COVID: Going Down With Polio

 

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COVID-19 vaccinees are going down with polio (tranverse myelitis, Guillain-Barre, AFP paralysis, etc) and its primary form of encephalitis which makes “polio forever” relevant once again. https://www.polioforever.wordpress.com

Today I can say this is the start of polioforever’s last chapter and it all comes down to the simplicity of viral forms –call it Shape Matters Two: The essence of biological currency and the universal foundation of ‘recognition’ from our immune systems and among all creatures. Viruses as we ‘see’ them have three shapes, like primary colors — spheres, rods, and the combined sphere-rod. Everything else is dressing.

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The primitive nanotechnology of the 20^th century called Virology has come of age with Three Master Keys to the Kingdom: bacteriophage (sphere-rod), poliovirus (sphere) and Tobacco Mosaic Virus (rod). Unmasking the keys and dressing them down will tell the story of viruses in our time, from tobacco mosaic virus to coronavirus, or what some of you know from me as “TMV to CoV”. Breaking down and rearranging these biological master keys for useful purposes was called “metabiology” by Jonas Salk, who coined the term and brought the OPV polio vaccine to fruition as we entered the ‘peak fallout’ period of atmospheric nuclear testing. Polio is caused by radiation and chemical toxins.

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Bacteriophage*

 

poliovirus sphere*                                                                                                                                 icosahedron

 

 

*tobacco mosaic virus rod*

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Poliovirus by other names and other species:

Tobacco Bushy Stunt Virus* TBSV*

                                                                                    TBSV*

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Poliovirus electron micrograph

Aggregation of poliovirus*

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………………………………………………………….BMV = Brome Mosaic Virus………………….TBSV = Tobacco Bushy Stunr Virus…………….TYMV=Turnip Yellow Mosaic Virus

 

 

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Cowpea Mosaic Virus*                                                                                          icosahedron, showing pattern of regular pentamer  subunits.

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…transitional forms*

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Human Rhinovirus*

Rhinovirus infections are the chief cause of the common cold. Thrive in the lower temperature of the nose (33oC) They are transmitted by airborne respiratory droplets or contact with contaminated objects. Figure 15.02: A Rhinovirus. Human rhinovirus 16: Picornaviridae; Rhinovirus; Human rhinovirus A; strain (NA). Hadfield, A.T., Lee, W.M., Zhao, R., Oliveira, M.A., Minor, I., Rueckert, R.R. and Rossmann, M.G. (1997). The refined structure of human rhinovirus 16 at 2.15 A resolution:

 

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Norwalk virus*

Cucumber Mosaic Virus,’negative’ image of Norwalk*

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Look again at poliovirus*

 

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carbon*

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If you’re uncertain about what you’re really looking at with the virus images (re: the same thing), see the previous posts: ‘Virus: Shape Matters’ and ‘The Nanoflower Shop’ for clarity. After this, a storyline begins about poliovirus and tobacco mosaic virus investigated by a group of researchers who gathered around Rosalind Franklin and J.D. Bernal at Birkbeck College London.  In 1958, this group made two virus models for the Brussels World Exhibition; poliovirus and tobacco mosaic, the subjects of their study.

1958 World’s Fair poliovirus model*

1958 World’s Fair TMV* displayed at Int’l Science Building, Brussels*

 

 

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The Virus Structure Research Group at Birkbeck College London, under the direction of J.D. Bernal, a communist and transhumanist since the 1920s, included Rosalind Franklin, Aaron Klug, John Finch, Kenneth Holmes and several others; Nobel Laureate Francis Crick, Americans Don Caspar and, by extension, Barry Commoner, the Fraenkel-Conrats, and more. The Birkbeck researchers focused on polivirus and TMV. Crick told the group that ‘any child could make a virus’. In 1958 Crick was invited to become a lifetime staff scientist at the Salk Institute of Biological Studies, then forming in La Jolla near San Diego. His ‘group’ at Birkbeck deferred to him often. Aaron Klug took over leadership of the group after Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in ‘58 and Crick accepted his honors and appointments in the U.S.

Klug wrote to Crick on Feb.13, 1959:

“Dear Francis,

… I feel it is now appropriate to draw attention to the occurrence of icosahedral symmetry in 5 viruses (although I haven’t mentioned Bea’s result on SBMV). I am now trying to see whether it is possible to classify the ways in which a large virus like Tipula IV might be built up out of subunits, a problem you suggested some time ago. It seems to me that one must start off with…a small virus and then try to make a ‘crystal’ of it, by adding more subunits to try to achieve close packing. In this way…one can arrive at 3 families of icosahedra, namely : truncated icosahedron, small rhomb-icosadodecahedron and snub dodecahedron.”

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https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101584582X213-doc

“Bea’s SBMV” refers to Beatrice A. Singer, the wife of TMV expert Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, who worked at the University of California Berkeley ‘Rad Lab’ –the famed ‘Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’ (LBNL, and its affiliate Lawrence Livermore) founded by Ernest O. Lawrence. Singer and her husband were jointly working on Tobacco Mosaic Virus mutants and sharing their samples and knowledge.

“Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV) .  The virus of our story is Southern Bean Mosaic Virus (SBMV), a humble RNA-containing plant virus that infects bean plants in the South of the United States. Neither SMBV nor its relative TBSV were ever as famous as the animal viruses that are fashionable today as human pathogens (for instance, AIDS virus or common cold -rhino virus-). Small…plant viruses like them were easy to obtain…[and] easy to crystallize and consequently they were the objects of a concerted effort to obtain their atomic structure by X-ray diffraction methods with conventional in-house X-ray sources. Viruses had to be constructed from a few identical subunits. [We call them “virus-like particles”, or VLPs, today—JL]. The icosahedral symmetry of small spherical viruses had been proposed by Watson and Crick in the early fifties[1]… they predicted that the virus envelopes would be highly symmetrical, and most likely icosahedral, containing at least twenty copies of the coat protein in the shell, or capsid.  The detailed arrangement of the proteins in the capsid on the surface, and a preliminary classification of icosahedral viruses was presented by Caspar and Klug in their classic 1962 paper [2].”

https://crystaledges.org/the-ballad-of-the-2-8-angstroms-structure-of-sbmv/

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Southern Bean Mosaic (SBMV)*

 

 

* 1957

…”Electron micrographs showing details of the internal structure of plant virus crystals are presented to demonstrate the values of the procedure. Crystals of purified tobacco ringspot virus and squash mosaic virus and some portions of turnip yellow mosaic virus crystals have been shown to exhibit hexagonal packing…”

 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/13416310/

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At Birkbeck lab, Franklin’s graduate student assistant John Finch’s “second PhD project involved crystals of poliovirus, which were given to Rosalind in 1957 by Drs Schaffer and Schwerdt from Berkeley… The study showed that poliovirus was rather similar to the small, spherical plant viruses also being worked on then, but the analysis was not taken any further.” https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsbm.2018.0028

 

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*Rosalind Franklin (b1920—d1958) became posthumously famous for failing to be included in the Nobel Prize given to Crick, Watson and Wilkins for discovering the structure of DNA, presumably learned from her crystallography images of Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV):

“Although best known for being the British physical chemist whose crucial experimental data enabled James Watson and Frances Crick to solve the structure of DNA as early as 1953, she received no gracious mention from either of them during their Nobel Prize speeches. Indeed, until 1968 when Watson wrote The Double Helix, she had only received vague credit for stimulating their work rather than specific credit for contributing to their original proposal.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/franklin-rosalind

 

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“Tobacco mosaic virus, which causes tobacco leaves to curl and discolor in patches (hence “mosaic”) had been a model for virus studies since the 1880s; it was a simple, stable, and highly infectious organism. Understanding the structure of viruses was the first step in learning how they caused disease. By 1950 it was known that viruses consisted of protein and DNA or RNA (ribonucleic acid). Bernal and Fankuchen had found that TMV was composed of identical protein subunits. James Watson, during his hiatus from DNA modeling in 1952, worked briefly with TMV and established that the protein subunits were arranged in a spiral. Franklin’s challenge was to find out whether the RNA was in the middle of the spiral, like a candle wick, or embedded in the proteins. She was aided in this work by Aaron Klug, then a postdoctoral fellow in theoretical physics and chemistry, and two research assistants, Kenneth Holmes and John Finch. For a time, the team also included Donald Caspar, an American biophysicist. When her Turner and Newall fellowship ended in 1954, Birkbeck arranged three years of support from the Agricultural Research Council (ARC) for Franklin’s team…

“…1954 also marked Franklin’s first visit to the United States. Invited to the Gordon Conference to give a paper on coal chemistry that summer, she also scraped together funding for visits to virus researchers at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole (where her visit coincided with the 1954 hurricane), Washington University in St. Louis, the University of California in Berkeley, and California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, among others. She made new contacts and renewed older ones, building a network of colleagues whose work complemented and informed her own. She returned home with virus samples and promises of collaboration from leading American scientists such as Wendell Stanley and Barry Commoner…

“[By] the summer of 1956, she was at the top of her profession. She had assembled a fine research team, and their work produced a steady stream of publications. She had established a wide network of research contacts and collaborators, and was invited to meetings everywhere. (Wendell Stanley would later call her “an international courier of good will and scientific information.”) And though she struggled with the ARC over funding (they disapproved of her working on “second hand material” from other labs, among other things) there was a good chance that a grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health would provide alternative funding. While in America she was honored with a request from the Royal Institution for models of helical and spherical viruses, for an exhibit in the International Science Hall of the 1958 Brussels World Fair. (The five foot tall models–modified from early versions constructed from ping pong balls and plastic bicycle handlebar grips–were well received.)

…. “Work continued on plant viruses–the team prepared over a dozen papers for publication in 1956-57–and Franklin had also started planning a project examining polio virus. She applied for and received a three year research grant from the U.S. National Institutes of Health, ensuring the survival of her research group. In March 1958, the cancer advanced again, and Franklin returned to the hospital. She died on April 16, not quite 38 years old.

“In the obituaries he wrote for the Times and Nature, J. D. Bernal praised her beautifully executed researches, carried out with apparently effortless skill, and her gift for organizing research projects. He noted, “As a scientist Miss Franklin was distinguished by extreme clarity and perfection in everything she undertook. Her photographs are among the most beautiful x-ray photographs of any substance ever taken.” Her life, he concluded, was a perfect example of single-minded devotion to research.”

https://rmp.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/kr/feature/viruses

 

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“The nature of the three-dimensional architecture of viruses and the assembly of viral subunits and nucleic acids have been among the central issues in virology over the past fifty years. Sir Aaron Klug (Medical Research Council Laboratory, Cambridge, UK), President of the Royal Society of London, offered his own historical perspective on the resolution of TMV architecture and its implications for virus self-assembly. Klug began working with R. Franklin in 1954, just two years before the first big picture of TMV quaternary structure emerged (Franklin et al., 1956). This picture was based largely on the high-quality x-ray photographs Franklin obtained from her samples of repolymerized, nucleic acid–free TMV particles (Franklin, 1955). Franklin thus confirmed J.D. Watson’s deduction that the rod-shaped virus was helical (Watson, 1954), but she also provided evidence that the helix was hollow rather than solid and that TMV RNA was embedded in the protein helix (Caspar, 1956; Franklin, 1956). Experimental evidence from these studies on TMV provided the basis for F.C. Crick and Watson’s contention that all viruses must be built up symmetrically from identical protein subunits that surround the nucleic acid (Crick and Watson, 1956). The elegant simplicity of this observation prompted the witticism, attributed to Crick, that “Any child could make a virus.” In listening to the participants at the Edinburgh symposium, one could not help but note that TMV research has been a serious playground (pace Max Delbrück) for some of the most formidable structural biologists of the twentieth century.”

http://www.plantcell.org/content/11/3/301

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………………………………………………………………………………………………..West Nile Virus*

Bacteriophage III

The role of phage research can hardly be overstated as the basis of recombination and genetic engineering; today’s “biotechnology”. The discoverers of phage, Frederick Twort and Felix d’Herelle, had vastly different experiences in their respective careers but both were relegated to obscurity near the end of their lives. They in themselves pose a mystery in the story of bacteriophage. D’Herelle, who as a self-taught scientist with a dominant personality, enjoyed “spectacular success” in the 1920s and 30s until he ran afoul of his colleagues at the Pasteur Institute, a concerted undermining that began in 1921. A biography written by William Summers (link below) notes that the only period of scientific stability for d’Herelle came during a five-year stint at Yale, a period from 1928 to 1933. Similar conflicts that he endured with the staff of Pasteur came to mark d’Herelle’s departure from Yale.

Speculation is that d’Herelle’s heresy against vaccines and the false process of creating “laboratory” diseases violated the vested interests of the burgeoning western medical establishment. This is given as his reason to accept the welcoming offer of Joseph Stalin that created a number of insitutes devoted to the study of bacteriophage and doubtlessly set the Soviets up with advanced bioweapons. It’s inconceivable to absurdity to believe the west did not also construct it’s biowar programs on phage research. Phage, and it’s multiple functions, are a weaponeer’s germ-theory dream come true. Phages have the distinctive capacity of target-specific destruction and the more abstract potential to alter the genomic basis of life on earth. This is no abstraction, however. It’s tangible and it’s happening.

The renaissance of bacteriophage experimentation is well underway, in fact it never did go away but became a supressed technology too good to lose. As the multi-field influence of physics and chemistry entered the laboratories to study phage, in the words of Salvador Luria, this “opened the way to the Holy Grail of biophysics”. Luria’s interest is noted to have been especially “in how radiation affects bacteriophages by causing mutations”. Prior to coming to the United States as a ‘displaced scholar’ and setting up shop, Luria had spent a year with Enrico Fermi’s physics team in Rome. Physicist Max Delbruck, friend and colleague to the fathers of the Bomb, was encouraged to pursue radiation biology and along with Luria became a leader of the field. Summer bacteriophage sessions at the Cold Spring Harbor lab under the auspices of the Carnegie Foundation became part of the backbone of American genetic science. Mutant recombinant influenza viruses exist because of this experimentation. It is well demonstrated in the journals. The year after flu specialist George K. Hirst claims that phage-influenza research was “dropped” in 1956, the next great pandemic of a new strain, Asian flu, swept around the globe.

 1915, discoverer of phage, Frederick Twort  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Twort and more, http://newsarchive.asm.org/sep01/animalcule.asp

Link to an abbreviated version of William Summers’ biography on Felix d’Herelle  http://books.google.com/books?id=o3uxoUfbBnQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=F%C3%A9lix+d%27Herelle+and+the+origins+of+molecular+biology++By+William+C.+Summers#v=onepage&q=&f=false

Read between the lines here, on d’Herelle   http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2542891 and the nature of his heresy…

…”d’Herelle and his disciples affirmed that vaccines and serotherapies did not work, at least not in accordance with the theories of conventional medicine. Sera, for example, would have been active exclusively against bacterial toxins and not the bacterium responsible for disease (3). In diseases with relapse, antibodies would be at their peak during the relapse and possibly at the time of death, demonstrating that the bacteria were not rendered impotent (42). For instance, vaccines and serotherapy against cholera were considered by d’Herelle to be ineffective and dangerous. This was confirmed, according to d’Herelle, by the deaths in the regions where they were used. In general, every therapy and preventive measure derived from traditional immunology was a real “public danger” (42).”

So many questions are begged by the experiences of Twort and d’Herelle in addition to who they were and what they believed. The author of the (nih) Stanier Institute paper would have us believe that the success or failure of research pursuits are intrinsically entwined with the cult-of-personality status achieved by individual scientists. The intrepid d’Herelle, who found himself in relative isolation, was just the right sort to advance the potential of bacteriophage to the growing ‘establishment’. In time, I hope to understand his role much better. In the present, his general theories are deemed to be correct.

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Commercial bacteriophage

“D’Herelle’s commercial laboratory in Paris produced at least five phage preparations against various bacterial infections. The preparations were called Bacté-coli-phage, Bacté-rhino-phage, Bacté-intesti-phage, Bacté-pyo-phage, and Bacté-staphy-phage, and they were marketed by what later became the large French company L’Oréal (68). Therapeutic phages were also produced in the United States. In the 1940s, the Eli Lilly Company (Indianapolis, Ind.) produced seven phage products for human use, including preparations targeted against staphylococci, streptococci, Escherichia coli, and other bacterial pathogens. These preparations consisted of phage-lysed, bacteriologically sterile broth cultures of the targeted bacteria (e.g., Colo-lysate, Ento-lysate, Neiso-lysate, and Staphylo-lysate) or the same preparations in a water-soluble jelly base (e.g., Colo-jel, Ento-jel, and Staphylo-jel). They were used to treat various infections, including abscesses, suppurating wounds, vaginitis, acute and chronic infections of the upper respiratory tract, and mastoid infections. However, the efficacy of phage preparations was controversial (20, 26), and with the advent of antibiotics, commercial production of therapeutic phages ceased in most of the Western world. Nevertheless, phages continued to be used therapeuticallytogether with or instead of antibioticsin Eastern Europe and in the former Soviet Union. Several institutions in these countries were actively involved in therapeutic phage research and production, with activities centered at the Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology (EIBMV) of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, Tbilisi, Georgia, and the Hirszfeld Institute of Immunology and Experimental Therapy (HIIET) of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Wroclaw, Poland.”

Dismissed in the United States

 “Starting with the first known use of phages in humans (the Enfants-Malades trials) and in all subsequent trials, d’Herelle administered phages to all sick patients. This failure to include placebo groups may be explained by the possibility that d’Herelle might have been reluctant to deprive anyone of therapy he believed could save his or her life. It could also have been due to the personal scientific style of d’Herelle, as he also failed to include placebo groups during his studies with chickens, when ethical considerations were not an issue (72). Similar failures were very common during the early history of phage therapy, and therefore the results frequently were controversial. To address this controversy, the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association requested that a full review of the available literature on phage therapy be prepared for the Council’s consideration. Consequently, Monroe Eaton and Stanhope Bayne-Jones reviewed more than 100 papers on bacteriophage therapy and in 1934 they published a detailed review of phage therapy (20). This report is one of the most detailed reviews of phage therapy ever published, and its conclusions were clearly not in favor of phage therapy. Among other conclusions, the authors stated that “d’Herelle’s theory that the material is a living virus parasite of bacteria has not been proved. On the contrary, the facts appear to indicate that the material is inanimate, possibly an enzyme.” The authors further stated that “since it has not been shown conclusively that bacteriophage is a living organism, it is unwarranted to attribute its effect on cultures of bacteria or its possible therapeutic action to a vital property of the substance.” At the present time it is clear that the above conclusions of the report were incorrect. However, the report delivered a severe blow to the interest of Western scientists in evaluating the utility of phages for therapeutic purposes and it undoubtedly had a strong negative impact on the enthusiasm of funding agencies to support therapeutic phage research. In addition, 7 years after the Eaton-Bayne-Jones report, a second unfavorable report was published by Albert Krueger and Jane Scribner (26) as a sequel to the Eaton-Bayne-Jones report. The authors justified the need to write the second review because “much more information about both phage itself and its clinical utility has accumulated.” However, the authors’ conclusions about the nature of phages also was incorrect since they stated “It is a protein of high molecular weight and appears to be formed from a precursor originating within the bacterium.” The authors further concluded that “it is equally evident that phage solutions possess no measurable degree of superiority over well known and accepted preparations.” Although the authors suggested that further evaluation of the therapeutic potential of phages might be warranted under thoroughly controlled conditions, their assessment (together with that of Eaton and Bayne-Jones) effectively stopped all major studies of phage therapy in the United States.”   http://aac.asm.org/cgi/content/full/45/3/649

Bacteriophage II

Bacteriophage II

http://drbroxmeyer.netfirms.com/001pdfBIRDFLUEDITORIALPUBLISHED.pdf

Statements from the website above:

…”If the devil were to work overtime in a plot to confound scientists in their quest for a causative agent to a serious disease of unknown origin, it is doubtful whether he could have come up with anything better than the phage …It is little wonder then why scientists could easily mistake bacterial elements for viruses…”

…”by the 1950s the word “virus” had become so mouldable a concept that one could speak of virus workers without the existence of any concensus whatsoever of what viruses were. Extremely supportive of this mouldability among virologists was Max Delbruck’s subtitle for Virus, 1950, a conference held at [Cal Tech] called “Proceedings of a conference on the similarities and dissimilarities between viruses attacking animals, plants, and bacteria.”

…”Indeed, in the 1930s and 1940s the concept of ‘filterable virus’ was subjected to such criticism that its very foundations were threatened…”

…”Statements coming from pioneer virologist Andre Lwoff in 1957 such as “viruses should be considered as viruses because viruses are viruses” were totally unacceptable. Also under the gun was Thomas M. Rivers, the father of American Virology…Rivers was wrong…some bacteria could pass through filters that some of the larger viruses could not.”

In the 1918 Pandemic…”the death rate was twice as high among men…the current epidemic wasn’t just influenza, thought [William] Welch. Nor did he believe those who speculated a ‘filterable virus’ which passed through a porcelain or clay filter. These reports had not been reproducible…..this ‘Influenza’s’ clinical symptoms truly shocked medical officers across the country… Patients could spike to 105 or 106 F with accompanying delirium..bled from the nose and ears..blue swollen lungs exuded bloody froth, causing pathologists to say, over and over again, that this must be some kind of new disease… Nevertheless, virologists saw a great opportunity provided by the 1918 pandemic and by hook or by crook would prove it to be viral. Richard Shope began the first salvo working on ‘swine influenza’… But beginning his investigations in earnest, Shope became perplexed. Not a virus but a bacteria kept cropping up…and it resembled the Pfeiffer’s bacillus, or Hemophilus Influenzae, more than anything else. The problem was he couldn’t infect most of his subjects with the bacteria…”

“There is an old adage which rings particularly true for even state of the art science. It reads “You get what you look for”. It is also a trap that no scientist should fall into. Specifically, if you are looking for a viral cause for the lethal Pandemic of 1918 and ignoring any evidence of bacteria.. you will not only ignore evidence of bacterial disease in specimens but you will use agents such as phenol which can kill every bacteria that crawls. You will be sure that the ‘virus’ passes a filter.. to once and for all nail down your argument. But does that mean in reality what you have seen and labeled a virus is in certainty a virus? Not at all. The fact that tuberculosis killed an estimated 1 billion people by itself between 1850 and 1950, the approximate midpoint of which was the Pandemic, is immaterial…”

“Bacteria reproduce asexually so there is no variation of genes in a colony, and no way for them to exchange genetic material. Phages, the viruses which live inside bacteria such as the mycobacteria called tuberculosis, can allow exchange of this genetic material, as well as force natural selection. The way bacteriophages, or ‘phages’, allow gene diversity is after they insert their own genetic material into their bacterial prey’s genome, they in essence hijack the manufacturing capacity of the bacteria for their own purposes, reproducing new viruses in the bacteria….. When these viruses infect other bacteria, usually of the same class, such as from bird tuberculosis to human tuberculosis inside the pig, they add the other bacteria’s genes to the new bacteria. [this was also done ‘in vitro’ in laboratories by flu researchers –JL]. This creates genetic diversity or ‘mutations’. Such genetic mutations can create far more virulent bacteria than either of the parent bacteria. This is what is theorized happened in 1918 Haskell County, Kansas, where genetic elements of human and avian tuberculosis combined inside hogs just prior to the Pandemic of 1918″.

“Dr. Andrew Noymer and Michel Garenne, UCBerkely demographers, reported in 2000 convincing statistics showing that undetected tuberculosis may have been the real killer in the 1918 flu epidemic… It is theorized that the lethal pig epidemic that began in Kansas just prior to the first human outbreaks was a disease of avian and human tuberculosis genetically combined through mycobacteriophage interchange… The obvious need for further investigation is presently imminent and pressing.”

[end excerpts]

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I posit that one would have to ignore many of the other possibilitites besides ‘phage’ and ‘flu genes’ brought about by toxic conditions in 1918. Clearly, ‘filtrate’ was an unreliable method of producing ‘purified’ phage and virus although such experimentation was well advanced by the onset of WWI. X-rays, radium treatment, toxic medicants, experimental vaccines, blood products derived from animals, malnutrition, crowding and stress, etc. all contributors to the many factors of flu. Human enteroviruses carried into the bloodstream and organs are just as able to mutate and infect the lungs and the possibilties of intentional or accidental bioweapons cannot be ruled out.

Bacteriophage, part III https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/08/06/bacteriophage-iii/

Bacteriophage I

This is a complementary post to Understanding Virus and the Flu

https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/07/25/understanding-virus-and-the-flu/

Bacteriophage (laid the foundation for viral influenza research)

http://www.phages.org/PhageInfo.html

Q: What are phages and how do they “work”?

A: Bacteriophages (phages) are viruses that infect bacteria. Typical phages have hollow heads (where the phage DNA or RNA is stored) and tunnel tails, the tips of which have the ability to bind to specific molecules on the surface of their target bacteria. The viral DNA is then injected through the tail into the host cell, where it directs the production of progeny phages often over a hundred in half an hour. These “young” phages burst from the host cell (killing it) and infect more bacteria.[animal qualities are used to describe these phages, however in a previous post ‘Understanding Virus and the Flu’ I quoted a website that states phages are “possibly an enzyme”]

Q: Can therapeutic phages be developed against any infection?

A:Therapeutic phages can potentially be developed against any bacterial infection. Obviously, because of their “mode of action”, phages can not be used to treat viral infections (e.g. influenza or herpes).[phages can potentially be developed against any bacteria!]

Q: Can any phage be used for developing therapeutic phage preparation?

A: No. In general, there are two major types of phages, lytic and lysogenic. Only the lytic phages (also known as virulent phages) are a good choice for developing therapeutic phage preparations. Lytic phages multiply inside the cell, and release a burst of phages through the membrane, thus lysing the cell. Lysogenic phages, on the other hand, integrate their DNA into the host DNA creating a prophage. Prophage can escape from the original host (by cutting not only its DNA back, but possibly some genes of the host bacterium as well) and can integrate into a different one (the process is called transduction). Such phages are inappropriate candidates for phage therapy because of their “mode of action”, and because they can lead to transfer of virulence genes and those mediating resistance to antibiotics.

[the U Wisconsin website posted below the phage picture states: “Usually it is difficult to recognize lysogenic bacteria because lysogenic and nonlysogenic cells appear identical”. If that’s the situation today is it likely that the phage discovers, Twort (1915) and Felix d’Herelle (1917) would have discerned the difference in a lab? The U Wisc. page continues, “But in a few situations, the prophage supplies genetic information such that the lysogenic bacteria exhibit a new characteristic (new phenotype) not displayed by the nonlysogenic cell, a phenomena called ‘lysogenic conversion’. Lysogenic conversion has some interesting manifestations in pathogenic bacteria…” The interesting manifestations are that the lysogenic bacteria/phages can turn lethally virulent in an animal host. ] 

……(cont.)

Q: Why is there so much controversy about the efficacy of phages?

A:Phages were previously never given a fair and scientifically well-thought-through evaluation; quite often, the conclusions made about the phage therapy or even the nature of phages were unbelievably naive as assessed from what we know about phages today. Among specific reasons contributing to the early problems of phage therapy, as well as the questions on their efficacy, were:

Failure to select specific phages against the target bacteria in vitro, before using them in in-vivo models and/or in patients; [does this mean that in a ‘best case’ the phage therapy did nothing and in a ‘worst case’ it caused severe illness and death?]
Lack of availability and/or reliability of bacterial laboratories for carefully identifying the pathogens involved, therefore making selection of specific phage impossible; [but they used phage-therapy anyway?]
Use of single phages in infections which involved mixtures of different bacteria;
Failure to neutralize gastric acidity prior to oral phage administration;
Lack of knowledge that when treating bloodstream infections, endotoxins can be released as a result of lysis of bacteria which could lead to a further deterioration of the patient’s condition (which is a potential problem with antibiotics as well); [this was learned in the later 1940s, John F. Enders noted the ‘SOS’ response in bacteria, presumably from the effects of antibiotics, where dying bacteria release their viral components. Polio was a significant common result after antibiotic injection.]
Lack of understanding of the heterogeneity and “mode of action” of phage (e.g., differences between lytic and lysogenic phages in respect to their ability to act as therapeutic agents);

……(cont.)

Q: Have phages ever been licensed for human use?

A:Yes. Phage therapy products were licensed for sale in the United States in 1930s. The Ministry of Health of the former Soviet Union routinely licensed active phage preparations for the use in humans. ; It is likely that therapeutic phages used (and sold) in Eastern Europe were also licensed by appropriate public health authority (e.g., ministry of health).

Q: Have phages ever been produced for commercial use?

A:Yes. In the 1930s, a large US pharmaceutical company listed phages among its biological therapies and offered them for sale. Phages were used at the Institute Pasteur in Paris, France, and were sold in Eastern Europe, and all over the territory of the former Soviet Union.

Q: Can the bacteria develop resistance against phages?

A: Bacteria can develop resistance against both antibiotics and phages. However, there are some very important differences to favor phages in this context:

Development of a new antibiotic is a very expensive and time consuming process; it can take over 10 years and several million dollars to develop, and to bring to the market, a new antibiotic. Developing of a new phage, on the other hand, can potentially be accomplished in days, at a much lower expense.

Science may approach a point when no effective antibiotics can be chemically developed (at least for a while) to treat certain multi-drug resistant micro-organisms. Since selection of active phages is a natural process, evolutionary arguments support the idea that active phage can be selected against every resistant bacterium, by an ever ongoing process of natural selection. [multi-drug resistant organisms, presumably ‘not natural’, would indeed theoretically ‘select’ for evolving phages in order to eventually ‘balance’ in some kind of eco-harmony but are they really suggesting that drug manufacturers are going to wait-it-out for ‘nature’ to correct this problem of mutant bacteria? Agressive species (such as the new ‘superbugs’) often cause the extinction of lesser competitive lifeforms, that’s nature’s way too.]

Photo above of bacteriophage ‘T4’

from http://bioinfo.bact.wisc.edu/themicrobialworld/Phage.html

This website notes that Twort and d’Herelle made their ‘phage’ observations by dissolving intestinal bacteria “by addition of a bacteria-free filtrate obtained from sewage”, adding that “Most research has been done on the phages that attack E. coli, especially the T-phages and the phage lambda”. The T-phages (T1 through T7) are a group of seven lytic phages known to infect E. coli. The lambda is a lysogenic phage (transfers DNA).

Bacteriophage, part II https://jenniferlake.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/bacteriophage-ii/