Public Each human gut has a viral fingerprint

Interesting research from Ohio, which may or may not have relevance for ME/ CFS.


https://phys.org/news/2020-08-human-gut-viral-fingerprint.html

 

It's interesting that they are able to identify about 33,000 different viruses in the gut. I'm guessing any individual would have a fraction of the that number. They say that 97.7% of those viruses only infect the bacteria in the gut, thereby influencing the bacterial diversity and proportions - so most of these viruses are technically not infecting humans, but rather are infecting the bacteria in the human gut.

There is a technology called "VirScan" which can apparently identify which out of about 1000 different viruses a human has been infected with over a lifetime. It provides a sort of a viral history (though I doubt it can tell you the order in which, let alone how long ago, you were infected with a particular virus). The technique identifies antibodies as opposed to the actual viruses.

It's currently a research tool, so you can't yet go and get tested for your "viral history." One interesting study using VirScan discovered that a measles infection can actually "erase" about 40% of your prior viral history (in one case it erased as much as 73% of that history). I imagine it does this by somehow stopping antibody production. The blog below says that this may explain why kids seem to get a lot of other viral infections in the wake of a bad case of measles (i.e. measles wiped out their prior immunity to those viruses).

Dr. Francis Collins blogged about this here last November (2019).
https://directorsblog.nih.gov/tag/virscan/

ETA: VirScan only needs a microliter of blood, which is something like 1/50th of a drop of blood.