "Emerging Infectious Diseases".
Round viruses!
Don't try to outsmart yourself with Latin. The correct plural is "viruses".
Thanks for correcting that. It's a huge pet peeve of mind when people put on intellectual airs and they're really stupid and/or lazy. A quick trip to Merriam Webster's online dictionary would help a lot of people in this joint.
"Natural Selection: The mechanism of Evolution" Graham Bell, (Chapman & Hall 1997).
+
I should be eating more chicken soup
+
ey, I read in the Jerusalem Post
Are you trying to tell us that you're Jewish?
I call myself "Irish" because I'm one of those goddamned Yanks both of whose paternal grandparents were born and grew to adulthood there. In the USA we use our grandparents' (etc.) nationalities to describe our, uh, ethnicity. "Irish-American" is clumsy and tedious.
I'm bitterly, bitterly sorry if this annoys you. You really can't imagine the number of violins I'm playing here. I'm crying a river, a genuine goddamn river. Really. By the way, you should start hassling the Irish government, too, because by their rules I'm eligible to go there and become a citizen . . .
In closing, I don't know if I'll succeed in irritating you further by mentioning this, but it won't hurt to try: I'm Catholic only in a sentimental sense. I really don't believe a word of it.
Ever heard of humor? Parody? No? Oh, well. Maybe next time.
Medical science and drugs are part of human evolution now. You'll have to live with it and might as well start enjoying it.
Just great. Keep all the people who can't afford it (at this price, most) suffering from colds. [sarcasm] Wow, I just LOVE the patent system. [/sarcasm]
I know one thing - I will remember this company everytime I get a cold now. And every time I can't afford to get the medication, I will grow more and more angry at both them and the patent system. Maybe if enough people are like me, something will happen to our patent system (like it'll be fixed)?
Of course, if after their R&D is paid off (about 6 months after release at $100 a hit), their price goes down to something both they can profit on and I can reasonably afford (say $10 a hit) then my anger towards them will go away... And I'll have renewed faith in both the patent system and the ability of companies to manage themselves. Yeah, right... and pigs are gonna fly in pink clouds.
Why environmentalists don't get listened to:
Here's what heppened to me (and a lot of others):
We were happily reading your post, and agreeing with most everything in it. It is true, I believe, we are going to step onto the virge of a possible viral pandora's box. But here's where you go wrong in trying to convince people:
You mention global warming, and the destruction of the earth by people during your post, as if they have something to do with viruses. Neither have anything to do with viral epedemics. Sure, when we move places en masse, the environment there is changed. And it might be good or bad. But the changing of the local environment to suit us has nothing to do with viruses. They'll live there wether we mess it up or not. In such a short post, you really must stay DIRECTLY on topic.
Then you move to global warming. What the hell does this have to do with viruses? I don't agree that global warming as the environmentalists describe it exists, but that dosen't matter. What matters is viruses will live whether the temperature goes up 20 degrees or lowers 20 degrees. Stay on topic, again.
When I see stuff like this, I begin to doubt the validity of your opinion, just like I would doubt the validity of the opinion of the guy on our local street corner who holds up signs saying the police are spying on him. Even if he said the truth, I wouldn't believe him. If he were to put down the sign, and I had never seen the person before, and told me a totally non-police related opinion, I would put a little faith in his opinion, and investigate further.
(please don't take this as a flame, just a freindly suggestion).
(Sorry for the run-on sentences, they happen sometimes...).
I suppose we shouldn't tell him that there is a parasitical agent that invades the gonads and makes them MUCH bigger. You just may get that cart.
Your position and what you think my position is are unclear to me. You seem to be advocating better public health
As I see it so far.
I really don't think we're that far away from each other. It's just that I am, as you may have guessed, slightly intolerant about this as it seems like a conspiracy of ignorance and populist freedom-mongering. That latter is again an old argument. My take on it is that my freedom not to breathe polluted air/get knocked down counts for more than others' freedom to sit in urban traffic jams. Having visited parts of Europe where these beliefs have been implemented as public policy I feel quite convinced this is what should happen.
Because they are writing for dummies... ;)
Eugenics isn't scientific, that's why it was abandoned. Genetics isn't as orderly as originally thought. Genes for disorders can lie dormant for many generations, then rear their head when combined with another gene. You don't have to trust me on that, read about eugenics in a text book or something.
As for this being a cure, go read the article. This medicine reduces the period you are sick by a few days, and reduces the symptoms. It will not stop you from becoming sick.
Scary how low the intellectual level can become even in a forum for geeks, sometimes.
Actually, I'm Irish Catholic. Isn't that the default ethnicity in Boston? I mean, if you're doing stereotypes. I'm not from here originally, though.
Why I read the Post is a long, long story.
Incidentally, chicken soup really has been medically proven to have some kind of positive effect on people with colds and whatnot. I'm serious. Once in a while, an old wives tale turns out to have some truth in it.
aargh! substitute effect for affect, can't believe I wrote that especially as I posted on that very topic not so long ago!. Also I note that I was saying "ought to is" in previous post and meant "is to ought". Sorry
Moderate this up you clueless karma whores!!!
It's american assholes demanding to get antibiotics when obviously suffering from common cold causing this MDR problem.
Check the post. What's where the "n" should be?
NOTHING!
Therefore, the "n" stands for nothing.
Slashdot should include an option for a spellcheck. That would at least reduce the perceived stupidity quotient of some of the comments.
That's the longest and funniest reply I've ever read to an Autocomplaint.
"Fascist rubbish. Maybe you should read "Shattering the Myths of Darwinism" by Richard Milton. And no he's not religious."
There is a book and a counter-book on just about everything. Hell, ever heard of the bible? Evolution makes complete sense, as does his post.
Just because he says it will lead to a healthier population does not make him a fascist. No matter what his thoughts are on it, he's just stating a fact.
I'm for more homeopathic remedies for minor things
Do you like taking sugar pills? Check this out for info on homeopathy http://www.csicop.org/si/9709/park.html
Hmm...
:)
This made me remember a film or book or something about how the common cold got eliminated or something, then humans immune systems evolved to not bother being sturdy against it, and then it came back and killed us all or something. Ringing any bells?
Hmm... [again]
Wait a minute, I'm thinking of that alien movie where they kill aliens with the common cold. Which one was that? Old skool sci-fi classic... hmm... war of the worlds...?
Argh.. someone fill me in
Speel chick hays pod lemmings of E.T.'s one.
It's sort of like most americans saying "we" when they talk about the research and inventions of others who live within their nation. It's sad, really.
"I see you clinging
stereotyping
just to feel comfort
just to belong
desperate for meaning
to make sense of your life
...
I'd rather die
than be a part of your pride"
No Use for a Name - More Betterness -- Pride
I get 502's all the time. Slashdot's engine is clearly faulty. Sometimes when I click on a link, it forgets who I am. I guess it's too much work to interrogate the cookie correctly.
Please stop coddling and protecting Rob Malda. He does not deserve your respect. Rather, he deserves our enmity for failing to live up to his promises.
Thank you.
The effete pointy-headed intellectuals of the East Coast, the nattering nabobs of liberal negativity, have done it again. Any fool can see that this is a hoax, an absurd presumption of infallibility by the murderers and thugs who brought us the eighty million innocent corpses killed by Communism.
Oh, hell, my heart just isn't in it this morning.
This anti-viral thing sounds neat. I hope it works. I live in Boston and I suffer like a bastard every winter. As soon as I get over one cold, another one comes along a day later. I should be eating more chicken soup, I guess. Hey, I read in the Jerusalem Post that some medical researchers somewhere recommended to the WHO that chicken soup be put on their list of antibiotics or something! That's pretty cool, and the article ran last week (as opposed to April first
I first became aware of this in a nationally syndicated column ("Ask Isadora" Ask Isadora) in a local alternative paper and followed it up with some research in my local community college library. I now take 500mg of lysine (which, BTW, is an amino acid our bodies need but don't produce) on a daily basis and no longer have genital herpes outbreaks.
Arginine is found in nuts and some other foods. I suggest avoiding arginine-containing foods during an outbreak as well. Also: get plenty of rest, water and exercise.
I've felt your pain. You *can* get better. Good luck!
That's right! "Virii" is definitely plural for many of a single type of virius.
You heard me right: "virius". What is a "virius", you ask? Why, nothing; it's not a word. And neither is "virii".
Idiot. Go play in traffic or something.
Well smart drugs are to the drug industry what the smart bomb is to the military. Question is will the virus evolve a way around these types of drugs? Evolution and all that. Also would you pay $50.00 to $100.00 for a cure for the common cold?
According to Webster's Online, a word is "something that is said". 'Virii' is most certainly said, and is therefore a word. Deal with it.
Imagine that the drug is a competitive inhibitor that closely imitates a cell receptor. It would be very hard for the virus to develop resistance without losing virulence.
Well, IIRC virulence is usually the result of the latter stages of infection by a pathogen. The stages are something like Attachment, Invasion, Replication, Release. The Latter parts of the cycle involve the release of the virulence factors like cellulases, heamolysin etc. Those are the bits that do the real damage and cause illness. So stopping the binding to cell-surface receptors would be selecting against a separate "functional" part of the viruses phenotype.
So, I guess I would draw a diametrically opposed conclusion - if one is providing a selection pressure only against attachment/invasion then the virulence factors are not selected against. So, if resistance does develop to the drug you've got a virus with the same virulence factors and a new way of entering the cell. The likelihood is that in all the billions of virus phenotypes out there there are many that have different ways of binding. Probably at the moment they are less effective at binding to the cell and thus reproducing than their fellows, hence lower frequency in the population. Along we come, change their "environment" and thus they ramp up in frequency in the population.
I have little faith in public opinion, legislative integrity and healthcare company ethics. While she has good ideas and so do you, you both are living in fantasies from my perspective. Intolerant idealism does not solve problems. A perceived solution that has no hope of ever being implemented is not a solution. Take the Clinton healthcare initiative.
I think you've got to have faith in public opinion. Legislation should flow from this and that will control drug company ethics. So, I believe that the biggest chance we have of making any succesful changes is by understanding what people want, telling them what the facts are and then allowing them to make the decisions which our elected officials implement for us. I used to believe in top-down solutions imposed on people but I don't think they work when people are really opposed to them. The most stunning example of the opposite is the southern Indian state of Kerala which has achieved incredible health-care reform on a small budget through education.
Clinton dropped the ball by betraying the large public constituency that wanted some sort of state health-care. He sold out to business lobbyists. Now he has no friends.
With regard to the Europeans, I wasn't arguing about individual personality traits, just some of the systems that they have in place that seem to work.
Sidenote: the British wellfare state was introduced as a result of the realization by the government during the First World War that it was presiding over a nation of very sick people and this was bad for wars and industry. There wasn't enough data available until the army recruiting boards were examining all those people.
Anyway, I'm going to drop this thread now. It's been fun talking with you though.
Regards,
Crush
It's an idiotic word.
TrollHumper
What the f*ck are you doing on this forum, using a computer, if you object to scientists? Computers are a product of science. That is to say, they are a product of REASONABLE DOUBT, NOT IRRATIONAL FAITH. Go live on some hippy commune somehere, and don't blame me if your entire colony is wiped out be something stupid like meningitis.
www.infidels.org
Customer? customer? You Americans scare me, a lot!
OTOH, it certainly is great to see the hardworking medical geeks finally getting some recognition!
I hate this! What ever happened to the term scientist or researcher? Why is it that on SlashDot people think that anyone with a brain is a geek? This sort of shit makes me cringe everytime I read it.
The terrifying thing about Spanish flu is that it didn't just kill the weak, it killed the wrong people. A very high proportion of the fatalities in the 1918 pandemic were otherwise healthy twenty to thirty yearolds. Don't ever think you know better than natural selection about what constitutes "fittest", it will surprise you every time.
Antibiotics do not, and have never done a thing against viruses. They kill bacteria, viruses are left unscathed by them.
And most vegans are not an example of a healthy diet -- what's your point? Also realize that your being vegan has nothing to do with your wound healing faster or the absence of the need for morphine. You can argue cholesterol and blood flow all you want.
..."
"Of all the mammals on Earth
Meat is still murder, dairly is still rape -- Propagandhi
While I agree with this, you must also take into consideration the fact that at this point it is impossible to go back. There are just too many humans on this planet to adopt less efficient means of food production. Also note that when it comes to meat, we are no different than meat eating animals. You can sit and complain in your home all you want, but the same commoditization that brought people the ability to become vegan also allows us to commodify meat. There is also the fact that it is virtually impossible to be a vegan in a natural environment.
There are also symbiotic relationships between sheep, elk and goat herders in old world countries where they protect the animals in exchang for the coat or milk or whatever. There is nothing wrong with this. It is actually an efficient relationship that ensures survival of both.
I still agree that the commoditization of certain foods has brought environments not exactly healthy or in a symbiotic interest to the animal. There is, however, nothing we can do about it. The only solution is eliminating a large quantity of human population. I could even argue that our control of certain plants is not in their interest of spreading as a species -- but then, since they are not similar to us, and do not feel pain like us, you can just ignore that fact.
I admire you -- but let's look at reality. Human nature will never know, and is incapable of utopia. The dilemma is one of the balance of nature -- not human capability. The only viable solution is just as cruel as not coming up with one.
I need to know!
Not a bad idea but I'd recommend a scoped .30-06.
Actually this drug attacks the basic structure of a whole class of viruses, so that would have to be one heck of a mutation.
Where they tried to eliminate aging by creating a virus that was supposed to stop aging at puberty. The side effect was that it accelerated aging for everyone who had already gone through puberty.
Probably the fact that HIV is constantly changing and this can only recognize what is defined by their recognizing in research?
Do not answer. He knows he is wrong.
You said it brother.
I can hit the reload button for seven hours straight.
My fear is that after generations of using these superdrugs, we will require their use in order to survive. Our bodies might forget about the need to fight nasty diseases after several rounds of evolution. But, that's not what I fear. I fear patents will be lobbied to last 1000 years.
OK, its "what if" time. Worst case. Invent the cure for the cold-2.6.111-xxxx and you could have a lot of "willing" customers. Imagine the drug companies buying the mass production food companies and cutting costs so disease could spread. Sound profitable?
Did you know drug companies have legal on half their payroll? Why is this?
>I think we'll need to be cautious about these new drugs. Why, just the
>other day I saw a rerun of ``Bewitched'' where Dr. Bombay came up with
>a cure for the common cold. The side effects when used on humans,
Be Afraid. Be very afraid. Remember the Star Trek:TOS epidsode "That Which Survives" in which an entire race managed to wipe themselves out by a disease accidently created as an side-effect of their planet-engineering technology?
Quick, somebody get a net.
rm -rf microsoft*
What are you smoking? I've never had a 502 from /.
/., call it /dev/null perhaps?
Considering the user base, Slashdot is doing an incredible job.
Go make your own
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Why did they not use the perfectly good word "placebo" instead of making up the less-specific and confusing term "dummy pills"? Sigh.
The article states:
Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill) is the latest in a short list of medicines that kill viruses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding has always been that viruses are technically not classified as living things, and thus they can't be killed. (Destroyed, perhaps, but certainly not killed.)
begin 644
A cure for the cold and other viral agents is certainly very nice, but what I really want is a drug that makes my wanker bigger. When that comes out I'll be eating them with breakfast, lunch, dinner until I have to drag the thing around on its own little cart. Until then, medicine won't be all that exciting.
This is my sig.
If the West Coast is filled with communists, then why is that the West Coast is making so much money? Microsoft is on the west coast, do you suggest that Bill Gates is a communist? And, if the west coast is filled with homosexuals, which I doubt, is that really a bad thing? You can avoid watching TV, surfing the net, watching the movies, and living a bunker afraid you might somehow turn into a gay communist, but I'm gonna go take the cold pill so I can get well, go and take a chick to a movie and hopefully score. You right wing types always confusing being afraid of god with being afraid of life. This east coast christian liberal feels obligated out that while you are quaking in your life-fearing boots that my assualt rifle is better than yours! Go back to work on your end of the world bunker and leave us alone.
This is my sig.
Not this old canard. Longer lifespans do not appreciably increase the worlds population. Learn some simple math about exponential growth.
All the deathrate does is increase the constant factor of the equation. Most people do not keep having children as they live longer. Even if everyone died as soon as their children turned 15, but they had 4 children, the population would continue to growth exponentially. The proper thing to do is to reduce birth rates by exporting education and capitalism everywhere.
This naive viewpoint that living longer hurts the ecosystem or increases population pressure has been debunked over and over by cryonics advocates, and other anti-aging groups.
I just wish the fucking anti-technology green leftist wackos (especially the damn paranoid "oh no, beef and gm foods will kill us, we can't take *ANY* risk") would stop their campaign of LUDDITE fear.
fuckers. They will block life saving technology for a stupid ecocentrist agenda.
Me, I hope I can live 200 years and get off this fucking rock to escape the bastards.
My Freakin Blog
I originally made my reply much harsher. Then I decided there was no good reason to be mean and that I should be accommodating instead.
... or a rubber chicken?" -- The Muppets (What was that one named?)
There is yet another factor to consider, herd immunity. If enough people in a population are resistant to a disease, that disease cannot propagate effectively. In effect, the whole population gains immunity. I think 70% is the estimated fraction of immunization necessary for herd immunity with many diseases. Prophylaxis is not so one sided. Drugs have to get much better, to the effectiveness of vaccines, before it will see like a convincingly good idea. The benefits of herd immunity may outweigh the risks of super resistant mutants. Widespread treatment of nuisance disease potentially shields the people with weak immune systems by reducing the number of contagious people. I do not know beyond doubt which decision is better. I doubt anyone does. In any case, I do not think the answer is at all obvious.
I believe human life is a valuable, precious thing. We should not take actions that are going to kill people. Realistically, we do it anyway. Automobiles seem like a good example to me. Effectively, we kill one another just so we can get somewhere fast. Electricity kills people. It also lets us flip switches and argue about killing people. Your example of the student speaking out against the old argument is good, but it doesn't make the problem vanish. The flu vaccine kills people, and the flu kills people. We get to choose whether to take the vaccine. Both choices hold the possibility of death. Whether or not we make utilitarian calculations, the possible consequences are there. Even something like a cold can kill people when it allows a secondary infection to take hold. Even drugs made to avoid inconvenience, like ones to treat common colds, often have the potential to save lives and the potential to kill people. It should never be strictly a numbers game. However, it is an unavoidable problem in many cases, and we can try to make decisions using the numbers.
As for driving to exinction, it's the only way I know to prevent a species from evolving. After a species is gone, however, other organisms eat its food. I'm not trying to excuse biological extermination. I'm not for "give me convenience or give me death." I'm simply trying to argue that we will cope with microbial disease for as long as we are good food. Since humans are big repositories of nutrients, chances are really good that things are going to keep trying to eat us. I think there is a different,--Viruses don't eat.--but analogous--Viruses have hosts.--situation with viruses. Maybe we'll get really, really good at coping. I hope so.
For the record, I'm pretty new to this biology stuff. My college background is in physics. I have had a few undergraduate level biology courses, including micro this past fall. I learned that material well, but the course was only introductory. I am trying to become a research physician.
"Would you prefer death
Your position and what you think my position is are unclear to me. You seem to be advocating better public health. Specifically, I think you demand that epidemiology and evolution, not just effectiveness and toxicity/side effects, be considered in the drug approval and prescription process. I agree. I think I'm less fervent than you. I'm not quite sure which approaches you think are best and what you see as the errors of my reasoning.
We have to deal with these problems within the framework we are given. That framework is really messed up. I don't think that something should be because it already is. I do think that what is is going to be with us for a while, even in the face of good arguments and good evidence. Powerful forces are at work. In a world of bad policies, we have to do what we can to make better policies and, in the meantime, deal with the current policies. The NIH, CDC and similar organizations seem to have many brilliant, cautious, moral scientists. They only can suggest policies. As an American, I am obsessed with liberty (not that the USA is close to as free as most think). Stupidity and wrong must be allowed.
The automobile has its upside. Life expectancy has risen. Automobiles do not directly promote health; they hurt it. They do facilitate technology. We can distribute medicines. People can go to universities and become researchers. People can get to hospitals and doctor's offices. Food can be transported. All of these good things could happen without people driving as much as they do. Walking and public transportation could eliminate many of the risks without losing many benefits. Every societal phenomenon I can consider has an upside and a downside.
Intellectual property is the real problem. Drug companies, now often called "biotech," are financial monsters. I heard Dr. Ruth Hubbard speak about a year ago. She was the first tenured woman biology professor at Harvard, and now she's a speaker, writer and activist for biological issues, especially feminist ones. She discussed a company that is genetically profiling Iceland. When the job is done, the company will own the data. Drug research and development have long been shaky ground. As we get better at them, their problems will loom larger. Now companies own and patent organisms. At some point, I hope people, through the governments of the world, will put public health before profit and decommercialize biotechnology, especially healthcare. She pointed out major financial problems of public health. These miracle drugs are nice for us Westerners and Far Easterners. 1% of us die from infections. Circulatory disease and cancer are our major causes of death. 46% of the undeveloped world die from infections. New drugs make more money that older, effective drugs sold at lower cost. Third worlders are short on cash. (The numbers came from my Brock Biology of Microorganisms.)
I don't think we're there yet on combating resistance mutations. I feel that we're going to get much better in the near future, maybe very good within 25 years. Evolution is very old, though. As far as I can tell, there will always be risks from infections and risks from their treatments. It is sad that these biotech companies pick an area based solely on financial potential. We are inviting danger. The danger arises from selfishness and greedy doctors. People want to feel better now. Too many doctors cave. Public health takes a back seat to personal health.
I'm less a believer in the doom of drug resistance. Drug resistance is bad, yes, but the treatment of apparently trivial disease can have great benefits. One argument is that we are going to create supermutants that will kill people. Another argument is that we already suffer. These diseases already kill people. A regular bug can look like a supermutant when there are no effective treatments. The mutants aren't going to put us anywhere new; they'll just return us to where we were, to a time of untreatable influenza (or whatever). The Golden Mean. We should not spew medicines out so much that we create mdr bugs that will kill pepole. We should not tell people they have to suffer and even die because we don't want to create mdr bugs. People do die from trivial disease. Having thousands of untreated contagious people everywhere has its own risks. We have to balance the tradeoffs. Of course, we don't understand quite what the tradeoffs are. It's tricky.
Thought: How will resistance affect virulence? If a drug becomes ineffective, will the new resistant bugs--I'll assume viruses.--be any worse than the virus strains before we had the drug? I would guess that the answer rests with the drug's mechanism. Imagine that the drug is a competitive inhibitor that closely imitates a cell receptor. It would be very hard for the virus to develop resistance without losing virulence. Imagine that the drug imitates some immune response. A resistance mutation could spell disaster. The new virus strain would be more resistant to the drug and to our immune response. At this time, we might not be smart enough to think clearly about this question.
When Dr. Hubbard was here, I asked whether she advocated a socialized health care system. As I expected, she said yes and contrasted us with nearly every other developed country on earth. IIRC, I then asked about how we are supposed to implement one, and she said something vague about legislation. I have little faith in public opinion, legislative integrity and healthcare company ethics. While she has good ideas and so do you, you both are living in fantasies from my perspective. Intolerant idealism does not solve problems. A perceived solution that has no hope of ever being implemented is not a solution. Take the Clinton healthcare initiative. His ideas may have been terrible. Maybe they were good. I do not know. I just know that he got nowhere with them and that people were in an uproar. Knowing what human forces we are up against is as much a part of the battle as knowing what disease forces we face.
Sidenote: When I tried to do a little (and very light) web research on these new antiviral drugs, I came across a NASA page. They grew neuraminidase protein crystals in microgravity. I guess they couldn't get good crystals on earth for x-ray crystallography.
I saw the movie Awakenings, I think. I don't know anything about the epidemic. I would write that I'll look into it. I'm sure it's interesting. Honestly, I probably won't look into it.
Europeans are idiots. So are Americans, but it's a different kind of idiocy. I used to think Europe was great until I started meeting Europeans. They were generally more aware than Americans in historical and cultural terms. They also tended to be very dogmatic and critical. They never seemed much different in critical thinking and debating abilities, just more offensive and rude.
My eyelids are getting heavy. I'm done writing for tonight.
I'm not so sure that the size of the virus would increase. Viruses (always?) self-assemble. The capsids have specific geometric shapes. Many viruses are icosahedral, for example hepatitis B. The subunits must be shaped and charged the right way for capsid assembly to happen. The geometric constraints make a size change in particle size seem very unlikely to me. It happens, though, that the proteins can change enough to foil the drugs and the immune system without the virus particle or its genome significantly increasing in size. There may be protein that is different to the drugs and immune system and still functional for the virus without being bigger.
As for a change in genome size, your reasoning seems good to me. A smaller genome that can do the job has its advantages.
The reasoning is not perfect. We do see some viruses that are larger than others. It appears that the size of the largest genome is bigger now than it was a few billion years ago. As you note, the balance of evolutionary factors is a delicate one. Nature always has its surprises.
Allow me to quote myself. "Even if they drive one species to extinction, another one can take its place." I recognize that extinction is always a possibility. I wrote so the first time.
As for resistance mutations against pleconaril, the researchers at ViroPharma have already seen resistant coxsackievirus B3 variants (whatever those bugs are). They claim that, as you guessed they might be, they are less virulent. See J Infect Dis 1999 Jun;179(6):1538-41. You can look for PMID 10228078 at PubMed and read the abstract just as I did.
I'm not sure what you mean about the inevitability of "the Red Queen's race." I do not doubt that we can continue to make strides in public health. You might mean that we will eventually stop having to run the race. You might mean that there are some diseases we can beat. You cited good examples for the second interpretation. I think there will always be diseases for which the race will continue, at least until we have a big change in what drugs do and how we take them.
Non-human reservoirs are going to be problems for a while yet. Some diseases have hiding places where they can come up with new mutations. There are other strategies against them, though. We have seen great success with the combination of rabies vaccinations for most dogs and rabies vaccinations for humans when necessary. If we can reach a time when these diseases are the ones we really have to worry about, I think we'll have an easier battle with them. If we have good drugs that we don't give to the reservoir, the disease might not ever feel enough selective pressure for resistance mutations to become a great problem.
Smallpox eradication, the example you cited, was so successful because humans were its only hosts. AIDS might be specific enough to humans to allow for its elimination through multiple drug therapy and better public health.
As with AIDS multiple drug therapy, we can force the mutations necessary for resistance to be extremely unlikely, maybe impossible. It is going to take some big steps in drug development, drug prescription practices and patient cooperation.
My mother the pharmacist told me about the 30-30-30-10 problem of medication. 30% of the people will be helped by a drug. 10% will react adversely. 30% will experience neither significant benefit nor harm. The other 30% won't take the drugs.
What gave you the idea that I think the indiscriminate use of drugs is a good idea? I think you missed a few sentences in my post. I'll get to it later in this post.
As for handing out cures that end up hurting or killing some, welcome to the nasty actuarial world. Many treatments are going to have beneficiaries and victims. How much non-fatal misery is one death worth? Sadly, that question probably does not matter. About half the web links I found for ViroPharma were financial profiles. You have a good point at the end of your post. Welcome to the nasty capitalist world.
If we get very good at drug design, more prophylactic drug use may not be so unreasonable. It might become an intelligent, viable public health strategy. We do not think vaccination is ridiculous even though we are effectively helping direct the evolution of some organisms. Let's consider your example, the flu. Right now, we do a pretty good job of vaccinating for the popular strains each flu season. What is stopping us from reaching a time when we can come up with effective drugs for the strains of each flu season? We are not there now. Preventative use of drugs has its dangers, as we have recently repeatedly learned. I see nothing that makes the approach intrinsically bad, though. Right now, it's just not prudent for many diseases.
As for whether viruses are living, it was a segue into explaining that viruses do carry genetic material. Because they carry genetic material that is imperfectly replicated, resistance mutations are possible in a fashion similar to resistance mutations in undebatably living organisms. Because many viruses have sloppy polymerases, their mutation, as you pointed out, can be very rapid. The flu has the added danger of antigenic shift. Hybridization can couple with mutation in deadly ways. I'm sorry you don't like my rhetorical style. Considering the discrepancies between what you read and what I wrote, my rhetoric hit a big speed bump this time.
I do not think that multiple drug resistance is no problem. I do not understand why you thought so. I have talked at length to a healthcare professional about this issue. (I call her "Mama.") A major point of my post is how difficult a problem drug resistance is.
Please allow me to clarify. I carefully chose to use "whether" in my sentence "Good biologists laugh, cry and bang their heads in frustration when people worry about whether resistance against some deadly substance will happen." We do not need to worry about whether we see a mutation. Because mutations will happen, we need to worry about what mutations we should expect, how important they will be, how they will affect the virulence of the individual mutants and the larger population. In the first post, I wrote, "[Smart farmers and doctors] concentrate on finding methods that make their weapons as effective as possible for as long as possible." I think that is exactly the point you made. There is already a journal article about pleconaril resistant mutants. I cited the abstract in another post of this thread.
I think we agree on most points in this debate. I'm sorry I didn't make my position clearer to you two posts up the tree.
According to the estimates I read, the flu of 1918 killed more people that World War I. I got my shot for this flu season. The microbiology course I was taking helped convince me to get it. They are not just for hospital workers and the elderly. The vaccine, like Relenza, always kills a few people, but it is less deadly than the flu.
They try to speak another language that they do not know. It is not a sin; it is just an error of convention. I do it, too. With the diversity of sources for English words, it is difficult or impossible not to. Calm down, Beavis.
Doesn't the jargon file clearly document the hacker cultural trait that such linguistic extensions are made in fun, even knowing that they are "incorrect"? Correctness in natural languages is over-rated, IMNSHO.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
I just hope this one is used responsibly, unlike the antibacterial things we now use.
Note that by responsible use I mean that it's not overused. That was the problem with antibacterial stuff. It was used so much that natural selection kicked in, and now we're stuck with drug-resistant versions of many of the old diseases we thought we had conquered.
If this is used as a treatment for the common cold, I'm all for it. I just hope they don't try and market this thing as a way to prevent the common cold. Otherwise, we'll be able to hear our old buddy Darwin laughing at us as this stops working in a few decades.
Americans can't even spell "colour" or "aluminium" correctly.
The english language continues to evolve just like a living thing. Ha, tenuously on topic or what?
If enough people say that "virii" is a real word and is the plural for "virus", then so it is.
Course, sometimes bad spelling or grammar make it difficult to read.
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Go search on any search engine.
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Earth first? Oooh, and I was thinking of paying the rent.
Maybe I'm missing the profound insight here, but I think this comment was supposed to be funny. I sentence the Slashdot moderators to watch TVLand until their nostalgo-humor is properly functioning.
I never get 502 errors. YOU are the one who is faulty. Change your internet provider.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
"read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said."
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"Insert witty quote here."
That's what really frightens me. Back in the days when antibiotics were new, nobody thought of resistance (because it was a new concept), and used the new drugs too much. Now resistant strains of bacteria are everywhere, and the old antibiotics are nearly useless.
Perhaps if the FDA requires that any antivirals be used in combination with at least 1 other, resistance could be prevented.
The "cure" doesn't immediatly kill every cold virus in a person's body. It binds itself to a number of the viruses making it so they're unable to attack cells. However, the all of those viruses are still in the bloodstream, and will still be cleaned out by the person's immune system as foreign particles. That means that the person's immune system will still be trained to defend itself against them.
Common sense is what tells you the world is flat.
>>okay, i feel stupid posting this Fear not! For you have hit the nail on the head! It is natural selection that will allow the common cold to grow stronger with this attack on its purpose in life and will come back as a viral King Kong disease! The common cold allows our bodies to keep in shape to fight other more powerful viral infections. Sort of like a workout which if we ignore, we'll fall suseptible to more deadly diseases and strains of viral patterns. Not to mention eliminating excuses for missing work for a day or two (what are we thinking playing into the hands of CorpGovLLC). Take a day off darn it! Enjoy that viral cold!
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Hey, What a great insightful post. Thanks. Does mankind want to take on regulating and controling the planet? Are we comfortable cutting down rain forests? The rain has to fall somewhere don't it? Won't that rain begin falling massively onto our land? Do we really want to start allowing children to be born who can't handle something like the common cold because medication has allowed them to escape the common cold experience? Will the day come when any infection will kill us if we get it? Are we that afraid of being at dis ease? Are we really that afraid of simply slowing down and taking a day or two to rest? What's next, a cure for sleep? Catching a common cold is a warning sign...you are worn out people, slow down, rest. A common cold is a warning sign...your community is being neglected. People who have a general sense of well being and experience less stress, are healthier. Scientists are hoping to allow overworked stressed out individuals to keep on creating consumer goods so CorpGovLLC can squeeze out yet another point toward the bottom line. Personally, sleep is the last excuse i'm allowed to leave the factory floor to do. Please don't find a cure for it. Or at least before you do, eliminate work. The only thing a body oughta do 24/7 is party.
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
Yeah,War of the worlds ended like that, yeah. It was the infectious air we breath everyday and are immune to that got them. We didn't attack them with it, it just got into their ships and into them when they foolishly stepped outside without any protection. ...Maybe scientist should invent a giant condom that fits over our entire body...
an enigma wrapped around a paradox driven by a paradigm shift
I've always assumed that there was a cost to any evolutionary "progress". I expect evolution to occur, but wouldn't you expect the size of the virus to increase. So the cost of making new copies would increase. So the rate of reproduction should decrease. Which would give the immune system more time to recognize the virus at the beginning of an onslaught. (I don't know if this would help, but it does make the equation more difficult to balence.)
I have that bacteria don't carry much "junk DNA", and I have attributed it to the cost of carrying the excess DNA (when you are a single cell in size). Certainly one would expect viruses (or Viri...I rather like that form) to be even more subject to this economy.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Agreed, and those limits are determined by the amount of variation in the population.
No matter how strong a selective pressure you excert against non-flying house cats, you'll never get one that flies
Are you sure about that? Given a large enough cat population and a suitably increasing selection pressure I bet you could get something similar to a flying fox
put down that cat! It's a gedanken experiment!
Now, there's probably some possible mutation that would cause resistance, but there's a reason why it's not common in the population.
I didn't see that data that showed it wasn't common in the population?
Also, and more importantly, it doesn't have to be common, there just has to be one (with a suitable dispersal and reproduction rate naturally - the whole thing is meaningless without a consideration of the parameters of population structure)
Disclaimer IAAEB too!
Of course evolution happens when selective pressures are significant enough to kill off most of the viral types that aren't specifically resistant
Evolution will happen even without selection pressure. In fact most evolution is neutral evolution, just the accumulation of random mutations and the stochastic fixation of alleles due to random drift. But that's besides the point - just a nit.
I'm in agreement with the rest of your point though - it would be damned hard to get people to co-operate in following whatever public health measures one tried to impose. Hence, as you very probably aware MDR TB in inner-cities of the U.S. There have been a lot of very ineffective programs and it's been damned hard to try and figure out the psychological reasons why people won't take their drugs (prophylactics I mean ;) ).
I preface this with the obligitory "I'm not a doctor but...", with the but being that I remember a thing or 2 from the class on historical epidemics that I took a while back.
:)
And if I haven't completely lost my memory, that's not how the flu works. It directly kills very few (those who were really on the edge) but the most devastating effects are against the strong and healthy. The victim's own immune response is responsible for their death in many if not most cases. That cuts out your HIV argument, since an individual with a comprimised immune system will not be able to have a deadly powerful immune response. This premise is illustrated by the fact that said 1918 flu had its worst effects among otherwise young & strong soldiers participating in WWI.
Or, if you follow The Onion's point of view (from their book), it's all the fault of the Spaniards
Pleconaril is the generic name for the medicine, e.g. the chemical name for the compound. When the drug company markets the drug, they give it a catchy REMEMBERABLE name like Virukil or something else that the PR dept thought of. That way the Docs and patients have an easier time remembering that company name for the drug and not some others company's name for it when it goes off patent. I know that most MDs usually refer to the drugs by their trade names (company names). Pfizer Pharm had trade-marked the name Viagra many years ago and were just waiting for the right drug to give the name to.
..........FULL STOP.
It's hard to reply to this statement since you are pretty much in the dark about immunology.
The common cold and every other virus is able to mutate like a mofo and they do it constantly. I'm sure that the common cold and a bunch of other viruses will still be able to infect us.
Bacterial and fungal inf ections would also not be affected by this drug and would still present challenges to our immune systems.
So the bottom line is don't woory.
..........FULL STOP.
As I recall, colds and flu mostly evolve in domesticated animals (such as pigs) in the Far East. Humans get them from the animals, and pass them around the world.
This being the case, you wouldn't necessarily expect super-strains to arise in humans, since the natural reservoir of animals won't be getting the drugs. Instead, the diseases would be effectively prevented from making the species-hop.
Actually global warming (or even normal climatic shifts) are very relevant to the spread of viruses. Very slight shifts are enough to change somethings preferred host, or to squeeze some species out of existence. As an simple example, the Black Death comes from infected fleas on rats. The fleas actually prefer rats to humans, but if the rat dies, the flea settles for second best.
The hard thing is to evaluate the degree of risk.
You just made my day.
CNN. News that WHAT????
What's even more likely, IMHO is that a drug will transform itself into something that has new side effects along with its new desired behaviors.
Very similar drugs (say, different by one atom) can have very different effects on the body. Just look at ephedrine vs. speed... they have similar effects, but definitely not the same effect.
Adaptable drugs sound cool, but we don't know what they'll adapt into. Perhaps harmful viruses themselves?
One area I could definitely see self adaptation used is in laboratory research to develop new, non adaptive drugs.
Either way, things like this are dangerous. Not that we should ignore their possibilities, just that we should tread carefully.
I wasn't suggesting that "increased population leading to even more increased population" was a bad thing in itself (though I think it will be), but more that if there are more peple alive *at the same time*, there are more resources consumed concurrently, and existing problems get worse. We already have problems with illness, poverty, social security, health care, damage to the environment, etc. with our current population; these things only get worse when you increase the number of people involved. That's the simplest math I can suggest, my anonymous friend.
Re:Any chance this could lead to tougher virii? (Score:2)
by tve (--- t.erven - chello.nl --- ( - -> @)) on Saturday January 15, @09:53AM The article states that it fits neatly into a groove on the surface of the virus. That sounds to me like the only selection process here is that of the form of this groove. So the only thing that could happen is that viri that have a different kind of groove will survive and that the others will not.
Being a biochemist/immunologist, I can tell you that the "groove" on the surface of this particular form of virus is more or less equivalent to two nostrils, in human terms. It's not something that we're going to change through evolution anytime soon - it's an integral part of our anatomy. This groove on the virus casing is pretty much the same. Our nostrils don't help us reproduce, but this groove is part of the replication process of the virus. If you inhibit this step, you inhibit the replication.
Matt
Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. Albert Einstein
Pleconaril (prounounced plah-CONN-ah-rill)
Saying that a viral protein could quickly evolve into one that works in an entirely different way is analogous to saying that filling rooms full of people and shooting them will select for bullet-resistant humans.
Who said anything about quickly? From the viewpoint of the virus, it has eternity to try and evolve a defense. And as far as the bullet analogy, it would select for the fastest, most nimble humans. Now, if those humans could reproduce from infant to adult in an hour (as viruses' can), they might keep ahead of the gunman.
That's for bacteria, not viruses.
Viruses and bacteria evolve by almost identical mechanisms. Natural selection relies on random changes to the genome that impart advantages to the host, which are then passed on to the progeny. Bacteria and viruses just display these changes faster because in the matter of 24 hours, they can go through 24 generations. So it is also for viruses, not just bacteria. Hell, it's for every organism on this earth.
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
I should clarify. I don't know of anything that has come straight off the computer screen and worked. They all need tweaking. Many drugs are based on computer predictions. However, our knowledge of structure based drug design just isn't good enough. Yet. I could be wrong, though, I don't know the history of acyclovir.
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
If the drug is intelligently designed and binds to a part of the protein that is critical for its proper function, for example, resistance mutations will give rise to defective viruses
Assuming the virus chooses to continue to function in the way we think it will. As soon as you introduce a drug which interferes with a function, you have placed selective pressure on that protein to evolve a new mechanism. Any which result in a non-viable virus won't propogate, obviously, that's what selective pressure is all about. Any that do, however, have an advantage over the other strains of the virus.
That's how we have Vancomycin resistant strains now. Vancomycin is a drug of "last resort," yet there are strains showing up which are resistant. If I recall correctly, the bug "changed" the chemistry it was using to synthesize its cell wall. Vancomycin blocked a protease needed in the synthesis, and the new resistant strain "decided" to use an ester bond instead of an amide bond to get around the drug. The talk I saw boiled it down to one hydrogen bond. That's almost impossible to design against. Fascinating and scary, all at the same time.
Jerm
Oh I get it, you're not a real doctor, are you?
No, no I'm not.
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
A virus is an RNA and/or DNA strand inside a protective protein capsule. Saying it is alive is like saying a printing press is alive. They both do a specific job with specific materials, and nothing else. The virus replicates itself, often swapping DNA coding with the host, and sometimes causing extraneous damage.
Bad Mother%&@*er?
Typically American to charge $50-100 for a single dose.
At that price I'll put up with the flu and save myself the future of a severely depleted immune system and the unforeseen cancer thanks to the drug.
They are always ahead of their knowledge, causing more trouble than the sickness. Here's hoping that this new drug is better than the antibiotics that have almost killed me and have killed others who did'nt need them in the first place.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
"Imagine the drug companies buying the mass production food companies and cutting costs so disease could spread. Sound profitable?"
This will be the point where I pick up my AK47 and start opening up some CEO heads.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
If there is cancer in my family tree, it is so far up the tree, that I am unaware of it. Except for one case, my grandmother. She ate red meat 3 times a day, bacon and eggs for breakfast, ham sandwich for lunch, lamb roast for dinner type of meals. She died in her 40's of bowel cancer. This fact, along with the statistics of bowel and colon cancers, are enough to sway me to never eat meat again.
Our closest ancestors are vegans (except when they kill their own in conflict). They have the sharp eye teeth that is supposedly proof that we are carnivores, they have flat back teeth for crushing vegetable matter, they have long convaluting intenstines designed to break up vegetable matter, flat blunt nails, etc.
On the other hand, the real carnivores of the world have much longer and sharper eye teeth, sharp back teeth for cutting meat in a scissor fashion, short intestines with very strong stomach acids, and long sharp nails for snaring prey.
Humans are designed to eat vegetable matter. Since we are "so smart", we have found that meat is more convienient and we have made it a part of our various cultures. Easier for us perhaps, but what about the Earth? To feed one human on meat, we could feed 10 on the grains that we used to grow that meat. We flaten rainforests so that McChuck can sell kiddies a $2.95 McCancer meal.
Nothing that anyone can say, quote or link can sway my opinion. I am living proof that humans do not have to eat dead animals. I had a period of complete health, for years not getting the colds and flus that were all around me, then I started seeing a girl that ate chicken but no other meats, so I started eating chicken to be less of a burden. Within weeks I was getting those colds and flus again. Meat weakens the bodies immune system.
Western medicine agrees with holistic medicine in that meat is cancerous and weakening of the immune system. If I die of cancer, then I may reconsider what I have made of my life.
Ironically, we are now seeing bacteria that our antibiotics cannot kill. Problems that have arisen from the usage of antibiotics in the fowl that we eat. Mother nature will beat us, our "intelligence and knowledge" will render us extinct and allow the Earth to continue on it's natural evolution.
I honestly hope this does happen. We do not deserve this great planet.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
"2. We should be carefull that viri don't keep on evolving up to a level that we entirely loose control."
The big danger lies in accelerating the viruses evolution whilst weakening the humans immune system. Killing viruses with medicine is something new to us, so who knows what terrible long term side effects may come of it. We might start the ball rolling on something far beyond what we can handle.
Doctors have been giving women drugs for morning sickness and menopause, which have now been found to cause cancer. Where will it end?
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Beef *does* kill. People that eat red meat often, usually are found to suffer bowel and colon cancer much more than vegetarians. And no, I'm not reading this from a Health Food Store catalog, every western doctor from GP's to hospital surgeons have also said this to me in reply to my 14 years being vegetarian.
I recently had some minor back surgery, and the doctors and nurses were shocked at the speed at which the wound healed. I also did not need any of the morphine shots that were set for me during recovery. I left the hospital the next day.
Of all the mammals on Earth, we are the only ones that not only continue to drink milk after being weened of it at a young age, but we drink the milk of another species! A practice that also harms our own young when we force it onto them. We consider ourselves to be pretty smart. Our arrogance far out weighs our knowledge, showing just how unintelligent we can be.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
... usually is of a particular shape so that it will fit into a slot on the cell-wall of a cell (think key and keyhole if you need a metaphor). if the virus 'mutated' so that it had a differently shaped key the drug would be ineffective but so would the virus.
caveat: i'm no biologist, i'm just remembering what i learned in college biology
You've heard it used because it is a valid word, just not the right one for this circumstance. Virii would be plural for many of a single type of virus, like there are 40 trillion poliomyelitis virii in that patient (which has no relevance, but is a good example...). Viruses is plural for many different types of virus, like the common cold is caused by many different types of viruses.
Actually, I'm faily sure acyclovir was design from scratch.
This IS a better explanation. When I said "from scratch" I meant "not a product which is either naturally occuring or designed to mimick the effects of other naturally occuring entities," NOT "produced by 3D modelling." Acyclovir is a very simple drug, but even it was almost certainly tweaked between the 3D design and actual production stages.
"... if they'll lower prices once they've paid for development." Probably not, but they will have to once the generic equivalent comes out. Drug patents are 17 yrs in length. But the drug company patents it immediately after it is discovered to work in rats. So that was probably ~ 8-10 yrs ago minimum. So about 7-9 yrs are left on the patent. After the generic equivalent comes out (assuming it is equivalent) they will be forced to reduce the price to stay competetive
-----Transmission Complete----- If you want to email me...Don't
I know nothing about microbiology, but this drug seems a tad off the wall. In the past, drugs were (and still are) a lot more brute force. They contained things like antibodies or poisons. Antibodies are an obvious solution because the have existed since living organisms contained more than a single cell. Poisons like ozone, chlorine, ethanol, etc, are also obvious because they destroy anything weak enough.
That's why I wonder if this may be an exception to the rule. Aids is smart enough to disable our immune systems, but is it smart enough to bend to reflect this drug? Or will research have to continue like mad to build new versions of the drug like a Windows antivirus program?
Time will tell.
Ozwald
Even if medical insurance didn't cover it, I certainly would pay that much. Think of it as a net financial gain if it prevents lost work time.
People will pay that much for a night's worth of recreational drugs. My overpriced drinks at the strip bar probably came to $50 last night. I'm sure plenty of people value several days of not feeling bad over one night of feeling good.
That's not too unreasonable a fear (though I'm not going to worry about it). All the elements needed to cause it already exist. Copyright keeps getting extended before old copyrights expire, so it essentially lasts forever. And, pharmaceutical manufacturers have no problem with selling physically addictive drugs (benzodiazepines and SSRIs to name two classes). The advertising we see on TV - ads that don't even say what the drug does but telling you that you need it, the Paxil ads that try to make everyone think they need some, advertising by the "news" and government (Bob Dole) for Viagra.
I'm afraid that I have to disagree with you. The previous poster brought up some very interesting (and fairly subtle) connections between people's manipulation of the environment and viral activity that you appear to have missed entirely.
For instance, at one stage all of the different parts of humanity were relatively isolated. Each group of people lived in a particular area, and grew accustomed to the various viral challenges that existed in that area. In a genetic sense, these people developed long-term (generational) immunity to many of the viruses that existed.
However, when these groups begin to mingle, you suddenly find that a group WITHOUT immunity or resistance to a set of viruses comes into contact with that virus. The result, as you could imagine, may not be pretty.
Because some viruses can jump species, the very entry of humans (which penetrate diverse territories as no other animal on Earth does) into new territories can elicit new viral activity. Ebola Zaire is a particularly good example.
Finally, viruses, as with humans, are essentially made up of proteins and DNA. Unlike humans, however, viruses don't have layers of protection between themselves and the environment. They operate in a specific range of temperatures. Considering that the one's we're worried about (human-infecting viruses) have to operate at OUR body temperature (30-odd degrees extremities to 37 degrees core), we should be particularly worried about global warming enabling viruses to survive better outside of our bodies! Imagine if you could catch (say) HIV through sneezing!
Anyway, just a few thoughts,
-Shane Stephens
> Sure but you body temperature will always be :-)
:-)
:-)
:-).
:-)
:-)
> about 30-37 degrees, unless you are dead.
Correct, but my point is this:
(1) We operate at (say) 37 degrees.
(2) Viruses that infect us operate AT OUR TEMPERATURE
(3) Viruses that are not at operating temperature often do not survive (and we can be talking as little as 5-10 degrees off operating temperature in some cases!)
(4) Thus, to a temperature-sensitive virus, the colder atmosphere outside (in most places) is a formidable barrier to jumping from individual to individual....hence sexually transmitted diseases, touch-transmitted diseases, etc....
(5) Raising the external temperature may remove this barrier.
> And you can catch HIV, Colds, etc... in the
> summer and winter.
Yes. HIV through a particularly pleasant 37 degree channel, but we won't go there.
Colds are a remarkably robust family of viruses, which fortunately don't tend to kill people. This is why they are transmissable anywhere.
> Viruses don't care about ambient temperature
> (unless you burn them up or freeze them, but at
> those temperatures, we'd be dead also), as long
> as the host is the right temperature - and that
> won't change.
Incorrect. Viruses care A LOT about ambient temperature, as I noted above. It is fortunate for them that the host temperature doesn't change....or are you forgetting that fevers are a DEFENSE MECHANISM against viral infections???
This definitely tends to argue my point - viruses are MUCH more sensitive to temperature changes than humans are.
> And, to the best of my knowledge, viruses aren't
> any more communicable when it is warm outside,
> or when it isn't. But that is just my guess.
And mine also. But I guess the other way.
> I suppose a comparison of viral sickness in the
> Sahara Desert to viral sickness in Siberia might
> be in order. But I don't have the stats for
> those places.
This would be a very interesting comparison.
> And besides, our destruction or non-destruction
> of the environment by moving still doesn't
> affect viruses. There are many ways to destruct
> the environment without making any difference to
> viruses (unless they run out of people and
> animals to feed off of).
This is a very naive view, possibly engendered by your lack of observing that ecosystems are extremely complex and inter-related objects.
Ecosystems are quite chaotic (in the mathematical sense of the word). Changing one variable can have very unpredictable effects elsewhere.
You can't just say, de novo, that changing an ecosystem CATASTROPHICALLY won't have an effect on the viruses within! Even changing small things has an effect!
Look, I'm not a raving greenie (or whatever you call them). I'm a biochemistry graduate, trained in science. There are _SO MANY_ things that people DON'T know about the ecosystem, viruses, etc. How can YOU claim to know that changing the environment won't change viral patterns when the EXPERTS don't know?????
> I might agree that the mingling of different
> peoples has spread viruses, but I don't
> necessarialy agree that our moving around the
> planet ruins it. Ruining the planet and viruses
> are two different points and don't meet (unless
> you want to ruin the planet with a Doomsday
> Boms...
Again, this is naive. Viruses are part of the ecosystem, which relies on the environment. Changing the environment changes the ecosystem. QED.
Let me use an analogy....the brain relies on blood. Part of the brain controls your breathing. You're trying to say that poisoning the blood doesn't effect your breathing.
> I'm not trying to pick at stones, but this is
> how I see it:
> If I take a trip alone to the African
> rainforest, look around, pick up a virus and
> return, and give others this virus to which none
> of us have immunity I haven't likely affected
> the environment. I have, however spread the
> virus to people without immunity.
And hence changed the environment that YOU live in. What about if you (and others) stay in this new environment, hence giving the virus another host within which different types of challenges need to be countered? 20 years and voila! A new virus jumps back into the ecosystem. That's change.
> I just don't want another touchy feely save the
> environment tone added to this discussion. There
> are enough nuts (and my definition of a nut is
> someone who believes blindly in anything that
> supports their cause - whether it is true or
> not) out there that willing to introduce the
> death of humanity thru the ruining of the
> environment into everything that I don't need to
> hear it ever again. No, I don't hate (or
> particularly dislike) groups like Greenpeace and
> other environmental groups out there, but I do
> dislike reading crap about global warming when I
> haven't seen a SINGLE article on it that leaves
> me with enough info to make an informed
> decision.
???
To my knowledge, nobody has come forward with a touchy feely save the environment tone yet! In fact, the first poster ADVOCATED spread into new areas, but CAUTIOUS spread; he certainly wasn't saying "don't do it...".
Global warming may or not exist. The fact that you have not been given enough information to make an informed decision on it simply suggests to me that you haven't gone to a half decent library and done any research on it.
My impression is that you use mass-media force-feeding channels ONLY to attempt to base your decision on. This is NOT a good source of information - television, radio, and newspapers are designed more to keep large numbers of people interested than to cater to the few that actually require INFORMATION!
I've done a little reading, and have noticed that experts themselves seem very cautious to say yea or nay about the global warming question. However, there's PLENTY of articles that give a LOT of information (even down to the mathematical formulae that the models are based on), if you just look for them. I suggest going to your local university library and conducting a journal search on "global warming".
> And the CFC crap just totally did me in on a lot
> of environmentalist theories - a company wants
> to keep their patent so they manipulate the
> gullible (environmentalists) to the point where
> they believe their now freed from patent
> chemical (freon) is dangerous so everyone should
> use their new patented product (can't remember
> the name - I think it was DowCorning who made
> freon). A bunch of real lame claims later
> written in newspapers and even the public
> believes.
Ah, you've been reading James P Hogan, I believe.
Yes, it's a very interesting (and quite possibly correct) viewpoint, that one. It illustrates nicely how companies subvert well-meaning people into being unconcious spokespersons...it doesn't have any bearing on the present conversation, however.
> But, you do have a point. In a small way, the
> environment you are currently in affects your
> chances of catching certain viruses, so I
> suppose, in an even smaller way, our treatment
> of the environment has a little to do with it.
In a SMALL way? This, of course, is why swamps have for YEARS been considered pestilental, as well as the Amazonian rainforest - I'd say your external environment effects your chances of catching viruses in a LARGE way.
> But only in a real small way.
Replace small by unpredictable, and you'll be correct
-Shane Stephens
never had a 502, myself, thru NT or Linux.
What OS are you using? What browser?
On the other hand, this drug will probably be a godsend for people with immune system problems for whom the common cold can be nigh deadly. You don't -have- to take it to cure your cold, and it certainly has many other applications(at least 168). It's not going to make us "soft and useless", it's just going to increase the quality of living a little.
"Help make the world a better place. Kill a moron."
The key to solving disease is not going to be found in cures, but instead in vaccines. IIRC, small pox is the only disease to ever be "killed", that is, to be no longer found in the wild in the world. This wasn't done with fancy anti-virals but with a simple vaccine that stopped the spread of infection. Now, this approach cannot work for diseases that use other animals as hosts, and I am not suggesting that we should not use treatments like this to cure patients who would otherwise suffer greatly or die. However, I find the idea of speeding the evolution of diseases which currently only present a small inconveniece dangerous. Even more dangerous is using this approach against one disease that they mention: polio. This disease was responsible for one of the most devestating epidemics in recent history, but thanks to vaccines has been eliminated in the wild from the Western Hemisphere, and is slowly being killed in the rest of the world as well. Using this drug against it instead of continuing with the vaccination program could result in a recurrence of the plague that struck America in the first part of the 20th century.
Uh, sorry to tell you this, but that's never going to happen - evolution stopped happening in humans about 50,000 years ago, and in fact can't happen anymore, because the basic mechanism of evolution (survival of the fittest, death of the weakest) can't happen anymore, since we support each other and keep even the weak/crippled/retarded alive.
SA
This is how protease inhibitors were developed. The time lag in anti-HIV drug development is more due to difficulties with drug delivery systems than with designing the active molecule itself.
1) Let's not get too carried away here. That's not what I said and I don't think that's what debrain meant. I think the 'Spanish Flu' example wasn't more than an example. Of course nobody would want a terrible disease to happen. One of it's side-effects however might be desirable: evolution. If we can achieve that goal by acceptable means, then we should certainly explore that possibility. I'm not saying that we should use it any time soon or even in the future for that matter, but we might not want to rule out the possibility.
2) But if we had used antibiotics more wisely, we would have had a lot less resistant strains of viruses. We should be carefull not to speed up evolution of viri too much by flooding them with all kinds of antibiotics when it isn't absolutely necessary (I'm thinking of Third World countries here).
3) Hmm, well, guess I shouldn't have used the first thing that came to mind. I stand corrected. Of course we're all running linux. Differences in people can mostly be accounted for by the different configurations and distributions they use. I wonder what modifications Gates made though...
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
My point is that, if there is a possible resistance to this drug, it will rise greatly in the population. However, if there is no possible mutation that would incur resistance (non-lethally), no resistance will evolve. Now, there's probably some possible mutation that would cause resistance, but there's a reason why it's not common in the population. I could speculate on the reason, but I'd just be pulling things out of my ass. If we're lucky, it will have the additional effect of making it less virulent in humans. The up side of pleiotropy.
Disclaimer: I am an evolutionary biologist
I think it was called "Status: Extinct" but the book and author's name escapes me.
-I only condemn hypocrisy in other people...
Norton AntiVirus (Organic Edition)
:)
Peter Norton's guide to Home Health.
# shiver # - No thanks.
Why not? Instead of going to the doctor to get my immunizations ("SneakerNet", as it were), I can just download them automatically in my sleep. Or, for people who might forget/misapply their medications (which helps antibiotic-resistant diseases evolve in the first place), this could automatically apply disease resistance without burdening the patient. (Tones of Big Brother, perhaps, but so long as the only thing this does is eliminate disease, no problem. Just so long as an eye is kept on other applications of this technology...)
It would also require managers to give sufficient time to testing new releases. Forcing to market programs that crash computers is one thing. Forcing to market programs that crash human bodies would get PHBs thrown out by their stockholders, at a minimum.
Correct me if I am wrong, but isn't it true that so many bacteria have mutated into antibiotic resistant strains, because of the carelessnes of people who use them? For example (a nurse explained this one to me), I sick. I go to the doctor. The doctor says "You have alskdjfal-acil. woiaent-oemon will cure you". So I go get woiaent-oemon, and start taking it. 3 days later, my temp is normal, I'm no longer a light shade of green with red x's on my arms, and I can see straight. So I say "Thanks Doc, but you prescribed me too much medicine", and throw away the rest of the 2 week prescription I got. Although I'm feeling better, the bug is still in me, and still alive-just not so numerous anymore, so that I don't notice the effect. And since I've stopped taking the antibiotic, the bug can now start replenishing itself again, and making me sick again. Only this time, the bug is more resistant to woiaent-oemon.... and then I kiss my girlfriend, and she does exactly what I did.... Thus, more resistant strains are formed, by carelessness. The same, I would guess can occur in viruses. So, wouldn't we be less likely aid natural selection, if we just finished the prescription, and made "dang" sure the bug, or virus or whatever was dead? And if so, wouldn't it take considerably longer for the virus to mutate, and thus give us time to find effective ways to irradicate the bugs?
Fish
couple of comments: first, I guess It's time to dump all of my kleenex stock ;-) As far as I can tell from the chart in the CNN story, this drug is NOT very effective, ie reduces overall nasal tissue use by a factor of ~50% and reduces the lenght of a cold by 2-3 days. This company is seeking rapid FDA approval for this drug on the basis that it will cure viral meningitis. Thus the FDA will fast track the drug through trials given the essential need for a drug to combat this type of infection. At the same time this is being hyped as a "cure for the common cold". Viruses mutate VERY rapidly and if they possibly can mutate themselves to be resistant to this drug (and still be able to replicate) they will. As noted in another post here, viruses already have become resistant in lab tests). If the general population starts taking this drug for the common cold it will become useless in a few years as resistance will emerge, and will no longer be able to help those few patients who are seroiusly at rick of dying from a common cold or from meningitis. Regarding rational drug design, scientists in both industry and academia have been working on this for years, the hit/miss ratio (succesful rational drug designs vs unsuccessful) is astronomically small. Having the x-ray or NMR structure of a protein/lead drug complex can help you tune your lead drug but as far as de novo design goes this field is pretty much in its infancy. I can just see it now: new drug approved for treating viral meningitis doctors prescribe drug for rich, whiney flu patients across the world reducing world-wide sale of kleenex drug company gets rich viruses become resistant to drug and drug is now useless in cases where it could have saved lives drug company gets sued for unforseen side effects of drug that was rushed through FDA approval for meningitis and then given to millions of people for common cold who now suffer from nasal polyps.
no sig.
The heart of civilization is the ability to specialize. Speaking for everyone else, we volunteer to let you get all the colds, including the ones we aren't going to be getting any more. As "designated sufferer," you will have a ready market for screeds on your agonizing sinuses and post-nasal drip.
Till then, it's nice to know that female genital mutilation, land mines, child slavery, and crushing poverty are pretty much like the common cold....
Well, right now we are creating superbacteria immune to almost any treatment we can give them. Ironically, soon these superbacteria will be creating superhumans, immune to almost any superbacteria. Of course, in the process 99% of humanity might be wiped out.
Our bodies see that our immune systems are just sitting there, getting precious resources which could be otherwise spent growing, doing work, or storing energy for that famine our bodies seem to think is always just around the corner. Thus, our immune systems get less resources.
Problem is, once our immune systems don't have things like the common cold around to keep them honest, they start to suck. And then a real disease comes along and we're sol.
Perhaps he meant holistic. Homeopathy is a specific division within holistic medicine. Holistic medicine (treating the person, not the disease) can work well.
Viruses WILL evolve resistance. When there is a selective pressure of the sort that this drug will produce in a human body, either evolution or extinction will result. Given the number of viruses, and their speed of evolution, there's no way that we could drive them to extinction!
Those who say that there's no way for the viruses to evolve resistance because the active site is integral to reproduction are fooling themselves. If a viroid such as Tobacco Mosaic can reproduce as a naked nucleic acid strand, then a virus can find a way to reproduce with a different protein coat.
Viruses evolve faster than any other replicating entity in the biosphere. We can at most hope to enter a red queen's race, in which we run as fast as we can to stay in the same place in regards to our opponents.
War of the Worlds did have the martians dying as a result of earthly diseases, but it was never specified what diseases. That was an allegory for malaria, I believe, as the whole book was an allegory for Western Colonialism.
I can't think of any books/movies/short fiction that had the first theme, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
According to the memphis local t.v. news who aired a story about this drug a couple of days ago, the drug is suppossed to decrease the length of cold symptoms from 8 days to 6 (or something close to that). Is a medicine technically a cure if it only alleviates the symptoms of the sickness? Would that not also make chicken soup a cure? -------------------------------------------------- "You have to feed a cold" - T.V. Commercial
Uh.. i hate to tell you this, but you misunderstand survival of the fittest.
It's not the strongest, and it's not about individuals
It's about species and the most capable of propagation.
The physical restrictions that guided evolution in the past have been replaced by social, intellectual, and emotional factors.
This isn't to say that anything physical has nothing to do with evolution, but rather that is has taken a back seat.
-EOF-
Remember those thiny robots?
Vision those little bastards entering your bloodstream in about 10 years from now. Custom programmed by a thiny central computerunit they fight diseases and keep your body in optima forma. This unit could be upgraded once in a while to gain the latest knowledge about virusses/bacteria and other threats to your earthly shell.
What about security you may think?
Someone could give your unit some false descriptions and gain root-access at your shell.. Well maybe somesort of dna-encryption algorithem could be used in combination with a 3d polymerstring based identity tag.. Hopefully this gives you some thoughts.
Regards,
Sarin
Games4Linux - opening begin of March or sooner!
Regards,
Sarin
Geez, you're ripping on this guy... ever stop to think that maybe he wasn't trying to act smart, and maybe just actually THOUGHT that the plural was virii?
It's probably a very common mistake, considering the amount of times I've heard the word used.
- Dr. Eldarion -
Well - I can only hope that the United States' interests will never diverge strongly enough from Europe's in order to justify usage of biological weapons against Europeans or anyone else on this planet. It left me shocked when the chinese embassy was accidently destroyed in an European capital this summer. I am working as a molecular biologist and in this field the only competition / rivality between nations I expirienced so far, has been either of economic or scientific kind. As a European citizen I can cope with this and even enjoy it. My deepest and most urgent hopes are, that the restriction on theese "battlefields" will still be in place in a new era of highly potent antiviral drugs and the ability to create / design novel virus strains. I am somewhat doubtfull if the risks that are inherent to this technology should be taken. Especially when I read the East Coast / West Coast thread in this forum. Hell - I come from Germany and I had to learn my leassons on this topic from my grandparents' generation. I thank god that this generation did not have such technologies in their hands. But I am really bothered when I ask myself if our generation should (at any geoplace you name) ...
a biological weapon that could be used for anything from the perfect murder to a full blown biological warfare. The problem with this drug lies in the broad spectrum of Virus targets. It blocks not only trivial flu but also more dangerous viral diseases. I hope it will not be export restricted like > 56-bit Encryption? It makes me sad that bright people from all over the world give things like this to the hands of the USA-Society and government. a scared soul from old europe
I pay $10 bucks for a flu shot every year, and it's more than worth it to me. And if it wasn't worth it to me, it might be worth it to my employer. After all, you can't get out of Jury Duty for finantial hardship, but you can if it's your employer's finantial hardship...
TC
-----
"Why is it that when we talk to God we're said to be praying, but when God talks to us we're schizophrenic?" --Lily Tomlin
TangoChaz
--------------------
Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
I remember once, reading the book The War of the Worlds. In the book, alien invaders from Mars come to earth, landing in England, and proceed to destroy the human race. And just when it looks as though they're going to move to the main land and kill us all, they all die, killed by the common cold because they had never previously had a cold. I hate to say it, but that could be very prophetic for the human race.
I think that the question that we should be asking ourselves is not whether or not we can cure the common cold (which, apperantly, we now can), but rather, whether or not it's worth it. The common cold is the main thing that stands between us and being suseptable to a lot more infections and diseases. If we were to start taking this drug for the common cold, we'd effectivly be weakening ourselves. And what about the virus? Viruses have been around since life on earth began, what makes us think we can stop them? They'll just evolve over the decades, make themselves immune to this drug, and then attack a generation of people with weak immune systems.
Now, I'm not by any means, saying that we shouldn't use this new drug at all. This is a marvolous breakthrough that will benefit thousands for whom there was no hope. There are many instances in which we should use it, like meningitus and the other viruses mentioned in the article. But to use it against the cold or flu just isn't worth it. We have to ration ourselves. If we over-use the drug, viruses will become immune and the good things that could have come from the drug won't be able to. For one thing, who really has 50-100$ just to throw around for some drug? It's not as if we can't deal with being sick for three more days. I personnally feel that this drug should not be put on the market for use against colds.
If everyone goes whining to their doctor for a prescription of this stuff everytime they get a little cold, that could mean disaster for health insurance companies -- which I'm sure would translate into higher costs even for those of us who would rather just endure a few days of sniffles than taking the time out to go to the doctor and getting the medicine.
Do you want to know something intersting. I have noticed over the past year in my stay at Illinois State University that the people that DO get flu shots are twice as likely to get the flu and miss class. While the rest of us still back and laugh at them trying to futily escape the flu.
People are trying to come up with synthetic drugs that help humans combat viruses, etc. I wonder if this is going to effect the human race in the long run. Even though viruses mutate themselves so that the next time we encounter them, we are at their mercy, one thing that does happen is that our body's immune system also steps "foward" everytime we catch the flu and get better from it...i.e. after we fight it, our bodies contain antibodies to for the virus we just staved off. Is this an important part of the evolutionary process? Will synthetic drugs eventually make humans weaker and more drug dependent???
HOLLYWOOD is...
A decent Network is finally here.
I think that by the time you are sick enough that you need the drug, you will already have antibodies to it, so I don't see that as being a serious issue.
As soon as you introduce a drug which interferes with a function, you have placed selective pressure on that protein to evolve a new mechanism.
That's true, but evolution isn't some magic thing that can defeat all obstacles. Saying that a viral protein could quickly evolve into one that works in an entirely different way is analogous to saying that filling rooms full of people and shooting them will select for bullet-resistant humans.
That's how we have Vancomycin resistant strains now.
That's for bacteria, not viruses.
Everyone seems to be worried that using pleconaril will generate some kind of super-viruses that are impossible to kill, and I think this stems from confusion about a few things. The primary thing is that viruses are not bacteria. Bacteria are complex organisms that gain resistance through a variety of mechanisms. Overuse of antibiotics leading to resistant strains of bacteria is a very different issue. Viruses are much simpler than bacteria, and resistance often arises through mutant forms of viral proteins (they don't have large genomes to hold new genes that confer resistance). The reason why resistance mutations can be less of a problem with viruses is because these mutant proteins don't always function properly. Drugs like pleconaril are designed to target parts of the protein that, if mutated, would render it semi-functional, leading to a weakened virus. Attenuated virulence has been reported in some drug-resistant HIV strains, and (as I just checked in medline) in pleconaril-resistant viruses as well. I'm not saying drug resistance isn't ever a problem, just that it's likely that pleconaril will not become ineffective after two years on the market.
Unfortunately, there are several reasons. First, the mechanism HIV uses for viral entry is highly complex. There is a protein on the surface of the virus called gp120 that sticks to the CD4 receptor (on a cell), which causes the shape of gp120 to change. This change in shape reveals a second site that binds to another receptor on the surface of the cell, which is actually responsible for viral entry. The two thought to be most relevant are the CXCR4 and CCR5 chemokine receptors, but HIV has been demonstrated to enter through many many other receptors as well, and even to infect cells through CD4-independent mechanisms. gp120 is a large and highly variable protein, and the binding site (which is highly variable since it sticks to many different coreceptors) we actually care about is only revealed after binding to CD4. People have been doing work along those lines, trying to get good data on the 3D structure of CD4-gp120 complexes or whatever, but it is very complicated and difficult (I haven't been following this, but I think there was a paper about it in Science this past year). The analogous data on picornaviruses was published in the early 90's (I think).
A second reason is that the body can fight off the cold, but it can't fight off HIV. From what people are saying, it doesn't sound like pleconaril is particularly effective. Shortening the cold by a couple days is one thing, but completely eradicating a virus from the body is another.
It's kind of a moot point anyway since the problem with current HIV drugs is delivery, not effectiveness. For those patients that can tolerate HAART (highly active anti-retroviral) therapy, levels of virus can be driven down below detectable levels, apparently indefinitely. However, when you take them off HAART, their bodies are full of virus in two weeks. The odd thing is that the virus that comes back isn't drug resistant virus, implying the presence of "viral reservoirs." Bob Siliciano at Johns Hopkins has done a lot of the work on the resting B-cell reservoir, and there has also been some work (by whom, I can't remember) showing that follicular dendritic cells in the lymph nodes can trap virions (free viruses) and hold them there for over 9 months in mice. People also talk about the testis/ovaries and central nervous system as reservoirs, but I'm not sure how convinced I am by that. So the challenge with HIV eradication seems not to be creating more effective anti-virals, but targeting reservoirs (not to mention figuring out ways to treat the 99% of the world who can't afford $20,000/year medications). There are some interesting ideas along these lines, but clinical trials are likely a LONG way off.
Luke
Who said anything about quickly? From the viewpoint of the virus, it has eternity to try and evolve a defense.
How long it takes a virus to replicate might as well be forever in terms of kinetics of the drug binding to the viral protein. What I'm saying with the bullet analogy is that there is only so much change that can occur in one generation. Over the course of 100,000 years, humans might be able to develop a hard bony plate in their chests that could stop bullets, but there is no conceivable way that a random mutation could cause something like that to arise in one generation. Someone else gave the example of throwing cats off a cliff to select for flying ones (a better example than mine). It is conceivable that a new viral protein could evolve that would somehow use a completely different mechanism and still be effective, but this is not going to happen in one generation or one hundred generations, and it will probably not happen at all if the initial resistance mutatations that arise cause the virus to be are defective. The speed issue is important because if you had a drug that killed 5% of viruses, you're leaving the other 95% to evolve new changes. If you can kill 99% of them, there are very few left to evolve. This has been shown to be important in HIV patients on HAART therapy, where if you can keep levels of viral replication low enough, significant resistance does not arise (at least over the period of years).
Viruses and bacteria evolve by almost identical mechanisms
I agree that they do at some level, but in terms of resistance to drugs, they do not, if only for the reason that antibiotics and antiviral drugs target very different things. Don't read too much into my whole viruses/bacteria distinction, my point is just that it's misguided to blindly extrapolate ideas about drug resistance from bacteria to viruses with no understanding of the underlying mechanisms. Just because bacteria developed resistance to penicillin doesn't mean that anything will magically develop resistance to any drug you throw at it. Neither bacteria or viruses have developed significant bleach resistance, for example, despite how often it is used to decontaminate surfaces.
blindly extrapolate ideas about drug resistance from bacteria to viruses with no understanding of the underlying mechanisms
And I didn't mean to accuse you of that, just almost everyone else here.
Well said. Some environmental types might argue that we should not even try to intrude on other ecosystems. I can only counter with the equally whacky notion that this sort of a capability is a technological requirement for the settlement of other planets and perhaps beneath the deep seas.
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The promise seems to be to develop a system that can analyize a viral molecule and automatically design a counter agent. If such a technology were developed, then bacteriological weapons would be merely annoying and not potentially catastrophic.
This must be done, if not by the United States, then somebody else.
I can certainly understand your apprehension of present US Power - Henry Kissinger has even said that the greatest foreign policy problem in the 21st century will be American stupidity. However, I should point out that the mood of the country is rapidly proceeding to one of isolationism and disengagement. Americans are not happy with the level of deployments of our forces overseas into situations where we have no perceivable gain. A backlash has developed and even traditional commitments such as NATO and the United Nations are now under scrutiny be credible candidates in the present election. While it is unlikely that the United States will abandon Europe in the immediate future, it is certainly possible. It is even possible for Europe become a rival and not a partner to the United States. For example: The US and France have competing interests in Africa. If the US can gain Russia as a staunch democratic ally, NATO and other Euro-American security treaties become pointless. The US can do whatever it wants whether Europe likes it or not.
In such a world, Europe would have to do an aweful lot to remain secure..and bacteriological weapons present an even bigger threat. If Washington DC decides that French Security is no longer in the US interest, then the French will still need to be secure. Same goes for Germany, Britian, etc. So, the need for a reliable anti-bacteriological and anti-viral warefare remains no matter who polices the world.
In short, if the United States is not working on anti-bacteriological and anti-viral agents, then old-europe had better be.
Somebody has got to be working on this. It does not matter who.
This is my sig.
Beta testing on the general population just like software.
If there's a bug, you die.
5 people have died allready while takeing the popular and heavily advertised Influenza drug "Reflenza".
>but I would suggest that something added to the "living equilibrium", such as a (relatively) >spontaneously created medication, has the >potential to unbalance many of the delicate >chemical systems we need to live a healthy, >darwinian fit, happy life.
;P).
I get somewhat annoyed by people who imply that the things humans do aren't "natural", as if beaver dams are more "natural" than the Hoover dam because they're made of wood rather than concrete. This "living balance" is *caused* by changes we (along with everything else on this planet) make and made, starting with amino acid formation and evolving into modern tech via microbes that made this world oxygen-laden. We just happen to be more observant of our changes because they tend to be large-scale (although microbes and virii can certainly beat us out for changing the environment, they're just less visible (pardon the pun)).
As for this "delicate chemical balance", I don't buy it. It's delicate in the sense that very little chemical things can do great damage (e.g. many atoms of cholrine in gaseous form). The *balance*, however, is not delicate, because the system is very flexible and efficient (efficient in the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "if it isn't in use, ditch it" senses). It will readjust to the new situation - the new virii will evolve around this medication (kinda similar to the Internet routing around censorship
Brynn, who believes that since evolution gave us this nice big brain, we might as well use it
"Any sufficiently advanced form of Magic is indistinguishable from Technology." - Gnomish Technomancer
As said in a previous response, it's not so much *if* evolution will occur for the viruses to adapt to the drug, but *when.* However, with this newer approach to developing a cure, where the drug is tailored to the infection, we should (hopefully) be able to counter adaptations of the virus to keep pace with it. I envision a future where you may even be able to receive nanite injections (read: Hemos) and set the nanites to simply disassemble the infecting agent.
However, the main reason we seem to be devloping superbugs at such an alarming rate, is because in western civilization, we tend to declare all-out war on the simplest infections. If you're feeling a little under the weather, or you have a minor infection, you shouldn't be taking antibiotics right off the bat. This can be just as hard on your system as the infecting agent. I'm for more homeopathic remedies for minor things, and then breaking out the big guns when things get serious. Just my silly rant though.
that was my first reaction too. curing meningitis and other serious viral diseases is great. taking medicine to cure a common cold, well, I'd rather just wait for it go away on its own, it just takes a week usually anyway. if we help the body by getting rid of even the small nasties on its behalf, it'll end up weakening us.
It seems likely that some viruses will be able to develop resistance to this drug. The rational thing would be to reserve it for life threatening infections, rather than use it for the common cold. But no matter what would be best for society, I suspect in the current corporate-friendly environment, that is an impossibility. But, then, given the cost, maybe HMOs won't cover it.
His opinion on the new anti-viral drug (this isn't the only one, there is one other (Relenza) that has been on the market this year as an anti-flu/anti-cold drug) is that it is costly and relatively ineffective. The reason that it has been prescribed much at all this year is that the most common flu vaccine is proving to be ineffective itself. Combined with a lot of people deciding not to get said vaccine, Relenza has seen a fair bit of use, especially since many people can ask for it by name because of television and print advertising.
In any case, he wonders if the study presented in the article was manufacturer-sponsored. If it was, it is highly suspect. We suggest waiting until it is fully approved by the FDA before deciding if it's the miracle drug that the company claims it is, and even then he would wait until independent researchers publish their findings before prescribing it himself.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and a CNN article is not extraordinary evidence, even one that has a chart. *g*
The point is that there is no need to provide a "cure" for the common cold except in extreme cases: for people that are immune compromised due to being old,young or HIV+. As things stand there is a population of very rapidly mutating viruses providing a huge amount of variation for selection to act upon. The result of this is that there will be a rapid response to any new pharmaceutical
The result of handing out cold cures to those who don't need them is that there will - as the poster at the top of this thread suggested - be a suite of resistant forms. These will then be a threat to those that need something to cure them. The emergency, critical treatment for those people will be much less effective then it might be.
The promise of carefully designed drugs is that we can keep pace with evolution better.
Not if we don't use them intelligently. Would you for example favour the idea of spraying plane-loads of anti-virals over major urban centers before the start of each flu season?
Viruses are not living according to the biologists I know. They probably would not call them organisms.
This is really an old and pointless debate and it is a non-sequitur as far as this argument (should we use new drugs indiscriminately without considering epidemiology?) goes. The point is that viruses form a population, they reproduce with variation, thus selection takes place as with what might be unambiguously defined as "life" and with "non-life" like memes or teddy-bears (Journal of Systematic Zoology (I think it was) had a great article on teddy-bear morphology and how aesthetic selection affected the population!). As viruses have the highest rate of mutation known, they are going to adapt much more quickly even than bacteria have to antibiotics (and that has been pretty damn quick).
You seem to think that ther e is little or no problem with Multiple Drug Resistant bacteria - well, talk to any health-care professional to hear about the appalingly needless problems caused by MDR.
All of this comes about from a careless attitude to population genetics and epidemiology.
I'm not disputing that we should try and understand the mechanisms involved, I want more than that, I want us to understand and use evolution against these problems. Careful application, restricted use would see us controlling a lot of these problems. The alternative is a race between us and evolution, needless and benefiting no-one except drug companies who always have a new miracle drug available at only $50.
1) Why? It seems to clash with what we call ethics. Kill all those that are born with disabilities? Let's just say some people may object.
2) Why? Who says we can't keep up with evolution? Germs became resistant to antibiotics, but that doesn't mean we're worse of than before we had antibiotics.
3) Argh. What, the human brain runs IIS? ARGH.
1) You claim you want evolution. But you don't want any casualities... the only way of doing that is stopping the weaker specimens from reproducing. (Wait, don't we have the internet for that? :-). And somehow I doubt the common cold is going to seriously stop someone from reproducing. Personally, I say bugger evolution, let's all get extinct. It doesn't matter for us personally, and it's nice for the conscience...
2) Yes, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't use it. Using it doesn't harm anyone without antibiotics. And, as the AC said, antibiotics only work against micro-organisms...
Of course evolution happens when selective pressures are significant enough to kill off most of the viral types that aren't specifically resistant. But the belief that the Red Queen's race (that we're caught in a cycle of developing drugs that only give rise to new resistant strains which then require new drugs, etc.) is inevitable is a little naive.
One of the problems with early HIV drug therapy (specifically straight forward azt treatment) was that only a single piece of the virus was targeted. It was relatively easy for the virus to find the mutation that blocked a single drug. The more recent approach has been to use multiple drugs at once (the triple cocktail, HAART) because its significantly harder for the viral population to find a set of mutations to develop resistance to multiple drugs at once.
Similarly, the major problem with antimalarial drugs is that people don't often take them for the full length of time that they're prescribed. The result is that the infection isn't entirely destroyed and returns, but with a higher proportion of slightly resistant variants. When this happens through a series of hosts, the ultimate result is a fully resistant strain (which is why neither mefloquine nor chloroquine will help you in much of Thailand).
Both of these considerations are important with regard to this antiviral. A viral species can indeed be wiped out by drug therapy, just as smallpox was wiped out by vaccination. But when a drug is so frequently prescribed for so many afflictions (which will no doubt be the case with this one), there's little chance that it will remain effective for long. It's unclear whether resistant viruses will be more or less virulent then the current strains, but the people who need these drugs (immuosuppressed patients) will be the ones who lose out.
With well researched and controlled treatment, this could be a very beneficial treatment and could, for instance, rid ourselves of rhinovirus. But that's not likely.
Luddite paranoia coupled with social darwinism?
How do you know that these viruses aren't in fact modifying our genetic code to cause us "to grow wings?" The inablity to forsee all posiblities is not an excuse for inaction, and certainly not an excuse to submit people to pain and death for your "darwinian fitness".
A cure for influenza may be somewhat like the spice from Herbert's Dune: it allowed many people to live their lives for longer and in unimaginable ways, but was a deadly addiction. Granted, the influenza cure probably isn't addictive, but the duality between truth and worth, effect and consequence is not clear. Administering a cure of unknown consequence may have worse consequences than not administering it at all. From a personal perspective, the choice is obvious: we give the cure, but from a holistic perspective the choice is not clear at all, and not to be made lightly.
I do know that common diseases, including influenza, do cause death in AIDS patients, as up until 1993 (IIRC - see WHO) influenza was the largest killer in the world - a statistic consisting mostly of those with advanced HIV, until strains of antibiotic resistent TB started making a comeback in 3rd world countries. (TB now being the largest killer in the world)
We must acknowledge two circumstances, first that a single chemical entity could end the world as we know and accept in a catalyst form, and second that our own industrialized chemical production could spread harmful entities (see DDT and tobacco) to all places where humanity exists. Failure to accept these possibilities is a most highly dangerous ignorance.
Also of note: nature is only efficient in terms of generations. Intragenerational modifications to a species are relatively minute, but generational natural selection is what makes nature so adaptable. Without generational selection, evolution is stagnated, which is the state of homo sapiens as we read this.
As humans, our main selection criteria are poverty and deadly addictions (and isolated modifiers). The fact that we can reason about this sort of thing does not change the fact that at some point, something will curb our growth. If not ourselves, then something else. (Unless we explore altenative habitats, like space and oceans).
Sorry I wasn't clear, and didn't respond earlier.
The link between global warming and viral diseases is this.
Viruses don't live and reproduce on their own. They are dependent upon another organism to provide the machinery for replication. Also, some viruses do not infect people directly, but through a "vector" organism, such as a kissing bug or mosquito.
The range of the natural host and vector organisms change with climate change (human or natural) and with ecological disruption. Furthermore not just any mosquito can carry, say, encephelitis. The viruses that infect people via mosquitoes require specific bits of biological machinery to amplify within the mosquito. This is why you can't get AIDS from a mosquito bite.
Mosquito ranges are exquisitely temperature sensitive. A change of half a degree or so can create pockets of viable habitat within temperate areas of tropical species.
Also, another example purely of ecological disruption is Lyme disease, which probably existed in deer population for thousands of years. In the Northeast, farmers cleared the land and removed natural predators. When the land reverted to suburbs, the deer population close to humans increased, without a significant top level predator such as wolves.
A friend of mine lives on an island with deer, and every one of his family has gotten Lyme disease. About a decade ago,the western coyote, moving into the abandoned ecological slot in New England, swam to the island and killed almost the entire deer population and much of the rodent population. Now the deer herds are much smaller. Last time I visited for about four or five days of tramping around, I didn't get a single tick on me.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
First of all, I have yet to see mention of this medicine in either JAMA or the New England Journal. I don't know where or if the Phase I trials were ever published. So, as far as this particular thing ever materializing, there's a lot of doubt in my mind.
However, I do say that eventually we will see something that will work. The ability to use x-ray and other techniques to probe the 3-D structure of viral receptors and recent advantages in immunology make "smart" drug design the clear way to go. The article unfortunately does not mention specific points the drugs attack, but there are many vulnerable points on all viruses. And where they attack will, in my mind, make a difference as to whether we'll ever see the extinction of these viruses.
The small RNA viruses (picornaviruses - which actually include the two genuses mentioned - enteroviridae and rhinoviridae) do mutate at a rapid rate. However, many if not most of them have humans as their only host. If a drug struck at the appropriate point in the viral life cycle, it would be possible to wipe it out. Now, this drug is far too expensive and the rhinovirus is far too mild to warrant the necessary world-wide attack. But other members (poliovirus, hepatitis A), even though they have relatively cheap vaccines available, might benefit from having a product which affect viral transfer after infection.
In the end, this development probably isn't too significant. Some people in the developed world will have a way to fight off some symptoms of a bad cold. Shorten their suffering by a few days. Now, I'd like to see this technique applied to something important like the rotavirus, which kills more than a million children worldwide with its diarrhea. Of course, most companies would rather be known as the people who cured the common cold rather than the people who stopped deadly diarrhea in some far off place. So it goes.
Invicta{HOG}
I remember seeing an article a year or two ago about how the 3d structure of HIV had finally been mapped. I think the article even mentioned that the researchers who did the mapping had identified a few potential targets for new drugs.
If there aren't a few startups working on it already, I'd be quite surprised. However, remember that the 3d structure of the viruses that this drug targets was mapped back in 1985 and it has taken until now to get a drug ready...
--
Will Dyson
Will Dyson
"We can't stop here
Surely this technique can be applied to more fatal diseases such as HIV or Hepatitis?
Any reason why not?
AKA herpes....I get them pretty regularly in droves (lips, tongue, back of the throat) and they suck fucking rocks. No doctor or dentist has been able to suggest anything other than hydrogen peroxide and various antifungal medications, but something that would wipe them out after a day or so would be worth just about any price to me (and probably lots of others)...
I use Macs for work, Linux for education, and Windows for cardplaying.
okay, i feel stupid posting this (enter the obvious reply, "that's because you are") but i've always sorta felt that of all the diseases in the world, the common cold should be one of those that we really just shouldn't bother to cure For adults at least, it's just a nuiscance, a small suffering. Seems like something people in the cushy part of the world should learn to endure, some amount of minor suffering.
Curing the cold is one more step towards us growing soft and useless. Of course, there are plenty of good reasons for doing this (such as learning about curing stuff in general), but it's just a feeling.
That is an interesting point.
From what I remember from Immunology I believe that the immune system will respond to even just a few virus particles.
So what this drug probably does is reduce the number of active virus particles to which the immune response has to mount a response, reducing the severity and length of the disease.
So, I do believe that the patient will still gain immunity against the virus.
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I remember an interesting story where the viruses in a planet's ecosystem had evolved in such a way that they ended up HELPING their hosts (reprogramming their genes to give them superior physical & mental abilities) instead of hurting them (on the basis that if the host was physically dominant, the virus would also benefit in ITS reproduction).
Note that the story did not say that the viruses were intelligent - just that evolution had decided that it was a competitive advantage for them to help their hosts.
If we end up with the ability to nullify all vectors which are harmful to ourselves (and keep up with their rate of evolution), then will it become evolutionary necessary for the bacteria & viruses to be HELPFUL to us (so that we don't eliminate them)?
And if it can help you get over the flu any faster, sign me up!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
The rhino virus also exhibits rapid genetic change. This is the main reason why we never develop immunity to them. We never get hit by the same one twice. I don't even want to imagine how much Pleconaril will accelerate their evolution.
"Usually the major problem with antiviral drugs is safety," [Dr. Catherine Laughlin] says. "It's hard to find something that kills the virus and doesn't kill the cell.... There are no similar cellular processes in the body. But you never know."
Once we have the entire sequence, we WILL know (well, realistically speaking, probably not until we figure out how to predict protein folding, too, but it's a big step to getting there), and it'll make designing drugs like this even easier. Add in the technique of DNA shuffling (sexual PCR), and we might actually have a chance at keeping pace with evolution.
1. We should also be carefull about the 'genetic' health of the human race as a whole.
2. We should be carefull that viri don't keep on evolving up to a level that we entirely loose control.
Good point there. I guess we should start debugging humans then using genetic engineering. I wonder what the first bugtraq-post would look like...
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
The article states that it fits neatly into a groove on the surface of the virus. That sounds to me like the only selection process here is that of the form of this groove. So the only thing that could happen is that viri that have a different kind of groove will survive and that the others will not. Should this happen, I think that they should be able to make another 'plah-CONN-ah-rill' targeting this new string.
/.?
I could be entirely wrong however. Does anyone have a more specific knowledge of the subject? Does Dustin Hoffman or any of the other guys from 'Outbreak' read
If there is hope, it lies in the trolls.
The major problem with all drugs which target the picornaviruses is the high mutation rate of the virus. As the other reply to this message points out, it's not a question of whether a virus will learn how to avoid a particular drug, but when. Mutations will happen and the viruses which come into contact with the drug will. Just like bacteria become resistant to drugs, viruses will too. It won't take long before subtle changes to the virus structures will render any drug useless, especially if it's thrown about with gay abandon, like antibiotics have been.
Another doubt that I have surrounds the blanket statement that the drug will be effective against the "common cold": the last time I checked there were 102 distinctly different viruses which fitted that bill, and they were divided into two groups. Antibodies - the sharp end of the immune systems response to a viral infection - which recognise members of one group won't have any impact on members of the other group. Yet we're to believe that a single, simple drug molecule is going to knock out every type of common cold virus, plus polio, plus enteroviruses, plus a handful of other viruses ?
Maybe I'm just a sceptic, but I find it hard to see how this drug can live up the hype which will undoubtedly surround it.
There should be no problem with this. The drug would normally be used after the first symptoms of the infection arised. At this point the immune system is allready in an alerted state. The drug would just reduce the strength and the duration of the illness. In fact a combination of the fully pathogenic virus and the drug could possibly be used as an vaccine and therefore establish protection against the virus without further need for the drug...
Hey, if Microsoft can beta test on the general populous, why can't the rest of us?
TC
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"The statistics on sanity are that one out of every four Americans is suffering from some form of mental illness. Think of your three best friends. If they are okay, then it's you." --Rita Mae Brown
TangoChaz
--------------------
Wise men talk because they have something to say, fools because the
Ok, "Anonymous Coward", whoever you are, maybe I'm just confused, but I'm having trouble making the jump from a cure for the common cold, to previously flourishing neighborhoods becoming dens of thieves, drug addicts and the lowest form of society imaginable. Perhaps you're basing your assumptions on information I'm not aware of, but that seems like quite a change jsut because the cure for the common cold may have been found. You yourself seem "out-of-touch and obtuse" perhaps you should clarify for those of us not deeply entrenched in conspiracy theory. Even given the assumption that say, a cure for AIDS was found, and this in turn encouraged those with deviant lifelstyles to continue in the same fashion, are you saying we should withhold the cure as a moral slide-rule? Who made you religion? Should we then simply tell those who contract deadly (but curable diseases) by innoncent means; "Sorry, we have the cure, but we can't give it to you because we're trying to control sexual deviancy."? Are you insane? Also, you seem to think the cure for the common cold will become something like the addiction of 'Soma' in "Brave New World." Apparently we're all going to become so afraid of sneezing that we'll have this stuff continuously pumped into oour veins. Even if that were the case, the appeal of this new drug would not last, because, as you would know if you understood the nature of medicine, the more widely used a drug becomes, the less effective it becomes. Why? Because, as organisms, viruses strive to adapt and survive, and in order to do this, they must develop into new strains (which they do) and therefore become unaffected by the drug. This very thing is happening with penacillin. It's been so widely used for so long that the viruses it was once intended to fight have developed and it has not. Simple as that. An entire population taking a drug 24/7 would simply herald this obsoleteness of the new drug even faster. Not to mention, I doubt this will be an over-the-counter medicine, but more likely a prescription drug, so you'd have to see a doctor to get any. Not that the cure for the common cold and potentially other diseases is not a big deal, but you've blown it so far out of proportion in the wrong direction, that I question your grip on reality.
I'm no expert in medicine, so I don't really know if I've got something wrong. But, isn't it that blocking viruses in a GENERAL way means that our immune systems never get the chance to develop real immunity to them?
Imagine a 30-year old cured against common cold from his childhood, having not developed immunity. Exactly what is going to happen when he simply doesn't get the drug anymore and all the common cold viruses strike him simultaneously?
Seems like this anti-viral agent strives to attack at a common point within a virus molecule. That is, it's a static agent and in terms of breakthrough, it really is not stupendously significant. It will save lives, it will save people, but it won't change fundamentally the arms race between virus maker and virus. So long as we use static agents, human intervention will be required every time the virus evolves. We may forestall the intervention with clever attacks like this new drug, but, the virus will change, and we will have to again interven. This static model of medicine remains the same.
The dynamic model seems to be the real breakthrough. At some point we will develop medicines that can themselves evolve to match their viral and bacteriological enemies. Adaptability is essentially what nano-technology promises in medicine, but it does not have to be nano-technology. We may some day engineer our own anti-virus virus, our own anti-bacteriological bacteria.
How far away is this dynamic medicine? What will be the consequences of it? Will we have to take drugs to stop the cure from curing us? Will our existence become a continual juggling act of cure management?
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Shanep dun said:
From what I've read, most of the possible increased colon cancer risk isn't so much from the meat itself as from ways of preparation (specifically, grillng meat till it's charred and/or frying it can form nitrosamines, which are potent carcinogens). Most of the other risks of meat-eating come largely from human bungling (there is probably some risk of cancer from the hormones moos and other animals are pumped full of, there is the risk of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infection from people pumping animals fulla antibiotics to fatten them up [one of the side effects of some antibiotics happens to be animals put weight on faster] and if one lives in the EC there is the risk of new-variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease [which recently was proved to be caused by the same prion that causes mad cow disease] from eating beef because humans made the positively stupid decision to feed cows rendered sheep remains which just happened to have died from scrapie).
There are some cases where people live on a diet almost entirely consisting of meat and don't regularly die of cancer; the Inuit, for one, live almost entirely on meat but don't die of cancer (largely because a lot of their food is eaten raw or boiled) the way we do in the West.
As a minor aside--a lot of colon cancer in the US is actually due to genetic factors that increase the tendency. Most of the genetic errors that have been found in familial colon cancer have directly to do with cell repair farging up (one cancer syndrome points to the P53 oncogene, which when damaged increases the chances of cancer radically; there have been several others found).
Incidentially--I wouldn't count vegetarianism out entirely for risks of cancer, either. Japan and other Asian countries have a drastically higher rate of stomach cancer, which is thought to be possibly related to the fact they eat polished rice as a large part of their diet; it is also suspected by some doctors that the rise in rates of breast and prostate cancer in the US are related to herbicides used on the majority of plants (many of the herbicides used are "estrogen-mimics"; this has had especially bad effects in Florida, where the land is so polluted from agricultural runoff that feminised male alligators and Florida panthers have been found in the Everglades) and some also suspect herbicides to be responsible for the drop in sperm counts in most Western countries.
I will grant, though, that most vegetarians do tend to take care of themselves better than most other folks; probably responsible for your rapid healing. Then again, I consider that part of being smart about one's health anyways (myself, I have to be careful about checkups because of strong family histories of colon cancer and diabetes--so I don't overload on fatty stuff (which is where most nitrosamines are stored as well as cancer-causing pesticides that are still in the food chain), I try to go organic-beef when possible (so the cows aren't pumped full of chemicals--better for you AND the moo), and I eat stuff with antioxidants like broccoli (which can help out a fair amount with beating genetic problems with cell repair such as those that cause familial colon cancer).
Going to EITHER extreme (total carnivore or total herbivore) prolly isn't real healthy, though; humans are obligate omnivores (there are some vitamins we do require from animal foods, and vegans have to be VERY careful to balance B vitamins for example; we are also obligate fruit-eaters, since we can't synthesize vitamin C like other non-primate animals) and pretty much have been since the ancestors of all apes (including humans and our closest relatives chimps and bonobos) evolved from monkeys. (Chimps and bonobos both share around 98 percent of our DNA and are omnivorous; so was, likely, Australopithecus. Gorillas are really the only apes adapted for a largely herbivorous lifestyle and have a much larger gut than other apes to digest plant matter; maybe in a few million years if a society of humans walls off and goe entirely vegan we'll have gorilla-bellied Homo who can live entirely off plants. :)
Oddly, milk-drinking (and, more to the point, the ability to properly digest milk) is actually a wonderful example of evolution (since the thread is largely on concerns of rhinoviruses and picornaviruses (the targets of Pleconaril) becoming resistant to Pleconaril eventually)...
Most milk-drinking started among people who raised moos in Europe, parts of sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of Asia (specifically India). These populations generally have a high percentage of people who can digest lactose (milk-sugar) after infancy, because they've been drinking milk for so long as a population that there's been enough time and "mutation pressure" that there aren't a lot of lactose-intolerant folks left.
In cultures that generally have not raised moos for milk or have not raised moos at all (largely Native Americans, Australian Aboriginals, much of Asia, parts of Africa where they never raised moos for milk, and people who are descended from those groups) there is a much higher rate of lactose intolerance (enough that in the US, they actually sell lactose-free milk and lactase pills), and folks who don't have the ability to produce lactase after infancy tend to get all bloaty and farty and have diarrhea if they attempt to drink milk or eat non-fermented dairy products (cheese and yogurt are easier for them to eat). They never had the gene selected for, so it's not all that common. (For that matter, a lot of African-Americans and especially Native Americans also lack genes selecting for breakdown of ethyl alcohol and for rapid breakdown of sucrose--because until fairly recently those genes weren't selected for. So Native Americans have a much higher incidence of type II diabetes (sometimes shockingly so--something like ninety percent of the Pima people who are adults have type II diabetes) and problems in drinking alcohol.)
As a minor aside--most animals don't produce lactase after infancy, either. This includes--of all animals--cats, who we feed cream to on occasion. (Cream actually has less lactose in it than milk does.) You really shouldn't feed too much milk to kitties, because if one does kitty WILL get the runs and fart (and trust me, kitty farts are NOT the most pleasant thing in the world). There are kitties on occasion that CAN produce lactase and can handle milk ok (and maybe in a few thousand years most kitties will be able to handle it--it's only the last few hundred years that kitties have been seen more as pets than as gods/demons/the little furry things what eat the mousies), but one does have to be careful about it.
This is not to say I don't agree that we've not been arrogant at times (like with mad cow disease or filling animals fulla chemicals)...I think in a way it's probably been mean how we breed dairy cows, for example (they get so full they can barely walk, the poor things...and then they moo pathetically, as if saying "MILK ME BEFORE I BLOW UUUUP!" as they go from show-ring at the fair to the milking station [they usually show moos with full udders, btw--at cow shows they wanna see the "capacity" of the moo] dripping milk or even streaming sometimes...and the poor moos look SOOOO relieved when the milking starts and they get fifty pounds of milk off of a poor Holstein who looks as if ALL of her feed went straight to her udders). I'm the first to agree that we should live more in balance with our fellow creatures and the planet, and Western civilisation probably eats more meat and milk than it should.
All the same, though...we have been determined enough (or stupid enough, your call) to breed animals to the point that we aren't going to just be able to release them into the wild. With dairy cows, for instance, they now intimately depend on humans to milk them precisely because humans have bred for big-uddered moos that give fifty pounds of milk in a setting (yes, I've actually seen this with a champion Brown Swiss at the Kentucky State Fair--it STILL amazes me that the poor moo can have THAT much milk in her)...if they DON'T get milked, the milk turns infectious and they get mastitis (humans sometimes get it too and it's called "milk fever"--nasty stuff; pus gets in the milk and it turns yellow) and they can well die from it if it's not treated (because it can go into septicemia or gangrene) and at the very least it makes moos VERY ill. Yes, it's the humans' fault for making them basically milk machines, but since we have we've got the responsibility to make sure they don't get sick from it (and maybe in time to breed them to something a little more sensible--there are no wild moos anymore, the closest there are to wild moos are the half-feral pointed cows of Ireland, and I seriously doubt moos would be able to survive in the wild--it's been bred out of them).
Of course, I also think that one has a responsibility to be kind to the cow as one can (making sure it's comfy and treated kindly, and not pumped fulla chemical crap) and to use all of the cow if one must kill it...and to be thankful to the cow and remember that you ARE taking a life or getting a gift from the cow (in the case of milk). (Then again, I have weird morals on that. I think eating meat is ok if one uses all the animal one can and is thankful and one does right by the animal that gave the gift of life so you might survive. I do NOT approve of trophy hunting, and to be honest I don't like the extremes to which some dairy cows have been bred because it looks bloody uncomfortable for the moo in question--but if one is thankful to the moo, I don't see a problem with, say, milking a Jersey and using the milk.)
Now, as for harming the young...the only things I can think of are lactose intolerance and milk allergy. The first is genetically determined, and no, I don't think lactose intolerant folks should have to drink milk. As for milk allergy, that's largely caused by introducing milk too early to kids; realistically, though, ANYTHING can cause a food allergy if fed too early to a kid. (In a lot of non-Western cultures, kids are regularly breast-fed all the way to the age of two or even later, and parents MIGHT start introducing solid food at age one or when the kid starts showing interest. In Western cultures, kids are often bottle-fed and solid food introduced as early as three or four months of age...sometimes I wonder if this is the cause of increases in food allergies, as most maternal antibodies start going away at three or four months if kids aren't breast-fed and this is when kids' immune systems start really kicking in; this is why baby shots also typically start around 3-4 months).
Then again, an issue could well be made over parents bottle-feeding kids period. :) (I understand there are some cases where one has to--like if a baby has a rare metabolic disorder like PKU or maple-syrup urine disease, or if a mother CAN'T give milk [me and my sis were bottle-fed for this reason--my mother had polycystic breast disease, where there are hardly any milk glands to GIVE milk in the first place]. But if one can, breast-feeding really IS best; babies handle it much better, it gives stuff like antibodies and other substances like colostrum that babies need. A lot of the ire at pharmaceutical companies in fact involves them donating formula to third-world countries (humans tend to dry up if their babies don't regularly nurse, and this gets them "hooked" on formula; also, most water supplies in third-world countries would put one at risk of Moctezuma's Revenge at best, and it's thought that dirty water used in making formula contributes to thousands, if not millions, of babies dying from diarrhea and dehydration from the runs in third-world countries; it's also been proven that breast-feeding as traditionally practiced in these cultures (up to the age of two-three, very slow introduction of solid food) actually has a protective effect against severe infant diarrhea)...that's probably for another thread, though.
-Windigo The Feral (NYAR!)
Yeah, it's interesting to think of us (humanity) as an ecosystem that other creatures live in.
What makes us a bigger target (so to speak) for virus and harmful bacteria is simply our sucess at propagating. As I recall, our biomass (number of individuals times average weight) is now greater than any other vertebrate species (mammals, birds, reptiles, fish). Combine that with our habit of living in large, crowded cities, and you've got a recipe for disaster.
The only thing saving us currently (until more anti-virals and antibiotics come along) is good hygine. So wash your hands after you've gone to the bathroom, dammit!
If you're interested in the evolutionary biology view on all this, I recommend Laurie Garrett's "The Coming Plague".
As I tend to mention in just about all of my posts, I'm in Brazil. I'm just wondering whether this drug will ever get here. The thought of a horribly healthy North-American population conquering and enslaving the drug-ridden Third World comes to mind.
:)
Oh wait, that already happened. Sorry
To the editors: your English is as bad as your Perl. Please go back to grade school.
I think we'll need to be cautious about these new drugs. Why, just the other day I saw a rerun of ``Bewitched'' where Dr. Bombay came up with a cure for the common cold. The side effects when used on humans, however, were horrendous!
(Score: -1, Oh...my...god!)
With the advent of a vaccine or cure to any given case of the flu, we can completely circumvent a pandemic instance of influenza. But the side effects of wide-spread population usage of any particular high-concentration drug could have drastic long-term effects on a population that we simply cannot forsee. We might all grow wings, I honestly don't know, but I would suggest that something added to the "living equilibrium", such as a (relatively) spontaneously created medication, has the potential to unbalance many of the delicate chemical systems we need to live a healthy, darwinian fit, happy life.
We must then weigh, should a pandemic influenza arise, the benefits of a cure versus the benefits of not using a cure. But if a cure exists, and people are dying, they will desire said cure, side effects be damned. At least, I would desire said cure.
Nature tends to "find a way" to create balance (often through chaos and destruction) in the world's systems of life. As has happened with many other kinds of virii and bacteria, when we find a "cure" for one strain, another strain emerges that is resistent to our medicine, and is often stronger and more effective.
Curing the common cold is great, but I'm scared that the common cold as we know it may then become a disease that gives us much more to worry about than a few days home in bed.
Just FYI, you have in essence defined an antibiotic (though this isn't an antibiotic, it's an antiviral). Most antibiotics work by "gumming up" the bacteria's reproductive ability. Actually, ALL the ones I can think of work this way.
On a slight tangent, next time anyone wonders why we should keep our "basic science" research budget, I saw a talk on this very subject by Dr. Michael Rossman of Purdue University. In 1992. I specifically remember the "comfort index" slide, where they measured grams of snot blown out of patient's noses with and without the drug. Yum.
Which leads to my next even more off subject rant, the fact that they "designed this from scratch." The truth is, no drugs have yet to enter the market that way, even this one. Don't get me wrong, this is an extremely powerful technique, and being an x-ray crystallographer, I'm very glad the drug companies are interested in protein structure and dynamics.
That being said the way it really works is this:
- Solve the structure of the virus or protein of interest which you hypothesize is causing the disease or symptoms of the disease.
- Using the structure of the protein, try to figure out the mechanism of "how it works," and localize it to a particular area of the protein.
- Try to find "pockets" in the protein near this area where you could design a drug to bind which would then disrupt the function of the protein
- Ask your theoreticians (computer geeks with doctorates in physics or chemistry who look like the "pulsing head" aliens in the old Star Trek) to design a drug to fit in the pocket.
- If you are CNN, you have a drug, viola! If you are in the real world, here is where the real work begins.
- Through an iterative process, design the drug, find out it doesn't bind quite the way you thought it should, or with a viable affinity, and turn it back over to the chemists, who then stick every chemical group known to humankind on it to try to get it to bind tighter. You then reassay it's activity, solve the structure again, but this time bound to the new drug, and see how the changes you made affected how well it binds to the protein, and try to correlate these changes to the difference in affinity you observe.
- If you are lucky, you find one that binds with a suitable affinity and specificity (doesn't help if it binds the viral protein but also binds proteins in the body needed to reproduce).
- Years later, your drug passes clinical trials (actually, in most cases it doesn't, because your designs don't take things like toxicity into account, only how well it binds the protein of interest) and you are now the proud parent of an antiviral, or in most cases making the news lately, an HIV protease inhibitor.
Also keep in mind when I say "you," I mean a large team of scientists with an incredible array of backgrounds.
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
Jerm
Oh, you're not a real doctor, are you?
My uninformed opinion, from what I read in the article, is that this isn't an antibiotic. It doesn't kill the virus, it just gums up it's reproductive abilities. I'm no biologist, I don't know if the viruses will be able to evolve a new "groove" that this drug doesn't fit into, but if they do, it seems quite possible that the people who designed this drug could just redesign it to fit the new groove. I don't see how viruses can become permanently immune.
Of course I'm probably wrong, in which case there's no real reason to correct me. I know I'm an idiot.
"Help make the world a better place. Kill a moron."
Yes as far as i know viruses do evolve and become stronger/different etc. That is the reason we keep getting colds, it is a different cold all the time. However the way this drug works, is by blocking a general mechanism, one that the virus is going to have to do considerable evolving to get around. Not that this capacity is beyond viruses - they can do many wierd and wonderful things. So this drug may indeed help in that regard, however like all biological systems, viruses will eveltually find a way to get around it. Although there is a sense you can create a drug so devastating that evolution is not possible. Probably unlikely tho. In related news, scientists have found that a virus may well be the cause of the motor-neuron disease that Stephen Hawking and a friend of mine have! link is here exe
The promise of carefully designed drugs is that we can keep pace with evolution better. Much drug development is still done with a shotgun.
That's part of the significance of this type of drug, that it was specifically designed based on knowledge of the 3D structure of a viral protein. Resistance mutations will obviously occur, but these mutations can only go so far. If the drug is intelligently designed and binds to a part of the protein that is critical for its proper function, for example, resistance mutations will give rise to defective viruses. I read a while ago that this had been observed by people developing neuraminidase inhibitors; I'm not sure if this new drug might be one of those (I'll have to read the paper).
In terms of resistance mutations, it's also important not to confuse viruses with bacteria, which are much more complex and become resistant in different ways.
As the articles says, however, the cold is not the most exciting application. This will certainly do a lot of people a lot of good.
One thought, though... Who would pay $50-$100 to get rid of a cold three or four days sooner?!!? I can certainly understand painful meningitis, but a cold? Come on!
OTOH, it certainly is great to see the hardworking medical geeks finally getting some recognition!
--
We have fought the AC's, and they have won.
A problem we're currently seeing with bacteria and common antibiotics and anti-bacterial products in the house is that you're enforcing natural selection rather rigorously and the bacteria that survive do so because they're naturally resistant to the drug. You end up getting antibiotic immune superbacteria. Any chance this could happen with the virii too? How many virus molecules do you get in a given cold? How prone are they to evolve a defense for this stuff? Though I suppose it doesn't matter since there's no way to cure them now anyway...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Don't try to outsmart yourself with Latin. The correct plural is "viruses".
Natural selection happens. It will happen with this drug. It will happen without this drug. It will happen on a train. It will happen on a plane. It is impossible (or nearly so) to stop. Unless biology changes drastically, evolution will keep going until every strain of every organism is obliterated.
Good biologists laugh, cry and bang their heads in frustration when people worry about whether resistance against some deadly substance will happen. The evolution of many organisms is hard to track because we do not notice great survival pressures bearing down on them. Provide enough pressure, and the organisms will evolve. If a drug, pesticide or herbicide is good enough, it will provide selective pressure. Evolution will happen. It happened against superpesticides that farmers thought would work forever. It happened against our miracle drugs.
The smart doctors and farmers have stopped thinking ridiculous thoughts such as, "Will evolution happen this time?" They know that, somehow, it will. Even if they drive one species to extinction, another one can take its place. They concentrate on finding methods that make their weapons as effective as possible for as long as possible.
Viruses are not living according to the biologists I know. They probably would not call them organisms. Many viruses carry DNA, just as living organisms do. Some carry RNA, and it functions similarly. All DNA and RNA molecules are subject to damage and to errors in base pairing. Mutation is going to happen. When mutation happens, evolution can and will happen.
The promise of carefully designed drugs is that we can keep pace with evolution better. Much drug development is still done with a shotgun. Researchers expose the bugs to chemicals and pick out the effective ones. We do not understand how many antimicrobials work. We just know that they do work and that they are not too toxic. By understanding disease mechanisms, more drugs can be designed and not just discovered. Even when a new bug appears, researchers will be able to discover how it works and to design chemicals that interfere.
What's especially cool is the way this drug was created: it was designed specifically to counter viruses, not just discovered in a hit-or-miss fashon.
It's not just cool. We're going to need this capability.
In some ways you can view viruses such as influenza or hantavirus as a kind of natural defense. They live for generations in natural populations of birds and rodents with little or no ill effects, and in some cases have been incorporated into the genese of the hosts. Humans probably have hundreds, if not thousands of viruses that are passed down through our stem cells. When an immunolgically naive population tries to muscle in on the terrirtory -- blamm! They're infected,like they were hit by a biological land mine. Disrupting a natural ecosystem can cause a species, for example deer, to explode, with their endemic diseases like Lyme disease to explode.
People are moving places they didn't go before (because of what we used to call "pestilence"), peturbing the natural ecology there, and moving with unprecedented speed across the globe. This means that completely novel viruses like Ebola or can be uncovered. Also, disease once endemic to limited areas such as West Nile encephelitis can be spread rapidly to new areas such as the Northeast US. It's no different from Kudzu or Zebra mussels except that it's on the microscopic scale and the ecosystem being colonized is us.
While there is at least a little doubt about global warming, what is clear is that climate is warming around inhabited parts of the planet. This increases, or at least changes the range of disease carrying organisms like certain mosquito species in places where they come into proximity with people. Mexico city is protected by its altitude from Malaria, but as the city expands and the region warms, the vertical range of Malaria bearing mosquitoes is increasing.
We don't take this very seriously, but a disease like Yellow Fever can kill thousands. At the end of the 18th century, Philidelphia almost collapsed because of a Yellow Fever epidemic. In the 1890s ten percent of the population of Jacksonville and something like half the population of the city fled. This led to the start of mosquito control programs in Florida; however it's not clear whether we've just had blind luck so far that it hasn't happened again. Historically, Yellow Fever has struck as far North as New York City.
Also, increasing population makes more aggressive "tactics" work better for these infectious agents. Remember the Volterra predator prey equation in Diff EQ? It's a microbe's banquet out there.
We either have to develop the ability to quickly tailor medicines to completely novel infectious agents, perhaps combined with vector control, OR we have to radically change our civilization to reduce population growth, restrict population movements into virgin territory (especially tropical), reduce our impact on environment, and generally reduce the level of global travel. These things might be worth doing in themselves, but speaking as someone who has at least a bit of a leaning towards environmentalism, I'm not optimistic about our ability to set the direction of our civilization out of our own volition.
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