Reply To: A Hello to Virology
Many critiques could be made of these studies, and I’m sure this will be done. For now, I’m nearing the end of my first installment in my introduction to virology.
I think there is enough here to “scientifically prove/evidence the existence of the alleged dengue virus (showing that the alleged particle exists and causes the disease that it’s alleged to cause)” and “[describe] the purification of particles that are alleged to be said virus(es), directly from bodily fluid/tissue/excrement, with purification confirmed via EM imaging (the images must be available as well)”.
I have only briefly covered 63 years of dengue virus research. There have been 53 years since the last mentioned papers, along with 53 years of advances of science, technology and methodology.
I’m certain a further critique will be made regarding the “bodily fluid/tissue/excrement” not being human. As mentioned before, it appears this was attempted, possibly unsuccessfully, by Sabin in his 1952 “Dengue Studies in WWII” paper.
To illustrate the difficulty in extracting this and some other viruses from human tissue, consider this point: In Sabin’s WWII paper, he stated that there were at least 1 million “infectious doses” per milliliter of blood. A study from 1916 estimated that concentration to be twice that (from Schlesinger, “Dengue Viruses”, 1977).
So, let’s just say it’s 2 x 10^6 (2 million infectious viruses per milliliter). There are probably more, as not all will be infectious, but let’s go with that number. That sounds like a lot, but…
The virus (one virion) is about 50 nm in diameter. Its volume is then (50nm)(4/3)pi*r^3 = 53,051 nm^3. A grain of salt is said to measure 1.6 x 10^16 nm^3 (0.016 cubic millimeters) (#https://is.gd/shhj1X). Given the maximum packing fraction is 74% (densest packing of spheres, i.e. 74% of a space is filled with viruses), the effective volume is about 1.2 x 10^16 nm^3. To fill that with infectious virus, we’ll need 2.2 x 10^11 virions.
(2.2 x 10^11 virions)/(2 x 10^6 virions/mL ) = 111,590 mL
That’s 111.6 LITERS of blood to make a virus pellet the size of a grain of sand. That’s over 22 people sucked dry!
Of course, you don’t need all of that for electron microscopy. But do consider that, do the electron microscopy work on cell-cultured virus in that last paper (“Physical and Biological Properties of Dengue-2: Virus and Associated Antigens”), they used “Eighteen 32-oz (ca. 900 ml) bottle cultures of BS-C-1 or LLC-MK2 cells”, whose supernatant fluid (cell media fluid over the cells that produced the virus) contained about 5 x 10^5 PFU/mL (PFU is “plaque forming units” and is the estimated # of infectious virions per unit volume).
So, if we were to try and reproduce these results with human blood from dengue patients, it would require (5 x 10^5PFU/mL)*18*900mL = 8.1 x 10^9 PFU
(8.1 x 10^9 PFU)/(2 x 10^6 PFU/mL) = 4,050 mL, which is 4 liters of blood.
So you still need multiple dengue victims to donate copious amounts of blood… Hence the utility of cell culture. Also, I can attest that removing rodent brains is already a difficult and gruesome procedure, so anytime cell culture can be used, it facilitates things nicely.