Another edition of "Complete Rubbish"

Adrian J. Gibbs, a retired plant virologist recently claimed that the H1N1 "swine flu" virus must have originated as the result of a laboratory accident.  

According to the New York Times, his theory (or, rather, his poorly thought out hypothesis) has now been debunked by the WHO. 

A brief excerpt from the article:

Dr. Gibbs, who had studied the gene sequences of the swine flu virus posted on public data banks, argued that it must have been grown in eggs, the medium used in vaccine laboratories. He reached that conclusion, he said, because the new virus was not closely related to known ones and because it had more of the amino acid lysine and more mutations than typical strains of swine flu.

His theory was reported by Bloomberg News on Tuesday. Even though scientists at theCenters for Disease Control and Prevention were skeptical and some prominent virologists openly derisive, news outlets have repeated and magnified the theory, adding speculation about bioterrorism that even Dr. Gibbs repudiated. He was also interviewed Thursday on the ABC News program “Good Morning America.”

Dr. Fukuda said a W.H.O. panel of experts had concluded that “the hypothesis does not really stand up to scrutiny.” The lysine residues and mutation rates were typical, he said, and many swine flus seem unrelated because not enough pigs are tested each year.

The article went on to make some astute points about the damage that misinformation like this has caused in the fight against diseases like AIDS and polio.

This is why the cultural expectation in science is that you publish, then pronounce.  Or, in cases where the early dissemination of your research could save lives, that you at least get your work through the peer review process before typing up your press release.  

Because science matters.  Getting it wrong matters. Reducing the public's trust in the people working to protect them matters. 

Dr. Gibbs should have known better.

Related posts:

Bogus bioweapon claims for H1N1 Swine Flu

From the comments: Is the bioengineering theory really rubbish?

From the comments: Is the bioengineering theory really rubbish?

Doxocopa writes:

"Complete rubbish???

For a start... still, not yet a SINGLE PIG INFECTION was reported, as far as I'm aware. Could you please answer two things?
1 - If no pigs seem to be affected at all, how on earth a pig flu virus turned suddenly to a human airborne disease? - First human cases from other species Flu virus begun by direct contact with the infected animals
2 - This virus is indeed a genetic chimera; independently of what people think about its origins, so probably can infect humans, pigs and birds, so how can it survive in Nature without an epidemiological reservoir?"

Hi Doxocopa,

Thanks for commenting.  Yes, actually: it's complete rubbish.  But I can certainly understand why the situation would be confusing to someone who hasn't studied the flu... especially because this strain was unfortunately saddled with the misnomer "swine flu."  What we're really all paying attention to right now is a HUMAN flu with swine-, avian- and human-flu progenitors.

This flu has four grandparents, if you will: two from different regions of swinelandia, one from birdlandia, and one from humanistan –and it LIVES in humanistan: really, it’s a human flu, even if it is an immigrant.

So, to answer question 1:

What does it mean that we haven’t seen any cases in pigs yet?  It could mean any one of a number of different things:

1. The virus may cause asymptomatic infection in pigs or cause only very mild symptoms.  That is, they might get infected and be able to spread the disease (both to humans and other pigs) without showing any sign of having the disease.

2. It may be that the cases in pigs have simply been missed, even if the disease was severe.  There are a number of diseases that cause illness in pigs, including “normal” swine flu, and the affected farmers may not have recognized that anything new was happening.  We can’t be sure yet where the virus first emerged, but there may simply not be a very robust veterinary public health surveillance infrastructure in the country of origin.

3. The recombination may have occurred a human, instead of a pig.  We are also capable of being infected by human, swine and avian flu strains.

4. Even if the recombination DID occur in pigs, that doesn’t mean that the new virus was best-suited to reproducing in pigs vs. humans.  Remember, the pig in question would have been infected by 2 or more strains of flu at the same time; its immune system was likely compromised.  A compromised immune system may be the reason it was infected by more than one flu strain in the first place.  Even if not, the infections, themselves, would have worn down its immune response. (Secondary bacterial pneumonia is what usually kills most people who are killed by seasonal influenza.) 

If this is true, even if the virus was better-suited to humans than pigs, the virus may have reproduced sufficiently in this one pig to infect a human handler and enter into circulation in the human population.  It might never have been, and might never be, primarily a disease of pigs.

 

As for question 2:

What is the “epidemiological reservoir?”  Humans appear to be the primary host species for this virus.  That’s why I saw “swine flu” is really a misnomer.  As far as anyone knows right now, this is solely a disease of humans, and WE are how the virus is “surviv[ing] in nature.”

What's more, this virus would be a profoundly stupid bioweapon.  No one would benefit from it.

Bogus: Bioweapon claims for H1N1 Swine Flu

Some segments of the blogosphere are all atwitter (pun intended) with the theory that the H1N1 Swine Flu must be the work of some nefarious group of bioengineers because the virus contains segments from 4 different progenitor viruses --2 different swine flu viruses, an avian flu virus and a human flu virus.  Some even seem to imply that US government researchers working on the 1918 pandemic flu virus (which was also an H1N1 virus, though very different) might have been involved in weaponizing it.

Much of this seems to be driven by a story written by Wayne Madsen of Online Journal:

It turns up all over the place, at PrisonPlanet.com, Know4Life, InTheseNewTimes, and elsewhere.

Jeff Denmark at Drudge Retort quotes the article:

"According to two mainstream media journalists, one in Mexico City and the other in Jakarta, who spoke to WMR on background, they are convinced that the current outbreak of a new strain of swine flu in Mexico and some parts of the United States is the result of the introduction of a human-engineered pathogen that could result in a widespread global pandemic, with potentially catastrophic consequences for domestic and international travel and commerce." 

And goes on to say: "WMR has been informed that the CDC and U.S. Army dug up the body of an Inuit woman who died in 1918... from an outbreak of Spanish flu. . . . . WMR has been told the genetic material recovered by the U.S. government from the corpse of the Inuit woman provided the basis for the development of the H5N1, or bird (avian), flu strain at the U.S. Army Medical Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) laboratory at Fort Detrick, Maryland, the point of origin for the Ames strain of anthrax used in the 2001 bio-war attacks against the U.S. Congress and the media."

This is, as they say in Jolly Olde England, complete rubbish.

"How, then" you may ask "did a brand new virus that's made up of four different viruses suddenly spring into being and spread all over the world? Doesn't it have to be the result of bioengineering?"  

...Actually, no.

This is exactly the sort of thing we've been expecting for years.  

If more than one strain of flu virus infects the same cell, the two strains can mix up their genes, leading to what is called a recombinant virus.  That simply means that the genes from the two (or more) viruses have recombined to create a new strain.  In effect, it's a lot like sexual reproduction in humans; parents mix up their genes with the result that a child might have her mother's hair and her father's eyes.

This recombination happens especially easily in pigs, because they can be infected by swine flu viruses, avian flu viruses and --you guessed it-- human flu viruses.  The pig as a "mixing vessel" scenario is something we've long known to be a threat when it comes to pandemic flu.  In fact, this is believed to be what caused the last two pandemics, in 1957 and 1968, as this figure illustrates.

This is perfectly natural and expected.  That doesn't make it good, of course, but there's no hidden conspiracy behind it.  The virus arose naturally and the epidemiological evidence seems to show pretty clearly that it's spread so quickly because of air travel --something else we knew to expect-- not because it's being used as some kind of very inefficient bioweapon.

We humans are all on the same side on this one.