Kirsten sent me this interesting article from The Atlantic (they dropped their pay wall for articles about Covid.):
"Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others: COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled."
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-immune-response/610228
"Why Some People Get Sicker Than Others: COVID-19 is proving to be a disease of the immune system. This could, in theory, be controlled."
www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/04/coronavirus-immune-response/610228
"There’s a big difference in how people handle this virus,” says Robert Murphy, a professor of medicine and the director of the Center for Global Communicable Diseases at Northwestern University.This degree of uncertainty has less to do with the virus itself than how our bodies respond to it. As Murphy puts it, when doctors see this sort of variation in disease severity, “that’s not the virus; that’s the host.”
...
...The people who get the most severely sick from COVID-19 will sometimes be unpredictable, but in many cases, they will not. They will be the same people who get sick from most every other cause.
Cytokines like IL-6 can be elevated by a single night of bad sleep. Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of daily and hourly stressors accumulate.
Ultimately, people who are unable to take time off of work when sick—or who don’t have a comfortable and quiet home, or who lack access to good food and clean air—are likely to bear the burden of severe disease."
Hey! I knew you would post it!!!
ReplyDeleteActually I found the article to be a very interesting one and less written from the frenzy we find daily from a particular House. The body's reaction once it reaches a certain tipping point was very fascinating. It reminds me of coughing and reaching a point where you can't stop.
The use of steroids is not that revolutionary as it has been given for years to people with inflammation. During my college days, it was given to students who had mono to keep them going. Of course, my family doctor hit the ceiling when he heard that and sent me home to bed for a week.
In a way, this article gave me some hope that there are medical people out there calmly going about their research without all of the fanfare.
Kirsten
KIRSTEN: Thanks, again for this article---not only is it interesting, but, like you, I appreciate that it's not frenzied!
ReplyDeleteAnd, yes, its' a reminder that many scientists are going about their work in their Mr. Spock-like ways.