SOURCE THE TRUE CAUSE OF STRESS

from Healthy Living April 2013

VITAMIN COPACETIC

WRITER: RICHARD T. BOSSHARDT, M.D., FACS

Without a doubt, I believe the most signiﬁcant advance in modern medicine occurred just recently when it was discovered that stress is actually caused by a viral infection. Just think about it. For decades we have been laying some of the blame for nearly every imaginable illness on stress. Stress caused everything from ulcers to high blood pressure to headaches. It even caused a compromise in the immune system leading to an increased susceptibility to everything from heart disease to cancer. But what about the cause of stress itself?

Blaming stress on modern society is too easy. We can point to the complexity of modern society with its instant communication, myriad ways of staying in contact, sensory overload from the media, television, the Internet, and constant pressure to do more and more in a twenty-four-hour day. Environmental deterioration, including everything from food contamination to global warming, has been thought to cause stress. Not any more.

An obscure group of researchers in the Maldive Islands recently isolated viral RNA from natives suffering from a variety of maladies. Until recently, the Maldivians were regarded as the only population in the world immune to stress disorders. In large part, this was felt to be due to the laid back lifestyle and lack of modern technology and other accoutrements of modern civilization. The Maldivian culture has been likened to turnof-the-century America in many ways, except more tropical and with fewer clothes. Unfortunately, the Maldives succumbed to that scourge of tropical paradises, very much like Florida: tourism. The influx of tourists, which included many celebrities and the paparazzi that inevitably follow, resulted in the islands rapidly acquiring Internet and cellular telephone service, a BMW dealership, traffic jams, and a casino, not to mention international hotel and restaurant chains and the first McDonald’s in the Indian Ocean, but I am digressing.

Natives began reporting to the local clinics with all the problems associated with our modern culture: high blood pressure, migraines, anxiety, hair loss (very serious since in the Maldives, luxuriant hair growth is used to rank one’s place in society), etc. Of course, in working up these complaints, blood was drawn, and when an astute group of researchers injected some of this blood into laboratory rats, they exhibited all the signs of stress without ever entering a maze, being smeared with cosmetics, or subjected to pointless, painful experimentation. Further work isolated a new virus, M. stressii (RNA strain 50210). Infection with this virus produced all the signs of stress with an incubation period of two weeks.

The discovery of M. stressii is such a stunning development that it is presently being reported only in medical journals not available to the general public. There is heated debate among virologists about the feasibility and appropriateness of trying to develop a vaccine for M. stressii. For some, the possibility that we continue to live modern lives characterized by unhealthy diets, obesity, lack of exercise, insufﬁcient sleep, chronic multitasking, and instant communication at all hours, but without the stress, is a dream come true. For others, the feeling is that some stress is good and we must ﬁnd a way to weaken the virus but not eliminate it completely. Time will tell which side will prevail.