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One universal antiviral to rule them all?

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331 points breve | 7 comments | 26 Aug 25 14:07 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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abeppu ◴[26 Aug 25 15:19 UTC] 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 ◴[27 Aug 25 00:25 UTC] 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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14 ◴[27 Aug 25 03:20 UTC] No.45035121[source]▶
I am sure it does cause concern to many. I mean how scary is it that you can run into someone seemingly healthy and next thing you know you are sick?

I know as a health care worker I actually think about things like this. MRSA is a good example. Most people don't react to exposure but some do. Those that do get long term infections that are hard to get rid of if ever. Most think of this as a hospital issue. But the reality is that there are literally thousands of people with MRSA all over the world and they are carriers of it and they do things like go to the bank machine and touch it, open the door at 7-11, pick up items at the store and then put them back on the shelf and so on and so on. MRSA is literally everywhere. Some people contact it and suffer problems others do not.

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1. _heimdall ◴[27 Aug 25 04:04 UTC] No.45035347[source]▶
With something like MRSA how do you determine that the virus is cause for disease when, as you said, many will be infected without showing symptoms?

That the root of the confusion for me. I haven't wrapped my head around how we can know a specific pathogen causes disease if a large number of people can be found to have that pathogen present without showing symptoms.

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2. kijin ◴[27 Aug 25 06:18 UTC] No.45036027[source]▶
Statistics.

Not all smokers get lung cancer. But with large enough samples, smokers turn out to be much more likely to get lung cancer than non-smokers. That's why we say that smoking causes lung cancer. It's not as if someone has actually watched a particle of tobacco interact with someone's lung cells to turn them cancerous in real time.

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3. _heimdall ◴[27 Aug 25 11:29 UTC] No.45038172[source]▶
Smoking isn't a contagious pathogen.
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4. sydbarrett74 ◴[27 Aug 25 17:35 UTC] No.45042540{3}[source]▶
Second- and third-hand smoke mimic contagion.
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5. _heimdall ◴[28 Aug 25 05:03 UTC] No.45048564{4}[source]▶
That has nothing to do with contagion, that's just a sign that the impact of smoke inhalation isn't limited to the one sucking on a cigarette.

Contagion would mean that the smoke can infect the host, replicate, and spread to others. That's not how second hand smoking works.

6. jodrellblank ◴[28 Aug 25 12:54 UTC] No.45051594[source]▶
Why doesn't that get dismissed with the usual universal dismissal "correlation != causation"?
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7. _heimdall ◴[29 Aug 25 05:46 UTC] No.45060655{3}[source]▶
For one I'd assume its because contagions and physical damage are quite different. That's not to say that correlation between viral presence and disease can't indicate causation, but it is more clear when you are looking at the direct damage to lung tissue from inhaling hot cigarette smoke for years or decades.