tern Profile picture
Oct 25, 2025 46 tweets 9 min read Read on X
How's that lymph system doing.
Blastic NK-cell lymphoma, England. Image
Blastic NK-cell lymphoma means something has gone *really wrong* in immune regulation.
It’s a malignancy of the cells that are *supposed to destroy infected cells*.
NK cells - "natural killer” cells - are the immune system's first-strike unit.
They're the ones that find and kill virus-infected cells before antibodies even show up.
If you start seeing more NK-cell cancers, something’s driving chronic activation and mutation inside that system.

Something up here. Image
Now, think about Covid infection:
Every infection triggers a massive NK-cell surge.
Those cells get overstimulated, exhausted, and sometimes permanently altered.
Post-COVID studies show lingering activation markers, basically, NK cells stuck in attack mode for months.
That means they keep dividing...
Keep generating oxidative stress...
Keep collecting DNA damage in a high-inflammation environment...
And all that while the repair pathways (like p53) are being suppressed (by cytokines like IL-6 and TNF-alpha).
At the same time, the immune brakes are off.
T cells are depleted and exhausted.
Interferon signalling is blunted.
So when an abnormal clone of NK cells appears, the immune system doesn't clear it. *It lets it grow*.
Add to that the reactivation of latent viruses (EBV, CMV, HHV-6) all known to cause NK/T-cell malignancies...
COVID reawakens them, repeatedly.
Each reactivation wave means another round of inflammation and oxidative stress and immune dysregulation.
The problems aren't just in adults... there's stuff going on in kids too. Image
So you end up with this:
A system of immune cells pushed to divide too often,
mutating in an inflamed environment,
with the tumour-suppressor side of immunity switched off.
And from that, you get what we’re seeing here. A surge in blastic NK-cell lymphoma.
I wonder what else is going on in that lymph system...

Oh boy.
😮 Image
Oh boy. Image
Oh boy oh boy Image
Erm.
👀 Image
👀 Image
👀 Image
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And then strange things going on with other aspects of the immune system... Image
And this running away... Image
And then damage to all that lets this kind of damage loose... Image
And that this... Image
Hmm.
Those gut infections are really exploiting something these last four years, aren't they... Image
Oh my word. Image
👀 Image
This is all just nuts. Image
This damage is in adults, kids, infants, everywhere. Image
It's in these kind of diseases where the end result is scarring of internal organs after immune hyperactivation:

This is in KIDS AGED 0 to 9. Image
You might expect this to pop up as a result of immune dysregulation in the gut... Image
Oh boy. Image
What the what. Image
What does inflammation in the brain cause... Image
More tomorrow... this list is long.
Maybe a few more... Image
👀 Image
👀 Image
This is in *kids*
👀 Image
This is in *young adults* 👀 Image
flip. Image
Nothing to see here, just a doubling of TUBERCULOSIS OF BONE. Image
Oh dear. Image
Hmm.
I didn't expect so many people to read this thread, or I would have included a bit like this, explaining that not every condition is rising like that...
@PetersCynthia There's 9,000 charts in the database, it's hard to even view them all, let alone post them!

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More from @1goodtern

May 19
If covid infections make you *more vulnerable* to almost every other pathogenic infection by multiple mechanisms, then you'd expect increases in almost every other pathogenic infection.

And that's what we see.

Ten completely unsurprising news stories:
1
Dengue virus
"Cases of the mosquito-borne viral illness have touched a record high in the Americas this year."
reuters.com/world/us/us-cd…
2
Measles virus
"Measles cases in the European region doubled in 2024."
reuters.com/business/healt…
Read 70 tweets
May 18
I was absolutely appalled to hear Bonnie Henry say "Personal Protective Equipment, the word we all dread".

You may have had an instant visceral reaction to that yourself, but here are the eleven things wrong with what she said:
It's like the head of NASA talking about the dread everyone has of space suits.
The space suit is something you *need* in space to be able to do the thing you want to do, and then to be able to do it again.

To hear the head honcho saying they dread it turns every single concept on its head.
Read 43 tweets
May 14
I don't think I have ever been so appalled about public health policy, information, and communication than by what I'm hearing about hanta at the moment.

It's like people's brains are just switched off.
Like they can't think straight.
It's unbelievable.
I genuinely think we should *not* be at high risk of a universal spread of hantavirus, but we don't need universal spread for it to have been an absolute failure.
If there are a couple more generations of spread, then it risks becoming a nightmare.

Is that going to happen? I don't know.
Neither do you.
The WHO doesn't know.
No one does.
Read 27 tweets
May 9
Since we've decided to do this all again:
🔟
Ten things that can reduce the risk of catching an airborne pathogen:
1 An ffp2+/n95+ mask (respirator) worn properly
2 Ventilation
Read 31 tweets
May 9
People are just not going to be able to get their heads round the slow incubation period of hantavirus.

On reflection, thousands of people have probably already been exposed, and those thousands could expose tens, even hundreds, of thousands more.
The sheer time scale is almost impossible to grasp when placed in the context of people engaged in the kind of fast international travel involved with a cruise ship.
You might think that's ridiculous because a cruise ship is slow and contained, but it's not the cruise ship so much as the interwoven pattern of flights people take to *get to and from* the cruise ship.
Read 23 tweets
May 8
I'm just going to say it again once, as simply as I can, for everyone who is slow to understand this:

Covid infection damages the vascular endothelium, the delicate lining inside your blood vessels.

Hantavirus *targets* the vascular endothelium.
If you've had the first one, you're more likely to be susceptible to, and damaged by, the second.
I don't know how to explain it more simply.
Read 9 tweets

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