ELi5: how do people discover new diseases and know it’s not just the common cold?
In: Biology
Besides some disease having distinctly un-cold like symptoms- you wouldn’t confuse leprosy with the common cold, for example- we can look at the disease itself. Viruses look different from bacteria which look different from parasites.
Further, we can look at the genetic code of the diseases for areas that tend to stick around when things mutate- conserved regions- which help us see a diseases ancestry.
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