Helminth infection is associated with dampened cytokine responses to viral and bacterial stimulations in Tsimane forager-horticulturalists.

Background: Soil-transmitted helminths (STHs) and humans share long co-evolutionary histories over which STHs have evolved strategies to permit their persistence by downregulating host immunity. Understanding the interactions between STHs and other pathogens can inform our understanding of human evolution and contemporary disease patterns.

Methodology: We worked with Tsimane forager-horticulturalists in the Bolivian Amazon, where STHs are prevalent.

Rapidly declining body temperature in a tropical human population.

Normal human body temperature (BT) has long been considered to be 37.0°C. Yet, BTs have declined over the past two centuries in the United States, coinciding with reductions in infection and increasing life expectancy.

Associations between male testosterone and immune function in a pathogenically stressed forager-horticultural population.

Objectives: Despite well-known fitness advantages to males who produce and maintain high endogenous testosterone levels, such phenotypes may be costly if testosterone-mediated investment in reproductive effort trade-off against investment in somatic maintenance. Previous studies of androgen-mediated trade-offs in human immune function find mixed results, in part because most studies either focus on a few indicators of immunity, are confounded by phenotypic correlation, or are observational. Here the association between male endogenous testosterone and 13 circulating cytokines are examined before and after ex vivo antigen stimulation with phytohemagglutinin (PHA) and lipopolysaccharides (LPS) in a high pathogen population of Bolivian forager-horticulturalists.

Immune function in Amazonian horticulturalists.

Background: Amazonian populations are exposed to diverse parasites and pathogens, including protozoal, bacterial, fungal and helminthic infections. Yet much knowledge of the immune system is based on industrialised populations where these infections are relatively rare.

Aim: This study examines distributions and age-related differences in 22 measures of immune function for Bolivian forager-horticulturalists and US and European populations.