While I might not be able to keep up with discussion right now, given a few pieces of data it seems that a thread for research on this topic might be timely. The question is: Can viruses have a positive effect on the human organism? If so, how, and under what circumstances?
Shijing's post here contained an interesting quote from Jane Roberts' Seth book, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events.
That quote included the following (blue text and insertions are Shijing's):
Here are the relevant excerpts from Laura's interview:
And another quote from further on:
Now, what started me creating this thread was a quick search inspired by Shijing's post, just to see if there is already known symbiosis of viruses with humans. I found the following paper which is very fascinating (my emphasis):
_http://jmm.sgmjournals.org/content/58/4/531.full
doi: 10.1099/jmm.0.002246-0
J Med Microbiol April 2009
vol. 58 no. 4 531-532
From the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, here's a stunner that I was not aware of (My emphasis, and I've added the references as well):
Human endogenous retroviruses in health and disease: a symbiotic perspective
Frank P Ryan, FRCP FLS
_http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079666/
Just after that:
After some discussion of the possible involvement of HERVs in disease, cancer, autoimmune problems, etc.:
...and that's about all I have time to read and post right now. If anyone else wants to tug this thread here's a link to repeat the search that turned up these two papers (the first two search results - I haven't looked at the others):
_https://startpage.com/do/search?q=human+symbiosis+viruses
Anyway, I hope this information inspires some enlightening discussion!
Shijing's post here contained an interesting quote from Jane Roberts' Seth book, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events.
That quote included the following (blue text and insertions are Shijing's):
The blue text seems to reference Laura's recent SOTT talk interview here: http://www.sott.net/article/273085-SOTT-Talk-Radio-Into-the-Mystic-Interview-with-Laura-Knight-Jadczyk Maybe there's more discussion about the idea somewhere, or Laura has written further about it, but a forum search found no dedicated threads, so hopefully creating this one serves a purpose.The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events said:Individually, each “victim” was to one extent or another a “victim” of apathy, despair, or hopelessness, which automatically lowered bodily defenses.
Not only do such states of mind lower the defenses, however, but they activate and change the body’s chemistries, alter its balances, and initiate disease conditions. Many viruses inherently capable of causing death, in normal conditions contribute to the overall health of the body, existing side by side as it were with other viruses, each contributing quite necessary activities that maintain bodily equilibrium. {Reference the concept of pleomorphism, and also some recent discussion about viruses being "information bundles" which can have different effects according to context}
If [certain viruses] are triggered, however, to higher activity or overproduction by mental states, they then become “deadly.” Physically they may be passed on in whatever manner is peculiar to a specific strain. Literally, individual mental problems of sufficient severity emerge as social, mass diseases.
Here are the relevant excerpts from Laura's interview:
Juliana: The Fifth Option?
Laura: Yeah, The Fifth Option. It's really... Robert [Bryant] Shiller, was that his name? But anyhow, he wrote this great little book called The Fifth Option. And the interesting thing about it is Shiller is an engineer, and what he did was he looked at the living system, you know, life itself, as an engineering problem. And if you have an engineering problem, you are presented with something, you begin to examine its characteristics, and then you kind of like extrapolate backwards to find out what the design purpose could be. And then if you have design functions, you can figure out the design purpose, and then you can speculate at least, about the designer.
I don't think there is a designer as such; I think what is the substrate of all existence is just simply information, and information configures itself in many, many ways. And information, ultimately, if you think about it in computer terms, it's just the many myriad ways that yes and no, on andoff, zero and one can be configured, and endless streams of it. In a sense, you know, some of those images from the movie The Matrix come pretty close to showing how our reality may be constructed. It's just these long strings of zeroes and ones, 'ons' and 'offs', 'yeses' and 'nos' that interact with each other and...
Joe: Yeah but where did it come from? I mean, isn't that the problem that all these people are trying to wrestle with?
Laura: Yes, that is the problem.
Joe: And is there an answer to that, or is there even any point in trying to?...
Laura: I don't think we, at our level of existence, can get that answer. I think we can go further into the question than the evolutionists or the Dawkins types can do, which is what physics actually does, and what mathematics actually does, and what my husband does. But, you know, ultimately you realise that what you can do is, you can configure those zeroes and ones, and you can do the mathematics, but beyond that you cannot go.
Juliana: Okay well if we can't figure that out, how does that translate, even? How does information translate into matter, for example, or into consciousness? I mean information is out there right?, and we pick it up like we were an antenna of some sort, and what if you have wrong information, lies?
Laura: Well those are just a couple of different questions kind of piled up together. How does matter come into being, is one question, and the issue about lies is another question. How does matter come into being? Well, as I said, it's configuration of yes /no, positive/negative. If you want to talk about it in terms of electricity it's like charge separation. Then there's many other physics terms, and you're getting into something here that's very, very difficult to talk about. But if you would imagine - if we're just going to talk about yeses and noes or positive/negatives, zeroes/ones. Let's just imagine that there's a whole bunch of zeroes associating, which are noes, which are impetus to non-existence, or parts of the ideas of non-existence. A whole bunch of noes with maybe just a few ones, which would be positives, or the impetus to existing, or creation, associated together. Well that would be kind of like a piece of matter, that would form as matter.
Now if you have something that has a whole bunch of ones, which is impetus to creation, and just a few zeroes, which would be the noes, or the non-existence, then you would have something like a spiritualised concept, perhaps. So you would kind of cluster things, you would add them together, it's like addition and subtraction.
And I would say that from an ideological or informational realm, that if there was a whole bunch of the noes that kind of glomped together, maybe in a way like just jostling around in a soup, but it's an idea soup. And they jostled around, they all kind of clumped together, and there was a little bit of, you know, just enough of the ones to give it the impetus to become matter, in the sense of hard matter, then it would kind of like burst into existence all of a sudden, it would just be a little bubble.
And then if you have a bunch of that happening, because there's so many infinite ideas and so many infinite concepts, concepts of like hydrogen and nitrogen and helium. So you start having these really basic little conceptual things popping into reality, and lots of them, and lots of them. And then they start jostling around, and because of the affinities, due to their accumulations or their properties of yeses/noes or positives/negatives, then they begin to clump together, because they have this tendency to do that, the same way the fat on a bowl of soup has a tendency to want to clump together, you know, it wants to form a big bubble on your soup.
And then you would have matter, and then you would still, in the information realm you would still be having clumps of more spiritualized idea things that still had enough of the zeroes that would give them kind of a tendency to want to connect, by some kind of charge, to a piece of matter. So they would then connect to it, and the matter that would be in one realm of existence, or one plane, and then there would be the spiritualized idea that would be kind of connected to it by a tenuous little link still in the spiritual realm, and it would infuse this bit of matter with information. It would create a channel for information so that piece of matter could then begin to do little more interesting things. And then you just multiply this process and then you get some pretty basic living cells, like for example a virus.
I mean this might be how viruses actually come into being, because they are, they're really kind of not really alive, and not really lifeless. They need a cell to get into in order to come alive, because they don't have all the properties of a cell, and viruses can float around in space, probably for billions of years and be dormant, and then finally land on a place where there's a living cell, and they kind of get into it, because they've got little programs.
And that's the interesting thing about it because all of these things are like little programs, like DNA are programs, viruses are programs. So maybe a virus is one of the most basic ways that information gets transmitted from other realms into our world.
And that kind of leads, in a funny sort of way, to your question about information and lies. What if viruses are infusions of information that create order? I mean think about it. What if there is a civilization that is loaded with lies and it has a deficit, and there is something that needs to happen, and virii arrive on the scene with a certain kind of information and begin invading the cells?
Well in those individuals where the information quality and quantity is kind of topped up with truth, maybe the virus won't have any effect, and maybe in those people where they have a real deficit, the virus invades and takes over and the body dies, and everything is returned to the information field. Yeah it's just a lot of interesting thoughts about that.
And another quote from further on:
Joe: Right, but just based on what has been said in the Cassiopaean sessions, is it simply people making those choices themselves that can change their reality, or is there some mechanism, like we were talking about...'the wave'?
Laura: There has to be a network. People have to be networked together, they have to be collinear, they have to be moving in the same direction, they have to understand things in the same way, or else there is not enough weight to the information they accumulate, and enough collection of this energy that can cause them to move to another reality, to create another reality. It takes a network!
Joe: But is there a macrocosmic force that facilitates some kind of a movement to a new reality?
Laura: That is probably the 'Wave'. Because there are things happening, there are things that we notice in our cosmos, our solar system, we notice, you know, our sun is going quiet, there has been 'global warming' on all the planets in the solar system, and I don't think we've been producing carbon monoxide, or dioxide, emissions on Mars, Venus, Jupiter or Saturn. They've all been accumulating extra moons and so forth.
There's something really big going on in the cosmos, and there's something happening, there is something coming, there is something going to happen. And at that moment, if there is a network, if there is a sufficient number of people who See things the same way - and we're not talking about some kind of 'overlord group mind' here; we're talking about people who See and perceive Truth. Because Truth is Truth, is Truth! I mean, it's not 'your truth, my truth, his truth, her truth'... that's that freakin' feel-good shit. Get over it! There is Truth, there is reality!
Juliana: How do you envision that transition? You know, you talk about third density and fourth, the possibility of transitioning into fourth density when the wave supposedly comes.
Laura: I think that when you start to accumulate certain information, you already begin your own transition. And some of the information involves dietary changes that actually change the DNA of your body, and make your body more receptive to that energy, so that you're actually better able to transform.
Let me tell you one thing; the lining of your stomach replaces itself something like every eight hours. That's because it hosts a lot of activity that is very destructive to tissues. But what that tells you is that there is a mechanism that can speed up the production, the building, of cellular tissues. You know, other parts of your body, there are other parts where the entire organ gets replaced every twenty-four hours, like parts of your pancreas. Other parts that replace more rapidly, bones every so many years... and this and that and the other thing....
Okay, there is something like 2% of our DNA is what they say builds our bodies. Okay, what if some of that DNA could instruct our bodies to transform in a way that I'm talking about, where they literally, when that DNA gets turned on, it transforms you completely. And all you're waiting for is a certain bit of cosmic energy, and you have to be receptive to that cosmic energy.
What if it's a virus that comes from space that causes the DNA to do that? What if a virus comes and all the people who are receptive, because they have the information and the information has caused them to make decisions, like changing their diet and living a certain way, and thinking a certain way, and doing certain things, so this virus comes along and it gets in you.
Well, what about the ninety-some percent who didn't accumulate the information and make the choices and decisions to move into another potentiated reality? Okay, so what's going to happen? The people who have it, the receptor, the receivership capability, they transform. The other people: Black Death, eighty percent mortality rate.
Juliana: And they might not even realise, right?
Laura: And they might not even realise. That's how a transformation could happen, because you can bet that when a transformation occurs, it's going to happen in ways that seem natural and follow the ordinary laws of our reality. You're not going to have some big, you know, flash of light...
Now, what started me creating this thread was a quick search inspired by Shijing's post, just to see if there is already known symbiosis of viruses with humans. I found the following paper which is very fascinating (my emphasis):
_http://jmm.sgmjournals.org/content/58/4/531.full
I'm not sure exactly how journal papers are catalogued, but for the record I'll paste what seems to be the info about this paper here:The challenge of discovering beneficial viruses said:The challenge of discovering beneficial viruses
Hong-Hui Shen
The most important effect of viruses on the human body is to cause infectious diseases. A number of serious diseases in humans are the result of viral infection, including influenza, haemorrhagic fever, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Deaths from infectious viral diseases make up a large proportion of those worldwide from human disease. Some viruses are recognized in the aetiology of non-infectious conditions, including inflammation, cancers and other life-threatening diseases. Even though many recent studies on new antiviral approaches focused on vaccines and RNA interference technology, and have obtained promising outcomes, newly identified human viruses, such as Ebola virus (Bermejo et al., 2006), SARS-CoV (Tsang et al., 2003), Nipah virus (Bellini et al., 2005) and H5N1 highly pathogenic avian influenza virus (Oner et al., 2006), are continually found. These create serious challenges to worldwide public health. Therefore, new strategies are needed to counteract pathogenic viruses.
As well as negative roles, micro-organisms also have beneficial functions. The biological world is harmonious. Many different micro-organisms coexist in an overall symbiotic relationship, such as the complex array of commensal bacterial flora that colonizes the gastrointestinal tract. Some symbiotic bacteria are beneficial to the human body (Sekirov & Finlay, 2006), and play an important role in the decomposition and absorption of food and other substances, including medicines. Quite simply, in the case of human dysbacteriosis, the alteration of the flora will result in diarrhoea and other intestinal disorders. As another example, many parasitoid wasps species are known to harbour symbiotic viruses, and these viruses have a mutual relationship with their wasp host, particularly for host immune responses (Renault et al., 2005). This poses the question: are there beneficial symbiotic viruses in the human body which protect humans from infections caused by other viruses?
It has been shown that many primary viral infections prevent superinfection caused by a homologous secondary virus. Interference between viruses occurs when infection by one virus results in the inhibition of replication of another virus. For example, hepatitis A virus infection suppresses hepatitis C virus replication, and may lead to recovery from hepatitis C virus (Deterding et al., 2006). Prior infection with human cytomegalovirus impeded subsequent superinfection with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV); in contrast, uninfected bystander cells within the population were still permissive for HIV infection (King et al., 2006). The nature of these phenomena is unclear at present, but increasing findings support the hypothesis that interference of virus infection may involve multiple mechanisms, including STAT activation (Bovolenta et al., 2002), intermolecular competition for the formation of active chromatin structure, virus gene mutation (Jardi et al., 2001), transcriptional regulation (Flichman et al., 1999), induction of antiviral cytokines or cellular resistance to another virus (van Nunen et al., 2001), and interference or down-modulation of cellular receptors for viruses (Crowley et al., 1996).
The interference of homologous and heterologous viruses has been well studied in vitro. However, most of the currently identified human viruses were isolated from patients, and all interfering viruses known today are pathogenic for humans. Virus isolation focuses on pathogenic viruses rather than possible beneficial viruses. The beneficial or symbiotic viruses that may be non-pathogenic micro-organisms in humans should never be ignored!
Some people may not be ill, even if they are infected with or exposed to a pathogenic virus. As examples, we see long-term nonprogressors with HIV infection, individuals with long-term high-risk exposure to HIV, populations with low morbidity of virus-related cancers, and individuals who remain free of illness in epidemics or pandemics of serious viral diseases. To explore these interesting phenomena, most current studies only look at the viral genome, genetic susceptibility and immunity; few associate these cases with the possibility of beneficial viruses. In fact, many genetic variations exist in both ‘healthy’ people and patients; and genetic diversity varies as well as severity of disease. Traditional laboratory techniques, such as the use of certain cell strains and culture conditions, may affect the results of virus isolation. The inability to cultivate most host-associated microbes hampers our understanding of beneficial viruses, which in turn limits the awareness of the possible existence of such viruses.
However, in support of the concept of beneficial viruses, a recent study (Venkataraman et al., 2008) revealed that ‘Seneca Valley Virus-001’ demonstrates cancer-killing specificity that is 10 000 times higher than that seen in traditional chemotherapeutics, with no overt toxicity; and that the 3D-structure of the virus is unlike that of any other known member of the virus family Picornaviridae. Thereby, it is reasonable to speculate that beneficial viruses may already exist, and what we need to do is to find out what they are and what their role is. Isolating beneficial viruses is a considerable challenge, and the critically important first step is to find out what region of its structure the virus is using to bind to target cells, and what those target cell receptors are. Then the beneficial virus may be used for treatment of disease.
To uncover beneficial viruses will be certainly a great project, and requires more attention from biological scientists all over the world. It will, however, be a great revolution in the field of biology if beneficial viruses become potent agents that can be used as therapy for many different diseases.
References
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Bellini, W. J., Harcourt, B. H., Bowden, N. & Rota, P. A. (2005). Nipah virus: an emergent paramyxovirus causing severe encephalitis in humans. J Neurovirol 11, 481–487.
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Bermejo, M., Rodriguez-Teijeiro, J. D., Illera, G., Barroso, A., Vila, C. & Walsh, P. D. (2006). Ebola outbreak killed 5000 gorillas. Science 314, 1564
Abstract/FREE Full Text
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Bovolenta, C., Pilotti, E., Mauri, M., Panzeri, B., Sassi, M., Dall'Aglio, P., Bertazzoni, U., Poli, G. & Casoli, C. J. (2002). Retroviral interference on STAT activation in individuals coinfected with human T cell leukemia virus type 2 and HIV-1. J Immunol 169, 4443–4449.
Abstract/FREE Full Text
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Crowley, R. W., Secchiero, P., Zella, D., Cara, A., Gallo, R. C. & Lusso, P. (1996). Interference between human herpesvirus 7 and HIV-1 in mononuclear phagocytes. J Immunol 156, 2004–2008.
Abstract
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Deterding, K., Tegtmeyer, B., Cornberg, M., Hadem, J., Potthoff, A., Boker, K. H., Tillmann, H. L., Manns, M. P. & Wedemeyer, H. (2006). Hepatitis A virus infection suppresses hepatitis C virus replication and may lead to clearance of HCV. J Hepatol 45, 770–778.
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Flichman, D., Cello, J., Castano, G., Campos, R. & Sookoian, S. (1999). In vivo down regulation of HIV replication after hepatitis C superinfection. Medicina (B Aires) 59, 364–366.
Medline
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Jardi, R., Rodriguez, F., Buti, M., Costa, X., Cotrina, M., Galimany, R., Esteban, R. & Guardia, J. (2001). Role of hepatitis B, C, and D viruses in dual and triple infection: influence of viral genotypes and hepatitis B precore and basal core promoter mutations on viral replicative interference. Hepatology 34, 404–410.
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King, C. A., Baillie, J. & Sinclair, J. H. (2006). Human cytomegalovirus modulation of CCR5 expression on myeloid cells affects susceptibility to human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection. J Gen Virol 87, 2171–2180.
Abstract/FREE Full Text
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Oner, A. F., Bay, A., Arslan, S., Akdeniz, H., Sahin, H. A., Cesur, Y., Epcacan, S., Yilmaz, Z., Deger, I. & other authors (2006). Avian influenza A (H5N1) infection in eastern Turkey in 2006. N Engl J Med 355, 2179–2185.
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Renault, S., Stasiak, K., Federici, B. & Bigot, Y. (2005). Commensal and mutualistic relationships of reoviruses with their parasitoid wasp hosts. J Insect Physiol 51, 137–148.
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Sekirov, I. & Finlay, B. B. (2006). Human and microbe: united we stand. Nat Med 12, 736–737.
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Tsang, K. W., Ho, P. L., Ooi, G. C., Yee, W. K., Wang, T., Chan-Yeung, M., Lam, W. K., Set, W. H., Yam, L. Y. & other authors (2003). A cluster of cases of severe acute respiratory syndrome in Hong Kong. N Engl J Med 348, 1977–1985.
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van Nunen, A. B., Pontesilli, O., Uytdehaag, F., Osterhaus, A. D. & de Man, R. A. (2001). Suppression of hepatitis B virus replication mediated by hepatitis A-induced cytokine production. Liver 21, 45–49.
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Venkataraman, S., Reddy, S. P., Loo, J., Idamakanti, N., Hallenbeck, P. L. & Redd, V. P. (2008). Structure of Seneca Valley Virus-001: an oncolytic picornavirus representing a new genus. Structure 16, 1555–1561.
Medline
doi: 10.1099/jmm.0.002246-0
J Med Microbiol April 2009
vol. 58 no. 4 531-532
From the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, here's a stunner that I was not aware of (My emphasis, and I've added the references as well):
Human endogenous retroviruses in health and disease: a symbiotic perspective
Frank P Ryan, FRCP FLS
_http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1079666/
Genome sequencing reveals that 8% of the human genome consists of human endogenous retroviruses, or HERVs, and, if we extend this to HERV fragments and derivatives, the retroviral legacy amounts to roughly half our DNA. 2,3
[2. Bannert N, Kurth R. Retroelements and the human genome: new perspectives on an old relation. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA(in press)]
[3. Medstrand P, van de Lagemaat LN, Mager DL. Retroelement distributions in the human genome: variations associated with age and proximity to genes. Genome Res 2002;12: 1483-95.]
Just after that:
The most recently integrated human endogenous retrovirus yet discovered is HERV-K113, found on chromosome 19 in just 29% of people of mainly African, Asian and Polynesian extraction. It could only have been incorporated into the human genome after the last great migration from Africa, certainly less than 200 000 years ago and possibly much more recently.4 Like the virus designated HERV-H/RGH-2, which is associated with multiple sclerosis, it may retain some degree of horizontal transmissibility.5 However, the great majority of HERVs have lost the capacity for horizontal transmission and have entered into a long-standing union with the rest of the human genome.
[4. Turner G, Barbulescu M, Su M, et al. Insertional polymorphisms of full-length endogenous retroviruses in humans. Curr Biol 2001;11: 1531-5.]
[5. Christensen T, Pedersen L, Sorensen PD, et al. A transmissible human endogenous retrovirus. AIDS Res Hum Retroviruses 2002;18: 861-6.]
After some discussion of the possible involvement of HERVs in disease, cancer, autoimmune problems, etc.:
While some of these associations may well play a part in aetiology, we need to bear in mind that HERVs are not acute viruses, behaving selfishly. Indeed there is growing evidence that HERVs are symbiotic partners that have been integrated into the human genome for millions of years. As Johnson and colleagues warn us, their expression might be augmented or disturbed as a secondary phenomenon in cancerous tissues or tissues involved in inflammatory responses, sometimes making them tumour markers or even a normal aspect of the inflammatory process.15 Researchers have of necessity become increasingly cautious in planning and interpreting their studies.
[15. Johnson JB, Silva C, Holden J, et al. Monocyte activation and differentiation augment human endogenous retrovirus expression: implications for inflammatory brain diseases. Ann Neurol 2001;50: 434-42.]
In 2001, O'Neill and her colleagues showed how retroviruses inhabiting the centromeres of the chromosomes of hybrid Australian rock wallabies are creating new species by wholesale juggling of chromosomal fragments.16 In that same year Hughes and Coffin used phylogenetic and sequence analysis to suggest that human endogenous retroviruses may have induced large-scale deletions, duplications and chromosome reshuffling in human genomic evolution.17 In the opinion of the geneticist Eugene Sverdlov, these viruses played a significant role in the evolution and divergence of the hominids.18
[16. O'Neill RJW, Eldridge MDB, Graves JAM. Chromosome hererozygosity and de novo chromosome rearrangements in mammalian interspecies hybrids. Mammalian Genome 2001;12: 256-9.]
[17. Hughes JF, Coffin JM. Evidence for genomic rearrangements mediated by human endogenous retroviruses during primate evolution. Nat Genet 2001;29: 487-9.]
[18. Sverdlov ED. Retroviruses and human evolution. BioEssays 2000;22: 161-71.]
...and that's about all I have time to read and post right now. If anyone else wants to tug this thread here's a link to repeat the search that turned up these two papers (the first two search results - I haven't looked at the others):
_https://startpage.com/do/search?q=human+symbiosis+viruses
Anyway, I hope this information inspires some enlightening discussion!