Mitchel Cohen’s “West Nile Conjecture”
I’ve long been curious about why young children in the U.S. do not
seem to develop serious symptoms to West Nile Virus, and why older people
are far more susceptible, including a certain low percentage who die from
complications from encephalitis caused, we’re told, by West Nile
virus.
Today, something snapped into place for me, and I wanted to run this by
you as a possibility, and to hear "where to go" with this
conjecture. (Yea, I opened myself with that, eh?)
Since 1981 or '82, advisory labels on aspirin warn parents not to feed
aspirin to children for any reason, as it has been very closely linked to
deaths in children following bouts with influenza, in a
then newly discovered disease called Reye’s syndrome. Books written in
the mid-1990s say that scientists do not know why that is, but that the
correlation is so strong that the warnings were added to the
labels.
At the same time, elderly people are much more likely to take aspirin
when they have headaches and muscle aches. And, older people with heart
conditions have been using aspirin since the 1990s prophylactically, as
blood thinners and in conjunction with other heart and
blood-pressure-related drugs.
So, and here’s the should-be obvious conjecture: Could aspirin interact
in the body with influenza to cause, in some people, encephalitis? And
what if West Nile virus is sufficiently related to influenza to interact
similarly?
Children don’t die from West Nile in the U.S. because they don’t take
aspirin. Some elderly people die from West Nile under some conditions
because they do take aspirin. What has gone unseen is that (I am
surmising), it’s the interaction of the aspirin with either the virus
directly or parts of the body’s immune system and/or liver that makes the
normally docile (for humans) West Nile Virus potentially deadly.
(Or, perhaps it's the taking of aspirin, period, that can lead to
encephalitis in some people whether or not the virus is present. Could it
be that during times of intense concern over the West Nile arbovirus that
plain old reaction to aspirin is misdiagnosed as WNV
encephalitis?)
Your thoughts?
(I was reading lots of material on West Nile recently (again), and on
viruses in general. I recommend Robin Marantz Henig’s "A Dancing
Matrix: How Science Confronts Emerging Viruses," (1994) pp. 167-178,
which I was reading when the aspirin-related conjecture snapped into
place (even though the book doesn't put those two or three threads
together, and even though I disagree with some of her formulations and
quoting of "experts" too uncritically (like Thomas
Monath)).
Mitchel Cohen
coordinator, No Spray Coalition
www.NoSpray.org