Will COVID research help solve the mysteries of other viruses?

Gina Corata Screenplay Works

Barry Carmichael lost his sense of taste and smell while traveling in Europe. She remembers having a dinner date at a Michelin-starred restaurant, but she hasn’t tasted anything. “I didn’t have the heart to talk to my host,” she said.

May sound like COVID-19 (new coronavirus infection).. However, Carmichael, 72, a fellow at the University of Virginia Business School, lost his sense of taste and smell for three years in the 1990s. The only respiratory infection she had was bronchitis.

According to medical scientists, the complications of COVID have attracted people’s attention, but many symptoms, such as loss of odor, are not unique to COVID. Inflammation of the heart, damage to the lungs and nerves, and small blood clots in the lining of the lungs occur in a small but significant proportion of patients with other respiratory and viral infections. And these patients can also have their own version of “Long COVID”.

No one says that COVID is, for example, the annual influenza epidemic. Common seasonal flu did not kill millions and more than 500,000 Americans worldwide in a year, disrupting society and devastating the economy. However, COVID-19 offers a new opportunity to understand the complications of many common viral infections.

In front of PandemicDanielle Reed, deputy director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a non-profit research group in Philadelphia, said it was difficult to obtain research funding to study olfactory loss.

“No one seemed to care,” she said. But now, “there is an explosive rise in interest among funders.” (She added that most people who say they have lost their taste have really lost their sense of smell.)

Monel researchers want to compare how often people lose their sense of smell after a flu and COVID-19 attack and how long that loss lasts. Is there a genetic predisposition to this complication?

Researchers at other institutions want to know who is vulnerable to heart infections, blood clots, or lung damage after being infected with a respiratory virus such as the flu. In most cases, little is known. Part of the problem is that only a few patients with the respiratory virus are affected by these conditions, Coronavirus, It tended not to be a big number. Many of these effects were noticed, but then forgotten.

Heart problems after a viral infection are one of the most well-studied. Each year, myocarditis (inflammation of the heart muscle) affects as many as 1.5 million people worldwide, most of whom were previously infected with the respiratory virus. Most will recover completely.

However, symptoms such as fatigue are often not recognized as being associated with myocarditis. Dr. Bruce McManus, an honorary professor of pathology at the University of British Columbia, also believes that the fatigue that follows a COVID-19 attack may be due to this heart problem.

“We consider COVID-19 and the flu to be respiratory illnesses, and in fact they are,” McManus said. “But in many cases, the myocardium is the reason many patients die.”

Some patients with severe COVID have lung damage. Dr. Clemente Brit Leon, a lung researcher at Yale University School of Medicine, said this could also occur with other viruses. He raises several possibilities.

“For example, influenza, herpesviruses, and cytomegalovirus infections can cause lung damage and scarring,” he said, referring to common viruses that usually do not cause symptoms. He said all of these viruses can be harmful in rare cases. “It can be very seriously injured and can destroy many tissues.”

According to Marco Goeijenbier of Erasmus University in the Netherlands, influenza can cause blood clots in the inner walls of the lungs, which look like small blood clots found in the lungs of some COVID patients. This happens when the flu virus infects the lower respiratory tract. This is a rare event as most people have existing defensive immunity.

Goeijenbier wants to study the blood clots that occur in these cases. Previously, because of the very small number of patients, he and others relied on laboratory studies and recreating the effects in ferrets, the preferred animals for studying the flu.

“It was difficult to get the money,” he said. “Big journals and funders didn’t find it interesting enough.”

COVID is changing that.

Pamela Dalton, a Monel odor researcher, said there is now a “huge cohort of people studying.” But “the big question is, even if you’ve learned everything about SARS-CoV-2” (the official name for the coronavirus) “how generalized it can be”.