http://www.cnn.com/2016/08/26/health/zika-transmitted-via-sex-without-symptoms/index.html
Better wrap it before you tap it.
Better wrap it before you tap it.
Zika virus is now sexually transmittable. - Get a blood test today!
- Thread starter Melkor
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In the multimedia board, I think, I made a thread for educational videos like that. If you wanna know more about viruses specifically, I would say the only good video source would be my professor's YouTube Channel and podcast/blog. (It will get really confusing really quickly without an understanding of molecular biology, so beware.)
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September 17 2016
CNN: Zika virus Miami Beach transmission zone triples
CNN: Zika virus Miami Beach transmission zone triples
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I'm generally a fan of good documentaries about biology, space exploration, zoology and such. Thanks I'll check it out.
Is the multimedia board on this site?
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Functional Animal
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Apparently the people in Florida said they would rather risk getting Zika than possibly be exposed to pesticides. I guess they don't really have anything to lose if they get Zika, they're already retarded.
a tightly clenched butt
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I think health authorities must have feared/suspected sexual transmission of the virus would become a thing for a while. I donated blood in the beginning of August, and they asked me specifically if my husband had been traveling to specific areas. They've never asked that before, it's always been just my traveling they've cared about.
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Zika can spread through tears, sweat, and practically any bodily fluid if the viral load is high enough. Roughly 80-90% of people infected show no symptoms at all. People who show symptoms almost never suspect Zika infection. Doctors who see Zika-infected people rarely identity it as Zika. The tests used to detect Zika virus are useless due to being highly inaccurate. Any infected mothers will have a 10-30% chance of producing a baby with an obvious birth defect. If the baby is born seemingly normal, it will still have serious developmental delays. Babies with infected mothers are at a much higher risk for autism, schizophrenia, and other serious mental disorders (and we know this because babies born during viral outbreaks like this typically grow up with extremely high rates of retardation). They are also at a much higher risk for non-mental disorders. Zika can infect adult brain cells in both mice and humans, but it is unclear how the virus impacts cognition. Zika can cause serious vision problems, and even cause blindness when people don't seek professional help. Zika is being linked to other diseases too. The virology community is starting to seriously panic right now. Because they fear backlash if anything they say is inaccurate, most scientists are remaining silent. The more we learn about Zika, the more disturbing things turn out to be. A lot of scientists feel all of this is just the tip of the iceberg.
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Kartoffel
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I'm far from an expert on the field but I still had at least some higher level education in biology... and I never heard of a virus enhancing its host. Please enlighten me, give me some examples for this theory. Currently the only way a virus "enhances" someone I can think of is that helps your immune system by either just being there, so it has something to attack (and keep being trained) or that there are some freaking side effects that block other infections - but I'd count neither cases as real enhancements. If there were no infection at all the person would be better off.
You are giving viruses too much credit here. There are little more then a hull with some genetic material inside that can reprogramm a cell to multiply it. There is neither intelligence nor agency in it at all. They are just a random product of nature that was super effective (but not too effective) in what it was doing, so it kept being around.
And why shouldn't something like this excist? It is only logical for something like this to be here, bacterias can change so freaking fast, that the necessary building blocks will be combined other and other again. Strip the things from a bacteria that are not dna and membrane and tada you've got a proto-virus. Because bacteria already include ways to transfer genes with others.
Humans have for a reason a dislike for the uncanny. One of the easiest and natural ways to avoid infection is to simply keep away from infected people as much as possible.
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I am kind of curious how viruses came to be. They seem to be at once so very well made to do their job and infect a cell, but at the other time most of them are too destructive for their own good. Why are there no viruses that boost the host and become symbiotic organisms, if we can call them that? Why always ruin the host that they absolutely need to reproduce? I just can't find any evolutionary sense in that.
If I was a crazy greek professor, I would think they are a bioweapon made by aliens, of course.
If I was a crazy greek professor, I would think they are a bioweapon made by aliens, of course.
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If there were no infections at all, no complex life would exist.
There are plants that are infected with microorganisms; these microorganisms are infected with viruses. Remove the viruses, and the plants lose their ability to thrive in extremophile conditions, and so the plants die. There are humans viruses which increase your chances of cancers as illnesses, but there are also human viruses which decrease your chance of cancer and other illnesses. A lot of non-protein encoding "junk DNA" in the human body is actually viral DNA which gives us all sorts of benefits we are just now starting to comprehend. This is just the tip of the iceberg. And like you said, infectious diseases keep the immune system trained. If your raised animals or people in sterile environments, they are always very unhealthy and end up suffering a lot and dying early. They can't think properly and they can't digest food properly and they behave abnormally. If you dissect them, their organs are abnormal and under the microscope their tissue is abnormal and sickly.
If anything, I am giving viruses and infectious disease far too little credit. I do realize I am attacking every biologist when I say infectious disease and viruses, and not the environment, is the driving force of evolution, but biologists deserve to have their world turned upside down as much as any other group of scientists. A lot of people tend to look down on me because I humanize viruses a lot and make extreme claims, like that the cosmos itself is a living organism. I actually encourage people to mock me by making intentionally outlandish, but not impossible, claims that will attract backlash.
Like you said, viruses are a protein shell with a strand of genetic information inside. But they do much more than just reprogram a cell to make more virus, and they can be manipulated into doing whatever you want. Why should scientists spend so much time and effort designing nanobots, when we already have them? Biologists have learned more about the workings of life studying viruses than anything else. Viruses rely on chance to get from one location to another; they are innate, passive particles that do nothing unless they happen to get lucky. However, the virus is alive once it infects a cell. An infected human cell is not a human cell; it is a living virus. Because the progenitor to the cell nucleus in all our cells was likely an ancient virus that accidentally began to work together with other simple pre-life, we can say humans are living viruses.
There's still a lot of work to be done before we have a better understand of abiogenesis. Scientists cannot randomly create simple life from chemicals. But scientists can mix together chemicals and produce simple viruses and passive chemicals and constructions of 'stuff' which resemble pre-life. Ancient viruses that exist today are far less parasitic than the viruses that exist today; this means that, a long time ago in the past, at least some viruses may have not required life [as we know it] to reproduce.
The difference between bacteria and viruses is that viruses do not need their protective shell to reproduce. All a virus is, is DNA or RNA. You can strip of a virus of its protective shell, and it can still hack cells. Bacteria and other forms of life are very different. If you strip bacteria of everything except its DNA, it can't do anything at all. Viruses, as we thought we knew them, need living cells to reproduce and evolve. All viruses, by definition, are, or were, parasites because they cannot do anything without living cells to infect. However, recent discoveries in biology, which I partly explained here, contradict this. We will soon be forced to redefine "life."
In my opinion, the new definition of life should be "an element of existence that reproduces and evolves." All the other requirements for life are redundant.
"The rise of the mammals may feel like a familiar tale, but there’s a twist you likely don’t know about: If it wasn’t for a virus, it might not have happened at all."
"Without retroviruses, mammals might never have evolved placentas."
“Viral proteins already have functions. It’s much easier to borrow these than to evolve them from scratch,” says Aris Katzourakis, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford.
"Viruses help turn us from a ball of cells into a fully-formed squalling infant and protect us from pathogens."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/evolution/endogenous-retroviruses/
There are viruses that help us, viruses that harm us, and viruses that do nothing at all.
The vast majority of viruses that exist do nothing at all or benefit us.
You only know about Ebola, Zika and such because they happen to be the rarest kinds of viruses to exist --- the ones that do harm to humans. However, I am willing to bet my life that even viruses like Ebola and Zika benefit us in ways we have yet to discover.
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Kartoffel
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Thanks for that information, @Ebola, that was quite the fascinating read.
I think it was probably simple Evolution. For a virus you just need the genetic stuff and something around it. Both ingredients can come from bacteria; and given how Viruses work, they right combination only had to work once right to start a chain reaction. And bacteria can cross cell borders and insert genome into another bacteria - that's how they can vary their genome.
And their are many huge amount of these around, exspecially in the oceans.
And immun answer in the earliest days of evolution won't have had that level that we have now.
I think it was probably simple Evolution. For a virus you just need the genetic stuff and something around it. Both ingredients can come from bacteria; and given how Viruses work, they right combination only had to work once right to start a chain reaction. And bacteria can cross cell borders and insert genome into another bacteria - that's how they can vary their genome.
And their are many huge amount of these around, exspecially in the oceans.
And immun answer in the earliest days of evolution won't have had that level that we have now.
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I don't know about bacteria, but viruses can have sex too. For example, the flu virus has a segmented genome. A single flu virus cannot harm you. But if two or more flu viruses get into one of your cells, they will have sex inside of you by mixing their segments of genetic material. This is one reason why there has to be a new flu vaccine every year.
It is a very real possibility that viruses [on Earth] formed spontaneously. It is a very real possibility that viruses are some form of machine or alien life, sent here, intentionally or not, from another planet or another universe. It would be very hard to send complex biological life from planet to planet, or from universe to universe. But viruses and other microorganisms can survive extreme conditions. For example, viruses LOVE cold conditions, but they HATE heat and radiation. Space is freezing, but there's a lot of radiation. However, comets are frozen balls of liquid; inside a comet, protected from radiation, countless microorganisms can be seeded on planets. In a perfectly frozen state, viruses can remain infectious for dozens to millions of years. The less sunlight in an area, and the lower the temperature in an area, the easier it is for viruses to remain infectious for extremely long periods of time. If it were the case that Africa were cold and cloudy all the time, the Ebola outbreak may have never ended. If you ever find yourself in the middle of a viral outbreak and it happens to be extremely sunny and hot outside, all you have to do is put contaminated materials in direct sunlight for a week or two, and pretty much all contamination will be gone as long as the surface you want decontaminated in directly exposed to heat and sun rays. There are artificial ways to achieve this too, but outside of the Western world, there's typically no electricity to power radiation-emitting devices which kill microorganisms.
Our soil, our oceans, and our atmosphere are packed with countless microorganisms that regulate weather, climate, life, patterns of evolution, cycles on Earth, and various other things.
It is a very real possibility that viruses [on Earth] formed spontaneously. It is a very real possibility that viruses are some form of machine or alien life, sent here, intentionally or not, from another planet or another universe. It would be very hard to send complex biological life from planet to planet, or from universe to universe. But viruses and other microorganisms can survive extreme conditions. For example, viruses LOVE cold conditions, but they HATE heat and radiation. Space is freezing, but there's a lot of radiation. However, comets are frozen balls of liquid; inside a comet, protected from radiation, countless microorganisms can be seeded on planets. In a perfectly frozen state, viruses can remain infectious for dozens to millions of years. The less sunlight in an area, and the lower the temperature in an area, the easier it is for viruses to remain infectious for extremely long periods of time. If it were the case that Africa were cold and cloudy all the time, the Ebola outbreak may have never ended. If you ever find yourself in the middle of a viral outbreak and it happens to be extremely sunny and hot outside, all you have to do is put contaminated materials in direct sunlight for a week or two, and pretty much all contamination will be gone as long as the surface you want decontaminated in directly exposed to heat and sun rays. There are artificial ways to achieve this too, but outside of the Western world, there's typically no electricity to power radiation-emitting devices which kill microorganisms.
Our soil, our oceans, and our atmosphere are packed with countless microorganisms that regulate weather, climate, life, patterns of evolution, cycles on Earth, and various other things.
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Fungi got hundreds of genders, they are the clear winner in the evolutionarry tranny race.
I would not say that the more lethal viruses do anything good for humanity, unless you are on the extremely darwinist scale of "always kill off all but the very strongest" . While such an approach has its own biological merits, it can reduce a population below sustainable levels and loose all its uses.
In my opinion, the new definition of life should be "an element of existence that reproduces and evolves." All the other requirements for life are redundant.
Would that make adaptive and copying computer programs alive? What about memes? Pepe LIVES!
I would not say that the more lethal viruses do anything good for humanity, unless you are on the extremely darwinist scale of "always kill off all but the very strongest" . While such an approach has its own biological merits, it can reduce a population below sustainable levels and loose all its uses.
In my opinion, the new definition of life should be "an element of existence that reproduces and evolves." All the other requirements for life are redundant.
Would that make adaptive and copying computer programs alive? What about memes? Pepe LIVES!
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Good; you get it. I am impressed. That's where I had hoped to lead at least one person in this thread. Even stupid internet memes are literally alive to one degree or another. And not just internet memes, but every element of reality, from subatomic particles to entire universes. They all work in the same fashion as internet memes (units of information), and they all contaminate each other. We can even add emotions, thoughts, religions, opinions, beliefs, and other non-physical things to the list. Literally everything is a meme. It's a hard concept for nomries to comprehend, let alone accept, but we have known, for decades now, that reality is information-based --- just like internet memes, just like biological viruses, just like video games...
A human is a meme too, a meme factory composed of a complex array of countless lesser memes in a mostly symbiotic relationship. Assuming Pepe keeps on getting more and more attention from us and more popularity, eventually he too will become a self-aware meme. Then again, some would argue he already is, in a poetic sense, and that he can influence real-world events. Through us, at least, Pepe already is infecting and influencing the 2016 election and the zeitgeist...
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First off, that was way too much to read. Second, it was littered with scientific inaccuracies...
Yes, we can. Synthetic bacteria is totally a thing.
Viruses are not fucking. They cannot, by definition, fuck. Viruses cannot even reproduce on their own. Components of the infected cell are what replicate the genetic segments and mistakes are often made. The cell itself has checks and balances to prevent large scale mutations of its own DNA but not the viral genetic code. Therefore, mistakes in replication, and not sexual intercourse, leads to mutations and viral evolution.
Edit: please enjoy this real science article describing the mechanisms of viral mutation
Yes, we can. Synthetic bacteria is totally a thing.
Viruses are not fucking. They cannot, by definition, fuck. Viruses cannot even reproduce on their own. Components of the infected cell are what replicate the genetic segments and mistakes are often made. The cell itself has checks and balances to prevent large scale mutations of its own DNA but not the viral genetic code. Therefore, mistakes in replication, and not sexual intercourse, leads to mutations and viral evolution.
Edit: please enjoy this real science article describing the mechanisms of viral mutation
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