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News that infection with a rhinovirus such as common cold, can protect you from Coronavirus infections may yet turn out to be very significant indeed. Let’s start with the story; today we’ll use the BBC but most outlets are covering it. According to James Gallagher, * researchers at the University of Glasgow Virus Research Unit have found :
If rhinovirus and Sars-CoV-2 were released at the same time, only rhinovirus is successful. If rhinovirus had a 24-hour head start then Sars-CoV-2 does not get a look in. And even when Sars-CoV-2 had 24-hours to get started, rhinovirus boots it out.
What impresses us at LSS is the surprising, counter-intuitive nature of the discovery. When that happens, you usually find that you’re on to something bigger. Older readers will probably recall the furore1887, when the strange results of the Michelson-Morley experiment showed that the speed of light was the same in all directions. It eventually opened the way to the Theory of Relativity. Darwin and Wallace‘s observations of anomolous patterns in animal distribution eventually led to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection. And so we at LSS think the University of Glasgow researchers could be onto something very deep in the ways that cells and viruses control the processing of RNA and DNA, and with it the flow of information. If so, it could save many more lives indeed.
Coronavirus: How the common cold can boot out Covid – BBC News
#rna #dna #rhinovirus #coronavirus #sars-cov-2 #commoncold #universityglasgow #interferon
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