Doctor of the Finnish Olympic team Maarit Valtonen received an interesting contact last year. The doctor of the English men’s national football team wanted to talk to Valtonen about fighting viral diseases.
When Valtonen listened to the English national team doctor in a video meeting, he quickly realized that the English football millionaires have at their disposal a completely different level of resources than, for example, the Finnish cross-country team, whose doctor Valtonen has long served as.
– One of the biggest things is certainly that they travel by private plane and are able to be more separate as a team, and they don’t have to face so many ordinary people. Therefore, the viral pressure from society does not necessarily affect the team as much. There are also resources to test the entire team more regularly if necessary, Valtonen opens.
In prestigious football tournaments, players have to be separated from their families for up to weeks, which makes fighting viral diseases easier, but can test the players’ mental well-being. In many national teams, players have been given the opportunity to meet their loved ones during the tournament.
– It is known that children under the age of five carry a respiratory virus on their mucous membranes half of the time. You have to think about whether you want to take that risk, when at the same time it is very important for the players to meet their families. I understand well if the team together decides to take this risk of infection.
– The team’s performance is structured differently than that of an individual athlete, for whom the impact of a single mild flu on the whole is significant. On the other hand, in a team, infections can spread from one player to another, in which case their importance for the team’s performance can increase, says Valtonen.
Valtonen describes the conversation as interesting and mutually rewarding.
– They work in the prevention of viruses in a very similar way to us. Even if you are traveling on a private plane, I would make sure that there is no virus on the plane. We certainly got confirmation from both sides that we are on the same lines.
Respiratory tract infections are a common problem for athletes
The contact from England is a descriptive example of how word of Valtonen’s expertise has spread among doctors working in elite sports. Valtonen, who is interested in combating respiratory tract infections, has pushed test sticks into the nasopharyns of athletes long before the coronavirus started to rumble around the world in the spring of 2020.
During his career, Valtonen had noticed that sports medicine was of very high quality, for example in terms of traumatology and orthopedics, but the study of respiratory tract infections had received less attention. Valtonen wondered why there is no effort to obtain the highest possible quality researched information on an issue that affects the training and success of every athlete.
– Respiratory tract infections are the most common diseases of athletes, both in big competitions and in everyday life. They have the potential to take up training days, decrease performance, thus cause loss of income and all sorts of other unpleasantness. It is important for us to take them seriously, says Valtonen.
Years ago, Valtonen noticed that athletes getting sick during major competitions repeatedly made headlines in the media. The reality was not much rosier.
– You can easily get the impression from the media that athletes get sick a lot. When I started working with cross-country skiers, the team had a lot of infections. It was quite a frustrating situation, because even though they tried to do something about it, the diseases still kept coming.
Valtonen wanted to do something about it, so in 2017, he started a cooperation project with the Huippu-eruhileinstiutti KIHU, the Paavo Nurmi Center and the infectious diseases and virology experts of the University of Turku. The virus diagnostics project was in full swing in 2018 at the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. Valtonen had a PCR diagnostic device at the games, which was used to find out how many and which viruses were circulating in the Finnish team.
The timing was perfect. When, a few years later, the corona pandemic also caused chaos in the sports world, Valtose already had cooperation underway with Finland’s leading infection experts and the important information collected by then about viral diseases.
– We had gained visibility internationally because we had published our studies. We were trusted and we quickly got involved in international collaborations, for example during the Tokyo and Beijing Olympics. It was a certain luck in the accident that we had started a research project a couple of years earlier, so we already had a head start on these things, Valtonen says.
Tests are done in the competition village in Paris
The Olympics offer favorable conditions for the rapid spread of infectious diseases, as crowds arrive for the mega-event from every corner of the world. Valtonen is happy to share information with team doctors from other countries. When more teams pay attention to measures to prevent the spread of viruses, the conditions in the competition village are safer for everyone.
Virus diagnostic data is still being collected during the Paris Olympics. Valtonen and his teams use a PCR diagnostic device to test every member of the Finnish team who reports symptoms of a respiratory infection during the Games. 45 minutes after sampling, Valtonen has information about which pathogen it is. The most common cause of flu is the rhinovirus, and corona infections have also increased in Finland and around the world in recent weeks.
– It is important that the athlete is not afraid to tell, for example, about a sore throat or that if a virus is found, we would immediately put him in isolation and prevent access to his own performance. On the contrary, our task is to enable the athlete to perform on his own. When we know which pathogen it is, we can better instruct the athlete and manage the risks. When we are able to tell in more detail which virus is causing the symptoms, it is also easier to understand why we do not start antibiotic treatment.
Valtonen and its work groups cooperate internationally with the Olympic teams of the United States, Canada, Great Britain, Australia, Holland and Ireland. These countries also have their own PCR virus diagnostic devices in the competition village.
– After these competitions, we bring the data together and write the results together for publication. We will think together about what can be learned from the results and how that information can be used to protect the athletes’ health and, of course, their performance as well.
Valtonen’s future plans include investigating the connection between various pathogens and performance in more detail. The research is still at the beginning, but Valtonen’s goal is that in the future it would be possible to give athletes instructions for training and returning to competitions based on research data.
– For example, the coronavirus is a virus that tends to reach the heart muscle, while the rhinovirus does not. Our experience is that athletes with rhinovirus, for example, have performed very well on their competition days.