✍️ Birth of the Latent Virus | Virology Series

I am not a virologist. Recent events have motivated me to explore the field I thought I understood - at least clinically. I started by reading historical texts on the matter.

Was not expecting this...

🧵 
https://www.remnantmd.com/1-slow-virus-virology-series/

Since the isolation of the first virus, tobacco mosaic virus, many harmless viruses have been identified and blamed for human illness.

The drug-induced SMON epidemic was blamed on viruses
https://www.remnantmd.com/lessons-from-history-1-the-15-year-s-m-o-n-epidemic-of-japan/

Researchers spent hundreds of years trying to find the microbe that caused Scurvy

https://www.remnantmd.com/lessons-from-history-2-scurvy-infection/

Hell was raised, children displaced from their homes, dairy stripped of its nutritional value...to find that microbe that caused Pellagra (B3 deficiency)

https://www.remnantmd.com/lessons-from-history-3-pellagra-misinformation/

These efforts were in full swing during the height of the polio epidemic. Researchers on the hunt for new variants of Poliovirus identified harmless passenger viruses...

Initially, these were classified as orphans - a virus without corresponding disease.

Whatever your sentiment towards the contemporary model of viral illness, it is important to consider the intellectual framework that virologists of the 20th century worked with.

For a review of what illness is and how we define it:

https://www.remnantmd.com/international-grand-jury-day-3-the-pcr-test/

One critical principle of classical Virology:

For any virus which causes disease, the illness will strike the victim soon after infection.

The critical factor here is how quickly the virus can replicate.

If it is too slow, the immune system will have enough time to mount a response and neutralize the invader. By exponential growth the virus has a chance of overwhelming the body and causing illness.

This growth rate is referred to as generation time.

Fundamental Problem:

once a virus is dormant, a healthy immune system will not allow it to multiply such that it would threaten the host. 

It is in equilibrium with the host. 

For the virus to reactivate, first the immune system must be perturbed in some detrimental way.


Thus, the cause of illness is that which weakens immunity.

In the case of Hepatitis, often occurs due to alcohol abuse or non-alcoholic fatty liver disease - hepatitis virus grows abundantly and can easily be detected by molecular testing.

Another example is Herpes - which lays dormant and breaks out periodically as the immune system fluctuates seasonally.

Is the culprit hepatitis or herpes virus?

Or weakening of healthy liver & immunity?

They are the ashes, not the spark.

To blame a disease on a virus which does not meet the above requirement for causing illness, one must invent a new property that allows the virus to violate this framework.

Enter the 'Slow' or 'Unconventional' Virus...

Dr. Gajdusek was a virologist and pediatrician at the NIH

In 1957, by sponsorship from the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis (polio wave), Gajdusek took a trip to New Guinea where he was introduced to kuru disease...

Kuru was said to have only affected one group of people (Fore tribe) in New Guinea. 

Kuru derived from the Fore word kuria - to shake. 

Before Gajdusek, no outsider had ever described the disease.


Gajdusek reported that natives of Fore would perform ritual cannibalization of their relatives, including the consumption of their brains. 

He decided that kuru was transmitted by consuming brains.

He looked high and low for the virus that would be responsible.

Unfortunately, he could not find any signs of infection:

• No fever
• No inflammation
• Not even changes in the cerebrospinal fluid of those who had ‘kuru’

Weirdly, even those with a weaker immunity had no greater risk of catching this ‘infection.’

Simultaneously, a colleague in England was studying scrapie (a similar disease) in sheep. 

The Brit suggested the possibility of a ‘slow virus’ in the manifestation of disease. 

Gajdusek ran with it.

In his experiments with chimpanzees, he tried to transmit kuru in every conceivable way. 

He transfused blood, urine and cerebrospinal fluid from the sick to the chimps. 

Nothing happened to the chimps.

The chimps did not even catch kuru from eating the brains of the affected people. 

Weird, considering cannibalism was his claim for transmission to begin with.

Desperate, Gajdusek injected a smoothie of kuru patient brains into the brains of the chimps.

Shockingly…some monkeys developed some symptoms.

Who would have thought that directly injecting foreign goop into the brain would result in neurological symptoms?

In these monkeys who developed some symptoms, no virus could be found - even under electron microscopy.


Because Gajdusek could not ‘isolate’ virus in any of the classically accepted methods…he designed a new set of experiments...

...in which he would treat the 'virus-containing' solution. He hoped to glean some characteristics about the virus by attempting to destroy it.

This proved to be yet another setback for Gajdusek. 

No matter what he did, it still caused the same kuru-like symptoms when injected into the brains of the chimps.

To add insult to injury, he could not identify any foreign genetic material in the kuru-affected brains.

All this lends itself to one obvious conclusion: there was NO virus!

True to his pseudo-scientific training, he flipped his findings upside down. Gajdusek concluded that the virus which caused kuru was a new type of super-microbe. 

Something of an ‘unconventional’ virus.

This new virus acted slowly - years to decades.

Gajdusek presented his hypothesis to a generation of scientists falling over themselves to work with virus-hunters and all the grant funding they attracted.

The community was uncritical as he claimed that a similar virus also caused Creutzfeldt-Jakob, Alzheimer’s and other such degenerative diseases.

Now, we believe all of the above the consequence of self-propagating misfolded proteins.

Anthropologist Lyle Steadman investigated Gajdusek’s claims. 

He spent two years in New Guinea, and  heard tales of cannibalism, but never found evidence.

Gajdusek claims that both cannibalism and kuru ceased to exist within a few years after his 1957 trip.

Stupefying as it is revealing, Gajdusek was awarded the 1976 Nobel Prize in Medicine for this work. 

The NIH promoted Gajdusek to head the lab of CNS studies.

His 1977 paper

"Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru"

...was ultimately proven wrong.

Unfortunately for virology, the damage had been done.

The idea of a slow ‘unconventional’ virus that caused illness years-to-decades after infection…without any trace of its existence except by robust immunity…had made its way into the conscience of the scientific community.


This is a remarkable history, for sure. And we can thank Peter Duesberg for a rather thorough observance of the events that had transpired at the time.

But, it is worth pausing on the implications of this story.

Daniel Gajdusek was award a Nobel Prize for doing something he hasn't done.

He claims to have found the viral cause of a disease.

But has presented an invention that doesn't work, even theoretically, based on the number of natural laws it seems to violate.

And to make things worse, the subsequent decades of virology became fixated on the effects of "latent" viruses that:

• have never been found in the wild +
• in the disease it claims to cause +
• in any predictable fashion.

• How many other decorated virologists and doctors are charlatans?

• What else in the field of virology & medicine is simply assumed to be true without confirmatory evidence?

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https://www.remnantmd.com/1-slow-virus-virology-series/