The history of the Lykovs’ illness in the generally accepted sense of the word does not exist. Of course, no one took a blood test either, because while the family was struggling with a serious illness, there were no doctors nearby. The nearest hospital is endless kilometers away. There was no need to count on help, and the Lykovs tried unsuccessfully to cope on their own.
The survivors Karp Osipovich and Agafya later told Igor Pavlovich Nazarov about the course of the disease, who became their friend and, in fact, a trusted doctor. The founder of the Krasnoyarsk school of anesthesiologists and resuscitators has repeatedly flown to the taiga dead end. He described this dramatic story in his book.
The illness struck the Lykovs almost simultaneously – in September 1981. The first blow was taken by Dmitry, who at that time was 39 years old. At first, the malaise was mistaken for a cold from hypothermia in water, although this was strange for the hardened Lykovs. They are used to walking barefoot at minus 5 degrees, wearing light hemp clothing. They dug potatoes out of the snow with their bare hands, washed their clothes in cold water. Of course, they also sometimes got sick, but, basically, it was injuries, “grazes”, colds. They were treated only with herbs and berries: honeysuckle, blueberries, nettles, plantains, etc.
“How can one conclude,” writes Dr. Nazarov in his book, “Dmitry had severe pneumonia, from which he died a week later. On the same days, all the other Lykovs fell ill, they also had symptoms of damage to the respiratory system: weakness, shortness of breath, a feeling of suffocation, cough, fever. “
Savvin (48 years old) was seriously ill for about two months. He experienced severe weakness, back pain, and bloody stools.
Natalia (46 years old) left in agony, “she was crushed, choked”, hemoptysis opened. It was she who looked after her sick brother Savvin, washed his linen. After his death, the Lykovs, suspecting that the clothes of the deceased could be a source of infection, burned them away from home.
The head of the family, Karp Osipovich, who at that time was 74 years old, suffered the disease most easily. Dr. Nazarov explains the milder course of the disease in the oldest member of the family by the greater “training” of his immune systems, since he grew up and lived for many years “in the world”, in contact with many people, and therefore with many infections. “
Agafya, his youngest daughter, also had pneumonia. The road to recovery turned out to be long – only towards the end of winter did relief come. Unlike her father, Agafya was born and raised in the taiga, and the disease that took the lives of her relatives was her first encounter with a viral infection. But youth won – Agafya was then 37 years old.
“The cause of illness and death of the Lykovs was some kind of infection, the development of which was facilitated by cooling, hard exhausting work and, of course, the weakening or absence of specific immunity,” Igor Pavlovich Nazarov concludes.
However, the head of the family did not survive the next infection, picked up, with a high probability, again from the geologists with whom the daughter spoke the day before. The day before his illness, a strong old man was still sawing wood and dragging heavy wood on himself, and then fell down and burned down in a matter of days. Yes, and Agafya struggled to get out this time. I even dared to take antibiotics …
It is interesting that the studies carried out in the virological laboratory of the regional SES, on the detection of antibodies in Agafia’s blood to the viruses of measles, mumps, toxoplasmosis, tick-borne typhus, epidemic typhus, influenza and parainfluenza, gave negative results. Antibodies to adenoviruses were not detected either.
Studies have confirmed that Agafya has practically no specific immunity against viral diseases widespread among people, and they pose a huge danger to her. The only thing for which she was found to be immune is the tick-borne encephalitis virus. The blood contains a high titer of antibodies (1:80) to the causative agent of this disease. Dr. Nazarov compares the organism of the last representativeness of the Lykov family to a battlefield without soldiers. Therefore, her living among people is a serious danger.
Why does not any new respiratory virus go away in the majority, like a habitual flu, and in many infected it causes a severe course, sometimes leading to death? It can be understood that our body reacts in this way to all “strangers”, first of all, “mutants” – the Spanish flu, the Hong Kong flu, the recent coronavirus infections with SARS and MERS.
“Scientists believe that the reason is in the peculiarities of our immune system, which in some people gives out too violent a reaction to an unfamiliar virus when it enters the lungs. Up to the cytokine storm that has already set the teeth on edge.
But in fact, this can be caused not only by a new, but also by the most common, harmless respiratory pathogen, if a person has never met him in his life, and for his immunity this familiar to us generator of a light cold is an insidious and dangerous mutant, ”writes in his blog, cardiac surgeon Alexei Fedorov.
As proof, the doctor cites a natural experiment in the family of hermits-Old Believers, the Lykovs, discovered by geologists in the Sayan Mountains in 1978. The Lykovs have not had contact with other people for 40 years. This is how any respiratory “novice” works. Humanity has not yet invented an antidote for the first contact with a new virus. And we do not know what awaits us in the near future.
Comment of Anna Toptygina, immunologist, doctor of medical sciences: “The primary immune response, firstly, is slow, and secondly, it proceeds with severe severe symptoms, and the secondary one is faster, with few symptoms. In children, everything usually proceeds according to the primary type. immune response, because they first encounter an infection A well-known scenario: they went to the garden – they started to get sick, and when an adult falls ill, a secondary immune response occurs to the vast majority of diseases.
– But with the Spanish flu, everything developed according to a different scenario …
– The famous “Spanish flu” is a good example, because a strong mutation of the virus has occurred. Humanity has not yet encountered a virus of this type. And everything went according to the primary immune response. The organizational moments also played a role, when people were placed in large wards, where they received bacterial superinfection, and then there were no antibiotics, so millions of people died.
– So the Lykovs’ case is typical enough?
– Yes, they gave a primary immune response characteristic of adults. The grandfather had some memory cells and partially responded with a secondary type of immune response. Therefore, he was sick more easily. And all the rest did not, because they did not come into contact with infections. Maybe they got the flu, maybe pneumococcus – it’s hard to say. In any case, this was their primary immune response, and whoever it turned out to be the most powerful suffered the most.
– Can we say that for them this infection has become a kind of COVID-19?
– There was the same story with the Indians when measles was brought to America. Before that, they had never encountered this disease. The whites brought in the virus, and the Indians began to die out in whole tribes. The adults died, and the children just got sick.
This is the cost of our defense, as if tanks went at us, and we would drop an atomic bomb in response. As a result, they would destroy not only all enemies, but at the same time civilians, would infect the territory with radiation for several decades.
The immune response begins to shoot from all weapons in order to win and hits both its own and others, such breakdowns occur in the body that it becomes unviable. We do not see this. Every year we get sick with the flu, we have already met with staphylococcus, and pneumococcus, so the secondary response is quick and very effective. Sometimes it happens that a person does not even notice that he has suffered an infection.
– And COVID – 19 is a completely new virus, humanity has never met with it, so it opens fire to kill …
– This virus has little in common with SARS and MERS, but in one case about 8 thousand people were infected with these infections, in another – about 6 thousand people. There are so-called seasonal coronaviruses with respiratory syndrome, but they are different – they develop only in the nasopharynx, never descend into the lungs.
– How will the current pandemic end?
– Hard to tell. When the first SARS appeared, they began to make a vaccine, and he took it and disappeared. And nowhere else is it. A similar story happened with MERS, so I will not make predictions.
You probably remember how we said in the spring and summer that the second wave would not happen, and now we are discussing what the third wave will be. Each virus has its own quirks. Over the history of mankind, this has happened more than once, when a microorganism appeared and disappeared. In the Middle Ages, the disease “English prickly heat”, or English sweating fever, appeared. Mowed people down in a few hours from the moment the first symptoms appeared, but disappeared without a trace and we still don’t know what it was …
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