viruses, schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis

Sometimes, one of us finds a book or article that really excites us and then that person helps the other understand and get enthused.  That is what just happened with the article in the June 2010 Discover magazine called "The Insanity Virus" by Douglas Fox.  

Our daughter died of brain cancer but she was incapacitated by schizophrenia and bipolar disease for 20 years before her death.  Extreme mood cycles can be a problem but serious delusions were a more debilitating problem for her.  As depicted in the film A Beautiful Mind and explained in the link above, she would at times be convinced that she was the actual physical lover of a long-dead historical figure or was about to be awarded a special medal by the US Congress.  We have long been aware of the efforts of Fuller Torrey, MD to find a virus that links to instances of schizophrenia.  Douglas Fox writes of the work of Torrey and Johns Hopkins scientists in cooperation with French, Swiss and others in uncovering the mechanisms that might explain many instances of both schizophrenia and multiple sclerosis.  

The book "Genome" by Matt Ridley started our basic knowledge about human genes a decade ago.  Statements there that large chunks of the human genome are "junk" made me wonder whether further knowledge might change that idea.  Fox writes that 60 million years ago, a virus infected a lemur ancestor of ours and managed to get into its testes or ovaries.  Actually, there are several that have managed to do that over time.  Our bodies seem to work at sealing them and their effects on us off, most of the time.  However, especially when we are babies, infections can begin cancers, incomplete myelination (insulation) of our nerves and schizophrenic misbehavior of our brains from these viruses that all humans carry.  These viral effects might not occur on a functional level until we are teens or young adults.  Torrey has been relentless in his pursuit of explanations of schizophrenia since 1957 when his sister was struck by the disease.