Tag: Viruses

Posted on

Ciliates can eat viruses

Researchers at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln have discovered a “species of Halteria – microscopic ciliates that populate freshwater worldwide – can eat huge numbers of infectious chloroviruses that share their aquatic habitat”.

Eurekalert

When I read something like this, my imagination invariably goes to thoughts of apocalypse. I think of genetically modified ciliates in a vaccine. Once in your system they start to feed on your body, consuming you from the inside, creating a biological grey goo that sweeps over the Earth, eating everything in its path.

What if engineered ciliates make it possible to convert food into energy, lots and lots of energy, causing all kinds of uncontrolled mutations in mammals? A planet of dinosaur size animals and humans roaming the planet.

Would living forever allow interstellar travel? Vast ships sent deep into space. People able to live long enough to travel beyond our solar system, find life on other planets.

What if ciliates lead to the cure for ageing? Generations living for two or three hundred, a thousand, years. What happens to people who no longer fear death? Will it bring cults of people who want to commit suicide to escape the purgatory to living too long?

The science is interesting. The possibilities endless.

Posted on

Wuhan virus – a reason to adopt a plant based diet

The following explainer of the Wuhan virus reads like the opening of an apocalyptic television show. Think Survivors (1975-1977) or The Walking Dead (2010-). It could also be the opening of any one of a hundred films. Stories like Fukkatsu no hi (1980) or Carriers (2009) or Contagion (2011). A virus, from who knows where, jumps the species barrier, infecting humans, then spreads through the population on the interconnected nature of our social, economic, and travel systems.

South China Morning Post

The outbreak has been linked to Wuhan’s Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market where they sell a bewildering assortment of meats.

I don’t eat meat so the variety of death on offer seems a little unnecessary to me. Humans don’t need to eat meat. We can get all of our nutritional requirements from plants. There’s plenty of evidence to prove this. Just watch The Game Changers (2018). Elite athletes who switched to a plant based diet achieve the best results of their lives.

I realise asking the people of Wuhan, or anywhere else, to stop eating the animals listed, could be seen as an act of cultural imperialism. But then I came across a post showing a dead bat infusing in a soup. That’s not the worst of it. It also contained the warning that bats are a reservoir of up to sixty different viruses.

It seems to me beyond hubris to think we can do this kind of thing without consequence. You only have to look at the HIV pandemic to see what can happen. According to Wikipedia HIV is “believed to have originated in non-human primates in West-central Africa, and are believed to have transferred to humans (a process known as zoonosis) in the early 20th century.”

The Wuhan virus is just the latest in a long line of threats that could do serious damage to us all. It’s bad enough bringing farmed meat into the food chain. Adding wild animals and their diseases is asking for trouble.

Removing meat from your diet benefits your health, and the health of the planet. It also reduces the possibility of some unknown virus or disease jumping the species barrier, and infecting humans.

It’s one less thing to kill us all.