Those pesky viruses. But is it all bad? 

Viruses are in the news just now; certainly the Ebola virus. Is it my imagination but in the run-up to the US congressional election Republicans seem to be blaming the African American President for the fact that one person – yep one – has died of Ebola in the USA. Americans should move beyond their self-centeredness and care about the thousands dying of Ebola in West Africa. Yes, even one person dying before their time is one too many; but let’s get things in perspective. According to the Centers for Disease Control, about 30,000 Americans die every year from the flu virus. Sadly, too often because they don’t get around to having a flu shot. And what’s the betting that some of those blaming Obama for Ebola in America are the same folk who are against having their children immunized, not only putting their own children at unnecessary risk, but many others as well. 

In the years 1918-1920 the Spanish flu swept around the world killing approximately 50 million people making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. Throughout the 20^th century alone smallpox killed about half a billion !  Another viral disease is polio which before the Salk vaccine came into use in the 1950s devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands, mostly children, every year. Jonas Salk was asked once why he hadn’t patented his vaccine. “Can you patent the sun?” he replied. He could have been a billionaire but worked until his death at 80 trying to find a vaccine against HIV. If anyone should be canonized it should be Jonas Salk. 

So what are viruses? They’re a relatively short thread of DNA or RNA in a protein coat. Are they alive? On their own – not really; just a very small packet of organic molecules. But let a few of the wrong ones inside you and your dying body can be riddled with trillions of them in a few days. In other words, with your help they come alive, using your cell metabolism to multiply them at a phenomenal rate. I remember in college our professor showed us a test-tube that had so many bacteria in it the water they were in was cloudy like watery milk – hundreds of millions of cells. We then added a small amount of bacteriophage – viruses that specifically attack bacteria. The professor knew the rate these viruses worked so that one virus would infect a bacterium and minutes later the poor bug would explode scattering hundreds of new viruses. The prof predicted the time and sure enough about an hour later the test tube liquid cleared as millions of bacteria exploded. Viruses move fast. They don’t multiply 1-2-4, but 1-100 -10,000; and not in years but in minutes. That’s why a virus infection can take hold so fast. And tricky to tackle:  a) because antibiotics don’t work because the cells they’re operating in are yours; and b) because their mutation rate (which is largely based on generation time) is so fast that they keep changing.

If they think about it, viruses must be quite a challenge for creationists. Did God make them too? Evolutionists, based on the fact that viruses are made of the same basic material – DNA and RNA – that give the rest of us creatures life, believe that in the very early stages of the development of cell life, these stray bits got in the mix. 

Should we say darn, and hope that on some other planet life has had better luck and no viruses are messing things up? The story gets a little more complicated. Most viruses get into a cell’s cytoplasm and then use the cell to make copies of themselves. But there’s a subset of DNA viruses that go one step further and splice themselves into our cell’s own DNA. They’re called retroviruses. They’re difficult to find let alone destroy. One example of a retrovirus is the HIV virus. Here’s the surprise – 8% of our DNA is composed of old no-longer-functioning (endogenous) retroviruses that have been handed down generation after generation for millions of years along with the rest of our DNA. More bad news for creationists. Most of us have heard that humans have a 98.5% overlap of DNA with chimps. Well we also share the same ‘fossilized’ retroviruses in the same locations on our DNA as our close primate relatives.  

If I haven’t given you enough bad news, some retroviruses can cause cancer! They do this by reverse engineering the DNA – RNA mechanism in our cell metabolism, which isn’t supposed to happen.  Before you say –‘There really must be a devil !’, here’s the kicker – we’d still be bird-brained egg-laying creatures but for this cancer causing viral insinuation.  It is believed that about 100 million years ago an early egg-laying mammal (there’s still a few around today) got infected with a retrovirus that caused a cancerous development in the embryo that embedded into the mother’s tissue, enabling an exchange of oxygen and nutrients across a protective membrane. Yep, we now refer to it as a placenta. Because retroviruses are embedded in the host’s DNA it can get handed down the generations, and it was. Put simply – we humans wouldn’t exist but for some viruses. But do get your flu shot.