posted on April 26, 2003 12:25:51 PM new
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. J. Cummins (Canada)
have ask for a study to determine if the virus was genetically engineered. Notice
the TV, radio announcers are not asking any questions?
Remember the pig virus that was stolen from Michigan State a few months ago?
Maybe the same thing happened with this virus, but in another country? Perhaps an animal got loose and the virus jumped species, was stolen or the engineered virus was released on purpose. If so, it would be to that countries advantage to cover it up.
Genetic engineering of our food, animals and trees have been getting bad press in places like the EU. If this happened in China, through a multi-national company, the government and company would want to suppress it. That company could be responsible for billions of dollars of lost revenues, not to mention the deaths.
Just look how well the research communities suppressed what was happening to our food supply, while we remained ignorant since President Reagan's days.
posted on April 26, 2003 01:05:47 PM new
Give us some reason to believe anyone would want to alter such a virii.
You have to have some credible reason for such an organism to be created in the first place.
It doesn't seem to be the sort that would have been created as a weapon.
If it is related to the common cold would there be any theraputic reason to create such an organism say as a cold vaccine?
posted on April 26, 2003 02:57:52 PM new
gravid - when the AIDS virus was isolated there were a lot of theories that it also was an engineered virus geared toward population control. The concept seems extreme until you remember that here in the US a small group of extremeists tried to poison a town by infecting various restaurant salads bars with botulism (sp?) Perpetraitors could be anything from rogue governments to enviromental extremists. Unfortunately there are many reasons it could be done, few of which subscribe to what we would deem to be logical or reasonalable.
[ edited by neonmania on Apr 26, 2003 03:05 PM ]
posted on April 27, 2003 12:59:41 PM new
Sorry, Gravid. I posted that and had to leave for the day. This was from Dr. J. Cummins. I don't know when he first sent it out. It is long, but explains about some genetic manipulations of viruses. It has been going on since the 90's.
SARS and Genetic Engineering?
The complete sequence of the SARS virus is now available, confirming it is a new coronavirus unrelated to any previously known. Has genetic engineering contributed to creating it? Dr. Mae-Wan Ho and Prof. Joe
Cummins call for an investigation.
The World Health Organisation, 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 programmes. 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 21 April, at least 3800 have been infected in 25 countries with more than 200 dead. The worst hit are China, with 1814 infected and 79 dead, Hong
Kong, 1380 infected and 94 dead, and Toronto, 306 infected, 14 dead.
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 diarrhoea, 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.
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. The molecular phylogenies published 10 April in the New England Journal of Medicine were based on small fragments from the polymerase gene (ORF 1b) (see Box), and have placed the SARS virus in a separate group somewhere between groups 2 and 3. However, antibodies to the SARS virus cross react with FIPV, HuCV229E and TGEV, all in Group 1.
Furthermore, the SARS virus can grow in Vero green monkey kidney cells, which no other coronavirus can, with the exception of porcine epidemic diarrhea virus, also in Group 1.
Coronaviruses
Coronaviruses are spherical, enveloped viruses infecting numerous species of mammals and birds. They contain a set of four essential structural proteins: the membrane (M) protein, the small envelope (E)
protein, the spike (S) glycoprotein, and the nucleocapside (N) protein. The N protein wraps the RNA genome into a nucleocapsid thats surrounded by a lipid membrane containing the S, M, and E proteins. The
M and E proteins are essential and sufficient for viral envelope formation. The M protein also interacts with the N protein, presumably to assemble the nucleocapsid into the virus. Trimers (3 subunits) of the
S protein form the characteristic spikes that protrude from the virus membrane. The spikes are responsible for attaching to specific host cell receptors and for causing infected cells to fuse together.
The coronavirus genome is a an infectious, positive-stranded RNA (a strand thats directly translated into protein) of about 30 kilobases, and is the largest of all known RNA viral genomes. The beginning
two-thirds of the genome contain two open reading frames ORFs, 1a and 1b, coding for two polyproteins that are cleaved into proteins that enable the virus to replicate and to transcribe. Downstream of ORF 1b
are a number of genes that encode the structural and several non-structural proteins.
Known coronaviruses are placed in three groups based on similarities in their genomes. Group 1 contains the porcine epidemic diarrhea virus(PEDV), porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus (TGEV), canine coronavirus (CCV), feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) and human
coronovirus 229E (HuCV229E); Group 2 contains the avian infectious bronchitis virus (AIBV) and turkey coronavirus; while Group 3 contains the murine hepatitis virus (MHV) bovine coronavirus (BCV), human
coronavirus OC43, rat sialodacryoadenitis virus, and porcine hemagglutinating encephomyelitis virus.
[b] 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.[/b]
Although parts of the sequence appeared most similar to the bovine coronavirus (BCV) and the avian infectious bronchitis virus (AIBV) (see SARS & bio-weapons , this series), the rest of the genome appear quite different.
Could genetic engineering have contributed inadvertently to creating the SARS virus? This point was not even considered by the expert coronavirologists called in to help handle the crisis, now being feted and woed by pharmaceutical companies eager to develop vaccines. A research team in Genomics Sciences Centre in Vancouver, Canada, has sequenced the entire virus and posted it online 12 April. The sequence information should now be used to investigate the possibility that genetic engineering may have contributed to creating the SARS virus.
If the SARS virus has arisen through recombined from a number of different viruses, then different parts of it would show divergent phylogenetic relationships. These relationships could be obscured
somewhat by the random errors that an extensively manipulated sequence would accumulate, as the enzymes used in genetic manipulation, such as reverse transcriptase and other polymerases are well-known to introduce random errors, but the telltale signs would still be a mosaic of conflicting phylogenetic relationships, from which its history of recombination may be
reconstructed. This could then be compared with the kinds of genetic manipulations that have been carried out in the different laboratories around the world, preferably with the recombinants held in the laboratories.
Luis Enjuanes group succeeded in
engineering porcine transmissible
gastroenteritis virus, TGEV, as an infectious bacterial artificial chromosome, a procedure that transformed the virus from one that replicates in the cytoplasm to effectively a new virus that replicates in the cell nucleus. Their results also showed that the spike protein (see Box) is sufficient to determine its disease-causing ability, accounting for how a pig
respiratory coronavirus emerged from the TEGV in Europe and the US in the early 1980s. [b]This was reviewed in an earlier
ISIS report entitled, Genetic engineering super-viruses (ISIS News 9/10, 2000), which gave one of the first warnings about genetic
engineering experiments like these.[/b] The same research group has just reported engineering the TGEV into a gene expression vector that still caused disease, albeit in a milder form, and is intending to develop vaccines and even human gene therapy vectors based on the virus.
[b]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.[/b]
In the latest experiment reported by Peter Rottiers group in University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, recombinants were made of the feline infectious peritonitis virus (FIPV) that causes an invariably lethal
infection in cats. The method depends on generating an interspecies chimeric FIPV, designated mFIPV, in which, part of its spike protein has been substituted with that from mouse virus, MHV, as a result, the mFIPV infects mouse cells but not cat cells. When synthetic RNA carrying the wild-type FIPV S gene is introduced into mFIPV-infected cells, recombinant viruses that have regained the wild type FIPV S gene will be able to grow in cat cells, and can hence be selected. So any mutant gene downstream of the site of recombination, between ORF 1a and ORF1b (see Box), can be successfully introduced into the FIPV.
This method was previously used to introduce directed mutations into MHV, and like the experiment just described, was carried out to determine the precise role of different genes in causing disease. This targeted recombination is referred to as reverse genetics, and depends on the virus having a very narrow host range determined by the spike protein in its coat. Another research team headed by P. Britten based in the Institute of Animal Health, Compton Laboratory, in the United Kingdom, has been
manipulating AIBV, also in order to create vectors for modifying coronavirus genomes by targeted recombination, a project funded by the UK Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and the Biotechnology and
Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). The procedure involved infecting Vero cells, a green monkey kidney cell line with recombinant fowlpox virus (rFPV-T7) - carrying an RNA polymerase from the T7
bacteriophage, with a promoter from the vaccinia virus - together with AIBV, and a construct of a defective AIBV genome in rFPV that can be replicated in Vero cells. Recombinant cornonaviruses with defective AIBV genomes were recovered from the monkey cells. This is significant because almost no natural coronaviruses are able to replicate in Vero cells; the researchers have created a defective virus that can do so, when a helper virus is present. The defective virus has the potential to regain lost functions by recombination.
[b]In addition to the experiments described, the gene for the TGEV spike protein has been engineered into and propagated in tobacco plants, and Prodigene, a company specializing in crop biopharmaceuticals, has
produced an edible vaccine for TGEV in maize. Information on whether or not that product was the one being field tested in a recent case of contamination reported by the USDA was withheld under commercial
confidentiality.[/b]
Sources & References
Coronavirus never before seen in humans is the cause of SARS.Unprecedented
collaboration identifies new pathogen in record time WHO Press Release, 16 April 2003, Geneva [email protected] BBC Radio 4 News Report, 19-21 April 2003.
China says Sars outbreak is 10 times worse than admitted by John
Gittings and Jame Meikle, The Guardian 21 April 2003.
Chinese cover-up creates new sense of insecurity in face of Sars epidemic by John Gittings, The Guardian 21 April 2003.
SARS virus is mutating, fear doctors by Debora MacKenzie, 16 April 2003, NewScientist.com news service.
Ksiazeh TC, Erdman D, Goldsmith C et al. A novel coronavirus associated with severe acute respiratory syndrome. NEJM online www.nejm.org 10
April, 2003.
Drosten C, Gunther S, Preiser W et al. Identification of a novel
coronavirus in patients with acute respiratory syndrome. NEJM online
www.nejm.org 10 April, 2003.
Calling all coronavirologists by Martin Enserik, Science 18 April 2003.
Lai MMC. The making of infectious viral RNA: No size limit in sight. PNAS 2000: 97: 5025-7.Almazan F, Gonsalex JM, Penzes Z, Izeta , Calvo E, Plana-Duran J and
Enjuanes. Engineering the largest RNA virus genome as an infectious bacterial artificial chromosome. PNAS 2000: 97: 5516-21.
Ho MW. Genetic engineering super-viruses. ISIS News 9/10, July 2001,
ISSN: 1474-1547 (print), ISSN: 1474-1814 (online).
Sola I, Alonso S, Zúñiga S, Balasch M, Plana-Durán J and Enjuanes L.
Engineering the transmissible gasteroenteritis virus genome as an
expression vector inducing lactogenic immunity. J. Virol. 2003, 77, 4357-69.
Masters PS. Reverse genetics of the largest RNA viruses. Adv. Virus Res. 1999, 53, 245-64.
Haijema, B.J., Volders, H. & Rottier, P.J.M. Switching species tropism:
an effective way to manipulate the feline coronavirus genome. Journal of Virology 2003, 77, 4528 38.
Kuo L, Godeke GJ, Raamsman MJ, Masters PS and Rottier PJ. Retargeting of
coronavirus by substitution of the spike glycoprotein ectodomain:
crossing the host cell species barrier. J. Virol. 2000, 74, 1393-1406.
Evans S, Cavanagh D and Britten P. Utilizing fowlpox virus recombinants
to generate defective RNAs of the coronavirus infectious bronchitis
virus. J. Gen. Virol. 2000, 81, 2855-65.
Tubolya T, Yub W, Baileyb A, Degrandisc S, Dub S, Erickson L and Nagya
EÂ. Immunogenicity of porcine transmissible gastroenteritis virus spike
protein expressed in plants.Vaccine 2000, 18, 2023-8.
Prodigene, http://www8.techmall.com/techdocs/TS000215-6.html Sept 2001.
Pharmageddon by Mae-Wan Ho, Science in Society 2003, 17, 23-4.
Edited for bolding. If it doesn't work I won't try again.
posted on April 27, 2003 02:34:43 PM new
Thanks aposter. That was interesting. Now if the sequence looks like it has been altered I wonder if anybody will say it out in public?
posted on April 27, 2003 04:28:32 PM new
ebayauctionguy: But, if you read it through carefully you will get the general idea. I got about half of it.
Gravid: Probably not, unless the world's population start asking the difficult questions. When we have announcers just spouting what the media moguls want them to say, we will not. You haven't seen anyone
asking difficult questions and the engineering has been going on since the 90s.
But, not to fear. When we end up with these "little problems" every year or so, the drug companies will just come up with a serum to counteract it. Of course, Africa or other poor countries won't be able to buy them. But, that is another story.
posted on April 27, 2003 06:36:38 PM new
I wonder what percentage of the population would die in an area like some of the African countries that have 20 or 25% HIV+ so they are immune weakened?
Somebody is going to move in and recolonize those areas when they are depopulated. Some of them have great mineral wealth.
posted on April 28, 2003 01:05:37 PM new
Just to let you know, I took a friend to the hospital for a doctor's appointment today - all the main entrances were locked except for one. We had to have our hands washed in that alcohol gel just to get inside the door. Everyone inside (staff) was wearing a mask. Then we had to 'wash' our hands again and answer a small questionaire before we could go through the second set of doors into the main hospital. I wasn't allowed in because I didn't have an appointment. (I wondered why there were a bunch of people snoozing in their cars!) Here's what we were asked:
Have you had a fever within the past month?
Have you had any bad headaches within...?
Have you been coughing within...?
Have you had any unusual cramping within...?
When did you visit a hospital last?
Then you had to give your name, address, phone number and signature.
I was surprised they didn't ask if we'd been to China or Toronto but I was happy with all the precautions they were taking.
posted on April 28, 2003 02:50:46 PM new
Kraft, actually I am surprised. I haven't read nor watched news this weekend much.
First I AM glad that they are taking those precautions. Because it IS the practical thing to do
On the other hand, there will be those who will scare more, and 'spread the panic' round because of it.
You know I was at the closest casino to me this weekend My daughter and I went. And there were 3 people in there wearing surgical masks. I was surprised to see that here.
if anyone cares, in WA state, the Muckleshoot casino out in Auburn. But then yesterday was one of those 'giveaway' days, it was so packed you could not walk anywhere without bumping into someone. (but then again... its ALWAYS packed)
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