Youtube show ‘Sick’ gross, fascinating

From malaria to measles to the common cold, disease can do a number on the human body. But how?

“Sick,” a Youtube show from Seeker, a digital publisher devoted to science, answers that question in gripping, often gross detail. The first season of the series is online now.

The show takes brief but deep dives into what various diseases do to the body. Covering timely diseases such as measles and lupus and more esoteric ones such as leprosy, it examines the workings of illnesses that can harm and even kill.

Take malaria. People have been trying to eliminate the disease for millennia. But thanks to mosquitoes carrying Plasmodium falciparum, the parasite that causes most malaria, it still infected 219 million people worldwide and killed 435,000 in 2017 alone, according to the World Health Organization.

With the help of a cell biologist from the University of California at Riverside, “Sick” provides a crash course in how malaria spreads from the liver to red blood cells, masking itself to escape the immune system.

Animations and clear narration act as supplements to scientific information conveyed by researchers.

It’s instructive and fascinating to hear more about diseases you may never have, such as rabies. But perhaps the most important video in the batch tackles why measles is so dangerous. It explains how it ravages its host’s immune system while hijacking the respiratory system, spreading when a person with measles sneezes or coughs.