Insert Foot In Mouth Disease

If your government is working on a highly-contagious virus that could threaten to wipe out massive numbers of cattle and other hooved animals, wouldn't you want it to be done in some location far, far away from other cattle? Say, a remote island?

Well, that's been the case for the last 50 years. Plum Island, out on the Long Island sound, has been the main research facility for Hoof and Mouth Disease (also known as Foot and Mouth Disease), for America, as well as Mexico and Canada (see picture).

But now the Bush Administration wants to move the facility to a mainland location:

http://www.comcast.net/news/articles/general/2008/04/11/Animal.Disease/

Oh, but hey, our government must surely take all the reasonable precautions. I mean, being a contagious cattle disease that, if released into the general bovine population would spell the needless slaughter of hundreds of thousands of cattle, won't this new facility will be located in some wilderness far beyond the reach of cattle farms? Right?

No, actually. According to a recent Congressional hearing on the topic, each of the five sites that they are considering, according to the article, are within range of between 132,900 and 542,507 cattle.

But they'll be careful. They'll have all the safeguards. Or will they?

It was revealed in that congressional hearing that the Plum Island facility, considered to be one of the nation's foremost top-level containment units, has had numerous accidents and releases of virus, one of which infected cattle outside of the facility in holding pens. Hoof and Mouth disease is so contagious that it can travel on the breath of worker, on their clothes, on their cars. In 2002, a simulation showed that an outbreak of the virus could potentially infect tens of millions of cows, leading to widespread food shortages, rioting, and a 25-mile-long trench to bury all the slaughtered cows.

The poor cows that get this disease experience painful mouth sores and hoof blisters that swell and burst, then can become infected. Eeesh. And I thought my occasional canker sores were painful.

And why are they moving the facility? Fear over being able to protect Plum Island against terrorists. Hillary Clinton was one of the ones who voiced this fear. Control of the island was recently put in the hands of the Department of Homeland Security. I tell you, with all the over-reaction to terrorism (two wars, illegal wiretapping, data mining, waterboarding, screenings at airports, etc etc), I'd say the terrorists have succeeded in their goals of disrupting the American Way. Let's not make it worse, shall we? And, may I add, I am a little leary of decisions about human and animal health issues that seem driven more by politics than science.

Now, I have a great deal of respect for Hillary (although I'm voting for Obama), but I am FAR more afraid of our government's inefficiency and the potential for mistakes by my fellow lab rats than I am of any zealous bin Laden followers.

Get real, Bush. Let's keep the virus off-shore.


Image taken from HERE.

Apparently I'm Stronger Today

I’ve been sick with the flu. Yesterday morning I came to work around 9AM despite feeling ill. Within two hours I fled to go home, feeling horribly nauseous and fatigued, and sporting a low fever. As soon as I got home I went to bed and slept for six hours. I woke up at 5:30PM only because I had to pick up the kids from daycare and watch them. Once they went to sleep around 9PM, I promptly fell back in bed and slept until 7AM the next morning. In all I was awake only about five or six hours yesterday, and I didn’t eat anything at all. Today I’m not nauseous, and I went to work, but I’m not “all there.” We’ll see if I work the entire day. The last couple years have been the worst for diseases for me and my wife, probably because we have two walking incubators called children.

Well, as Nietzsche said, “That which does not kill you only makes you stronger.”

It is in line with this sentiment that a new book has been authored by Marlene Zuk, entitled Riddled with Life: Friendly Worms, Ladybug Sex, and the Parasites that Make Us Who We Are (Harcourt, 2007). Zuk is an evolutionary biologist better known for her investigations into the evolutionary development of sex.

http://www.physorg.com/news95002406.html

Zuk argues that the battle against disease has defined the evolution of our species in many ways. She even argues that fighting disease is part of what led to the development of sexual reproduction in our species, in that cloning would not diversify our genetic code enough to develop resistance. Zuk is also very concerned about the extent to which we have over-exposed ourselves to antibiotics in soaps, cleaners, and other materials, and over-prescribed antibiotic pharmaceuticals. The end result is that we do not develop immunity, causing a decreased resistance and increasing rates of asthma and allergies. Hospitals are becoming problematic for antibiotic-resistant bacteria. This is nothing new, but there is a growing movement away from the use of antibiotics for this reason.

When I went to college, I knew a guy who readily ate food out of trash cans. No kidding, he would dig through the trash and eat pizza slices from boxes that had been thrown in the trash the day before, for instance. He said he had always done that, and never got sick. He thought the rest of us were prudes for letting good food go to waste in the trash. I’ve often wondered how he has fared since then. Has he died from some horrible disease from contaminated food, or is he one of the healthiest guys on earth? I think I’d believe either possibility.

Apparently Zuk says disease can be a “vital partner and friend.” I’m not sure I’d go that far. That which tries to kill or maim you isn’t a friend, in my opinion, but we can evolve a tolerance. A better question is, “Are there viruses out there which do not cause sickness, but in some manner better humanity?” I’ve never heard of such a thing, but I’d be interested to know, and wouldn’t be surprised.

Update (4/13/07): I had to rush home yesterday because my lovely wife had caught this bug and was throwing up. She's better today, as am I. It's hard to think of diseases as our "friends" when you're perched over the porcelain god barfing your brains out.

Raising the Dead

Mad Scientist Syndrome. You know its symptoms: a seemingly respectable but overly-ambitious scientist goes “renegade” with a genius but ill-considered experiment, stirring up some unholy broth or lightning-generating device, then experimenting on himself or an unwitting victim to create a nightmarish scenario. In the process, his eyes grow wild, he has an uncontrolled urge to utter “Mwa ha ha ha ha”, and he can’t seem to control his hair no matter how much hair spray he puts on. 50’s sci-fi movies were full of them and their beastly creations, trouncing hapless eastern-block villages or slaughtering innocent teenagers parked at Make-Out Point.

The truth is that most of us scientists are more like your local librarian than Dr. Frankenstein (although I can name a lab rat or two who resemble Dr. Frank-N-Furter). There have been a few real-life mavericks out there who fit the bill, though, like Nikola Tesla, John C. Lilly, and Edward Teller.

Well now we have a real-life Dr. Frankenstein, of sorts. Imagine, if you will, how you would react if someone brought a person back from being very, very dead. It would be weird and wrong, unethical, but probably not nightmarish since it’s easy enough to avoid, kill, or in some other way control your average zombie. Now imagine how you would react if someone brought back a horrible and naturally extinct virus like smallpox. Okay, that’s nightmarish! By the time the last victim died in 1978 and the disease was eradicated in nature, up to 500 million people had died worldwide in just the 20th century alone.

Finally, imagine that you had the ability to bring back an infective virus from millions of years ago with an unknown pathogenic effect and known human infectivity. What would you do? A French (mad) scientist by the name of Thierry Heidmann recently faced this question:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=AAE5AA31-E7F2-99DF-3D8667A185A61229&ref=rss

Heidmann took sequences of a retrovirus found degraded in human DNA, which infected human ancestors five-million years ago and resequenced it (basically bringing it back to life). This resequenced retrovirus, which he named “Phoenix”, was put into human and mammalian cells and found to be “mildly infective.” They used only biosafety level 3 (comparable to studies of 1918 flu pandemic, compared to smallpox which rates a 4) and apparently did not have national or international oversight. They do not yet know what, if any, clinical effect if would have on an organism.

Eek! So let me see if I have this right: Heidmann brought back to life a very ancient but extinct virus which was known to have infected human ancestors, without knowing how infective it was, what clinical effects it might have, and without the highest level of safety or oversight?

Do I hear a “Mwa ha ha ha ha”?