Are the types of virus that can trigger ME/CFS a clue to cause/mechanism?

[Sasha]

From another thread:

I find this interesting going back to my experience of vaccines, no problem with the flu one but significant issues with mRNA and viral vector covid-19 ones. So my body is, for some reason, reacting very differently to I guess the spike proteins?

So within the wider population why not differences in how the body (or some people’s bodies) responds to both severity but also type of virus? No idea if this has a relationship with ME/CFS, just as likely not. But how and how long the body responds to things is vey interesting and I’m assuming given the complexity of the immune system and many different virus.. complicated.

Always looking for a clue to mechanism!

Do only certain types of virus that can trigger ME/CFS, and if there are, what does that tell us about cause/mechanism?

@Jonathan Edwards?

 

[Murph]

I think this is a good point and even among the various covid variants we might be able to tease out why early variants seemed to cause more long covid than more recent variants.

Are enteroviruses our major lead on the most likely type of virus to leave lingering symptoms?

 

[Kitty]

It's interesting, and I wonder if Covid has moved the conversation on a bit. There are numerous proposed triggers for ME/CFS, but EBV has long been thought to be the most frequent.

If we accept that, the fact that EBV usually becomes latent in the immune system is an obvious focus for research. Maybe it's led us astray a bit?

 

[hotblack]

So now we’re moving beyond types of virus to variants within a virus! Makes you think though, if (still a big if) ME/CFS is virally triggered is there some bit of DNA or RNA shared amongst those which trigger?

 

[Creekside]

Possibly ME is triggered by immune system activation, and the trigger for the immune system is not important. I think this might be one of those cases where far in the future, when ME is well-understood, someone might be able to write a paper on viral types that are more or less effective at triggering ME, but it's pretty much impossible to make those conclusions at this time, due to lack of data.