Re: Alternative Media, Blogs, Speculation, TinFoil Hats Allo
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Passwater: After publishing your selenium - HIV discovery, you proposed a possible relationship between selenium and the Ebola virus. What did you find and why did you think to look for this relationship?
Taylor: Coincidentally, I began to study Ebola less than a month before the 1995 outbreak in Kikwit, Zaire that brought this virus so drastically into the public consciousness. I did so because of a poster presentation I had seen that spring in Santa Fe, at a meeting of the International Society for Antiviral Research. A Russian group presented a world map showing the geographic areas where various hemorrhagic viral diseases tended to occur, and I was struck by the fact that the area shown for the filoviruses Ebola and Marburg matched a region in Africa that I suspected might be a low-selenium region. What we found was striking: several gene regions in Ebola contained large numbers of UGA codons, up to 17 in one segment. We later published a paper showing that it might be possible for Ebola to synthesize selenoproteins from these gene regions, and proposed a mechanism whereby this might induce artificial selenium deficiency and contribute to the blood clotting characteristic of Ebol
a pathology.During the revisions to the final draft of that paper, we learned of a 1993 paper in a Chinese journal that reported the use of selenium to treat an Ebola-like hemorrhagic fever, with remarkable results. Luckily, the English translation of the abstract was available. Using the very high oral dose of 2 mg selenium per day as sodium selenite, for only 9 days, the death rate fell from 100% (untreated) to 37% (treated) in the very severe cases, and from 22% to zero in the less severe cases. Apparently there were about 80 people involved in this outbreak. Dr. Hou of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, the author of this study, has since told me that he thinks more lives could have been saved if he had been permitted to give the selenite by injection, because in many of the more severly affected there is so much organ damage due to internal bleeding that they may have been unable to fully absorb or retain the oral dose of selenium. All in all, this is the closest thing to
a curative result in the treatment of hemorrhagic fever that I have ever heard of.
Passwater: Dr. Hou used selenite because quick and dramatic action was required as the patients were dying in front of him. For normal, long-range protection, organic selenium supplements, such as selenium-rich yeast or selenomethionine, are preferred, as discussed by Dr. Gerhard Schrauzer in the December 1991 issue, and by others as will be discussed later in this series.
How do hemorrhagic fever viruses cause hemorrhaging? Would selenium's effect on blood clotting in the host play a role in such diseases, or is the effect strictly an interaction with the virus itself?
Taylor: The characteristic hemorrhaging produced by various "hemorrhagic fever" viruses involves the production of blood clots that ultimately block small capillary vessels, which rupture under pressure to produce internal and even external bleeding in severe cases. This is known as "disseminated intravascular coagulation", or DIC. Thus, paradoxically, the bleeding is produced by a pro-clotting mechanism, and anticoagulants (which usually promote bleeding) have been used to treat symptoms of the disease.
This may be very significant in regard to selenium involvement, because the biochemical basis for an anti-clotting effect of selenium is very well established. Severe selenium deficiency, usually artificially induced in animals, is known to produce hemorrhagic symptoms. Thus, the idea that hemorrhagic fever viruses might produce a severe selenium depletion would be consistent with the established pro-clotting mechanism of DIC. So there may be an interaction here, where viral activity is having a direct impact on host selenium status over the period of one or two weeks, sufficient to cause serious pathology.
Alternatively, the results obtained in the Chinese study could have been simply due to the anti-clotting effect of selenium, or other mechanisms. Dr. Hou apparently decided to try the selenium treatment because of his own theories about the involvement of selenium in complement activation, another feature of hemorrhagic disease. So additional studies are badly needed, to determine what the predominant mechanism of protection by selenium really is.
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