Swine Flu Update: D225G Mutation in Brazil

Once again, Dr Henry Niman is out front keeping us abreast of all that is new in the still on-going Swine Flu epidemic. The major media are largely silent and are mostly concerned with the vaccine scammers backstabbing one another. The marketing campaign to convince the public of the world's nations that they must be vaccinated against the Swine Flu has been a miserable failure. Now governments are backing out of production contracts they signed months ago with the big vaccine manufacturers. Expect big law suites as inventories grow of unused and unsaleable vaccine lots. They're talking about shipping it all off to 'third world' countries as 'foreign aid'. But the real story centers around the severe and fatal cases that are still occurring around the world in many countries caused by a viral mutation called D225G. Now D225G has showed up in fatal cases in Brazil which is a long way from Ukraine and other Eastern European countries where it first appeared. This may mean that a fatal mutated virus is spreading, and there is the possibility that it may replace the milder form that has been wide-spread so far. In that event, the death rate may sky-rocket. Let us hope that that does not happen.

But the news from Brazil is not good.

Identical H1N1 Fatal D225G Sequences in Brazil and Ukraine

Recombinomics Commentary 14:39January 11, 2010

Recent sequences from five fatal cases in Brazil were released, including an HA sequence with D225G, a polymorphism which had only been seen in fatal cases in Brazil. This 100% case fatality rate linked to samples with D225 or D225N has been reported for several countries, but in many instances the origin of the sample has been the affected tissue. This might skew data toward fatal cases because most milder cases are diagnosed via nasopharyngeal swabs which may have lower levels of H1N1 with D225G. However, the Brazilian sample, A/ Rio de Janeiro/5826/2009 was a nasopharyngeal swab, demonstrating that D225G could be identified through an upper respiratory source commonly used for milder cases. However, the sequence in the July sample from Brazil was an exact match with A/Lviv/N6/2009, which was from the lung of a fatal case in Ukraine, collected in late October. This identity provides additional evidence supporting the spread of these sequences, which is further supported by matches between more localized sequences.However, the WHO working hypothesis maintains that the changes at position 225 are random errors that do not transmit. The matches such as the one above, or the same change in closely related sequences that are close in time and space, are simply coincidences generating independently again and again by copy errors. This unlikely scenario is cited because these changes are appended onto different genetic backgrounds. In Brazil the background in Rio de Janeiro with D225G is distinct from the two sequences in Sao Paulo with D225G. Moreover, there have been many additional examples of jumps from one genetic background to another, which is most easily explained by recombination. However, WHO consultants insist that recombination plays little or no role in genetic drift, which is solely driven by random copy errors.As more data accumulates, this random mutation hypothesis becomes less and less tenable. In addition to the above sequence from Brazil, recent sequences from Ukraine and Moldova have two or more changes at position 225, further diminishingly the explanation of random mutations. In Ukraine, these new sequences demonstrated that the reports of position 225 changes paralleled the spread of the outbreak and associated fatalities. Initial sequences were from western Ukraine and involved HA sequences with D225G or D225N. Subsequent sequences from Kviv and Chernihiv had both changes in the same patient, which would require two random errors that coincidently targeted the same position in the same patient. Moreover, the Kyiv patient also has D225A requiring three random errors at the same position. Examples of multiple changes at the same position in the same patient have been reported in patients in the United States, Mexico, and Sweden, which are unlikely to be generated by the same random errors repeated again and again.These changes are associated with a case fatality rate of 100% in many countries, including Ukraine and Brazil and raise serious concerns. The WHO effort of shoring up an untenable hypothesis is hazardous to the world's health.