This has been a real bugger of a year at Casa Bushwhacked.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
It started with us both getting some seriously nasty bug while on a cruise ship going round New Zealand in January.
Those damn boats are big bug incubators at times, even though the cruise ship companies and staff work hard to keep everyone healthy.
We came back to Benders sounding like a Saturday night at the greyhound races. Everything hurt.
Mrs Whacked was hacking and barking so much she cracked a few ribs – seriously, I wouldn’t dare make that up.
This meant that whatever symptoms I had were clearly inferior and of a blokish nature – Man Flu.
We have been trading germs and infections of various sorts for most of 2017.
There is only one response to accusations that you have Man Flu and your wife is much, much more ill: “Yes dear. Like a cup of tea? A peeled grape? New slippers?”
But inside your head, you’re screaming: “Dammit woman! I am really ill. I feel like I’ve fallen under a steam roller and had eight litres of hot snot injected into my head!
“But is there any sympathy? No, there bloody well is not. I DREAM of having cracked ribs.”
Now, along with blokes around the globe, we can finally report official, academic, non-fake news that Man Flu IS REAL.
Huzzah!
About time.
Weirdly, this news comes to us from a man called Sue. Again, I am not making this up.
Dr Kyle Sue, assistant professor of family medicine at Memorial University of Newfoundland in Canada was sick, and tired of having his illnesses downgraded – often by women.
“Awww, poor widdle pwofessor feeling a bit icky wicky.” That sort of thing.
Dr Sue found evidence of what he called an “immunity gap”.
Men tended to fall ill faster and report feeling worse than women, and he believed there was an evolutionary cause for it.
Women were more responsive to vaccination than men and their reactions to vaccines tended to be more localised.
Men had higher rates of hospitalisation for flu treatment and had higher flu-induced death rates.
Sue found it can be dangerous to be a chap. Men suffer more from viral respiratory illnesses (C'mon, it just an URTI. dear.") than women because they have less-robust immune systems.
Testosterone tended to suppress the male immune system while the female hormone oestradiol protected the immune system.
There were two theories about why evolution had come up with this:
- Testosterone equipped blokes to be competitive, at the cost of the immune system. A sort of “live hard die young” hormone.
- Feeling symptoms more severely was more likely to lead a male to rest more, thus increasing his survival chances.
The research has led to outbreaks of academic eye-gouging around the world, and it seems to me that it is tending to be a gender based he said/she said stoush.
I don’t believe the Man Named Sue’s work is going to end the issue anytime soon, so I have a suggestion.
The only way to proceed is for chaps to keep up the conveyor belt of hot tea and cold comfort while women should, well, do whatever they want, really.
WAYNE GREGSON