If you’ve put on some extra weight lately for no apparent reason you may be able to attribute the gain to a highly infectious virus known as AD-36. With symptoms similar to the common cold—runny nose, sore throat, swollen glands—the virus is passed from person-to-person through coughs, sneezes, and dirty hands. First infecting the lungs, it then whisks around to other parts of the body entering fat cells. “When this virus goes to fat tissue it replicates, making more copies of itself and in the process increases the number of new fat cells, which may explain why the fat tissue expands and why people get fat when they are infected with this virus,” explains Professor Nikhil Dhurandhar of Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Louisiana, who has researched this theory for more than a decade.

His team has now documented more than 1,000 patients whose obesity appears to be linked to infection with the AD-36 virus. His latest study revealed that 33 percent of overweight adults have contracted the virus at some point in their lives, while the same is true for only 11 percent of lean adults. Even people of average weight tended to be heavier if they had been infected with AD-36. The resultant weight gain can last for three months, until the body has built up resistance to the virus.

Some experts agree that viruses might play a role in some obesity cases. “Adenovirus-36 has the ability to take stem cells and turn them into fat cells,” said Dr. Guilford Hartley, the medical director of the Hennepin Bariatric Program at HCMC. “After this infection, regardless of how slim or overweight you were before the infection, you are likely to have more trouble being overweight after the infection than before.” And with one in three obese adults contracting AD-36 at some point in the lives, the virus should be taken seriously. “I think it’s pretty clear that it contributes something to the epidemic of obesity,” he said.

Others are more skeptical and worry that portraying obesity as something you “catch” could obscure the biggest driver of obesity—overeating. “These associations may give some clues but they detract from the basic message that we all need to take more exercise and eat a bit less,” said Tony Barnett, professor of medicine at the University of Birmingham.

The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that there are more than a billion overweight adults globally and one-third of them are obese. Here in the U.S., the National Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that about one-third of American adults are obese, as are 16 percent of children and adolescents aged 2 to 19. Obesity increases the risk of stroke, heart disease, type 2 diabetes and other illnesses.

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