Not so much the name, but I always found Mother Abigal’s posts interesting. Focused on pandemics, Ebola, H1N1, etc. Too bad she isn’t around anymore for our current one.
Found the following FR link for a series of interviews of Mother Abigal (MA) from 2009 during the H1N1 flu. The thread is very confusing - not sure the author/interviewer new how FR worked or what. But you can muddle through it if one is so inclined.
On post 32 is the following that is very appropriate today as well:
MA: ....
It is another aspect of vaccines that I would like to make you aware of and especially with the coming flu season.
Q [Questioner]: And what is that?
MA: It is a phenomena called antibody-dependent enhancement.
As we discussed this winter the majority of viral infections of animals and man are not fatal, but are followed by recovery and the development of a state of relative or absolute resistance against re-infection with the same virus.
Much of this resistance can be attributed to specific antiviral antibodies, although cellular immune mechanisms also contribute to the protection of the host.
However not all antiviral antibodies are necessarily virus neutralizing antibodies - in addition to these virus neutralizing antibodies or non-neutralizing antibodies a further group of antibodies exist: antibodies which enhance the infectivity of the virus.
This phenomenon is known as antibody-dependent-enhancement (ADE) of viral infectivity and has been observed with various macrophage-infecting viruses.
The common features of viruses exhibiting ADE are:
1. preferential replication in macrophages
2. ability to establish persistence
3. and antigenic diversity
Q: That’s odd. How does it work?
MA: ADE occurs when the host is more efficiently infected by a combination of virus plus antibody than by the virus alone.
Can you see that?
Q: Yea, I guess. But it seems strange that an antibody would aid the virus in infection.
MA: Child, nothing in the world of Virology is strange. Let’s go back to our favorite subject the HIV virus for a moment.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2820204/posts
Oops! Above is the link to the Mother Abigal interviews.
This is an interesting post. Thanks.
I was not that into FR back then and only took infrequent peeks.
Perhaps I will try to work this into a vanity or make it part of my next “Flatten” post.
Can you provide the link please?
It doesn’t seem to have “come through.”
“I always found Mother Abigal’s posts interesting.”
Her main interest was following flu threads. The ability to track the global spread of flu using internet news sources was new and she recognized it as a valuable new tool for virus hunters.
Mother Abigail said that she was a retired CDC scientist. Ebola was one of the diseases she had worked on. She predicted that fruit bats would be the animal vector, and that a cave in Kenya would be the epicenter. This was several months before that appeared in the news.
She also believed that we were going to experience a “near-extinction event”. She based this on what happens to animal populations that experience logarithmic growth. Which in her opinion is what the world population has been doing.
So everyone was asking her if Ebola could do that; and she said no, it wasn’t easily transmitted and it killed its victims too quickly.
She said that the big killer would be airborne, and would allow you to spread it around for awhile before you got real sick. Probably a flu, which is why she was focusing on the flu threads. A hybrid flu like the 1918 H1N1 which had avian genes.