Disease occurs because our health is already compromised, usually as a result of decades of running ourselves down. Have you noticed that some people don’t catch the flu even when surrounded by people with runny noses and coughs? Or they get sick and recover really quickly, while others take months to get better? Without a doubt, they are exposed to the same germs but they don’t get the illness. Others catch the flu all the time, and the ones who catch it all the time always seem to have something wrong with them. It is widely recognised, both in animal experiments and humans, that exposure to an infectious agent alone is insufficient to cause, consistently, clinical manifestations of the disease(1). Even in the case of individuals who appear similar, exposure to a given contagion may manifest the disease differently, or not at all, in the individuals(2).
From both laboratory and epidemiological studies we know that people who are more stressed are more likely to get the flu and other illnesses, including experiencing increased risk of heart attack, stroke and cancer. The greater the stress, the more likely you are to be affected by the virus. Studies on shift work and sleep deprivation, which is a major stress on the body, show that sleep-deprived people are more likely to catch infections, and experience dramatically increased risks of cardiovascular disease and some cancers, including breast cancer. They are more likely, by as much as three times, to develop type 2 diabetes(3) and to put on weight. In an analysis of data on more than one million people, the levels of nearly all forms of death were two-and-a-half times higher for people who slept four hours or less per night compared to those who slept between seven and eight hours.
Infection with the meningococcal bacteria (neisseria meningitides) occurs in around 2.2 per 100,000 people, that is 0.0022%. However, the bacteria can be detected in the nasal cavity of around 30% of the population. Why do such a relatively small number of people get meningococcal disease if the bacteria that causes it is so prevalent? The age categories that seem most susceptible to the illness are around the age of two and at 18 to 25 years. At two, it is self-explanatory, as the immune system has not fully developed and in the 18-to-25-year-olds category it has been referred to as the “partiers’ illness.” The 18-year-old woman I first knew who contracted the illness was a student of mine and was away on a weekend of rowing and partying. Since then, I have met more than a dozen young people who have all told me of their busy social and physical schedules prior to catching the illness—busy schedules that run down the system and make them more vulnerable.
In extreme cases, death from superbug outbreaks in hospitals is almost exclusively with older and sicker patients or people with HIV who don’t die from the virus, but as a result of a bacterial infection that takes over a compromised immune system. Patients, for example in an ICU, are highly traumatized by procedural medicine, cared for under the most stressful conditions, and confined to the most hostile microbial environment(4). No wonder so many of them die from hospital-related infections.
Legionnaires’ disease got its name because when it was first discovered in a Philadelphia hotel in 1976, it lead to the deaths of the old Legionnaires who were heavy smokers, drinkers and unhealthy (but not to the deaths of young people at the hotel). Virtually anyone who has worked in air conditioning has been exposed to the Legionella bacteria, Legionella pneumophila, but none of them die from it, rather they get a few flu-like symptoms and get over it. Similarly, scientists long believed that the Black Death in the 13th century, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed indiscriminately, but recent research found the plague was like many sicknesses—it preferentially killed the very old and those already in poor health. The biggest killer in World War I was not weapons but infections of extremely undernourished and stressed soldiers. The same occurred with the Spanish flu and the soldiers returning home. Many tens of thousands of soldiers died while on the ships returning home. All of them undernourished and extremely stressed. Get the (tragic) picture?
However, the Covid picture is even more complicated as most of the people who are sick have elevated levels of ACE2 which enables the Covid viral particles to gain quick and easy access to the cells. They can sneak through the multiple defences to overwhelm the cells and cause a state of hyper inflammation. Ideally, other than building up the immune system of all of us we can focus on reducing the ACE2 and slowing down or even blocking the entry of the virus into the cell. Many of the superfoods like curcumin (turmeric) and green tea polyphenols and dozens of other nutrients can work together to dramatically lower the ACE2 and build up our immune defences. Win-Win.
