Common cold combats Covid-19

https://news.yale.edu/2021/06/15/common-cold-combats-covid-19

by walterbell • 5 years ago

153 74 5 years ago

news.yale.edu

MontagFTB2• 5 years ago

Despite my deep desire to see modern medicine win out in this war against Covid, I find myself becoming increasingly blasé about these kinds of articles. Regardless of their supposed authority or the site/journal they’re from, subsequent headlines often disprove them.

Case in point: there is a raging disagreement about booster shots in the news over the past several weeks, and the conflicting statements drive me to news-weariness.

dmitrij• 5 years ago

You are talking about two different topics.

The first case: this story is not an article. It's a press release, and I wish we would stop treating these like "scientific publications".

The second case: there is a real debate going on, on a global level: should we use vaccines for booster vaccinations, or shouldn't we first vaccinate the whole world to get control of the pandemic. This is not only a question of medicine, this is also global politics, the rich North versus the not so rich rest of the world, patents and corporations versus saving lifes – debate is inevitable.

goinfar• 5 years ago

Inoculate the whole world against a coronavirus.. preposterous. Aren't the current EUA shots for targeting the initial alpha strain?

MontagFTB2• 5 years ago

Well, yes and no. While they are different topics, both are trying to present facts to back up their viewpoint. Is it a _fact_ that a rhinovirus infection helps fight Covid? Is it a _fact_ that booster shots are necessary, or is the current vaccine regimen sufficient? The facts seem to be changing in headlines faster than I can recall.

RobertRoberts• 5 years ago

Third case: Natural immunity needs to be required part of the discussion on any/all pandemic planning.

nradov6• 5 years ago

This is yet more evidence that living in overly sterile environments isn't good for overall health. We have a bad tendency to focus on specific narrow health goals while missing the big picture.

SketchySeaBeast2• 5 years ago

I'm not sure how this information improves the fight against COVID. Is the argument that everyone should be constantly sick with a cold instead? How many people have a cold at any one time, and what are the odds those same people would be infected with COVID? There's also no mention of whether that would give lasting COVID immunity, or if it would just swing around for when the person isn't actively sick. I don't know if the Mr Burns method of fighting COVID is a particularly great idea.

nradov6• 5 years ago

My comment was about overall health, not specifically about COVID-19. There is more to health than fighting one specific virus.

dilap2• 5 years ago

I don't think it does anything to help in the fight against COVID, but it does highlight potential unanticipated adverse effects of COVID mitigation measures -- e.g., what's going to be the impact on the immune systems of kids that end up being "socially-distanced" for N years?

gwbas1c• 5 years ago

The good news is that, if you have a bad cold, catching covid-19 won't "do you in."

clord4• 5 years ago

I’m surprised to see people disparaging natural immunity. This news about the rhinovirus is great. We should not turn our backs on any method of reaching herd immunity. There was previous news that one of the coronavirus cold strains also provided good immune response to sars-cov2. And of course cov2 itself has proven to produce a very effective antibody response such that those for whom it is less dangerous than flu might consider trying to get infected (don’t take my words as medical advice; talk to your doctor!). I’d consider bringing my young kids to a ‘pox party’ to help get things under control, given the latest evidence. The only reason I don’t still is social pressure, but the science is getting pretty clear that this virus is more like chicken pox than we thought, including it’s age dependent effect curve.

Especially now that we’re seeing that the effect of current vaccines is waining over 6-12 months, it’s time to start thinking more widely as the first people with the vaccine are coming back into risk. Animal reservoir data suggests this choice might be forced anyway - we can’t go vaccinating all the bats.

nkozyra2• 5 years ago

This is yet more evidence that living in overly sterile environments isn't good for overall health.

You could make that argument but here it appears it's not a lasting immune response but an ephemeral one which requires an active rhinovirus infection and antigen response to be protective.

It's also not definitive and the article mentions the possibility of cytokine storms.

nradov6• 5 years ago

I am making an argument about overall long-term health, not about a specific, temporary immune response to SARS-CoV-2.

sjaak• 5 years ago

It's amazing how many people think linearly and are unable to zoom out and look at the system as a whole.

nradov6• 5 years ago

This is a symptom of the reductionist trend in much of modern medicine which focuses primarily on treating specific conditions with individual small-molecule drugs. That's not a bad approach necessarily; it makes the experiments easy and has produced excellent results in many areas. But it seems to be running out of steam with most of the low-hanging fruit already picked. Return on drug development costs is trending lower.

In order to make major new advances we'll need to go back and develop a better theoretical understanding of how all the moving pieces fit together through basic research.

ddek3• 5 years ago

I heard a few months ago that UK infant ICU was in a dangerous spot because babies had caught all the bugs. Someone born in March 2020 would hardly have been outside until they were 1, so would be getting their first exposure to respiratory illnesses late. Babies usually get a slow, trickling exposure. By getting exposed to so many minor illnesses at once, their immune systems overloaded and they ended up in ICU with 4 or 5 things at once.

moltar2• 5 years ago

Do you have a source? Would love to learn more. We have a child that’s 8 months old in a similar situation. Need to prepare.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

Why would they have hardly been outside? Outside is the best place to be w/r/t COVID.

ls65536• 5 years ago

I would further add that not only do we often have a tendency to focus on specific narrow health goals while missing the big picture, but it sometimes seems we are doing things (though perhaps in some cases unwittingly without the benefit of hindsight) at the expense of broader, long-term health goals as well.

Maybe this is really just our human nature and hubris ultimately doing us in. We focus on trying to resolve short-term, acute situations where the cost-benefit calculations are perhaps more tangible and easier to measure and understand, but as a result we ultimately fail to properly consider the possible longer-term costs of our actions, even if those may turn out to be more damaging (by some measure) in the long term. In the pursuit of an ephemeral benefit today, the negative and possibly persistent effects of our actions get massively discounted, with the burdens of cleaning up after our actions ultimately placed on our descendants. If solving some problem today causes some problems down the road, then we seem so sure today that somebody else will manage to figure it out then, ad infinitum. The ratchet can only tighten things so far before something breaks.

throwawayboise2• 5 years ago

Problem is of course that it's not always possible to know long term effects when you make a decision on some more immediate benefit. So it's not like you're even making an informed trade-off.

As an example, I'd wager that the rise in childhood asthma/allergies is related to something that was thought to be (and maybe actually is) beneficial for children's health in the short term.

When I was a kid, there were a few people I knew of who had chronic issues with asthma and allergies but it seemed pretty unusual. Today, it seems like half the kids on my kids sport teams have inhalers or epi-pens or both.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

Probably helps explain why covid hit so hard in nursing homes.

abfan1127• 5 years ago

nursing homes are filled with people knocking on death's door. They have degraded cardiac and lung function, aged immune systems, most are on lots of medications. All respiratory (i.e. easily transmissible) diseases hit nursing homes hard.

graeme2• 5 years ago

Hold on. Compared to the ancestral environment, we have:

* Much more sterile environments for fomites. We wash everything including our hands

* Much more sterile environments for water pathogens

* Much less sterile environments for respiratory viruses. We now have indoor sealed buildings that allow aerosols to build up. Ancestral humans would not have had this

It seems to me that we could plausibly use less sterility in terms of stuff we touch, but more sterility in terms of air.

Water seems fine as it is: you see some pretty bad results in places with water borne pathogens.

On what basis can you argue we evolved to have more respiratory pathogens than present, given the lack of indoor environments in the past?

ivanhoe• 5 years ago

When speaking of "ancient times" we should really define more precisely who do we talk about - there were a huge differences between say citizens of Ancient Rome and some tribesman culture of Amazonia in terms of exposure to the pathogens.

We nowadays live in more sterile conditions, but we also live in a way bigger communities than ever, with significantly more population mobility - which makes us on average potentially exposed to a much wider spectrum of different germs in one's lifetime than it was a case ever before. When modern ppl get in contact with isolated tribes, although they're living whole lives in totally non-sterile conditions, it's almost always the modern people who will make them sick, not the other way around.

hyperpallium2• 5 years ago

Covered sewerage is one of the most significant health benefits of modern cities.

How much of a bad thing is a good thing?

tobr• 5 years ago

That’s gotta be one of the most useless science illustration I’ve seen. Surely they intended to also show the rhinoviruses in the right image, but never got around to it?

tclancy• 5 years ago

The modern equivalent of the comic book ad for an anti-zit popper: it clearly works because the second drawing of the kid has fewer dots!

fasteddie31003• 5 years ago

This was suspected early on in the pandemic. Before the vaccine was FDA approved I publicly wondered if we could just give people one of these "colds" that protects against COVID-19. My doctor friends said that would never pass any ethics board. I also suspect there would not be a good way for pharmaceutical companies to make any money on this more natural approach. Today the future looks like a carousel ride of booster shots and people are wearing masks again. My person approach, which would never be endorsed by public health officials, is to be fully vaccinated, not wear a mask and be in close proximity to people in the hope to get a breakthrough case of COVID-19. I want a mild case to build natural immunity, which studies show provides better immunity than vaccines, and get off a booster shot carousel and put COVID-19 behind me.

dhimes• 5 years ago

That was my hope too- unfortunately I don't live alone so can't go out and do it. And it probably is smarter to do what we can to avoid it as we still don't really understand the long-term effects of this nasty virus, just that it can have some bad ones for some people.

hannob• 5 years ago

What you're proposing is pretty much how the first vaccine was invented. (Jenner gave people cow pocks because that created immunity against the much more severe small pocks.)

That was great at the time, but today's vaccines are just a much better and more targetted way of creating immunity.

bodyfour• 5 years ago

The big problem with any deliberate-inoculation strategy: dosage.

In the vaccination you received, there was a controlled dosage of the active ingredient. This had been tested in thousands of people and is known to give a certain amount of immune response and an acceptable amount of side effects.

When you get have contact with someone who is infectious there is a huge variation in how much viral load they might have and how much they shed. So the first person you mean might only "gift" you a tiny dose that doesn't improve your post-vaccination immunity much at all. The next day you might meet a super contagious person, get basically drenched in viral particles, and then have a breakthrough case that makes you sick for weeks.

It's the sort of "clever hack" that probably sounds appealing to a lot of software engineers but is a terrible public health plan.

cardanome• 5 years ago

If you are under 60 and not in a vulnerable group and got two shots you are already done. Biontech/Moderna both offer pretty good protection against getting seriously ill.

So no need to get Covid the "natural way". If you are fully vaccinated, you are fully vaccinated. As long as there is no new escape variant you are fine already.

The third shot might be pretty optional for young people, we will have to see. Still even if necessary, it is not like you have to get a shot every week, the third will probably last much longer.

pawelmurias• 5 years ago

Having everyone have a common cold whole year round (we would have to get infected with new strains every few days) seems like 10x worse then just ignoring the pandemic and letting everyone get covid

coding123• 5 years ago

You're immune system would wipe out covid pretty fast if you had a cold year round. Iga was shown early as one of the most immediate responders that kills covid. in fact that's what our vaccine is trying to get your body to coax out when it sees the spike protein.

crubier• 5 years ago

You might still get COVID every year then, or get various strains per year, like the flu. So COVID-19 won't be "behind you", but "with you forever <3".

jareklupinski• 5 years ago

silly life; always finding ways~

sk2020• 5 years ago

A $20 injection for 70% (for now) of about 8B people is around $100B which no longer carries any legal risk. That’s a lot of incentive to overcome.

tradesmanhelix• 5 years ago

I want a mild case to build natural immunity, which studies show provides better immunity than vaccines.

Do you have a source for this? I feel like many articles/studies I've read state the opposite, i.e., vaccine immunity > natural immunity.

dr_dshiv2• 5 years ago

This is a great approach to the unvaccinated. I guarantee many of them would be willing to get a "natural" cold rather than the vaccine.

cblconfederate• 5 years ago

gonna be very hard due to restrictions and general distancing

Common cold combats Covid-19

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