Re: another winky problem



iladsfan@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Chuck wrote:
> > Kathleen makes a valid point also.
> >
> > What about the treatment of woman by the so called peaceful people??
>
> We don't treat women very well here in the United States. Americans who
> live in glass houses shouldnt be throwing stones


By comparison, African American
women are treated the absolute worst
of any class of people in this country.

But that's relative to this country
and doesn't come close to the others
we are talking about.

The commonality is the inherent, God-given
integrity of the person. Unfortunately
there is no time or money to address these
issues because of the famine, disease, war
and related unnecessary distractions caused
by an uneven distribution of wealth.


Which will grow ever more frantic,
unless we have a really great pandemic.
The biggest one ever, percentage-wise.

That way there won't be so many people
who need to buy oil, and probably reduce
the unemployment rate in Europe (the
two are related). Ya think?
Around here there will be a problem with too
many unemployed corrections officers, and
we know how often *they* get into "mischief."
http://www.cslib.org/attygenl/press/2004/child/mistreatmentvideos.htm

I wonder what's the update on that
pig flu, by the way...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=15746398&query_hl=26

Science, Vol 307, Issue 5714, 1392 , 4 March 2005


[DOI: 10.1126/science.307.5714.1392]

INFECTIOUS DISEASES :
Experts Dismiss Pig Flu Scare as Nonsense
Martin Enserink
It could be the result of an embarrassing lab escape or a vaccine study
gone awry; it could even be the smoking gun from a secret biowarfare
program.

But then, it could be nothing at all.

For 4 months now, a series of strange influenza sequences has been
sitting in GenBank, the U.S. National Institutes of Health's DNA
database, that seems to suggest that pigs in South Korea have become
infected with a flu strain used for research in labs around the world
but not known to occur in nature. The World Health Organization (WHO)
in Geneva has dismissed the snippets as the result of a lab error. But
the Korean scientist who posted them insists they are real--and
troubling--and he is hoping that two renowned flu labs will prove him
right.

Meanwhile, speculation about the case has been fueled relentlessly on
the Internet by an outsider to the influenza world. Henry Niman, the
president of a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania-based company called
Recombinomics and the operator of a mailing list about flu, believes
that the virus, called WSN/33, poses a grave danger to human health.
Recently, his views have begun to draw attention--much to the chagrin
of those scientists who think the whole story is nonsense.

The bizarre case started on 24 October when Sang Heui Seo, a researcher
at Chungnam National University in Daejeon, deposited in GenBank
partial RNA sequences from a series of viruses isolated from pigs.
Niman, a molecular biologist and former Harvard surgery instructor with
an intense interest in virus evolution, discovered them soon after they
were made public in late November. He noticed that six of the viruses
appeared to be hybrids; in addition to genes from H9N2, an avian flu
virus that previously circulated in Korean pigs, they had between three
and seven genes with WSN/33-like sequences.

WSN/33 was produced in 1940 by infecting mice with the first human flu
virus ever isolated, in London in 1933. It's a mystery how it got into
the pigs, says Niman, who proffers scenarios ranging from a lab
accident to illicit experiments to create a deadly flu strain for
biowarfare--neighboring North Korea comes to mind, he says. Niman
believes the spread of the virus should be thoroughly investigated,
because WSN/33, which infects mice's brains, is distantly related to
the 1918 pandemic virus, and if it infects pigs, it may infect humans
as well. That's why he immediately alerted WHO in December.


Agitator. Henry Niman (right) is worried that pigs on Korean farms
(shown here being sanitized for foot-and-mouth disease) may harbor a
strange flu virus, posing a threat to human health.
CREDITS: YUN SUK-BONG/REUTERS; (RIGHT) H. NIMAN


But WHO is unimpressed. The agency discussed Niman's claims by e-mail
with its flu advisers in December, says Klaus Stöhr, WHO's global
influenza coordinator. They quickly concluded that the results were lab
contamination. Such mix-ups can happen easily when researchers use the
polymerase chain reaction to amplify bits of genetic material, says
Robert Webster of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis,
Tennessee, one of Stöhr's advisers. Contamination was likely, says
Webster, because Seo had previously received WSN/33 from Webster's own
lab. (Seo also worked at Webster's lab between 1999 and 2002, and the
two published seven papers together.)
But in an interview, Seo denied ever having received the WSN/33 from
Memphis or anywhere else. What's more, "I have many scientific data
that can rebut WSN contamination," he wrote in a follow-up e-mail. But
he declined further comment until his results are published. Seo says
Science rejected his paper describing the discovery of WSN in pigs but
may reconsider the manuscript if the findings are backed up by a
well-established flu lab.

Seo hopes that Malik Peiris at the University of Hong Kong and Yoshi
Kawaoka at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who both have samples
from Korea, can confirm WSN's presence. Both Peiris and Kawaoka
declined to comment for this story, but Stöhr says the results from
the Kawaoka lab will be out soon. The Korean National Veterinary and
Quarantine Services also told Science it has been unable to replicate
the findings, despite testing hundreds of pigs.

Molecular biologist and flu expert Ron Fouchier of Erasmus University
Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, says the sequences
definitely contain WSN's genetic signature. But he says the fact that
the six controversial isolates have varying numbers of WSN fragments
points to lab contamination: "If this was an endemic pig virus, I'd
expect all viruses to have the same WSN gene segments."

Even if WSN were circulating in Korean pigs, Stöhr says, that wouldn't
spell disaster. There's no evidence that WSN is still dangerous to
humans, he says; indeed, Fouchier adds, many labs use it without taking
special safety precautions.

Determined to draw attention to the case, Niman, who has also
criticized WHO extensively for its handling of the severe acute
respiratory syndrome and avian influenza outbreaks, has posted more
than 50 messages about the case on his site since December, with some
success: Infectious-disease specialist Laurie Garrett of the Foreign
Relations Council in New York City wrote about the case in an online
article on 16 February--although she dismissed it as a "scary
near-miss"--and last week, Nature reported Niman's claims.

That attention irks Stöhr, who points out that Niman has not published
in the scientific literature since 1996 and is not a flu expert. WHO
will not issue an official statement about the case, he says: "We're
not going to bother 6.5 billion people with something that's of no
public health importance." Webster, too, says any publicity is too
much: "It's so easy these days for somebody with a Web site to create a
lot of panic."

Being an expert doesn't always mean being right, counters Niman, who
adds that when the truth comes out, "WHO and Webster will look very
ridiculous."


« Last Edit: May 09, 2005, 09:15:44 pm by niman » Logged

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry L Niman, PhD
Founder, President
Recombinomics, Inc
www.recombinomics.com

Kathleen

.