Building a Weather System for New Viruses

 

Over the past summer, a group of doctors, including Dr. Michael Mina, had gotten together to collaborate on the Global Immunological Observatory. Together, they're planning to develop a technique in which they will be able to collect blood samples from all over the world to test for the antibodies of hundreds of viruses. Their collection of samples dates begins back in January of 2020. This is beneficial in tracking new viruses before they are spread. It will give the scientists insight on the patient's reaction to the virus and how they may have been infected - things that would have been good to know about the Coronavirus before it became a pandemic. They're able to look far back into the history of your body's  viruses through this little vial of blood. This type of testing is called serology which is different than just virus testing. It provides information in which they are able to see the amount of immunity a given population has to a virus. 

It's crazy that we have so much technology out there that has yet to have been used. Especially technology like this in which it could have helped to prevent (not fully prevent) the Coronavirus. It would have been able to identify the weird immune system responses at an earlier time, which would have given us more insight on what the virus actually does to our bodies - something we are still not 100% sure of today.

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Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2021 at 2:23 PM

    It is very interesting to think that they are able to gather so much information about viruses from blood samples. This could be very beneficial (much like you said) in helping to prevent people from getting a specific virus, and what effects to treat/look if a person is infected.

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  2. AnonymousFebruary 21, 2021 at 7:02 PM

    Being able to see your bodies history of viruses would be a huge leap forward in medicine. Medical documentation on the history of viruses could be much more accurate, and people would be able to figure out weather they had a specific disease of not (which would be especially helpful in this day as COVID is often asymptomatic in younger people, leaving many to wonder weather they ever contracted the disease or not). In addition, pinpointing how someone got infected could drastically help understand how to better prevent the spread of specific diseases/viruses in the future. This technology offers much hope for the future of medicinal research and will hopefully be practiced more thoroughly soon.

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