December 15, 2016.
Viruses would adapt to the sex of the person they infect, in a strategic propagation reflex. A British study has just revealed this strange phenomenon.
Viruses detect sex before attacking
Do viruses have a thing for women? This is what suggests a recent study published in the journal Nature Communication. By “survival instinct” or by strategy, viruses would have the ability to determine the sex of the person they infect, in order to react in a more or less virulent way.
To reach this conclusion, researchers Francisco Úbeda and Vincent Jansen, researchers at the School of Biological Sciences at Royal Holloway University in London (United Kingdom), looked at one type of virus in particular: HTLV -1 (human T-1 lymphotropic virus). The latter, a widespread fear in France, is more so in Japan, the Caribbean, Latin America and tropical Africa.. It can cause leukemia in those who are infected.
Japanese people are up to 3.5 times more likely to die from leukemia
However, researchers have noticed that in Japan and the Caribbean, the virus infected men and women differently. In the Caribbean, both sexes appear to respond to infection in the same way and there are no notable differences to report. But in Japan, men are more likely to have leukemia than women. As if the virus was more virulent in them than in women.
The researchers then put forward a hypothesis: that of the attack strategy. In Japan, women breastfeed their children and, for the most part, breastfeed for quite a long time, unlike the Caribbean, where this practice is less widespread. If the HTLV-1 virus appears less violent in Japanese women, it would only be to go unnoticed and spread faster. As a result, in Japan, men are 2 to 3.5 times more likely to die from leukemia caused by this virus than women.
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