New blog on Age of Autism about XMLVs in xenografts

[Kate_UK]

http://www.ageofautism.com/2011/07/when-science-journals-are-scarier-than-science-fiction.html

 

[gregf]

Hi Kate,

I think this paper is not being noticed but it is huge news.

Basically, yes XMRV is a result of mouse/human xenografts AND it is easily transmitted and causing illness.

XMRV is real, dangerous and contagious, and it is human made. Here come the conspiracy theorists.

Greg.

 

[alex3619]

Hi, there is a mistake in this article I can't talk about yet because I cannot attribute it to the person who made the comment for one or several days, due to confidentiality agreements.

However, the paper discussed made quite an impact with more than a few of us who watch the science closely. The virus is probably highly infectious, yes, but this is proven only in tissue cultures which lack an immune system. I still think the virus is much less infectious in humans - but what does that mean? All it does is slow the transmission rate. Once fully infected, the virus cannot be eradicated and will persist for life. So people get infected, then more people, then more. This is likely to follow an exponential curve until it hits a natural limit, like genetic or other resistance, or total population saturation. The thing about exponential growth curves is that they start out low and rise very fast. So I expect to see that almost nobody is infected (e.g. 1934), then many people (e.g. 1984) then most people (e.g. maybe 2028).

This does not mean that XMRV is a pathogen though. It could be opportunistic in humans. However, given this is from a class of viruses best though of as vertebrate (not mouse) viruses, I would be surprised if it had no health impact. So best case is its a low level risk that will spread to everyone who is not immune. Worst case is that it is highly dangerous, and will dramatically decrease global life expectancy, and catastrophically increase global disability rates. Can the world economy handle that? Can societies?

This is a real virus. It is out there in the world. We are only just now investigating what that means. While I do not believe it or its family of viruses necessarily cause ME or CFS, I do think that the risk is high enough that we must do something about it - this requires extensive investigation. That is why I support the WPI.

On conspiracies, they serve only one purpose - to alert us to possibilities so we will not ignore hard evidence if we find it. Most conspiracy theories are wrong, but one is right from time to time. We need hard evidence before we can call something a conspiracy. Human ignorance, human stupidity and human selfish self interest are much more likely culprits than conspiracy.

Bye,
Alex

 

[shannah]

Just received this from Jan. So where does this piece fit in?


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With many thanks to Dr. Dusty Miller.

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Re: XMRV -Science Journals
Scarier than Science Fiction

This piece by Kent Heckenlively confirms that a little
bit of knowledge can be dangerous!

The problem with the piece is that he got the wrong
definition of "xenotransplantation".

Xenotransplantation refers to transplantation of cells
between species, not just from mice to humans, as
Heckenlively quotes.

In fact, the report he discusses deals with
xenotransplantation of human cells into mice, not the
reverse.

This procedure is used to coax human cancer cells to
grow outside of humans for further study.

Surprisingly, human cancer cells are often difficult to
grow in cell culture, outside of a human, but are more
easily grown in nude mice.

While mouse cells have been transplanted into a few
humans, this procedure is very rare and could in no
way explain chronic fatigue syndrome or autism.

A. Dusty Miller, PhD

Member
Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center

 

[alex3619]

Hi shannah, this was the mistake I was referring to, which is now public so I can comment on it. While technically correct, it is also irrelevant in the big picture sense. Once the virus is infecting cultures, it can transfer rapidly from culture to culture. This is not good. How many MLLVs have done this? We don't know the answer to that. We also don't know what subsets of people can be infected.

The real message is this: labs doing culture work take great care to prevent contamination. Yet somehow this virus can get past those defenses. Personally I suspect it does so via infected people. So yes contamination can occur, but it should contaminate controls and subjects equally.

Under what conditions does it infect people? This is an important question. If never, OK, but I really doubt it. Does it require someone to have a depressed immune system or specific defect? Does it require contact with mucous membranes that have lowered resistance to this virus? Is it enough for it to infect the lining of the eyes or nose or mouth? We don't know, and we need to.

Bye
Alex

 

[RustyJ]

Yes, the paper is basically talking about human viruses which being spread from humans to human tissue in mice and back.

It seems to me, at the very least, this study confirms that lab precautions are being circumvented and claims to the contrary are baseless. So if it is theoretically possible for transmission to humans to occur in a laboratory situation, or to material used in vaccines, transplants, etc, then it is likely that this is happening. Simply by saying 'we take precautions' to prevent this from happening could now be interpreted as deliberately clouding the issue.

Although the study does refer to MLVs replicating under certain circumstances in human tissue outside the body, the big unsaid here is that it almost must be replicating inside the body for it to show up in the first place (and then afterwards for it to pose a biohazard). Given some of the huge leaps taken by many researchers in XMRV studies, surely this could have been stated more clearly in the study. The studies authors have ventured to discuss a biohazard risk, but have dodged saying XMRV is definitely replicating inside humans.

I would love to see lab technicians tested for XMRV or MLVs. What a revelation that would be.

 

[ukxmrv]

Rusty, the possibility of infected lab workers was brought up at one of the conferences. I remember Stoye responding to something brought up by an attendee. They mentioned testing lab workers though which test are they going to use. The WPI and Lo/Alter have both published papers in which they can find MLV's.

Can we see some of the labs of the "can't find XMRV in human's" going there?

p.s. just found the quote I was looking for (thanks to CBS)

Mike Bush - Director, Blood Systems Research Institute - "I think that there is no doubt after this meeting that this virus arose from a recombination when an original prostate tumor was explanted and propagated and it's extraordinarily infectious. In vitro it is clearly demonstrating infectivity and in explants and a variety of human cell lines and it can transmit into non-human primates. I'm a little concerned, this was human created in the laboratory and its a highly infectious retrovirus. And subsequent to that event, could it transmit to humans? We've been doing studies in pedigreed negative controls, some of whom happen to be lab workers working with this virus who intermittently score positive in one lab or another and I've just ignored that but now I'm beginning to be a little concerned that might there be transient infections in humans. Has anyone embarked on studies to look at nucleic acid or serologic detectability in lab workers who have or are working with these cell lines?"

Again, ignore the large obnoxious self-absorbed guy (who reassures himself that the test he did on himself was not a false negative).

William Switzer - CDC - (@ 54:55 min. - look at how anxious he is to get his hands on the mike :worried
"I just wanted to add to that, we share your concern Mike and we (THE CDC) have started a study looking at some archived specimens that we've screen and found other simian retroviruses for example and we're going to look for XMRV and other MLVs."

http://forums.phoenixrising.me/archive/index.php/t-10394.html

 

[ukxmrv]

This is more than just a botched together "conspiracy theory" by a few patients. In 2010 we had from Amsterdam

how did XMRV enter the human population? We will discuss two possible routes: either via direct virus transmission from mouse to human, as repeatedly seen for, e.g., Hantaviruses, or via the use of mouse-related products by humans, including vaccines. We hypothesize that mouse cells or human cell lines used for vaccine production could have been contaminated with a replicating variant of the XMRV precursors encoded by the mouse genome

Of mice and men: on the origin of XMRV
Antoinette Cornelia van der Kuyl, Marion Cornelissen and Ben Berkhout*
Laboratory of Experimental Virology, Department of Medical Microbiology, Center for Infection and Immunity Amsterdam, Academic Medical Center, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

 

[RustyJ]

Thanks for the transcript ukxmrv. I have seen references to this. Bush must have been hired for his good looks. I guess it has been discussed on another thread. He uses the term 'transient'. Hadn't he been listening to anything? He also says there was transferal to non-human primates. Was this the macaque study or something else? He also says this was human created in the laboratory. What did he mean exactly? I don't think he says it was an accident. The recombination was deliberate.

And he admitted some of their staff are positive. I smell our first law suits coming up. I hope someone has a word in the ear of the labs workers. I hope it goes public, although it will probably be a payout and confidentiality. But wow, if one of those infected lab workers went publc, it would blow this thing wide open. A good investigative journo could really go to town on this. It has everything.

Methinks Bush put his foot in his mouth up to his thigh a dozen times in the space of sixty seconds.

In vitro it is clearly demonstrating infectivity and in explants and a variety of human cell lines and it can transmit into non-human primates. I'm a little concerned, this was human created in the laboratory and its a highly infectious retrovirus. And subsequent to that event, could it transmit to humans? We've been doing studies in pedigreed negative controls, some of whom happen to be lab workers working with this virus who intermittently score positive in one lab or another and I've just ignored that but now I'm beginning to be a little concerned that might there be transient infections in humans.

 

[RustyJ]

Further to above. It would be interesting to know what particular recombinant Bush has running loose. It is certainly not the original ones. Also I guess he uses 'transient' because the virus disappeared from the blood of the macaques after a few months. He obviously swallowed the CDC PR hook line and sinker. What a dumbo.

Bottom line is when are these idiots going to stop believing in their own conspiracy. So now Bush realizes he has a retrovirus running loose, that it is highly contagious, that it can replicate in humans. Waiting Mike... waiting.... waiting... No, it's alright. CDC says it's only transient and only makes you a bit tired. Everyone back to work.

 

[gregf]

The blog on AgeOfAutism talks about the virus being in a range of murine based products (being a type of xenograft), including vaccines. What do we think about that ?
Or are the Autism ppl just in too much of a hurry to link to vaccines like MMR ?

 

[currer]

Hi all,
Dont forget the risk now posed by gene vectors used in gene therapies.
These have not yet been authorised for release but as these are based on MLV viruses they could recombine with "wild" virus in the population. (XMRV etc)

http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0003144

 

[currer]

Why is Dusty Miller being so disingenuous in his statement about xenotransplantation?

The concerns expressed in the paper are not dismissed by this equivocation.

The Zhang paper clearly states in the discussion section
"However three of the nine positive samples contained varying amounts of mouse DNA, presumably as a result of survival of mouse stromal cells from the mouse xenograft. Apparrently, the mouse stromal cells may persist for lengthy periods in culture, occasionally in excess of one year."

Does Dr Miller believe we cannot read research papers in the public domain on the internet?

Edit. Stromal cells are connective tissue cells from the mouse which would have formed as the human cancer xenograft transplant healed and grafted successfully onto mouse tissue.

Edit. "a little learning is a dangerous thing" Pope.
A frequently used quote from the eighteenth century in England used tio justify denying education to the labouring classes. - often in conjunction with the argument that wages should be kept at starvation level or the feckless labourer would not work.
Silverblade, where are you?

 

[ukxmrv]

Greg,

I think that the Autism group are just picking up the concerns of the patients obviously plus the scientists who have already expressed concern over vaccines and other ways that XMRV could have got into the population.

Example 1 (The Lancet Infectious Diseases, Volume 11, Issue 4, Page 264, April 2011)

Once a virus is endogenised, it is forced to follow the evolutionary rate of the host. Since XMRV is integrated in cell-lines the virus evolution is restricted to the host's pace of evolution, and viral descendants have none or minimum sequence diversity. Thus, if a contaminated product, previously cultured in cell-lines, is administered to people then the infections would provide the evolutionary patterns reported by Hue and colleagues.4 If the immunological data reported by Lombardi and colleagues5 are correct, then we need to trace the common source for these infections to prevent possible public health concerns. Products from cell-lines should be the first candidates

Example 2

But the detection of integrated XMRV proviruses in prostate cancer tissue proves it to be a genuine virus that replicates in human cells, leaving the question: how did XMRV enter the human population? We will discuss two possible routes: either via direct virus transmission from mouse to human, as repeatedly seen for, e.g., Hantaviruses, or via the use of mouse-related products by humans, including vaccines. We hypothesize that mouse cells or human cell lines used for vaccine production could have been contaminated with a replicating variant of the XMRV precursors encoded by the mouse genome

Citation: van der Kuyl AC, Cornelissen M and Berkhout B (2011) Of mice and men: on the origin of XMRV. Front. Microbio. 1:147. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2010.00147

 

[currer]

I find it interesting that the Zhang paper was published in an open access journal.

Obviously virologists must have known about these dangers, they cant have been totally forgotten, and once the WPI research came out they could all make the obvious connection. Some are prepared to ask themselves searching questions, others just want a cover-up.

I think there is a certain amount of whistle blowing going on.

 

[RustyJ]

It does beg the question 'why aren't more lab worker getting infected?' After all, 3-6% of the population is carrying the virus, so must 3-6% of lab workers. So there's a high possibility that none of the lab workers were infected in the lab.

Nobody has yet come up with a satisfactory reason for the initial spread of the virus throughout the body, then the die-back to tissue reservoirs. if Abopec 3 inhibitor was consistently involved on a cell by cell basis, you would not expect the initial bloom.

 

[currer]

Perhaps it spreads in blood cells to all areas, then as the initial immune reaction kicks in it is cleared from the blood. Provirus would persist permanently in long lived infected cells but perhaps hides in blood cells so it would only APPEAR to be cleared in blood.

Judy Mikovits says that XMRV hides in PBMCs and is difficult to find, requiring amplification. I dont suppose the macaque study bothered to amplify the PBMCs.

Retroviruses create a LATENT infection in the genome of infected cells as provirus. From there they spread only to adjacent cells.
If they are in the immune cells in the blood though, they could spread all round the body in an enclosed state. Maybe they are released once the PBMC is activated by an immune response.

Yopu wouldnt need much virus though if ME/CFS were caused by an immune reaction to the XMRV it could never quite eliminate. So it does not have to be the XMRV itself directly making you sick but your own reaction.

You are right about the lab workers, that is a good point

 

[RustyJ]

Looks like the vector cannot be lab workers...what does that leave...?

currer. Rhetorical? Doesn't of course rule out vaccinations or human to human transmission. And as you eliminate some routes, you make others more likely.

What it underlines is the point that lab researchers knew/know next to nothing about MLVs, and were lucky this time around. It beggars belief that they weren't aware of contamination in human tissue. Far from crowing about their contamination and recombinant theories, these people should be doing a bit of deep soul searching about why it's taken them fifty years to find this out.

The contamination argument is not refutation of the WPI case, it is a scathing indictment on the reputations of those researchers who have been working on MLVs in whatever capacity for the last fifty years. Mistakes have been made which undermine the credibility of these people.

 

[SilverbladeTE]

Why is Dusty Miller being so disingenuous in his statement about xenotransplantation?

The concerns expressed in the paper are not dismissed by this equivocation.

The Zhang paper clearly states in the discussion section
"However three of the nine positive samples contained varying amounts of mouse DNA, presumably as a result of survival of mouse stromal cells from the mouse xenograft. Apparrently, the mouse stromal cells may persist for lengthy periods in culture, occasionally in excess of one year."

Does Dr Miller believe we cannot read research papers in the public domain on the internet?

Edit. Stromal cells are connective tissue cells from the mouse which would have formed as the human cancer xenograft transplant healed and grafted successfully onto mouse tissue.

Edit. "a little learning is a dangerous thing" Pope.
A frequently used quote from the eighteenth century in England used tio justify denying education to the labouring classes. - often in conjunction with the argument that wages should be kept at starvation level or the feckless labourer would not work.
Silverblade, where are you?

Oh, I'm here, never fear

Any of you ever watched the classic film "METROPOLIS"? Awesome film, way ahead of its time.
Conspiracy...slave labour...hubris blinding the "Great Minds!" to the fact their own inventions are their own destruction because they themselves are NOT gods and do NOT know everything, quite the reverse in fact.
Or, take another classic from sci-fi "The Forbidden Planet", the great and noble Krell race, destroyed in a single night by the combination of their own genius, their own lack of udnerstanding of some of the deeper darker secrets, and their own inner horrors.

To those who may think that it's chidlish, foolish to bring in sci-fi, I give a simple point: fiction is how we explore and learn abut things long before science gives us the factual realities. They are the "practice", the "war games" the "simulations" in a way.
Do I have to give examples from fiction of other technologies, ideas, problems fiction has brought up and dealt with, warned of long before the damn D*CKHEADS in "The System" ever did, hm?
Not to mention, scifi direclty spawned much of the tech we have now (classic example's the modern mobile phone, so sci-fi is NOT a joke except to those with small minds)

We maybe "The Krell", we may have polluted our bodies with viruses that may well doom us...not impossible, we maybe the "canaries in the coal mine"...who knows?
That's the thing: a truly wise person knows there is always doubt, but our systems do not want to hear, it's wrapped up in a suicidal arms race of greed, stupidity and arrogance.

Ou leaders would rather condemn "oh an insignificant few tenths of a percent!" of children to potential long term harm or death, "if it could save a greater number!"..and keep the risk secret, so as "not to alarm the ignorant herd!"
In other words, our political and medical leaders have probably decided to BURY the fact that vaccines, and other products, are potentially directly infecting folk with pathogens, because "the ends justify the means!"...which is always the excuse mass murderers and tyrants use!.

Won't be so damn fun when their kids start getting these odd ailment, like ME, autism etc...or, if the do not get them, then it proves they KNOW and are avoiding the risk factors, and how could they do that if they didn't know them? So, either way, they'll suffer in the end, as well as us. And anyone who'd willing risk their kids like that is...a monster indeed

they are covering up so much, it may have all got completley away from them..not realizing that covering up...Vacines.. AND...pesticides..AND...herbicides...AND...lead in petrol...AND...uranium/mercury/PCBs/nerve gas in fish...etc etc, all adds up to one huge nasty health time bomb. (look how long it took the UK to ban lead additives in petrol to see how stupid they are)
And we wonder why cancer rates are increasing beyond expected, eh? Oh I wonder why...?

Most of our leaders, and that includes "The Weasels" have little bloody imagination, they are all ego, they must have CONTROL at *any cost*, and part of that cost is lacking the ability, or willingness, to imagine, to think outside the square...to see the approaching meteor.

History is going to paint them as the blackest-hearted bastards ever, for they'll kill and maim far more than ALL the tyrants of history did, and far far more cowardly for they don't even have the balls to even order have someone else shoot or bomb their victims, never mind do it themselves, or quickly with mercy: bloody murderous idiots, jeesh :/

/rant mode off jeesh, gets you down, that stuff does.

 

[ukxmrv]

I do know of 2 ex-lab workers with ME in different countries. One went on to die of cancer and the other is still alive as far as I am aware. Don't know what they handled though.