let's talk about the COVID-19 cytokine storm what is a cytokine storm well it's
a situation that occurs in severe cases in critical cases where you have a very
high fever the spleen can be enlarged you have this serious out-of-control
inflammatory State not just in the lungs but spreads throughout the body you can
have a decrease or an increase in the white blood cells low blood pressure but
the point is that if you have this your risk of dying goes way up
another name for cytokine storm is macrophage activation syndrome okay
macrophage is a white blood cell I'll talk about it in a second they also
observed that cytokine storms usually occur when someone's immune system is
weak or they may have a genetic weakness towards this condition or they're
grossly overweight which increases the risk for this condition so the question
is what is a cytokine a cytokine is a communication messenger okay it's
something that signals the cell to do certain things so it's like a hormone
like message and it's a protein so when the virus invades the cell your cells
will then send out these messages okay to let your immune system know there is
a problem and we need help this is why when this protein gets
signaled you have this huge inflammatory reaction and if it happens in your lungs
there'll be destruction in the lungs and the problem is if it gets out of control
your lungs fill up with fluid you get damaged and then you basically drown and
you're in fluid it can also destroy other cells as well so the cytokine
basically tells your soldiers to fight okay
so let's first talk about the macrophage this cell means macro means big or large
and phage means to eat so they're this large immune cell that can eat certain
things and it eats microbes it eats viruses it'll eat bacteria so it'll
engulf them and they'll bind it to a certain vesicle or
a certain little sac filled with acid and poisons so it literally dissolves
them and kills them through toxic chemicals these chemicals leach out into
the macrophage it'll kill itself so it's highly protected now the b-cell is a
part of the immune system that helps you develop antibodies so in that way if
you're exposed to the virus later on you have a memory of it and you have
protection because now your army is ready for them and prepared to fight off
the virus or the bacteria and then you have the mast cell which is involved
with histamine reactions you've probably heard of an antihistamine for sinus
congestion in mucus but these guys are heavily involved in cytokines and
inflammation and then you have this thing called the cytotoxic T cell cell
toxic T cell and you have natural killer cells and you also have this thing
called interferon so interferon actually releases cytokines but this is
not a cell it's just the body chemical that's produced by your body to protect
it but this is heavily involved in attacking viruses now this one the
cytotoxic T cell and the natural killer cell have a weapon to kill off the cell
that's infected with the virus okay and that weapon is perforin okay now what
they found with the cytokine storms is that the perforin is defective also if
you have a genetic defect or a problem with making this and you're deficient
you may have a tendency to have a cytokine storm in your body as well so
it could be a genetic thing or it could just be that your immune system is weak
and you're deficient in this weaponry so if you can imagine having an army
that you take away their weapons and you have them try to fight they're going to
lose every single time but this protein perforin literally punches holes in the
infected cell and injects a poison into the cell to
kill it now the problem is when you have your army fighting this infection
without all the weaponry so you can't end up killing the cell so it creates
this feedback loop that never turns off because we never are able to complete
the action of killing the cell so it keeps going on and on and on now there's
also parts of your immune system that are supposed to suppress this
overreaction that's not working as well so you get the situation we have this
out-of-control storm of inflammatory reactions that end up destroying your
own body so that's really the basic mechanism behind this but the
interesting thing is this zinc enhances perforin now this is just another
reason to beef up on zinc no pun intended it just so happens that beef has a
lot of zinc in it and so does shellfish and especially oysters zinc has over 200
enzymes and a lot of these enzymes are involved in various ways of improving
the immune system so you'd want to lose weight get healthy we talk about that
in our videos a lot and lastly which is not really talked about now especially
in the news is you want to strengthen your immune system to understand more
about that I created a video on that I put it right here check it out