"Fatally flawed....WHO press releases..."

The bigger the scope of government, the more useless they are, so I'm not too surprised that the WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION is incapable of getting anything right. So much for the New World Order!

March 15, 2006
The Straits Times-SINGAPORE

The WHO maintains vigorously that H5N1 evolves via random mutation - which cannot be predicted. But many (non-WHO) scientists no longer share this view. Instead, studies of publicly available data offer evidence that the virus is generating new gene variants through a process called recombination.

This is significant because, unlike random mutation, this process follows certain rules that may predict how the virus is going to evolve. This, in turn, implies more specific diagnostic kits and anti-viral therapies could be prepared beforehand in anticipation of such changes.

Indeed, deposits by Chinese scientists of H5N1 data into one of the public online banks of H5N1 data last week offered the clearest evidence to date for recombination, which the researchers noted clearly in the very title of their submission itself.

Studying recombination processes, some scientists predicted last October that a specific variant of a gene (S227N) would appear in the Middle East in the later part of 2005. Indeed, this was discovered in Turkey's first human case at the end of December. This genetic change enabled H5N1 to infect humans more efficiently. As a result, the world witnessed how rapidly people became infected all over Turkey with its clusters of human cases growing bigger and faster than they had ever done in Asia.

It is now predicted that another gene variant (G228S) is likely to appear in the H5N1 virus circulating in Europe which will also enable it to infect people more readily. Thus, from Europe two variants that can potentially infect humans much more easily than before may begin spreading to the rest of the world.

Meanwhile, the bug has expanded its reach not just in geographic terms. It was also reported last week that it is now known to be able to infect many other mammals too, including cats, tigers, rats, mice, swine, civets and stone martens, a weasel-like creature. Taken together - the expanded geographical and host range - there will be more opportunity for recombinations to generate new gene variants of the bug.

Perhaps that is why Dr David Nabarro, head of the WHO Crisis Management Team, said recently that the bug was only 'two mutations' away from a form that can cause a pandemic.

But monitoring these changes requires a robust and current database so that scientists can predict emerging changes to the bug and identify targets for drug development and the updating of H5N1 diagnostic tests.

Current public databases are just incomplete: They do not carry data from the latest samples while some of samples they do carry are just partial ones. So it is high time the WHO made its H5N1 data more widely available.

http://www.asiaone.com/st/st_20060315_377966.html

The only problem I have with recombination, as I understand it, is that it appears that, according to 'recombinatin theory' ,  mutations are predictable.  This reeks of determinism.  Current thinking in science is that, while individual processes do proceed according to deterministic laws, the behavior of complex systems (which include all biological forms) is dynamic and, therefor, not predictable.

Snicklefritz wrote: The only problem I have with recombination, as I understand it, is that it appears that, according to 'recombinatin theory' ,  mutations are predictable.  This reeks of determinism.  Current thinking in science is that, while individual processes do proceed according to deterministic laws, the behavior of complex systems (which include all biological forms) is dynamic and, therefor, not predictable.

Low-dimensional Chaos in Biological Systems

James E. Skinner
Totts Gap Medical Research Laboratories, Bangor, PA 18013, and Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX 77030.

Correspondence to: Totts Gap Medical Research Laboratories, RR1 Box 1120-G, Bangor, PA 18013 (e-mail: 76520.557@compuserve.com).


"During the past five years general rules have been developed for the application of chaos theory to biology and medicine, which enable investigators to avoid the pitfalls that invalidated and trivialized many earlier results. The importance of biological chaos is that the variables governing the spatial and temporal geometries of the system may be few in number, fractional in dimension, and thus enable low-energy control with complex deterministic consequences.

The complexity of control inherent in chaotic systems may be important in the dynamics of gene expression and translation. Extending these ideas may lead to completely novel ways to modulate protein production by introducing simple pulses at critical times or places."

http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v12/n6/abs/nbt0694-596.html;jsessionid=8B42A22011204A61A980F8D851BD713C