4 ms·

I wonder if any of the Not Infected group were kindergarten teachers. I knew someone who - at the start of being a teacher - got sick. Then at some point her

• SkyPuncher 2y ago
  Her body didn’t “adjust”. She just built immunity against all of the common illnesses. We went through the same thing when we sent our two to daycare. Just constantly sick for the first year/
  • leephillips 2y ago
    I might describe the acquisition of immunity as a body adjusting.
    • maxerickson 2y ago
      Which fine, but it's not really clear that is what the other poster meant. I'm presuming they have the common understanding of immunity to infectious disease of course.
  • wruza 2y ago
    You can’t build immunity against cold and flu, afaiu, and I doubt that “constantly sick” meant measles, chickenpox, etc. How does that work? Edit: am I wrong here? Would like to know.
    • SkyPuncher 2y ago
      You're right that you can't build immunity to everything, but you do build immunity to a lot of stuff - namely many of the viruses that are colloquially called "a cold". Flu, Measles, Chickenpox and several others are best handled with vaccination. My point was namely that your body doesn't actually "adjust". It doesn't reduce your symptoms or change your baseline response to a virus. You start getting fewer illnesses because you've encountered the most common ones that come around in your environment.
      • wruza 2y ago
        So you can become more immune to next year’s colds by being exposed to many of them in present? Didn’t know that, thanks. I thought it’s sort of a brand new virus signature every year that your immune system doesn’t know, by design.
        • SkyPuncher 2y ago
          > So you can become more immune to next year’s colds by being exposed to many of them in present? I can't tell if your being genuine. Colds aren't like the flu. The flu tends to surge in a way that has a semi-predictable set of strains. The annual flu shot is largely an educated guess on which strands of the flu are going to be most common that year. There are dozens (hundreds?) of viruses that are responsible for causing colds all over the world. Just by the nature of how viruses spread and survive in a population, viruses strains tend to stay somewhat regional. You'll build immunity to the cold viruses common in your region, but you won't "pre-build" immunity to cold viruses from other areas. Overtime, though, virus strains permeate to other areas. People work together, people travel, etc, etc, etc. That means there's almost always a new "cold virus" that you can get exposed to. For example, if you dropped 100 people on an island and isolated them, they may all transmit cold viruses among them - but over time colds would disappear on that island. Everyone would have caught every possible cold that was brought to the island. The virus might actually hang around in the population, but people would have immunity to it and not get sick. However, if you just started dropping random people on that island, two things would happen: (1) Those people would likely bring new colds to the island, which everyone on the island might get (2) The island people might give the newcomers their colds ----- Part of the reason people get sick so often when flying is because they come into contact with a LOT of people who have exposure to different virus pools.
          • wruza 2y ago
            I can't tell if your being genuine. I am. My misconception was that cold viruses mutate rapidly and chances are low that it becomes dormant in an isolated group (given someone still bearing it). A common factoid/stereotype that I picked up somewhere and believed in. Thanks again for the explanation!
• ebiester 2y ago
  Considering they were able to identify a genetic difference in the groups, no?
  • duffyjp 2y ago
    That part wasn't clear to my layman's understanding... > Lastly, we identified a specific gene called HLA-DQA2, which was expressed (activated to produce a protein) at a much higher level in the volunteers who did not go on to develop a sustained infection So everybody has this gene, but it was more expressed in those who didn't get sick. What causes the difference? Something genetic or something environmental?
    • taeric 2y ago
      I'd love to get a confirmation on if that is what this means? Seems odd to reference it the way they did if we all have the gene. My reading was more that it would be like the gene for a certain hair color. But, my reading is a very naive one, to be sure.
• animal531 2y ago
  When I was in my mid 20's I went through a period where I had constant tonsillitis. I'd be on antibiotics and then get better for a week or two, then I'd just regress and become sick again. After about 6 months of that I'd had enough and had my tonsils taken out. Before the whole ordeal I became sick every now and then like most people, but afterwards it changed to where I no longer had to worry about any form of cold or flu, I just would seemingly not get them (as per the people in this study).