Scientists Recreate 1918 Flu and See Parallels to Bird Flu

By BLOOMBERG NEWS
Published: January 18, 2007

Scientists infected monkeys with a virus that caused the 1918-19 influenza pandemic and said in the Jan. 18 issue of the journal Nature that it caused an illness like that suffered by patients with the bird flu now spreading in Asia.

Infection with a reconstructed version of the 1918 virus, known as the Spanish flu, incited a deadly chemical reaction in the laboratory animals, a group of scientists said in the magazine.

The group was led by Darwyn Kobasa, a researcher for the Public Health Agency of Canada in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Both the Spanish flu and H5N1 bird flu in Asia appear able to set off the reaction, the researchers said. Studying the Spanish flu virus’s interaction with monkeys may help health officials prepare for a possible pandemic caused by H5N1.

“We see responses that are similar between humans infected with H5N1 and nonhuman primates infected with the 1918 virus,” said Yoshihiro Kawaoka, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “By studying this model in detail, we may learn to cope with those immune responses.”

The 1918 flu may have killed as many as 50 million people, about 2 percent of those infected. Researchers say the outbreak started as a bird virus, until genetic changes enabled it to spread in people.

Similar mutations may allow H5N1 to set off a pandemic, researchers say. The bird flu has infected 267 people, mostly poultry workers or keepers in Asia, and killed 161 of them since late 2003, according to data compiled by the World Health Organization.

While the study points to an immune response as a probable cause for the destructiveness of the 1918 flu, researchers are still learning about the virus, said Michael Katze, a microbiologist at the National Primate Research Center at the University of Washington in Seattle.

“We know very little about why these viruses are so lethal,” Dr. Katze said.

Research has shown that H5N1 kills mice, causing the same kind of chemical reaction, called a cytokine storm, seen in the monkeys. Many other flu viruses are also fatal in mice, and the researchers said it was important to conduct studies in primates.

In 2005, Army scientists reported that they had reconstructed the Spanish flu virus by extracting genetic fragments from the bodies of victims exhumed from the Alaskan permafrost. American and Canadian researchers compared the effects of the virus on monkeys with those of seasonal flus.

The 1918 virus grew faster and spread more widely in the monkeys than the other viruses. While the immune reaction to the seasonal viruses abated after a few days, the response in monkeys with Spanish flu persisted, damaging tissues and impairing lung function, the study said.

The invisible hand of the market is robbing us blind.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-meyerhoff14jan14,0,2352747.story?coll=la-news-comment-opinions

Financial forces run amok
Without regulation, the invisible hand of the market is robbing us blind.
By Al Meyerhoff

January 14, 2008



For about the last 30 years, our nation has been traveling the deregulation highway, a road with no rules or direction. We have let enterprise be free, business go unfettered, the good times roll. And roll they have, but to where? One stopping point: the current mortgage crisis.

Recently, however, there has been a slight regulatory bump in the road. After its chairman acknowledged that "market discipline has in some cases broken down," the Federal Reserve released new mortgage lending rules "to protect consumers against fraud [and] deception." Banks making sub-prime loans will be required to actually consider the borrower's ability to pay and confirm a borrower's income before handing over the money. Now there's a radical notion.

Disclosure also will be required of those nasty little (actually not so little) "bonuses" that brokers receive for writing loans at rates higher than a poor, unwitting consumer can afford.

To some, they may not be much, but the absence of such rules encouraged the predatory lending practices that have left millions of Americans facing foreclosure.

Let's take a look at how we got here before the deregulation highway takes us over a cliff.

The Reagan revolution was the beginning, when we started seeing rollbacks in government safeguards, such as those protecting food, drinking water and the environment. Then came the savings and loan crash in the 1980s, a pit stop that cost taxpayers $150 billion. President Clinton added the "bridge to the 21st century," along with his proclamation that the "era of big government was over." During his administration, Congress repealed a Depression-era law called Glass-Steagall, which kept banking and investment separate. Henceforth, banks could offer investment advice as well as loans -- one-stop shopping on the road to disaster.

However, deregulation of the markets really took hold in 1994 with the GOP's "Contract with America." The first to go were the nation's securities laws. Over a Clinton veto, Congress enacted the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act, making it far more difficult to prove securities fraud. Said to be necessary to free the markets of red tape and trial lawyers, it gave the green light to corporate chiefs such as Ken Lay and Dennis Kozlowski and led to the Enron, WorldCom, Tyco and HealthSouth fraud debacles. As a result, shareholders lost hundreds of billions of dollars from a wave of fraud unseen since the Roaring '20s -- and maybe not even then.

A declawed Securities and Exchange Commission, a neutered plaintiffs' bar and missing congressional oversight empowered Wall Street to push as far as it could. Facts were hidden, self-dealing was rampant and deceit rewarded. Congress finally intervened in 2002 by passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, imposing strict new accounting rules and other controls on business. That law is now under siege.

The current sub-prime mortgage mess is simply the latest wreck on the highway. Banks have been left to their own devices, unchecked by government watchdogs or pesky regulations. Interest rates on millions of mortgages are set -- like time bombs -- to accelerate in 2008. Defaults of $1 trillion are predicted -- affecting not only large institutions such as pension funds, hedge funds and universities but also countless average Americans. Hand-wringing time? Just consider these recent events:

* Moody's and other such agencies have threatened to downgrade the ratings of securities that are based on mortgages that allow accelerated payment -- with far more bad paper still out there.

* To avoid bankruptcy after its stock plummeted because of record high foreclosures, Countrywide Financial is being acquired by Bank of America.

* Money managers including Bear Stearns and investment bankers Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual are under investigation for fraud and allegedly making Enron-like off-balance-sheet transactions.

* Of the nearly 3 million sub-prime adjustable-rate loans surveyed by the Mortgage Bankers Assn., a record 18.81% are already past due.

What clearer evidence do we need that markets do not regulate themselves? Yet the government response has been mostly timid.

The Fed's recent rules allow action against predatory lenders only on showing a "pattern and practice" of unlawful conduct; disclosures of "yield-spread premiums" -- kickbacks -- can still remain buried in a mountain of loan documents. Prepayment penalties make it nearly impossible for good-faith borrowers to get out from under bad loans. The Bush administration's voluntary mortgage rate "freeze" will reach less than 25% of borrowers.

Politicians of every stripe are running scared -- and for cover. Yet Republicans and some Democrats (lining up at the Wall Street trough) are actually still calling for less regulation of U.S. markets.

It is time -- it is past time -- to get off this deregulation highway. We need more government, not less, to protect us against banks and conglomerates and the sheer concentration of power they portend.

We need the SEC to change from Wall Street lap dog to aggressive advocate for the public interest. Instead of holding round-tables with corporate lawyers to find ways to prevent shareholder lawsuits, it should act, for example, on an investors petition to require polluters to disclose their multibillion-dollar liability for climate change. And the Justice Department needs to be the people's law firm again -- not house counsel for big banks and corporations, as has been the case in every major fraud and antitrust lawsuit before the Supreme Court of late. And Congress needs to enact and send to the White House the proposed Mortgage Reform and Anti-Predatory Lending Act to strengthen consumer safeguards against rapacious bankers and their Wall Street enablers.

Change, it is said, is in the wind. There is no better place to start than reining in the robber barons of the 21st century.

Al Meyerhoff is of counsel in a law firm specializing in securities fraud cases.