World’s Brightest X-Rays Reveal COVID-19’s Damage to the Body
From National Geographic:
Not a colorful piece of agate, but a lung.
“…the images were awe-inspiring: an organ-wide view like a standard medical CT scan, but “with one million times the information.” It was as if the researchers had spent their lives studying a forest by either flying over it in a jumbo jet or hiking along one trail. Now they were soaring just above the forest canopy, like birds on the wing.”
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“…Ackermann and Jonigk suspected that SARS-CoV-2 was somehow attacking the lungs’ blood vessels. As the disease spread through Germany in March 2020, the duo began conducting autopsies of COVID-19 victims. They soon tested their blood-vessel hypothesis by injecting tissue samples with resin and then dissolving the tissues in acid, which left behind faithful casts of the original vasculature.
Using this technique, Ackermann and Jonigk compared the tissues of people who hadn’t died of COVID-19 with those who had. They immediately saw that among COVID-19 victims, the smallest blood vessels in the lungs were distorted and reshaped. These landmark results, published online in May 2020, showed that COVID-19 wasn’t strictly a respiratory disease but a vascular one—one that could affect organs across the entire body.
“If you go through the human body and you take all the blood vessels in one line, you come up with [60,000] to 70,000 miles, double the distance around the Equator,” says Ackermann, who is also a pathologist at Wuppertal, Germany’s HELIO Clinics. If just one percent of these blood vessels gets attacked by a virus, he adds, the blood’s flow and ability to absorb oxygen can be impaired, with potentially devastating consequences across entire organs.”
Entire article here:
nationalgeographic.com