C4 DOCUMENTARY: Fat Plague
The docu did not reveal a lot more info than was given in the Guardian article.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk_news/story/0,3604,867841,00.html
But the attitude shown here seems unnecessarily hostile:
".. Stephen Bloom, an endocrinologist at Imperial College, London, was sceptical. He said: "We know that obesity has been growing at a very constant rate for about 50 years and the cause is obvious. People are eating much more and taking less exercise. Why do we need to invent some strange theory about a virus?"
The point is, the theory was not 'invented', but discovered. The story started in India, where Dr Nikhil Dhurandhar worked as a doctor in Bombay, specialising in obesity. He heard about a virus that was killing off flocks of chickens: when vetinary specialists studied the birds, they discovered that they all had greatly increased fat levels. Dr Dhurandhar then experimented by injecting healthy chickens with the virus, and found that their fat levels also increased.
Convinced that more research was needed, he moved to the US, and found that monkeys could be infected with the (human) AD 36 virus, and they also showed dramatic weight gains. But he was getting little support from the scientific community, and was on the point of returning to India before he got university backing for more research. Since they couldn't infect humans with the virus, they researched the antibodies to the virus found in human blood, with the results already described - obese people were more likely to have been exposed to the virus than control groups. The geographical spread of obesity in the US also mirrored the spread of other viruses studied by epidemiologists. The C4 programme also showed a pair of twins of different weights (which is rare) - the larger one had the antibodies.
But there lies the rub - at present it seems the virus invades the body and does its work (probably on 'pre-fat' cells) before the body fights it off - hence the antibodies. This means obese people are no longer infectious - but if anyone sneezes near you, beware! It also means that fat people cannot (at present) be 'cured', because the damage has already been done. But better understanding of the problem will no doubt lead to new ideas. There was a suggestion that the virus may have arisen as a result of interactions between human and chicken viruses (remember that Asian flu is also poultry related).
There certainly seems to be some viral component to the obesity probablem. (This could perhaps also explain why it runs in fanilies - not only similar genes and eating habits, but you are more likely to catch infections from your nearest and dearest!)