Can your body prepare to get sick?

Patricia C Lopes

This is a plain language summary of a Functional Ecology perspective article that can be found here.

Imagine the following scenario: you are at work, and the two people working on either side of your desk keep sneezing and blowing their noses. You have the strong feeling that you will be next in line to be sick, but you can’t ask for sick leave pre-emptively, to avoid getting sick. Sickness seems unavoidable and there’s nothing to do – or is there? Research shows that we (animals in general) can perceive sickness in others. Upon perception of sick individuals, a good strategy is to move away, to avoid them. However, for various reasons (like the example above, or caring for babies, or depending on being in a group for survival), this is not always possible.

A high infection risk scenario (credit: Gorodenkoff/Shutterstock.com)

In this paper, I compiled and examined examples of a different way to deal with unavoidable sickness scenarios: to prepare the body for battle. Our physiology, particularly the immune system (the system that protects the body from invaders), is tightly regulated. Once we become sick, our physiology can drastically change to support recovery from the disease. While still poorly understood, emerging research is now showing that there are scenarios in which our physiology can change prior to becoming sick, when disease risk is high. How this ability to change physiology before getting sick helps animals cope with, or recover from, disease is not well known, but could have major impacts on how diseases spread, and on how we care for and study sick humans and other sick animals.