Herpes Virus Reactivation in Astronauts During Spaceflight

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2019.00016/full

by daegloe • 7 years ago

108 93 7 years ago

fixermark• 7 years ago

Interesting to me personally because I'd never heard before that HSV-1 reactivation was stress-linked.

mfoy_• 7 years ago

It's well known that stress weakens the immune system[1]. So it's not a surprise that stress might encourage dormant infections (such as HSV-1) to enjoy a resurgence.

[1] https://www.apa.org/research/action/immune

jacobolus• 7 years ago

Speaking anecdotally, sleep deprivation is the biggest immune system damper for me. Often it’s hard for me to judge the effects of stress per se, because sleep deprivation also leads to stress and vice versa.

dajohnson89• 7 years ago

I get canker sores [0] only during periods of extremely high stress or sleep deprivation.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphthous_stomatitis

degenerate• 7 years ago

If you ever had chicken pox, high stress can re-activate the dormant virus, and it reactivates as "shingles". There is a vaccine that came out a few years ago to suppress it from happening.

brewdad• 7 years ago

I think the vaccine is only covered by insurance (USA) for people over 50 in most cases. If you are lucky enough to have coverage, get the vaccine. Shingles as an otherwise healthy 42 year old was no picnic, I can't imagine how bad it must be for someone older or more immuno-compromised.

tomcam• 7 years ago

Had chicken pox in my 30s. Not good. The shingles vaccine isn’t expensive, thank heaven. It’s a quarter century later and my mom got shingles at about this age…

rincebrain• 7 years ago

AFAICT both the options for shingles vaccination are just variants on the chickenpox vaccine - one being more directly just a high dose of it.

This doesn't undermine anything you say, I'm just bemused at the lag time between the chickenpox vaccine (1984) and Zostavax (2006).

g45y452• 7 years ago

"Filthy stinking astronauts" -- upright citizens brigade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK-30442RII

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

I was thinking "space herpes," but couldn't remember what movie it was from.

sp332• 7 years ago

Ice Pirates.

xkcd-sucks• 7 years ago

Space is cool, but I didn't see any gravity related controls nor any other space specific controls.

Consider that the relationship between stress (HPA axis, etc.) and viral activation is pretty well known. Models of chronic rodent stress include constant loud noise, uncomfortable environmental scale (open spaces versus "comfortable" places with places to hide/nest), weird lighting and temperature, "violent" (freaking them out, not hurting them) handling, etc. These rodent models seem pretty similar to "put humans in a cramped little box, shake them around and mess with their sleep and eating schedules".

There's nothing novel and space specific here except for "going to space is stressful" and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out.

potiuper• 7 years ago

FTAA - "Larger quantities and increased frequencies for these viruses were found during spaceflight as compared to before or after flight samples and their matched healthy controls." Further details such as graphs, p values, and references are also provided.

nabla9• 7 years ago

I would humbly suggest submarine crews as control group.

Canned air, tight space, weird sleep cycles, noise and artificial light. Submarine crews are even more isolated because they can't contact families while underway.

w-ll• 7 years ago

Or even saturation divers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturation_diving

taneq• 7 years ago

Also airline crews? They get to do their high-pressure job in lower-than-normal air pressure, they get shaken around in a tin can and their sleep schedules are shot to hell.

freeflight2• 7 years ago

I'd imagine this whole "being strapped to a ton of explosives and using them to fly" moment is a tad bit more extreme and stressful than a submarine dive.

After that, they both have similar constant stress factors, but imho the launch alone is probably way more than what anybody on a submarine would go through.

SubiculumCode• 7 years ago

I mean you are right, but in the articles I read, their hypothesis is exactly about stress.

minikites• 7 years ago

Reminder that the stigma against herpes is a pharmaceutical marketing creation from the mid 1970s:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herpes_simplex#Society_and_cul...

Pedro Cuatrecasas states, "during the R&D of acyclovir, marketing [department of Burroughs Wellcome] insisted that there were 'no markets' for this compound. Most had hardly heard of genital herpes..." Thus, marketing the medical condition—separating the 'normal cold sore' from the 'stigmatized genital infection' was to become the key to marketing the drug, a process now known as 'disease mongering'.
Much of the hysteria and stigma surrounding herpes stems from a media campaign beginning in the late 1970s and peaking in the early 1980s. Multiple articles were worded in fear-mongering and anxiety-provoking terminology, such as the now-ubiquitous "attacks", "outbreaks", "victims", and "sufferers". At one point, the term "herpetic" even entered the popular lexicon. The articles were published by Reader's Digest, U.S. News, and Time magazine, among others. A made-for-TV movie was named Intimate Agony. The peak was when Time magazine had 'Herpes: The New Scarlet Letter' on the cover in August 1982, forever stigmatizing the word in the public mind.

reaperducer3• 7 years ago

The peak was when Time magazine had 'Herpes: The New Scarlet Letter' on the cover in August 1982

It's was actually "Today's scarlet letter: Herpes."

https://goo.gl/images/hVd6um

Sad when people can't do a simple Google search to verify most easily verifiable claims.

g45y452• 7 years ago

Did you update the wikipedia article with the correct citation? Its easy to complain on HN, takes a little more effort to correct misinformation for future internet users.

dwringer• 7 years ago

Agreed, but the article itself from that issue is titled "The New Scarlet Letter"[1]. The statement from Wikipedia seems to conflate the cover line with the article itself.

[1] http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,1715...

andrepd• 7 years ago

Why so confrontational? It's a simple mistake, and relatively harmless since the meaning is not at all changed.

ericol• 7 years ago

"The stigma against" is exclusively a US bound thing. I consume a lot of media (Plus memes) from the US, and people make a real fuss about it.

In my country people give it the same importance as a simple cold.

newnewpdro3• 7 years ago

Judging from the content on the linked wikipedia page for Herpes Simplex it strikes me as absurd that one would categorize it with the simple cold.

dpark5• 7 years ago

"In my country" with no context and not even a name for your country? I'm disinclined to believe that your anecdote accurately describes any country.

I like how you've inverted the common "US represents the world" fallacy by literally asserting that your herpes-blind nation is representative of the entire world exclusive of the US.

trhway2• 7 years ago

widespread cold sores in a given society i think have 2 pronged effect:

1. a something widespread does usually have naturally higher societal acceptance

2. [IANAD] kind of "de-facto" vaccination/immunization. For example i (like many many Russians) have occasional cold sores (once in a 1-4 years, in CA seems to be less frequently than back in Russia) since childhood. I've had it on both sides of my lips which probably means that i have both - HSV1 and HSV2. That also means that i never going to get it anywhere else on my body (once any one site in the body gets infected with herpes the rest of the body develops immunity)

From descriptions genital herpes seems to be worse than lip cold sores. In US (at least in CA) i see no people with cold sores, so the majority of the population is most probably susceptible to the infection. Given that sexual contact is a frequent transmission method in adulthood (while not a factor in childhood), i'm not surprised that for US population "herpes" statistically means and happens as "genital herpes" (while i haven't heard about such a thing back in Russia where we get it early in the childhood as cold sores on lips).

dpark5• 7 years ago

Note also though that Wikipedia claims that genital herpes infection rate increased dramatically during the 1970s. If true, it's not surprising that it would be relatively unknown before the increase and stigmatized after. HIV wasn't stigmatized in the 70s either.

bdamm• 7 years ago

At first I thought this was going to be about breakouts of shingles on the ISS, the thought of which nearly put me off spaceflight entirely. What a relief!

ncmncm• 7 years ago

The article doesn't mention, among possible stressors, that spacecraft are always operated at reduced air pressure and high oxygen fraction, and low humidity.

The problem is, nobody knows which factors are actually responsible for downregulating immune system activity, because every astronaut gets all of them.

A few ought to be variable. Sleep deprivation ought to be entirely avoidable, but NASA cannot quite manage not scheduling more to do in a day than there is day.

benj1112• 7 years ago

"The problem is, nobody knows which factors are actually responsible for downregulating immune system activity, because every astronaut gets all of them." They could check? Might be a good idea to know before they send Astronauts to Mars or something?

None of your examples are space dependent, and compared to SLS, slightly cheaper.

jamesmontalvo3• 7 years ago

ISS is at 1 atmosphere, except in the airlock when preparating for a spacewalk.

sitharus• 7 years ago

ISS, Soyuz and soon the crewed Dragon 2 all operate at sea-level air pressure with standard o2 partial pressure. Apollo was the last high oxygen environment.

bootlooped2• 7 years ago

I am surprised to see this data, because my impression was that you essentially had to be a physically and mentally flawless human being to go into space.

rjurney2• 7 years ago

They don't mention simplex B, which makes me wonder if it cancels you out.

icedchai5• 7 years ago

Over 60% of humanity has HSV-1 [1], aka "cold sores" virus. When people "get tested", they generally don't even check for it unless you request it, because it would create unjustified concern.

[1] See https://www.who.int/news-room/detail/28-10-2015-globally-an-...

burfog4• 7 years ago

So almost 40% of humanity does not have HSV-1.

Astronaut selection is already severe. You don't get selected if you have tuberculosis, diabetes, amputations, or deafness. Once selected, you won't go on the launch if you are sick with the flu.

It doesn't seem like HSV-1 needs to be a problem in space. Simply add that to the gigantic list of conditions that prevent space travel.

I highly doubt that HSV-1 is anywhere near 60% in the pool of astronaut candidates. Disease presence is correlated: if you have one, you probably have another. Since lots of other diseases would already be disqualifying, adding HSV-1 to the checklist won't strike off very many potential astronauts.

NikkiA• 7 years ago

Don't forget that the Herpes family also includes Herpes/Varicella Zoster, aka Chickenpox; and it also can be awakened by stress.

wakon• 7 years ago

NASA could send a control group of astronauts to space with NO duties and see if it has any effect on health (relative to those with “jobs”). Space travel is surely stressful, but perhaps the additional pressure of having tight schedules and deliverables is an additional stress?

saagarjha• 7 years ago

That seems like it would be an extremely expensive experiment.

JimmyAustin• 7 years ago

Make it a rich person, call it space tourism and you could make it profitable.

usrusr• 7 years ago

Absence of duties, schedules and deliverables can be quite a stress factor as well. I would not be surprised if that control group would end up suffering even more from being locked up in a free-falling can.

the2and7• 7 years ago

I get cold sores when I fly commercial airlines.

Herpes Virus Reactivation in Astronauts During Spaceflight

Related Stories