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Cod Enzyme Kills Bird Flu
Jon Golden writes "An Icelandic cod enzyme might be the cure for bird flu. A recent experiment, which the Icelandic company Ensímtaekni hf. took part in, indicates that in five minutes, the isolated fish enzyme killed 99 percent of H5N1 viruses.
The killer enzyme, called penzim, was extracted from the intestines of cod by Ensímtaekni and is currently being developed for beauty products and various types of medicine. The experiment on the H5N1 virus was conducted in London.
CEO of Ensímtaekni and biochemist Jón Bragi Bjarnason said he is very excited about the results of the bird flu experiment.
"People have feared that the bird flu virus will change into a human flu virus and now we have a likely cure in case that happens."
Bjarnason also believes that penzim might prove a cure for common flu and cold, eczema in children and arthritis."
The virus may mutate into a form resistant to the enzyme in the future but it would then no longer be the same virus strain, the virus would have to start all over again and it may not even succeed. There is no reason why other 'cured' viruses like smallpox & polio couldn't have mutated and beat their cures (although influenza does mututate more than small pox) but they didn't and now the world is free of them.
If proven effective in the real world then it is still a cure, saying otherwise is like saying "Why bother trying to cure the disease, everyone is going to die someday".
One reason epidemiologists are especially concerned about avian flu because flu pandemics have killed tens of millions of people before. This was in 1918 when the public health system was less developed, but population densities and the mobility of the human population are much greater today.
Another respondent has already detailed the other reasons why an avian flu is logistically more threatening. Your political/conspiracy theory may be completely true and valid, but the fact remains that people are concerned about the flu rather than ebola or airborne rabies because it's the disease that has been observed to kill in great numbers in the recent, documented past.
The fact that Donald Rumsfeld might be profiteering from the hype does not mean that avian flu is not a real threat.
Most plants do not require other organisms. While some plants use nitrogen fixers (like legumes, peanuts and clover), there are others, like cotton, which do not rely on nitrogen fixers and will just suck all the nitrogen out of the soil. This is why George Washington Carver advocated rotating cotton with peanuts. The same goes for trees. Granted, plants would eventually all perish if there were no decomposers, but if they were fed artifical fertilizers, they do not depend on other organisms the way viruses depend on others.
That's not the point I want to make though. Although multicellular organisms are much more complex than a bacteria, bacteria are many many many times more complex than viruses. Viruses are basically a protective capsule around genetic information, similar to, but stil less complex than the nucleus in a eukaryotic cell. Bacteria have many different structures and functions, including many pathways (generally more than even eukaryotic cells) for generating energy, as well as structures for regulating both the environment inside and outside their cellular membrane. All these bacteria are completely independent. The debate over whether viruses are alive or dead is not about whether something depends on something else, or how complex it is. It really boils down to this: 1) Biologists claim that there are 7 indications of life that must be met for something to be alive, and viruses do not meet all these criteria; 2) biologists also say that the central point of life, its meaning if you will, is to reproduce, and viruses certainly do do this. If viruses replicate and adapt like living things even though they do not exhibit all the signs of life, are they alive? That is the question...
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
There are at least a dozen _known_ diseases that will just as gleefully sicken or even kill the human animal. Why we're so upset about the bird flu and what makes it special, I don't know, except of course that the entire subject is pushed into our faces and through our ears nonstop through the media. (Just to forestall some comments: The rabies virus could mutate too and become airborne for all we know. Gnade uns Gott should that ever happen).
I'm not sure why this is "interesting". The reason there is such an interest in the bird flu is due to the danger it poses. It's quite simple, actually. Due to a couple factors I won't get into here, the flu mutates very quickly. The obvious consequence of this is that it is constantly evading the human immune system. It also means that it can quickly mutate to forms that are far more deadly and far more transmissible than the flu normally is. Currently, the bird flu already has the "far more deadly" aspect. It kills roughly 50% of the people infected with it. As of right now, it still has trouble being transmitted, so it is not killing many people. However, due to the ease with which the flu mutates it is very simple for the bird flu to become highly infectious. So, we're a chance encounter away from a virus that could quickly kill millions of people in a single season. Moreover, there is a precedent for this: the 1918 flu. And that flu had a lower mortality rate than H5N1 currently has. Will H5N1 mutate to quickly spread among humans? We don't know. What we do know is that it most certainly will mutate, and that it has the ability to mutate into a pandemic form.
As for Tamiflu, your point only makes sense if Donald Rumsfeld controls the entire scientific and medical communities, as well as the worldwide press. I suggest that instead of reading conspiracy theory bulletin boards, you check out the Flu Wiki to find out more about the subject.
"fist in the air in the land of hypocrisy"
Apples and oranges. Neither smallox nor polio was "cured", in the manner implied in the original post. Smallpox and polio have been (nearly) eradicated via removing their ability to infect new hosts, by means of vaccines protecting tose potential hosts. And the vaccines activated our own immune systems, and didn't have a direct effect on the smallpox and polio viruses.
This enzyme is being toutes as a "cure" in the sense that it can eliminate bird flue in those already infected by it by acting directly on the virus. That is how antibiotics work, and the GP has a point - if the stuff only kills 90%, there is a risk of resistant strains developing. For that matter, it's already happening - researchers are finding Tamiflu resistant strains of bird flu already.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson