Thursday, October 13, 2005
No One Expects the Spanish Influenza
One of my favorite columnists, Charles Krauthammer, has written a chilling tale of science taking one step too many--reconstructing the virus for the Spanish Influenza of 1918, which killed millions around the World, and then publishing its entire genome so anyone with a commercial DNA sequencer can make a copy of one of the World's most deadly viruses. Anyone at all.
I guess the good news is that we found out things about it--we found that it is a virulent form of Avian Flu. Mr. Krauthammer is a doctor, a psychiatrist, so he knows more about this stuff than I do, but he seems to fall into the genetic path trap. He implies that the H5N1 virus' movement from a relatively benign (to us) form of flu that won't travel person to person to a deadly pandemic like in The Stand is merely a few mutations away, like dialing in a safe's combination or putting in a PIN at the ATM. My education in this stuff, never too intense and 30 years ago, tells me that that's not how mutation works. The important change in the continual mutation process is to the 'shell' of the virus, so that, for example, the virus can last outside a body longer or so that the body that had a flu shot no longer recognizes and kills the virus inoculated against.
There remains, however, no effective treatment for the resulting infection once you've contracted this virus--the H5N1 virus is resistant to amantadine and rimantadine, two antiviral medications commonly used for influenza, but two other antiviral medications, oseltamavir and zanamavir might work. In the absence of effective antiviral medication, you let the disease run its course, giving what palliative care you can, and the person gets well or, uh, doesn't.
The real triumph of modern medicine, once they stopped the bleeding people to cure a cold thing, is that they can inoculate us against the virus so that our bodies never let it get started. I can only hope that the reconstruction of the Spanish Influenza virus is the sort of pure research that helps create a vaccine that works, in the off chance that we need it for the Asian Avian Flu out there now. They have not yet developed a vaccine for that virus.
I haven't bought the hand soap or Michael Jackson surgical masks yet, but I'm thinking about where I could get them.
I guess the good news is that we found out things about it--we found that it is a virulent form of Avian Flu. Mr. Krauthammer is a doctor, a psychiatrist, so he knows more about this stuff than I do, but he seems to fall into the genetic path trap. He implies that the H5N1 virus' movement from a relatively benign (to us) form of flu that won't travel person to person to a deadly pandemic like in The Stand is merely a few mutations away, like dialing in a safe's combination or putting in a PIN at the ATM. My education in this stuff, never too intense and 30 years ago, tells me that that's not how mutation works. The important change in the continual mutation process is to the 'shell' of the virus, so that, for example, the virus can last outside a body longer or so that the body that had a flu shot no longer recognizes and kills the virus inoculated against.
There remains, however, no effective treatment for the resulting infection once you've contracted this virus--the H5N1 virus is resistant to amantadine and rimantadine, two antiviral medications commonly used for influenza, but two other antiviral medications, oseltamavir and zanamavir might work. In the absence of effective antiviral medication, you let the disease run its course, giving what palliative care you can, and the person gets well or, uh, doesn't.
The real triumph of modern medicine, once they stopped the bleeding people to cure a cold thing, is that they can inoculate us against the virus so that our bodies never let it get started. I can only hope that the reconstruction of the Spanish Influenza virus is the sort of pure research that helps create a vaccine that works, in the off chance that we need it for the Asian Avian Flu out there now. They have not yet developed a vaccine for that virus.
I haven't bought the hand soap or Michael Jackson surgical masks yet, but I'm thinking about where I could get them.
# posted by Roger Fraley @ 11:12 PM 
