Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

quantamagazine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 115 posts

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#101

Post by refurb »

vikramkr wrote: post #14
dorfsmay wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> boosting ourantibody response What I wonder is if we can develop immunity (not boosting, assuming never been infected before) from being exposed to small doses, or do we need at least one full blown infection.

Yep that's called vaccination! No need to get a full blown infection it's how we eradicated smallpox

That's not vaccination.

You get a hefty dose of vaccine. The difference is that it's either not an infectious agent at all (just a fragment of one) or it's a low-infectious agent.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#102

Post by refurb »

Sakos wrote: post #5
curiousObject wrote: post #2

> A tiny enough dose may even serve to remind our immune system of a pathogen’s existence, boosting our antibody response to keep us protected against it. This article should be required reading, whatever your views on Covid and other conditions. Although the attack method of the infection is significant, and the potential victim’s defenses are significant, the raw quantity of infectious agent and the exposure rate a…

This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. edit: Imagine this being controversial. I didn't realize there were Covid deniers and skeptics here, because what I've stated is completely within established science.

No not really.

Infection is binary or not. You either get exposed to enough to actually result in replication inside your body or you don't. If you get exposed to a small amount and your immune system immediately eliminates it, that's not an infection.

The amount of exposure needed to actually cause an infection is different from person to person depending on their immediate immune response.

But it's not like reducing exposure by 50% reduces disease severity by 50%. Biology doesn't work that way.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#103

Post by lesuorac »

ryanjshaw wrote: post #98
gregwebs wrote: post #33

Great to see statistical thinking. There have been a lot of Covid shouting matches because people are trying to reduce things to binary. Masks don’t work! Actually, they work as advertised- only 95% effective at best (and a cloth mask may be 30%), not a binary protected or not. That’s effective at blocking particles. You are still guaranteed to get some virus particles. They are going to be in your respiratory tract…

If you want to be truly scientific you also need to discuss the risks of mask wearing. Then, in relation to COVID response, you have to weigh up the costs vs. benefits of a mask wearing policy . Some of those costs are hard to quantify scientifically or intangible e.g. restrictions on individual freedom, and even the scientifically quantifiable data may have large variability so you have to take an opionated position…

> Therefore, at this point you leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. For whatever reason, people like to pretend it's entirely a scientific discussion but it's not.

I mean discussions are typically both science and politics. Masks lower the amount of people that get sick is scientific fact; why do you think they wear them in the operating room? Whether or not that is "worth" wearing a mask is politics though. However, if you want to convince people of something (aka politics) you may want to appeal to them using logic and for that you'll want to use facts.

Having large variability doesn't make something not a fact. Plenty of males 20-24 do not get in car accidents but that doesn't mean that none of them will or that if you were to insure say 100k males 20-24 and 100k females 20-24 that the males wouldn't in aggregate have higher claims. But given a specific male and specific female its entirely possible that the female gets into an accident first.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#104

Post by yieldcrv »

dorfsmay wrote: post #67
yieldcrv wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve gotten lots of anti vaxxers to be into vaccines by saying what the parent said, most of them are just allergic to the word vaccine and don’t know what it means, (specifically I’m referring to using dead pathogens not just a low dosage of live ones) so just describe the procedure, and call it a secret that big pharma doesnt want them to know, and theyre into it. be anybody but a doctor lol slam dunk

I'm not anti vaccine, no need to out words in my mouth. My understanding of vaccine is that they use deactivated viruses but not small doses. My question is about live viruses, and if we can get exposed to small doses enough that will trigger a immunization mechanism without triggering a full blown infection? Or does it work to boost an existing immunity only.

> I'm not anti vaccine, no need to out words in my mouth.

I didn't write that you were, I wrote that I've gotten anti vaxxers to like vaccines with the same logic.

Its pretty clear that its coincidence that you didn't know your hypothesis was the basis of vaccination, regardless of your predilection.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#105

Post by the_gastropod »

mozman wrote: post #39
Sakos wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons why masks are so important and why they don't need to be 100% effective. Just reducing the amount of viral load could turn a serious infection into something you might barely notice. edit: Imagine this being controversial. I didn't realize there were Covid deniers and skeptics here, because what I've stated is completely within established science.

There shouldn’t be any requirements for masks. Want to wear one? Great. Should I have to? No.

It puzzles me that nearly 4 years after the start of the pandemic, this naive libertarian thought fragment is still so widely used. As the saying goes, “Your right to swing your arms ends just where the other man’s nose begins”.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#106

Post by avidiax »

lesuorac wrote: post #103
ryanjshaw wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to be truly scientific you also need to discuss the risks of mask wearing. Then, in relation to COVID response, you have to weigh up the costs vs. benefits of a mask wearing policy . Some of those costs are hard to quantify scientifically or intangible e.g. restrictions on individual freedom, and even the scientifically quantifiable data may have large variability so you have to take an opionated position…

> Therefore, at this point you leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. For whatever reason, people like to pretend it's entirely a scientific discussion but it's not. I mean discussions are typically both science and politics. Masks lower the amount of people that get sick is scientific fact; why do you think they wear them in the operating room? Whether or not that is "worth" wearing a mask is po…

> if you want to convince people of something (aka politics) you may want to appeal to them using logic and for that you'll want to use facts

I used to think this way, but this advice needs to be conditional.

Dispassionate or distant parties can sometimes use facts to drive a decision. It's not even clear that it's the "correct" decision, since nobody has all the facts, and presentation, ordering, accessibility all matter tremendously.

Once you add an emotional reaction, well, people will logically or rationally pick or ignore facts to justify the emotion. Surely you've had someone tell you that you logically shouldn't be angry, and you greatly appreciated that insight and recalculated your emotions, right?

https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2022/01/logic-or-emot...

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#107

Post by kbelder »

sfblah wrote: post #89
AnthonBerg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Thank you. I think I can also pretty decisively say that hospital purchasing optimizations give face-fitting masks a bad rap. The FFP2 masks that hospital staff wear here are cheap and very uncomfortable. This bleeds into society as a negative view. There’s also another aspect: The difference between a N95/FFP2/whatever mask as part of the industrial production of a verifiable sanitization chain in a hospi…

Occam's razor here is that your interest in masks is a mental illness, and not because someone in your family is so immunocompromised or whatever that the mask is standing between that person and certain death. Is it possible that the latter is the case? Maybe. But in my view almost all cases of people stubbornly wearing masks are just psychiatric in nature. I know my comment will just make you angry, because "you're…

I know a family who still wears masks in public because their daughter is very sick, very weak, and they don't want to risk her getting covid. Perfectly sensible. I also know people who wear masks in public because they're a little nuts... just can't let go, or politically or psychologically hung up.

So what can you say? You see a stranger wearing a mask, you don't know if it's for a good reason or not. Probably the odds are that it's an emotional or psychological hangup, but it may be for a really good reason. So you need to just shrug and let people do what they think best for themselves. They're the ones responsible for themselves.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#108

Post by 3seashells »

A fascinating thing is that you can catch a infection early. If you know you have been exposed and time it right you can induce a artificial fever via sauna or steam bath. This catches the whole infection ahead of the curve and shortens reconvalescing and downtime significantly.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#109

Post by lesuorac »

avidiax wrote: post #106
lesuorac wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Therefore, at this point you leave the realm of science and enter the realm of politics. For whatever reason, people like to pretend it's entirely a scientific discussion but it's not. I mean discussions are typically both science and politics. Masks lower the amount of people that get sick is scientific fact; why do you think they wear them in the operating room? Whether or not that is "worth" wearing a mask is po…

> if you want to convince people of something (aka politics) you may want to appeal to them using logic and for that you'll want to use facts I used to think this way, but this advice needs to be conditional. Dispassionate or distant parties can sometimes use facts to drive a decision. It's not even clear that it's the "correct" decision, since nobody has all the facts, and presentation, ordering, accessibility all m…

If you argue purely with logic you won't convince everybody but that doesn't mean you won't ever want to appeal to somebody with logic; just that not _every_ time you won't want to.

The different words in "Pathos, Logos, and Ethos" all have their place and if somebody is acting emotionally it'd be better to use a Pathos arguement.

Re: How many microbes does it take to make you sick?

#110

Post by southernplaces7 »

cutemonster wrote: post #97
southernplaces7 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As with many things in medicine, it depends on specifics and context. With some viruses, this might work, and with others it could kill you. Vaccination itself is tricky partly for this very reason as far as I know (not a doctor or epidemiologist). Variolation for example, the predecessor to the world's first practice of vaccination (against smallpox) involved taking tiny amounts of live smallpox from scabs or pustul…

Interesting! I suppose one more dangerous thing with this, could be how popular anti vaccination ideas could become, when the anti-vaxxers start saying that vaccine is live virus

My variolation example above was only a very specific, very antique context of something that did involve live virus but wasn't considered true vaccination as we use it today. However, even today the basic reality is that some vaccines do involve live viruses or other pathogens in a weakened state. This doesn't make them dangerous in any general sense.

And that live pathogens are sometimes used should be known and discussed for the sake of clinical honesty and public health transparency. Either way, for any deeply dedicated anti-vaxxer, it probably wouldn't matter what they hear from even the best source. Once one's fixation on a concept becomes emotional or ideological, the subtleties and details of explaining contrary details stop mattering to them.

Post reply on HN