Wow I thought I had done several posts on xenografts but I could not find any. I usually babble about them while hikeing and such. But in a nutshell- living animal tissue, is inserted surgically into a human being or the other way around. But in most cases it is animal tissue into humans because in some cases it is used medically to treat certain diseases such as Parkinson’s.
With Parkinson’s it is fetal pig brain tissue that is injected. It really seems to help. But microbiologically that is just asking for an animal virus to “learn” — to mutate, to take over a human being. The key thing is that both of the cell types are alive and ticking along. Animals, including humans have something on the order of 100,000 hidden (cryptic) viruses in their genomes.
Since the cells are alive and expressing their DNA there is a low chance that a cryptic virus could mutate and become active. And thus be creating genetic variance. If one of these genetic variants could infect the human tissue or host it could be catastrophic.
If an AIDs type swine virus with the communicability to humans of the common cold became active the human race would be dead before we knew it. The problem is: like asteroid impacts; there is a very low probability of this happening and it is virtually impossible to tell a victim of Parkinson’s or their family members that we have a good treatment but we don’t want to use it because there is an incredibly tiny chance that we would kill the entire human race.
But biologically it is still not a good idea to be putting living animal tissue into humans or the reverse– human cells into animals.
Bob
PuraVidaAquatic.com