It seems like it could happen quite easily; someone gets a cut or gash out in the wilderness and cleans the wound in a stream. Enter a tardigrade. Due to their large size (relative to bacteria) could they cause a blood clot or a stroke?
Don’t need answer fast.
If blood was gushing out of a wound how exactly does the tardigrade, or anything else really, find it’s way into your bloodstream? Now if it was injected into your bloodstream with a syringe how long would it survive before your immune system neutralized it?
Why would it enter your bloodstream? And how?
Tardigrades are huge compared to blood cells, so for a start, if one or more somehow found its way into your bloodstream, it could not traverse capillaries or the smallest venules and arterioles - so it could get stuck in a blood vessel.
The body has some mechanisms that can deal with small obstructions by encysting the blockage and moving it out of the blood flow. I don’t know if this would work with an object the size of, and with the properties of a tardigrade, though.
Well, river blindness infects you when larvae 10 mm in length enter your bloodstream after you get bitten by a fly, so it’s not like big parasites cannot enter your system that way. For that particular disease they are nematodes rather than tardigrades, however.
Say what now? There’s something that kills tardigrades?
… and it is INSIDE US??? :eek:
A penetrating injury with a contaminated object. This is also how things like tetanus and necrotizing fasciitis get started.
IANAD, but ISTM that since a tardigrade is composed of biological material, your body ought to be able to break it down and get rid of it - but if it can’t, you’re right, I would expect your body to entomb it in a granuloma.
There are stage(s) in the life cycle of the river blindness parasite in which the worms are anywhere from 2-70 cm long - but the L3 juveniles that are passed from the black fly to the human host are only about 740 microns long and 19 microns wide.
Tardigrades aren’t these worms, though. They have no reason to want to be there.
Tardigrades basically eat by sucking the “juices” out of cells, don’t they? If so, I imagine they could do that to some of YOUR cells. Not on any kind of dangerous or noticeable scale, though.
Since they aren’t “native” to the bodies blood system in any way, they are basically just another contaminant that might get into a suitably sized vein during a cut. They won’t thrive, reproduce, etc. Effectively a tiny bit of gravel.
I’d be more afraid of the bacteria on them than the bug itself.
“Encysting.”
Cool word. Thanks.
What did the monocyte say to the lymphocyte?
I encyst.