Umm. How would a vaccine weaken your immune system?

.........You know it definitely is a pandemic, by definition, whatever the origin.

If there was any monkeying around with the flu gene pool, it was done by tamiflu not by makers of vaccine!!! That is massively where the money is and they have been experimenting with different strains. Not that i think they did it, but they are the ones with means and motive, NOT VACCINE MAKERS as there is really not much money in that at all for reasonable reasons i won't get into here unless asked.

In the country, we see a lot more evidence of vaccines and their worth. I have a good buddy who bought a dozen or so calves last spring, up big enough you usually don't worry, but they up and died gruesomely in a couple of weeks because they had not had tetanus shots which they were supposed to. . Modern medicine has insulated us enough from this sort of horror that we have forgotten about it.

Though not specific to Swine Flu this is on the periphery of the issue brought up here.
From this week's Science magazine:



Resignations Highlight Disagreement On Vaccines in Autism Group
Erik Stokstad

A prominent member of the science advisory board for Autism Speaks, the largest private funder of autism research, resigned last week citing his disagreement with efforts to study vaccines as a possible cause of autism. Eric London, a psychiatrist and chief science advisor for the New York State Autism Consortium, says that funding such research, in addition to being wasteful, unduly heightens parents' concerns about the safety of immunization. London's departure is a sign of growing frustration in the research community, says Alison Singer, a former high-ranking leader of Autism Speaks who resigned from the group in January.


Figure 1

CREDIT: COURTESY OF AUTISM SPEAKS

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Since its founding 4 years ago by former NBC executive Bob Wright and his wife, Autism Speaks has committed $128 million in research grants through 2014. The group has won widespread praise for raising awareness of autism spectrum disorders (ASD)—the odds of a child being diagnosed are 1:150—and for advocating federal support of autism research (Science, 5 January 2007, p. 27).

But an increasing number of researchers and parents are concerned about the organization's position that vaccines may cause some cases of autism. Although numerous scientific studies have searched for a link, they have found none. Autism Speaks holds that vaccines or other environmental agents may cause ASD in a subset of medically or genetically predisposed individuals. "We believe that the question of whether immunization is associated with an increased risk for ASD is of extremely high priority," clinician-researcher Geraldine Dawson, the chief science officer at Autism Speaks, wrote in January to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That same month, Singer, then executive vice president of communications and awareness at Autism Speaks, resigned. She says Bob Wright wanted her to endorse a boost in federal research on the role of vaccines. "I felt very strongly that it sent the wrong signal," Singer says. "The science is saying it's time to move on."

London says the same concerns prompted his resignation from Autism Speaks' Scientific Affairs Committee. "If Autism Speaks' misguided stance continues, there will be more deaths and potentially the loss of herd immunity which would result in serious outbreaks of otherwise preventable disease," he wrote.

Dawson responds that Autism Speaks spends only about 2% of its $33 million research budget on research related to vaccines. Dawson rejects the argument that this research raises parents' concerns about vaccines. She claims it does the opposite: "We feel that by addressing questions parents are raising with ongoing rigorous research, that that serves to increase confidence" in the safety of vaccines.




CREDIT: COURTESY OF ERIC LONDON

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In April, Singer cofounded a new group called the Autism Science Foundation to fund research, in particular small pilot projects—but not on vaccines. Singer declines to say how much money the group has raised so far, but she vows to keep overhead low; the organization is currently working out of her basement.

Oh, and then there's this article from Science magazine as well.

NOTE: I post this with the caveat that because the study and reportage' of science is poo-poo'ed by several readers here that the information contained forthwith is subject to unreasonable (and unreasoned) scrutiny along with a series of myopic, agenda driven objections.

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Pandemic Influenza:
Straight From the Pig's Mouth: Swine Research With Swine Influenzas
Jon Cohen

If the novel H1N1 virus behaves like its ancestors, humans may have a rough road ahead, especially if it takes hold on hog farms.

To borrow a line from the movie Babe about a precocious piglet, there was a time, not so long ago, when pig flu researchers were afforded little respect except by other pig researchers. Important swine influenza discoveries were relegated to Veterinary Microbiology and other specialty journals, while highly lethal avian influenza won all the headlines. But now, pig studies have taken on a new cachet because of the swine origins of the 2009 A(H1N1) strain that's causing the current pandemic—and the community's eerily prescient predictions that something like it was bound to make headway in humans. "If we don't have veterinarians working with good medical scientists here, we're in real doo-doo," says veterinarian and swine influenza expert Jürgen Richt of Kansas State University's College of Veterinary Medicine in Manhattan.

Human influenza researchers, who mainly work with ferrets and mice as models, have turned up provocative findings about the new virus in a remarkably short time. Yet the veterinarians who do most of the flu studies with pigs, primarily to help pig farmers, are well placed to make a unique contribution. They know the closest relatives of the novel H1N1 virus intimately, and their studies are offering critical clues to its genetic origins as well as sobering insights about how it may evolve.

Pigs have long been known to play a special role in the spread of influenza viruses among different species. Pigs' tracheal cells have receptors on the surface that welcome both avian and human strains. Human cells, in contrast, by and large shut out bird influenzas. (The H5N1 that causes deadly avian influenza has mostly infected chicken farmers who are exposed to huge doses of virus.) This makes the pig a potential mixing vessel for viruses from different species to combine genes—a process called reassortment—possibly creating dangerous new human strains. But pig viruses circulating in pigs have been something of a bore until recently: The "classical" swine influenza virus isolated in 1930 in the United States remained stable for decades. "You could bet your house on that guy," says virologist Richard Webby of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee.

Then in 1997, an H3N2 that was mostly human in origin emerged in North American pigs, and the next year, researchers found a human/avian/swine H3N2 mishmash—a triple reassortant—that quickly became the dominant virus in pigs. Triple reassortants have continued to evolve in pigs at a break-neck pace, mixing and matching genes with aplomb. "They're quite promiscuous," says veterinarian Amy Vincent, a leading swine flu researcher at the National Animal Disease Center in Ames, Iowa, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).

Although the 2009 A(H1N1), also a triple reassortant, descends from this family of swine viruses, it is the first one that readily transmits the disease from human to human. No one yet knows why it has this property, but Vincent and others say close comparisons among the new variant and its older relatives may uncover the genetic properties that enable it to spread and thrive in humans. They wonder, too, whether the new virus will share its ancestor's penchant for reassortment, which has kept pig researchers scrambling to keep up with new strains. "It's been a very confusing picture for the last 12 years," says virologist Christopher Olsen, whose group at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, School of Veterinary Medicine was one of the first to isolate the pig triple reassortants.


Vincent and her colleagues have discovered what they contend is an important factor driving the success of the triple reassortants in pigs. Influenza has eight genes: six code for internal proteins and two for the surface proteins hemagglutinin and neuraminidase (the "H" and "N" in H1N1). All of the triple reassortants that have established themselves in swine populations contain the same internal genes. Vincent's group calls this the triple reassortant internal gene (TRIG) cassette. "This TRIG cassette may be a very fit combination of influenza A genes that are able to pick and choose neuraminidase and hemagglutinin genes," says Kelly Lager, who works with Vincent. "If the TRIG cassette does in humans what it does in pigs, that's not a good thing."

Lager, Vincent, and Webby signaled TRIG's dangerous potential for humans in a paper they published in the 26 December 2007 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study focused on two highly similar H2N3 viruses isolated the year before from pigs on different commercial farms in Missouri that had no known connections. They found that the pigs had picked up both the H2 and the N3 from birds, possibly from pond water contaminated by infected waterfowl. The last H2 seen in humans caused a pandemic in 1957. "That was a wake-up call to us and our human health partners," says Vincent. "Many of us would not have immunity to H2N2 that circulated in the late '50s."

The novel H1N1 now circulating in humans has a key difference from the triple reassortants in North American pigs: Two of its genes trace back to Eurasian swine. One codes for neuraminidase, which the TRIG routinely replaces. But the other codes for matrix, an internal protein. So the new virus, in effect, violates TRIG. "The Eurasian matrix is the wild card," says Vincent, who says it is a "good hunch" that it may shed light on the novel H1N1's spread among humans.

Kansas State's Richt, who formerly worked with the USDA group, thinks the Eurasian neuraminidase is the wild card. Richt agrees that the TRIG cassette is important to the ascendancy of the triple reassortant viruses in pigs but says only three polymerase genes—not matrix or the two other internal genes—must remain the same. Mechanistically, neuraminidase also makes sense, he says, because it codes for a protein that controls how much virus a cell releases, or sheds. And more shedding means more virus is sprayed by a cough or dripped from a nose, increasing the chance of transmission.

Richt is keeping an open mind; he's particularly interested in engineering the Eurasian matrix and neuraminidase genes into an unusual swine flu virus that infected 26 people who visited a pig barn at the Huron County Fair in Norwalk, Ohio, in August 2007. "The Ohio virus shed like crazy," notes Richt. The virus did not transmit among humans, but Vincent and colleagues warned about its potential in a paper published online in January in Veterinary Microbiology. "This report underscores the need for vigilance in examining influenza A viruses from swine (and other species) for human potential in addition to the major focus currently placed on avian influenza viruses," they wrote. Ultimately, Richt would like to conduct pig and monkey experiments with newly constructed Ohio–novel H1N1 hybrids to see how different gene combinations affect their replication and spread.

Malik Peiris, a virologist at Hong Kong University who did key work with the H5N1 virus, cautions that several factors may account for the novel H1N1's success in humans. "The Eurasian matrix and neuraminidase are obvious suspects because these are new, but sometimes it's the constellation, the fitting together of things, rather than one thing," he says.

Peiris's own lab has focused on another baffling riddle about the new virus: Where did it come from? To date, the novel H1N1 virus has surfaced in pigs at only two farms, one in Canada and, more recently, one in Argentina. Officials suspect that in each case a human transmitted the virus to the herds. Adding to the mystery, a detailed genetic study by Peiris and colleagues published online in Nature on 11 June shows that the closest known isolates to the novel strain circulated in pigs more than a decade ago, suggesting that the new virus lurked undetected in pigs for many years. Or maybe, as the Nature paper suggests, the virus hid in birds or some other species. "We've been a strong advocate for not blaming the pig without evidence," says Ian Brown, whose group at the Veterinary Laboratories Agency (VLA) in Surrey, U.K., was the first to report that experimentally infected pigs could transmit the new virus to other pigs.


David Swayne, director of USDA's Southeast Poultry Research Laboratory in Athens, Georgia, says the evidence is leaning against birds as the missing link. His group recently tested the new virus in turkeys, chickens, ducks, and Japanese quail. Although some became infected, none transmitted the virus.

Peiris and many other researchers suspect that the virus circulated in pigs and went unnoticed because of patchy surveillance. That said, Peiris, who has sampled pigs each month for several years in a Hong Kong slaughterhouse, doubts that the virus circulated near him. "If it happened in Hong Kong, we definitely would have picked it up," he says. Similarly, VLA's Brown and USDA's Vincent say it's unlikely that passive surveillance—which relies on farmers and vets reporting cases of sick pigs—in Europe and the United States would have missed the novel virus if it caused disease in commercial herds. "It's quite conceivable that the parent viruses were kicking around in pigs in Mexico and Central America, because there's no surveillance there," suggests Peiris.

Researchers widely agree that countries everywhere need to step up surveillance for the virus in pigs. There's also growing interest in making a novel H1N1 vaccine for swine, says Richt, who has been contacted by several companies. But right now, no government has allocated money for increased surveillance, and there's no market to prevent a disease that so far has affected just two herds.

Humans, of course, can spread the virus, and, in a bizarre twist, an increasing worry is that we will start routinely infecting pigs. Preliminary data from USDA suggest that pigs have limited immunity against the new strain, indicating that virus should spread easily among animals, as happened in Canada, Argentina, and the U.K. experiment. "The chances are high that this will eventually become pandemic in pigs," says Richt. And that, says Peiris, "opens another Pandora's box." If the novel H1N1 infects many pigs, it increases the likelihood of the virus mixing with an avian strain that humans have no immunity to, like the deadly H5N1. "I wouldn't put that high on the probability scale, but that is quite a scary scenario," says Peiris.

Brown counters that both the 1918 and 1968 human pandemic viruses went into pigs without later returning to wreak havoc in humans. "We only have n = 2, and that's not a lot to go on, but they didn't evolve into something that came back in a more dangerous form," says Brown. "The biggest threat to public health now is people and the virus evolving in them."

Then again, the University of Wisconsin's Olsen, who has studied a bevy of swine influenzas, has this advice about what these viruses might do: "Never say never. And never say always."

it seems that it was a series of mere lucky leaps that the human race made it all the way to the 80's without the benefit of most of the major industrial population on some form or legal drugs. To that end what Dr's Jekyll and Mr Hide have done to the world to sell something so they can have a large number in a bank account some where is going to be a bitch of a burden to carry into 2012.

I sure would like to hear what Darwin would make of us now.

btw in a natural environment the body produces a virus to fight something that is turning the body toxic in order to return it to balance which is our god given right to be in, all the time, without fear.