5 replies to this topic

[Jai Dee]

Thai bird flu strain found to be resistant to drug

Scientists have found that a strain of the H5N1 bird flu virus circulating in Thailand is resistant to the flu drug amantadine, and they called for rigorous study of H5N1 strains to better treat human victims.

While the World Health Organisation has long recommended that Tamiflu be used as the first line of defence against H5N1, it said last May that a "dual therapy" combining amantadine and Tamiflu may be considered in case of an outbreak.

Yong Poovorawan, a medical professor at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, said an H5N1 strain in the central part of Thailand had become resistant to amantadine, casting more doubt over its use to fight the disease .

"It would be very dangerous if we don't know the sensitivity or resistance of the strain to amantadine and we use amantadine (to treat people infected with this strain of H5N1)," Yong said.

He urged more rigorous surveillance and study.

"If you follow any new strain you will know the genetic changes, you analyse its molecular structure, make experiments to see which drug it is sensitive to and find out which is the best antiviral for any given strain," he said.

"It's like a jigsaw, we have to find the pieces and see the big picture."

Yong and his researchers came to the latest conclusion after studying the molecular structure of the strain, which has been circulating in Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam since 2004.

"We need to conduct in vitro experiments," he said, referring to experiments in a laboratory or other controlled settings.

However, he could not say how effective a dual Tamiflu-amantadine therapy may be as Thailand has not tried administering such a treatment.

Their findings were published in the March issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

There are two H5N1 strains circulating in Thailand, one in the northeast and the other in the central part of the country.

Yong identified the strain in the northeast province of Nakhon Phanom as the Fujian-like strain, which an international group of virologists said in October may start another wave of H5N1 outbreaks in poultry in Southeast Asia and Eurasia.

The Fujian-like strain was first isolated in China's southern Fujian province in 2005.

"The Nakhon Phanom strain is the same as the Fujian-like strain...which is also in (the Chinese provinces of) Anhui and Zhejiang, and Laos," Yong said.

"From the molecular structure, we would say it is sensitive to Tamiflu and amantadine."

Although H5N1 mostly affects birds, the big concern is that it could mutate into a disease that easily passes between people, triggering a global pandemic.

The emergence of various strains of H5N1 is a matter of deep concern because each one may respond differently to different antiviral drugs and vaccines.

"If there are too many strains and they are very different, we will not know the efficacy of the vaccines," Yong said.

Source: Reuters - 20 March 2007

[Scott]

Thailand had better hope that drugs to treat the resistant strains aren't made by Abbot laboratories.

[Morty]

Scott, on 2007-03-21 09:29:53, said:

Thailand had better hope that drugs to treat the resistant strains aren't made by Abbot laboratories.

well, since Abbot are banning drugs from LOS, I wouldn't think they would be given any samples of the new resistant strains, at least not by the Thais, and would have a hard time developing a drug by guessing. I guess Abbot will find that out soon enough. (i.e when the drug is patented by someone else.)

Just my two satang


Morty

[John K]

Not totally unexpected. From the very start if anyone cares do dig into the archives, they can’t make the drugs until virus becomes human to human contagious. It is all a bit of a big gamble on having a drug ready with a pacifying effect on the public that everything us under control. It is a bit like having a key that works except for one tumbler.

[Ranger77]

Excerpts from: "Bird Flu Redux", Date: 09/26/2005, By: Jon Barron

The Reality about Vaccines

  * The vaccine may be promising, but it is unproven. And it is absolutely unproven for whatever final mutation the avian flu must go through before it readily transmits from human to human.

  * The antivirals Relenza and Tamiflu are theoretically useful, but so far, in real life application, neither have shown much benefit in helping those infected with avian flu. Also, even if ultimately proven effective, supplies will most likely be limited.

   * Don't count on having access to a reliable vaccine. First of all, no vaccine has proven effective at stopping even the current strain of avian flu, let alone the eventual mutation that truly threatens humans. Yes, it will be a related strain, but as experience has shown year after year with flu vaccines, in most cases, related is not close enough. If you don't have a vaccine for the actual strain that is causing the pandemic, the odds are not good that a "related" vaccine will help -- and no one can develop the proper vaccine until that final strain makes its appearance. So any vaccine now available (or currently under development) is a 50/50 "shot" at best. So, is a 50/50 bet worth taking? Not necessarily. For one: supplies are limited. ...

  *  "A meta-analysis of vaccine trials and case-control studies among older people shows that vaccination seems to have a modest effect in reducing influenza-related complications, if little efficacy in preventing initial symptoms." According to the Washington Post, this was the most comprehensive study ever done on the topic, one done by the Cochrane Collaboration in Rome. The 40 year analysis concluded that vaccination is about 30 to 42% effective at preventing the flu (when they pick the right one!)

  * Another [study] done by the CDC [Center For Disease Control of the USA government], who analyzed 7,000 samples of flu virus around the world for genetic mutations, found that germs have developed resistance to a class of drugs known as adamantanes, which includes the widely used drugs amantadine and rimantadine. They found that rate of resistance increased from .4 percent of the sample in 1994 to 12.3 percent in 2004. In the U.S., it jumped from 1.9% in 2004 to 14.5% in the first six months of 2005.

And Governments everywhere are developing plans to make it sound like they are in control and spending inordinate sums of your money buying up vast quantities of marginal vaccines and flu drugs in an attempt to convince you that they are wise, proactive, and worth keeping in office.

The Bottom Line and Alternative Health

Many alternative health companies are trying to tell you to boost your immune system to protect yourself. That's a questionable tactic with bird flu -- at least if not accompanied by the use of pathogen destroyers. Death from bird flu is most likely to come from a cytokine storm triggered by your own immune system, not from the flu itself. This is the same situation we saw in the great influenza pandemic of 1918/1919. The bottom line is yes you do want a strong immune system, but you also want a supply of nature's antiviral agents such as garlic, olive leaf extract, oil of oregano, and grapefruit seed extract on hand to rachet down the bird flu's attack on your body. If you can ratchet down the strength of the attack, then a strong immune system works in your favor-- finishing off the invading little buggers. But if you don't ratchet down the strength of the attack, then your immune system actually works against you -- potentially eating up your lungs.


You are not defenseless, and you don't need to be unprepared. And you certainly don't want to pin all your hopes on governments and the drug companies to protect you. Stock up on your favorite immune boosters and pathogen destroyers

    Immune boosters

          o Echinacea (Despite the latest study)
          o Pau d’arco
          o Suma
          o Astragalus
          o Medicinal mushrooms
          o Beta glucans
          o Aloe vera
          o Alkygycerol
          o Lactoferrin
          o Bovine colostrums
          o Glutathione
          o Mangosteen

    Pathogen destroyers

          o Garlic
          o Olive leaf extract
          o Oil of wild mountain oregano
          o Grapefruit seed extract

[The preceeding is excerpts from "Bird Flu Redux", Date: 09/26/2005, By: Jon Barron
http://www.jonbarron...5/9-26-2005.php ]


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In my next post I plan to put my favorite excerpts from:

"Why Antibiotics and Antivirals Fail".

[Ranger77]

Excerpts from: Why Antibiotics and Antivirals Fail, Date: 12/05/2005, By: Jon Barron

... What we want to talk about is why and how bacteria like C-diff and viruses like bird flu develop resistance to antibiotics and antiviral drugs. And more importantly…what you can do about it.

Antibiotic Resistant Infections

Penicillin was discovered (actually rediscovered) by Dr. Alexander Fleming in 1928. But just four years after drug companies began mass-producing it in 1943, microbes began appearing that could resist it. Since then, we’ve seen penicillin-resistant strains of pneumonia, gonorrhea, and hospital-acquired intestinal infections join the list. And it’s not just penicillin. Bacteria resistant to most of the other antibiotics of choice have also appeared and proliferated on a regular basis.

Antibiotic resistance to manmade drugs is almost impossible to stop since it is the result of some simple rules of evolution. Any population of organisms, bacteria included, naturally includes variants with unusual traits -- in this case, the ability to withstand a particular antibiotic's attack. When said antibiotic is used and kills the defenseless bacteria, it leaves behind those bacteria that can resist it. These renegade variants then multiply, increasing their numbers a million fold in a single day, instantly becoming the dominant variant. In other words, the very act of using an antibiotic creates the opportunity for strains resistant to it to flourish.

How do antibiotics work?

It’s important to understand that antibiotics vary in the way they kill microbes. Penicillin, for example, kills bacteria by attaching to their cell walls and then breeching those walls, thus killing the bacteria. Erythromycin, tetracycline, and streptomycin, on the other hand, kill bacteria by attacking the structures inside the bacteria (ribosomes) that allow them to make proteins, thus also destroying the bacteria.

Unfortunately, because each antibiotic is a single compound and one dimensional in its approach, it’s not that hard for microbes to "evolve" around such attacks. For example, microbes resistant to penicillin have developed cell walls different from the norm and that prevent the penicillin from binding. Similarly, other variants prevent antibiotics from binding to ribosomes, thus neutralize the effect of those antibiotics.

Again, because antibiotics are one dimensional in their approach, it’s not that hard for microbes to "evolve" around them.

Where it gets really frightening, though, is that bacteria swap genes like politicians swap favors -- which brings us to vancomycin, the antibiotic of last resort. When all other antibiotics failed, doctors knew they could count on vancomycin. But then vancomycin resistance was discovered in a common hospital microbe, enterococcus. By 1991, 38 hospitals in the United States reported the variant. Just one year later, vancomycin resistant Staph bacteria were observed with the same gene. What this means is that not only are bacteria programmed to "evolve" defenses against antibiotics, but once they produce such a defense, they are also programmed to rapidly share that defense with other bacteria -- thus rapidly spreading the resistance.

Viruses

Whereas bacteria are single-celled organisms, viruses are far simpler -- more primitive even. Essentially, viruses consist of one type of biochemical (a nucleic acid, such as DNA or RNA) wrapped in another (protein). Viruses are so primitive, in fact, that most biologists do not consider them to be living things, but instead, they are considered infectious particles. Since antibiotics specifically attack bacteria, they are useless against viruses. For viruses, doctors rely on a much less effective group of drugs called antivirals. Tamiflu, which governments are currently stockpiling as bird flu insurance, is one such antiviral.

Because of their primitive structure, viruses mutate even more easily than bacteria. Whereas antibiotics can remain effective for 2-5 years before resistant strains render them ineffective, antiviral resistant strains can appear in a matter of months, or even weeks. And in fact, we have seen that with Tamiflu. Although governments are stockpiling it as a safety net for bird flu, bird flu arrived on the scene pretty much resistant to Tamiflu and the other antivirals right out of the gate. And even those flus that Tamiflu was once helpful with are developing resistant strains by the month.

What can science do?

It was briefly thought that alternating the most commonly used antibiotics might stop the spread of antibiotic resistance. But a new model shows that the practice of cycling, alternating between two or more classes of antibiotics as often as every few months, probably will not work.

The latest theory is that mixing cocktails of antibiotics may help. And, in fact, this is closer to the way natural substances avoid the resistance problem.

How natural substances avoid the problem

When you think about how quickly pathogens "evolve around" antibiotic and antiviral drugs, it’s more than amazing that they have been unable to do so against most natural antipathogens such as garlic, olive leaf, and oil of oregano even given tens of thousands of years to do so. How does this happen? What is their secret?

Actually, it’s quite simple – or more accurately, quite complex. Earlier, we talked about how drugs are essentially one dimensional, which allows microbes an easy avenue to evolve around them. Natural antipathogens, on the other hand, are anything but one dimensional. They often contain dozens of biochemicals. Not all of them are "active," of course, but many of the so called non-active biochemicals work to potentiate the active ones and offer combinations with each other numbering in the thousands – presenting a complexity that makes it virtually impossible for microbes to work around.

Take garlic for example

For a long time, many people thought there was only one active component in garlic, allicin (in fact, many companies still promote that concept). It was believed that raw garlic had very little biological activity, but when you "damage" garlic cloves - by slicing, cooking, or chewing them - the enzyme alliinase immediately converts non-active alliin into the active ingredient, allicin.

As I mentioned, it was once thought that allicin was garlic's principal active ingredient. However, researchers now know that allicin is rapidly oxidized. In the process of oxidation, allicin breaks down into more than 100 biologically active sulfur-containing compounds. While allicin may still serve as a general marker of garlic's potency, research increasingly points to S-allylcysteine and other compounds as the most therapeutically active ingredients in garlic.

So how many possible pathogenic defense combinations can you get from garlic’s 100 biologically active compounds? A whole bunch!! Thousands and thousands and thousands, in fact!

The formula for finding the number of combinations of k objects you can choose from a set of n objects is:


    n_C_k = n!  /  k!(n - k)!


With 100 objects/compounds to work with and possible combinations ranging from any 2 of them to any 99 of them, the complexity is just far, far, far too much for simple pathogens to evolve around.

And that’s the secret. But it gets even better.

When you combine several natural substances in one formula, the combinations of compounds are beyond counting. Quite simply, microbes cannot evolve around them.


10 of the most powerful antipathogens found in nature.

   1. Ginger
   2. Onion
   3. Garlic
   4. Olive leaf
   5. Horseradish
   6. Habanero
   7. Zinc
   8. Grapefruit seed extract
   9. Wild mountain oil of oregano
  10. Apple cider vinegar


Individually, their effectiveness is astonishing.

Garlic

Garlic is one of the best infection fighters available for both bacterial and viral infections. It is a natural antibiotic that does not appear to create resistant bacteria strains. In addition, fresh garlic extract has been shown to be virucidal to many viruses.

Garlic possesses the ability to stimulate the immune system. It can stimulate the activity of the macrophages (white blood cells), which engulf foreign organisms, such as: viruses, bacteria, and yeast. Furthermore, garlic increases the activity of the T-helper cells (immune cells which are central to the activity of the entire immune system). Garlic may be particularly effective in treating upper respiratory viral infections due to its immune-enhancing properties and its ability to clear mucous from the lungs.

It destroys and/or inhibits various bacteria and fungi, with an antibacterial action equivalent to 1% penicillin. Garlic is effective against strep, staph, and even anthrax bacteria.

Ginger

Ginger has been traditionally used to treat colds and flu. Chinese studies have shown that ginger helps kill influenza viruses (even avian flu), and an Indian report shows that it increases the immune system's ability to fight infection.

Olive Leaf Extract

Olive leaf extract has a long history of being used against illnesses in which microorganisms play a major role. In more recent years, a drug company discovered that in vitro (in a test tube), an extract from olive leaf (calcium elenolate) was effective in eliminating a very broad range of organisms, including bacteria, viruses, parasites, and yeast/mold/fungus.

Habañero and Horseradish
[...]
Horseradish, in particular, contains volatile oils that are similar to those found in mustard. These include glucosinolates (mustard oil glycosides), gluconasturtiin, and sinigrin, which yield allyl isothiocynate when broken down in the stomach. In test tubes, the volatile oils in horseradish have shown antibiotic properties, which may account for its effectiveness in treating throat and upper respiratory tract infections. At levels attainable in human urine after taking the volatile oil of horseradish, the oil has been shown to kill bacteria that can cause urinary tract infections, and one early trial found that horseradish extract may be a useful treatment for people with urinary tract infections.

Oil of Wild Mountain Oregano

Numerous studies have shown wild mountain oregano oil (not to be confused with the oregano found in your kitchen) to be a potent antimicrobial. It has been proven useful as an antiviral, antibacterial, and antifungal agent rivaling even pharmaceutical antibiotics such as streptomycin, penicillin, vacnomycin, nystatin, and amphotericin in its ability to eliminate microbes. Remarkably it accomplishes this without promoting the development of drug resistant strains and other problems often attributed to the use of standard antibiotics. In addition to this already impressive list of abilities Oregano Oil is also a powerful parasitic expellant.

Grapefruit Seed Extract

Grapefruit seed extract was originally developed as an antiparasitic, but studies quickly showed that it had the ability to inhibit the growth of not only parasites, but fungi, viruses, and bacteria as well. The active ingredients of grapefruit seed extract are non-toxic and are synthesized from the seed and pulp of certified organically grown grapefruit. The process converts the grapefruit bioflavonoids (polyphenolics) into an extremely potent compound that is being used to kill strep, staph, salmonella, E. Coli, candida, herpes, influenza, parasites, fungi, and more.

Conclusion

As I said above, individually, the effectiveness of these ingredients is astonishing. But taken as a whole, and when you consider the number of possible active biochemical combinations these 10 ingredients and their hundreds of biochemical compounds afford, it would take bacteria and viruses more time than the earth has left in existence to evolve their way around them.


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[The preceeding is excerpts from "Why Antibiotics and Antivirals Fail", Date: 12/05/2005, By: Jon Barron
http://www.jonbarron...5/12-5-2005.php]