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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 Smith 
System Administrator, Public Health Research Institute
455 First Avenue, New York, NY 10016