[HN Gopher] Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to faci...
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Bacteria hijack a meningeal neuroimmune axis to facilitate brain
invasion
Author : bookofjoe
Score : 104 points
Date : 2023-03-12 13:40 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nature.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nature.com)
| bookofjoe wrote:
| >Bacterial meningitis hits an immunosuppressive nerve
|
| https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00540-0
| ramraj07 wrote:
| This brings up an important point many folks may not realize: our
| immune system a robust multilayered, highly redundant response
| against any normal bacterium or virus. Thus, Any pathogen that
| currently still causes disease by definition has to code multiple
| specialized workarounds that hack these immune responses.
|
| And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are
| typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it's
| generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking to
| kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are considered
| to be in the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of
| their hosts.
| hammock wrote:
| Sometimes our immune systems don't work though. In that case we
| need vaccines. Please don't forget that
| ramraj07 wrote:
| What's your point? I literally said any pathogen that causes
| disease in us has to break our immune system first. Of course
| we need vaccines to help fight those disease.
| originalcopying wrote:
| sometimes we read people saying dumb things on the internet.
| in those cases we need censorship. please forget this.
| nick__m wrote:
| A vaccine works by stimulating the immune system with a
| pathogen-like substance to produce a response that trains it.
| Ergo, if the immune system doesn't work, a vaccine is
| useless!
| krisoft wrote:
| > Sometimes our immune systems don't work though. In that
| case we need vaccines.
|
| Sorry, but that sounds a bit confused.
|
| Vaccines bring information to the immune system to train it
| to recognise something as a threat faster than it would
| otherwise. Think of it as a "wanted dead or alive" poster.
| The poster doesn't go out and kill the baddies on its own.
| The poster is distributed to the sheriffs of the towns, so if
| the baddie shows up they recognise it for what it is before
| the baddie robs the bank. In this parallel the baddies are
| the infectious material (virus, or bacteria), the sherrifs
| are the immune system, and the poster is the vaccine.
|
| If your immune system don't work, first of all that is very
| bad, second you don't need a vaccine. Because it won't help
| you! Same as sending wanted posters to a town with nobody who
| could act on them wouldn't make the town more secure.
| realjhol wrote:
| The problem comes if a mimic of the baddies gets attached
| to hostages e.g. spike proteins attached to heart muscle
| tissue. In this case, the immune system will attack the
| "baddies" causing harm to the heart muslcle tissue in the
| cross-fire. Heart muscle tissue never regenerates, hence
| the spike in Myocarditis cases.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| > Heart muscle tissue never regenerates
|
| Given the importance of the heart, that seems like a
| strange way that this has evolved, given that other
| tissue does regenerate
| realjhol wrote:
| Hard to fix a machine that can never ever go offline.
| realjhol wrote:
| Sometimes, but other times e.g. COVID-19, our immune systems
| work extremely well in all except the very elderly and obese.
| hammock wrote:
| I'm sorry you are a victim of deplorable disinformation.
| The vaccines actually prime our immune system to fight the
| infection, and Covid is killing children not just the
| elderly and body positive
| realjhol wrote:
| The evidence is all out in the open now - there's really
| no hiding from it any more.
|
| In randomized control trials of the mRNA COVID-19
| vaccines here in the UK, we now know the risk of serious
| adverse effects was 12.5 per 10,000 vaccinated i.e. a ~1
| in 800 change of serious adverse effects:
|
| 22-Sep-22 https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/
|
| The UK government has now published its estimate of the
| number of people needed to vaccinate to prevent a
| COIVD-19 hospitalisation:
|
| 25-Jan-2023 https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gove
| rnment/uploads/...
|
| For example in the 20-29 year no-risk group, the number
| needed to vaccinate to prevent one hopitalisation is
| 168,200. To prevent one serious hospitalisation requiring
| oxygen or ventilation you would need to vaccinate
| 706,500.
|
| Even in the at-risk group for 20-29 years, the numbers
| are 7500 and 59,500 respectively.
|
| In fact there was no group except for 70+ where the risk
| of hospitalisation (not severe requiring oxygen), came
| close to the risk associate with vaccine injury.
|
| It's for this reason, that these mRNA vaccines are no
| longer being offered by the NHS.
|
| Look - I'm sorry you were lied to, but at some point
| you've just go to hold your hands up and admit the truth
| of the matter.
|
| Edit: plenty of downvotes, but no refutation.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Here's your refutation: many of these results confound
| pre omicron Covid with omicron Covid - the former was
| 10-100x deadlier, and totally warranted global mandating
| of the vaccines even with the published SAR rates. After
| omicron, it is absolutely true that the adverse reaction
| rate from mRNA vaccines might not be worth the benefit of
| avoiding the relatively less fatal omicron variant
| diseases for young individuals.
|
| I will agree that regulatory agencies and many pro
| vaccine arguments are doing a disservice by not being
| thorough about such distinctions. That doesn't mean the
| choices made pre omicron were invalidated. The mRNA
| vaccines did a great job and did them in time to protect
| millions more lives from being lost.
| notahacker wrote:
| You're comparing apples with oranges.
|
| The majority of the serious adverse effects reported in
| the original trials the first paper rehashes (15.1
| effects per 10000 above a 6.4 effect per 10000 placebo
| baseline with some people reporting multiple effects,
| after the authors stripped out SAE's where the placebo
| group reported _worse_ outcomes...) did not involve
| hospitalisation, never mind intubation.
|
| And a significant proportion of COVID infections that do
| _not_ require hospitalisation (i.e not counted in the NNV
| metric) nevertheless involve serious adverse effects
| including both those credibly associated with vaccine
| side effects but more commonly in symptomatic COVID
| patients (myocarditis) and those not thought to have any
| association with the vaccine such as long term brain fog.
| The vaccines were found to have a high efficacy at
| reducing these types of symptomatic infections though....
|
| More generally and unfortunately for the cranks, its
| noticeable that excess deaths and hospitalisation peaks
| follow COVID infection spikes, not the ramp up of
| vaccinations, and have declined considerably since the
| vaccination programmes began. It's almost like the
| professionals know better than someone who thinks
| influenza is a coronavirus...
| MaxfordAndSons wrote:
| Sorry this is ot, but I can't help but note: replacing
| "obese" with "body positive" is a wildly Orwellian
| linguistic move. They aren't remotely synonymous, nor do
| the groups they actually denote fully overlap (not all
| obese people are body positive, nor are all body positive
| people obese).
| groestl wrote:
| It's so over the top that it actually registered as
| cynism with me.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| It's kind of the opposite, the majority of deaths from
| covid were due to cytokine storm, which is your immune
| system working _too well_ , and producing too many
| inflammatory cytokines.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| 1/1000 people are dead in the US. Much more in places like
| in India. And yet here we are people still underplaying it.
| It's amazing seeing rewriting of history right in front of
| your eyes for sure.
| realjhol wrote:
| As I say, most of those are in extremely elderly or obese
| category.
| parasubvert wrote:
| This is a misunderstanding of how statistics work, and
| part of the lie that Covid is an old people and obese
| person's problem. Not that you're directly making this
| argument, but for posterity: It's not just their problem.
| Unless you feel cardiology and oncology are also old and
| fat people's problems, since they die more of cancer and
| heart disease?
|
| The extremely elderly and obese die of _all causes_
| disproportionately. But Covid lowers life expectancy and
| increases mortality of _all age groups_ starting around
| age 30 even after all mitigating measures (vaccines,
| masks, etc) are taken in to account.
|
| The young lower their own life expectancy when they
| betray an inter-generational commitment to the older
| generations to take care of them. This won't be the last
| pandemic, and the young won't always be young.
| realjhol wrote:
| We have no idea what the long term effects of COVID-19
| infection will be, however there's no reason to think the
| long-term impact will be any different from any other
| coronavirus flu.
|
| And given that the virus is endemic, and the vaccines
| only provided fleeting protection (they're not even being
| offered by the NHS here in the UK any more), we'll all
| get it sooner or later. There's no choice about it.
| Fortunately for the vast majority of people, COVID-19 is
| a mild disease that they will recover from quickly.
| parasubvert wrote:
| You have no idea what you're talking about and are
| spreading misinformation.
|
| 1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza.
|
| 2. Influenza is not a coronavirus.
|
| 3. Influenza usually kills 300,000-500,000 people
| annually
|
| 4. Consensus estimates of excess deaths from COVID-19 are
| 14 million over the two years of 2020-2021. 2022 isn't
| looking great either.
|
| 5. All developed countries _highly_ recommend the annual
| Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy,
| as a way of lowering the intensity and spread.
|
| The same will likely continue in many countries for
| COVID-19, where the recent Bivalent vaccines show reduced
| but still significant effectiveness against the recent
| variants of SARS-CoV-2.
|
| 6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers
| life expectancy across _all age groups_ starting before
| middle age.
|
| 7. The UK NHS continues to offer standard two dose and
| 3rd shot booster COVID-19 vaccines (all mRNA now) for
| children over aged 5 and adults. This has not stopped.
|
| Beyond this, they've limited additional boosters to
| seasonal programs for target populations that are at
| greater risk. They had one in the Autumn of 2022 and is
| staring a new one for Spring of 2023 for the
| immunocompromised and elderly (75+). The UK also signed a
| deal with Moderna to begin producing mRNA vaccines within
| the UK by 2025.
|
| The vast majority of the UK population have COVID
| antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in
| 2020, but this continues to be monitored and may require
| broader seasonal vaccination campaigns if immunity wanes.
|
| 8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to
| use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces,
| vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something
| other countries learned decades ago.
| realjhol wrote:
| > You have no idea what you're talking about and are
| spreading misinformation.
|
| I actually do know what I'm talking about.
|
| > 1. SARS-CoV-2 is not influenza. > 2. Influenza is not a
| coronavirus.
|
| I know. It's a flu-like respiratory illness from a class
| of illnesses that humans face every season.
|
| > 5. All developed countries highly recommend the annual
| Influenza vaccine even with its variable annual efficacy,
| as a way of lowering the intensity and spread.
|
| No they don't. The UK does not offer flu vaccine for
| anyone except member of vulnerable groups, young children
| or medical workers.
|
| > 6. COVID-19 has raised all cause mortality and lowers
| life expectancy across all age groups starting before
| middle age.
|
| The all cause mortality has risen. There's every
| indication that this is due to the mRNA vaccines.
|
| > Beyond this, they've limited additional boosters to
| seasonal programs for target populations that are at
| greater risk.
|
| Any why are they doing that?
|
| It's because the likelihood of hospitalisation due to a
| vaccine injury (1 in 800) [1] is greater than the
| liklihood of being spared from a hospitalisation due to
| COVID [2] in every age category except 70+.
|
| [1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36055877/ [2] https:/
| /assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
|
| > The vast majority of the UK population have COVID
| antibodies and are at far less risk than they were in
| 2020
|
| The vast majority of the UK population were at minimal
| risk of COVID to begin with. I myself recovered from it
| in less than a day.
|
| 8. As with any disease vector there always is a choice to
| use mitigations such as masks in crowded indoor spaces,
| vaccinations, etc. to lower the spread. This is something
| other countries learned decades ago.
|
| As the Danish mask study shows, the mask mandates were
| nothing more than securiy theater. The vaccines only
| offer fleeting protection of a few weeks, so it's not
| possible to keep the population on a 3-monthly treadmill
| of boosters.
|
| > This is something other countries learned decades ago.
|
| No the UK had a policy that explicitly recommended
| against mask mandates - especially paper and cloth masks.
| heretohelp3546 wrote:
| Hiya, here to help. In reviewing the HN guidelines at the
| bottom of the page I was reminded that my initial
| reaction to your performance on this thread here today
| was uncouth, to be avoided.
|
| Instead I'll take the high road. For an account created
| ten months ago it seems possible you haven't read the
| guidelines for commenting. Maybe it will help you
| understand a bit of why you've been downvoted on this
| thread today.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| My two cents, your mind appears to be made up on this
| topic. It shows. It also tips your hand as to what media
| sources you likely consume beyond HN.
|
| Please consider (beyond the emotional reactions
| associated with this thread on this day) that you could
| perhaps use some improvement on having constructive
| discourse in this sort of forum. Chiming in because I
| like this place and have been here since near the
| beginning. I'd like to see discourse not devolve into
| factionalism or whatever more appropriate word could take
| it's place in this context.
| bitL wrote:
| > no reason to think the long-term impact will be any
| different from any other coronavirus flu.
|
| Long covid is real and seems to affect up to 5% of covid
| patients. We have no clue what the risk will be with
| repeated infections and 1.05^n is a pretty steep
| exponential curve when viewed in decades.
| realjhol wrote:
| > We have no clue what the risk will be with repeated
| infections and 1.05^n is a pretty steep exponential curve
| when viewed in decades.
|
| This is fantasy
| bitL wrote:
| Head over to /r/covidlonghaulers and read it yourself.
| realjhol wrote:
| There is zero evidence of the exponential growth you are
| describing.
| concordDance wrote:
| > The young lower their own life expectancy when they
| betray an inter-generational commitment to the older
| generations to take care of them
|
| I get what you're trying to say, but this isn't the
| correct argument for it. Social precedent relies on
| people not having any excuses that allow special-casing,
| which obviously doesn't apply here.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| Doesn't the US have a population of 330 million? And I
| think we're at a million dead from COVID? So 1 in 330,
| right?
|
| Of course, taking into account time, population turnover,
| and tourists, the ratio may actually be closer to yours
| depending on how we decide to design the metric.
| groestl wrote:
| > it's generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily
| speaking to kill hosts you infect
|
| That sound's like it's giving some kind of agency to the
| pathogen ;) when in fact it's more like: everyone that's
| severly infected isolates or dies, so the more harmless
| variants of the pathogen can replicate faster.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| Prions are so hyper-intelligent that they've even hacked this
| "the host dying kills you too" problem.
| originalcopying wrote:
| it's merely a different way to lay down the explanations.
|
| it's not "in fact" like you say; you merely provide an
| alternative way to understand what's going on and to describe
| it.
|
| it's incorrect to claim that either is wrong because of the
| other.
|
| in the end, we gotta learn to have multiple ways to explain
| the same things and it's best to shift between these
| 'theories' of what is going on as it serves our purposes.
| It's stupid to have this alternatives "fighting each other";
| see? I just have agency to the ways to conceptualize,
| understand, and explain phenomena.
| Silverback_VII wrote:
| When it comes to viruses, I think it is important to
| understand that they simply replicate because they can. The
| virus has no interest in keeping you alive or killing you;
| it just infects cells and that's it.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| It's just an abstraction used to ease the conversation. If a
| disease is inclined to behave like X, that's just a shortcut
| to say, "it's evolutionarily advantageous if the mutations
| result in X behaviour."
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Rabies is generally fatal and is not new or genetically novel,
| and like the article linked, is a CNS infection that travels
| the peripheral nervous system. First recorded case was 4000
| years ago, suggesting it's likely ancient through pre-history.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Rabies most probably evolved from a virus from plants so is
| very "alien" to animals. As long as can hide in their main
| host, it does not care about killing everybody else (if
| accidentally ends in the wrong place). This can be also and
| advantage and selected by evolution in some cases ("enemy of
| my host is my enemy" situations).
| kevviiinn wrote:
| AFAIK is also isn't super contagious, less opportunity for it
| to evolve
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| It's super contagious in the reservoir species. But it's
| not in humans. The point made above was about age if the
| pathogen not infectiousness.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Viruses like rabies are interesting because they are actually
| not as serious in the species they evolved to infect; just
| turns out they rapidly kill some other species (us) that they
| don't care about.
|
| Make no mistake, rabies virus also has multiple immune
| evading mechanisms that are unluckily supercharged in humans.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| Yeah I expect that's the case - the bubonic plague spread
| via the reservoir fleas and rats, etc.
| echelon wrote:
| How many humans get rabies per year versus how many that get
| influenza?
| pvaldes wrote:
| Is not really designed for surviving outside. Very long
| filaments are fragile out of vascular systems.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| I'm not sure that's relevant? I didn't see anything stated
| about rates of infection. Absolutely if influenza were as
| fatal as rabies we would be extinct. But we also wouldn't
| be posting on hacker news about it either. The statement
| was about longevity of the pathogen and fatality.
| echelon wrote:
| > Absolutely if influenza were as fatal as rabies we
| would be extinct.
|
| The chance that it would evolve to be as infectious would
| be greatly reduced. They teach this in first semester
| immunology.
| unsupp0rted wrote:
| Not necessarily. What would be reduced is the likelihood
| of showing any symptoms while still being infectious.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Tuberculosis is likewise at least 5000 years old, and kills
| around 50% of those infected.
| meindnoch wrote:
| >Roughly one-quarter of the world's population has been
| infected with M. tuberculosis, with new infections
| occurring in about 1% of the population each year. However,
| most infections with M. tuberculosis do not cause disease,
| and 90-95% of infections remain asymptomatic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuberculosis#Epidemiology
| somewhereoutth wrote:
| Pathogens will evolve to best survive and replicate - for
| fitness. If a pathogen kills a patient quickly before much
| chance of spread then yes they wouldn't be very fit and
| mutations delaying death would be beneficial.
|
| However this certainly does _not_ imply that all pathogens
| evolve to become 'mild'. Killing the host (or permanently
| incapacitating them) is not necessarily incompatible with
| effective spread.
|
| Indeed, we have _no_ strong evidence of a pathogen evolving to
| become milder. We do have lots of examples of hard won
| population immunity reducing the harmfulness of pathogens.
|
| Unfortunately it has become a bit of a 'natural is best' trope
| that viruses necessarily become weaker, but in fact nature will
| quite happily slaughter us, and it is our artificial
| interventions that keep us fit and healthy.
| jfowief wrote:
| > And importantly, pathogens that cause fatal diseases are
| typically not very old in evolutionary time scales, it's
| generally considered to be a bad idea evolutionarily speaking
| to kill hosts you infect, and most of these pathogens are
| considered to be in the path towards evolving into more benign
| invaders of their hosts.
|
| This isn't necessarily true.
| https://abcnews.go.com/Health/debunking-idea-viruses-evolve-...
|
| How sad that chatgpt does a better job than most of the
| commenters here.
|
| >> ChatGPT: There are a few issues with this:
|
| The statement that "Any pathogen that currently still causes
| disease by definition has to code multiple specialized
| workarounds that hack these immune responses" is not entirely
| accurate. While many pathogens have evolved strategies to evade
| or suppress the immune system, not all pathogens rely on these
| mechanisms to cause disease. Some pathogens may cause disease
| by producing toxins, disrupting host tissues, or interfering
| with cellular processes, without necessarily having to evade
| the immune system.
|
| The claim that "pathogens that cause fatal diseases are
| typically not very old in evolutionary time scales" is not
| necessarily true. While some pathogens that cause fatal
| diseases may be relatively new, others have been around for a
| long time and have co-evolved with their hosts. For example,
| malaria is caused by a protozoan parasite that has been
| infecting humans for millions of years.
|
| The statement that "it's generally considered to be a bad idea
| evolutionarily speaking to kill hosts you infect" is an
| oversimplification. While it is generally true that pathogens
| that kill their hosts too quickly may be less successful at
| spreading to new hosts, this is not always the case. Some
| pathogens may benefit from causing rapid, severe disease if it
| increases the likelihood of transmission to new hosts.
|
| The claim that "most of these pathogens are considered to be in
| the path towards evolving into more benign invaders of their
| hosts" is also not entirely accurate. While it is possible for
| some pathogens to evolve to become less virulent over time,
| this is not a universal trend, and many pathogens may continue
| to cause severe disease for extended periods of time.
| Additionally, the evolution of a pathogen is influenced by a
| wide range of factors, including the host population, the
| environment, and the selective pressures imposed by the immune
| system.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| No single statement I made was absolute for a reason which is
| that exceptions exist, and while what gpt wrote is quite
| amazing you can see how you can't trust it yet. I'm not
| communicating to an audience that's well versed in
| immunology, but to one that's new to it. Exposing them to
| some common ideas and thoughts of why biological systems are
| the way they are to give them better understanding without
| overloading them with the vagaries of biological variety.
|
| The reply from the bot sounds more like the smug 1st year
| graduate student sitting at the back of the lecture who
| thinks they're smart because they made a technically correct
| counter point. Technically correct yes, but you won no fans
| here for sure.
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