Aids - UK Government opposes US?

[cantdog]

and the spread of the disease would be exponential rather than merely doubling, given the method of vectoring.

Doubling is exponential. The curve is hyperbolic, not linear.

OK I'm not a biologist but

quote:genetically engineered combination of an animal ‘retrovirus’ (look it up) within a human ‘HeLA’ (look it up) cell.



doesn't sit well with your previous statement

quote:not naturally prone to cross-species jumps



I'd guess would mean non-viable.

Genetic engineering routinely uses cross-species splices. That says nothing about the behavior of the result in nature.

Actually the only safe place to test ANY genetically engineered organism is in low orbit, where you can space the fucker if it is too dangerous to let loose. They engineered a bacterium to prevent frost damage on citrus crops and tested it by spraying it around Florida in "test orchards." I guess the bacterium was supposed to read the sign and not leave the test plots.

[Genetic frankencorn has very bad effects of monarch butterflies, but like all that shit, it's loose now, and you can't put the grenade back in the casing.

The most famous frankenfoods are engineered to require Roundup, meaning you need to buy Monsanto's herbicide to use it. How beneficial to humanity is that? Spray more poison! It's the wave of the future and it makes Monsanto money.]

 

[Guest]

Wow, this thread has become interesting. I plan to read Garrett's book now. Looked up her website (www.lauriegarrett.com) and other articles on her. This one is just a preview (have to pay for full article) but I post it here cos it addresses some of the more scientific talk above. Thanks TV and Gauche. - Perdita
-----

The Return of Infectious Disease - Laurie Garrett
From Foreign Affairs, January/February 1996 (Article preview: first 500 of 4,551 words total.)

Summary: After wiping out smallpox and winning other battles against the microbes, modern medicine ran into the aids virus. With urbanization and jet travel bringing people together in greater concentrations and more rapidly, infectious diseases are enjoying new opportunities to spread--and to evolve drug-resistant and more lethal strains. Advances in genetics make the threat of biological warfare even more threatening. It is time to write a better prescription for public health.

THE POST-ANTIBIOTIC ERA
Since World War II, public health strategy has focused on the eradication of microbes. Using powerful medical weaponry developed during the postwar period--antibiotics, antimalarials, and vaccines--political and scientific leaders in the United States and around the world pursued a military-style campaign to obliterate viral, bacterial, and parasitic enemies. The goal was nothing less than pushing humanity through what was termed the "health transition," leaving the age of infectious disease permanently behind. By the turn of the century, it was thought, most of the world's population would live long lives ended only by the "chronics"--cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer's.

The optimism culminated in 1978 when the member states of the United Nations signed the "Health for All, 2000" accord. The agreement set ambitious goals for the eradication of disease, predicting that even the poorest nations would undergo a health transition before the millennium, with life expectancies rising markedly. It was certainly reasonable in 1978 to take a rosy view of Homo sapiens' ancient struggle with the microbes; antibiotics, pesticides, chloroquine and other powerful antimicrobials, vaccines, and striking improvements in water treatment and food preparation technologies had provided what seemed an imposing armamentarium. The year before, the World Health Organization (WHO) had announced that the last known case of smallpox had been tracked down in Ethiopia and cured.

The grandiose optimism rested on two false assumptions: that microbes were biologically stationary targets and that diseases could be geographically sequestered. Each contributed to the smug sense of immunity from infectious diseases that characterized health professionals in North America and Europe.

Anything but stationary, microbes and the insects, rodents, and other animals that transmit them are in a constant state of biological flux and evolution. Darwin noted that certain genetic mutations allow plants and animals to better adapt to environmental conditions and so produce more offspring; this process of natural selection, he argued, was the mechanism of evolution. Less than a decade after the U.S. military first supplied penicillin to its field physicians in the Pacific theater, geneticist Joshua Lederberg demonstrated that natural selection was operating in the bacterial world. Strains of staphylococcus and streptococcus that happened to carry genes for resistance to the drugs arose and flourished where drug-susceptible strains had been driven out. Use of antibiotics was selecting for ever-more-resistant bugs.

More recently scientists have witnessed an alarming mechanism of microbial adaptation and change--one less dependent on random inherited genetic advantage. The genetic blueprints of some microbes contain DNA and RNA codes that command mutation under stress, offer escapes from antibiotics and other drugs, marshal collective behaviors conducive to group survival, and allow the microbes and their progeny to scour their environments for potentially useful genetic material. Such material is present in stable rings or pieces of DNA and RNA, known as plasmids and transposons, that move freely among microorganisms, even jumping between species of bacteria, fungi, and parasites. Some plasmids carry the genes for resistance to five or more different families of antibiotics, or dozens of individual drugs. Others confer greater powers of . . .

www.foreignaffairs.org is copyright 2002--2004 by the Council on Foreign Relations. All rights reserved.

 

[Teenage Venus]

And thanks to YOU too, Perdita.
(Have to limit the roses in case I upset someone )

 

[gauchecritic]

Doubling is exponential. The curve is hyperbolic, not linear.

I just meant that simple doubling is a slow way to increase compared to one person infecting three or four others etc. I'm not a mathematician either.

Gauche

 

[Clare Quilty]

Some plasmids carry the genes for resistance to five or more different families of antibiotics, or dozens of individual drugs. Others confer greater powers of . . . ]

It's methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) that scares me to death. I won't set foot in a hospital for fear of this super-bug.

 

[Guest]

It's methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) that scares me to death. I won't set foot in a hospital for fear of this super-bug.

Quilty, say more. P.

 

[oggbashan]

MRSA is present in too many UK hospitals.

People going to hospital for a minor surgical operation can and do die from it. They weren't sick until the hospital made them sick.

Og

 

[Guest]

MRSA

Q., you scared me enough so I did some research. If you can contradict this, do let me know. P.

How are staph and MRSA spread?

Staph bacteria and MRSA can spread among people having close contact with infected people. MRSA is almost always spread by direct physical contact, and not through the air. Spread may also occur through indirect contact by touching objects (i.e., towels, sheets, wound dressings, clothes, workout areas, sports equipment) contaminated by the infected skin of a person with MRSA or staph bacteria.

How can I prevent staph or MRSA infections?
Practice good hygiene
1. Keep your hands clean by washing thoroughly with soap and water
2. Keep cuts and abrasions clean and covered with a proper dressing (e.g., bandage) until healed
3. Avoid contact with other people’s wounds or material contaminated from wounds.

source