Can COVID analysis assist remedy the mysteries of different viruses?

Written by Gina Kolata
Barie Carmichael misplaced her sense of style and odor whereas touring in Europe. She remembers holding a dinner date at a Michelin-starred restaurant however tasting nothing. “I didn’t have the heart to tell my host,” she stated.
It might sound like a case of COVID-19. But Carmichael, 72, a fellow on the University of Virginia’s enterprise faculty, misplaced her capacity to style and odor for 3 years within the Nineteen Nineties. The solely respiratory an infection she’d had was bronchitis.
Medical scientists say that though the issues of COVID have riveted peoples’ consideration, many signs — like a lack of odor — will not be distinctive to COVID. Heart irritation, lung and nerve harm and small blood clots within the lining of lungs happen in a small however noticeable proportion of sufferers who’ve had different respiratory and viral infections. And these sufferers, too, can have their very own model of “long COVID.”

No one is saying COVID is the equal of, say, the flu that circulates annually. The traditional seasonal flu has not killed hundreds of thousands worldwide in a single 12 months, and greater than half 1,000,000 Americans, whereas upending society and ravaging economies. But COVID-19 is offering a brand new alternative to grasp the issues of many widespread viral infections.
Before the pandemic, analysis grants to check a lack of odor had been onerous to come back by, stated Danielle Reed, affiliate director of the Monell Chemical Senses Center, a nonprofit analysis group in Philadelphia.
“It seemed like nobody cared,” she stated. But now, “there is an explosive growth of interest among funders.” (She added that almost all who say they’ve misplaced a way of style have actually misplaced a way of odor.)

Monell researchers wish to examine how typically individuals lose their sense of odor after a bout with the flu versus a bout with COVID-19 — and the way lengthy the loss lasts. Is there a genetic predisposition to this complication?
Researchers at different establishments wish to know who’s prone to coronary heart infections, blood clots or lung harm after having a respiratory virus just like the flu. For probably the most half, little is understood. Part of the issue was that solely a minority of sufferers with respiratory viruses had been affected with these situations, and till the coronavirus, that tended to not be a giant quantity. Many of those results had been observed however then forgotten.
Heart issues following a viral an infection are among the many finest studied. Every 12 months, myocarditis — an irritation of the center muscle — impacts as many as 1.5 million individuals worldwide, most of whom had a previous respiratory virus an infection. Most get better absolutely.
But signs like fatigue are sometimes not acknowledged as being associated to myocarditis. And Dr. Bruce McManus, an emeritus pathology professor on the University of British Columbia, suspects that the fatigue that typically follows a bout with COVID-19 could be attributable to this coronary heart downside.
“We think of COVID-19 and influenza as respiratory diseases, and in fact they are,” McManus stated. “But the reason many patients reach their demise in many instances is myocardial.”
Some severely ailing COVID sufferers have lung harm. That, too, also can happen with different viruses, stated Dr. Clemente Britto-Leon, a lung researcher at Yale School of Medicine. He lists some prospects.
“You can have lung injury and scarring with influenza, with herpes viruses and with cytomegalovirus infections, for example,” he stated, referring to a typical virus that often causes no signs. All these viruses can wreak harm on uncommon events, he stated. “You can have a very severe injury and a lot of tissue destruction.”
Influenza could cause blood clots within the lining of the lungs that look similar to the small clots seen within the lungs of some COVID sufferers, stated Marco Goeijenbier of Erasmus University within the Netherlands. It occurs when flu viruses infect the decrease respiratory tract, an uncommon occasion as a result of most individuals have some preexisting protecting immunity.
Goeijenbier desires to check the blood clots that happen in these instances. Previously, with so few sufferers, he and others resorted to reproducing and learning the impact in laboratory research and in ferrets — the popular animals to check flu.
“It was hard to get funding,” he stated. “Big journals or funders didn’t think it was interesting enough.”
COVID is altering that.
There is now “a huge cohort of people to study,” stated Pamela Dalton, a odor researcher at Monell. But “the big question is, even if you learn everything about SARS-CoV-2” — the formal title of the coronavirus — “how generalizable is it?”