Outbreak of common colds at Antarctic base after 17 weeks of isolation (1973)
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
> Food comes mainly from packets or tins [...] There is a daily bread bake, and special occasions merit the thawing of a small amount of meat from a -20 C. freezer or from an ice cave in the nearby glacier.
Then in the "Discussion" section:
> The occurrence of a common cold during isolation, when the chances of introduction of new infection from the outside are virtually nil, implies that in some way virus persisted, either in the environment or in the men
It then goes on to suggest animal reservoirs as a potential cause, as well as inanimate objects and that a virus "might have persisted in the respiratory tract of one or more men".
But one of these packets of meat being opened and thawed isn't mentioned as a potential cause. I could find a couple of papers claiming that viruses survive for months or even years in food. Mystery most likely solved without the need for hitherto unknown or unlikely transmission vectors.
That seems to me to obviously be the most likely cause. Someone sneezed on or otherwise contaminated a packet of meat that was then frozen and thawed months later.
These people aren't truly "isolated" in the sense that they're going through a continual process of opening time frozen time capsules from the past.
One of the papers that cite this one (published in the same year) discusses such "time capsule" effects, although not with food, but from opening presents kept in storage, unpacking stored clothing etc.[1]
1. https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/c...
Sanjay Gupta was talking on CNN (I know, not the most reputable source) and at one point flat out said "If a cook in the kitchen of a restauraunt you're ordering from has covid19 and sneezes on your food, it won't get passed on to you, since this is not a food borne illness".
I was quite shocked to hear that.
I'd be very curious to see what actual science says about food as an infection vector.
The above study seems to imply that a gastro based infection of COVID is linked to mild symptoms though since cells in the digestive tract have far fewer ACE2 receptors compared to the respiratory system. So maybe it's the best way to catch the disease?
It is, indeed, not a great way to immunize the public, as the patient becomes contagious, and can pass on full-blown infection to other people. It's also dangerous in its own right; 'mild' infections can progress to full-blown infections.
If this is in fact the case, then fecal material wouldn't necessarily be a transmission vector. Although it could be; it could be a vector even if the irritation was not by infection.
There can be little difference between the virus reaching your lips by coming in contact with recently handled food or your hands. Restaurant food is absolutely an infection vector, we're just in the phase where we pretend it not to be for economic reasons.
Wipe or wash groceries properly, not like in his videos, and stay away from food that was recently in contact with people outside your household and that cannot be properly cleaned, such as fast food.
Here are the videos:
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/04/03/sanjay-gupt...
https://edition.cnn.com/videos/health/2020/05/08/cnn-town-ha...
"Currently there is no evidence of food or food packaging being associated with transmission of COVID-19.”
https://www.fda.gov/food/food-safety-during-emergencies/food...
Sure, there are no double blind, placebo controlled randomized studies looking at that.
Also, because of the respiratory nature of the spread of coronavirus, it would be really hard to tease out someone who got it from food or food packaging.
However, Corona virus isn’t the only virus that we no about. We know Hepatitis A can spread in the food. We know Norovirus can spread in the food. Talk about how coronavirus is different that makes you think that spread is unlikely. Also, If you don’t have any idea, say “we don’t know”.
But scientists and doctors use “currently we do t have evidence of” to avoid making a call. Then when lay people see that statement, 9 times out of 10 they take it to mean that “scientists think that you can’t get coronavirus from food.” When the statement is saying no such thing.
But “currently, there is no evidence of” needs to go. Experts need to step up to the plate and give their expert opinion. If there are no direct studies say so and then use your knowledge of various viral protein and related viruses and food conditions, etc to give an actionable recommendation.
I saw this with the question of masks. Experts hid behind “no evidence that masks prevent infection”. Yes the double, blind placebo co trolled studies are lacking, but medical knowledge suggests that reducing the number and spread of infected dropplets is probably a good thing, and given that wearing a mask is a very safe intervention unlikely to cause side-effects, masks should probably have been recommended from the start. The Asian cities where wearing masks is more cultural seemed to have fared a lot better.
In the midst of a pandemic, I think for a lot of questions the null hypothesis should be that corona virus can be transmitted by this, and I should have evidence with 95% confidence that it cannot be.
Thus, a phrase “no evidence of” makes we worried about whatever they are discussing.
This may be the essence of what raises my hackles every time someone says trust the experts.
Is it possible? Absolutely. We don’t need to test feeding someone fast food sneezed on by an infected cook to find out either...
Also, appeal to authority is a fallacy, double so with the authority you chose (though at least it's not the cdc).
I'd be interested in the counter sources for your claims as we've been ordering in pretty regularly!
This is exactly the kind of question which must be answered through experimentation. Anything else is wasting time.
Plus a Vit D deficiency
One part mentioned how long covid could persist on things.
- aerosol form - 3 hours
- on cardboard - 1 hour
- on plastic/metal - 3 days
Later in the video they mention heat and cold
- heat in microwave - kills it
but then...
- some coronavirus species can live frozen for up to 2 years
For this reason, my own policy now is to treat any package that went straight from store to fridge/freezer as contaminated.
Everything non-perishable sits near a sunny window for three days before any further handling.
[0]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3142679/#S2titl...
Google Scholar says this study has been cited by a measly 16 papers since it was published in 1973:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1453678737796934715...
Without any other context, I would assume that the relative lack of studies that reference this paper suggests that there might be issues with reputability.
But who knows? Maybe it's a gem that never got the attention it deserved.
"The question was, how did the rats know, because the corridor was so beautifully built and so uniform, that this was the same door as before? Obviously there was something about the door that was different from the other doors. So he painted the doors very carefully, arranging the textures on the faces of the doors exactly the same. Still the rats could tell. Then he thought maybe the rats were smelling the food, so he used chemicals to change the smell after each run. Still the rats could tell. Then he realized the rats might be able to tell by seeing the lights and the arrangement in the laboratory like any commonsense person. So he covered the corridor, and still the rats could tell.
"He finally found that they could tell by the way the floor sounded when they ran over it. And he could only fix that by putting his corridor in sand. So he covered one after another of all possible clues and finally was able to fool the rats so that they had to learn to go in the third door. If he relaxed any of his conditions, the rats could tell.
"Now, from a scientific standpoint, that is an A-number-one experiment. That is the experiment that makes rat-running experiments sensible, because it uncovers that clues that the rat is really using-- not what you think it's using. And that is the experiment that tells exactly what conditions you have to use in order to be careful and control everything in an experiment with rat-running.
"I looked up the subsequent history of this research. The next experiment, and the one after that, never referred to Mr. Young. They never used any of his criteria of putting the corridor on sand, or being very careful. They just went right on running the rats in the same old way, and paid no attention to the great discoveries of Mr. Young, and his papers are not referred to, because he didn't discover anything about the rats. In fact, he discovered all the things you have to do to discover something about rats. But not paying attention to experiments like that is a characteristic example of cargo cult science."
- Richard Feynman
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html
Maybe it's one of those papers that, by a less charitable interpretation than Feynman, invalidates an entire field of study and undercuts it's central assumptions, so it just gets ignored.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregor_Mendel
Mendel’s work was not appreciated for 30 years. Ignoring ignored works is following the herd.
For fun, I also found this 1938 paper as I was looking around that I haven't read. It's interesting what random things scientists were doing during this time and what debates were had [3].
-----
[0] "The effect of incidental stimuli on maze learning with the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0071189
[1] "Further studies of the effect of incidental stimuli on maze learning with the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0075810
[2] "Correlations between conditioning and maze learning in the white rat" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0053662
[3] "The effect of a native Mexican diet on learning and reasoning in white rats" https://doi.org/10.1037/h0061906 (The study found that the rats had less body mass, but did not find a statistically significant difference in maze solving ability.)
I also discovered my temp is generally 96-97, rarely goes up to "normal".
Let me reword this for you: "interacting with a teenager who deals with about a thousand people a day, and going to a facility that is frequented by tens of thousands of people a week, has been my only exposure."
I'm avoiding Covid conversations as my self-esteem is too fragile to tolerate downvotes. ;) But, if I were opining on the subject, I'd say that masks, social distancing, lock-downs, etc. are absolutely and utterly worthless and unecessary. But, if it makes some people feel virtuous to wear their placebo masks while cowering in the apartments, so be it. As for me, I'll be at the river this weekend tubing with several hundred others, drinking a Corona, and thinking of you all.
Also, validate that yours give consistent readings. There's been some evidence of a bunch of them going out un or poorly calibrated recently and being off by a couple of degrees, and we're not talking about low end models, either.
Warning: You will need a strong stomach if you intend to search for "tonsilloliths" on Google or Youtube.
This is how people get shingles many decades later after chicken-pox, it's the same virus, just hid in nerve cells and spinal cord.
Am I the only one who had to look this up, thinking it was a hidden commentary on current political items?
The first comment sums it up well.
Are there implications for the millions of folks isolating and reducing their daily exposure to pathogens?
I keep seeing this idea floated around.
Our entire concept of vaccinations would fail if a few weeks of isolation could collapse your immune system. We retain immunity for decades against diseases like measles that our bodies may not see at all during that time period.
None of us has a living environment approaching anything like a clean room, either, no matter how fastidious the housekeeping.
This is Hacker News after all, it's important to know what is and isn't current events because without a date, it's kinda assumed that it is a current event.