“Women may simply have better immune systems than men,” says Prof. Paul Hunter.
By Aaron Sull, World Israel News
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to sweep the world, new research suggests men are more likely to die from the deadly virus than women.
The research published last month by China’s Center for Disease Control and Prevention found that while the infection rate among men and women is relatively the same, the death rate among men is 2.8 percent compared with 1.7 percent for women.
Numerous experts have weighed in on the findings.
According to Prof. Paul Hunter, from the University of East Anglia, women may simply have better immune systems than men.
“Women have intrinsically different immune responses to men. Women are more likely to suffer from auto-immune diseases, and there is good evidence that women produce better antibodies to vaccines against flu,” he told the BBC last week.
Prof. Michal Linial, a computational biologist at Hebrew University, said a woman’s immune system functions better than a man’s because it always has to prepared for the “foreign” aspects associated with pregnancy.
“In pregnancy, the woman’s body has to avoid a negative response to the development inside of it of an entire organism, half of whose DNA is totally foreign. Various mechanisms have to activate to suppress the immune reaction of the body so that it doesn’t act against the embryo,” she said.
Environmental factors may also have played into the skewed results.
According to researchers cited by Business Insider, considering the data was extrapolated from a study of only Chinese people, it is safe to assume that the majority of the men in the study were smokers.
It is well documented that over 50 percent of Chinese men smoke compared to 2 percent of Chinese women.
Lack of proper hygiene may also have contributed in some way to the results, said Sabra Klein, a scientist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health,
“It has been well documented that men are less likely to wash their hands and use soap than women,” said Klein as quoted by the Advisory Board, a team of experts who research and predict global health trends.