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Asked by 12parrk to Lyn, Katy, Paul, PB, Ruth on 18 Jun 2013.
Question: if diseases are orgernisams can diseases them selves become diseased
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Peter Balfe answered on 18 Jun 2013:
Of course. Especially true of bacteria and their viruses, though some parasitic worms carry parasitic bacteria of their own. Even some viruses (Mimivirus for example) are prone to infection by other viruses (the gloriously named “sputnik” virus, which in russian means ‘fellow traveller”).
Just pulled this from wikipedia:
“Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ’em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.”
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Katy Brown answered on 18 Jun 2013:
Yes, it’s possible for some organisms which cause disease to catch diseases themselves, in a way.
For example, there is a type of virus called a bacteriophage, which infects bacteria and often kills them. These are sometimes used to treat bacterial infections, as the viruses kill bacteria but don’t harm humans, although this is less common since antibiotics were invented. Amoebas, which are parasites causing several diseases in humans, can also be infected with viruses.
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Paul Waines answered on 18 Jun 2013:
There are so many examples of this, as Katy and Peter have described. Evolution has created so many ingenious ways for this to occur, and I would think that there are very few organisms on the planet that could be considered to be immune to some kind of infection, be it by a virus, bacteria, fungus or parasite- even if they themselves are known to cause diseases in other organisms.
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Ee Lyn Lim answered on 18 Jun 2013:
Peter, Katy and Paul have given great answers to this question, so what I’m going to do is I’ll try and give a different perspective!
Think about what a ‘disease’ means – it basically means a condition in which you are unwell. So while bacteria and viruses CAUSE diseases – they can make you unwell – we wouldn’t call a virus or a bacterium, on its own, a disease.
So then – if a virus or a bacterium is to cause a disease, it has to be quite strong and healthy, in order to multiply in big enough numbers and produce enough toxins to make you sick. Otherwise it might still be able to infect you, but it would be too weak to cause any harm, and you wouldn’t have a disease. In other words, if a disease-causing organism became diseased, it probably wouldn’t be a disease anymore!
BUT – there is always a but! – sometimes the disease-causing organism catches a disease that actually makes it stronger! There are some species of wasps, called parasitoid wasps, which lay their eggs inside other insects. As the eggs grow, the host insect gets more and more sick, so to them, this wasp has given them a disease. But the most effective species of parasitoid wasps actually carry a viral infection – they have a kind of virus, called polydnaviruses, living in them. These viruses are injected into the host insect body together with the eggs, and they protect the eggs by attacking and shutting down the host immune system. This means that all the wasp larvae that hatch out of those eggs will be infected with this virus too, and the cycle continues. Read more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitoid_wasp
Hope this is helpful!
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Ruth Mitchell answered on 19 Jun 2013:
I’d like to underline Lyn’s point of not all diseases are organisms. So in effect, as already said organisms that cause disease can themselves become infected and destroyed/made stronger.
Diseases can be caused by things inside the body going wrong, like heart attacks are caused by blood not getting to the heart for it to be able to pump – things like this might be caused because the human body is just getting older or just a random event. Multiple sclerosis, which I work on, is an autoimmune disease which means that the body just reacts against itself – we don’t really know what causes it, it is influenced both by genetics and environment. So in these cases diseases aren’t caused by organisms and thus can’t because “diseased” themsleves.
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