e strategy of all is toenlist ty. Infectious organisms love mosquitoes because to’s sting delivers tly to a bloodstream raigo im’s defense mec is, and a ed but often rapacious maladies—begin o bite. It is afortunate fluke for us t , isn’t among t least not yet. Any o sucks up on its travels is dissolved by to’s oabolism. tates its rouble.
It is a mistake, o consider tter too carefully from tion of logicbecause microorganisms clearly are not calculating entities. t care oyou any more t distress you cause . time your continuing o a pat kills you too e you before t t sometimes ory,Jared Diamond notes, is full of diseases t “once caused terrifying epidemics and teriously as tes t but mercifully transientEnglising sickness, ens of t, before burning itself out. too muc a good tiousorganism.
A great deal of sickness arises not because of o you but rying to do to ts quest to rid tem sometimes destroys cells or damages critical tissues, so often t your oting sick is a sensible response to infection. Sick people retire to t to ty. Resting also frees more of toattend to tion.
Because t tential to you, your body s of different varieties of defensive en million types in all, eaco identify and destroy a particular sort of invader. It to maintain ten million separate standing armies, so eacy of s on active duty. ious agent—igen—invades,relevant scouts identify ttacker and put out a call for reinforcements of t type.
uring to feel c ofrecovery begins o action.
e cells are merciless and patoavoid extinction, attackers al strategies. Eitrike quicklyand move on to a neious illnesses like flu, or t te cells fail to spot t iced in to action.
One of ts of infection is t microbes t normally do no allsometimes get into ts of the words of Dr.
Bryan Marsious diseases specialist at Dartmoutcer inLebanon, Nes are normally benign in t get into ots of tream, for instance—and cause terrible havoc.”
t, most out-of-control bacterial diso