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The Fat Pandemic
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Dr. Nikhil Dhurandhar
Wash your hands. Is this the next AIDS?
Contagion is a fear that is etched in the depths of our collective minds. We all share a terror of the Black Plague and SARS and AIDS. We are social creatures but others among us can pass along agents that will infect us -- we are susceptible to all sorts of attack. Bacteria still kills us and we have, through our over use and abuse of antibiotics, bred super antibiotic resistant bacteria.
This newest threat is viral and one that will have society by the belt when it is established; not because of how contagious it is but because of what this virus does. First, let’s get acquainted with these ultramicroscopic, metabolically inert, infectious agents known as viruses. Viruses are cleaver and only replicate when they are in a host. Hosts include plants and animals but bacteria can carry viruses. This can cause confusion as a virus bearing bacteria could keep the lab chasing the wrong guy. The virus can jump from the bacteria once it is in a more attractive host. A virus has either an RNA or a DNA core and a protein coat, the more advanced of them have a protein envelope, but even with a protein covering they are 20 to 300 nm in diameter. We’re talking small.
This newly discovered virus is cousin to the common cold but unlike the cold it will not make you feel run down or take away your appetite, what this virus, the Human Adenovirus 36 or AD36, does is make you fat. IT MAKES YOU FAT.
AD36 is suspected to be present in 30% of obese people, 11% of the population are believed to have the virus but are not obese. So like polio there are carriers. As an issue of public health this is huge, not because we are all going to become infected but because of hysteria. Obese people in the USA already carry stigma. As this becomes more top-o-mind the reaction will be extreme. Professor Nikhil Dhurandhar who is a staff researcher with Pennington Biomedical Research Centre in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has a study that implicates AD-36 as a potential cause for Britain's relatively high rate of adult obesity. (One would think he could have stayed in Louisiana and researched there)
The implications for the USA’s epidemic of obesity are not yet understood. So while we have been waiting for the Avian Flu to transmutate and begin to infect humans and become a pandemic and the H1N1A to come closer and closer to the astronomical numbers of fear infections, we may have been sitting on a pandemic. There are 174 million over weight US citizens and 92 million obese. I don’t know if it is a relief or a burden to consider that my inability to become svelte might be related to AD-36. I know for sure, at the All-U-Can-Eat buffet we will be hearing less and less about a thyroid conditions and more and more about this stubborn virus.
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