Immune Systems Advisor

COVID-19 symptoms have now become more mild and are nearly indistinguishable from allergies or the common cold, often affecting the upper respiratory tract, a number of doctors have said.   They note that some of the notable COVID-19 symptoms, including a cough or a loss of taste or smell, are less common among patients. "It isn’t the same typical symptoms that we were seeing before. It’s a lot of congestion, sometimes sneezing, usually a mild sore throat," Dr. Erick Eiting, vice chair of operations for emergency medicine at New York's Mount Sinai, told  NBC News  on Sept. 16. "Just about everyone who I've seen has had really mild symptoms," Dr. Eiting said, referring to urgent care COVID-19 patients. "The only way that we knew that it was COVID was because we happened to be testing them." A study  published in The Lancet  shows that symptoms for COVID-19 have become milder since the omicron variant emerged and supplanted the delta variant in late ...

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is refusing to change its statements against ivermectin, even after a court said it acted outside of its authority when it told people to stop using it to treat COVID-19. The U.S. appeals court said that the FDA's statements, including one telling people to "stop" using ivermectin as a COVID-19 treatment, went beyond the authority conferred on the agency by Congress. “FDA can inform, but it has identified no authority allowing it to recommend consumers ‘stop’ taking medicine,” U.S. Circuit Judge Don Willett wrote in  the Sept. 1 ruling . Two weeks later, FDA social media posts and a key webpage remain unchanged. That includes an Aug. 21, 2021, Twitter post , on the social media site since renamed X, that hyperlinked to a FDA webpage and stated: "You are not a horse. You are not a cow. Seriously, y'all. Stop it." The  page  has not been updated either. It says people "should not use ivermectin to treat or preve...

Of the 36 million Americans who contracted COVID-19 in 2021, an estimated 800 thousand and 540 thousand did not regain their sense of smell or taste, respectively, after recovering from the infection, according to a study published in   The Laryngoscope  (2023) . The study’s data further suggests that 5.2 million and 4.2 million people experienced only a partial recovery in their taste or smell, post-infection. “Losing your sense of smell or taste isn’t as benign as you may think,” Dr. Neil Bhattacharya, a professor of otolaryngology at Mass Eye and Ear and the senior author of the study, said in a press release. “It can lead to decreased eating for pleasure and, in more extreme cases, it can lead to depression and weight loss.” Sense of smell is intricately connected to emotions and memories, providing individuals with a sense of security that is often taken for granted. It enables the detection of stale food, smoke, and other environmental chemicals. Furthermore, t...

COVID-19 and long COVID may be linked to impaired sensory neurons, a recent study Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study finds. Sensory neurons are responsible for smell, taste, touch, pain, and changes in temperature. Damage to them may lead to impaired senses. Surprisingly, the study found that infected neurons released viral proteins like the spike protein and nucleocapsid proteins rather than the virus releasing them. Not all neurons were infected. All lab-made neurons were exposed to the Wuhan, delta, and omicron strains, but only up to 30 percent of the neurons were infected, with the omicron variant having the lowest infection rate.   Sensory Symptoms in Long COVID and Vaccine Injuries Some doctors have suspected that the  sensory problems , such as lost or impaired smell, taste, and hearing, and muscle pains, numbness, burning, and electrical shock sensations, seen in long COVID and  vaccine-injured patients  are due to the spike proteins on the...