• Question: how do healthy people get ill?

    Asked by chloewildman to Chris, Eva, Michael, Paddy, Philip on 21 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Eva Bachmair

      Eva Bachmair answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Hi Cloe, that depends on the disease we are talking about. Most of the time because the immune system is not up to date or running to its best e.g. your immune cells don’t know the bug / virus yet or if you don’t eat healthy or have to little sleep then your immune system is suppressed and then also the known bugs have a chance to strike.

    • Photo: Michael Wharmby

      Michael Wharmby answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      Nice answer Eva! So it’s basically if your body doesn’t recognise the bacteria/germs or if the immune system is not up to it’s best to fight them off. Is that the same with viruses – I’ve never been quite sure on how they work differently to bacteria?

    • Photo: Paddy Brock

      Paddy Brock answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      yep, i agree with they guys, the regulation of the immune system is very important and anything that supresses it like stress or diet could lead to healthy people becoming ill. this happens even in sea lions: when they come into contact with pollutants (like toxic waste), their immune systems become supressed (which means they don’t work so well) and get diseases.

    • Photo: Chris Jordan

      Chris Jordan answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      The “life science” people have answered this for me 🙂

      There is also of course cancer, which is when some of the cells in your body go wild. I don’t know if anyone knows exactly why this happens – perhaps its cell mutations.

      Perhaps one of the other scis can help.

    • Photo: Philip Denniff

      Philip Denniff answered on 21 Jun 2011:

      I agree with the answers given by the other scientists, but I think they are taking a very narrow view of illness. I would expand the definition to include many other classes, to include mental illness (eg dementia), metabolic disorders (diabetes), parasitic disease (malaria), cancers, heart disease and many more.

      Each disease has its own cause, dementia – don’t know, diabetes type I break down of insulin production, malaria bit by infected mosquito, cancer – cell growth out of control. Heart disease heart muscle deprived of oxygen and blood.

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