I wonder if any of the Not Infected group were kindergarten teachers.
I knew someone who - at the start of being a teacher - got sick. Then at some point her body adjusted to the constant exposure to sniffly kids and she never got sick.
I knew someone who - at the start of being a teacher - got sick. Then at some point her body adjusted to the constant exposure to sniffly kids and she never got sick.
We went through the same thing when we sent our two to daycare. Just constantly sick for the first year/
I'm presuming they have the common understanding of immunity to infectious disease of course.
Edit: am I wrong here? Would like to know.
My point was namely that your body doesn't actually "adjust". It doesn't reduce your symptoms or change your baseline response to a virus. You start getting fewer illnesses because you've encountered the most common ones that come around in your environment.
I can't tell if your being genuine.
Colds aren't like the flu. The flu tends to surge in a way that has a semi-predictable set of strains. The annual flu shot is largely an educated guess on which strands of the flu are going to be most common that year.
There are dozens (hundreds?) of viruses that are responsible for causing colds all over the world. Just by the nature of how viruses spread and survive in a population, viruses strains tend to stay somewhat regional. You'll build immunity to the cold viruses common in your region, but you won't "pre-build" immunity to cold viruses from other areas. Overtime, though, virus strains permeate to other areas. People work together, people travel, etc, etc, etc. That means there's almost always a new "cold virus" that you can get exposed to.
For example, if you dropped 100 people on an island and isolated them, they may all transmit cold viruses among them - but over time colds would disappear on that island. Everyone would have caught every possible cold that was brought to the island. The virus might actually hang around in the population, but people would have immunity to it and not get sick.
However, if you just started dropping random people on that island, two things would happen:
(1) Those people would likely bring new colds to the island, which everyone on the island might get
(2) The island people might give the newcomers their colds
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Part of the reason people get sick so often when flying is because they come into contact with a LOT of people who have exposure to different virus pools.
I am. My misconception was that cold viruses mutate rapidly and chances are low that it becomes dormant in an isolated group (given someone still bearing it). A common factoid/stereotype that I picked up somewhere and believed in. Thanks again for the explanation!
After about 6 months of that I'd had enough and had my tonsils taken out.
Before the whole ordeal I became sick every now and then like most people, but afterwards it changed to where I no longer had to worry about any form of cold or flu, I just would seemingly not get them (as per the people in this study).
> Lastly, we identified a specific gene called HLA-DQA2, which was expressed (activated to produce a protein) at a much higher level in the volunteers who did not go on to develop a sustained infection
So everybody has this gene, but it was more expressed in those who didn't get sick. What causes the difference? Something genetic or something environmental?