Sharks kill people and so do viruses, but are they friends not foe?
The movie Finding Nemo helped explain the role of sharks in the marine ecosystem and now a similar PR campaign is needed for viruses, especially the ones we have managed to exclude from our microbiome or virome.
Viruses are the smallest, yet most powerful force on this planet. There are 38 trillion in all of us, 8% of our DNA. They are like the police of our microbiome keeping in order a diverse gut garden of bacteria, funghi and microbes.
Imagine Bill Gates (aka virus hunter) suddenly working out that measles virus, influenza and polio have a role in our microbiome.
What do these viruses do? A question Bill has never asked as he prefers to hunt them with a “the only good virus is a dead virus” zeal.
The pro-vaccine lobby is so powerful, anyone who questions the holy cow of vaccines is shunned as an anti vaxer (shark lover).
Some researchers have put viruses to work treating cancer and autoimmune conditions.
Instead of singing the praise of these viruses, they have made viral treatments more acceptable by calling them immunotherapy.
Duke university has had great success treating brain cancer with a “re-engineered” polio virus. It poses the obvious question, should we have learned more about what polio virus actually does before excluding it.
After all many scientists believe we evolved because of viruses, our cells welcome them in and like sharks they do not exist to kill us. It doesn’t make sense.
American Doctor Lewis Thomas put it very colourfully.
" We live in a dancing matrix of viruses; they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party."
In our misguided war against viruses, a few decades ago the World Health Organisation declared victory against communicable diseases, only to see the non communicable diseases rise exponentially, overtake and increase steadily.
Measles is an excellent case study where my generation was the last in the 1960s to be naturally infected with measles. We had 97% herd immunity by 3 and it was never clear if measles was causing deaths from encephalitis and in Australia at least the number of deaths was very low. No one feared measles.
Now we know that 3 year old timeframe matches the creation of every child’s microbiome. Recent studies show measles viral infection was a catalyst to shape , test and fortify the immune system. Since the 1970s measles was gone, in its place a growing spike of autism, allergies and autoimmune diseases.
This measles white pointer of the viral world has been hunted and tamed, but at what cost? Like the marine environment, if the top predator goes all creatures suffer.
In Australia as a environmental journalist I watched the boom bust cycle of the outback. After a long drought, the rains finally came and the grass was green. I was shocked to see thousands of dead kangaroos, despite an abundance of food. The rangers told me a virus kills off the weak so only the strong will breed during the good times. They weren’t worried and said they seemed to die peacefully and the kangaroo population bounced back (sorry for the pun) within a year or too. The virus had done its job and simply disappeared till needed again.
Viruses are like sharks, but we need to understand what they do, before hunting them out of our lives.