F Rosa Rubicondior: Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks Are Designed to Make Us Sick

Saturday 1 October 2022

Malevolent Designer News - How Ticks Are Designed to Make Us Sick

Tick on a human finger
European tick, Ixodes ricinus
Study demonstrates for the first time that ticks weaken skin's immune response

Creationism's divine malevolence is nothing if not a fanatical perfectionist for whom no detail is too small in its quest to find ways to make its creation sick - or so you must believe if you've fallen for the intelligent [sic] design hoax.

Here for example is a paper in which the scientists have shown how well-designed ticks are for passing on infections to its victims, including humans and our livestock. The scientists found that tick saliva contains a powerful immuno-suppressant the prevent the body from reacting to the nasty little organisms it injects along with its saliva when it takes a meal. This also solves the mystery of why ticks are such powerful disease vectors. It almost seems they were designed for it.

The team of scientists led by led by Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases) in collaboration with the research group of Hannes Stockinger (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna) have published their paper, open access, in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The Medical University of Vienna news release, explains the research and its significance:
(Vienna, 28 September 2022) Hitherto, scientists have not fully understood why ticks are such dangerous disease vectors. A research team led by Johanna Strobl and Georg Stary from MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology shows that tick saliva inhibits the skin's defence function, thereby increasing the risk of diseases such as tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) or Lyme disease. The study was recently published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

The researchers carried out their investigations on skin samples from volunteers and also on models of human skin, mimicking the bite of the most common European tick (Ixodes ricinus). In both cases, the team led by Georg Stary (MedUni Vienna's Department of Dermatology, CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Rare and Undiagnosed Diseases) in collaboration with the research group of Hannes Stockinger (Center for Pathophysiology, Infectiology and Immunology at MedUni Vienna) identified rapidly occurring patterns of immunomodulation. For example, it was found that the function of immune cells, especially T cells, which are important for immunological memory, was disrupted by contact with tick saliva.

Tick saliva modulates immune system

Overall, we found that tick feeding causes profound changes in the skin's immune system inhibiting the local immune response. This means that dangerous pathogens that are introduced into the skin together with tick saliva, can multiply more easily, leading to infection

Johanna Strobl, lead author
Department of Dermatology,
Medical University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria
The scientists made similar observations in early stages of model infection by Borrelia burgdorferi, the most common cause of Lyme disease. They found that pre-incubation of Lyme disease-transmitting bacteria (B. burgdorferi spirochetes) with tick salivary gland extracts impedes the accumulation of immune cells in the skin and increases the pathogen burden.

Climate change increases danger from ticks

Austria is one of the countries with the greatest prevalence of ticks. Nearly every second European tick is infected with pathogens, Lyme disease and tick-borne encephalitis (TBE) being the most common tick-borne diseases. The arachnids become active at a temperature of seven degrees. Due to rising temperatures associated with climate change, ticks now also pose a threat in higher-altitude regions of Austria and well into late autumn.
It takes a real genius to come up with the idea of including somethign to supress the immune system the supposed same designer gave us to protect us from the infections it designed to make us sick, in the saliva of the ticks it designed to give us the infections it designed to make us sick.

The scientists give more detail in the abstract to their open access paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation:
Abstract

During cutaneous tick attachment, the feeding cavity becomes a site of transmission for tick salivary compounds and tick-borne pathogens. However, the immunological consequences of tick feeding on human skin remain unclear. Here, we assessed human skin and blood samples upon tick bite and developed a human skin explant model mimicking Ixodes Ricinus bite and tick-borne pathogen infection. Following tick attachment, we observed rapidly occurring patterns of immunomodulation including increase in neutrophils and cutaneous B and T cells. T cells up-regulated tissue-residency markers, while lymphocytic cytokine production was impaired. In early stages of Borrelia burgdorferi model infections, we detected strain-specific immune responses and close spatial relationships of macrophages and spirochetes. Pre-incubation of spirochetes with tick salivary gland extracts hampered accumulation of immune cells and increased spirochete loads. Collectively, we showed that tick feeding exerts profound changes on the skin immune network, which interfere with the primary response against tick-borne pathogens.
Graphical Abstract
Graphical Abstract


To be a Creationist is to believe:
  1. An intelligent [sic] designer designed microorganisms to make us sick.
  2. The same intelligent [sic] designer designed our immune system to protect us from the microorganisms it designed to make us sick.
  3. The same intelligent [sic] designer designed ticks to inject the microorganisms it designed to make us sick, into our bodies.
  4. The same intelligent [sic] designer designed ticks to inject a immuno-suppressant substance into our bodies to stop our immune systems it designed to protect us from the microorganisms it designed to make us sick, (with me so far?) from working in the way it was designed to work.
And all to increase the amount of suffering in the world.

The question which has remained unanswered so several years now, is why do Creationists prefer us to see their putative designer god as a stupid, pestilential malevolence, rather than accept that this is all the result of a perfectly natural process in which no intelligence of supernatural entities were involved?

I wonder if any Creationists is ever going to find the courage and intellectual integrity to answer this question!

Thank you for sharing!









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