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Yep. My mother had Epstein Barr and was eventually diagnosed with MS.

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The naturopaths and herbalists have been pounding their fists about EBV for ages. It’s fun when the “quacks” were right all along.

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Big thing in TCM. the link between environment getting ‘into’ the body joints etc.

Lingering pathogens they’re called. But, then TCM is just old quackery and pseudoscience apparently 🤦🏼‍♂️

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I don't buy it tbh! So many people get various herpes viruses like EB. (HHV4) I had it also, and got mono from it. They're all latent viruses, so you'll never get rid of them completely, (herpes 1-8, most contract at least the first 5 during their lifetime) but the immune system will usually hold them in check, although they can reactivate in times of stress. (diet, inflammation, other infections etc.) It's also been shown that some of them can cause transient symptoms of mental disorders in kids mainly.

But, since our immune system will get control of these viruses (or you die) after some time, it's hard to imagine how they can continuously cause some form of cross-reactivity/molecular minicry type action and be a causal factors in autoimmune disease that is permanent. Remember that these pathogens are extremely common, you basically can't avoid them. 90 percent of adults worldwide are estimated to be infected. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6008310/

I think it's much more likely that this is a correlation, and that other factors like diet which can be permanent immune activators with certain genetic phenotypes are they real cause. This dynamic explains why viruses can cause transient autoimmune conditions also, since it's not a consistent insult to the immune system over time.

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The link is old news in the MS community but it’s nice to see the gen pop understand.

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