Saturday Night Swine Flu update

The second person confirmed to have swine flu has died in King County. May she rest in peace.

The news will emerge on Sunday that New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin and his wife are quarantined in Shanghai because someone on the mayor's flight for his trade mission was showing flulike symptoms.

RantWoman has not poked at WHO stats this week. Last time she did, whatever one thinks of the numbers and countries' capacity to detect cases, one could understand other countries' urge to disinfect and scrutinize anything arriving from the US. Would this slack off if suddenly proportionately much larger number of cases started getting detected somewhere else? Perhaps best not to have to find out and just live with the sanitizing.


The volunteer at the Friendly Neighborhood Center for Extreme Computing who pointed out the relevance of hand sanitizer has taken to doing lots of things in rubber gloves. He is a wheelchair user and RantWoman found herself thinking of the multicultural masculine habit of spitting in the street. RantWoman knows of nothing associated with the Y chromosome that would require frequent spitting, but RantWoman can attest that the revolting practice is multinational. Mercifully it is not universal.

If RantWoman needed a manual wheelchair, she would use good gloves just on the grounds of ordinary disgustingness. RantWoman is not sure she wants to think about the matter of wearing the same gloves one goes tooling around the slime-covered byways in to poke and point at things in the Friendly Neighborhood center. Probably another reason hand sanitizer is topical.



A doctor was on the radio yesterday talking about some of the intransigent people who came into her clinic without any of the worst telltale symptoms and WOULD NOT LEAVE until the clinic did blood tests. RantWoman thinks that is NUTS: why spend a second longer than you have to in a doctor's waiting room full of germs, germ vectors, and multiple options for mutant germ conventions?



RantWoman emailed her friend the STD doctor about something else and asked what was likely to be the theme issue at an annual professional meeting. Swine flu did not even register.



RantWoman emailed her friend the chemical physicist turned translator. Chemical physicist, aka RantScientist, most certainly concurs with RantWoman that the word "quantum" should not be seen in public with sentences about housing construction.

RantScientist is already an ardent germ-phobe and militant handwasher for multiple reasons of her own. RantScientist's capacity to rant at formidable length so vastly exceeds that of RantWoman that sometimes RantWoman just has to stand by in awe, even if not necessarily in complete accord:


RantScientist writes
Going back to the house calls of my childhood would go a long way toward slowing down infections and would make life much easier for many of us. The last place I want to be when I'm sick is in a waiting room full of sick people, and just traveling is hard to do when really sick. (Don't even get me started about what dangerous places hospitals are for sick people...) Why not a van with essential devices in it for any routine testing, a mobile lab as is used in many other contexts?

All of these problems really go back to the basic problem of our predatory approach to health care costs. A real national health care system like what other people in the world enjoy would make a huge difference. For instance,the Australians only pay 2% of their income to support their system (4% ifthey're rich), and it works. When I was sick for several months (with acompletely treatable, non-chronic, common disease that should have been under control in a couple of weeks if the original doctor hadn't been such a greedy idiot) thanks to the incompetence and insanity of the American WeDon't Care system, meaning several months with no income, I still had to paythe outrageous medical premiums and all that the insurance company didn'tfeel like paying for. Guess who had to go into big debt again after a delightful period of owing nothing to the credit card banker vultures? Ifigured that in the aftermath, 40% of my taxable income was going to the insurance vultures just for premiums.... I would need to make over $150,000per year for my insurance premiums to even be just 5% of my income (and that will undoubtedly change upward in July, when the vultures will inevitably decide to up my premiums again - 24% last year, they tried for 38% the previous year since I had the audacity to actually get sick the year before, so I had to go to a $5000 deductible which I don't really have).

Anyway - if we had a rational system, preventive measures (which are cheaper than dealing with the inevitable disease) would be so much easier to deal with. But what can we expect from a system that doesn't cover blood glucose testing kits for diabetics but does cover amputations when they can't control their glucose?!? (RantScientist lives in a different state; RantWoman thinks some WA healthcare providers do a better job in this area.) So we're hardly going to do the obvious thing and provide free supplements of things that are proven to help boost the immune system, such as Vitamin C or Shaklee's Nutriferon (an herbal supplement concocted after years of research by the Japanese scientist who discovered human interferon). Or a systemt that won't provide ways for the schools to quickly isolate sick children (without forcing their parents to lose workdays) and treat them properly immediately, instead of waiting until theinfection spreads to half the class. And of course just providing governmental financial support for extra sick days when facing the prospectsof a pandemic might make restaurants and workplaces a lot safer. Too simple?Or too sensible?

...

>from OCA's Weekly Newsletter> <http://www.organicconsumers.org/>> > "Despite years of warnings by public interest organizations, such as the> Organic Consumers Association and the Humane Society of the U.S., intensive> confinement factory farms are incubating deadly viruses that could set off a> deadly epidemic....> > A dangerous and rapidly spreading strain of influenza, which combines> genetic material from pigs, birds and humans in a way researchers have not> seen before...
I suppose it could also be an escapee from a lab... But pigs can definitely harbor human, bird, and pig viruses - so if domestic birds can get "birdflu" from wild birds, I imagine a pig could do the same (even if humans arethe immediate vectors from the pig's point of view rather than directcontact with birds). So it could be a "natural" brew.
But I worried about that possibility of "lab escapees" when the killer E.coli bacterial strain came out a while back - a biologist friend had expressed concern years before about E. coli (ubiquitous in mammalianintestinal tracts, including humans) being used for genetic engineeringpurposes. When I did translation work later on genetic engineering, Irealized why he was worried. E. coli, for instance, which is well characterized genetically and easy to grow, is used as a little factory for making large amounts of genetic material from foreign sources (with desirable properties) that can be injected into other organisms (including higher organisms such as plants, where they are transferred typically through a pathogen).
One-celled organisms include circular bits of DNA called plasmids in thecytoplasm (besides the chromosomal DNA in the cell's nucleus). Specificgenes with specific properties can be inserted into these plasmids (called vectors). A typical procedure is to use vector plasmids already carrying antibiotic resistance to also carry the gene of interest: the vector plasmid enters the E. coli, which are then grown in media containing the antibiotic so that only those which harbor the plasmid of interest (containing the new gene plus the antibiotic resistant gene) will be resistant to the antibiotic and thus will be fruitful and multiply. Then these plasmids can be transferred to other types of cells relevant to the final goal, e.g., a plant pathogen to eventually impart the desired property to the plant. Desirable properties can include such things as resistance to common pesticides (so the pesticide will kill weeds but not the crop) or increased production of something valuable by the plant (e.g., a particular vitamin).
These plasmids are easily shared outside the lab with other microorganisms(even of different species) as well. This is why antibiotic resistance(carried by the plasmids) easily crosses species barriers amongst the one-celled crowd, and hospitals are like country clubs for the microbeasties(bringing diverse populations into contact that would rarely meet in the wild). For instance, if a particular antibiotic targets a particular component of the bacterial cell membrane to make it leaky - an antibiotic resistance gene might alter the component enough to make the antibiotic ineffective. Another antibiotic is needed with a new target. Until themicrobeastie develops another gene to block the new antibiotic, of course.
Viruses are much simpler entities than bacteria and take over the reproductive apparatus of a cell, churning out copies of themselves. The antiviral tamiflu seems to inhibit production of a particular membrane protein in cells targeted by the bird flu virus. The virus can get in, but its viral copies can't easily break out to infect other cells if that virus needs that protein for escape. Of course, this only works with the right virus that uses the right escape mechanism.
Generally the antivirals are effective only very early in the infection(within the first 48 hours), when they can seriously inhibit reproduction of the virus. Many people don't know they are infected until too late for the antiviral, although it can be helpful if you know you've been exposed. There is never any guarantee that a developed antiviral will be effective on a particular strain, and flu strains especially mutate incredibly fast. Also the antivirals are just as expensive as many other antibiotics here in the US - a little bottle of 10 doses can cost USD 50 to 60 or even more and most medical insurance is unlikely to cover the cost (my insurance didn't cover regular antibiotics significantly, and I ended up paying more than USD 400 just for the antibiotics to knock out a UTI). So they are something to beused sparingly, both because of the cost and because resistance to them willincrease as they become more commonly used.
Best to keep up your immune system in other ways, since that's a much more multipurpose approach. Besides, even the most powerful antibiotic won't helpif your immune system doesn't eventually kick in - they just reduce thenumbers of the pathogens enough to give your body a fighting chance.
Anyway - although the quoted article mentions the problem of antibiotic resistance spreading in the crowded conditions of factory farms (even worse than human hospitals...) and that is generally associated with bacterial pathogens, the problem of incubation of viruses is also definitely a problemin such conditions. The animals have poorer immune system functions because of all the stress. If you look at the bird flu problem - once it got past the original cases where farmers were living too close to the birds with inadequate sanitary provisions, I think that the outbreaks (in Europe, for instance) were not coming from the small family farms but rather from thefactory farms. The small flocks typically included healthy unstressed birdswho were much more likely to be resilient enough to deal with any stray virus that they might have encountered from wild birds.
So it's the weakened immune systems of the animals raised under factory farming conditions that are the problem, and that would be true for viral illnesses as well as bacterial illnesses.
Pigs are especially a problem because they seem to be more similar to humans in certain key ways. This is why the poor things (especially the babies and the miniature variety) are often tortured for human medical purposes andeven used for organ transplants. This would suggest more opportunities for cross-species jumping of various illnesses and parasites. The religious prohibitions against eating pigs make a lot of sense on that basis. It may have been noticed that people got sick more often from eating pigs than other animals.
Peace (RantScientist)
Ph.D. Chemical Physics/M.A. Physics/B.S. ChemistryScientific Translator since 1978Russian/French/German/Spanish/Italian into US English
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