Colds and Flu

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COLDS AND FLU

I believe that cold and flu viruses are healthful and that we shouldn't try to kill these. They probably perform useful functions in our bodies. Getting a cold or flu once or twice a year is probably much healthier than not getting one.

Many people with thyroid disease, especially hyperthyroidism, tend to not get colds or flu. However, once they start supplementing copper and other nutrients, they often get sick with a cold or flu. I believe that when the body is very deficient in key minerals, viruses cannot live in the body. Replenishing these nutrients allows you to heal and getting a cold or flu is a part of that healing.

Following is an article that suggests that viruses may have very important functions in the body such as cancer suppression.

Common Virus May Fight Brain Tumors

June 20,2001

WASHINGTON (AP) - In research that may offer new hope for treating an aggressive and lethal cancer, doctors say an injection of a common virus into the brains of mice caused tumors to shrink without causing other disease.

Although the study was conducted in laboratory mice, Dr. Peter Forsyth of the Tom Baker Cancer Centre in Calgary, Alberta, said the virus injection therapy may be ready for human clinical trials in about six months.

Forsyth is senior author of a study appearing Wednesday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute. The researcher acknowledged he owns stock in a company that may conduct human clinical trials with the experimental cancer therapy.

The study extends earlier work, said Forsyth, that proved the concept of treating cancer using what is called a reovirus. This is a virus that is common in the lungs and gut of humans, but which is thought to be harmless except to cancer cells.

``Normal cells have a block to infection and death from reovirus,'' Forsyth said. ``The virus can get into the normal cell but cannot infect it further.''

But the reovirus can invade cancer cells and go wild, he said.

``The cancer cell become a bloated bag of viral particles,'' said Forsyth. ``It explodes, and the viruses are released to go on and infect and kill other cancer cells.''

In the study, Forsyth and his colleagues implanted laboratory cells of glioblastoma, a highly aggressive form of brain cancer, into the brains of two dozen mice. Once the cancer cells were established and growing, half of the mice received injections of live reovirus and half got injections dead reovirus.

Forsyth said that the mice with the inactive virus died within a short time from their tumors, while at 90 days eight of the 12 mice that received live virus were still living.

``Animals treated with live virus appeared to be healthy and gained weight,'' the study said.

In an editorial in the Journal, Dr. Matthias Gromeier of Duke University said the study ``produced very encouraging results.''

In an interview, however, Gromeier said the new study does little to advance work first reported by Forsyth and others in 1998.

Gromeier also noted that although the reovirus does not produce any recognized disease in humans, there are many unknowns about the effect the virus might have if it were injected into the brain of a human.

``There are a number of aspects of the proposed strategies with reoviruses that are in the dark,'' said Gromeier, a scientist who is researching the use of another type of virus in the treatment of cancer.

Selenium Deficiency may increase Flu symptoms.

Selenium Deficiency Makes Flu More Harmful - An insufficient amount of the mineral selenium can boost damage that can be caused by the flu virus. This was determined in a laboratory setting where researchers fed mice either a normal diet or a diet lacking in a sufficient amount of selenium. The mice were then exposed to a strain of human influenza virus. The mice that were fed the
diet lacking in adequate amounts of selenium developed much more lung inflammation than the mice that were fed a normal diet. The inflammation also lasted significantly longer in the selenium-deficient mice than in their selenium-fed counterparts. April 30, 2001.