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New Virus Jumps From Monkeys To Lab Workers
sciencehabit writes "It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy."
The California National Primate Research Center. Hmm, does that sound like it's owned by a private corporation or the US Government? I know, lets make a bunch of retarded, baseless accusations under the assumption that it is without first taking 5 seconds to look it up.
Why would it "wipe out the bulk of the human race"? We encounter new viruses every year and our immune systems adapt. The workers in question didn't die either. How do you make the leap from a simple virus in an ape jumping to a few isolated humans to it wiping out the human race? Been watching too many movies? How would this be different than say, avian or swine flu? Somehow because it comes from an ape suddenly we're all doomed? Grow up.
From Wikipedia:
The California National Primate Research Center (CNPRC) is a United States federal government funded biomedical research facility, dedicated to improving human and animal health, and located on the University of California, Davis, campus.
Yeah, sounds just like a private lab far away from the scrutiny of the public eye. Hell, the freshmen might even have trouble getting into the lab for late-night makeout/pot smoking sessions! Doubt it, though.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Nothing more than could go wrong with natural evolution over the the same course of time.
See, we have these things called DNA, that occurs naturally, and these things that happen to it called mutations, that occur naturally, and every time we wipe something out or solve a problem, we "force" the organism (indirectly) to move to a mutation that survives. In doing so, nature does the same things as we would do, except more efficiently, more quickly, more randomly and under far less control.
Wait 50 years. AIDS will be back, in a slightly different form. Bird flu will be back. Swine flu will be back (it is already, in various mutated forms that we can't treat). MRSA will be back (because MRSA is basically nothing more than an evolved bacteria).
30 years ago we hadn't even heard of MRSA or AIDS and today they are present most of the world. Guess what'll happen 30 years from now, especially if we eradicate either of those and leave lots more potential human hosts living for longer with freedom to copulate more than previously?
Nothing we do in genetics, or even huge tracts of biology, isn't happening too, now, around you, this second, under far, far less control. And guess what? If we don't tinker with it ourselves, we have no way to detect, understand, treat and cope with any of those natural changes that have a devastating effect on people (i.e. we'd be able to do fuck-all about AIDS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, even just simple cancer). Cancer is a naturally-occurring mutation that makes a single cell out of billions in your body go ape-shit and not stop reproducing.
Despite all that, statistics show that people have NEVER lived as long as they do now (and cancer survival rates are phenomenal compared to even 10 years ago). All that's because of people tinkering.
Basically, your argument would make more sense reversed - why aren't we tinkering more? Tinkering helps, yet nature destroys and keeps coming back and back and back and attacking us with new things all the time that we take DECADES to understand.
I think you read the article wrong.
The original source of the infection was perceived to be the rhesus monkey, because it was the only thing with antibodies that wasn't sick (and thus was presumed to be the carrier). The virus either passed from rhesus to human to titi, or from rhesus to titi to human.
Either way, a monkey made a human sick. The article specifically points out that this isn't a common human ailment, so it didn't originate in a human. A human wasn't the "source" of the virus. That's the entire reason it's usable for gene therapy; humans don't already carry antigens for it so we won't immediately kill it if it is introduced into our body with a beneficial payload. Theoretically. After all, even with no previous human exposure, the humans in this case managed to kill it off in four weeks.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.