India on Monday reported 3,207 Covid cases and 29 fatalities. The cumulative caseload is 43,105,401 (20,403 active cases) and 524,093 fatalitiesWorldwide: Over 517.35 million cases and over 6.25 million fatalities.Vaccination in India: Over 1.9 billion doses. Worldwide: Over 11.33 billion doses.TODAY’S TAKEA bout of Covid spurs antibodies against common coldsThere’s a silver lining to getting bitten by the Covid-19 bug: An infection might, at least temporarily, boost the number of antibodies you have against common cold-causing coronaviruses as well as the virulent relatives causing Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak. The findings, published in the journal ‘Science Advances’, showed that the immune system’s antibodies against one coronavirus spike protein could, potentially, also recognise other similar spike proteins as disease-causing. That’s because all these coronaviruses are closely related.Scientists at Scripps Research in California have characterised coronavirus antibodies isolated from 11 people to reveal how Covid impacts the immune system’s ability to recognise other coronaviruses.In each case, the researchers measured how strongly the samples reacted to isolated spike proteins from different coronaviruses – OC43 and HKU1, both associated with common colds, along with SARS-CoV-1, MERS-CoV and SARS-CoV-2.The team found that only the serum from recovered Covid patients reacted to the SARS-CoV-2 spike proteins. However, these Covid patient samples also reacted more strongly than the pre-pandemic samples to the other spike proteins as well.“Getting a better understanding of how immunity against this broad family of coronaviruses changes with COVID-19 infection is an important step toward developing better coronavirus vaccines, both for COVID-19 and for future, related pathogens,” says Andrew Ward, PhD, professor of Integrative Structural and Computational Biology at Scripps Research and a senior author of the paper.TELL ME ONE THINGObesity may weaken protection from Covid vaccinesTill last year, the scientific community believed that Covid vaccine efficacy was not significantly different in people with and without obesity, which is a major risk factor for mortality and morbidity from the infectionBut a new Turkish study, which is yet to be peer-reviewed, claims that severe obesity may weaken the effectiveness of the vaccines in those who have managed to escape testing positive in the successive waves.For the study, researchers had compared immune responses to vaccines in 124 volunteers with severe obesity – defined as a body mass index of 40 or higher – and 166 normal-weight individuals (BMI less than 25). Overall, 130 participants had received two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine and 160 had received two doses of Sinovac Biotech’s CoronaVac.Among participants without previous SARS-CoV-2 infection, who had received the mRNA vaccine, the very obese patients had antibody levels more than three times lower than normal-weight individuals, according to data being presented at the European Congress on Obesity in Maastricht, Netherlands.Similarly, among recipients of Sinovac’s inactivated-virus vaccine, those with severe obesity and no history of prior infection had antibody levels 27 times lower. On the other hand, among the 70 volunteers who had previously tested positive, there was no link between obesity and antibody levels.While two doses of the Pfizer vaccine appear to generate more antibodies than CoronaVac in the study, “further research is needed to determine whether these higher antibody levels provide greater protection against Covid-19,” study leader Volkan Demirhan Yumuk from Istanbul University said in a statement.Follow news that matters to you in real-time.
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Research: Rajesh Sharma
