Viruses are a completely unique creation of Nature. This is a bacterium-a complex organism with a shell, nucleus, cytoplasm! I always come up with an analogy with a fortress: powerful walls (only the spleen can destroy a polysaccharide capsule of pneumococcus or meningococcus!), its own power plant – mitochondria, a factory for the production of spare parts – ribosomes, headquarters – the nucleus. And a virus is something ephemeral: a chain of gene material-DNA or RNA-and a protein film that covers it. And that’s it! They cannot exist on their own, they are mandatory intracellular parasites: they get inside the cell and use its structures. Their most important role is precisely in the formation of the transmission of gene mutations. Imagine a string of DNA or RNA rolled into a Rubik’s cube. Easily and lightning-fast, the virus mixes gene particles, its own and others’! Question: are they even alive?! Well, Yes, they have genetic material, are able to create similar viruses and evolve by natural selection. Since they have some, but not all, of the properties of life, viruses are described as”organisms on the edge of life.” If you add “human, our life”, the phrase takes on an ominous connotation. And I’ll explain what I mean.
If there are many antimicrobial drugs-antibiotics for every taste (another thing is that they lose their properties), then we have very, very few real antiviral drugs. They are extremely difficult to create against an almost ephemeral, but really deadly enemy. A real battle with the shadow, which constantly changes its size, shape and properties! Continuing the comparison of a microbe with a fortress, you can liken antibiotics to battering rams that break gates, stone-throwing machines that destroy walls, and flamethrowers that burn out the interior space. And the virus? Something like the shadow of hamlet’s father, a Ghost hovering in the Royal chambers. Take the immunodeficiency virus. For many decades, they have not been able to find a vaccine and create a completely effective drug (although there are undoubtedly some successes in this direction).
A paradoxical situation: the world is armed to the teeth with atomic weapons, lasers, sound and climate weapons are being developed, and we are practically defenseless against the main enemy! We are all afraid of nuclear war, evil aliens, asteroids, uprisings and man-made disasters. And you should be afraid of pigs, ducks, bats, monkeys, camels and mice! There will be no nuclear war (bad NEMA!), the aliens will not find us, and the asteroid will fly by. But mutations of those viruses that live in pigs, monkeys, bats, birds and many other animals, which make it possible for these viruses to be transmitted from animals to humans, can pose a global threat to humanity. So it was with the “Spanish flu”, swine flu, AIDS, Ebola, coronaviruses in 2002 and 2014.
Actually, we have known coronaviruses for a long time. Among people, several varieties of it are common. Each of us once had a coronavirus. In winter and autumn, it causes about 1/3 of acute respiratory infections in the Northern hemisphere. The coronavirus family is present in both humans and animals (bats, cats, camels, birds, etc.). In humans, until 2019, there were four known types of them: HCoV-229E, HCoV-NL63, HCoV-OC43, HCoV-HKU1. Widespread” human ” coronaviruses are transmitted mainly in autumn and winter. For example, the survey in Norway 59 thousand. in adolescents under 16 years of age with acute respiratory infections, it was shown that coronavirus in the cold season causes pneumonia, requiring hospitalization in 1.5 children per 1000 population per year. Immunity is unstable, repeated infections are typical. Coronavirus is a common cause of gastroenteritis, and there is a causal relationship with some neurological diseases and Kawasaki disease.
Dossier on the virus. Fight with a shadow that constantly changes its size, shape and properties
Mutations of viruses transmitted from animals to humans can be a serious threat to humanity.
Dossier on the virus. Fight with a shadow that constantly changes its size, shape and properties
But these are” our”, human, coronaviruses. In the twenty-first century, bats have already given us their mutated coronaviruses three times. Genetically, they are very similar to our human ones. Similar, but not identical. Therefore, in the human environment, they behave very aggressively.
In 2002, an outbreak of SARS began in the same China. It quickly spread to almost 30 countries with a fairly high mortality rate of 10 %. SARS-Co, as the coronavirus was then called (from the English abbreviation “severe acute respiratory failure”). Over the years, 8098 people have been affected and 774 have died. At the same time, local outbreaks were observed in collectives and in hotel residents. In Hong Kong, then in the hotel “Metropol” fell ill about 300 people… The source was bats and Viviers – cute animals of the cat family. The Chinese eat them too! For a long time they tried to make a vaccine, tried to identify effective antiviral drugs and spent $100 billion on it. Didn’t get far, the epidemic has gradually exhausted itself and faded away, but it was a serious Wake-up call: the coronavirus has shown what can happen when the virus inherent in animals acquires the ability to be transmitted from person to person. By the way, those developments of pharmacologists can be useful in the prevention and treatment of today’s epidemic.
In 2012, another epidemic of coronavirus SARS broke out in Saudi Arabia and adjacent countries. The source is one-humped DROMEDARY camels and the same bats. At first, the owners and drivers of camels were sick, then the infection began to spread. Imported cases were reported in 25 countries with a high average mortality rate of 35 %! The dead were mostly Saudis, the transmission of the middle East coronavirus from person to person was not really proven.
And here is COVID-19. There is still a debate: is this virus artificially modeled? After all, it is obvious that all these tectonic changes in the world economy and politics are clearly inadequate to the existing threat. So “if there is no enemy, then it must be invented”? Personally, I do not believe in the artificial origin of this virus. We see that he is 75% similar to his predecessors, figuratively speaking, we know his mother and father, grandmother and grandfather. As a biological weapon, it clearly falls short with its low, fortunately, mortality rate; as a pretext for the redistribution of the world-also too difficult, because the fact that this or that epidemic is about to descend, it was obvious, even I wrote about it in my previous books.
Dossier on the virus. Fight with a shadow that constantly changes its size, shape and properties
Zoonotic infections in the human environment behave very aggressively.
Dossier on the virus. Fight with a shadow that constantly changes its size, shape and properties
Anyway, the new coronavirus came from the Chinese city of Wuhan. Either from the local market, where “gourmets” tasted a certain anteater, which was previously infected from “chrysanthemum” bats, or, as many still believe, as a result of a leak from a large bacteriological laboratory located there. Chinese ophthalmologist Dr. Li in late November was the first to draw attention to patients with severe shortness of breath and high fever. He sounded the alarm, drew the attention of the authorities to a new and unknown disease. And soon he himself died from it – the first doctor who died from the first “shots” in this war of the virus and man. The Chinese were a little late with the introduction of quarantine measures: by their beginning, 5 million people had left Wuhan to meet the Chinese New year with relatives and friends. And soon it broke out all over the world. Planes spread the infection like flies, cruise ships proved to be perfect incubators of infection… The traditional new year’s sale in Milan, which attracted thousands of Chinese, turned into a nightmare for Italians, half a million residents of Chinatowns returned to the United States in February from winter holidays. Russia has held out longer than others, but since the end of March, we have seen a rapid increase in the incidence of diseases, fortunately, with a minimum mortality rate compared to other countries. As a result, millions are infected worldwide and hundreds of thousands of deaths. The horror, the horror?! Yes, of course. Only here everything is not so linear simple…