Click on the photo below to read about a paper, by Ed LeGrand and Joe Alcock, published in the Quarterly Review of Biology (March issue), entitled “Immune Brinksmanship.”  Immune Brinksmanship is an evolutionary hypothesis for why the immune system causes harm to the human body during the acute phase response. The analogy is one of trade sanctions: the body induces harm to both self and pathogen, gambling that the body can endure harm more than the pathogen. Science Daily has a great summary of the paper:

Joe Alcock MD

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Joe Alcock

Emergency Physician, Educator, Researcher, interested in the microbiome, evolution, and medicine