Hepatitis C
Vapor Virus?  Grass Roots Seeded by Drugmaker
By Robert O'Harrow Jr. Washington Post Tuesday, September 12, 2000; Page A01 Showing all the signs of a thriving grass-roots movement, a host of new health-care groups are drawing attention to the perils of a contagious, sometimes lethal virus called hepatitis C. But contrary to appearances, these coalitions are not spontaneous gatherings of concerned citizens. They are instead a key part of a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign funded by Schering-Plough Corp. to sell the primary therapy for hepatitis C, Rebetron, which costs $18,000 a year Slow Viruses: The Original Sin Against the Laws of Virology By Peter H. Duesberg and Bryan J. Ellison from INVENTING THE AIDS VIRUS, Regnery, 1996 Most virus hunters prefer chasing real, if arguably harmless, viruses as their deadly enemies. But Gajdusek's "unconventional" viruses - the ones neither he nor anyone else have ever found - have been making a comeback in recent years. Given the abundance of research dollars being poured into biomedical science by the NIH and other agencies, opportunistic virus hunters have been finding creative ways to cash in. One increasingly successful method utilizes modern biotechnology to isolate viruses that may not even exist. For their comments on hepatitis C: Phantom Viruses and Big Bucks Latent Viruses and Mutated Oncogenes: No Evidence for Pathogenicity Peter H. Duesberg and Jody R. Schwartz Progress in Nucleic Acid Research and Molecular Biology 43:135-204, 1992 The scientific community has been virtually unanimous in admiring its recent triumphs in biotechnology - above all, the detection and amplification of minute amounts of materials into workable and marketable products. However, in clinical diagnostic applications, the new detection methods have become a mixed blessing, which benefits medical scientists but not necessarily their clients. Since rare signals have become just as detectable as abundant ones, many latent viruses have been detected and have been assumed to be just as pathogenic as active prototypes (1-3). Likewise, cellular mutations have become detectable that do not, or just barely, affect the function and activity of genes. Yet when the affected genes are structurally related to retroviral oncogenes, they are assumed to be just as oncogenic as highly active retroviral oncogenes (1, 4-8). However, the evidence for these hypotheses is only circumstantial-based on structural similarities to classical pathogenic viruses and viral oncogenes. Thus, without direct proof, these hypotheses may open the doors to psychologically harmful prognoses and clinically harmful prevention programs, termed "molecular genetics at the bedside" by Bishop (9) "Circumstantial evidence is a very tricky thing," answered Holmes, thoughtfully. "It may seem to point very straight to one thing, but if you shift your point of view a little, you may find it pointing in an equally uncompromising manner to something entirely different.... There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact...."For their comments on hepatitis C go here
Hepatitis C field the land of "I don't know".
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