24 May 2009

Swine Flew and flu

Loved this photo - not sure where it came from but great stuff! I last mentioned Swine Flu here - an equally good photo there - Greens have been for some while echoing scientists concerns that factory farming helped lead to swine flu - another factor which is just coming to light is that the man who helped develop the Tamiflu flu anti-viral drug believes the swine flu epidemic has been caused by human error.

This guy, Adrian Gibbs says the H1N1 virus may have been man-made and was passed to humans after a handling mistake at a laboratory. He suggests it has escaped from the laboratory - the strain apparently mutates three times faster than the most closely-related viruses found in pigs, which suggests it had evolved outside of swine.

This, of course, is not the first time a virus has ‘escaped’ from a laboratory - just this year the avian flu virus made its way into a consignment of seasonal flu vaccines, which were destined for around 18 countries in Europe. Some scientists also suspect that the Russian flu outbreak of 1977 was started when a virus was accidentally released from a laboratory.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

it being created deliberately in a lab - a conspiracy theory
It's possible such a virus could be created in a lab without it necessarily
being a "conspiracy" (taking this to be a group working illegally for
malicious ends).
Obviously it's very dangerous and ought ot draw prohibitive legislation.
It's one thing to work with existing diseases and develop vaccines, etc, but
surely another to go out of one's way to develop new ones.
Yet the present level of science allows us to do just that.

Monsanto and friends surely rejoice when they develop a new strain which
appears to have the properties they want.
Yet we have endless misgivings about what they are up to.
Then there's the power they have over lawmakers, etc.
There's not much point accusing Monsanto of being in a conspiracy to take
over world food.
Theyd' just go "So?"