Lets vaccinate all the kids now .

Obese people 'simply have the fat virus'
By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
(Filed: 29/07/2000)

OBESE people tend to blame their glands, metabolism or "heavy bones"
for their weight problem. Now they have a new excuse: they "caught"
their obesity in much the same way as they might catch a cold.

 

The University of Wisconsin, Madison, has shown that inoculating
chickens and mice with a human adenovirus (Ad-36) causes them to put
on fat, it reports in the International Journal of Obesity. Not only
did infected individuals gain more than the controls, they also gained
more than those individuals inoculated with another virus, suggesting
that obesity was not the result of just any viral infection, but of
this particular human virus.

The same experiments could not be done on humans, for ethical reasons,
but a link has been found between people who have been infected with
Ad-36 and obesity. Dr Nikhil Dhurandhar, head of the team, said:
"Obesity induced by viruses is a novel finding and Ad-36 is the first
human virus implicated in causing obesity."

One day, it might be possible to formulate some form of treatment for
"infectious obesity", such as a vaccine, if such a disease really does
exist in humans. Dr Dhurandhar has shown that obesity induced by Ad-36
can be passed on. "Animals receiving transfusion of blood drawn from
Ad-36 infected animals developed significant obesity."

Surprisingly, they drop their cholesterol and triglycerides (fat in
the blood) levels, compared with uninfected animals. The mechanism
causing the obesity is not known, but does not appear to be due to
increased food intake, suggesting a decrease in energy expenditure.
Studies of cultured fat cells show that "Ad-36 increases fat cell size
and number in Ad-36 infected animals", he said. "These are very
exciting data."

A project to screen several hundred people for the presence of
antibodies to Ad-36, which reveals infection, showed a strong
association with obesity, he said. "About 30 per cent of the obese
individuals and only five per cent of the lean individuals tested had
Ad-36 antibodies."