• Question: Does your blood type or the fact that you are Rh+ or Rh- makes you less/more vulnerable to certain diseases?

    Asked by anon-256593 on 17 Jun 2020.
    • Photo: Alena Pance

      Alena Pance answered on 17 Jun 2020:

      Hello Javier, the blood type makes a bit of a difference to malaria infection. Some parasites prefer a blood type over another. In the case of malaria this does not mean unfortunately that you wouldn’t get it at all if you had a particular type, but it could make you more vulnerable to infection by certain parasites. There are other molecules on the surface of blood cells that are definitely related to disease and if you don’t have them you are unlikely to get it. Another malaria example is a molecule that is on the red blood cell called Duffy, which is the protein one of the plasmodium species, vivax, uses to enter the red blood cell. It so happens that African people don’t have it and as a consequence there is very little presence of Plasmodium vivax in Africa with Plasmodium falciparum being much more common.
      This applies to other diseases as well that are related to surface molecules of the cells.

    • Photo: Rachel Tanner

      Rachel Tanner answered on 23 Jun 2020:

      Great question – you’re clearly thinking like a university student already, because this is something I teach on our Medical Genetics course! There are lots of interesting associations between blood groups and susceptibility or resistance to disease – for example people with blood group O are more likely to die from severe cholera, but are more resistant to severe forms of malaria. People with blood groups B or AB are more resistant to Norwalk virus (which causes food poisoning). Interestingly, there’s new genetic evidence in the last few weeks that blood group might also affect susceptibility to COVID-19! People with blood group A seem to be more likely to get infected and to get serious disease, whereas people with blood group O might have some level of protection.

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