Virus Screen and Treat
First a disclaimer. This will go totally outside my zone of expertise and comfort. This is meant to be evaluated by experts to see if this is worth a try. (Of course, so far as I can tell, this whole virus thing is outside the zone of expertise and comfort of the highly paid experts. Nobody really knows what’s going on,) So, listen or read for interest, please send this on to anybody and everybody, and if we all would send links to our congress folk, senators and the White House, maybe we can pester somebody up there enough so they take an interest.
Alas we live in a world where motivation is largely money and power. On the face of it, our political leaders want to kill us. They do so with wars and executions and recently by incredibly ignoring the virus which has become a raging pandemic. Sweden, which avoids wars and executions has joined enthusiastically in going deer-in-the-headlights and ignoring the spreading virus. Unless some treatment such as I shall explain below is instituted and succeeds, their medical facilities will be overwhelmed and about 20% of their citizens, read victims, will die. There will only be enough medical care for the rich and powerful. The true colors of their politicians are revealed. Personal opinion of course.
Worldwide, if everybody gets the bug, twenty percent will perish. Available health care will not make a significant dent in that. Nobody seems to want to use the B word, but take a fifth of over 6 billion, and you come up with a number well worth saving even if it pales in comparison with infertility.
We might all get lucky. Somebody has looked at the best numbers and thinks that mutations that lessen the severity of the virus are successfully competing with the worst form. I recently watched in interview with a certified virologist who denied this, but I found her testimony troubling because she spent the whole time rocking backwards and forwards which made it look like she was most uncomfortable with what she was saying. Of course, the lords of the earth had no way of knowing whether helpful mutations would happen, although it’s long been considered a possibility. And of course, a bad mutation could happen.
There is a hope that if we can slow the spread of the virus sufficiently, there will be “herd immunity.” But even people who are not sick enough to go to a hospital can get lung involvement with the virus. Indeed, the chest CT is about the best way to screen for an infection. The virus damages the lungs, leaving permanent fibrosis. How many survivors of “mild” disease will take lung damage and how bad is of course unknown. I think prudence dictates you try not to get it at all.
The mighty of the earth do not want to hear from you; they want to kill you (Drat, there I go again.). Hence my earnest appeal to challenge them. Let’s get down to the biology.
Here is a nose:
The nose gives us a sense of smell, and it is in direct contact with the brain by little nerves that come through a plate of bone called the cribriform plate so always treat the nose gently. The selective advantage of the smell is that it helps tell us whether something is good to eat. This function of course can be interfered with by highly spiced food. The other thing the nose does is to warm and filter air to protect the lungs. The nose has enormous blood flow for warming and it can filter out things as small as a virus. How effective it is at picking up viruses I don’t know and don’t know whether anybody knows. So, let’s decide that the one virus that is going to make you ill has an 80% chance of getting stopped by the nose. Use any number you like and adjust what I am going to say accordingly. The currently coveted n95 mask has a 95% chance of catching one virus, so the nose, which has been subject to selection in mammals for hundreds of millions of years should be pretty good.
The virus is able to attack particular cells at particular places on the cell. There are many such cells deep in the lungs, which is where the virus does its dirty work. There are also such cells in the pharynx; we know because they use swabs from there to test for the virus. And it seems to me more than likely that there are such cells in the nose, because the nose can lose its sense of smell quite early in the infection. That’s not proven. I just watched a show by Stefan Molyneux interviewing a specialist in virology, who was most impressive. The guest said his work with monkeys indicated that the virus could get into the brain either through the nose or up in from peripheral nerves. It seems to me that once, there the virus could be protected by the blood brain barrier for the treatment I’ll get around to describing. Now if selection has gifted the virus with ways to get through all the obstacles to entering, it probably has given a way for the virus to get out after lurking potentially for years. If you want to get really depressed, You can find the interview here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkqYLKDWrVc
If you don’t want to try to freeze the video, you can go to the script at http://nobabies.net/movie%20scripts.html scroll down to 61 and maybe give me a day or two to get it properly posted.
So here is a cell being attacked by a Corona virus:
The spikes on the virus give it sort of an appearance of a crown, and hence the name. The virus has a membrane that is like membranes around your own cells. It contains a payload of RNA, which is kin to DNA. The surface of the vulnerable cell has a location called the angiotensin converting enzyme, or ACE. Selection has tweaked the tips of the spikes to fit the ACE site, and once it does the RNA, which is of the form messenger RNA, is dumped into the cell. There the RNA is replicated using, among other things including the cell’s own chemistry, a protein called RNA polymerase to make things the virus needs. The result is that new virus particles either bud off from the surface of the cell or the cell ruptures – I don’t know which – and new virions are released.
This process can be broken up by a zinc ion, Z++, which destroys the RNA polymerase. That does the host no harm, since RNA polymerase is of no use to the host cell. The host messenger RNA is made from DNA in the nucleus. The zinc does destroy the mechanism of the virus.
But the zinc ion cannot simply cross the cell membrane of the host cell. It has to go in by way of another site on the cell surface we can call the zinc receptor. If the zinc receptor is activated, in goes the ion. It seems to me miraculous, but the cheap and well-studied drug chloroquine fills the bill. It has been used for decades to treat the big killer malaria.
Other things also can open the zinc receptor, including hydrochloroquine and a food supplement called quercetin. In cell culture quercetin functions best at a concentration of 100 mg per kg.
I envision a roadside testing place at a suitable location with twenty volunteers, a single professional, a couple of police to make it official, and suitable signs. Somebody drives up, a volunteer offers on a nice long stick a bit of filter paper with an essential oil like wintergreen, eucalyptus, peppermint or whatever. If the diver can smell it, he gets a list of suggestions, a caution that this misses cases so not to be overconfident and an invitation to return. If he cannot, he is given a bag with instructions, a mask and a course of quercetin and is told to stay at home until a professional can drop by and test everybody in the household and Ok the general layout and availability of necessities. He’ll have volunteers phone him and do contact tracing.
He can also be assured that there are going to be false positive tests and although it would be been nice to have a negative test, he has spared himself and his loved ones a lot of heartache, and best of all the treatment is starting very early. How much would it cost?
A bucket of soapy water in case somebody touches a stick, sticks, clothespins, cord to tie them together, filter papers, a tent for shade, signs, oil masks around and gloves would be trivial. The volunteers bring lunches, protective glasses and chairs. The police and professional at $40 each would be $120 an hour or $1,200 for a ten-hour day. 20 volunteers each able to screen 20 subjects an hour or 4,000 a day or 30 cents per screening. Say 300 million drivers in the country, you could screen them all for 10 million dollars. For about 3 million dollars a day you could screen them all twice a week. Now we are talking about being ahead in the game. The professionals of course would be able to keep records, which would allow for evaluating the success of the enterprise and follow where the disease was.
A thought: if the infection starts in the nose, maybe a nasal swab would be more sensitive than a nasopharyngeal swab. Would somebody do a little study please.
So, catch the virus before it grows down the airway to the lungs.
The virus is always mutating, so one must wonder if it can become resistant to the chloroquine class of drugs. My guess would be that this won’t happen for a long time, since it would have to be most difficult to attach to the ACE site and block the zinc site at the same time.
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