Tuesday, July 28, 2020

IN PRAISE OF THE COMMON COLD


Our Enemy

This is not a “Frivolity” by any stretch of the immagination, but as it isn’t about ovarian cancer I stuck it here,


You probably know more about how the immune system works than I do; it wouldn’t take much.  Well, Francis Collins has provided us with a blog concerning Covid 19 - more specifically about how we might combat it - that I found very interesting.  The gist is something like this:  

The virus we now are contending with is a member of a “family”; specifically, the coronavirus family.  Other members include SARS, MERS, and several of the bugs responsible for the common cold.  All members of this family are structurally and/or biochemically similar.  Seems that “memory” T cells activated by these various coronavirus-type diseases hang around for decades – and sometimes, somehow, under some circumstances, may be effective against our current tormentor.  This was discovered by some guys in Singapore; it may lead to an effective vaccine.  Much work is ongoing, in Singapore and elsewhere.  Let us fervently hope.

So maybe those childhood "colds" were a blessing in disguise.  Well, probably not.



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