Seems like the natural world is infecting human kind with some nasty pathogens these days. Just think about it, in just the past 20 years we have had to deal with SARS-CoV-1 (likely coming from bats), and MERS (a camel cold virus), H1N1 (from pigs and birds), and Zika jumping from rhesus monkeys to humans via mosquitoes. And this is just a partial list. In a world where pathogens are coming at us faster than a major league fastball, it's time for us to learn more about epidemics and more importantly, how to defend ourselves. That's exactly what we are going to do in today's pedcast. Above Image by Pixabay Musical Introduction How do Germs Move Around? As we have just witnessed, infectious diseases can travel very fast and won't stop until they have run out of susceptible hosts. Some germs require a "vector" like a mosquito but others have the ability to jump from human to human without an intermediary insect or animal, the way corona viruses move. This type of germ is more likely to cause pandemics like we are experiencing today. Any highly transmissible germ will continue to circulate and make children and people sick until enough the microbe literally runs out of children or people to infect. The contagiousness of a germ is measured by a number called the R-naught. The R-naught represents the average number of people each sick person will infect. The higher this number is, the more contagious the germ. Once a large number of people have become immune to infection, the population has reached a critical percentage of immunity known as "herd immunity". At this point, the epidemic stops. With SARS-CoV-2, it has an R-naught of between 2-3 and experts guess that person to person transmission will stop when about 60-70% of our population is immune. For measles, a much for infectious germ with an R-naught of 12-18 , epidemic spread will continue until 95% of the population is immune. At the time of this writing, a sample of North Carolina residents finds that only 10% of our residents are immune to SARS-CoV-2. As you can see, we have a long way to go before we can say good riddance to Covid-19. Other Ways of Getting Immunity to SARS-CoV-2 Specific immunity to an infection like SARS-CoV-2 can come from a child acquiring that specific infection, from the child getting an antiviral medication that works against that virus, from getting the immunity that someone else acquired (convalescent serum or monoclonal antibodies), or can be derived from a vaccine. And here is something that researchers have hopes might also provide some protection to children during the 2019 pandemic- there are indications that getting a live virus vaccine like the MMR or chickenpox vaccines, can help both children and adults fend off other viral pathogens not specific to that vaccine. Wouldn't that be ironic if the MMR vaccine ends up saving us from this pandemic! Anyway, It appears that getting any live virus vaccine jump starts a person's immune system into reacting faster to SARS-CoV-2, Case in point, it was noticed that after giving children live oral polio vaccine like children like me got in the 1960's, seemed to protect them for a few months from getting influenza and other viral infections that year. In some seasons, the live oral polio vaccine helped protect the children from influenza virus better than the flu vaccine! Let's hope that re-purposing an old vaccine might protect both children and adults from Covid-19. Wouldn't that be amazing. How Do You Protect Your Children Today from Getting Covid-19? All of this information is very interesting, but what can you do today, to protect your family from contracting Covid-19 until we, as a nation, develop immunity to SARS-CoV-2-until we get the herd immunity we talked about before? Now, I am about to give you some advice as we understand this pandemic today, July 4th, 2020. Things can change very fast however and I might tell you something different as we learn m...
Comentarios