According to an article by an American biologist, the bodies of animals and humans anticipate the risk of falling ill and trigger the defense mode.
- The company is the third place of contamination by the Covid behind the home (42%) and the extended family (21%).
- Almost one in two professionals (46%) is symptomatic when they infect a colleague in their workplace.
- Employees are not contaminated mainly in open spaces: contaminations take place first in a shared office of two to five people (26.7%), then in the cafeteria (23.6%). Source: ComCor study (2020-2021).
Surrounded by sniffling and sneezing colleagues? You may not be able to request sick leave preemptively, but your body may already be preparing for battle.
This is what the article by biologist Patricia C. Lopes, assistant professor at the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University in California, reveals.
Activation of the immune system
Published in the journal Functional Ecology from the British Ecological Society, the article highlights research showing that there are instances in animals in which the physiology changes before becoming ill, when the risk of disease is high, in order to promote healing. For this, the brain would analyze the information that comes from sick individuals and then cause changes in our physiology. Thus, in humans, the observation of images of sick people could already trigger an activation of the immune system.
animal parasitism
His article, titled “Anticipation of infection: how the risk of parasitism changes animal physiology”, explores this phenomenon in the case of the risk of parasite transmission in animals. Uninfected animals may attempt to prevent parasitism in several ways: behavioral avoidance of parasitized conspecifics, for example, has been documented in several species.
“How this ability to change physiology before becoming ill helps animals cope with or recover from illness is not well known, but could have major impacts on understanding how disease spreads and on how we care for and study sick humans and other sick animals”said Patricia C. Lopes.
