Tracking Disease

When you’re sick, there’s nothing you want more than to be well again (unless you’re just angling for a day on the sofa). In fact, this could be seen as the goal of modern medicine – getting people back to normal life and health again following illness or infection. But in the early stages of a disease it’s hard to predict who is more resilient and likely to spring back to wellness and who will have lingering severe symptoms, perhaps needing more powerful treatment to fight the disease or never fully regaining their health. By tracking the presence of immune cells and parasites in humans and mice with malaria as they go through cycles of responding to the disease and recovering, scientists have created these colourful disease ‘maps’. Each one traces how the infection moves through individuals – mice on top, humans along the bottom – revealing crucial differences in recovery between them.

Written by Kat Arney

Kat Arney

Writer

Dr Kat Arney is an award-winning science writer, broadcaster and public speaker, and is the founder and Creative Director of First Create The Media.

Website

• Image adapted from work by Brenda Y. Torres and Jose Henrique M. Oliveira, and colleagues
• Program in Immunology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA,
• Image originally published under a Creative Commons Licence (BY 4.0)
• Published in PLOS Biology, April 2016