For instance why does the body display differently if a person contracts the Mumps vs. something like Ebola?
In: Biology
Different cells in the body have different physical and chemical properties, so different infections affect them differently. (And of course viruses and bacteria also have different properties, so it’s about how they match up with your cells.) Think of it as your house: ants, wasps, mice, rats, and raccoons can all infest it, but they’ll go to different places to hide and feed and they’ll do different damage when they’re there.
Because different pathogens cause different immune responses. Diseases have evolved with us, adapting to us as we have adapted to them. Something that is infecting us doesn’t want to kill us, because that means it will die, and it doesn’t want us to kill them. We have multiple different ways to fight off infections. Think of it like a home security system, where we have an alarm, guard dogs, motion sensors, floodlights, armed guards, the police on speed dial, all of it. Some disease tries to steal from us, and they’re kind of good at breaking in, so they only set off the alarm and the floodlights. But then other pathogens come in and kick open the door and yell “THIS IS A ROBBERY!” and every home security thing we have goes off and it’s intense and chaotic and unpleasant.
I think I kind of went in and out of that analogy, but hopefully you get the idea.
You are looking at the issue the wrong way.
The disease impacts the body in a certain way causing symptoms based on points of failure.
The body isn’t getting swollen neck area trying to tell us we have mumps….the mumps virus is damaging In lymph nodes which then react…and we see the reaction
To think of this another way (intentionally pretty different from the others, which I do not disagree with) there are dozens of ways you should be dying every day (acidosis, asphyxiation, hyperglycemia, hypoglycemia, fungal infection, heart arrhythmia, ammonia poisoning, urea poisoning, the list goes on) and every day your organs work biochemical magic to stave off all those deaths, and all those things kill you in different ways.
Life-threatening diseases cause one or more of your organs to malfunction and that means one of the above deaths starts to close its bony fingers around you. Just like getting shot and strangled feel different to you, asphyxiation and ammonia poisoning and the others also feel different, i.e. present different symptoms.
Different diseases effect different parts of the body. That’s pretty much it. COVID goes after the respiratory system, gonorrhea the genitals, and tapeworms go for the intestines. Since they go after different parts on the body their symptoms of disease are different.
Latest Answers