Can H1N1 Be Cured Easily Without Medicine?
Can H1N1 Be Cured or Are You Doomed if You Get it?
H1N1 is spreading through news media outlets like the virus it is. Every day brings a new report of another outbreak of this new flu. It seems like researchers and scientists should be able to develop a cure for the common flu – after all, humans had been catching the flu since time began, but to date, there is no cure . This is because of the unique nature of the flu virus. A recent paper by Mount Sinai School of Medicine researchers may offer hope.
First, it’s important to understand just why it is so difficult to ‘cure’ the common flu. Each year, a different strand of flu (or several different strands) begins to attack the immune system of humans all over the world. The way the flu virus works is the reason behind this phenomenon. Each flu virus is a spherical structure that holds eight separate RNA segments. These segments tell the virus what to do: enter a host cell, replicate, reform and leave the host cell to find a new cell to infect. When the virus reforms is where the trouble begins. During reformation, different strains of virus can ‘reform’ together, thus creating an entirely new virus. For example, imagine a host cell is infected by two separate strains of the flu. The strains replicate and then begin to reform. In a perfect world the viruses would resemble only with RNA segments from their same strain. Strain A, segment 1 would only match up with other strain A segments. This is not what happens. Strain A segments 1,2,3 and 4 may match up with strain B segments 5, 6,7 and 8. Strain A segment 1 and 2 may match up with strain B segments 3 – 8. If you sit down and actually do the math, it is easy to see the problem: there are over 250 different combinations that can occur each causing a slightly different flu.
Scientists have named this process reassortment and it is a smart process. Each segment contains special markers, called packaging signals that tell it where it starts and where it ends. Peter Palese, Mount Sinai’s Microbiology Department head claims to have beaten this system and by beating reassortment, it may be possible to stop the flu virus from mutating. He did this by taking a packaging signal from the eighth segment and splicing into onto the fourth. What he ended up with was a complete virus that could no longer reassort.
Now the trick is to apply that theory to the H1N1 virus. By preventing the H1N1 virus from reassorting, our immune system may be able to develop a way to fight off the infection all together. Remember, the difficulty comes from the slight mutations and variations inherent in the way the flu virus works. There is one major hold up. In order for this process to work, scientists would have to genetically engineer what would, in effect, be a super virus. This virus, which would prohibit independent reassortment, would need to overpower all of the other viruses on the planet. One has to wonder what is more dangerous, the ever evolving flu virus or a new super virus.
