sars2 – Dr. G.C's Health and Wellness Initiative

Last week’s health news was disturbing: the new twist to the Covid pandemic that has been going on now for over 2 years and was seeming to come under control with vaccines and other measures, could see yet another wave.

The protagonist of the pandemic, the SARS-Cov-2 virus, which has been mutating from time to time to make it more contagious and to evade our vaccine induced immunity, has lived up to its notoriety! It has mutated again, and this time at over 30 sites, possibly 50, making it potentially quite a different animal altogether!

If you are familiar with the Greek alphabets, Alpha, Beta, Gamma and the all too famous Delta that wrecked the havoc of the infamous second wave, it is Omicron this time.

It is yet another Greek alphabet chosen to label the new mutated variant that has been reported first from South Africa.

What makes the new Omicron variant (B.1.1.529) scary right now is that it has 30 mutations in its spike protein region…the portion by which the virus attaches and enters the human cell, raising the possibility that vaccine induced immunity may not work to protect us from this strain. Also, there is speculation that the strain could be more contagious than the last one, DELTA, which was bad enough.

This news evokes a déjà vu feeling. In February 2020, many of us (I included) had thought that COVID was a strange infection occurring in distant lands, and would not come here to harm us. If the two waves, one of 2020 and the 2^nd one of Aril-Mat 2021 are anything to go by, we had underestimated the fury of a new infectious virus with a strong capacity to mutate.

The Omicron variant has already landed in Western Europe, making some countries close its borders to International travel, especially from Africa. The global stock market has nose dived fearing another blow to international travel, manufacture and trade.

And scientists are anxiously waiting to see how the new strain behaves on 3 fronts: contagiousness (how infectious is it likely to be, and how easily might it spread?), severity (ability to cause serious disease and kill), and how dodgy it might be to the vaccine generated immunity that has emboldened us (can those who are double vaccinated develop serious disease and die?). The answers are not known, but it makes sense to go back to COVID appropriate behavior (masks, social distancing, hand sanitizing, testing and isolating, till we have the answers

Medical Journal

Research Gate

Public Health Issues in Digestive Health: Lessons from the COVID Pandemic

(Talk delivered in national e-Conference of Association of Physicians of India on March 7th, 2021)

One major track-change that the COVID Pandemic has brought about is to shift the focus from individualized precision medicine back to PUBLIC HEALTH, a subject dealing with
- protecting and improving the health of people and their communities.
- by promoting safe behaviour and healthy lifestyles,
- researching disease and injury prevention,
- and detecting, preventing and responding to infectious diseases.

While it is a viral infection this time, following on the heels of its predecessors such as the SARS, swine flu, influenza and other respiratory infections, PUBLIC HEALTH as a science started with a Gastrointestinal infection, namely cholera, in 1854 in a London epidemic, when a doctor (John Snow) was the first to suspect that it could be spreading through infected water.
Infections, be it respiratory, GI (water or food borne), skin are still the typical ones that PUBLIC HEALTH has grown up to address, but has now expanded to 5 more domains:
- Contaminants such as high levels of toxins like arsenic in drinking water
- Occupational : such as those of miners where their eyes and lungs bear the brunt
- Genetic: such as thalassemia
- Accidents: such as road traffic accidents, a leading cause of injuries and death in India
- LIFE STYLE diseases such as obesity, fatty liver, cardiac disease and depression
While COVID pandemic has been dramatic because of the rapidity with which it has spread across the world, a slow simmering one of the “Life-style” variety that has been going on for the last 3 decades is FATYY LIVER disease, a condition characterised excess deposition of fat in the liver
These two seemed to have intersected in recent months. Scientists noted that those with Fatty Liver (often associated with Diabetes, obesity, heart disease) constituting 30% of urban adults, developed more severe disease and had a higher chance of dying when they contracted COVID infection
Commonly referred to as Co-morbidities, the presence of these metabolic “life-style related” diseases made the COVID 19 infection much more deadly.

Tag: sars2

Omicron variant of Sars-cov-2 virus