Our immune system is notoriously unreliable and often fails when it is needed most, with cancers and serious infections. As a piece of supposedly intelligent [sic] design, (according to creationist superstition) it is more an example of blithering incompetence, if not downright malevolence.
Remember, creationists believe the designer of it is supremely intelligent, omniscient with the power to foresee the future, omnipotent and perfect. Remember too that creationists claim, as the only supernatural entity capable of designing live things, that it also designed the pathogenic organisms that the immune system was designed to protect us from.
Apparently, in creationist circles, designing pathogens to make us sick, then designing an immune system to protect us from those pathogens, then redesigning the pathogens to bypass our immune system that should be protecting us from them, is considered evidence of supreme intelligence.
Similarly, designing a method of cell replication to replace out old cells when they wear out, but using a method that sometime makes mistakes and turns the cells into cancer cells is also a sign of infinite wisdom.
For reasons that can only be guessed at, and probably for political motives that depend on fools being misled about science and which have nothing to do with worshipping their particular god, creationist frauds would rather we thought of their putative designer god as an incompetent fool and pestilential malevolence, than accept that pathogens, cancers and our immune system are the result of a mindless, utilitarian natural process that operates without a plan and produces suboptimal results, providing the result is better than that which preceded it in terms of producing more offspring which go on to breed successfully.
For creationist frauds, religion merely provides them with an excuse for their avarice and demands for political power over others.
In what creationists should see as a triumph for their favourite sadist if they were true to their professed belief and weren't selective in its application, the Asian longhorned tick, Haemaphysalis longicornis which they believe it designed, which feeds by sucking the blood of its victims and which was first detected in the USA in 2017 and in Ohio in 2021, is now present in such vast numbers that it is believed to have killed three cattle in southeastern Ohio, simply through blood loss.
One of the cattle was a healthy, 5-year-old bull. It would have taken about 10,000 ticks to kill it by exsanguination.
that number of ticks were recovered in 90 minutes on one Ohio farm alone.
Ticks, like other parasites, if we accept the intelligent [sic] design argument for a moment, can only be ascribed to the work of a pestilential malevolence because creationists also insist that the putative designer is omnipotent and omniscience, therefore it knows exactly what its designs will do, and designs them to do exactly that.
And ticks appear to be designed to do only two things:
And, in a brilliant piece of malevolence, what gives these nasties their great power to spread and colonise new territories in vast numbers, all the adults are females that breed parthenogenically. In favourable conditions a newly-hatched tick can reach sexual maturity in a few weeks to a few months. Each female can lay up to 2,000 eggs which, if they all hatch and breed, will produce 4 million breeding ticks in two generations and 8 billion ticks in three, in favourable conditions.
As an introduced species in the USA, the Asian longhorned tick has few natural predators that can keep their numbers in check. In parts of their native range in Asia, guinea fowl are used to keep them in check, but the breeding rate of the tick is so high that natural predation has negligible impact on their numbers. This fantastic rate of reproduction means that a single female colonising a fresh territory can, if the conditions are right, produce tens of trillions of offspring within a year or two.
An international team of mycologists led by Christoffer Bugge Harder of the Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway has discovered that a family of fungi, the Mycena or Mycenaceae, also known as the bonnet mushrooms, is in the process of evolving a change of life style from that of a saprophyte (i.e., feeding on dead and decaying plant matter, mostly wood) to becoming a symbiont, living in cooperative alliance with other plants, or even a parasite able to invade and live on living plant tissues.
As the reputed work of an intelligent [sic] designer, this tick can only be regarded as evidence of the pestilential malevolent of any designer that could design such a creature, as it serves no purpose other than to be the vector of a number of different pathogens and to make more ticks.
One of the more gruesome aspects of many parasites is their ability to take control of their hosts so the host participates in its own destruction, for the benefit of the parasite.
I wrote extensively about these relationships in by popular, illustrated book, The Malevolent Designer: Why Nature's God is not Good, to illustrate the fact that the creator god creationists purport to worship has to be regarded as a pestilential, sadistic monster forever devising more and more nasty ways to make its creation suffer, for no apparent reason other than the pleasure of watching the suffering.
An example I used was the parasitic nematodes known as horsehair worms that live for part of the life-cycle in an insect such as a cricket or mantis, and, when mature, it induces it to seek out and jump into water where it either drowns or gets consumed by a fish. If the former, it emerges from the dead or dying body of its host and adopts a free-living life in the water; if the latter, it passes through the fish unharmed and emerges into the water via that route.
It's proving to be another terrible week for the creation cult with yet another science paper that casually, and without any intention on the part of the authors, utterly refutes some basic creationist cult dogmas.
This paper deal with the evolution of the mosquitoes and the parasite-host relationship that refute intelligent design ideas with their arms races, needless complexity and prolific waste, in addition to their refutation of the notion of an omnibenevolent designer.
And of course, as we've come to expect, almost all that evolutionary history occurred millions of years before creationists think the Universe was magically created out of nothing by a magic man made of nothing who popped up from nowhere, in the days when nothing was something that existed. This magic, invisible man then allegedly created every living thing without ancestors, pretty much as we find it today, but on a flat Earth with a dome over it to keep the water above the sky out. Seriously!
The point has already been made by others many times before: creationism is not a problem for science; science is a problem for creationism; and this paper is just one more drop in the tsunami engulfing the cult.
I wonder if creationists ever puzzle over the fact that science never produces any evidence supporting their dogmas and superstitions; instead, science repeatedly finds evidence the flatly contradicts them. It takes a special form of delusion and self-deception to dismiss all that contrary evidence and stick with an evidence-free notion.
Just such a creation-refuting piece of science has just been published in the journal Nature Plants. It concerns the evolution of the parasitic plants, the Balanophora and in particular, the discovery that during their evolution they lost 38% of their genome.
Parasitism is also a refutation of the childish notion of intelligent [sic] design, especially by a supposedly omni-benevolent designer, because no intelligent designer would design the inevitable arms race that characterises a parasite-host relationship, unless that designer was both malevolent and extremely stupid.
Scientists based at the Docherty Institute, Melbourne University, Victoria, Australia have discovered just how devious any designer of the deadly super bug, Staphylococcus aureus, also known as Golden staph, would need to have been to come up with such a clever way to make us sick and die.
Curiously, for people who purport to worship the putative designer of all living things, creationists would have us believe that the designer is just such a mendacious malevolence, rather than have us believe that a natural process such as evolution by natural selection is responsible for parasites and the way they evade our immune systems - also, so creationists claim, designed by the same designer, making it look like a bumbling incompetent amnesiac than a supremely intelligent deity.
On top of a couple of recent papers showing creationist dogma to be false and that, if there were such a thing as an intelligent designer of living things, that designer can only be regarded as a malevolent monster, we have another paper which, if we believe creationist dogma, again shows their divine creator to be an obsessive, sadistic psychopath.
It is the news that scientists at Nottingham University, UK., and China have discovered how the variant of the H3N8 avian flu virus which is endemic in Chinese poultry farms, is mutating in a way which could make it more likely to cross the species barrier into humans and become the next pandemic.
What is the H3N8 Avian influenza virus and what threat does it pose to humanity?
H3N8 Avian influenza, also known as avian flu or bird flu, is a subtype of the influenza A virus that primarily affects birds, especially waterfowl and shorebirds. It is one of several subtypes of avian influenza viruses, each identified by specific combinations of surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N). In the case of H3N8, it refers to the third type of hemagglutinin (H3) and the eighth type of neuraminidase (N8) found on the virus's surface.
While H3N8 avian influenza primarily affects birds, it has the potential to pose a threat to humans under certain circumstances. Here are some key points to consider regarding its potential threat to humanity:
Zoonotic Transmission: Avian influenza viruses, including H3N8, are zoonotic, which means they can infect humans when they come into close contact with infected birds or contaminated environments. Most human cases of avian influenza have resulted from direct or indirect exposure to infected poultry.
Limited Human Infections: H3N8 avian influenza has not been as widely reported in human infections as some other avian influenza subtypes, such as H5N1 and H7N9. However, there have been occasional cases of H3N8 avian influenza infection in humans, often associated with direct contact with infected birds.
Potential for Adaptation: Avian influenza viruses have the ability to mutate and potentially adapt to human hosts. If a strain of H3N8 were to acquire the ability for efficient human-to-human transmission, it could lead to a more widespread outbreak or even a pandemic. This is a significant concern with avian influenza viruses in general.
Influenza Pandemic Preparedness: Due to the risk of avian influenza strains causing pandemics, public health organizations and governments worldwide monitor and study these viruses closely. Preparedness plans and strategies are in place to respond quickly to potential outbreaks, including the development of vaccines and antiviral medications.
Importance of Surveillance: Surveillance of avian influenza in both bird populations and humans is crucial to detect any changes in the virus's behavior or its potential to infect humans more easily. Timely identification and containment of outbreaks are essential to minimize the risk to public health.
In summary, H3N8 avian influenza is primarily a bird virus, but it can infect humans in rare cases. The main threat it poses to humanity lies in its potential to evolve and adapt to human-to-human transmission, potentially leading to a wider outbreak or pandemic. Vigilant surveillance, early detection, and preparedness are key components in mitigating this threat and preventing a significant public health crisis.
As explained in a Nottingham University news release, the evidence comes from an isolate of the H3N8 avian influenza virus (AIV) recovered from a human patient:
The mutualistic relationship between Gastrodia foetida and its pollinator, both of which primarily feed on mushrooms. The flowers emit a mushroom-like smell that lures the flies in.
A characteristic of evolved systems is that they tend towards increasing complexity, the antithesis of an intelligently designed system, which should be minimally complex for the simple reason that complexity is expensive in terms of energy and resource, and more likely to go wrong.
Unnecessary complexity and prolific waste, which are normal components of evolved systems, are the strongest arguments against intelligent design and for a mindless, utilitarian, near-enough-is-good-enough, process such as evolution by natural selection.
And just such a case of quite ludicrous complexity has been revealed by Kenji Suetsugu of Kobe University Graduate School of Science, Kobe, Japan.
Sadly, the paper in Ecology is behind a paywall, however the research and its significance is the subject of Kobe University press release:
Creationists apologists, in a desperate effort to explain why a supposedly omnibenevolent designer would design so many nasty little parasites, whose sole purpose appears to be to increase the suffering in the world, find solace in the Bible myth of 'The Fall' which apparently allowed 'sin', over which their reputedly omnipotent deity is powerless, to enter the world and begin creating parasites.
Forgetting for a moment that several of these parasites have been cited by creationism's favourite 'creation scientist', Michael J Behe, as examples of irreducibly complex (therefore made by God [sic]) organisms. This means that the entire history of parasites must be shoe-horned into the last 8-10 thousand years or so, or however many thousands of years ago the convenience of the argument needs to place this 'Fall'.
And, of course, since 'The Fall' involved a parentless couple, there could not have been parasites before there were humans on Earth - so the logic of the argument dictates.
It must set up some awful cognitive dissonance in creation cult victims to discover, not only that Triassic animals suffer from parasites, but parasitic nematodes and probably other intestinal parasites existed some 200 million years before they think Earth and humans were created.
Of course, this is just another example of the yawning gap between what the creation cult teaches its scientifically illiterate dupes, and the real history of the Universe and life on Earth.
The discovery of the eggs of parasitic nematodes in the fossil remains of ancient faeces or coprolite, was made by Thanit Nonsrirach of Mahasarakham University, Thailand, and colleagues. The coprolite is from the Upper Triassic Huai Hin Lat Formation in Northern Thailand, which formed in shallow, low-energy brackish or fresh water about 200 million years ago.
The team's findings are published, open access, in PLOS ONE.
Like a multifunctional gardening tool, the T4A pili of different Acinetobacter strains have evolutionarily modified the ComC protein at their tip (oval, in different colors) to settle in different niches within humans.
Model of the type IVa pilus (T4aP) in A. baylyi. OM–Outer membrane; IM–Inner membrane; PG–peptidoglycan. The individual components are listed in Table 1.
Remember how Michael J Behe got an entire book out of the fact that his target readership thought ignorant incredulity was scientific data, so the fact that neither he nor they knew how the bacterial flagellums evolved was presented as evidence that a god must have designed it? His book is still one of the central gospels of the creationist cult, even though few members would be capable of reading and understanding it, let alone be prepared to read the detailed rebuttals by Miller and others.
In fact, the evolution of the bacterial flagellum by exaptation of pre-existing structures, namely the Type III secretory system that bacteria use to anchor themselves to target cells before parasitizing them, was known about before he wrote his book, as Kenneth Miller has pointed out - a fact that Behe has failed to acknowledge in subsequent editions.
Dandruff is caused by a yeast of the Malassezia family, Malassezia globosa to be precise. As a complex, eukaryote cell, creationists superstition insists that it must have been designed by an intelligent [sic] designer. It is also axiomatic in creationism that the only entity capable of designing living organisms is the omnipotent, omniscience god of the Bible, Torah and Quran.
It follows from that then, if we accept the dogma for the sake of argument, that this designer god knew precisely what Malassezia globosa would do and so designed it for that purpose.
And that purpose, apart from making more copies of Malassezia globosa, is to cause the embarrassing condition in humans, dandruff. Dandruff doesn't cause a general illness or handicap (apart maybe from a social handicap), and it isn't even painful, apart from an irritation or itch that needs constant scratching. In fact, inducing the person with dandruff to scratch their scalp a lot is Malassezia globosa's dispersal strategy.
The thing about being a follower of the intelligent [sic] design cult is that you have to believe whatever the 'design' is, that was precisely what your putative intelligent [sic] designer intended to design because, although you should never say so, your designer god is one and the same god that fundamentalist Christians and Moslems believe in, i.e., it is omniscient, omnipotent and inerrant so is incapable of making a mistake.
So, what the cult now has to explain is why their favorite sadist gave some people a gene which protects then against symptomatic COVID-19, but not everyone, if, as the normal excuse for these parasites is valid - i.e., it wasn't God, it was something called 'sin' which creates viruses (and apparently the supreme, omniscient ruler of the universe is powerless to stop it or uncaring enough to not bother, or maybe even unaware of it).
In which case, why create the protective gene?
Of course, a ready explanation which fits in with the intelligent [sic] design superstition is that it wanted a few people to catch COVID-19 but not know they has=d it, so they could spread it around - the infectious but asymptomatic cases that are believed to have been responsible for a great deal of the pandemic's success.
So, creationists need to explain whether their intelligent [sic] designer deliberately created these super-spreaders to infect as many people as possible and if not, what did it create them for and how come it didn't know what the outcome would be?
The discovery of this gene was made by a group led by researchers from the University of California San Francisco, who have just published their findings, open access, in Nature. As the UC San Francisco news release explains:
The U.S. Department of Agricultures (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) has found that SARS-CoV-2, the virus causing COVID-19, has widely spread within the U.S. white-tailed deer population, possibly transmitted from humans to deer, where it mutated and potentially transmitted back to humans. The findings are part of a study involving the surveillance of over 11,000 white-tailed deer.
White-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) in 2022, 12.2% were carrying the virus and 31% showed signs of previous exposure.
If you're a malevolent designer and you just had a major triumph with a nasty little virus that killed millions, made many more times that sick, and wrecked economies worldwide, but the human victims hit back with a vaccine that protects them, what do you do?
We'll, if you're creationism's favourite sadist, you don't just give up and allow your victims to win; you have a long-term plan to teach the upstarts a lesson.
Using the fact that immunity to your virus is short-lived because you designed their immune systems that way, you store your nasty little virus away somewhere where there is no vaccine-induced immunity and you can experiment with better, more deadly and more infectious versions of it and wait until your human victims no longer have enough immunity to resist the new, improved, version, then you transfer it back into the human population and sit back to enjoy the suffering again!
And what better than a wild species that humans regularly hunt for food, but which don't need to meet the food-hygiene regulations with which humans normally protect themselves from infections in domesticated species.
In China, this could be practically any species, but in North America, what better species is there than the white-tailed deer, which is regularly hunted for meat?
This, of course, is the sort of thinking an honest, troobuleeving creationist (if there is such a thing) would have to believe, because the evidence is that white tailed deer are a reservoir species harbouring the SARS-CoV-2 and providing an environment in which to mutate and evolve.
This evidence comes from the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) which has just released the results of its first year of sampling white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) for active infection of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. These studies show that SARS-CoV-2 is likely to have spread widely within the U.S. white-tailed deer population.
According to a USDA APHIS news item:
It's turning out to be another terrible week for those few creationists
capable, and willing, to read the science.
Here for example is a report on the work of a team led by evolutionary
biologist, Professor Jay T. Lennon, of the Department of Biology in the College
of Arts and Sciences at Indiana University. It shows a number of things that
refute basic creationist dogmas:
The team use a genetically engineered, stripped down version of the
bacterium Mycoplasma mycoides, a parasitic organism that, in common
with many parasites had lost genes in the course of its evolution as a
dependent parasite in the gut of goats and similar animals, reducing its
genome to just 901 genes. So here we have evolution by loss of information
(something creationists claim can't happen because their dogma says loss of
information is invariably detrimental) as the starting point of this
research.
The team then removed all but the essential genes needed to maintain a
functional, reproducing cell, removing a further 45 percent of the genes,
reducing the genome to just 493 genes, showing the massive amount of
redundancy in a cell's genome - something that no intelligent designer would
have designed, showing there was no intelligence in the design of
M. mycoides. By comparison, a typical cell can contain 20,000 genes!
The team then allowed the minimal cell to evolve for 300 days, or 2000
generations (equivalent to 40,000 years of human evolution). They found that
even with a minimal genome and so fewer targets for mutation and selection
to act on, the minimum cells evolved towards greater fitness, just as the
TOE predicts.
And of course, as with all biological research, there is the complete
dependence on the TOE to understand and explain the results, with no hint of
doubt in it's explanatory powers or any suggestion that the creationists
superstition with its magic and unproven supernatural entity might offer a
better explanation of the facts.
Here then is how the Indiana University news release describes the research:
Two ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi: The lighter colored ant is infected with larvae of the tapeworm Anomotaenia brevis (bottom right) and thus has a different cuticle color as well as, more importantly, a considerably longer lifespan.
A beautiful example of how the mindless, undirected process of evolution can produce parasites that turn their hosts into zombies, because that suits the survival interests of their offspring, was published a couple of years ago in Royal Society Open Science.
And more bad news for creationists because it makes their beloved designer god look even more malevolent.
The study was conducted by a team of researchers led by Professor Susanne Foitzik of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU).
Why an intelligent designer would design something like this is something for creationists to explain because the designer of such a system can only be described as malevolent and planning to increase the suffering in the world, or full of hate for the ants it supposedly also designed.
The study showed that worker ants of the species Temnothorax nylanderi can live several times longer than normal workers of the same species when infected by a parasitic tapeworm, Anomotaenia brevis.
The ants are the intermediate hosts of the tapeworm, the primary host of which is a woodpecker. The longer an infected ant lives, the greater its chances of being eaten by a woodpecker, so it is in the interests of the tapeworm genes to keep the ant alive as long as possible.
The research is explained in a press release from JGU:
The thing about believing in intelligent design, if that's what Christian and Islamic creationists genuinely do, is that you have to believe the bad stuff is designed by the designer of the good stuff because your religion only allows you to believe in one supreme designer, or you have to believe there is some other entity or force capable of intelligently designing things against which your putative supreme designer is powerless.
The other entity or force is capable of altering your supreme designer's plans at will and there is not a thing the supreme designer can do about it. Even the bizarre and morally repugnant blood sacrifice of its own son didn't give it sufficient power to overcome this rival designer, apparently.
The logic then of insisting there is only one intelligent designer is that the same designer that designs parasites that make us sick, designed our immune system to protect us from its malevolent designs. It needs a private definition of the word 'intelligent' to define that as intelligent design.
As this latest piece of research shows, some bacteria, in this case those that cause food poisoning not only have genes that produce the toxins that make us sick have also been designed to share these genes even with other species, and creationists dogma dictates that creationists believe this can't have evolved by a mindless process, so must be the design by ab intelligence that can only be described as malevolent.
The research was conducted by scientists at the Graduate School of Life and Environmental Sciences, Osaka Prefecture University, Osaka, Japan, with colleagues from the School of Environment and Life Sciences, Independent University Bangladesh (IUB), Bashundhara, Dhaka, Bangladesh and the Department of Pediatrics, Mizushima Central Hospital, Okayama, Japan.
The work is explained in a brief press release from Osaka Metropolitan University:
How the Biblical Origin Myths Failed the 'Chosen People'
The toilet seat from the estate at Armon ha-Natziv. The site, excavated in 2019, probably dates from the days of King Manasseh, a client king for the Assyrians who ruled for fifty years in the mid-7th century.
Any caring, omni-benevolent, omniscient god would have warned his chosen people about the need for good hygiene in the form of sanitation and the importance of hand-washing, because it would have told them about germ theory and how to avoid catching the parasites it had designed to cause, amongst other things, debilitating diarrhoea.
But not so the god of the Old Testament.
The evidence just discovered by scientists working at Cambridge University, in collaboration with colleagues at Tel Aviv University, with the cooperation of the Israel Antiquities Authority, is that a particularly nasty parasite, Giardia duodenalis, which causes an intractable form of dysentery, was rife in Iron Age Judah.
There is, of course, no mention of this in the Bible, not any hint about how to avoid it with good hygiene and sanitation. It's just like the authors of the Bible were as ignorant as the Late Bronze age/Early Iron age people who lived in Judea at the time. There are extra-biblical Babylonian references to diarrhoea affecting the populations of what is now the Near and Middle East. One example reads: “If a person eats bread and drinks beer and subsequently his stomach is colicky, he has cramps and has a flowing of the bowels, setu has gotten him". The cuneiform word often used in these texts to describe diarrhoea was sà si-sá.
Some texts also included recommended incantations to increase the chances of recovery, showing that they believed magic spells would help control the cause.
But if we listen to the childish fantasies of creationists, we should conclude that this was deliberate, because an omniscient creator would know precisely what the microorganisms it designs will do and creates them for that purpose. Leaving humans ignorant was all part of the plan to allow the parasites to make them suffer, apparently.
How did the Cambridge-led scientists make this discovery? A press release gives the details:
Creationism's divine malevolence excelled itself with the SARS-CoV-2 virus that caused the COVID-19 pandemic, killing millions, making hundreds of millions more sick either in the short term with the initial infection, or long-term with the long-lasting aftereffects experienced by some victims with 'long-COVID'. It managed to achieve a stunning over three-quarters of a billion cases worldwide with nearly 7 million deaths, as of 18 May 2023, not to mention the bankrupted business and ruined national economies.
But human science having hit back with a vaccine produced in record time, it then had to go into an arms race of new, resistant variants to keep it ahead of science. The most successful of those, Omicron, resulted in unprecedented peaks of cases although deaths were relatively low due to the vaccines.
And now, not to be outdone by humans, it has produced the latest variant, a version of Omicron (Omicron XBB.1.16) that epidemiologists have named Arcturus.
Should we be concerned, that Arcturus can evade the immunity conveyed by vaccines, regular booster vaccines and natural immunity due to previous infections? Here is how Manal Mohammed, a Senior Lecturer and Medical Microbiology at the University of Westminster, UK sees it. Her article is reprinted from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence, reformatted for stylistic consistency:
Arcturus: what to know about the new COVID variant, omicron XBB.1.16
A new COVID variant XBB.1.16, or “Arcturus”, has now been identified in at least 34 countries including the UK.
Arcturus is a subvariant of omicron and was first detected in India in January 2023.
As of April 17, the latest date up to which the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) has reported data on this variant in the UK, 105 cases of Arcturus had been sequenced across England. Five Britons who tested positive for Arcturus have died.
It’s important to note that only a small portion of COVID infections undergo genetic sequencing, so it’s likely there are many more cases of Arcturus. The UKHSA recently reported that the variant is making up 2.3% of sequences in the UK.
Meanwhile, Arcturus has been steadily rising in the US in recent weeks, accounting for more than 10% of new confirmed COVID cases as of the end of April.
But the variant has been most dominant in India, which had recorded 61% of global sequences of Arcturus as of mid-April. It has driven a huge increase in cases in India over the past month. The country was recording more than 10,000 COVID cases each day with Arcturus making up about two-thirds of all cases. Fortunately this wave now appears to be on the decline.
Nonetheless, Arcturus has been classified as a variant of interest by the World Health Organization. So what do we know about this variant, and should we be worried?
XBB.1.16 is a descendant of XBB, a recombinant omicron strain, meaning it contains genetic material from two different variants. Specifically, XBB is a mixture of two BA.2 sublineages: BA.2.10.1 and BA.2.75.
XBB has shown increased transmissibility relative to earlier variants, probably because it appears to be better at evading existing immunity from vaccination and prior infections.
Arcturus is very closely related to XBB.1.5, also known as Kraken.
Compared with its parent strain XBB, Arcturus has three additional mutations in the spike protein: E180V, F486P and K478R. This is a protein on the surface of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes COVID) which allows it to bind to and infect our cells.
Arcturus is understood to be the most contagious subvariant yet, and these additional mutations might explain why.
The typical symptoms of COVID include fever, cough, runny nose and loss of sense of taste or smell. However, doctors in India have reported conjunctivitis symptoms in children infected with Arcturus, which has not generally been seen in earlier COVID waves.
What about vaccine protection?
COVID vaccines target the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2. As such, mutations in the spike protein may affect how well the vaccines work.
There is no data yet on vaccine efficacy against Arcturus. However, a recent study found that among people who had been vaccinated or previously infected, the antibody responses generated against closely related strains XBB and XBB.1 were significantly lower than against other variants.
So XBB subvariants could threaten current COVID vaccines and therapeutics. But importantly, it’s likely vaccines still offer good protection against severe disease.
While further studies are needed to confirm how Arcturus responds to vaccines, scientists are continuing work on new vaccines that could offer stronger protection against emerging variants.
The continued evolution of omicron
Although omicron was first detected in late 2021 it continues to evolve resulting in new subvariants. Arcturus is one of some 600 detected to date.
This is to be expected in a highly vaccinated population. New variants naturally evolve to evade existing defences. Those strains with a competitive advantage – namely greater transmissibility and capacity to escape our immune response – will dominate. Arcturus may yet fuel a rise in cases in the UK and elsewhere.
However, there is no great cause for concern. While scientists will continue to monitor Arcturus, there’s no evidence at this stage to suggest it’s more severe than previous variants. In addition, we have good protection now from vaccines and natural infection.
That said, the continued evolution of COVID and the emergence of new strains such as Arcturus is a reminder that the virus is still with us. For those eligible for further boosters, it’s important to keep these up to date.
Manal Mohammed, Senior Lecturer, Medical Microbiology, University of Westminster
Published by The Conversation. Open access. (CC BY 4.0)
I'm still waiting for an intelligent reply explaining why creationists would rather we thought of their putative designer god as a pestilential malevolence forever designer new and better ways to make its creation suffer, than have people accept that the theory of evolution explains the origins of parasites like the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus as a natural process, without the intervention of a supernatural deity - which would let their favourite genocidal monster off the hook.
