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abeppu ◴[] No.45027823[source]
> When he and his colleagues looked at the individuals’ immune cells, they could see encounters with all sorts of viruses—flu, measles, mumps, chickenpox. But the patients had never reported any overt signs of infection or illness.

Given that the article goes on to talk about mild persistent inflammation, is it possible that these individuals are sometimes asymptomatic but still capable of carrying/transmitting viruses at least temporarily? The article talks about potentially immunizing healthcare workers during a future pandemic, but if this was just allowing people to never develop symptoms (and not have to leave work) while having low-grade infections, would we accidentally create a work-force of Typhoid Marys?

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_heimdall ◴[] No.45034006[source]
Asymptomatic carriers are a concept I've always found interesting and honestly a bit confusing. When a pathogen can be present without ever causing symptoms it becomes much trickier to show causality.

This was a lynch pin of sorts in Koch's postulates. We can't properly go through those postulates with viruses like we can with biological pathogens, but it is odd to me that we don't have similar concerns when the presence of a replicable pathogen doesn't cause the symptoms they are expected to cause.

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1. Fomite ◴[] No.45035118[source]
You can show transmission pathways with a combination of epidemiological evidence and sequencing data.
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2. _heimdall ◴[] No.45035325[source]
Epidemiology can never show causation or evidence, at best it shows correlation that is a useful indicator for future research.