Could a virus be the cause of MS?
Posted: Mon Mar 12, 2012 7:38 am
Might some forms of neurological illness, such as multiple sclerosis and schizophrenia, be caused at least partly by bacteria, viruses or other parasites? A largely Danish team has recently published evidence of a strong association between multiple sclerosis and a retrovirus, together with hints that a gene called TRIM5, which is used by cells to fight viruses, is especially active in people with MS.
Other illnesses have unexpectedly turned out to be caused by parasites. In the 1980s, Barry Marshall of the University of Western Australia ran into a brick wall of official disbelief for suggesting that a bacterium caused stomach ulcers. Only by deliberately infecting and then curing himself did he finally get the medical establishment's attention (and eventually the Nobel Prize).
The virus implicated in multiple sclerosis is called HERV-Fc1, a bizarre beast called an "endogenous" retrovirus. What this means is that its genes are part of the human genome. For millions of years, they have been integrated into our own DNA and passed on by normal heredity. It was one of the shocks of genomic science to find that the human genome contains more retroviral than "human" genes: some 5% to 8% of the entire genome.... Read More - http://www.msrc.co.uk/index.cfm/fuseact ... ageid/3392