 |
| SARS Is It A Genetic Mutant Virus? by Helke Ferrie (physical antropologist & medical science writer) |
|
 |
 |
 |
| This article was published in "Vitality" (Toronto's Monthly Wellness Journal) June 2003 issue. Stats on SARS deaths by May, 2003 - 326 dead worldwide here is the excerpt from the article: "Not only did the ill-prepared immune systems of some people over-react dangerously to SARS, but so did the whole world, according to virus expert and Nobel laureate David Baltimore, Stephen Lewis of the UN's AIDS program, and the relief organization Doctors Without Borders. They pointed out that over the last six months, a North American had a 10,000 greater chance of dying from ordinary flu than from SARS (every day 55 people die from regular flu). Is SARS A Genetic Mutant Virus? SARS may be more than another nasty virus. One of the key Canadian SARS researchers, Dr.Frank Plummer of Canada's National Microbiology Laboratory, disagreed with the World Health Organization's assertion that SARS is caused by a specific corona virus, because only 40% of SARS patients tested were found to have it. Corona viruses mutate often in hours, but strangely this one didn't change in seven weeks. Really "weird" said Dr. Plummer, is the fact that the SARS samples taken from people all over the world were genetically identical - a unique finding fro a virus which adapts rapidly to local conditions and ought to have been different in every sample. Furthermore, some people who recovered from the virus became illl again, yet same-strain corona virus infections were totally unknown, until now. Fundamentally unnatural is the fact that this virus is a hybrid: one side is like a virus that causes hepatitis and pneumonia (New Scientist April 26, 2003). Nature does not go in for genetic recombinant technology. Are 60% of cases just regular viral pneumonia patients? And are the remaining 40% "real" SARS cases the result of an experiment gone wrong, as speculated in the international journal Virology (No.77,2003)? Indeed Canada's University of Western Ontario virologist and anti-GMO activist Professor Joe Cummins wonders why the "large body of reports on the genetic manipulation of corona viruses" is ignored and suggests that the SARS virus might well be "a unique virus that arose as a laboratory accident or purposeful experiment." What we do know is that the biotech companies Prodigene and Monsanto have used corona viruses to make an oral live-stock vaccine (projected market: US $140 billion by 2020). Indeed, it is vaccines that all biotech companies are now pinning their hopes on, as reported in Nature (April 24, 2003), since the "industry is battling for survival." Biotech stocks have fallen by 50% in the past two years because of waning investor confidence and increasing worldwide rejection of GMO foods. Interstingly, China had granted permits for those vaccine experiments and China's Guangdong province is the epicenter of classic SARS from where it spread across the world. |
| Back to HEALTH PHILOSOPHIES PAGE |
|