EMERGING VIRUS – A NEW THREAT TO LIFE

Dr. Javeed Kakroo
Microbiologist Certified infection control Auditor
Kidney Hospital Srinagar

The world of Microbes was never silent, today many of us suffer in spite many advances with virus infections, take simple cold become part of our life and living and nobody dies. But the threat posed by viruses is always out there. There are approximately 320,000 mammalian viruses, according to a recent estimate. If even just a fraction of those can infect humans, those are thousands of reasons to further the research working toward developing effective broad-spectrum antiviral. The real sensationalism in Medicine lays emerging microbes which we were silent until an opportunity, until very recently, almost no one had heard of the Zika virus. The few familiar with the mosquito-borne illness didn’t think they had any reason to be concerned by it. Now, within the past few months, fears that the rapidly spreading illness could be responsible for a surge in infants born with microcephaly — a much smaller head and brain than normal — have prompted public health officials in Brazil, where there’s a particularly serious
Zika outbreak right now, to ask women to avoid getting pregnant. The virus is threat from birth to death, from sex to pregnancy. The question remains how to live in spite of Microbes prevailing all around us. An editorial in the January 9 issue of The Lancet journal calls Zika an emerging virus that poses a threat to global health security. But this outbreak demonstrates clearly both the threat that emerging viruses pose to the world and the need to have some sort of antiviral agent those we can use to try to treat any new viral illness. While we can try throwing different antibiotics at any number of strange and unfamiliar bacterial infections, we have no similar sledgehammer for mysterious viral diseases, which each have to be studied carefully before we can even begin to figure out how to fight or prevent them.
A cure for all viruses – Since a new virus — or a mutated version of an existing one — can spread around the world before researchers have the chance to try and develop a way to treat it, some thing that could be used against any such infection would be an incredible tool. These treatments, called “broad – spectrum antiviral” could be the biggest discovery in medicine since the invention of antibiotics
Four years ago, Todd Rider was on top of the world. The MIT-trained bioengineer had developed a radical idea for killing viruses. Initial test results showed that his therapy, called DRACO, could kill every virus he threw it at: 15 viruses were killed in human cells, and two in mice. It seemed like there was a chance it could be the biggest discovery in medicine since the invention of antibiotics. Enthusiastic headlines praised the potentially world-changing panacea. “Todd Rider Has a Kill Switch for Viruses,” wrote Bloomberg BusinesWeek. The Verge: “Killing sickness: is DRACO a doomsday device for viruses?” Time magazine declared it one of the top 50 inventions of the yea. He realized that he could create a molecule to find infected cells that carry that viral signature. And he could make it do more than just identify them. All cells have the ability to self-destruct, so Rider programmed molecules to activate this kill switch after they attach to a virus, destroying the infected cells and the viral particles they were hosting. Since viruses mutate quickly, they can easily develop resistance to typical antiviral drugs that target a specific protein found in the virus. Something like DRACO might in theory avoid this problem because it’s not targeting one protein, but rather the genetic material that identifies something as a virus in the first place.

The world of science needs a new thinking on microbes as today life is at risk from food to sex, birth to death, from dog bite to mosquito bite, or even kiss to intimacy and wish the braoder thinking on antiviral drugs will be boon to many virus related issues

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