I forget to log in.

Insects share their world with germs, bacteria and viruses. From a layman's perception (certainly flawed), I see insects as being immune to those nasties that live in their world. I know nothing about entomology or medicine, but wonder if anyone has found a connection between bugs and germs. I do know about he use of maggots to destroy rotting flesh, but that is common knowledge. If bugs are immune to diseases, can that immunity be used to create drugs to treat humans?

Hi ron. I disagree with your premise that bugs are themselves disease free.

http://insectweb.inhs.uiuc.edu/pathogens/vidil/table2.html

We are at a different scale and so hardly could notice that they had 'symptoms'

Since insects have no lungs, we could say they have immunity to pneumonia, but that is a fallacy, since it requires lungs to have pneumonia.

As disease vectors, by carrying bacteria, ithink that that case is pretty clear .

http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dvbid/Lyme/

milo

The anopheles mosquito actually suffers as the vector host of malaria, so not all insects are immune to the diseases they carry. Better research might be made into the digestive system of earthworms, which are immune to all known human diarrheal diseases, and the immune system of the horseshoe crab, which can detect pathogens in extremely low levels.

I have had many dogs. Most of them succumbed to diseases which also affect humans, like cancer, diabetes, pneumonia, etc. There also appears to be some diseases that dogs never contract, at least according to my limited knowledge.

If one visits a foreign country and drinks the water, you will come down with intestinal problems, yet the natives are not affected. The reverse is also true. The foreigner will get sick from our water. There must be an immunity factor here.

The first white men to visit an island in the tropical south pacific brought with them diseases that the native islanders had no immunity for. Some of those islands were almost entirely wiped out.

These are only observations. My interest is only in understanding what is happening. Don't lose any sleep over it.

Ron,

Don't know about the insects specifically, but I can tell you about shellfish and some other sea critters. Mussels, oysters, shrimp (not too far from insects) and others are susceptible to 'germs' in the same way we are, but they don't have the kind of immune system that we have, with specific immune response. What many of them have instead, is the ability to secrete/produce some non-specific (broad spectrum) antibiotic or antiviral substances.

Mussels make a damn good antiviral soup. I recommend it.

I'm not that fussy about the idea of eating insects... personal taste.

As an apiarist (hobbyist beekeeper), I can tell you that the honey bee colony can be wiped out by a single cell parasite called microspria. They were thought at first to be protists (having characteristics of both plant and animal) but are now known to be fungus.