Posted on 07/26/2013 11:17:15 PM PDT by neverdem
Public-health officials discount role of sex in people's response to flu and other infections.
Sabra Klein came to the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Reproduction this week armed with a message that might seem obvious to scientists who obsess over sex: men and women are different. But it is a fact often overlooked by health researchers, says Klein, an immunologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
Her research on influenza viruses in mice, presented at the meeting in Montreal, Canada, helps explain why women are more susceptible to death and disease from infectious pathogens — and the reason is intimately linked with reproduction. “She’s one of the people that really gets the bigger picture as far as why do we see these patterns,” says Marlene Zuk, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, in St. Paul.
Women generally suffer more severe flu symptoms than men, for example, despite the fact that they tend to have fewer viruses during an infection. To Klein, this suggests that women quickly mount a substantial immune-system attack to clear infections — and suffer the consequences of the inflammatory responses that flood their systems. “This is where females run into trouble,” Klein says.
She and her collaborators have found this disparity in mice infected with flu viruses1. But when the researchers castrated the males and removed the ovaries from the females, the difference disappeared as the males became more sensitive to infection.
But testes are not simply protective. Klein found that giving the neutered females the female sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone actually protected them from disease.
For females, infections appear to throw these cycling sex hormones out of whack. They elongate the oestrus cycle in non-neutered female mice — stretching the part...
(Excerpt) Read more at nature.com ...
Not to bring actual scientific speculation into this thread or anything, but I wonder if this is connected to the auto-immune diseases that are more common in women than men, like Rheumatoid Arthritis and Lupus....
I thought it was because they have two X chromosomes, and men only have one. There being hardly anything on a Y.
Maybe it has something to do with that big ol’ hatchet wound
The author chases his tail attempting, to maintain feminist orthodoxy. Women get sicker merely because they’re better at it than men, you see. Castrate a male and he’s as “sensitive” as a female, but testes aren’t protective.
This rampant political science would be hilarious, if it hadn’t seized the reins of government.
Neverdem, I just wanted to thank for posting this thread. Haven’t laughed so hard in weeks. There is absolutely NOTHING I can contribute as a woman. Hilarious!
Same with Mrs. RWA. She rarely misses work but the younger women burn off all their sick days. Some of that 'sick' is shopping trips and 4-day weekend trips but they do seem to get truly sick more often than she does.
Seriously it’s probably more your personal genetics than anything else.
Dunno. I take a ton of supplements and herbs and avoid the doctor, who is more interested in asking about guns and supposedly THE numbers I need to hit, and pushing meds he gets kickbacks on. I’ll go in if I think I have a serious problem (and have) or if I need an ER, but otherwise no way.
Because a knackered up sack isn’t nearly as cute as a widdle baby...and they never hug you and say ‘I love you mama!’
Then again your knackered up sack may be different?
I learn something every day on FR.
She took everything did she? Wow, “ that’s the way it goes, first your money and then your clothes”.
Too bad so sad!
Boo Boo Kitty Kitty flu
It’ll make you max your credit cards
Lol
You, me and tuco bad!
I dunno....my parents caught every bug that came within a mile of them, despite getting “flu shots” [or because of them, perhaps] and so does my sister and her kids.
The only difference I can think of was that I grew up ‘wallowing’ with the farm animals and getting good and dirty playing outside.
That might have boosted my immune system.
To this day I don’t indulge in the “hand scrubbing/sanitizer” frenzy that’s so popular.
I do have a bottle of hand sanitizer here but that’s only used if one of my snakes is sick since I -have- to avoid cross contamination to my other snakes.
All that didn't keep me from having asthma and allergies.
Curious, but Mrs. Joe doesn’t drink alcohol at all (makes her horribly sick). Is there a similarity there, too?
Mrs. RWA rarely drinks alcohol, but occasionally has a glass of wine before bed. It doesn’t bother her, but one drink is about her limit.
First your heart then everything else
I see two possibilities that aren’t discussed in the article.
1. Boys tend to spend more time out playing rough and getting dirty, so they are exposed to more at a younger age and give their immune systems a better workout.
2. Men tend to partake in more outdoor activities, and thus have better vitamin D stores to boost their immune system.
It might be interesting if they ignored gender and compared people with outside activities vs those that spend most of their time indoors.
You picked the wrong girl. I am sorry.
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