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PHOTO: Pixabay
On the train, on the bus or at work: protecting our mouth and nose is now an integral part of our daily life. Masks have been shown to protect against coronavirus by retaining most of the viruses that we release when we speak, cough, or sneeze.
However, the masks do not protect one hundred percent. The droplets containing the virus can enter our breath, despite protecting the mouth and nose. According to a new scientific theory recently presented in the New England Journal of Medicine, cited by National Geographic.
Scientists believe that a small amount of pathogens ingested by your interlocutor can cause a mild or asymptomatic infection, but that the body’s immune response is strong enough to develop immunity to the virus. Thus, masks can create a kind of live vaccine, according to the theory of Monica Gandhi and George Rutherford of the University of California in San Francisco.
The theory that a small number of pathogens lead to a mild course of the disease and yet a strong immune response is not entirely new.
Before the arrival of the vaccine against smallpox, the so-called smallpox – the first vaccine in the history of medicine. Doctors applied a small amount of secretion from pimples from people with smallpox to the skin of healthy people. This led to a relatively mild transmission of the disease and the development of immunity in a healthy person. However, as this treatment did not have particularly predictable effects and sometimes led to a serious, often fatal development of the disease, it was eliminated with the introduction of the vaccine.
How the number of viruses affects the course of COVID-19 in humans is still unknown. According to Brinkman, this is only known in animal studies. A study of hamsters shows that animals are infected to varying degrees depending on the amount of virus they are exposed to. Such a study with humans is difficult to conduct for ethical reasons.
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