New paper on the “pathogen penalty:” People carrying multiple persistent infections (e.g., HSV-1, CMV, EBV, and H. pylori) show accelerated biological aging, even after accounting for some health and socioeconomic factors.

Study link: academic.oup.com/jid/advance-...

Apparently, a common childhood infection can seed the mutational signature for bladder cancer in the future.

A new neuroimaging study just mapped white-matter damage in ME/CFS using machine learning and causal inference techniques, going beyond typical imaging statistics.

Here are three key points I noted:

A recent review by Proal & VanElzakker (2025) outlines how chronic infections—whether viral, bacterial, fungal, or parasitic—can accelerate nearly every aspect of aging:

New preprint from Belgium: IgG antibodies from neuro-long COVID patients can directly induce pain behaviors when transferred into mice.

A recent Cell Reports report found that phosphorylated tau — usually cast as the villain — actually protects neurons by suppressing HSV-1 proteins via the cGAS-STING-TBK1 innate immune pathway. In infected neurons, p-tau cut viral protein expression and cell death from 64% to 7%.

While we don't have a licensed EBV vaccine yet, several vaccine candidates are currently in development:

- mRNA vaccine by Moderna
- Nanoparticle vaccine by the NIH
- VLP vaccine by EBViously
- Viral vector vaccine by UK and Hong Kong scientists

Figure source: Dai et al. (2025), Viruses

Epstein–Barr virus (EBV) infection is linked to several chronic diseases in a causal manner, e.g.,

- Multiple sclerosis
- Lupus
- Nasopharyngeal cancer
- Stomach cancer
- Lymphoma

This begs the question: Where’s our EBV vaccine?

Figure source: Rzymski and Szuster-Ciesielska (2023), Reumatologia.

Imagine telling future neurologists that multiple sclerosis once affected millions, before we vaccinated against the virus that caused it.

theinfectedneuron.substack.com/p/eradicate-...

Google Scholar notified me that a new review, “Sequelae of viral CNS infections including outcomes, mechanisms, and knowledge gaps,” cited one of my papers.

After going through it, here are the key points:

Certain oral microbes raise pancreatic cancer risk by up to 50%, while others lower it. And the pattern is reproducible across cohorts.

Source: Meng et al. (2025), JAMA Oncology.

New study from South Korea:

The spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 entered the hippocampus, disrupted synaptic genes, and triggered tau and α-synuclein aggregation, resulting in cognitive impairment in rats.

A new Medical Hypotheses paper proposes a causal chain linking ME/CFS and long COVID to mechanical stress on the brainstem: www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...