Bacteria from the lungs protect against flu viruses. As a research team from Lausanne showed in an experiment, droplets containing flu viruses remain infectious longer if certain bacteria from our respiratory tract are also present in the droplet. This finding helps explain why viruses spread so easily from person to person, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL) wrote in a statement on Wednesday.
The new findings were published in the journal “Journal of Virology”. For their experiment, the EPFL researchers created droplets that resembled the droplets released when sneezing. Some of these droplets contain only flu viruses, others also contain bacteria such as streptococci and staphylococci.
The virus survives for several hours in bacterial droplets
They placed these droplets on a surface and allowed them to dry in normal room air. After half an hour, the virus in the droplets had almost completely died without bacteria. At the same time, the infectious viral load in the droplets containing bacteria was a hundred times higher. The virus could survive there for several hours. A second experiment showed similar results, measuring the effect of floating droplets.
Microscopic examination showed that the droplets with the bacteria are flatter than those without. According to the researchers, this accelerates the evaporation process and leads to faster crystallization of the salt in the droplets, allowing the viruses to live longer.
Researcher: ‘Contamination risk is probably underestimated’
Previous models for predicting the spread of a virus in an enclosed space do not take this effect into account. “This means they are likely underestimating the risk of infection,” said lead author Shannon David.
Source: Krone
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