All Posts Tagged With: "DNA"

Linda comment:  To investigate whether Borrelia burgdorferi sensu lato (s.l.) infection is associated with mortality in mountain hares, tissues and ticks collected from hares were investigated for infection with the spirochete. mountain  hare to some degree functions as a transmission host for B. burgdorferi s.s. and Borrelia sp. SV1.

Excerpt:

Our results indicate that disseminated Borrelia infection in 
hares rarely occurs and, presumably, does not play a central role in the 
suspected population decline. The results also suggest that the mountain 
hare to some degree functions as a transmission host for B. burgdorferi 
s.s. and Borrelia sp. SV1.

I believe over 90% of all prostate cancer does not need surgery or radiation. Now you have another expert agreeing but he puts the number at 80% did not need surgery.

Garry F. Gordon MD,DO,MD(H)
President, Gordon Research Institute
www.gordonresearch.comSubject: Holistic urology

Link: www.integrativeurology.org

Excerpt:

Dr Aaron Katz is Director of Holisitic Urology at Columbia University Medical Center in NY. The impact of Oximation on DNA transcription is becoming more evident. Researchers at Stanford,MD Anderson,Johns Hopkins,and Columbia looking at prostate cancer seem to be ahead of other researchers looking at cancer. The upshot is that epidemiologically, what we see work for prostate cancer also works for breast cancer. This article is from the Winter edition of Holistic Primary Care.

There are approximately 200,000 new cases of prostate cancer diagnosed each year. The vast majority are caught at early stages— thanks to concerted screening efforts—and most can be controlled through a comprehensive multimodal holistic approach aimed at reducing inflammation, a key driver of the disease.

Mental illness in our young is epidemic. Does anyone believe that administering another toxic substance to an obviously already very toxic brain is the best approach long-term?

With our health care “system” we just hang a label on the disturbed youngster and start trying all the chemical straight jacket medications to see which is tolerated, in spite of frightening statistics about adverse effects including violent behavior that often appears. 
Everyone shows known chemicals and heavy metals that today when tested, aswww.ewg.org paid for on the “Ten Americans’ study of ten babies chosen at random across the USA and widely reported on the internet. It was also discussed in depth on CNN special on Toxic America that you can still watch any day on mywww.gordonresearch.com website.

Garry F. Gordon MD,DO,MD(H)
President, Gordon Research Institute
www.gordonresearch.com

Link: http://www.naturalnews.com/031198_psychiatry_teens.html#ixzz1CxTV2z9J

Excerpt:

NaturalNews) It’s been nearly a month since the nation’s attention was focused on Tucson, where five were killed and 13 injured , including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, several other shootings missed the mainstream news. Violence seems to be erupting among youths everywhere, from Los Angeles(1) to Omaha(2) to Brooklyn(3) – indicating something is seriously going wrong in the minds of young persons in this country.

Why Young Brains Are Sick
The list of assailing particles on children is long, and starts with chemical exposure in the womb. In July, 2005, the Environmental Working Group released a hallmark study using cord blood to assess the chemical exposure of neonates in-utero. The placenta has long been thought to shield the developing baby from pollutants in the environment. The study’s alarming results dispelled this as a wishful myth. Of the 287 chemicals identified in the umbilical cord blood of 10 infants, 180 were known carcinogens, 217 were toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 208 have been associated with birth defects or abnormal development in animal tests. The study concluded that, “the dangers of pre- or post-natal exposure to this complex mixture of carcinogens, developmental toxins and neurotoxins have never been studied.”(4)

Within hours of emerging from the womb, a newborn is given a dollop of antibiotics in the eyes, injected with the hepatitis b vaccine, with known neurotoxic properties,(5)and jabbed with a vitamin K shot, which contains 9 mg of benzyl alcohol. In 1992, Golding published concerns that vitamin K injections could be associated with a doubled risk of malignant disease in children, particularly leukemia. While there have been considerable doubts about whether the association is coincidental or causal, the controversy has never been completely resolved.(6)

Starting around the 60th day of life, infants with still immature immune systems are subjected to a battery of vaccines: DTaP, HiB, polio, Prevnar, and a squirt of oral rotavirus vaccine, all generally given at the same time. The onslaught of these shots, including two additional injections of hepatitis b vaccine, repeats twice, every 60 days. This deposits approximately 66 different viral or bacterial antigens and measurable amounts of a dozen different chemicals into a six month old infant.

By the time a child is five years old, a little 40 pound human will receive up to 35 injections, containing at least 110 different weakened pathogens (or pathogen particles), and an assortment of 59 different chemicals. If all approved shots are administered, the little tot will also be injected with stray viral DNA, four types of animal cells, cells from aborted fetal tissue and a bit of human albumin (a foreign protein.) By the way, all of these substances are listed on package inserts for each vaccine.

Excerpt:

Nature.com

It’s time for animals – including humans – to admit that the bacteria, viruses and other microbes have won. Our bodies are home to many times more bacterial cells than animal cells and countless trillions of viruses. Ancient retroviruses make up a good size chunk of our genome. Now, scientists have discovered that most any virus can set up shop in an animal’s genomes and lay dormant for millions of years.

A scan of 44 mammal genomes, plus those of several mosquito and tick vectors and two birds that could serve as reservoirs, has uncovered DNA sequences that can be traced to 10 different families of viruses, including some related to viruses that cause hepatitis B, Ebola, rabies and dengue. Most of the viral sequences are riddled with enough mutations to be considered junk, but some appear to encoding working genes co-opted by their host. The work is published online today in the journal PLoS Genetics.

It’s not obvious how all these viruses got into animal genomes. The researchers, Aris Katzourakis at the University of Oxford, UK, and Robert Gifford at Rockefeller University in New York, searched specifically for viruses that aren’t retroviruses, which are obligated to copy their DNA into hosts. Many but not all of the viruses infect their hosts persistently or replicate inside of the nucleus, however, offering ample opportunity to take up residence in the genomes of germ cells.

The work is just a first look at all the non-retroviruses in the animal genome, but Katzourakis and Gifford turned up a few interesting findings. For instance, their scan identified sequences from filoviruses, the family Ebola belongs to, in the genomes of bats, tarsiers, several rodents, opossums and even wallabies. This hints that filoviruses have a much wider host range than the primate and bat species which these viruses are known to infect.

The paper also hints at unknown ancient transmissions of viruses between hosts. The bottlenose dolphin genome, it turns out, is home to sequences of a kind of parvovirus similar to one found in birds, suggesting that the viruses may have jumped between mammals and birds in the past.

Most of these sequences are junk, so filled with mutations that they can’t make working proteins. But some of the viral sequences might do something inside their hosts. One example is a bornavirus gene called EBLN-1 that took up residence in ancient primate genomes some 50 million years ago and survives intact in many modern primates, including humans. A similar protein latches onto RNA in bornaviruses, so it might do the same in primates as part of a viral defence mechanism, Gifford speculates.

Like the ancient retroviruses locked inside animal genomes, these viruses offer a window into infections that occurred millions of years ago.

“People who are looking at the ecology of those diseases, they very much work in recent time and they have no assumptions that it’s an old system that might have evolved over billions of years,” says Gifford. “The data that we’re finding is really contradicting that and providing the first evidence that these are really old relationships between hosts and viruses, and I think it’s really critical to how we underestand them to get that context right.”

 

Comments

This is a key paper with major implications. Hundreds of viruses appear to have infiltrated the human genome. The important consequence of this is that the proteins
of today’s viruses resemble our own. Numerous BLASTs of translated viral DNA vs.the human proteome are shown at this site named Pandora’s
box for obvious reasons. Small contigous amino acid stretches of 5 or more amino acids within human proteins exactly match those in the current virome (Vatches = viral matches).
Upon infection these viral proteins are likely to seed havoc within the host’s protein networks, acting as dummy ligands, decoy receptors or by interactome interference. This has major implications for understanding how viruses contribute to disease and several examples are shown.For example it
would appear that such viral insertions,repeated over evolutionary time, are
responsible for the creation of gene families. HSV-1 and HSV-2 are homologous to many kinases,
and the cytomegalovirus to many chemokine receptors.

The viruses implicated as risk factors in Alzheimer’s disease, schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease all express proteins that are homologous to hundreds
of susceptibity gene products in these diseases.This suggests that genes and risk factors act together, and that each may be a risk factor precisely because of such matches. In addition, given such homology at both the DNA and protein level, it is likely that some gene association studies, using blood samples, have been
indexing infection as well as identifying key susceptibility genes.

Link: http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&id=21079313&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks

Excerpt:

Bacillary angiomatosis is a recently described infectious disease that
usually affects immunosupressed hosts with a previous history of contact
with cats. We report a rare case of bacillary angiomatosis in an
immunocompetent 59-year-old woman with no history of previous exposure to
cats, and atypical clinical features (fever and subcutaneous nodules with
ulceration on the left ankle).
Histopathology of the lesion showed extensive ulceration and reactive
tumor-like vascular proliferation of the blood vessels with swollen
endothelial cells and an inflammatory infiltrate including neutrophils and
lymphocytes in the dermis and subcutis. Staining with the Warthin-Starry
method demonstrated the presence of clustered bacilli located in the
extracellular matrix adjacent to the proliferating endothelial cells.
Diagnosis was confirmed with the detection of Bartonella spp. DNA in the
affected skin and in bone marrow using polymerase chain reaction.

Excerpt:

Home Labs on the Rise for the Fun of Science
Wednesday, December 15, 2010

By PETER WAYNER, The New York Times

One day Kathy Ceceri noticed a tick on her arm and started to worry that it was the kind that carried Lyme disease. So she went to her home lab, put the tiny arachnid under her microscope, which is connected to her computer through a U.S.B. cable, and studied the image.

“It was,” she said. “Then of course I Googled what to do when you’ve been bitten by a deer tick.”

Ms. Ceceri’s microscope, a Digital Blue QX5, is one of several pieces of scientific equipment that make up her home lab, which she has set up on her dining room table in Schuylerville, N.Y. Home labs like hers are becoming more feasible as the scientific devices that stock them become more computerized, cheaper and easier to use. 

Ms. Ceceri has several microscopes and a telescope. Other home laboratories have tools like infrared thermometers, which can be used in the kitchen, and kits to analyze DNA at home.

Many of these tools work closely with home computers and come with software that enhances their power. Others mix low-cost computers into the hardware to deliver more precise control.

Some people who set up home laboratories are serious hobbyists in search of better tools; others are home-schooling parents equipping their children; and others are just curious.

 Ms. Ceceri, a writer, seems to fall into all three camps because she teaches her sons Anthony, 15, and John, 18, at home, and then she writes about some of their discoveries for a number of blogs like geekdad.com, geekmom.com and homebiology.blogspot.com.

 “This year we’re doing integrated science,” she said of her home science curriculum. “Anything we were looking at, we put under the microscope.”

 She explained that she and her children raised triops, tiny crustaceans, and examined the eggs under the microscope. “We took a really nice video of the paramecium and nematodes swimming around just holding a digital camera up to a microscope,” she said.

 Brian Haddock, a software developer from south of Fort Worth, who also writes about science topics on his blog, Reeko’s Mad Scientist Lab, particularly enjoys using a microscope with a computer.

 “Those U.S.B. microscopes are pretty cool,” he said. “They don’t magnify as much as one of those optical scopes would, but you can look at it on your computer screen. It’s got a big picture on your screen that’s easier to see instead of those little tiny images you squint at.”

 “Personally, I like the Carson zPix,” he said.

 The growth in home labs is helped by manufacturers who are building tools at affordable prices.

 ThinkGeek.com, an online store that sells items for home laboratories, among other things, offers three models of microscopes at various prices, said Scott Smith, a co-founder of the site.

Prices begin at $99, with models that offer 20x to 200x digital enlargements of whatever is being examined. The store’s high-end model costs $349, and it delivers what Mr. Smith characterized as sharper, better quality images for both hobbyists and businesses like jewelry shops.

Adding a computer interface to a telescope makes it possible to collect more detail than might appear to the eye looking through the optics. The computer can collect multiple images over time and combine the results, enhancing the appearance of the faintest items.

 “It isn’t just about capturing video or still images. It actually allows you to stack a whole bunch of still images to get those really beautiful, spectacular pictures of the night sky,” explained Timothy Burns, the director of marketing at Edmund Scientific, the scientific supplier, which stocks a wide range of telescopes for the casual and professional scientist.

Linda’s comments:  SAY TO to these scanners, they are dangerous.  Men need to think about prostate cancers.  Go for the pat down…

Link: http://www.blaylockreport.com/

Excerpt:

Dr. Blaylock: Body Scanners More Dangerous Than Feds Admit
Wednesday, November 24, 2010 9:58 AM
By Dr. Russell Blaylock
 
Dr. Russell Blaylock is a nationally recognized board-certified neurosurgeon, health practitioner, author, lecturer, and editor of The Blaylock Wellness Report. 
 
The growing outrage over the Transportation Security Administrations new policy of backscatter scanning of airline passengers and enhanced pat-downs brings to mind these wise words from President Ronald Reagan: The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: Im from the government and Im here to help you. 

So, what is all the concern really about – will these radiation scanners increase your risk of cancer or other diseases? A group of scientists and professors from the University of California at San Francisco voiced their concern to Obama’s science and technology adviser John Holdren in a well-stated letter back in April. 
The group included experts in radiation biology, biophysics, and imaging, who expressed serious concerns about the dangerously high dose of radiation to the skin. 

Radiation increases cancer risk by damaging the DNA and various components within the cells. Much of the damage is caused by high concentrations of free radicals generated by the radiation. Most scientists think that the most damaging radiation types are those that have high penetration, such as gamma-rays, but in fact, some of the most damaging radiation barely penetrates the skin. 

One of the main concerns is that most of the energy from the airport scanners is concentrated on the surface of the skin and a few millimeters into the skin. Some very radiation-sensitive tissues are close to the skin – such as the testes, eyes, and circulating blood cells in the skin. 

This is why defenders using such analogies as the dose being 1,000-times less than a chest X-ray and far less than what passengers are exposed to in-flight are deceptive. Radiation damage depends on the volume of tissue exposed. Chest X-rays and gamma-radiation from outer space is diffused over the entire body so that the dose to the skin is extremely small. Of note, outer space radiation does increase cancer rates in passengers, pilots, and flight attendants. 

Link: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1007407 

Excerpt:

Parapoxviruses are a genus of the double-stranded DNA family of poxviruses that infect ruminants, and zoonotic transmission to humans often results from occupational exposures. Parapoxvirus infection in humans begins with an incubation period of 3 to 7 days, followed by the development of one or more erythematous maculopapular lesions that evolve over the course of several weeks into nodules. In 2009, parapoxvirus infection was diagnosed in two deer hunters in the eastern United States after the hunters had field-dressed white-tailed deer. We describe the clinical and pathological features of these infections and the phylogenetic relationship of a unique strain of parapoxvirus to other parapoxviruses. Deer populations continue to increase, leading to the possibility that there will be more deer-associated parapoxvirus infections.

Full article: This article may be reprinted free of charge provided 1) that there is clear attribution to the Orthomolecular Medicine News Service, and 2) that both the OMNS free subscription link http://orthomolecular.org/subscribe.html and also the OMNS archive link http://orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/index.shtml are included.

Excerpt:

(OMNS October 12, 2010) In massive doses, vitamin C (ascorbic acid) stops a cold within hours, stops influenza in a day or two, and stops viral pneumonia (pain, fever, cough) in two or three days. (1) It is a highly effective antihistamine, antiviral and antitoxin. It reduces inflammation and lowers fever. Administered intravenously, ascorbate kills cancer cells without harming healthy tissue. Many people therefore wonder, in the face of statements like these, why the medical professions have not embraced vitamin C therapy with open and grateful arms.

Probably the main roadblock to widespread examination and utilization of this all-too-simple technology is the equally widespread belief that there must be unknown dangers to tens of thousands of milligrams of ascorbic acid. Yet, since the time megascorbate therapy was introduced in the late 1940’s by Fred R. Klenner, M.D. (2), there has been an especially safe, and extremely effective track record to follow.

Still, for some, questions remain. Here is a sample of what readers have asked OMNS about vitamin C:

Is 2,000 mg/day of vitamin C a megadose? 
No. Decades ago, Linus Pauling and Irwin Stone showed that most animals make at least that much (or more) per human body weight per day. (3,4)

Then why has the government set the “Safe Upper Limit for vitamin C at 2,000 mg/day? 
Perhaps the reason is ignorance. According to nationwide data compiled by the American Association of Poison Control Centers, vitamin C (and the use of any other dietary supplement) does not kill anyone. (5)

Does vitamin C damage DNA? 
No. If vitamin C harmed DNA, why do most animals make (not eat, but make) between 2,000 and 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C per human equivalent body weight per day? Evolution would never so favor anything that harms vital genetic material. White blood cells and male reproductive fluids contain unusually high quantities of ascorbate. Living, reproducing systems love vitamin C.

Full article: http://eutils.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/eutils/elink.fcgi?dbfrom=pubmed&id=20180313&retmode=ref&cmd=prlinks

Excerpt:

Ticks harbor numerous bacterial, protozoal, and viral pathogens
that can cause serious infections in humans and domestic animals.
Active surveillance of the tick vector can provide insight into
the frequency and distribution of important pathogens in the
environment. Nucleic-acid based detection of tick-borne
bacterial, protozoan, and viral pathogens requires the extraction
of both DNA and RNA (total nucleic acids) from ticks. Traditional
methods for nucleic acid extraction are limited to extraction of
either DNA or the RNA from a sample.
Here we present a simple bead-beating based protocol for
extraction of DNA and RNA from a single tick and show detection
of Borrelia burgdorferi and Powassan virus from individual,
infected Ixodes scapularis ticks. We determined expected yields
for total nucleic acids by this protocol for a variety of adult
tick species. The method is applicable to a variety of arthropod
vectors, including fleas and mosquitoes, and was partially
automated on a liquid handling robot.