Month: January 2022

That some patients had reactivated Epstein-Barr virus also made sense, Dr. Nath said, because other diseases have reawakened that virus, and its reactivation has been linked to conditions like chronic fatigue syndrome, which some cases of long Covid resemble, and multiple sclerosis. Dr. Deeks said it might be possible to give antivirals or immunotherapy to patients with reactivated Epstein-Barr virus. There were other intriguing findings that experts said needed more substantiation. One was a suggestion that because people with lingering respiratory problems had low levels of the stress hormone cortisol, they might benefit from cortisol replacement therapy, which Dr. Heath said some doctors were already trying. In another finding that he said might provide a way to document that patients’...

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Because an immunocompromised host doesn’t produce a lot of antibodies, many viruses are left to propagate. And new mutant viruses that resist the antibodies can multiply. A mutation that allows a virus to evade antibodies isn’t necessarily advantageous. It could make the virus’s spike protein unstable so that it can’t latch quickly onto a cell, for example. But inside someone with a weak immune system, viruses may be able to gain a new mutation that stabilizes the spike again. Similar mutations could have built upon themselves again and again in the same person, Dr. Pond speculates, until Omicron evolved a spike protein with just the right combination of mutations to allow it to spread supremely well among healthy people. “It certainly seems plausible,” said Sarah Otto, an evolutionary bi...

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