Viral Immunity: A 10-Step Plan to Enhance Your Immunity against Viral Disease Using Natural Medicines

by J. E. Williams

Overview

HIV, hepatitis, influenza, the common cold, herpes, Ebola, Hantavirus, West Nile fever, dengue, TT virus--the viral world keeps posing new major challenges to human health each year. At the same time as this onslaught of emerging powerful viral infections, our antibiotic arsenals are losing ground and our immune systems are compromised. Can we handle the next viral epidemic?

Yes, says James Williams, an experienced, credentialled naturopath, acupuncturist, and expert in traditional Chinese medicine. We can shore up our immune system to handle current and any future viral infections and not be dependent on conventional vaccinations or antibiotics to insure our health.

In 10 practical steps, Dr. Williams shows how to develop unassailable viral immunity using natural approaches. If you already have a viral infection, these steps will help you reverse its effects; if you're concerned about exposure to one in the future, these steps will give you the keys to prevention. Included in these steps are the best that natural medicine offers: stress management, enzymes, nutrients, detoxification, oxygen therapy, immune modulators, hormones, natural antiviral medicines and anti-inflammatory medicines, Chinese and Western herbs, and more.

"Viral immunity is without question one of the most important health issues of this century," says Dr. Williams. "The message of this book is clear. You can improve your system in general with diet, lifestyle, and natural medicines. Here you will find natural ways of improving immune function, remedies to treat viral infections, and suggestions on how to reframe outdated concepts that could otherwise prevent you from obtaining effective treatment."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781612830407
Publisher:	Red Wheel/Weiser
Publication date:	08/01/2002
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	496
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Dr. J. E. Williams has practiced Oriental Medicine for more than two decades and is the author of three books. Presently, he is the academic dean at the East West College of Natural Medicine.

Read an Excerpt

VIRAL IMMUNITY

A 10-Step Plan to Enhance Your Immunity Against Viral Disease Using Natural Medicines

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By J. E. Williams

Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc.

Copyright © 2002 J. E. Williams, O.M.D.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61283-040-7

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CHAPTER 1

The Virus at Our Doorstep

Viruses recognize no international borders or time zones. They have no obligations to country, race, social status, or gender. Rich and poor alike are victims of viral infections. If given the opportunity, viruses do not stay in any one place and may travel over extraordinarily long distances. In 1983, the Asian tiger mosquito, Ades albopictus, a relative of A. aegypti, the mosquito that transmits dengue fever virus, was found in the United States for the first time. The mosquito larvae, stowaways in accumulated rainwater inside automobile tires, were transported on a cargo ship from Southeast Asia.

In our modern world, viruses and other infectious microbes can easily hitch rides on international flights to and from any major city. A European tourist visiting Thailand can bring home a strain of immunodeficiency virus from a sexual encounter in Bangkok; a Cantonese grandmother visiting her family in San Francisco can harbor a potent influenza virus in her lungs and carry it all the way from China and pass it to her grandchildren who transmit it to other children in preschool.

Viruses do not leave fossil remains or other archeological clues. They leave only what we have found, for example, in frozen tissue samples of their victims, such as from the remains of Eskimos in the Arctic tundra, or victims of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Though there are a variety of theories, there is no way of completely knowing the origin, natural history, or evolution of viruses. Yet what we do know is fascinating.

For one, we know that viruses have been with us a long time. Archeological evidence indicates that smallpox developed along with civilization in the river basin agricultural settlements of Asia and the Middle East as early as 10,000 years ago. We also know that viral epidemic diseases were unheard of in the New World before the arrival of the Spanish. Viruses are not only the cause of many infectious diseases, ranging from the common cold to slow death of AIDS and the frightening hemorrhagic fevers, but they have dramatically influenced history as well.

Why Have Viral Infections Become So Devastating in Recent Years?

As agents of change, they have toppled dynasties, changed the outcomes of wars, and altered populations. In the twentieth century, smallpox alone killed an estimated 300 million people. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, smallpox killed the emperors of Japan and Burma, as well as kings and queens of Europe. Queen Mary of England died of smallpox in 1694; Louis XV of France, Joseph I of Germany, and Peter II of Russia also died from the same disease.

The Aztec emperor and many in his immediate household were killed by smallpox. It is a matter of historical record that the successful conquest of the Aztec empire in Mexico by Hernando Cortez and the Incan empire by Francisco Pizarro in Peru were ultimately achieved more by the enormous deaths from fatal epidemics of smallpox and measles than by superior military strategy or overwhelming firepower.

The 1918–19 epidemic of Spanish influenza killed 20–40 million people in less than a year, causing more deaths than all the massive military casualties of World War I. In the spring of 1918, the German Army's assault on Paris was halted by this flu. It not only affected Europeans, but an unbelievable 80 percent of the United States Army's death toll was from the Spanish flu that killed 43,000 American soldiers between 1917 and 1919—nearly as many as died in combat in the Korean War some thirty years later.

Viruses not only infect humans but all living things including plants, animals, birds, and sea creatures. In 1988, seal plague virus killed 2,800 seals in the United Kingdom; a similar disease had already devastated the rare freshwater seals of Lake Baikal in Siberia in 1987. Canine distemper and other common animal viruses kill our pets as well as livestock. Rinderpest, or cattle plague, killed an estimated 2 million cattle annually in South Africa during the 1920s. The virus responsible was introduced into South Africa in 1889, and within the first ten years there it spread northward, killing an estimated 90 percent of the wild buffalo population in Kenya.

Viruses are everywhere, and due to their microscopic size they also infect the invisible world, including bacteria, fungi, and protozoa. If viruses are ubiquitous in nature and have intimately accompanied us in the human evolutionary journey, why have viral infections become so devastating in recent years?

This question is as yet unanswered even by the experts. My hypothesis, which I develop throughout this book, is that it is because of widespread immunological breakdown caused by the stress of modern living, environmental destruction, and toxic chemical pollution—nature out of balance. The experts are starting to catch up with this possibility.

What Is a Virus?

The most frequently quoted popular definition of a virus belongs to Sir Peter Medawar (1983): "A virus is a piece of bad news wrapped up in protein." However succinct and graphic this definition is, it does not describe a virus in sufficient detail, nor does it answer any of the evolutionary and ecological questions concerning the nature of viruses. The word "virus," coming from the Latin meaning "poisonous fluid," also does not reveal what a virus is. Here are three things that a virus is: small, parasitic, and genetically lean.

Viruses Are Very Small: Viruses are referred to as subcellular organisms, meaning they are smaller than cells, smaller than bacteria, and certainly smaller than most human host cells. Bacteria are measured in micrometers (10-6 meters) and viruses in nanometers (10-9), which is a thousand times smaller. Viruses are so minute they can maintain their ability to infect even after passing through filters small enough to strain out all bacteria. In fact, they are so small that they can only be seen by the most powerful of electron microscopes.

Viruses were long thought of as the smallest infectious agent, yet we now know of two other pathogens that are even smaller: prions, the suspected cause of Mad Cow Disease, discovered only recently by the 1997 Nobel Laureate in medicine, Stanely Prusiner; and viroids, organisms that only affect plants.

Viruses Are Parasites: Viruses are intracellular molecular parasites. They enter the body silently, and in the case of HIV and hepatitis C viruses, they often do so without notice. Then they use our cells to manufacture substances needed for their own replication and life cycle. They have no metabolic life of their own outside a host cell, which makes them dependent on living cells for their existence. Viruses have a receptor binding protein that allows them to attach to other cells and convert them into virus-producing mini-factories. They do not make their own energy or proteins for survival and cannot reproduce without the assistance of cellular material from other living cells. Viruses grow and multiply only within other living cells—human, animal, plant, bacteria. Outside the host cell, a virus is not alive and exists in a world between the living and nonliving.

Viruses Are Genetically Lean: The basic viral particle or single virus is called a virion. It consists of a nucleic acid genome, in which the virus's hereditary information is stored, surrounded by a shell of protein. Unlike most living cells, viruses do not have cell walls composed of a plasma membrane. Instead, a protein coat called a capsid, which may also contain lipids and sugars, protects the viral genome.

All living cells contain both known types of genetic material, RNA and DNA, but viruses possess only one type, either RNA or DNA. They also have a very small number of genes compared to other cells. For comparison: the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has fewer than ten genes; a larger virus like smallpox contains between 200 and 400 genes, but even the smallest bacteria contains 5,000 to 10,000 genes, and a human cell has 80,000 to 100,000 genes (see figure 1-1).

While at first it seems like a reproductive disadvantage compared to other life forms, minuteness and limited genetic material become an advantage for the virus. These characteristics make it easier for a virus to jump from one host to another, and at times from one species to another, rearranging and reengineering the host's genetic material to suit its needs. Dorothy Crawford, Ph.D., in The Invisible Energy (2000) describes viruses as "rogue pieces of genetic material," as if they were accidents waiting to happen.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Viruses exhibit a remarkable intelligence and a superb ability to survive and adapt to new environments, but Western science has only recently focused its attention on the viral world.

Advances in microbiology and bacteriology were at least a century ahead of those in virology, which is a relatively new science with its beginnings only in the twentieth century. Though there were many microbe hunters in the early 1800s, the first virus discovered is credited to the Russian scientist, Dimitri Ivanowsky. In 1892, while studying tobacco mosaic disease, he found that the agent that caused the disease was small enough to pass through a filter known to trap all bacteria.

The virion is a subcellular particle with a shell or envelope of protein and lipids called a capsid. The capsid may contain protein spikes or round capsomeres that serve to help penetration of a host cell. Inside the shell is the functional portion containing the virus's genetic material, referred to as the nucleic acid genome, which directs the activity and function of the virus.

Yellow fever was the first human virus identified. One of the most devastating plagues of past centuries, and a re-emerging infectious disease of the twenty-first century, yellow fever has been responsible for tens of millions of deaths. Although Carlos Juan Finlay, a Cuban physician practicing in Havana in 1880, proposed that yellow fever, then epidemic in Cuba, was a mosquito-borne infection, it was not until 1901 that Walter Reed, a physician and colonel in the United States Army, identified the causative source as a virus. Once mosquitoes were identified as the disease vector (the method of how the virus is carried from human to human), the introduction of aggressive mosquito control dramatically reduced the incidence of yellow fever within a few years.

Antibiotic drugs were developed far in advance of drugs to treat viruses. Penicillin, the first antibiotic, was discovered in 1928 by Alexander Fleming and introduced for clinical use in 1941. However, no antiviral drugs were developed until the late 1950s and were not available for general clinical use until two decades later.

Since there were no drugs until recently that treated infectious viral disease, the focus of medical research for viruses was on the development of vaccines. The first vaccine developed in the West was by Edward Jenner in 1796 against smallpox. Though controversy and different opinions plague it, vaccination continues to be one of the cornerstones for the treatment of viruses in modern medicine. (The use and risks of vaccinations are discussed in appendix D at the end of this book.)

However, it was not until 1930 that the first virus was actually seen. The tobacco mosaic virus had the honors here (as pictured on the cover); the electron microscope brought the vague viral symmetry into view. Detailed characterization of viruses only began in the later part of the twentieth century with the advent of better techniques for studying viruses, including more advanced electron microscopy, cell culture, high-speed centrifugation, electrophoresis of RNA and DNA genomes, and nucleotide sequencing.

The Evolutionary Perspective—Long-Term Coexistence?

Before discussing viruses and the diseases they cause, let's establish a point of view that suggests a relationship between the co-evolution of viruses and other species. The conventional, current model looks at a virus as a unique entity separate from the host, with a linear relationship between them: the virus infects the host, the host gets sick and develops symptoms; gets well, dies, or carries the virus which eventually infects others to continue its life cycle. This linear model is useful in analyzing basic viral characteristics and in quickly assessing and treating symptoms. However, it does not penetrate deep enough into the viral world and is not solving the problem of the current viral disease paradigm.

The evolutionary model questions this hypothesis and suggests that it may be more of a two-way street with virus and host exchanging genetic material. This idea presents more of an interdependent picture than is currently postulated, and allows for an understanding of how humans and viruses coexist and have done so for hundreds of thousands of years.

Though simple compared to the complexity of a human being, viruses are elegantly constructed organisms exhibiting remarkable bioarchitecture, beautiful design, and precision functioning. They play a significant role in the life cycles of all living organisms and are rightfully imbedded in the ecological infrastructure. From this evolutionary and ecological point of view, viruses have a place in assisting human evolution by assuring the survival of the species through natural selection. By exchanging genetic material from host to host, they influence the heredity of cells. As evolutionary messengers, viruses have effectively colonized nearly every living thing on this planet, from bacteria to humans. That is why viral disease will remain among us and why it can never eliminate the human race: we depend on each other.

The evolutionary model presents more of an interdependent picture than is currently postulated, and allows for an understanding of how humans and viruses coexist and have done so for hundreds of thousands of years.

There is an ancient Chinese saying, "Pure water has no fish" (Zhang 2000). For some things to live, other things must die, and nothing lives in a completely purified environment. Ultimately it may be a great mistake of modern medicine to attempt to sterilize the planet of viruses.

Interdependence among all living things is a rule of nature. We live in a biological world populated by billions of microscopic organisms that are friendly, neutral, and lethal. Biological life is a continuum, and there is less separation between independent organisms than previously thought. In fact, there may be no separation at all; viruses are not "us," yet their DNA has been worked into our genes, and therefore is a part of what we are as biological beings.

Four Thousand Types of Viruses—Welcome to the Viral Realm

There are 4,000 known types of viruses, but less than 4 percent are well characterized, and new viruses are discovered regularly. Indeed, at least fifty have been identified since 1988. Classification of viruses is based on several criteria, mainly by the type of nucleic acid (DNA or RNA) and by whether the genome contains a single strand (ss) or double strand (ds) of genetic material.

For example, smallpox is a dsDNA virus and HIV has an ssRNA genome. Among the DNA type are viruses that cause hepatitis B infections, herpes simplex blisters, and warts. In the RNA family, there are viruses that cause yellow fever, measles, polio, bronchitis, AIDS, and hepatitis C (see table 1).

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from VIRAL IMMUNITY by J. E. Williams. Copyright © 2002 J. E. Williams, O.M.D.. Excerpted by permission of Hampton Roads Publishing Company, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Preface,

Acknowledgments,

Introduction: What Viral Immunity Is, How You Can Achieve It, and Why It's So Important,

Part One: Viruses, Immunity, and Evolution,
1: The Virus at Our Doorstep,
2: Viruses: Common and Exotic—A Review of the Key Viral Agents,
3: Immunity and Viral Disease,
4: Fever and Fatigue,
5: Why We Get Sick and How to Get Better,

Part Two: Ten Steps to Viral Immunity,

Introduction to Part Two,
6: Step One: Build a Strong Immune Foundation with an Immune-Enhancing Lifestyle,
7: Step Two: Defend and Strengthen Your Immune System with Antioxidants and Oxidative Therapies,
8: Step Three: Rejuvenate Your Immune System with Enzymes,
9: Step Four: Renew Your Cells through Detoxification,
10: Step Five: Restore Your Innate Immune Response and Manage Inflammation,
11: Step Six: Boost Your Immunity with Natural Immune Enhancers,
12: Step Seven: Target Viruses with Natural Antiviral Alternatives,
13: Step Eight: Empower Your Viral Immunity Program with Chinese Medicines,
14: Step Nine: Optimize Immune Performance with Hormonal Balance,
15: Step Ten: Implement Your Viral Immunity Plan,

Appendix A: Finding the Right Doctor to Oversee Your Viral Immunity Program,

Appendix B: Useful Laboratory Tests that Support Your Viral Immunity Program,

Appendix C: Physician-Administered and -Prescribed Therapies,

Appendix D: A Note on Vaccinations,

Appendix E: Resources,

Appendix F: Additional Reading,

Glossary,

Notes,

Bibliography,

Index,

About the Author,