Social distancing, masks, and closures would have kept pathogens away from our immune system, today ‘less trained’ and therefore less prepared to defend itself against the various viruses circulating at the moment
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As reported by Fanpage, which cites the testimony of Jeanne Marrazzo, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Alabama, to the Washington Post, we are facing a winter that presents “respiratory viruses gone mad” following two years of anti- Covid. Social distancing, masks, and closures, in fact, would have kept pathogens away from our immune system, which today is ‘less trained’ and therefore less prepared to defend itself against the various viruses circulating at the moment, and which for this reason strike more aggressively those who get infected. Specifically, the most widespread viruses at the moment are the human respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and the influenza virus, which are triggering severe epidemics in various parts of the world. The risk, the experts point out, is to contract a co-infection, i.e. a simultaneous infection of two or more pathogens. One of these is the “Flurona”, or the simultaneous contagion of Covid and flu.
What is Flurone
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The name Flurona derives from the union of the English term used for the flu, therefore ‘flu’, and the contraction of the word coronavirus. However, this is not officially recognized, and therefore does not appear in medical textbooks. Flurona, it should be emphasized, is not a new disease, but simply the simultaneous infection of two viruses: the flu and the Sars-CoV-2 coronavirus. As demonstrated in the study “The Outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 Interfered with Influenza in Wuhan”, published in The Lancet in March 2020, cases of co-infection were already known at the beginning of the pandemic, precisely because they are not a ‘novelty’ that arrived with the spread of Covid-19. The first cases that, however, have found space in the news, are those detected in Israel at the Beilinson hospital in Petach Tikva at the end of 2021.
Spread and treatment of Flurona
As explained by the virologist Fabrizio Pregliasco to Repubblica, although it is possible, coinfection remains a rather rare event. This is because a sort of viral competition is triggered between the two viruses where, in the end, one of the two prevails. According to what was declared by Giovanni Maga, professor of the National Research Center (CNR) of Pavia, also in Repubblica, the possibility of contracting a coinfection in the last year and a half would be between 0.5 and 0.7 percent, against 4 percent observed before the spread of anti-Covid vaccines. However, this would not involve particular risks for healthy people who do not have risk factors related to complications. Despite this, a double infection in young people and adults could still lead to a strong inflammatory state, with a lasting fever and “accompanied by severe sore throat, difficulty swallowing, cough, headache, bone pain”. Classic symptoms present in both flu and Covid. The elderly, those with particular respiratory disorders, and children must pay particular attention if they contract the infection. To date, however, it is not possible to say with certainty how widespread Flurona is: this is because, once the positivity to Covid-19 has been ascertained, doctors are unlikely to even look for a second infection through an anti-Covid test. The basic symptoms of the two infections remain almost the same.