20 ms·
Outbreak of common colds at Antarctic base after 17 weeks of isolation (1973)
- sjg007 6y agoI noticed this in my own family of four. We've been in isolation for 2 months and we've all had colds for a week. You'd expect after 4 weeks for it to stop but nope. We've been social distancing and only one person goes out to pick up groceries curb side. We've been wiping stuff down too. I think this is one reason they say sars-cov-2 aka covid-19 is inevitable..
- throw_away 6y agoI heard a recent podcast (which, I cannot remember) where a family went through a similar scenario. They consulted with an expert, who, after eliminating common forgotten vectors, said that this can happen with bacterial infections dormant in the body which are then activated due to stress-induced lowered immune function. Theirs did not seem to transmit to others in the family, however.
- marktangotango 6y agoSame here, two weeks in 3 of 4 in our family had mild fevers (99<100) this was end of March. Last week the wife had another bout of 99+ (but less than 100) for a few days. Drive through windows and me going to the store have been our only exposures. I also discovered my temp is generally 96-97, rarely goes up to "normal".
- lurquer 6y ago>Drive through windows and me going to the store have been our only exposures. Let me reword this for you: "interacting with a teenager who deals with about a thousand people a day, and going to a facility that is frequented by tens of thousands of people a week, has been my only exposure."
- sushid 6y agoSeriously, how is this not comprehensible to people? If you or your family members are going outside, you HAVE NOT been in isolation. You've been interacting with people outside and bringing in germs from your visits.
- lurquer 6y agoAs Jeff Goldblum would say, "Life finds a way." I'm avoiding Covid conversations as my self-esteem is too fragile to tolerate downvotes. ;) But, if I were opining on the subject, I'd say that masks, social distancing, lock-downs, etc. are absolutely and utterly worthless and unecessary. But, if it makes some people feel virtuous to wear their placebo masks while cowering in the apartments, so be it. As for me, I'll be at the river this weekend tubing with several hundred others, drinking a Corona, and thinking of you all.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- sushid 6y agoIs the irony not lost on you? You're not really avoiding a COVID conversation in your comment...
- estoniandwarf 6y agoPeople go out once a week and thinking its comparable to living on Antartica, I know lockdown is very different from normal life but yet lol
- sjg007 6y agoI think the issue is that we are wearing masks and gloves so despite those protections you still can get sick while maintaining 6 foot social distance and even strictly limiting the time in a store (if ever)... Also the vector is one adult here max.
- abfan1127 6y ago
- Natsu 6y agoAverage body temperature seems to have been dropping for a long time now. Also, validate that yours give consistent readings. There's been some evidence of a bunch of them going out un or poorly calibrated recently and being off by a couple of degrees, and we're not talking about low end models, either.
- JoeAltmaier 6y agoThe simplest answer is often the correct one: somebody is cheating. Going out to see a friend; visiting a neighbor for 'just a minute'; chatting with the mailman.
- kzrdude 6y agoI don't think it's a big mystery that viruses stay around, inside one of your bodies.
- ck2 6y agoViruses can linger in the body and "hide" waiting for immune system to weaken. This is how people get shingles many decades later after chicken-pox, it's the same virus, just hid in nerve cells and spinal cord.
- dharma1 6y agoSome can stay latent for a long time - herpes viruses, retroviruses like HIV, Epstein-Barr, shingles like you said - but most viruses don't, as far as we know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_latency https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virus_latency
- derekp7 6y ago> Epstein-Barr Am I the only one who had to look this up, thinking it was a hidden commentary on current political items?
- avar 6y agoIt's interesting that the "Environment" section mentions this in passing: > Food comes mainly from packets or tins [...] There is a daily bread bake, and special occasions merit the thawing of a small amount of meat from a -20 C. freezer or from an ice cave in the nearby glacier. Then in the "Discussion" section: > The occurrence of a common cold during isolation, when the chances of introduction of new infection from the outside are virtually nil, implies that in some way virus persisted, either in the environment or in the men It then goes on to suggest animal reservoirs as a potential cause, as well as inanimate objects and that a virus "might have persisted in the respiratory tract of one or more men". But one of these packets of meat being opened and thawed isn't mentioned as a potential cause. I could find a couple of papers claiming that viruses survive for months or even years in food. Mystery most likely solved without the need for hitherto unknown or unlikely transmission vectors. That seems to me to obviously be the most likely cause. Someone sneezed on or otherwise contaminated a packet of meat that was then frozen and thawed months later. These people aren't truly "isolated" in the sense that they're going through a continual process of opening time frozen time capsules from the past. One of the papers that cite this one (published in the same year) discusses such "time capsule" effects, although not with food, but from opening presents kept in storage, unpacking stored clothing etc.[1] 1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/B2473CA4D9EB915221145A1480743FD9/S0022172400022919a.pdf/common_colds_in_antarctica.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
- nelaboras 6y agoViruses also can stay inactive in the body for years, see herpes as an obvious example. No idea if that can also be true for flu viruses though.
- cpncrunch 6y agoTrue for herpesviruses as they infect the immune system, but rhinovirus and coronavirus don't reactivate.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
- schoen 6y ago(1973)
- yasp 6y agoWould have added it but the title was too long
- prophesi 6y agoPerhaps take out "complete" to make room for it?
- airstrike 6y agoThe (1973) is probably the most important part of the title...
- tensor 6y agoWhy do you feel that? Being old doesn't somehow invalidate results.
- noodlenotes 6y agoYou don't see that someone might read the title and infer there's a current outbreak of Covid-19 in Antarctica? The title seems like deliberate clickbait without a year.
- yasp 6y agoDidn't make that connection but it's obvious in hindsight. sigh
- warranty 6y agoBecause just like me thousands reading the title would think this has something to do with coronavirus.
- mdszy 6y ago
- jawns 6y agoWhenever I see a paper from this long ago, I immediately check to see how often it's been referenced in the literature. Google Scholar says this study has been cited by a measly 16 papers since it was published in 1973: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=14536787377969347156&as_sdt=10005&sciodt=0,8&hl=en https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1453678737796934715... Without any other context, I would assume that the relative lack of studies that reference this paper suggests that there might be issues with reputability. But who knows? Maybe it's a gem that never got the attention it deserved.
- Buttons840 6y ago"There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before. "The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell. "He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell. "Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running. "I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science." - Richard Feynman http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html Maybe it's one of those papers that, by a less charitable interpretation than Feynman, invalidates an entire field of study and undercuts it's central assumptions, so it just gets ignored.
- Zealotux 6y agoAmusingly, I currently have a flu and can't focus for more than 5 minutes, could someone give me a summary of the findings (if there are any)?
- wolco 6y agoBy far the strangest comment. The first comment sums it up well.
- didgeoridoo 6y agoReactivation of latent[0] adenovirus infection due to the stress of Antarctic living? [0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142679/#S2title https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142679/#S2titl...
- jansan 6y agoDoes anybody else here have tonsilloliths? By their awful smell I assume that they may contain all kinds of bacteria or virii. Is it possible that they can survive in there and reactivate several months later again? Warning: You will need a strong stomach if you intend to search for "tonsilloliths" on Google or Youtube.
- didgeoridoo 6y agoUgh. I had those nasties in my early 20s. No idea why, but they just went away one day. Good luck!
- knicholes 6y agoYeah, I hock one up every couple months. I know I shouldn't, but something inside me makes me squish and smell it. It's always as disgusting as I know it will be, yet here we are.
- jansan 6y agoWhy shouldn't you? I have been removing them with water (syringe with plastic tip) for quite a while and haven't seen any negative effects. I also feel more confident that I do not have a bad breath.
- knicholes 6y agoNo, I'm saying I should not squish and smell them because it's always gross.
- nazca 6y agoI wonder if after 17 weeks of isolation their immune systems atrophied due to limited exposure to pathogens, making them more susceptible to relatively a 'small' initial exposure? Are there implications for the millions of folks isolating and reducing their daily exposure to pathogens?
- ceejayoz 6y ago> I wonder if after 17 weeks of isolation their immune systems atrophied due to limited exposure to pathogens... I keep seeing this idea floated around. Our entire concept of vaccinations would fail if a few weeks of isolation could collapse your immune system. We retain immunity for decades against diseases like measles that our bodies may not see at all during that time period. None of us has a living environment approaching anything like a clean room, either, no matter how fastidious the housekeeping.
- didgeoridoo 6y agoAtrophy, yes, but not from lack of challenge. More likely due to limited exercise, highly attenuated sunlight, and questionable diet.
- ceejayoz 6y agoNo worse than your average winter in the northern US. We get that for 4-5 months at a time in upstate NY.
- aszantu 6y agothere was one article about how viruses are involved in sheep fetuses, when they took out the viruses, the eggs and sperm wouldn't turn into a fetus or something
- buescher 6y agoThere's a lot we don't know about infectious disease.