https://news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-resistance-among-children-primed-165852261.html
Sarah Knapton
,The Telegraph•June 15, 2020
Children may be protected from coronavirus because they catch so many colds, scientists have suggested.
Figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) suggest children are just as likely to pick up the virus, but few ever develop serious disease, or even show symptoms.
Now scientists have suggested that children may be resistant because their immune systems are already well primed by the common cold.
The common cold is caused by four different types of coronavirus which circulate in the community and are largely harmless. But while adults pick up a cold around two to four times a year, school age children catch an average of 12 colds annually, studies have shown.
Professor Sir John Bell, Regius Professor of Medicine, University of Oxford told the House of Lords Science and Technology Select Committee, that it may allow youngsters to build up some ongoing resistance that adults do not have.
“How you respond may be due to the state of your existing immunity to coronaviruses generally,” he told peers.
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[On the other hand:]
Professor Adrian Hayday, Chair, Department of Immunobiology, King's College London, Group Leader, Immunosurveillance Laboratory, Francis Crick Institute said the immune systems of young people may simply be better at reacting to new viruses.
“All adults past a certain age - 30 to 35 - eventually have no thymus so their T-cells work by looking at whether they have seen something before, whereas children are very good at seeing things that are completely unknown.
“The issue may be that children are able to see this as something fresh.”
The scientists also said that older people may suffer from immune cell ‘senescence’ where their immune cells start to shut down but are not cleared away and replaced with a working version. Cell senescence is implicated in many diseases of ageing and may be behind the ageing process itself.
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