Wash Your Hands, Otherwise You'll Get Fat!

"If you want to lose weight, eat less and don't forget to wash your hands!", this is how the dietician's advice will sound from now on and this is because new evidence showing that obesity could be caused by adenoviruses have surfaced.

The study led by Leah D. Whigham of the University of Wisconsin found that the human adenovirus Ad-37 causes obesity in chickens. This finding builds on studies that two related viruses, Ad-36 and Ad-5, also cause obesity in animals.

Moreover, Ad-36 has been associated with human obesity, leading researchers to suspect that Ad-37 also may be implicated in human obesity. Currently, only a handful of people showed evidence of infection with Ad-37, which is not enough to draw a conclusion.

Ad-37, Ad-36 and Ad-5 are part of a family of approximately 50 viruses known as human adenoviruses.

"If Ad-36 is responsible for a significant portion of human obesity, the logical therapeutic intervention would be to develop a vaccine to prevent future infections," Frank Greenway, professor in the Department of Clinical Trials, Pennington Biomedical Research Center, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, wrote.

"If a vaccine were to be developed, one would want to ensure that all the serotypes of human adenoviruses responsible for human obesity were covered in the vaccine," he added

The theory that viruses can cause obesity has been long debated among scientists, but there is an increasing amount of evidence that points out to other factors than poor diet or lack of exercise in the obesity epidemic.

"The prevalence of obesity has doubled in adults in the United States in the last 30 years and has tripled in children. With the exception of infectious diseases, no other chronic disease in history has spread so rapidly, and the etiological factors producing this epidemic have not been clearly identified," Leah D. Whigham said.