Mike asks:
<Has there been any follow-up on Jerry's (BeeResearch) claim of the
Irridescent??? virus carried by varroa in conjunction with nosema might be a
possible cause. Has anyone run any tests to try to duplicate Jerry's
research to either match or refute his claims? I've heard a lot of nay-saying,
but as far as I know, none was backed up with research.>
Mike:
1) Every proposal to USDA that we or any member of our team has submitted
to USDA to follow up on this work has been rejected or disappeared in limbo
with no response at all. We've a bit of funding to do a bit more, but not
what we need to purify, isolate, sequence, and fully ID the IIV, then
conduct the appropriate inoculation trials that would put our findings to the
final test. So, until someone is willing to fund the required work, we're
not going to be able to do anything more - have been forced to re-direct our
efforts toward things that pay our bills - namely, work for the military,
and a USDA SBIR to develop the acoustic scanner to detect bee diseases,
pests, and toxic chemicals (including pesticides).
2) We know there are some people in other countries checking for IIV. At
least one researcher has misread our data set - thinking that our Army
proteomics specialists mistook bee peptides for IIV - and overlooking the
caveat that we included with the provided data set. We clearly stated that we
were only providing the part of the data set that we used in the statistical
analysis for our paper - i.e., the peptides and proteins for all of the
bee pathogens that we detected.
Army found all of the bee peptides, but most of those were sorted out
prior to the statistical analysis - our paper was not about the proteomics of
bees or gene expression in bees, it was focused on the bee pathogens. So,
absence of bee peptides and proteins in the data set that we've distributed
does NOT mean Army didn't see them. Army is currently preparing a paper
covering the bee peptides and proteins.
3) For everyone's information, we have at least two more papers to extract
from Army protoemics results - one on the hundreds of plants pathogens
found in/on the sampled bees from across the US, and another on the mammalian
pathogens. If a mouse lived in a hive, we found mouse pathogens. If the
beekeeper was sick, we found that too. None of that data has been
distributed yet, because we're still analyzing it, trying to fully understand it.
We'd published our findings so that others would be aware of the IIV so
that it could be more carefully examined - if you don't know its there,
you're not likely to look for it.
Jerry
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