India’s poor hygiene standard turned beneficial to fight Covid-19: Study

With India having one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 case and death rates, two scientific studies have come out with an interesting proposition – India’s poor health and hygiene standards may be having a beneficial impact for lakhs of people as their immune system got naturally “trained” to fight the virus.

Carried out by two separate groups, the studies open up a new window to look at the epidemic in the Indian context even though the researchers made it clear that they didn’t advocate poor health and hygiene standards as a natural corollary of the research findings.

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In one of the studies, scientists from the National Centre for Cell Sciences, Pune, and Chennai Mathematical Institute studied - across 106 countries - 25 to 30 parameters including demography, the prevalence of communicable and non-communicable diseases, BCG vaccination, sanitation, and Covid-19 deaths per million.

"Per million population (deaths) number appears to be high in countries that are richer and having high GDP and (in) countries with low GDP, less number of people are dying, which is very paradoxical," said Shekhar Mande, a former NCCS director who is a co-author of the paper.

The percentage of people above the age of 65, who are at greater risk of Covid-19 infection, is significantly higher in high-GDP countries. Such countries also have a higher prevalence of auto-immune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, psoriasis, rheumatoid arthritis, and asthma.

“There are interesting correlations, not causation, in this ‘yet to be peer-reviewed’ work. Importantly, we are not advocating a move towards weaker hygiene practices by any means,” said Mande, the director-general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

Rather, he said, the findings could lead to the exploration of "immune training with possibilities of microbiome (a big pool of bacteria) therapies" - a suggestion flagged by another research group in an independent study.

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Analysing data from 122 countries, medical researchers at Dr Rajendra Pradsad Government Medical College at Kangra have proposed that high microbial exposure can possibly induce a protective effect against Covid-19 through a chain of complex immune processes inside the body since countries with less mortality also tend to have lack of sanitation and high incidence of attendant diseases.

Out of the 122 countries they studied, 80 were high-income countries while 42 were low-income ones.

“There may be a need to look at the dynamics of Covid-19 pandemic using an immune perspective. The approach can potentially inform better policies including interventions,” the Himachal Pradesh researchers concluded.