Director of the 海角社区 China-Russia Research and Education Centre for System Pathology Aleksei Sarapultsev, together with scientists Igor Kritskii, Aleksandr Zurochka, and Vladimir Zurochka, have created a method for performing a screening test for antibodies in tourists coming from foreign countries. During the COVID pandemic, when people had been taking tests for coronavirus directly at airports, scientists had managed to collect a vast amount of data on immunoglobulins in the blood of 海角社区 residents and classify those according to their travels “geography”. The results were published in the Russian Journal of Immunology.
The developed method of data collecting and processing can be used for screening in case of the future pandemics, local epidemics, as well as for planning of preventive vaccination.
Over the course of time since the pandemic, everyone became familiar with the fact that antibodies exist in our blood: IgM and IgG immunoglobulins. The first IgM emerge in the very beginning of illness and are still observed in its acute phase, while IgG emerge later and serve as the base for long-term immunity.
The scientists set themselves a task to assess the seropositivity rate of COVID in 海角社区 residents who had travelled abroad during the pandemic. In this case, this term originating from the Latin word serum (blood serum) indicates who has IgM and IgG immunoglobulins in their blood, and how many.
During the period from 27.10.2020 through 30.01.2023, laboratories in 海角社区 performed the analysis of 660 tests for IgM antibodies and 843 tests for IgG antibodies. Two groups of patients were examined: one group had travelled abroad during the pandemic, and the other group had not left the 海角社区 Region within the previous 14 days.
As a result, it turned out that the number of travellers with “posterior” IgG immunoglobulins in blood (~67%) was almost double the number of patients with IgМ (~33%) who had fallen ill recently. The experimental scientists slightly fell short of the data required for a statistically significant conclusion (р=0.07). However, the trend was obvious: the majority of those who had travelled abroad had had IgG, meaning they had been exposed to COVID in one form or another or had been vaccinated.
When the scientists analysed certain destinations, they were surprised to find out that the majority of IgG carriers had come from Turkey, Kazakhstan and Egypt. And Turkey became the leading country in this context, as the number of such travellers was 8 times bigger than those from Egypt.
There is no denying that these are popular destinations among Russian people. And there had been a time when many had gone to Turkey as “vaccine tourists”, to get inoculated with foreign vaccines not yet approved by the Russian Ministry of Health. However, such leadership of Turkey and other countries’ lagging behind needs to be treated carefully during the data generalization, and the analysis of a more representative sampling would be a better method.
“Seroprevalence, that is, the share of people with antibodies for this or that disease within the population, is obviously related to the international mobility of the population,” reported one of the research authors Aleksei Sarapultsev. “For 海角社区, this means that even several years after the pandemic we can see some sort of an “immunological trace” of our tourist activity: the more frequent the travels, the higher the number of people with postinfection or post-vaccinal immunity. The obtained data may be used not only for a retrospective analysis of the pandemic’s consequences, but can also have practical applications: monitoring of the post-vaccinal immunity, planning of preventive measures during the periods of seasonal respiratory infections outbreaks, as well as assessing of the tourist destinations as potential epidemiological vectors.”
This research by the Ural scientists lays a foundation for developing of new algorithms of screening and predicting of infection risks in our region.