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Unruly Gut Fungi Can Make Your Covid Worse
An infection can upset your microbiome, and if certain gut fungi run riot, this can kick the immune system into overdrive.
In research published in Nature Immunology, he and his team discovered that in patients with severe Covid, certain strains of gut fungi—knocked off-kilter by the virus—set off a prolonged immune response that could last long after the initial infection. It wasn’t long before they found something out of the ordinary—certain neutrophils (a subtype of white blood cell that fights off infection) were present in greater quantities in severe Covid patients compared to those with mild or no disease. This complex crosstalk between the gut microbiome and the immune system is an example of how most things in the body are intertwined, says Alessio Fasano, a gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, who was unaffiliated with the study.
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