Ademe Muluneh, Girma Friehiwot
Department of Microbiology, Immunology and Parasitology, College of Health Sciences, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
Department of Pediatrics and Child Health Nursing, School of Health Sciences, College of Medicine and Health Sciences, Bahir Dar University, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.
Infect Drug Resist. 2021 Oct 27;14:4421-4426. doi: 10.2147/IDR.S335447. eCollection 2021.
Immunologically, chronic worm infections prevent themselves from strong immune responses by skewing the host response towards a T helper 2 (Th2) type. The regulatory response initiated by helminth infections is supposed to temper responses to non-helminth antigens including viral infections which will, in turn, alter the clinical outcomes of infections. In view of this, recent reports highlighted the possible negative associations of severe COVID-19 and helminth co-infections in helminth-endemic regions. As the pathology of COVID-19 is primarily mediated by an excessive immune response and subsequent cytokine storm, which contributes to the poor prognosis of COVID-19, helminth-driven immune modulation will hypothetically contribute to the less severe outcomes of COVID-19. Nevertheless, emerging reports also stated that COVID-19 and helminth co-infections may have more hidden outcomes than predictable ones. Herein, the current knowledge on the interaction of COVID-19 and helminth co-infections will be discussed.
在免疫学上，慢性蠕虫感染通过使宿主反应偏向2型辅助性T细胞（Th2）类型来避免自身引发强烈的免疫反应。由蠕虫感染引发的调节性反应被认为会缓和对包括病毒感染在内的非蠕虫抗原的反应，而这反过来又会改变感染的临床结果。有鉴于此，最近的报告强调了在蠕虫流行地区严重COVID-19与蠕虫合并感染之间可能存在的负相关关系。由于COVID-19的病理主要由过度的免疫反应和随后的细胞因子风暴介导，这导致了COVID-19的预后不良，因此蠕虫驱动的免疫调节理论上会使COVID-19的结果不那么严重。然而，新出现的报告也指出，COVID-19与蠕虫合并感染可能产生比可预测结果更多的潜在结果。在此，将讨论目前关于COVID-19与蠕虫合并感染相互作用的知识。
