Altering a lethal virus with an ancient form

[guy]

 

It appears that scientists plan on altering the genome of a deadly chicken virus in hopes of recreating the less virulent form of the virus.

Merek disease virus (MDV) is a highly lethal virus that kills 90% of unvaccinated chickens and costs the poultry business one billion dollars each year. It was observed that the virus was less lethal before the 1900s.

Scientists have examined nearly 1,000 chicken bones from archaeological digs across Europe, some 2,000 years old. By comparing the ancient genomes with the modern MDV genome, point mutations were discovered in the modern virus. It is thought that these mutations were the cause of the modern virulence of the virus.

Scientists have synthesized the ancient, less lethal gene and inserted it into living chicken cells. This new hybrid virus did not show the lethality of the modern virus.

What could go wrong with altering natural viruses? /sarc

 

https://www.livemint.com/science/health/reviving-ancient-viruses-can-help-fight-modern-ones-11707805683759.html

Edited February 13 by guy

[guidoLaMoto]

Do you remember the TV commercial for butter that criticized margarine ~40 y/a where the punch line was 'It's not nice to fool Mother Nature??

The same govt bureaucrats who brought us the CoViD disaster advise us now to kill ALL our chickens so that the new virus doesn't kill SOME of them.

No epidemic is over until a certain characteristic ratio of Susceptible to Infected to Recovered (S-I-R Model) is reached. That math (a Laplacian  diffusion function) that describes epidemics also describes, among other things, the coat patterns on leopards and zebras, the wing patterns on butterflies and the way your car bounces along when it has a bad shock absorber.

Every century or so an existing viral genome mutates spontaneously to a form that has increased virulence. Determined by the natural consequences of mathematical probabilities (the driving force behind Natural Selection) the natural course of a pathogenic virus is for the gene pool to become dominated by less virulent (ie- less damaging) and more infections (ie- easier to spread) alleles....Things like "Social Distancing" and "Lock Downs" do not limit the deaths of susceptible individuals. They only affect the time course of reaching that magic ratio in S-I-R...The politicians turned what should have been a 6 month pandemic into a two year nightmare.