I really needed to see/hear something a little upbeat this morning.
Thanks for this.
No one imagine there was an alternative to mentally ill, foot flapping high-stepping sailors with syphilis.
Then sulfonamides and penicillin wiped it out!
My uncle died after a drunk night out as he caught pneumonia when his wife locked him out, (as she had promised him many times before)! Just a decade later, my mother was one of the first in the world to have her life saved by penicillin!
Smallpox? No doctors in the past 10 years have seen it.
As plagues appear we wipe them out.
The problem is that we have advanced to one global village. So an exotic wild creature brought to market in China essential brings new pathogens to all of us!
Now we know!
Since Ebola virus amazingly brilliant open source statistical and incredibly analytical software has been developed to help map, track and predict the virus spread and postulate the nature of new medicines to be built.
Previously, bat virus study was considered to be line stamp collecting or being able to boast a butterfly collection.
Now we realize that we must grasp a detailed understanding of the novel microbes in other species.
We are at the very beginning of automated rapid analysis of any new microbe that might threaten us.
Growth in tissue culture is 2-3 days and sequencing is another day, then it’s published openly on the web.
Immediately scientists in scores of different disciplines put it through their own software and we break down its secrets world wide in several weeks what would have taken a decade or more 20 years ago!
By looking at related sequences we can model likely intercepts to knock out these new agents!
Israel developed “The Iron Dome” to routinely track and eliminate thosecof thousands of incoming missiles that are otherwise going to hit homes, schools, nurseries and infrastructure. The rest make craters in open fields. So what!
We are at the verge, by convincing necessity, of the same advances in treating wild virus outbreaks.
I have no doubt we will succeed.
Just wait for the few weeks to go by and we will rejoice as at least one of the vaccine trials gives its first positive results with immune globulins in the volunteers blood
The joy will be Worldwide and its pretty certain.
Those spikes in the virus are essential for binding to our susceptible respiratory passage lining cells.
It’s not like influenza whe the antigens cycle in and out, rearranging every season.
With Coronavirus the coat structure is very stable. The single point mutations, (in ever second person spread), are unlikely to make ineffective, the expected vaccines to the virus capsid antigens.
In my mind, the disease has already been defeated, it just takes two years to implement the knowledge we have, as “gearing up” has not yet been accelerated.
We obviously need to accelerate the “gearing up” processes including shorting trials and production cycles! Tony Fauci has work to do here for sure!
But we now know the questions to ask.
Yes it’s painful, but we will be celebrating very shortly.
Asher
