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Three years into the pandemic, COVID-19 remains strong, causing wave after wave as the number of cases skyrockets, decreases, and then rises. But last fall saw something new or old: the return of the flu. In addition, respiratory syncytial virus (RSV), a virus that makes few headlines overall, has been triggered on its own rise, creating a “triple epidemic. “
The outbreaks of those ancient enemies were surprising, as influenza and RSV virtually disappeared in the first two winters of the pandemic. Even more surprising, a specific edition of the flu would possibly have disappeared at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The World Health Organization surveillance program has not definitively detected the influenza B/Yamagata strain since March 2020. “I don’t think anyone will stand up and say he’s gone for now,” says Richard Webby, a virologist at St. Brown. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis but, he adds, “we hope he was expelled. “Such an extinction would be a very rare event, Webby says.
But then, the last few years have been very good for human-virus relationships, and lockdowns and masks have gone a long way toward preventing influenza and RSV from seeping into human nostrils. Still, Webby believes something else would possibly have kept them in the bay while COVID raged. This is called viral interference, and it just means that the presence of one virus can block another.
Viral interference can occur in individual cells in the laboratory, as well as in animals and other people exposed to viruses, but it can also occur in entire populations, if enough people contract a virus that prevents others from flourishing on a large scale. . . This results in waves of infections through individual viruses that take turns dominating. “Looking back over the last two years, I’m pretty sure COVID can block flu and RSV,” Webthrough says.
This wouldn’t be the first time scientists have observed such patterns. In 2009, for example, the dreaded swine flu virus, which had passed from pigs to humans in the spring of that year. It seemed about to increase when autumn came. , but suddenly, in some parts of Europe, it stagnated. The rhinovirus, which causes unusual blood loss and is likely transmitted through children returning to school, took center for a number of weeks before swine flu took over. This flu strain then delayed the typical increase in RSV in the fall through up to two and a half months.
Interference can occur in the frame in several ways. One occurs when two viruses use the same molecule to enter host cells. If virus A arrives first and attaches to all the molecular gate handles, the B virus may be out of luck.
Another type of interference can occur if two viruses compete for the same internal resources of the mobile, such as the machinery to manufacture new viral proteins or tactics to escape that mobile and infect others. Think of it as a race between two viruses. Webby says.
But the best-known form of interference comes from a defensive molecule called interferon that is produced through the mobiles of all animals with backbones (and also some invertebrates). In fact, viral interference is the explanation for why interferon was given its name. When a mobile detects a virus, any virus begins to generate interferon. And this, in turn, activates a multitude of defensive genes. Some of the products of those genes act within the mobile or at its limits, where they save you from others. Viruses enter and prevent the viruses already provided from replicating or leaving the mobile.
Cells secrete interferon into their environment, alerting other cells to stand guard. The result of all this: if at some point the virus occurs, the cells already have their defenses activated and possibly could.
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