By Edward B. Rackley

The novelty of the New Year is only now dawning on me. Last year was exceptional; amazing and sad in equal measure, like the dynamics of any satisfying novel or credible cosmology. This year started with an unexpected blast in the face: a week of wilderness survival training in southern Florida.

I had expected to be tossed naked into a Florida swamp and told to ‘survive’ (I admit the idea still excites me), but the course proved long on lecture and short on real-time scenarios. This mix has its merits. Not of the ‘me alone against nature’ school, the Tracker School approach emphasizes the acquisition of primitive/ancestral skills over grin-and-bear-it privation and raw endurance. Its aims are far-reaching and total, merging the physical and spiritual. Provided one is ripe for conversion, the experience can be genuinely transformative. On the pragmatic level, its lessons will enable you to enter Nature’s green veil without a knife, food, water or clothing and still ‘live lavishly’, or so the instructors like to repeat.

There is no obvious reason to embark on a primitive survival course, unless you’re an apocalyptarian, a rabid Luddite or a very gung-ho Navy Seal. But there we were, a room full of seemingly normal people, eager with curiosity and our love of dirt. Both elements proved essential as the week wore on. Highlights of the course included fire by friction, emergency shelter, track identification, camouflage and stalking, trapping, skinning and tanning, edible plants, flint knapping, cordage, and safe water. We learned all of this and more, but the skills themselves mean nothing until you get out in the wilderness and practice–‘dirt time’, they call it.

Uncomfortably numb

Our instructors were often blunt but never repetitive. I heard this sentence only once, and it stuck: ‘By the end of this course, you will know how to make or do anything you see in a museum.’ I looked up from carving a friction fire tool, the bow-drill. Other students also laid down their handiwork. We stared for a moment of mental digestion, then resumed our cutting and scraping. Were these skills so lost as to require preservation in natural history museums? Those dusty diaramas of Stone Age domesticity are all that’s left of the knowledge that kept our species alive for hundreds of thousands of years?

Humanity has been around a while, even our Creationist friends would agree. Whether this makes us ancients or moderns–closer or further from history’s point of departure—we’ll let the philosophers decide. Besides this continuity in time, and a prehensile thumb, we share almost nothing with our distant ancestors. We would definitely not know how to survive in their world, nor they in the world we have built for ourselves. In fact, so much has been learned and lost in the passage from Cro-Magnon to Joe Sixpack that we need museums to house it all. The fact that our minds are now crammed with information needed to navigate our world—none of it serving the simple purpose of survival in the wild, the primary human activity for countless millennia—hit me in the head like a locomotive. If nature is a womb, we are test tube babies: functional and yet entirely oblivious of our true origins.

It took a full week of rumination over this breach of knowledge for the various pieces to come together. The school’s founder, Tom Brown Jr., spelled it out in his own way on the final morning of the course. ‘How can you expect someone confined to a hospital bed, for a full year, pumped with three meals a day, to walk out the door and be able to run, jump or do anything physical?’ Given the extreme state of our separation from nature today, who could possibly know where to start the process of reanimating the personal, immediate relation to nature enjoyed by humans of all previous eras.

Far greater than the sum of the survival skills we’d learned during the course, Tom continued, the quintessence of ‘living lavishly’ in the wild could not be taught. Wild animals fashion no tools and most lack prehensile thumbs, yet they manage to survive, and flourish using only this one skill. Tom refers to it simply, and deceptively, as ‘awareness’.  Sound flaky? Diss not, gentle reader.

When most of us enter the wilderness today, we do so for leisure, rarely survival. Such is our prerogative, our luxury, and our choice: we are after all Lords of the Food Chain. We bring in our own food, water, and gadgets to make our nature experience as much like home as possible. We treat the excursion as if we were scuba divers or astronauts. Inserted into an alien, potentially hostile medium, our comfort and security depend on the conveniences we import. Shelter, food, water, heat: without these we are naked, vulnerable, shit out of luck. As a result, our forays beyond domesticity are typically brief and highly choreographed: we stick to prescribed trails; we don’t touch the animals. The would-be naturalists and conservationists among us like the concept of ‘leave no trace’ because it reflects how we were raised, in pristine domesticity.

The story is well known. From our origins as lowly, abundantly hairy yet edible items on nature’s menu, we have come to dominate the planet’s only inherent hierarchy, the Food Chain. Among the spoils of this conquest, we are granted liberation from the immediate risks and rewards of survival. In its stead, we bask in the Holy Trinity of Comfort, Safety and Security. Doubtless much is gained in this progression; what is lost is less clear. To illustrate my point, indulge me this simple exercise.

Pull out your wallet or purse and look at the cards and bills inside. Like yours, the contents of my wallet allow me many privileges. Among them, I am allowed entry to supermarkets where I wander the aisles, sway to the Muzak, ask the assistant for directions to gluten-free bread and unpitted olives, collect various comfort foods and items of irrevocable necessity (like non-frizzy dog shampoo). Occasionally option paralysis overwhelms me, I abort mission and curse the supermarket experience.

But usually my basic needs are immediately, magically satisfied, with a minimum of conscious effort. There is no stealth, no guile, no creativity involved (although if we drove our shopping carts like bumper cars things might get more interesting). Those parts of my brain get their exercise while I’m perched here on my hindquarters, gazing at this screen and poking intermittently at the keyboard. This sequence of perching, staring and poking ultimately results in the plastic cards and paper money that I find in my wallet. These baubles and trinkets in turn allow me a trip to the supermarket. On off days, when I use my body at all, it is to stand up, walk a few steps, open the fridge and ingest whatever consumables I find there.

All these actions I can perform on autopilot, a blissful state of full-blown mind/body dualism. So long Homo Faber. Meet Zombie Man, connoisseur of post-industrial carrion, the Twilight Consumer.

As long as I fill my wallet at regular intervals, I can perform the minimal necessary actions to secure shelter, fire, water, and food. Nature’s immediacy recedes further and further from my life until it becomes pure idea. For the rest of nature’s creatures, of course, reality is nothing like a vending machine. There is no currency to exchange, no symbolic transactions, no passive remove. Awareness is their sole survival mechanism.

Farewell, Homo Faber

In a 2003 Sports Illustrated article on the Tracker School, Tom reflected on the place of his teachings in today’s society: ‘People are aliens to their own planet. I’m just trying to reintroduce people to their own natural landscape.’ This is certainly true of me, a creature of convenience, but it is not universally true. We co-exist on the planet with traditional peoples whose circumstances are not unlike the Stone Age diaramas in our museums. Their relationship to nature remains immediate, the awareness informing their survival skills is still vital. Clothing, matches and metal tools are now available to many of these peoples, but how these objects are made or where they originate not widely known. Many of the traditional peoples I work with in rural Africa use matches but do not, for instance, know what to make of a mirror or a lighter, nor do they recognize themselves in a photo. They’ll turn it over in their hands like an alien artifact, which it is. 

In Luzubi, a rural Congolese village where I spent two years, I once placed an ice cube in an elderly neighbor’s palm. Nzolene retracted her hand immediately, exclaiming tiya! (fire). The ice fell in the dirt as she turned to search my eyes and read my intent. I realized she thought I had tried to burn her. Suddenly she laughed, clearly delighted to have encountered something utterly alien.

In my two years in Luzubi, I learned a lot from Nzolene. Our friendship began rather mysteriously. The day I arrived in the village, she approached my the door of my mud hut, bowing low and avoiding eye contact. Silently she placed a cola nut at the threshold, turned and left. Locals later told me her husband, also named Edouard, had fallen from a palm tree while tapping wine and died. Nzolene believed I was his reincarnation, and the cola nut was a traditional gift to welcome me home.

When the time came to slaughter my first chicken, Nzolene’s son Masaba was climbing the coconut tree in front of my hut. He climbed down to watch me chase the chicken around the yard in vain, squawking and flapping for its life. When I stopped to catch my breath and reconsider my strategy, he nimbly snatched it up. I had planned on decapitation, but before I could reach for my machete, Masaba had wrung its neck, killing it instantly. I stared as he handed me the limp bird, then stepped back to watch me work.

Standing there holding a lifeless chicken, I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I gut it then de-feather it, or the other way round? I put down the machete and, cradling the bird with my left arm, grabbed some feathers with my free hand. I pulled hard—nothing. I tightened my grip and yanked harder, still nothing. A pot of steaming water appeared, brought by other boys who’d gathered to watch. Masaba laughed, taking the bird from me and plunging it into the pot. The feathers came out like pins from a cushion.

When I wasn’t working, Masaba and I would head into the forest and catch things—mostly birds, fish, and insects. Striding along a forest trail, Masaba could swat a grasshopper in the weeds, set it on his fishhook and have a line in the water in a single seamless motion that announced the joys of boyhood. After a heavy rain, we’d pick through underbrush to find a forest clearing where flying termites were taking to the air in droves. Masaba would catch a few in his cupped hands, eat some and affix others to the poles I’d cut and pasted with sticky tree sap. We’d step back into cover and watch small birds and bats swoop down to nip as the insects twitched, stuck to our poles. If the sticky sap did its job, birds and bats would get stuck alongside the live bait. Then we’d make a fire and roast our catch, munching as we sat on the forest floor.

Cro-Magnon Love 

In whatever country I happen to be, children always reveal themselves as a ‘traditional people’ in their own right. Mostly because they are curious and unashamed of their ignorance—like Nzolene’s unabashed delight at the sensation of heat left by an ice cube. We all start out that way, ignorance setting the stage for the wonder to come. I like to quiz my friends’ children when we’re eating together. Anybody know where this mayonnaise comes from? ‘The mayonnaise plant’–my favorite answer. How about my hamburger? ‘Uh, the refrigerator?’ If it’s meat we’re eating, they often don’t know the animal or understand that death was involved. But they want to know, and there is always joy in their curiosity.

Tom often referred to his teachings as having originated from nature itself, gleaned through direct observation and years of solitary ‘dirt time’. By the end of the week, a full circle had been drawn around the human and animal worlds. ‘Living lavishly’—the mark of success in any survival situation—was not the re-conquering of the Food Chain using arrowheads, deadfall traps or high-speed invisibility techniques. These were the glitter and sheen of Tom’s teachings. Successful survival required something far more elemental, a basic disposition of mind and spirit. By foregoing our modern trappings of convenience and comparative advantage (rifles, sleeping bags, MREs, etc.), we meet the animal world on equal footing, where survival is a matter of wits and senses. In short, awareness.

If you’ve read this far, you may be wondering what you can do to ‘increase your awareness’. Many techniques were shared with us, but the following can be practiced almost anytime, anywhere. On a summer night, stand at the edge of a garden, forest or field and listen to the cacophony of insects. Try to isolate one insect song, and approach it. Or listen to trees blowing in the wind, and try to identify one in the chorus. Next time you get up in the middle of the night, don’t turn on the lights. Let your vision adjust to the flat dark world, compensating for reduced vision with your other senses, including memory.

Curiosity is the condition for wonder, and wonder—I like to think—the condition for gratitude. For Tom Brown and his School, awareness is the synthesis of gratitude, childlike curiosity and wonder. Without awareness, the survival skills themselves are empty acts performed in a barren, non-responsive landscape.

Another word for the type of awareness being described here is love. Whether this has any bearing on our broken link with our distant ancestors, who knows. I’ve no idea, for instance, if love Cro-Magnon style was anything more than a monosyllabic, grunty affair. But after a week of survival school I came away certain that the Cro-Magnon definitely had their own version of the boob tube. No doubt about it, fire was Cro-Magnon TV. To watch a fire as it transforms solids into air is mesmerizing, its flames in constant motion and yet without mass. Starting a fire, feeding a fire, and watching it burn: a truly timeless showcase event. Ugh!

He walked into the bar just after sundown. Steven Levine. His friends call him The Adorable Rabbi. Some prefer The Divine Levine. Cold outside. The kind of night you pull your coat up around your head and make like a turtle. The bartender took an immediate dislike to the Divine One. She stared at him like he’d slapped her sister. It was making me nervous. But that’s the sort of night it was. Lonely no matter the number of people around. Edgy.

The Rabbi settled onto his stool and I looked up.

“I finally saw it.”

He got excited, in his way.

“you saw it?”

“I did.”

“what’d you think?”

“it’s good. real good”

Time passed. He was waiting for me to want to know but he already knew I wanted to know and I knew he knew it. More time passed.

“alright Stevie, what’s your theory?”

The Rabbi always has a theory but I can’t fault him for it. So do I. Trouble is, the Rabbi’s a Hegelian. If you know any, you know what I mean. No doubt it’s the side effect from all those dialectics. Metaphysicians the lot of them but they try to queer it. Made the whole system organic, fused it with history. The works. Hegelians.

“spill it, Rabbi.”

“the thing is,” he was warming up, “the thing is that after a few disastrous movies the Coens went back to their bread and butter.”

“keep talking.”

“they went back to The Big Lebowski.”

“you’re crazy.”

“no, listen.”

I ordered him another whisky to settle his upper lip. I hate it when Hegelians take to quivering. They never know how to start a point ‘cause it’s all one big fucking idea. Like Parmenides and his “well rounded truth.” No way to get in. A whole tribe of hedgehogs. Hegelians.

“take a sip, kid, and start from the start.”

“it’s like this, see. The Dude is the person for whom, in the end, nothing matters because everything is OK.”

“always loved The Dude.”

“but in No Country we get The Dude for whom everything matters and nothing is going to be OK.”

I kept quiet for a minute. Damn Rabbi was on to something.

“the Dude is the Coen Brothers’ theory of goodness, which is basically that the good is banal… The Banality of Goodness. and that’s a good thing. goodness is really about absolute flexibility, just flowing around.”

“spin it out, Rabbi.”

“well, they decided to take the goodness out of The Dude and remove all the limpness. what happens if you make The Dude hard? what happens if you make The Dude a man who actually turns his maxims into imperatives? you remove all the fluid goodness and you get badness, evil. Anton Chigurh.”

They always throw a dig at Kant in there. They can’t help it, it’s in the blood. The Rabbi was no different. Still, he had me up against the ropes. Nobody ever called that stinkin’ Hebrew stupid. I was stalling for time. Never let a Hegelian close the circle.

“sure, I see the angle. but what…” (I was grasping here) “what about the fate stuff? what about the Greek shit?”

I was swinging wilder than a blind kid at a pinata party but I figured I might square his circle a little with the flip. Plus you can always slow a philosopher down with the classics. Only thing that intimidates them. Throw out a few lines of ancient Greek and they’ll let you date a family member. I saw The Rabbi hesitate and I made my move.

“Chigurh is a Fury, man. plain and simple. we’re talking Oresteia territory here. never get messed up in affairs of the Gods. never get tangled up with Fate and never get in the way of the Olympian order… because the Furies do not stop.”

He downed his whisky in one gulp. I had snagged a line and I was yanking it until somebody yelled Uncle.

“you’re good Rabbi, but you’ve got the wrong movie.”

Then it came to me.

“the real remake here is Raising Arizona.”

He turned away, thinking. I could see the vein bulging on his neck from all the blood his brain was begging for. Time to give the screw one more turn and then let Wilhelm Friedrich the Second dangle.

“fate is the subject, my friend. always has been, always will be. moira is big and human beings are little and when the two get together you have got yourself a story. Aeschylus or the Coen Brothers. don’t matter. everybody gets their portion.”

“yeah, I can see that.”

“funny thing about the Coens in the 80s and 90s is they thought they could do the Fates in the register of comedy. human beings transgress. the Furies are sent to do Fate’s bidding. hilarity ensues. Raising Arizona.”

“OK.”

“now the cheeky bastards think they can do tragedy as tragedy. they’ve always liked to swing it far in whichever direction. either everybody’s talking all the time or no one ever says a damn thing. either everybody has something smart to say (Miller’s Crossing) or you can barely get a frickin peep out of nobody (Fargo). you get the picture. they picked up the Cormac McCarthy book and read their own damn script. ‘shit’, they said ‘we couldda wrote that’. Raising Arizona done minimalism and done mean. tragedy.”

Mostly I think he bought it. Started getting that faraway look in his eyes like he’s trying to peer into the night in which all cows are black. But the fact is I was just jumping on his argument and giving it a ride. That’s why we’re good together, me and the Rabbi. Cracked a few open in our day. Aim to crack a few more before the big boat comes. It was a cold night. Lonely. Me and the Adorable Rabbi and some harmless speculatin’ like it ought to be. That’s my story.

..

–yesterday at a local wired coffee house: the place is full,
but no one’s talking —McSorley’s Bar it’s not.

Internet Cafe
Jim Culleny

where virtual folk
with cappuccinos
gather at tables
like islands of stone
in zen gardens,
faces lit by laptops—
and no one’s apt to step
into the cool raked space between,
to be laughingly hugged or nudged
at key points in a repartee
that flies back and forth
on waves of beer-scented
breath

Rather, they sit
keyboarding thoughts into capacitors
that are Bluetoothed into broadband
and bound for distant counterparts
in other states and hemispheres
instead of being uploaded to
that other E-cocooned human
less than three feet away, breathing
to the left of the stacked biscottis,
keyboarding too, but longing for a
real spontaneous embrace

Painting of McSorley’s Bar, artist unknown

..

My January was anything but uneventful, though I rarely left my apartment.  This month will be remembered by the Kleenex, always to my nose, and all the apologies, after each unguarded sneeze.  My body seemed trapped in a sauna and after spending the night lying awake from a hacking cough, I found another wretched soul. Natalie Angier wrote about a New Year’s Eve visitor who “for the next 18 hours would treat the mucosal lining of our stomachs like so much pulp in a pumpkin”. Her family’s violent weight-loss program helped them lose 10 pounds, to maybe meet one of their resolutions.

Their crash-diet came thanks to a virus, a norovirus (named after a bunch of sick kids in Norwalk, Ohio in 1968).  It’s more commonly called the “stomach flu” and targets the digestive system. I also had the flu, the influenza virus, which targets the lungs, not the guts. Along with the rhino and the common cold (corona viruses), January felt like a train wreck for most of us, or more aptly put, a hit-and-run.

The culprits are tiny guys, so small that thousands can sit on the period at the end of this sentence. Viruses very likely appeared about four billion years ago, though they’re are not given ‘living’ status, since they are not much more than DNA or RNA wrapped in a protective shell, without the tools for reproducing themselves or turning their genetic information into useful proteins.  Viruses are fragile, entirely dependent on a host organism for survival.  So they need us. And use us… whether we like it or not.

So, how do they do it?  When a virus infects a host cell, the cell becomes its factory. It hijacks the cell’s machinery, turning the cell away from its usual tasks to now solely replicate the virus’s genetic material and protein coat.  So effectively does the virus take over the cell, with so many viral copies produced, that the cell eventually bursts under the pressure of the viral young, setting them free to infect other cells and continue the cycle. 

Viruses have a kind of docking device, used to infiltrate a particular cell. Rhinoviruses dock onto receptors projecting from the cells of our nasal passages. Coxsackie virus B attaches to a surface protein called CAR, using it to invade cells in the pancreas. Hepatitis viruses are set up to infiltrate receptors on liver cells. Their specificity is from competition for a niche in a virus-packed world. As Phillip A. Sharp of the Center for Cancer Research at M.I.T. put it, “every virus has to have a scheme.”

By the way, we’re also out-numbered. Recent estimates indicate that the total number of viruses exceeds the total number of cells in every other life form – including bacteria – by a factor of ten.

Bounty Hunters

Before we plan on avoiding contact with other people, and showering with chemical disinfectants there are a number of ways to fight viruses. A vaccine can prime the immune system to attack them as soon as they invade the body. If a virus manages to establish itself, a doctor may be able to prescribe a drug to slow down its spread.  If all else fails, a patient may be quarantined in order to head off an epidemic. 

We even have disease detectives to solve the case. They are NOT microbe detectives as I’m told by my good friend Tracy, who was a disease detective.  In the early 1950s the Centers for Disease Control formed a special unit, called the Epidemic Intelligence Service, or EIS. These detectives are dispatched on two-year active assignment, paid by the CDC, in various local and state health departments, in order to combat the causes of major epidemics.  Tracy tracked tuberculosis outbreaks in many regions, the last place New York City.

Some scientists are now exploring other ways to wipe out disease. Carl Zimmer wrote (NYT, 3/27/07) that they are using decoys to lure them to their death.  Viruses invade a cell by latching onto certain proteins on its surface. But unlike most other cells, red blood cells can’t be infected. Since red blood cells develop in bone marrow they lose their DNA. If a virus ends up inside a red blood cell, there are no genes it can hijack to replicate itself, a dead end. 

Dr. Robert W. Finberg, at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and his colleagues, decided to do just that.  They would bait their virus traps (red blood cells) with a surface protein, engineering mice to produce this protein on their red blood cells.  The normal mice all died within a week of the viral infection. The engineered mice tended to live longer.

It showed some promise, but didn’t reveal exactly why they failed to eradicate the virus. Dr Paul E. Turner, an evolutionary biologist, tested what threshold was needed for these traps to force the viruses into extinction. His team mixed normal bacteria with different levels of mutant traps and then infected them with viruses. After letting the viruses replicate, they discovered there was indeed a trap threshold above which the virus population could not survive.

Scientists are using what was learned with bacteria to study HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. While now purely speculative, they hope that someday it might be possible to give HIV patients transfusions of engineered blood cells. Ultimate success would depend on the details of HIV infection. At some points in an HIV infection, a single milliliter of blood can contain as many as 10 million viruses, which would require allot of traps.  It is also possible that viruses will mutate in such a way that they avoid the viral traps. The results are exciting, but still in the early stages.

Less along the lines of a ‘Viral Terminator”, but with possibly equally effective results, Dr. Paul Ewald also believes that the rules of evolutionary biology can change the course of infectious disease. http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99feb/germs.htm

In his interview with Judith Hooper of the Atlantic Monthly, he argues that the notion of “commensalism”, which dominated medical thought for decades, is wrong.  This idea was that the pathogen-host relationship inevitably evolved toward peaceful benign coexistence, because it is in the germ’s interest to keep its host alive. But Dr. Ewald counters that the Darwinian struggle of people and germs is not necessarily so benign. It can go either way, toward mildness or toward virulence.

Imagine that you’re a disease organism, such as the common cold.  You’d want to multiply inside your host as fast as you can. However, if you produce too many copies of yourself, you’ll risk killing or immobilizing your host before you can spread. The average airborne respiratory virus would ideally want its host well enough to go to work and sneeze on people (like I did)… This is BAD.

But what if the germ doesn’t need host mobility to spread. If it can use a vector, another organism, such as a mosquito, for it to travel from person to person, it can then afford to become very harmful. That is why insect-borne diseases such as yellow fever and malaria are so horrid. Cholera uses another vector to transmit. It goes by way of fecal matter shed into the water supply… This is UGLY.

His team showed that cholera strains are virulent in Guatemala, where the water is bad, and mild in Chile, where water quality is good.  Moreover, strains of the cholera agent found in Texas produced such small amounts of toxin that rarely anyone who gets infected will come down with cholera. On this, he said, “If you can make an organism very mild, it works like a natural vaccine against the virulent strains. That’s the most preventive of preventive medicine: when you can change the organism so it doesn’t make you sick.”

Dr. Ewald has also taken the laws of evolutionary theory, and applying them to a new theory: that diseases believed to be caused by genetic or environmental factors, such as certain forms of heart disease, cancer, and mental illness, are in many cases actually caused by infections.  The ordinary stomach ulcer is the best recent example of a common ailment for which an infectious agent turns out to be responsible.

The medical establishment had earlier thought that peptic ulcers were caused by: environmental factors, smoking, diet, certain drugs such as aspirin, or stress. Not infection. So for years, ulcer patients ate bland food and swore off stress. But in 1984, Marshal and Warren indicated that maybe an infection explained the ulcers.  It was ignored, until Marshall reportedly “personally ingested a batch of the spiral bacteria and came down with painful gastritis”.  There is now little doubt that Helicobacter pylori causes inflammation of the stomach lining. 20% of those infected produce an ulcer. Many can be cured in less than a month with antibiotics.

Ewald takes Darwin’s laws to mean the evolutionary success of an organism relative to competing organisms. Genetic traits that may be unfavorable to an organism’s survival or reproduction do not persist in the gene pool for very long. Natural selection, by its very definition, weeds them out in short order. By this logic, the genes that spell out that disease or trait will be passed on to fewer and fewer individuals in future generations. Therefore, in considering common illnesses are unlikely to have a genetic cause. He says “When diseases have been present in human populations for many generations and still have a substantial negative impact on people’s fitness, “they are likely to have infectious causes.”  This may offer a new way to think about the causes of our most baffling illnesses, that we have previously considered tied to genetic or environmental factors.

The Good

With news about AIDS, Ebola, the Avian Flu and SARs, it’s hard to imagine anything good could come out of the viral world.  But while viruses are the pirates of the cellular sea, there may be a few Peter Pans also around.  Scientists are starting discover the extent of viral diversity, which may one day radically shift how we think of our uninvited guests.

Hamish Clarke wrote that viruses, which are cheap, quick to produce, and easy to modify, “filled out the toolboxes of many a biologist” for years. Martha Chase and Alfred Hershey used viruses in 1952 to help establish that DNA, rather than protein, forms the basis of heredity.  Their success launched its new career. Their ability to entwine themselves with the host’s genome has made viruses an important factor in the field of gene therapy. The notion of going into a person’s cells and correcting genetic ‘typos’ earlier seemed unlikely. But now researchers are planning to swap the virus’ harmful genes for a corrected version of the patient’s defective genes and use the virus’ unique abilities to insert the gene into patient’s genome. Like a Hollywood movie, the scientists are essentially hijacking the hijackers. 

Patients may feel uncomfortable with the thought of being injected with a virus to cure a disease. But, according to Paul Osten, from Northwestern University in Chicago, the risks are low and decreasing. He wrote that “The viral vectors … are in most cases stripped down to the most basic elements that are required for gene delivery, and thus in no possible way pose any risk with respect to the original disease.”

We always hear about their assault on humans, but viruses don’t just attack animal cells. A large number of viruses actually target bacteria, including the bacteria, called bacteriophages (phages for short), that infect humans. Targeted bacterial killing may be an alternative to antibiotics.  Sounds like another Hollywood thriller, but it’s very real.  In August of 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a bacteriophage food spray designed to reduce the amount of illness-causing bacteria on ready-to-eat meals.

Viruses were known to do allot to control other parasites.  But they are now recognized to be an integral part of every ecosystem and can’t be ignored.  Microbiologist Nick Colman said “We usually only hear about viruses in the context of human disease. But most viruses are actually not harmful, and in fact have played an important part in evolution and in maintaining healthy ecosystems.”  Andrew Holmes, a microbiologist from the University of Sydney, thinks that people should know that viruses “have the potential to cause very rapid biological change through epidemic disease, but that is exceedingly rare”. He pointed out that this same process is an important part of correcting imbalances that occur in nature, such as explosions of algae that choke sea life and disrupt food chains. He notes that, “such viruses are the means by which the ecosystem corrects itself.”

It’s now February, and my nose still runs and my head feels like a football.  Still my role as reluctant host has become little more clear, and my thoughts for these uninvited guests a little more understanding (though I still dont want them around.

by Shiban Ganju

Dedicated to Jenny Mah, a 3QD reader, who blogged the following comment in my earlier post: “Would you consider doing one on other forms of “detox” such as “cleansing” diets and, the latest to hit my city – ionic footbaths!”

—————————————–

I travel for my work; I fly forward across continents and backward across centuries. In twenty-four hours, I journey away from the worried–well, who scurry to ‘detox’ their bodies, to the scared sick, who fall prey to needless death; from twenty-first century neurosis to nineteenth century ignorance.

Currently, my work lands me in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state in north India with 186 million people, which would make it the sixth largest country in the world, were it an independent nation. From Lucknow airport we drive – in a rented Toyota Qualis – deep into the state, where 783 persons stuff every square kilometer, all of who seem to crowd into the bazaars on the two-lane highway. The driver assiduously – and miraculously – avoids every sauntering pedestrian without a scratch, but he can’t avoid potholes, which outnumber people. Our Toyota drops and hops, rattling my vertebrae and shaking my innards.

After trundling for four hours we reach our destination – a small village of 150 houses. My jolted body slides out of the car and hobbles into a dusty patch in the center of the village, where I see a circle of women in bight colored saris, who greet me with restrained smiles and curiosity. I learn they have walked miles, from twenty surrounding villages, to become social health activists. My travel aches vanish. I sit among them on the tarp-covered ground.

My job: to strengthen health delivery systems. My aim: to eradicate ignorance. My method: to persuade and educate. And my success: not guaranteed.

Failure to persuade is not new to me; I remember having failed before, when I ‘imparted education’ in my faraway home country, where ‘body detox’ is big business. And where it sells in different packages.

Detox customers throng to ‘colonics’ where they learn that the colon holds body waste in its crevices for a lifetime and a medicated colon wash is curative. The caregiver inserts a tube into the rectum and flushes the client’s colon with a gallon or two of the washing fluid. They may also offer a strong purgative called the ‘oral colonic.’ I have tried – with limited success – to convince ‘colonic addicts’ that a normal colon does not hold any grouse and does not need catharsis. They listen, they ignore me and they go back for the colon scrub.

Then there are the ionic footbath parlors for stressed urbanites. Here, I am quoting a sales pitch I found on the net about ‘Ion footbath detoxification’:

“This is the most relaxing way to get rid of the toxins present in the body. You just have to sit on the chair, with your feet dipped into the water container. A flow of warm water will flow under your feet and the positive and negative ions in the water will attach themselves to the toxins present in the body. Toxins that are insoluble will also dissolve in this water.”

Look at the clever craft of words – toxins, positive and negative ions – to add credence. It helps to sell, if the pitch throws in a couple of mysterious words without context to create a scientific aura. Flowing water under the sole may be soothing but that probably is the only truth in the statement. Even a perfunctory knowledge about the working of the body is enough to arouse suspicion against this ludicrous claim preying on the gullible.

Ions are components of a salt in solution. Common salt, also called sodium chloride, floats as sodium and chloride ions in water. These ions – the commonest ions in the body – can cross through porous barriers by passive osmosis or active transport. Thick sole of a foot is not permeable and the ions in the container cannot penetrate into the feet, which hoard no special toxins to extrude.

Feet also become touch pads for ‘reflexologists’ who carry an unsubstantiated belief that feet possess a mirror ‘reflex’ representation of the whole body. These practitioners promise relief for migraine, hormonal imbalance, digestive, sinus, respiratory and many other ailments by rubbing areas – representing the sick organ – on the feet. Unfortunately for the sufferers of these ailments this relief is merely an expensive promise.

Similar to such practitioners are ‘energy field’ or ‘biofield’ healers, who claim to heal by transmitting energy from the healer to the patient in some mysterious way. They claim to ‘restore balance’ and release ‘congested energy.’ Spurious claims abound in this field and we have to be as much skeptical as we have to be receptive to healthy holistic tips.

Then there are cleansing diets, which may be harmless to the body but not to your wallet. These diets offer no extra benefit. If we just eat the calories and the nutrients we need, we cannot go wrong. Food has an either-or effect; we become what we eat: fat-slim, happy-sad, intoxicated-sober, energetic-mellow, sick-healthy – the choice is ours to make. Each nutrient – carbohydrate, fat, protein, vitamin, mineral or water – has a specific utility for normal functioning of the body and in special circumstances, we may have to increase or decrease the quantity of one or the other nutrient. Cleansing diets provide extra amounts of one or the other nutrient and claim an exaggerated benefit.

Some alternative medicine practitioners recommend a liver and gall bladder cleanser. The recipe contains Epson salt (magnesium sulfate), olive oil and ornithine. They offer no rationale about what it cleanses in the liver and how it works.

For people with a temperament of ‘faith’ in much abused clichés of ‘organic’, ‘natural’ and ‘holistic’, probably I sound foolish. It is nothing new to me. I am aware of my limitation to persuade people of seemingly simple things. My inability haunts me now, as I face these eager women in this remote Indian village, which still lives in the nineteenth century.

My mission is to devise ways to reduce maternal mortality, which is one of the highest in this part of the world. Over 500 women die out of 100,000 live deliveries. Compare that with the USA, where maternal mortality rate is under 9 per 100,000 live births. The solutions are so simple that we in the west are incredulous. If we treat anemia with extra iron, prevent excessive hemorrhage during birth, give one prophylactic antibiotic before delivery and encourage institutional delivery, we can decrease the mortality by almost 75 percent. It has been done before.

The women, sitting in a circle, introduce themselves; they tell me their name and the village they come from. I enquire about the deaths in their villages.

Shakila, a girlish woman, wearing black, recounts – in a flat voice – the story of her neighbor, who died in childbirth last month.

“How old was the mother?”

“Twenty one.”

Her emotions do not match the tragedy; death is not an occasional visitor – it is their next-door neighbor.

But it doesn’t have to be this way; ‘this death was preventable!’ My challenge is to penetrate this simple message into their brains – the most obstinate organ of the body.

Changing behavior is an uphill task – anywhere in the world. I have ranted against scams in health care; pleaded against colon cleansers, protested against refeloxolgy and energy healing without success. If I have failed in persuading educated twenty first century people against ionic footbaths, how will I convince these illiterate women about the benefits of iron in pregnancy?

I realize, it is all about ‘detoxing’ the mind and not the body.