Monster Mold Threatens Health in the South

Thanks for the article, bobsmythhawk..

We are not the only organism in the gulf releasing toxins.

Isn't it amazing what you discover if you pause to read rather than sluff over articles. Famous Bob quote (or infamous): There are none so blind as those who will not see.

Possible sensationalism by the press:

http://www.epa.gov/mold/moldresources.html

Thanks for that site Noddy. While posting media hysteria a common ailment occurred to me. I haven't seen the charter but my understanding is that writer's tools are now required to include embelishment. Writer's without this tool need not apply.

Have you passed through a supermarket checkout line lately? The tabloids infect us all, including mainstream journalists.

Reality is sordid enough without borrowing mutations that haven't happened yet.

I've always wondered who reads these tabloids. Apparently they have money to throw around to paparazzi so someone must buy them. Literature it's not; sensational it is. The number of people who go to them to use for reference is really small. The thirst to attract the public's eye I'm sure has swayed many an otherwise prudent reporter to wander from their usual path to add "color" to their stories. The ferreting out of truth is left to our own devices.

The people in the check-out lines who pick up the tabloids add the "newspapers" to carts heavy in convenience food and snack items.

Part of the problem is the gradual blurring between news and entertainment that started with radio and television and is now infecting the print media.

The mess in New Orleans is mess enough without adding murders, raped children, killer molds....padding the scripts as though Katrina was a sit-com that needed a little more oomph to sell convenience food or snack items or new cars....

The times are out of joint.

various kinds of flu
hi all,

That was quite informative and interesting to read about molds .. The ohter big news is the avian flu which is also assuming pandemic proportions.. This can be controlled by taking the right medcations on time.. What about the human flu called influenza. Has anybody heard of this.. how can this be treated.

Just what we need after 87 years, a sequel.

Killer 1918 virus re-created in bid to avert next pandemic

By Jacob Goldstein

Miami Herald

Using tissue fragments from two World War I soldiers and a woman buried in the Alaskan permafrost, scientists have reconstructed for the first time the flu virus that killed an estimated 50 million people when it swept the world in 1918.

The breakthrough shows important genetic connections between the 1918 virus and the Asian bird flu that has killed at least 60 people and millions of birds since 1997. An upsurge in cases in recent weeks has prompted concerns among President Bush and other world leaders.

''We have been able to unmask the 1918 virus and it is revealing to us some of the secrets that will help us to predict and prepare for the next pandemic,'' said Dr. Julie Gerberding, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which supported the research. The re-created virus is stored in a high-security CDC lab, Gerberding said.

In 1918, microbiology was in its primitive stages -- scientists did not even know what caused influenza. In order to reconstruct the virus, modern researchers had to retrieve lung tissue from victims of the 1918 flu, isolate virus particles from the tissue and decipher the genetic sequence of the virus.

During World War I, Army doctors used paraffin wax to preserve lung tissue taken from autopsies of soldiers who had died of flu. These tissues, stored in the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, provided samples. Scientists obtained another sample by exhuming a woman buried in an Alaskan village, where the permanently frozen ground had prevented her body from decomposing.

''Over the last nine years, we've been able to piece together the entire genetic coding sequence of the 1918 virus using tiny, tiny fragments of genetic material we could fish out of the 87-year-old tissues,'' said Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger, who led the project.

The genetic sequence provided a blueprint that allowed a second team to reconstruct the virus in the lab and study its effects on human tissue and mice. The virus infected lung cells of the mice, cells that normally would not be affected by ordinary flu.

''This is amazing, amazing stuff,'' said Dr. John Treanor, a University of Rochestor microbiologist working on an avian flu vaccine who was not involved with the project.

Understanding the 1918 virus is important because pandemics continue to arise every few decades, when a flu virus that has infected animals develops the ability to pass easily from person to person. The 1918 pandemic, also known as the Spanish flu, was the deadliest of the 20th century's three pandemics.

Experts worry the new Asian bird flu, known as H5N1, could become the next pandemic.

A bird virus can become a pandemic in one of two ways. It can infect a person or animal also infected with a human flu virus and swap genes with the human virus, creating a deadly and contagious disease. Or it can gradually change its genetic code over a long period of time, as happened with the 1918 virus.

In the reconstructed virus, researchers identified a series of key mutations in each of the virus' eight genes that made it both lethal and highly contagious among humans. Those mutations should provide a road map for scientists tracking H5N1, according to Treanor.

Scientists also created hybrid viruses that had some but not all of the mutations found in the 1918 virus. The hybrids were far less deadly than the pure 1918 virus in lab mice, suggesting that an avian flu has to undergo an extensive series of mutations before it can launch a deadly pandemic.

''There wouldn't be a single mutation that suddenly changes a virus from being inefficient to being a killer,'' Treanor said.

While some strains of H5N1 have shown a few of the mutations found in the 1918 flu, the mutations have been scattered among different samples -- one mutation in one sample, a different mutation in another, according to Taubenberger.

''They share the same changes as 1918, but where in each protein of 1918 there may be as many as four or five or six changes, the H5 viruses only ever show one change or so per protein,'' he said. ``So it suggests that . . . they're early on in this process.''