One of the many mysteries of COVID-19 is why infants, seemingly the most vulnerable to viruses and other pathogens, don’t get as seriously ill from the infection as adults. Hospitalizations for babies remains the lowest when compared to other age groups, so researchers led by a team at Stanford studied how infants respond to SARS-CoV-2 before, during, and after infection. They found some interesting differences in the immune responses of the babies that could lead to better ways of generating immunity, through vaccines and treatments, in the future. Here’s what they reported in a study published in the journal Cell:
Babies, especially infants only a few months old, can produce antibodies to the COVID-19 virus that last for nearly a year.
Infants don’t develop severe inflammatory reactions in the blood like adults do.
Instead, infants have strong inflammatory reactions in the mucosal tissues in the nose and upper respiratory tract, which suggests that they can keep the infection confined to those regions and “nip it in the bud” before it becomes a more system-wide infection in the blood, says one of the study’s authors.
Globally, humans share 99.9% of the same DNA, making race a biologically meaningless concept. Now, as Sydney Trent writes in the Washington Post, scientists are pushing to end the categorization of people by race, including in the U.S. Census.
