Fight or learn to live with the consequences?

Individuals can fight their infectious diseases by reducing the growth of a pathogen (resistance), but they can also ameliorate the disease it causes (tolerance). A recent paper shows that there is variation between mouse strains in tolerance to a rodent malaria and that this was negatively correlated with resistance. This is important, because tolerance has major implications for the epidemiology and coevolution of host–parasite interactions, but has been neglected in the animal literature.