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Comment by all2 | Hacker News Reader

I remember reading awhile back about a study that showed people with the flu are generally more social while the virus is spreading. There's also those nasty sugar cravings that seem to pop up when people diet, and it may be that the microbiome drives those cravings. It's a curious thing to think that the bugs in our bodies may drive our impulses.

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the idea that a virus can change the behavior of the host to make it more likely to spread is one of those things that's beyond creepy. lots of scifi based on this, and the ones that are more subtle are much more effective than getting bit by a zombie trope.

Have I got bad news for you. This is past speculation in certain species:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/cordyceps...

Also in humans, with the rabies virus which makes people be repulsed by water, which would limit the spread of the virus since its vector is saliva.

I mean this is something well proven in parasitic infections. For example snails that climb to the top of plants to be eaten by birds when they are infected.

Also rats that are infected that go hang about places where cats have peed so they get ate spreading the infection to cats.

what makes you think that this is something I doubt? I can accept it happens and still be creeped out by it all the same.

This is already well established in humans for toxoplasmosis, for example. It’s a parasite rather than a virus, but it doesn’t seem crazy that a virus might do similar things.

I don't know the mechanism of the flu thing (and i have heard it, after you get infected you're more social until the virus confines you to bed), but the craving sugar thing is 100% gut biome, the grass-fed gut flora release opioids when they eat grass, which get sent, via the blood, to our brains, which make us feel good. not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal!

> not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal!

That's an unreasonable exaggeration. Nobody is getting significant opioid modulation and withdrawals from their microbiome.

And ketchup doesn't have enough nicotine in it, even when applied to potatoes, to notice!

This is fascinating. I wanted to know more about that but my cursory searches didn’t turn up anything except for connections between opioid use and gut microbes. It certainly feels like withdrawal!

oh, i get downvoted every time i bring this up on any social media platform that supports downvoting. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37129256 for example.

I'm not sure where all of my research PDFs wound up over the last 20 years, but start with that DOI ( 10.1016/0014-5793(92)80414-C ) from 1992(!).

There's a trend to looking into the gut for causes of certain diseases. Prior to the pandemic, there were publications that Alzheimer's, for example, was linked to gut biome.

I get the downvotes, what i say goes against conventional wisdom, that all you gotta do to lose weight is "not eat so much" - but the human body is not just your brain and heart and some tooling to allow intake of fuel as food.

There's a growing (and, depending on your views of "life", alarming) sense that our guts are in more control than we think. This can cause a lot of "free-willers" to get upset and be reactionary.

> remember reading awhile back about a study that showed people with the flu are generally more social while the virus is spreading.

Am I an idiot or is this clearly non-causal?

does seem weird as the flu usually makes me sore and not want to move at all.

You're probably still contagious for a while after the symptoms weaken.

But thinking about it, you're also probably in a good mood at the same time. So yeah, of course you're going to be more sociable.

I assume the poster meant that the infected are more social before they start having symptoms

You're probably contagious before symptom onset.

To clarify, the the claim is that individuals are more sociable when they are infected with the flu virus.

These results show that there is an immediate active behavioral response to infection before the expected onset of symptoms or sickness behavior.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20816312/

I did a quick skim and the main problems with the study are:

1. no placebo, so it's unclear whether it was actually due to the flu virus or some unrelated factor. The study admits this might be an issue, but casually dismisses it with "We looked for this, and found no such effects."

2. the "flu virus" in question is actually a vaccine. Needless to say there's a big difference between getting a flu shot and an actual flu.

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