Fat virus

I just heard about something called "Human adenovirus 36" which is a respiratory virus in chickens that supposedly appears in about 30% of humans and is responsible for a kind of obesity which is different from other kinds of obesity and can't be treated the same way you'd treat "normal" obesity.

They're not entirely sure of what happens in humans but think either:

Wired said:

(1) It increases the uptake of glucose from the blood and converts it to fat; (2) it increases the creation of fat molecules through fatty acid synthase, an enzyme that creates fat; and (3) it enables the creation of more fat cells to hold all the fat by committing stem cells, which can turn into either bone or fat, into fat. So the fat cells that exist are getting bigger, and the body is creating more of them."

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[read more here]

It's not so well studied though. What do you all think of this and what it's implications would be if it's confirmed that 30% of people have a fat virus that's causing them to grow more obese despite their attempts o control it in the normal way?

Great, now I'm scared that I may have this virus, because I've been eating crispy/breaded chicken (for a long time) and grilled chicken (just recently) and I have a pot belly.

I knew Chicken McNuggets were bad from the beginning!




And they thought I was crazy...

Yo! xD I dunno but

if it's confirmed that 30% of people have a fat virus that's causing them to grow more obese despite their attempts o control it in the normal way?

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I didn't found that only 30% of people are infected with virus in article. ( or I just simply skip past that part lol)

So the article and research says that whoever is infected with SMAM-1 virus got this kind of obsesity.
But its also unclear that virus will transfer just by contact between human and chicken.

I believe that there is virus that cause fat and cannot be treated like normal fat but little disagree about its getting transfer from chicken to human like they stated, getting a scratch from Chicken causes his (Randy's) appetite blast and made him fat. C: lol

To what extent does it cause obesity?

I love my chicken...

It turned out that 20 percent of the people we tested were positive for antibodies for SMAM-1. And those 20 percent were heavier, had greater body mass index and lower cholesterol and lower triglycerides compared to the antibody-negative individuals, just as the chickens had."

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Might actually be good to have this.

An obesity causing virus.. in chickens? What? o_O

I don't think I've ever heard of such a thing before and honestly it seems a bit strange. I've lived in an area where people still raise chickens to this day and nobody's really heard of such a thing. Would such a virus even be communicable between chickens and humans? Chickens have much thicker blood and higher body temperature than humans, so there's only a few diseases both can get; usually it's just one or the other. It's possible given avian flu's trans-species leaps but how is this virus even being spread? The article makes it sound like physical contact or perhaps contaminated blood is the cause, but do you have to be flogged by a chicken like this man was to get it, or will eating a contaminated bird suffice, or can even touching an infected animal make you infected too?

To say we need more research on this is a vast, vast understatement.