Bugs and medicine

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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

I got Lyme disease from a tick bite 2 years ago and you can never really get rid of it 100%, you can only suppress it so it stays in it's dormant state. You get it from tick saliva.

Ticks carry and many other insects carry hundreds of different kinds of bacteria and spread them either through their saliva or waste products.

Spiders even have spider mites which is definetly an infestation that only affects spiders so yes, they have their own problems aside from the ones we create for them.

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.

Forgot one thing, yes, Lyme vaccine was invented from tick saliva components so, yes, research is being done all the time but unless a drug company can market it to enough sick people and make a HUGE PROFITfrom it, it will not go into mass production whether it works or not.

They actually took Lyme vaccine off the market because it wasn't selling. Now, more than 300,000 people have Lyme in the US alone and could have avoided a lifetime of misery if it had been available and marketed and advertised.