This as yet unproven theory suggests that the mask may simply immunize other people while we wait for the vaccine.
Non-medical tissue or disposable mask has been distributed worldwide, primarily to help prevent other inflamed people from spreading the new coronavirus.
Although they do not offer complete protection, the mask can potentially the amount of virus inhaled through a carrier, according to a recent paper published this month in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).
“We assume that the higher the dose (or inoculum) of viruses you introduce into your body, the sicker you are,” one of the authors, Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, told AFP.
“We masks decrease the dose of virus you inhale and, as a result, increase rates of asymptomatic infection. “
Gandhi, director of the UCSF-Gladstone Center for AIDS Research, said asymptomatic infection was linked to a strong immune reaction of T-cell phones, a type of white blood cell phone, that can act in opposition to COVID-19.
“We thought the mask might act as a kind of ‘bridge’ to a vaccine by giving us some immunity,” he said, adding that researchers were launching several studies to verify the theory.
This would come in determining whether the requirement of a mask in some cities had reduced the severity of the disease there.
They are also antibody studies in Taiwan, where masks are ubiquitous but where there are very few restrictions.
“Of course it’s still a theory, but there are a lot of arguments in his favor,” Bruno Hoen, director of medical studies at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, told AFP.
He said we deserve to “take another look at the use of masks,” first considered dead by the fitness authorities, in a context of scarcity.
Today, they are widely used to curb the spread of infection.
Smallpox lessons
The theory echoes “variriolation”, a rudimentary strategy used before the advent of vaccines that referred to giving others a benign disease in an attempt to vaccinate them as opposed to a more serious bureaucracy of the disease.
In Asia, early smallpox meant blowing dried scabs of smallpox patients into the nose of healthy people, according to the US National Library of Medicine.
When he arrived in Europe and America in the 18th century, the practice, which sometimes killed the patient, was to insert smallpox under the skin.
The NEJM article suggests a parallel in the sense that exposure to small doses of viruses strengthens immunity.
“This is an attractive theory with a hypothesis,” Archie Clements, vice-chancellor of the Faculty of Health Sciences at the Australian University of Curtin, told the AFP.
But others expressed reservations.
Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at Columbia University in New York, said she was “pretty skeptical that this is a smart idea. “
She said we still know if a lower dose of virus means a more benign disease.
“We don’t know if the mask reduces exposure to the virus,” he said on Twitter, adding that the duration and point of immunity are also little known.
“It’s an attractive idea, but there are too many unknowns to say that the mask can be used as a tool to ‘vary’ others who oppose SARS-CoV-2,” he added.
A major impediment to answering these questions is that it is difficult to control speculation from UCSF researchers.
“It is true that such speculation in human reference strategies (experimental design) can never be shown, as we cannot intentionally disclose to humans about the virus,” Gandhi said.
But some studies have proved useful, he said, and he added in Hong Kong about hamsters.
Scientists pretended to be dressed in a mask by hitting one between the cages of swollen rodents and healthy rodents.
They found that hamsters were less likely to get COVID-19 if they were “masked,” and even if they hit it, their symptoms were milder.
There have been some accidental experiments in the genuine world.
In one case, a cruise departed Argentina in mid-March and passed a surgical mask on board after the first sign of infection.