(Teleborsa) – Since the beginning of the coldest season there are already two and a half million Italians knocked out by flu or flu-like syndromes760 thousand in the last week alone. In fact, double that of the same period last year. And it doesn’t just concern our country since the situation seems to be practically the same even looking outside our borders. What is happening?
To give an answer, it is necessary to bring up the expression “immune debt”, used among the first by some French scholars who in 2021 in the position paper of the Pediatric Infectious Disease Group expressed their opinion onto “lack of immune stimulation” due to “reduced circulation of microbial agents and reduced vaccine uptake”. Scenario that according to scientists has caused a “immunity debt vwith a growing percentage of susceptible people”. Then the specific reference to the anti-Covid strategy: “The current COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a series of hygiene measures unprecedented in history (social distancing, masks, hand washing, reduced number of contacts, etc.). These non-pharmaceutical personal interventions (NPIs) helped limit the transmission of SARS-CoV-2, but they also reduced the spread of other pathogens.”
In a typical year, “we may be exposed to a small amount of virus that the body fights off –John Tregoning, an immunologist at Imperial College London also explained -. But this kind of asymptomatic enhancement maybe in the last couple of years there has been “.
Translated into simple words: in these two years now, the anti-Covid measures have worked, bringing down the cases of flu and other respiratory diseases, but this is the first flu season without distancing and masks and is offering viruses the opportunity from return to the charge. In short, it seems that we will have to discount the infection debt recorded in 2020-2021.
