It's interesting that the "Environment" section mentions this in passing:
> 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]
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.
I have recently watched two of Gupta's videos about grocery shopping and disinfecting groceries, and they were light entertainment, with very little practical value.
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.
I for one hate this “no evidence” phrase that people are using.
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.
Yes, the citation of "currently no evidence of X" as if it meant "good evidence of NOT_X" is just the sort of thing that demonstrates that those who support policies of silencing "misinformation" are no better informed that the rest of us.
I get the impression it's a widespread attitude that you can be "scientific" without being honest about what prior probability you assign to anything. And by "honest", I mean that it exists, so you must disclose; you can't evade.
This may be the essence of what raises my hackles every time someone says trust the experts.
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?
The digestive tract doesn't need to be infected to be effected. AFAIU, in some cases non-infectious viral particles (i.e. non-viable segments floating around in your body) have evolved to make you cough and sneeze through irritation, so it would be unsurprising if in some people they irritated other tissues or possibly even effected gut flora.
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.
If we could somehow confirm that most (>95%) of gastro based infections result in mild symptoms, I wonder if that would be one way (although not a great way) to "immunize" the public vs a vaccine? Swallow the pill containing the virus and let it run its course to develop immunity?
This general strategy is called inoculation, or variolation.
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 the risk could be reduced 10-100X it may be worth consideration. I could imagine one of the crazier/more desperate countries trying this in order to get ahead long term (North Korea?).
At the same time, guidelines say not to share food. So either that guideline is superfluous for covid, or the government just wants people to keep ordering takeout despite it being dangerous. Given their record so far, I won't be ordering takeout till after the pandemic, especially given the amount of restaurant workers who go to work sick and the relative lack of cleanliness in restaurants in general.
I think that's reasonable. Simple viruses like this inactivate quickly at room temp. So the less handling the better. Soap/detergent also kills these types of viruses. You don't need medical grade sterilization.
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.
Granted 16 isn't a lot, but that's actually a higher citation count than the vast majority of academic papers. Anyways, thinking of citations as a reliable proxy for paper quality is like ranking artists by how many followers they have on Twitter.
"There have been many experiments running rats through all kinds of mazes, and so on--with little clear result. But in 1937 a man named Young did a very interesting one. He had a long corridor with doors all along one side where the rats came in, and doors along the other side where the food was. He wanted to see if he could train the rats to go in at the third door down from wherever he started them off. No. The rats went immediately to the door where the food had been the time before.
"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."
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.
Indeed, the closest things I've been able to find have been these two studies [0, 1] which investigate a large number of different possible incidental stimuli (from lights all the way to the placement of the assistants during the experiment). Neither of these mention sand as far as I can tell nor were they written by a "Young". There is a paper that does, though, found here [2], which used it in the walls of the maze, but it does not mention a reason for doing this.
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].
[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.)
The method of the experiment can be more ground breaking the immediate result. We really should be putting strong effort into level of science itself. Just like we would say a database in some nth-normal form, we should science the same way.
I noticed this in my own family of four. We've been in isolation for 2 months and we've all had colds for a
week. You'd expect after 4 weeks for it to stop but nope. We've been social distancing and only one person goes out to pick up groceries curb side. We've been wiping stuff down too. I think this is one reason they say sars-cov-2 aka covid-19 is inevitable..
The simplest answer is often the correct one: somebody is cheating. Going out to see a friend; visiting a neighbor for 'just a minute'; chatting with the mailman.
I heard a recent podcast (which, I cannot remember) where a family went through a similar scenario. They consulted with an expert, who, after eliminating common forgotten vectors, said that this can happen with bacterial infections dormant in the body which are then activated due to stress-induced lowered immune function. Theirs did not seem to transmit to others in the family, however.
Same here, two weeks in 3 of 4 in our family had mild fevers (99<100) this was end of March. Last week the wife had another bout of 99+ (but less than 100) for a few days. Drive through windows and me going to the store have been our only exposures.
I also discovered my temp is generally 96-97, rarely goes up to "normal".
>Drive through windows and me going to the store have been our only exposures.
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."
Seriously, how is this not comprehensible to people? If you or your family members are going outside, you HAVE NOT been in isolation. You've been interacting with people outside and bringing in germs from your visits.
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.
I think the issue is that we are wearing masks and gloves so despite those protections you still can get sick while maintaining 6 foot social distance and even strictly limiting the time in a store (if ever)... Also the vector is one adult here max.
short of N95 masks, masks don't help you at all. In fact, they make it worse from the standpoint that as you touch it, you are applying various yuck on it to inhale.
Average body temperature seems to have been dropping for a long time now.
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.
Does anybody else here have tonsilloliths? By their awful smell I assume that they may contain all kinds of bacteria or virii. Is it possible that they can survive in there and reactivate several months later again?
Warning: You will need a strong stomach if you intend to search for "tonsilloliths" on Google or Youtube.
Yeah, I hock one up every couple months. I know I shouldn't, but something inside me makes me squish and smell it. It's always as disgusting as I know it will be, yet here we are.
Why shouldn't you? I have been removing them with water (syringe with plastic tip) for quite a while and haven't seen any negative effects. I also feel more confident that I do not have a bad breath.
Some can stay latent for a long time - herpes viruses, retroviruses like HIV, Epstein-Barr, shingles like you said - but most viruses don't, as far as we know
I wonder if after 17 weeks of isolation their immune systems atrophied due to limited exposure to pathogens, making them more susceptible to relatively a 'small' initial exposure?
Are there implications for the millions of folks isolating and reducing their daily exposure to pathogens?
> I wonder if after 17 weeks of isolation their immune systems atrophied due to limited 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.
You don't see that someone might read the title and infer there's a current outbreak of Covid-19 in Antarctica? The title seems like deliberate clickbait without a year.
Nobody's saying that, the point is seeing this title is very different knowing that it's from 1973 rather than the present day.
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.
there was one article about how viruses are involved in sheep fetuses, when they took out the viruses, the eggs and sperm wouldn't turn into a fetus or something
> 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...