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Study finds infectious retrovirus in pet vaccines - Vet screening methods inadequate

CJB

Senior Member
Messages
877
Retrivirus and cat/dog vaccines???? I am in over my head.....

I'm too tired to try and characterize this new blog by ERV. But I really want to know what this means???? Something to do with dog and cat vaccines.:confused::confused::confused:
 

CBS

Senior Member
Messages
1,522
Isolation of an Infectious Endogenous Retrovirus in a Proportion of Live Attenuated Vaccines for Pets

J. Virol. doi:10.1128/JVI.02715-09

Abstract:
The genomes of all animal species are colonized by endogenous retroviruses (ERVs). Although most ERVs have accumulated defects that render them incapable of replication, fully infectious ERVs have been identified in various mammals. In this study, we isolated a feline infectious ERV (RD-114) in a proportion of live attenuated vaccines for pets. Isolation of RD-114 was made in two independent laboratories using different detection strategies and using vaccines for both cats and dogs commercially available in Japan or the United Kingdom. This study shows that the methods currently employed to screen veterinary vaccines for retroviruses are inadequate and should be re-evaluated.

http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/JVI.02715-09v1

The authors raise the issue of XMRV and the recent CFS and Prostate studies.

(C)ontamination of human vaccines with XMRV, would not pass undetected with the currently available technology although this may not be necessarily true for vaccines produced in previous decades.

I'm not sure just exactly what implications this has for human infection with an XMRV like retrovirus but it does seem to raise a number of questions.
 

CJB

Senior Member
Messages
877
Finally! I posted about this twice and nobody commented. Some very interesting findings.
 

CBS

Senior Member
Messages
1,522
What else don't we know?

Finally! I posted about this twice and nobody commented. Some very interesting findings.

CB,

I found this because of one of your earlier posts but to be honest, I didn't really feel like visiting the original site where it was referenced. Thanks for posting it.

To me, the take home from this is what George alluded to on another thread, there are only two known (now three) known infectious retroviruses. That's so little go on that I'm not going to be too surprised by what we learn in the next several years. As Judy Mikovits said in her ProHealth presentation;

"Retroviruses are not common, nor are they benign. The big news was that here was evidence of another INFECTIOUS retrovirus."
 

flybro

Senior Member
Messages
706
Location
pluto
TThe animals i had vaccinated all did poorly, the ones i didnt' get vaccinated were much healthier and lived longer.

I konw its sujective, but other cat and dog owners have similar stories.

I wonder if XMRV cud be hidden in human vaccines?
 

CJB

Senior Member
Messages
877
CB,

I found this because of one of your earlier posts but to be honest, I didn't really feel like visiting the original site where it was referenced. Thanks for posting it.

To me, the take home from this is what George alluded to on another thread, there are only two known (now three) known infectious retroviruses. That's so little go on that I'm not going to be too surprised by what we learn in the next several years. As Judy Mikovits said in her ProHealth presentation;

"Retroviruses are not common, nor are they benign. The big news was that here was evidence of another INFECTIOUS retrovirus."

I couldn't understand anything they were saying except retrovirus and vaccinations. Thanks for the analysis. One more little piece of some puzzle -- maybe not this one! Since joining this forum, I don't know what to think about anything I read until it's been chewed over by the big brains on this forum.
 
Messages
5,238
Location
Sofa, UK
The recent news about Andrew Wakefield prompted me to have a look at some of the studies that found no connections between MMR, autism, and a history of gastrointestinal problems. From the news articles and from wikipedia I was led to 3 references to studies that failed to confirm Wakefield's findings. I only read the abstracts, but it only took a few seconds to see why none of the 3 disprove the general possibility of a connection between vaccines and autism. I could cautiously say that the 3 studies just about rule out the idea that autism is caused by MMR alone, which may have appeared to be Wakefield's original thesis...but these 3 studies, at least, leave the door wide open for the sort of theories that we're interested in here.

Of course we know that if the XMRV infection is a prerequisite for the effect, then the effect would be at least 1/25th the size of a 'direct correlation', and a reasonable estimate would be that less than 1% of people would be susceptible to post-vaccine XMRV-mediated disease. This is well within the tolerance of the tests I saw; indeed one of the primary ones stated a 95% confidence that the autism/MMR correlation is between 0.5 and 2.1, due to a sample size of about 100 and 400 controls, which leaves plenty of room for an effect. Similar was true with the other studies, also notable that one study excluded anyone with atypical autism-spectrum symptoms, which would be exactly the group we are looking for if the XMRV-mediated autism is an atypical subset of all autism as the XMRV theories would predict.

The most interesting study, though, was the Japanese one, where a substantial population had MMR withdrawn and replaced with single vaccines. The study described how, far from falling off, the rate of rise of autism rose significantly when MMR was replaced with a new vaccination regime. This was advanced as evidence that Wakefield was not only wrong according to this study, but in fact if anything the opposite was the case and the single vaccines caused less autism than the MMR. This struck me as somewhat bizarre reasoning, and also rather suggestive. Could it possibly be that it is not specific vaccination protocols that cause retrovirus-mediated autism, but specific retroviral infections in particular batches of vaccines? Perhaps Wakefield might have found the correlation he observed with other vaccines as well - in proportion to the rate of infection of the vaccine with as-yet unknown retroviruses perhaps? The 3 studies I've seen today are a million miles away from disproving such a connection, and all seemingly narrowly focused on one very specific and tight hypothesis - whereas this pet vaccine study seems to confirm that retroviruses do sometimes slip through into commercial vaccines...hmm...

...so any local CFS-related retrovirus, according to this theory, would differ depending on what vaccinations the local population had received and what retroviruses they were therefore infected with...

...hmm...so if one knew this had happened, and knew what the retrovirus was and sequenced it, one would be able to confidently predict which nucleotide sequence from the XMRV genome would NOT be found in the local population - if one had access to official secrets, of course - which would help one to not find it in one's citizens during PCR testing...

Just a thought...
 

acer2000

Senior Member
Messages
818
Its possible that if human vaccines were made from mouse cell lines, and those lines had transmissible retrovirus in them, that at some point the vaccines could be contaminated by accident with mouse virus. It then would follow that if that virus could infect humans, people would get it via this route.

This line of reasoning is similar to one of the theories behind how HIV got into the human population. The polio vaccine was originally made using monkey kidneys. Since scientists at the time didn't know such a thing as HIV existed, they didn't test for contamination by it in the vaccine culture cells, and thus the vaccines were contaminated. The theory says that this is the reason HIV started in Africa, HIV contaminated Polio vaccines were tested on Africans in that area and they were unknowlingly infected.

I don't know what the status of that HIV theory is, but I know its not particularly welcomed. :) I am sure it would be equally hard to prove a similar mechanism for XMRV contamination - given the political and financial stakes involved in such a hypothetical mishap.

My isn't it fun to speculate.... :)
 

acer2000

Senior Member
Messages
818
I always was curious about the theory of vaccines "causing" autism as explained by Dr. Mikovitz. XMRV replication supposedly accelerates due to immune cell activity triggered by the vaccine. But if this were the case, you'd also expect to see HIV viral load go up in response to vaccines - since HIV replicates when T cells are activated. And I'm not an expert in HIV, but I'm not sure that this is the case. Anyone know for sure? Vaccines are recommended for HIV patients as far as I know. Of course most-if not all HIV patients are on ART, so this would be a difficult phenomenon to study if you assume ART would modify this effect. Perhaps there are studies from the 1980s that looked at the effects of vaccines in HIV patients before ART was common. Obviously there is the possibility that XMRV would behave differently in this respect than HIV - since it is a different virus. But its an interesting question nonetheless.
 

Marco

Grrrrrrr!
Messages
2,386
Location
Near Cognac, France
I admit that I know little about this subject but find it fascinating.

I'm aware that lateral gene transfer is a feature of bacteria but hadn't realised that it is also common in other types of organism.

While we are speculating, is it possible for a RNA retrovirus to combine with a DNA attenuated virus as used as vaccines, instead of, or in advance of invading the cells of the host organism. If so, how might this affect replication, transmission etc.

Would such a mechanism lead, as Mark suggests, to hybrids, dependent on the type of vaccine used. Could this explain regional differences in detecting XMRV?
 

Dr. Yes

Shame on You
Messages
868
Actually, I did read that blog post CJB linked to, and the blogger jokes (?) that some of us will probably now start foaming at the mouth about how we got XMRV "from a vaccine". :Retro wink: Well, no, I don't think that reaction is likely! But it's the authors of the paper Shane cited who themselves suggested the possibility that the virus made the species leap via vaccination (rather outside their own argument, I think):

"Interestingly, the current methods used for screening human vaccines for retroviral contaminants include extremely sensitive PCR-based RT assays (not required for veterinary vaccines) that are much more sensitive than conventional RT assays. Thus, contamination of human vaccines with XMRV, would not pass undetected with the currently available technology although this may not be necessarily true for vaccines produced in previous decades."
It isn't clear to me whether the authors really meant contamination with XMRV or with the mouse ERV they mentioned in a previous sentence.

Either way, one question would be whether these PCR-based RT (reverse trancriptase) assays really would have led to detection of either retrovirus, given the apparently low copy number and generally elusive nature attributed by some to XMRV and ERVs. The general FDA-recommended procedure for screening out retroviruses, to my understanding, is to perform the above mentioned PCR RT assay and, if a positive signal is found, to then try to identify the viral contaminant. But I don't know what the FDA regulations are for vaccine manufacturers in this regard; are they prohibited to use vaccine substrates that had a positive PCR RT, whether they can identify its source or not? I doubt it; and if not, as I'm guessing, what was (or is) the extent of the testing that was (is) considered necessary by the FDA to establish that substrates' safety?

I should mention that many vaccines use avian, not mammalian, substrates; MMR and influenza vaccines for example usually use chicken embryo cell lines or tissue.

Btw, Marco (et al) - you may find something of interest in the following commentary from an issue of the CDC journal "Emerging Infectious Diseases" in 2001... The author argues for the safety of vaccines despite the fact that "almost any cell substrate for vaccine production (avian, rodent, or primate) is likely to contain and express (at low level) endogenous retroviral genomes". However, he suggests the possibility that substrate ERV's and the infectious components of the target virus (the one that's supposed to be in the vaccine) could interact, producing "pseudotypes or phenotypically mixed virions"; he himself had once demonstrated the ability of a couple viruses to do this in his own graduate studies. He says the CDC had begun (@2000) to look into the general issue. You can find his commentary here:

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/vol7no1/weiss.htm
 

Countrygirl

Senior Member
Messages
5,429
Location
UK
=flybro;42520]TThe animals i had vaccinated all did poorly, the ones i didnt' get vaccinated were much healthier and lived longer.

I konw its sujective, but other cat and dog owners have similar stories.

I wonder if XMRV cud be hidden in human vaccines?

My minature duchshund collapsed after her third booster and was ill for the rest of her nearly 18 year life. The vet diagnosed her with 'doggie ME'. Another family labrador also became very ill indeed after her vaccine and died. It triggered lymphoma. I've since heard a BBC documentary that investigated this problem and found that pet chronic illness not infrequently followed vaccination.
 

Marco

Grrrrrrr!
Messages
2,386
Location
Near Cognac, France
I should mention that many vaccines use avian, not mammalian, substrates; MMR and influenza vaccines for example usually use chicken embryo cell lines or tissue.

Thanks for the link - I'll have a good read. BTW I was musing about the BCG vaccine on another thread which is bovine I believe.
 

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
I could cautiously say that the 3 studies just about rule out the idea that autism is caused by MMR alone, which may have appeared to be Wakefield's original thesis


Mark, that is actually a myth. There was no thesis as to what "causes" what.


All that study attempted was find the answer to why all those kids (and thousands since) had severe gastro problems following MMR. It found the vaccine strain virus there, nothing else. It reported on the findings. The later 'retraction' of the interpretation by authors was absurd, because the interpretation was not there in the first place anyway...

must dash
 

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
ops, forgot to mention the findings of live vaccine polio virus in the gut of HIV kids. Live vaccines are contraindicated in individuals with low CD4+ levels (although there have been attempts to "discredit" and "debunk" those warnings as one can expect :)


"...inability to mount appropriate immune responses results in vaccine virus persistence. For example polio vaccine strain has been found in gastrointestinal tract of vaccinated individuals. No antibody production to Dtp or measles live virus vaccine. These findings have lead to proposals that both immunotherapy and vaccination of HIV-infected individuals should be accompanied by administration of an antiviral drug(s). In addition, it is suspected that exposure to antigenic stimulation through vaccinations may enhance the susceptibility of uninfected subjects to HIV-1 ..."

http://www.autismcalciumchannelopathy.com/HIV_and_Autism.html for references
 
Messages
5,238
Location
Sofa, UK
Mark, that is actually a myth. There was no thesis as to what "causes" what.

Quite so, I agree, thanks for making that explicit. The theory they seem to be disproving seems to be something of a straw man. What I found from my limited survey of the 3 most prominently linked studies I could find 'disproving' the link, was that they were all basically somewhat limited and circumstantial evidence against the theory that MMR causes all autism. Which was never stated as the theory, never was the theory, and was just a kneejerk interpretation to Wakefield's paper. Hence the papers I've seen are clearly inadequate evidence to disprove any more limited links between vaccines and MMR, and in particular none of them are anywhere near strong enough to disprove the theory that rates of autism might be higher after vaccination in about 1-4% of the population. There may be another study disproving such a link, but the 3 studies I found certainly don't.

The most startling thing I noticed was the methodology of the prominent UK study, which explictly removed from the findings all subjects whose autism or gastrointestinal symptoms were atypical or unverifiable. It was a bit of a scary moment reading that, since the XMRV-MMR-autism theory that has been tentatively proposed would predict that all the XMRV-mediated autism and MS would be atypical forms. The UK vaccine study I read removed all such people from consideration - scary, because it's almost as though they were deliberately removing all the affected patients from the study. When I read something like that, yet again, I have to wonder whether the methodological weakness is deliberate, or merely yet more incredibly ironic bad luck...I think the least I can conclude is that the people doing these studies really aren't looking very hard for something they don't believe exists.
 

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
Mark, you are on the right path. Here is good review of the "debunking" studies (those and other famous ones) and who funded them: http://fourteenstudies.org/

By the way there is no such thing as a typical autism. Not one child or adult is 'typical'. Put ten diagnosed individuals in the same room and you will be hard pressed to even divide them into any kind of groups... The only real "classification" or division is as regards the level of functioning, as in those that speak and those that don't, and how well... those that are toilet trained or not... Apart from that even the most common accepted wisdom on autism, such as 'lack of empathy' is actually a myth. There are very severely affected sufferers out there who are also very empathic, love human contact etc, and some very functional ones who aren't... There are really no rules here, and to say that autism is an umbrella diagnosis is an understatement.
rant over.
but have a look at this http://www.tarzanacme.com/video.asp?VidID=notautism
(the only thing he got wrong is that even the original 'kanner' kids were not "typical", and even then they had many obvious medical issues, including gastrointestinal in some of them...)
 

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
But if this were the case, you'd also expect to see HIV viral load go up in response to vaccines


And that is exactly what happens!!!


... but I would rather not rock the boat at this stage, if you get my drift. We need pharma on our side at this vulnerable stage of xmrv research. So to that effect I won't be posting anything on the subject. If you want references drop me a private message.
 

natasa778

Senior Member
Messages
1,774
Funny coincidence

ok, I shall say only this, only once :Retro smile: 'Cos we need to finish on a light note...

One of the so-called experts, a big shot involved in several studies that "debunked" Wakefield's study, was not a gastro doc or any sort of doc. The guy is a psychiatrist. (According to journalist Martin Walker, this guy also has a chubby portfolio of pharmaceutical stock and regular paid engagements). He also gave evidence (according to some he downright lied) against Wakefield at GMC.

He is based at, guess where, Institute of Psychiatry at King's College.

Small world, innit?
 

CBS

Senior Member
Messages
1,522
By the way there is no such thing as a typical autism. Not one child or adult is 'typical'. Put ten diagnosed individuals in the same room and you will be hard pressed to even divide them into any kind of groups... The only real "classification" or division is as regards the level of functioning, as in those that speak and those that don't, and how well... those that are toilet trained or not... Apart from that even the most common accepted wisdom on autism, such as 'lack of empathy' is actually a myth. There are very severely affected sufferers out there who are also very empathic, love human contact etc, and some very functional ones who aren't... There are really no rules here, and to say that autism is an umbrella diagnosis is an understatement.
rant over.

Natasha,

I liked the rant. Between time in grad school I worked for a couple years as a trainer of counselors in a facility for adults with "severe autism" that had been previously institutionalized. Everyone in our facility was severely effected but no two were the same. Even those that were verbal and those that weren't couldn't be characterized by anything except verbal ability.

The only thing that seemed clearly consistent to me was that they all had significant neural issues. As for possible links to infectious agents, Klimas had speculated that if something was interfering with the immune systems of infants (XMRV?), then the introduction of a live virus that the immune system could not deal with would have much a different impact on an infant with a developing brain than it would on an adult.

I do wonder about all of the times that I was bitten, spit upon and scratched while at the home for autistic patients. That was four years before I got CFS which for me started with a clear infectious episode and a documented abnormal (absent) immune response.

One stead fast rule for me now is NO LIVE VIRUS ANTIVIRALS!

Again, a lot of questions and a very large number of studies that are going on right now, trying to figure out what we're looking at.

Shane