Feed a virus, starve a bacterium

WHETHER it is best to feed a fever and starve a cold, or vice versa, varies with the grandparent being asked. Medicine has decided that it is always a bad idea to deny food to the ill. Now a new study suggests that by ignoring such old wives’ tales, medics may have missed a trick. A paper just published in Cell by a team of researchers led by Ruslan Medzhitov at Yale University suggest that force-feeding mice infected with influenza keeps them alive—but doing the same to mice with bacterial infections is fatal.

Dr Medzhitov was inspired by experiments conducted not by medics, but by zoologists. Most animals instinctively respond to infection by cutting back on food, and a slew of studies in recent years have shown that when diseased animals are force-fed they are more likely to die than if they are allowed to abstain. But Dr Medzhitov wondered whether that held true for all types of disease.

To investigate, he and his team infected one group of mice with a murine influenza virus, and the other with Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterium that causes food poisoning. Some mice in each group were force-fed rodent chow,…Continue reading
Source: Economist