Spotting infection just by looking at you

摘要

PEOPLE across cultures can tell when others are in the early stages of infection by looking at them. Artin Arshamian at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and his colleagues tested whether it was possible to tell if someone was sick just by looking at photos of their face. The team worked with 169 volunteers from six different cultural backgrounds, including city dwellers in Stockholm and hunter-gatherers in the rainforests of Thailand and Malaysia, and in the coastal deserts of Mexico. Each volunteer was shown photos of Swedish people taken 2 hours after they had been injected with either Escherichia coli or a placebo. Those who had been injected with E. coli were at the beginning stages of an immune response when their photos were taken, and some of the volunteers in all six groups had a better-than-chance ability to identify that they were sick.