Researchers discovered that Covid-19 patients can keep the coronavirus in their stools for months after infection, raising concerns that it can irritate the immune system and create long-term Covid symptoms.
In the broadest investigation of SARS-CoV-2 RNA in faeces and Covid symptoms so far, researchers from Stanford University in California discovered that over half of infected individuals shed evidence of the virus in their waste in the week following infection, and about 4% still do so seven months later. The researchers also found a relationship between coronavirus RNA in faeces and stomach problems, concluding that SARS-CoV-2 most likely enters the gastrointestinal tract directly, where it can lurk.
Ami Bhatt, a senior author on the study published online Tuesday in the journal Med, and an associate professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford said, ‘It raises the question that ongoing infections in hidden parts of the body may be important for long Covid’. In an interview, she noted that lingering viruses might directly infiltrate cells and destroy tissues, or create proteins that provoke the immune system.
Nobody understands what causes the constellation of post-Covid symptoms, often known as extended Covid, that affects between 5% and 80% of patients who have SARS-CoV-2. According to Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology and molecular, cellular, and developmental biology at Yale University, unique forms or subtypes of extended Covid might be caused by at least four separate biological causes.
‘Long Covid is likely multiple different diseases’, Iwasaki said last week in an interview in her lab in New Haven, Connecticut. Persistent SARS-CoV-2, in one of these forms, may provoke a harmful immune response, leading to illnesses that may be treated with antiviral medications, she added.
Researchers in China discovered in 2020 that the digestive tract is the primary location for SARS-CoV-2 survival and periodic viral shedding outside of the respiratory system. Within weeks of Covid’s introduction, traces of the virus were discovered in faeces, prompting the adoption of wastewater surveillance to track the pandemic progress.
According to Bhatt, data on the prevalence and persistence of the coronavirus in the faeces of persons with mild-to-moderate Covid is mostly inadequate. In May 2020, she and her colleagues started tracking long-term Covid symptoms as well as the degree and location of viral shedding in participants as part of separate research.
When the researchers looked at faeces samples from 113 people at different times after infection, they discovered that nearly a third of them were still shedding viral RNA four months later, even though they had eliminated the virus from their lungs. Two of the subjects showed viral evidence in their faeces 210 days after being infected.
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