Ladies, when your man says he's too sick to take out the trash, he may not be lazy! He might actually have an evolutionary disadvantage.
Hey guys and dolls, Trace here for DNews.
It's a pretty common trope that a cold or the flu doesn't really affect women as much as it does men. There's even kind of a pejorative name for it, " the man flu" , which implies that men are just being babies.
Now, of course this is a crazy exaggeration… being sick sucks for everyone. . . except… studies have shown this difference in experience may have a hint of truth to it.
Empirically, men tend to die more often than women when they catch tuberculosis, and they're five times as likely to get cancer when infected with HPV. There are a whole mess of viruses that seem to be much faster and deadlier in men than they are in women, or they cause worse outcomes.
Well, a paper, that came out in December of 2016 in the journal Nature Communications studied a phenomenon where a certain virus called HTLV-1 caused leukemia to develop and eventually killed approximately twice as many Japanese men as it did Japanese women, but it affected both sexes equally when studied in the Caribbean.
Researchers posited that the biggest explanatory difference was that in Japan, breastfeeding goes on for longer than it does in Caribbean.
Now this might seem unrelated, but think of it from the viruses perspective. Viruses need to spread from host to host to survive, it doesn't do them any good to instantly kill whoever they infect, because that doesn't leave enough time for them to infect others and continue to survive.
Although more research is needed, the authors of the study suggest that it maybe it is evolutionarily benefit for a virus to keep a women alive longer, and therefore affect them less severely, because they're more likely to pass that virus onto their children through breastfeeding.
But, in societies where breastfeeding is less common, and the risk is lower, the virus has no such evolutionary imperative.
