Is SARS genetically engineered?

[Guest guest]

Before I give you an article, I would like to tell you some cover up

information of SARS not mentioned in the article. Vinegar was not

mentioned in the mass media as a prevention against the spread of

SARS. As you already know you can kill any viruses using various

digestive enzymes (-ase, pectinase, protease, etc.). But what was not

mentioned is you can protect yourself against sars using vinegar.

Vinegar sales went through the roof in China as vinegar dissolves the

coating (you can also mix it with H2O2). I will send you that

information in the next posting about articles on using vinegar to

stem SARS outbreak. What I do is, it add pure acetic acid to a cup in

my room. (at 30 degrees celsius room) the acetic acid will evaporate

and disinfect the room preventing spread. Vinegar contains 5% acetic

acid 95% distilled water.

 

Well, here is the story:

 

Is SARS Genetically Engineered?

 

By Mae-Wan Ho

 

 

 

 

 

In the weeks that the allied forces were wreaking destruction

and death in Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein and his elusive " weapons

of mass destruction, " a SARS epidemic has been criss-crossing

continents carried by air-passengers and spreading like molecular

cluster bombs that explode to liberate further millions of infectious

particles soon after a target is struck.

 

SARS —Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—is a completely new

infectious disease spread by human contact, and kills about four

percent of the victims.

 

The epidemic originated in Guangdong Province, South China. The

Chinese authority has admitted mishandling the crisis and to have been

slow toinform its citizens.

 

The disease first struck last November. In March, Liu Jianlin,

64 year-old medical professor who was involved in treating patients,

went from Guangdong to Hong Kong to attend a wedding. He was taken ill

soon after arrival and admitted to hospital. He asked to be put into

quarantine, but was ignored; nor did the hospital warn his contacts.

As a result, nine guests in the hotel where he stayed caught the

disease and carried it to Singapore, Canada, Vietnam and other

hospitals in Hong Kong.

 

On 10 February, news of the disease was posted on ProMed, an

international email notification service for infectious diseases

outbreaks. The next day, China informed the World Health Organization

(WHO), but refused to let the WHO team into Guangdong until early

April.

 

A palpable sense of panic has gripped the health authorities

around the world. " Mother nature is the ultimate terrorist " says an

editorial in the journal Nature. " Powerless to stop the spread, " says

New Scientist magazine, whose editor decries the lack of international

control when it comes to disease epidemics: " The international

community has weapons inspectors poised to force entry into a country

at the first hint that it may possess chemical weapons. But when it

comes to disease, we have no international body empowered to take

charge, even though the disease may be vastly more dangerous. "

(italics added)

 

Eleven laboratories around the world participated in the hunt

for the disease agent, a collaborative effort organized via

teleconferencing, since March 17, by virologist Klaus Stohr at the WHO

headquarters in Geneva.

 

The journal Science says that Malik Pieris of the University of

Hong Kong was the first to identify coronavirus (which causes colds

and pneumonia) just four days later. This finding was replicated in

other laboratories. The virus and antibodies against the virus were

detected in many, though not all infected patients, but were not found

in more than 800 healthy controls tested.

 

The New Scientist says it was the death of Carlo Urbani, the WHO

doctor who first recognized SARS as a new disease, that led to the

discovery of coronavirus. It was isolated from his lungs and sent to

Joe DiRisi in University of California at San Francisco who made the

identification. The virus has since been named after Urbani. The World

Health Organization, which played the key role in coordinating the

research, formally announced on 16 April that a new pathogen, a member

of the coronavirus family never before seen in humans, is the cause of

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

 

" The pace of SARS research has been astounding, " said Dr. David

Heymann, Executive Director, WHO Communicable Diseases programs.

" Because of an extraordinary collaboration among laboratories from

countries around the world, we now know with certainty what causes

SARS. "

 

But there is no sign that the epidemic has run its course. By

early summer, nearly 10,000 people had been infected in 25 countries

with more than 750 dead. The worst hit regions are China, Hong Kong,

Toronto, Canada.

 

A cluster of SARS patients in Hong Kong with unusual symptoms

has raised fears that the virus may be mutating, making the disease

more severe. According to microbiologist Yuen Kwok-yung, at the

University of Hong Kong, the 300 patients from a SARS hot spot, the

Amoy Gardens apartment complex, were more seriously ill than other

patients: three times as likely to suffer early diarrhea, twice as

likely to need intensive care and less likely to respond to a cocktail

of anti-viral drugs and steroids. Even the medical staff infected by

the Amoy Gardens patients were more seriously ill.

 

The Complete Story?

John Tam, a microbiologist at the Chinese University of Hong

Kong studying the gene sequences from these and other patients

suspects a mutation leading to an altered tissue preference of the

virus, so it can attack the gut as well as the lungs.

 

There is some remaining doubt, however, whether the coronavirus

is the complete story. John Tam, director of virology at Prince of

Wales Hospital in Hong Kong, found another virus, the human

metapneumovirus in 25 out of 53 SARS patients, as have laboratories in

Canada and Germany. Metapneumonovirus belongs to the family

Paramyxoviridae, which includes viruses responsible for parainfluenza,

mumps, and measles, as well as the Nipah and Hendra viruses in recent

outbreaks.

 

Coronavirus showed up in only 30 patients tested while the

bacterium Chlamydia has been identified in all samples in Hong Kong,

through that strain of Chlamydia is not known to cause disease.

 

Could it be that both viruses are bystanders of the disease

while an as yet unidentified virus could be responsible for SARS?

 

The coronavirus was atypical. It rapidly infected cells in

culture dishes, something that other human coronaviruses do not do.

Viruses from the lung tissue in Toronto patients readily infected

monkey kidney cells, and no known human coronavirus infects that cell

line.

 

DiRisi's laboratory has a virus detector chip capable of

screening for 1200 viruses all at once. When samples sent from the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the United States (CDC)

were screened, several species of coronavirsues lit up, the strongest

spots " indicating the closest identity were the avian bronchitis virus

and a bovine coronavirus. " This appears to fit China's statement that

the earliest cases were in bird handlers.

 

However, more detailed analysis using polymerase chain reaction

(PCR) by two groups who just published their results online in the New

England Journal of Medicine indicate that the new virus is not closely

related to any known virus at all—human, mouse, bovine, cat, pig,

bird, notwithstanding.

 

Further, the virus was isolated from cell cultures only, and not

from the tissues of patients. The PCR fragments of the new coronavirus

were not detected in any healthy subject tested so far. But not all

patients with SARS tested positive for one of the PCR fragments. Where

did this new virus come from?

 

Genetic Engineering Super Viruses

While the epidemic has still to run its course, a report

appeared in the Journal of Virology, describing a method for

introducing desired mutations into coronavirus in order to create new

viruses. A key feature of the procedure is to make interspecific

chimera recombinant viruses. It involves replacing part of the spike

protein gene in the feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV), which

causes invariably fatal infections in cats, with that of the mouse

hepatitis virus. The recombinant mFIPV will no longer infect cat

cells, but will infect mouse cells instead, and multiply rapidly in

them.

 

These and other experiments in manipulating viral genomes are

now routine. It shows how easy it is to create new viruses that jump

host species in the laboratory in the course of apparently legitimate

experiments in genetic engineering. Similar experiments could be

happening in nature when no one is looking, as the SARS and many other

epidemics amply demonstrate.

 

Where does the SARS virus come from? The obvious answer is

recombination, which can readily occur when two strains of viruses

infect a cell at the same time. But neither of the two progenitor

strains is known, says Luis Enjuanes from the Universidad Autonoma in

Madrid, Spain, one of the world leaders in the genetic manipulation of

coronaviruses.

 

Although parts of the sequence appeared most similar to the

bovine coronavirus (BCV) and the avian infectious bronchitis virus

(AIBV), the rest of the genome appear quite different. Could genetic

engineering have contributed inadvertently to creating the SARSvirus?

This point was not even considered by the expert coronavirologists

called in to help handle the crisis, now being feted and wooed by

pharmaceutical companies eager to develop vaccines.

 

Coronaviruses have been subjected to increasing genetic

manipulation since the late 1990s, when P.S. Masters used RNA

recombination to introduce changes into the genome of mouse hepatitis

virus (MHV). Since then, infectious cDNA clones of transmissible TGEV,

human coronavirus (HuCV), AIBV, and MHV have all been obtained.

 

It is not even necessary to intentionally create lethal viruses,

if one so wishes. It is actually much faster and much more effective

to let random recombination and mutation take place in the test tube.

Using a technique called " molecular breeding, " millions of

recombinants can be generated in a matter of minutes. These can be

screened for improved function in the case of enzymes, or increased

virulence, in the case of viruses and bacteria.

 

In other words, geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution

in the laboratory to create viruses and bacteria that have never

existed in all the billions of years of evolution on earth.

 

Controlling Bioterrorism

John Steinbruner, University of Maryland arms control expert,

has been calling for mandatory international oversight of inherently

dangerous areas of biomedical research, specifically, an international

body of scientists and public representatives to authorize such

research.

 

He has taken the proposal to meetings of the American

Association for the Advancement of Science and the World Medical

Association in recent months, and in April 2003, to a London

bioterrorism meeting, sponsored by the Royal Society of Medicine and

the New York Academy of Medicine.

 

The oversight system would be mandatory and would operate before

potentially dangerous experiments are conducted. Access to results

could also be limited to those who pass muster.

 

Requiring scientists, institutions and even experiments to be

licensed " would have a devastating chilling impact on biomedical

research, " said American Society for Microbiology (ASM) president

Ronald M. Atlas. His answer is self-regulation, already in line with

ethical requirements to prevent the destructive uses of biology.

 

The ASM orchestrated and supports a statement released February

15 by a group of major life sciences editors and authors,

acknowledging the need to block publication of research results that

could help terrorists.

 

Critics say even the self-censorship espoused by the journal

editors and authors group is an impediment to the rapid progress of

science, which is the best way to defuse the lethal potential of some

biological research. But Steinbruner fears that self-regulation does

not go far enough to head off terrorists.

 

Who needs bioterrorists when we've got genetic engineers?

 

But what caught the attention of the mainstream media was the

report in January 2001 of how researchers in Australia " accidentally "

created a deadly virus that killed all its victims in the course of

manipulating a harmless virus. " Disaster in the making: An engineered

mouse virus leaves us one step away from the ultimate bioweapon, " was

the headline in the New Scientist article. The editorial showed even

less restraint: " The genie is out, biotech has just sprung a nasty

surprise. Next time, it could be catastrophic. "

 

The SARS episode should serve as a reminder of some simple facts

about genetic engineering. In the first place, genetic engineering

involves the rampant recombination of genetic material from widely

diverse sources that would otherwise have very little opportunity to

mix and recombine in nature.

 

In the second place, disease-causing viruses and bacteria and

their genetic material are the predominant materials and tools of

genetic engineering, as much as for the intentional creation of

bioweapons.

 

Finally, the artificial constructs created by genetic

engineering are designed to cross species barriers and to jump into

genomes, i.e., to further enhance and speed up horizontal gene

transfer and recombination, acknowledged to be the major route to

creating new disease agents, possibly much more important than point

mutations which change isolated bases in DNA.

 

With genetic engineered constructs and organisms routinely

released into the environment, we hardly need the help of terrorists.

That may be why we are coming up against new epidemics of viral and

bacterial diseases with increasing regularity. Mother nature is not

the ultimate terrorist, we are.