Trevor said:

> So if the virus is rapidly changing, 

At this point, the claim is mere speculation, nothing more.
Viruses certainly do change, often rapidly, but multiple 
"strains" of IAPV was merely the excuse offered when the 
Evans/Chen paper was published (buried!) in ABJ, merely to 
avoid retracting the claims of the Sept 2007 paper in "Science"
in light of the contradictory findings of Evans/Chen, which
refuted nearly every claim made in the "Science" paper:

http://listserv.albany.edu:8080/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0711A&L=BEE-L&P=R1466&D
=0&I=-3&T=0

http://bee-quick.com/reprints/claims_collapse.pdf

While it is gratifying to at hear that at long last, some data will 
be offered along with the claims "(J. of Virology, in Press)",
the usual approach is to get some data FIRST and THEN to
make some claims, rather than the other way 'round.  :)

> couldn't it have been the case that Australia got the IAPV 
> from stock imported from the western USA prior to 1983,

Yes, that's possible, but it is not the only plausible scenario.

IAPV >>might<< have come to the Western Hemisphere from Australia 
via Canada when the Canadian border was closed to US bees, and 
Canadian beekeepers were forced to get bees from elsewhere, thereby 
creating the entire wacky concept of shipping bees across oceans, 
setting up both Australia and New Zealand "in the business".

But there's no need to claim that anything "came back" to the
US from Australia at all to fit the data in hand.  All the 
variants could have easily have developed here in the US 
without any outside "help". In fact, the sheer number of
variants claimed to exist in the USA tends to indoicate 
that Australia was nothing but another victim of
an infection that spread from the USA.

> the virus has changed since then and what came back to the USA 
> in bees is a mutated version of what came out in the first place?  

> The statement says the Australian and western USA isolates 
> are a close matches.

Yes, isn't that interesting.  CCD was first noticed where in
the USA?  Not out west.  3,000 miles east of "the west".  
Let's walk though this:

Assume for a moment that the following claims are true:

1) That there are "strains of IAPV" in the USA.

2) That these strains are "regional".

3) That one of these IAPV strains is somehow 
   "associated with CCD".

If follows that if IAPV has anything to do with CCD, 
CCD should have been a regional phenomena, or a specific 
strain of IAPV should be consistently found in CCD 
colonies, and traceable via specific movement of 
hives from the orginal region to the others.

What has been found is that IAPV is nowhere near as
consistent a "marker for CCD" as was claimed, as it is
not even reliabily found at all in CCD colonies.  The
speculation about "IAPV strains", even if it was true,
simply DOES NOT FIT the experience we have had with CCD.

The AIA news release itself admits:

"Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus (IAPV) was 
found in 9 of the 11 states sampled, and 
in 47% of all sampled colonies."

and

"No cause and effect between IAPV and CCD 
was demonstrated"

So why are we still being "informed" about Ian Lipkin's 
pet virus when it continues to become more and more 
irrelevant with every set of samples analyzed?

And, when someone says:

> "Australian and western USA isolates are a close matches."

Recall that "Close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades,
as ALL the variants of IAPV could be said to be "close matches".

Also, remember that this is the same gang that claimed IAPV was 
a "significant marker" for CCD and had been "traced to two points 
of entry into the US", only to be proven wrong by samples kept 
on the very next shelf in the same refrigerator.

If "isolates" are "close matches", does this imply that one
isolate is a ancestor of the other?  It certainly is likely, but
this exact logic is what prompted me to suggest last fall that
IAPV originated in the USA! "Epidemiology 101" teaches that the 
place where the most viral variants are found is the site of 
origin of the virus.  

Further, we still have no association between IAPV and any
disease, CCD included, as there was no "locality" or "regionality"
to CCD as there appears to be for their suspect strain.  Let me 
stress this, as it only requires one to think slowly about what 
is now being claimed.

One thing is heartening - they are at long last tacitly admitting 
that what was suggested by another research team was both insightful
and prescient, that there are multiple strains of Nosema ceranae in the
US.
A year ago, they ridiculed that team, and now owe them an apology and
a few citations and notes.  (We also have Higis in Spain, who reported 
very "CCD-like" pathologies in hives experimentally infected with 
Nosema ceranae, and left to cope.)

In general, the experience of the Penn State/USDA CCD team has been an
object lesson for all on the perils of becoming infatuated with any 
single theory.  New data should not prompt even more unlikely scenarios 
to be offered, when the simple solution is to simply drop the single 
claim that was tacitly disproven by the new data.

Others looking for IAPV in the field are finding it much less often than
the "Science" paper claimed they would, and one is forced to wonder if 
"metagenomics" was a less discriminating assay than Penn State and 
USDA were led to beleive by Ian at Columbia.  (Anyone heard from Ian
lately?  I wonder why he has distanced himself from his own findings
when he trumpted them so widely at the time.) 

Bottom line, "Metagenomics" may have been just as misleading for CCD 
as it was for the Neanderthals:

http://www.plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.003017
5

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