Re: Beginning, Middle and End

In article <MPG.21d4c6ea2ba5dddb98be44@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Gerry Quinn <gerryq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
In article <ddfr-7555DF.21244019122007@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
ddfr@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx says...
In article <JtBJDy.C8s@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx (Dorothy J Heydt) wrote:

And then there's the other kind, which I seem to have: our
resistance is way way up all the time, and there's the *feeling*
of having a low-grade fever (that subtle shivering that you feel
if you're lying very still) without ever running a temperature,
and we catch practically nothing else. I catch, on average, one
cold or flu per year, and during the winter I occasionally get
the sore-throat feeling that presages a cold -- and then it goes
away again.

Fascinating. That suggests that perhaps what's happening is some
defensive mechanism ramped way up.

It does make sense to me too, although I'm not convinced about the
fever thing. I assume that the cold or hot feelings you get with fever
come about when your internal thermostat switches to some state at
which you're not. So if you are at 99 and your thermostat goes to 101,
you feel cold and shivery until you get up to 101. At which point it
goes down to 99 again and you get covered in sweat and toss off the
bedclothes you had wrapped around you...

But it could be some other defence mechanism that is usually associated
with fever.

My (possibly completely off the wall) analysis of mononucleosis is that
we have evolved a system that says, basically, if you can't kill a
virus after three weeks or so fighting it, try switching off the
defences for a while and if you're lucky it's a benign virus that
wasn't going to kill you, or something that lives in the immune system
and gets worse when you attack it.

So maybe some people have a fault with that switch, and can be sent
into permanent immune reaction by some persistent viral infection (or
maybe the fault is with the system that recognises when a virus has
been eradicated).

Well ... a genetic basis for CFS has been found. Any one of
several genes are deficient in such a way that when the patient
is subjected to sufficient stress, he doesn't bounce back
afterward. I know that I came down with mine after several
months with a genuine pointy-haired boss from hell, only he was
wavy-haired actually. If part of the intermediate process
between gene deficiency and chronically fatigued patient is a
permamently on immune system, that would work. But it doesn't
appear to be viral, at this stage of investigation.

Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx
.

Relevant Pages

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