Back at work, you find yourself face to face with a colleague who coughs, blows his nose, sneezes. As the Covid-19 pandemic is still on everyone’s mind, there is reason to question or even worry: are you going to get sick too? Is your body ready to cope?
If it is difficult to predict whether or not we will be sick when we encounter a microbe, we can however say that our body is already preparing for combat.
This is at least what Dr. Patricia C. Lopes, researcher and professor of biology at the Schmid College of Science and Technology at Chapman University (California, United States), declared to the scientific site Eurekalert (Source 1 ).
The researcher, who studies the physiological responses to the risk of parasitism, thus declares that “our physiology, especially the immune system – the system that protects the body from invaders – is tightly regulated”. “As soon as we get sick, our physiology can drastically change to support recovery from the disease.”, she adds.
An immune system on the alert
In a scientific article published on August 4 in the journal Functional Ecologythe specialist highlights several researches showing that there are several scenarios where our physiology changes just before an infection, when the risk of falling ill is high.
“In other words”,…
