BoomBoomBigelow
Genius of Love
"unsuccessful" virus.
Interesting biological factoid of the day
- Thread starter Tiltsta
- Start date
Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
I need to read up on the blood brain barrier. Have heard about it but don't know anything about it.
It's a brain tumour problem. Much like Tilsta just described, most chemotherapy drugs can't pass the barrier.
Also a problem in that some of the drugs that do pass the barrier are often oral drugs. That's a great thing, because hey; you can take them at home, no IV, etc. But they can be incredibly expensive, and a lot of insurance plans don't cover them, for virtually no good reason.
Interesting that it can protect against everything except the stuff that will actually help.
EDIT. Including the things that can actually help.
Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
Not everything, obviously. Some drugs work, others don't. Cancer can metastasize to the brain, but a primary BT won't spread outside.
But yeah, it's ironic.
To put Ebola into perspective , the current CDC count is 6574 cases, out of a West African population of 340 million. Even if you drill down to the most cases per country, Liberia has had 3458 cases, out of a population of about 4 million. I don't mean to undermine the tragedy for those infected and their families, nor do I intend to make the current outbreak seem not important or significant, but the rate of infection is very low relative to many viruses, including those that cause significant disease. Ebola causes acute, intense and often lethal infections, so it is an important pathogen, but it is far from the world ending infection the news media suggests.
To give some reference, Liberia has 26,000 HIV infections, and their surveillance is poor, at best.
To give some reference, Liberia has 26,000 HIV infections, and their surveillance is poor, at best.
Last edited:
Well, it is a zoonotic infection. These are typically the most dangerous types of viral infections. Basically, Ebola has evolved to live in some animal in nature, and managed to jump, probably inefficiently, into humans. It is probably spread in the native host with no greater pathogenesis that the common cold or herpes, but when viruses jump to a new host, they encounter new rules, a new immune system, and very different host behaviors...and this leads to the acute, severe disease you see. It is probably very well evolved to spread in the native host with few symptoms or pathogenesis, but it is the jump to humans that is the problem. I can reference many viruses that exhibit this behavior. Heck, the earliest live virus vaccines were made by simply passing the virus into a new host and selecting for less pathogenesis. You get more pathogenesis sometimes too, but it is beyond medical science to predict what will happen.
That makes a great deal of sense. What a great thread. Thank you.
Flamencology
You don't deserve koa.
How are antivirals with keeping up with new viruses and trends? Presumably not facing the same problems as those created by over-prescribed antibiotics, and I understand that it's a different ball game... But what's being done about all of this, in the laboratories?
I like to explain this phenomenon to people who are not scientist by comparing the difference in chocolate metabolism between dogs and humans. My dog is sitting next to me, and we are pretty darn similar. Both mammals, both social animals, similar physiology, and so on, but I can eat as much chocolate as I want, but my dog can die from eating too much of it. Slight changes in metabolism, but a dramatic effect in that one case. Viruses are similar, but they can actively change themselves to partially meet the new host, and often this, in the first cases, enhances replication/escape.
Last edited:
I may save this for tomorrow's thread, as it is equally complex as this thread has turned out to be, if not more. Suffice it to say for now that resistance in viruses to drugs is far worse than in bacteria, meaning viruses evolve resistance much faster than bacteria. The world of virology is constantly looking for new targets to hit viruses and avoid resistance. The numbers are staggering, but in global terms, a virus like my main focus, hepatitis C virus, generates more sequence variants per day than the number of atoms that make up the Earth, and at least some of those result in drug resistance. Imagine trying to design drugs to that.
BoomBoomBigelow
Genius of Love
VOTD, hot or not.