Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/18/84; site phri.UUCP Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!mhuxn!ihnp4!houxm!vax135!timeinc!phri!roy From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) Newsgroups: net.med Subject: Re: Viral infections: Modern medicine seems virtually helpless! Message-ID: <401@phri.UUCP> Date: Tue, 13-Aug-85 21:08:32 EDT Article-I.D.: phri.401 Posted: Tue Aug 13 21:08:32 1985 Date-Received: Sat, 17-Aug-85 15:33:19 EDT References: <191@tekig5.UUCP> Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY) Lines: 101 >We've had antibiotics to combat bacterial infections for HOW long now? About 50 years. Penicillin was just starting to become available in the early 1940's, sulfa drugs were around for a while before that. > [...] there seems to be virtually no viral infection that DOES yield to > ANY sort of chemotherapy! All that's available is vaccination; That's right; *all* we can do is vaccinate children so they no longer contract polio, smallpox, mumps, measles, german measles (all viral infections) not to mention diptheria, tetanus and whooping cough. Since nobody gets these diseases any more, finding chemotherapy for them is not a high priority. Smallpox, by the way, is one of the few viruses for which chemotherapy has been moderately successful, but erradication of the virus was even better. > Go ahead, get upset about AIDS - How would you like to see an AIDS virus > that DOES spread like the common cold? Or a rabies virus? And I don't hear > any screaming and yelling about it. Where have you been lately? Actually, the media is doing the screaming and yelling. The scientific community has been quietly doing the research and has identified and characterized the AIDS virus within the space of a year, thanks to the new biotechnology that emerged from basic research. > I think there's finally been a recorded case of a rabies victim > surviving, in the U.S., under intensive care. You miss the point. Almost nobody bitten by a rabid animal contracts rabies anymore, thanks to the administration of the vaccine. Pre-Pasteur, 100% of these people contracted the disease and died. > Admittedly the problem is difficult; since viruses are such a simple life > form, it's difficult to find a means of attacking them without also > attacking the host. A surprisingly lucid observation. This is indeed the major problem with fighting viral infections. Antibiotics work *because* bacteria have a sufficiently complicated metabolism. You can feed a person erythromycin (which screws up bacterial protein synthesis) without killing the patient because a person's protein making machinery is sufficiently different from the bacteria's that it is not affected by the drug. Viruses don't have any metabolism of their own; they are parasites which rely on the host's metabolic machinery to grow. Since they share our metabolism, it is difficult to find a way to interfere with their growth without also killing the patient. The most success in viral chemotherapy has come with viruses that are sufficiently complex that they supply some of their own enzymes, which are different enough from the host's to be a possible target for chemical attack. > But it is just appalling to me that so much noise is made about similarly > difficult problems [...] and the medical profession doesn't seem to even > care. This is such a patently untrue statment, I don't know where to begin to argue with it. You seem to imply that the noise is proportional to the effort. Herpes and AIDS are two of the hottest fields in medical research. > One has to wonder how long we have before the inevitable, particularly > with some of the rumors I hear about research in biogenetic warfare. I > believe the Wall Street Journal published some articles a while back > claiming that that Russians were attempting to engineer a flu virus which > would produce cobra venom. That may be a little far-fetched in reality, It would actually be rather trivial to make such a virus, given existing biotechnology. BTW, I wonder why you consider the WSJ to be a good source of scientific information. They certainly are a respectable publication, but to keep up with scientific progress, I would suggest the N.Y. Times science section (every Tuesday) or Scientific American. Both are readable by the "intelligent layman" and are readily available at most newsstands and libraries. > but it's certainly not beyond the nonexistent morality of some of the > nerds in the scientific community to attempt it, if they could get the > funding (no need to debate whether there's anyone amoral enough to fund > it, I hope). It's the United States government that funds such projects, and it was the academic community that took the government to court recently and won an injunction against the construction of a P4 (highest level of biological containment) laboratory at Fort Dugway, Utah, that the Army wanted to use for "testing" toxic biological aerosols. > Anyone who cares to flame at me for putting this in net.general is > welcome to a dose of cobra venom, sans virus, direct from my laboratory. > You might direct your responses to net.med, however; there's actually > a couple of MD's out there among the compunerds. Consider yourself flamed, I won't waste the space. But I left your last paragraph in so that everybody who reads net.med can be equally offended. Unfortunately, for all the random screaming and yelling in your article, I can't figure out what point you are trying to make. Obviously, you have some gripe with the medical community, but just what it is I can't figure out. -- Roy SmithSystem Administrator, Public Health Research Institute 455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016