4 ms·
I wish people applied this much caution to the virus. Who knows what cancers it causes 10 years down the road.
by titzer 6y ago
I wish people applied this much caution to the virus. Who knows what cancers it causes 10 years down the road.
- TrevorJ 6y agoDo any corona-family viruses cause cancers that we know of?
- titzer 6y agoI don't know. But HPV and Herpes definitely can. Here's some more: https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/infectious-agents/infections-that-can-lead-to-cancer/viruses.html https://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancer-causes/infectious-agent... It takes quite a long time to prove the link between a viral infection and a cancer that develops decades later, so it'll be a while before we know for sure.
- TrevorJ 6y agoI think that given the fact that we've been getting sick from corona-family viruses for years with no suspected link to cancers, this should be of relatively low concern, barring any specific information. There are other potential longer term side effects that at least seem to have some emerging data to back them up, which seem more concerning to me.
- makomk 6y agoHow would we even know? In order to tell if coronaviruses caused cancer, we'd need to be keeping track of which people had ever been infected with one of them and how many of them ended up with cancer, and we're not. It'd just fall into the background level of cancer incidence otherwise. Hell, we haven't even figured out if they're the main cause of Kawasaki disease yet, and that's a fairly spectacular and dangerous condition affecting children. There's some evidence that some common viruses in the family might be really deadly to elderly people, but that doesn't seem to have been researched much either. There's a lot we just don't know.
- TrevorJ 6y agoThis isn't actionable information, though. There are no good ways to mitigate all unknown potential risks, because the mitigations have risks themselves.
- stjohnswarts 6y agoYou mean proteins if you're talking modern/pfizer. It's literally triggered by one protein that matches a protein on the covid membrane. Everything in life is a chance, just stepping out and getting some sun puts you at risk for skin cancer yet still people have been doing it for a couple million years.
- krona 6y agoWe have 17 years of SARS-CoV-1 patient data. We're even using their antibodies to treat COVID-19.
- titzer 6y ago8000 infections of SARS worldwide. It took how many hundreds of millions of HPV infections and cancers to detect the link?
- jussij 6y agoThere is already plenty of evidence some people who survive the virus end up with lasting lung damage. While this is not cancer, for those poor souls, a lifetime spent struggling to breathe is not much better.
- kelnos 6y agoWell, consider that a lot of people who aren't applying as much caution to the virus itself just don't think it's that big a deal. Either they think their infection risk is low, or they expect they'll be asymptomatic, or think that even symptomatic infections aren't that bad. Through that lens, it makes sense to be wary of taking a vaccine with possibly-dangerous side effects when they don't believe the virus it protects against is all that bad. I don't agree with the premise behind this reasoning, but I can see how it'd come about.