Slowly, Ever So Slowly, Things Are Starting To Make Sense -- Covid And HLA -- August 19, 2023

Locator: 45441COVID.

The significance of "HLA" popped up during my training back in the late 1970s, early 1980s. Forget exactly when.

HLA -- a genetic "node" on the human chromosome, or multiple "nodes."

HLA-B27: associated with a condition that causes severe back pain. Link here. 

Apparently, it turns out that another HLA "node" is associated with "some type of immunity” from Covid-19. The node: HLA-B15:01.

Researchers had a significant sample size of coronavirus-positive patients with European ancestry to generate meaningful data; there were too few test-positive participants of other ancestries for those results to be significant.

Scientists identified about 1,400 people with European ancestry who had a confirmed positive coronavirus infection in the first year of the pandemic, and all were unvaccinated because shots weren't yet available.

Of that group, 136 were asymptomatic, or roughly 10%. Reasons symptom-free people were tested could include the nature of their job, such as being a healthcare worker undergoing routine testing, or perhaps their family member had been infected and they were considered exposed to the virus.

Significantly, the scientists found that people who had a version of the gene called HLA-B*15:01 were more than twice as likely to remain asymptomatic compared with those who didn't,

Hollenbach said. And if a person had two copies of the version of this gene — one from each parent — "they were 8½ times more likely to have remained asymptomatic," Hollenbach said. 

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A Musical Interlude

Whenever I play this video, I have tears. Someday, I'll tell you why, but not today. It's related to the story above. Link here.