Surrounded by Sick Coworkers? Your Body is Preparing for Battle
hubie writes:
Chapman University biologist says physiology shifts gears from anticipating sickness to defense mode:
Surrounded by coworkers who are sniffling and sneezing?
You may not be able to ask for sick leave preemptively, but your body is already preparing for battle, says Patricia C. Lopes, assistant professor of biological sciences at Chapman University's Schmid College of Science and Technology.
[...] Lopes' article in the British Ecological Society journal Functional Ecology "Anticipating infection: How parasitism risk changes animal physiology" highlights research showing that there are scenarios in which our physiology changes prior to becoming sick, when disease risk is high.
"In other words," Lopes, explains, "our brains can obtain information from diseased people and then elicit changes to our physiology. For example, observing images of sick people can already trigger activation of the immune system."
From a big picture perspective, this means that parasites affect our lives much more than previously considered, because they are already affecting our physiology even before they invade us, she says.
Journal Reference:
Patricia C. Lopes, Anticipating infection: How parasitism risk changes animal physiology [open], Functional Ecology, 2022. DOI: 10.1111/1365-2435.14155
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