[ ARC forum 2 ]
Written by chImp at 04 Jun 2003 01:46:27: Re: Brief Summary 4
As an answer to: Re: Brief Summary 4 written by Ivan at 04 Jun 2003 01:05:40:
Here are the links (the first one is the most important, it is a lecture given to students, thus is is quite easy material to read, with a lot of humor! Watch out for Clinton jokes!)
The lecture
The interview
Duesberg on slow viruses>I hadn't really bothered to read the interview you had linked to; now it seems that there is no need, as you are going to eventually post the whole thing piecemeal.
Nope. Here's how it works:
1) You get infected by a virus.
2) The virus starts to replicate itself exponentially
2b) (most probable, but not if you're immune): it's so much of it that it causes an illness (within days)
3) The immune system finds out how to fight it and start to produce a vast amount of antibodies
4) The virus is under control. It's numbers are limited so that it can't do any more harm. The immune system calms down
4a) Alternative: The immune system fails and you die. EXITWe don't see that in HIV patients, do we? They get ill maybe after 10 years, but not within its first week. You mensioned chicken pox: you'll get ill within a week after you got it! If a person had chicken pox as a child, he is concidered immune!
Official Chicken Pox information . Quote:
***
Usually a person has only one attack of chicken pox in his or her lifetime. But the virus that causes chicken pox can stay dormant in the body and can cause a different type of skin eruption, called shingles, later in life.
***Only ONE attack, Ivan! So what if it stays dormant! If it causes something later in life, it's on a MUCH lesser scale than the initial attack. It's quite the other way around with HIV, isn't it? After one week the patient feels nothing, but after 10 years THEN the major attack comes! You haven't convinced me, Ivan! Please give me a better example of a "slow virus"!
>The parts you are quoting however show him to be an immensely ill-informed person - is he even a biologist!? Of course there are slow viruses, particularly among the retroviruses. There is a definite evolutionary advantage to not killing a host too quickly, as you noted elsewhere. A great example of that is chicken pox, which causes the well-known rash and other symptoms initially, then sits latent for long periods, erupting in times of stress as shingles. Or the Herpes Simplex viruses, which cause an initial outbreak of the Herpes cold sores, and then sit latent until stress allows another outbreak, when they can again be transmitted. These viruses are parasites, not killers, and they are extremly widely dispersed for that reason.