We Have Thousands of Viruses In Us All the Time
Posted on April 4, 2015 Comments (0)
Biology and the amazing interactions within a human body are amazing. Our bodies are teeming with other life (and almost life – viruses). All these microbes have a drastic impact on our health and those impacts are not always bad.
A Virus In Your Mouth Helps Fight The Flu
But every once in a while, one of these viral inhabitants might help us out.
Young people infected with a type of herpes virus have a better immune response to the flu vaccine than those not infected, scientists at Stanford University report Wednesday. In mice, the virus directly stops influenza itself.
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We’re talking about a ubiquitous critter, called cytomegalovirus. About half of all Americans carry it. And so do nearly 100 percent of people in developing countries.
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In younger people, CMV had the opposite effect that Davis had predicted: “The virus ramped up the immune system to give better protection from pathogens,” Mark Davis says. “We tested only for the flu, but I speculate it protects against everything.”
So should we all go out and get infected with CMV? No way! Davis exclaims.
You see, CMV has a dark side. It can become dangerous if the immune system is suppressed, which happens after an organ transplant or during treatments for autoimmune disorders. CMV is also a concern for pregnant woman. It’s the top viral cause of birth defects worldwide.
The human microbiome is incredible and teams with thousands of species (bacteria, viruses, members of domain Archaea, yeasts, single-celled eukaryotes, helminth parasites and bacteriophages). The complexity of interactions between all the elements of what is in our bodies and cells is one of the things that makes health care so challenging. It is also fascinating how these interactions provide benefits and costs as they work within our bodies.
The fact that we have evolved in concert with all these interactions is one of the big problems with anti-biotics. Antibiotics are miraculous when they work, but they can also decimate our natural micro-biomes which does create risks.
I would have thought Stanford wasn’t still supporting closed science 🙁 Sadly this research is not published in an open science manner.
Related: Foreign Cells Outnumber Human Cells in Our Bodies – Microbes Flourish In Healthy People – Tracking the Ecosystem Within Us – People Have More Bacterial Cells than Human Cells – Cats Control Rats With Parasites – Skin Bacteria
Categories: Health Care, Life Science, Research, Science
Tags: amazing, bacteria, biology, human health, Research, Science, university research, virus
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