Pathogens Matter: Herpesvirus Infection Found to Have Huge Effect on Immune System

[Cort]

You don't have to be sick with it - all you need to do is carry it....and your immune system is changed forever... The study was done by Ron Davis - the same guy doing the big ME/CFS immune study at Stanford.

• http://www.sfgate.com/health/article/Scientists-say-environment-trumps-genetics-in-6018629.php

The scientists also identified one particular virus — a common pathogen called cytomegalovirus — that has profound effects on the immune system. The virus doesn’t cause illness in most people, who can carry cytomegalovirus their entire lives and never know it, but it can still influence immune markers. In the study, if one twin had been exposed to the virus and the other hadn’t, more than half of their immune markers were dissimilar.

“That’s one single pathogen that can really change the whole structure of the immune system,” Davis said. “Your immune system is almost certainly being shaped by the microbes you come into contact with over your lifetime. That creates an influence on your immunologic makeup that is not gong to be so predictable from genetics.”

The study also found that the things you encounter in your environment (such as cytomegalovirus) are probably much more important your genetic makeup.

nearly 60 percent of the immune markers were almost totally defined by nongenetic factors — in other words, the environment. And some of the markers became increasingly defined by nongenetic factors with age.