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 ...
i don’ t believe this. i’ve been told by so many women across 30+ years they are stronger than men physically because they have the babies.
Racist!
Are they, or are men so conditioned to walk off anything less than decapitation that they just don’t notice?
Duh
They have wet warm moist vaginas ....receptacles for bad crap to fester
Poor gals.....their greatest treasure is their most vulnerable
God love em
Its why hetero wise they got the ninja so much easier than straight men
Maybe it's because women take medicine for things like colds and flu more readily than men, and in doing so, they bring on the very thing they think they are preventing.
A weak defense system and a weak mind make one sick, regardless of sex.
The infection affects their memory. They remember f
even the smallest mistake a husband made no matter how many decades ago it happened.
Then, too, I am reminded that statistically, women outlive men...
Maybe it's because their immune system has been challenged and as a result strengthened during the lifelong course of battling- and winning- said infectious afflictions, that they become stronger and better poised to endure later-stage illnesses. Well, that and on the whole they tend to take fewer risks and care better for their health than their worse half.
Give me a grant and I'll come up with and publish the truth of the matter. But my findings, I just have a hunch, will require lots of investments. Send. Check. Now.
Most women are a-holes ... and that’s being nice . They use and abuse men and then wonder why they can’t get a good one. Quite frankly most .... remember I said most don’t deserve a good man. I have no sympathy for most. They want the rogue ... the bad guy ... and won’t give the time of day to a nice guy. Well you get what you ask for Luckily I have found a good one ... for the most part. I feel sorry for young guys now as most young women are the kind that will hurt a man with no consideration what so ever of how they hurt them
Yup. I knew there would be posts labeling women negatively. More and more I encounter women-hating FReepers. It’s too bad really - they are half the planet and then factor in liberals - you’re not left with many people you don’t automatically despise. Oh well, some people just can’t help themselves for hating half of humanity based on gender alone I guess....
I rarely ‘catch’ anything that’s going around.
Hubby is a plague dog.
:)
HEY!!!
What kind of women are you hanging around with, WD?
LOL
Sal “Clean Machine” Amander
You really need to read the lyrics to “Feed My Frankenstein”.
;]
We know there are a host of blood-transmitted diseases out there and one gender that has open bleeding on a regular basis. I think it would be only natural one gender would be more prone to such infections. But I am not convinced you can then make the leap that one gender is more or less prone to infections overall because there are airborne illnesses and others to balance this and woman tend to be more insular and stay indoors more than men which would somewhat limit their risks to exposure. Plus women spend more of their time around soaps and disinfectants than men.
To me, it all balances out.
All cause mortality doesn't tell you very much. Males are much more likely to engage in all sorts of physically risky behaviors including jobs.
Antigenic sugars identified for Chagas disease
Asymmetrical glycans synthesized in lab
FReepmail me if you want on or off my combined microbiology/immunology ping list.
it is because of their internal plumbing. Sleek, slim and more aerodynamic but being hidden does have its own specialized problems. Prone to temporary monthly break downs that cause irritability and unproductivity of the unit usually self corrects in a few days.
All in all though the operational aspects are very pleassant and somtimes requires a jump start.
Next time a woman tells you about how bearing a child is the most painful thing ever, tell her somthing along the lines of:
You know, I’ve never heard a man say “Boy, it’s been a couple of years since I got kicked in the knackers. I think I’ll go out and get sacked again.”
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