tolerate a disease, don't fight it!

At the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, Janelle Ayres and her colleagues’ had many mice that got sick. Ayres and her colleagues had infected mice with Citrobacter rodentium, which in turn inflamed the colons of the mice. Half of the mice lived, and half died. These mice all had an identical lifestyle, they all ate the same and did the same activities during the day. The point of this experiment was to determine what causes genetically identical mice to respond differently to certain pathogens. She realized that the mice that died, did not have sufficient iron. Thus, she decided to treat the living mice (with pathogen C. rodentium) with iron supplements. This was a rather holistic approach, as she did not go in with full war to try to use antibiotics, and drugs that can later develop resistance in the mouse. This approach supplies to the internal system of the mouse, which boosts the immunity of the mouse, rather than targeting the pathogen with an antibiotic.