I'm going to post this here because I don't know where else to post it. If anyone thinks I should have posted this somewhere else, please let me know. Sooo...sorry if you guys think this is getting too off topic.
Fredfam,
Looked at your article. Indeed it was interesting. However, a few points deserve mention here. Firstly, the experiments were conducted with Plasmodium berghei, Plasmodium gallinaceum, and Plasmodium cynomolgi bastianelli which are not commonly implicated in either malarial infection or death in humans. Interestingly, these parasites are commonly used in experiments on rodents. Secondly, these were virus-like particles and were not definitively proven to be viruses although the assays performed do suggest a viral infection of the parasite. Indeed, to quote the authors of the paper “It is not unreasonable to suppose that the oocyst capsule constitutes a physical barrier to these particles throughout the majority of sporogony and effectively contains them.” The authors repeatedly refer to the intracellular nature of these particles, impyling that the “virus” is held inside the parasite. Thirdly the authors state at the end of the paper that these particles have only been found in the Sporogonic aspect of their life cycle (inside the mosquito). Although this does not preclude their presence in the Exo-erythrocytic or Erythrocytic (both in mammals) parts of the lifecycle, it had not been proven as of the date of this articles publishing in June 1976.
Now, I thought maybe some progress had been made on this subject in the last 32 years and performed a medline search for the terms: malaria (limited to Microbiology, Parasitology, Pathology, Therapy, Transmission, Etiology) and viruses (limited to Isolation & Purification, Pathogenicity, Genetics, Ultrastructure). Unfortunately, there seems to be no link that I could identify in the 30 results that came up (dating from 1996 to May 2007) that suggested malaria might be due to a virus. If you can find a more recent paper, or even one using the parasites that commonly infect humans, please let me know because I would love to read it.
Regarding your thinking that anti-viral medications should be tried on Malaria; my search did find some papers that seem to suggest that a potential therapeutic route that is emerging is the use of various viruses, coated with antigens from the Plasmodium falciparum parasite can be used to activate the immune system. Your body kills the virus, but learns to recognize the antigens. This in turn becomes a sort of immunity that could potentially prevent the actual infection by the parasite (if it is recognized and killed before it can infiltrate red blood cells and). However, no word is out there that this is in anything more than a research-based setting. If you would like some more information I can provide it. Also, do you think you could provide a research article that implicates lysine as an effective anti-viral therapy? I’m quite genuinely interested to see how that works.
Finally, how does this relate to dinosaurs and the bible? 1) dinosaurs probably got viruses just like people, cows, plants, dogs, fishes, bacteria, and anything else that’s alive gets viruses. Secondly – the bible makes no mention of viruses…. Hmmmmm.
