Your immune system is a fascinating, interconnected network. It protects you from millions of harmful bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins and parasites, yet most people often don’t give it a second thought.
At the break of skin and the openings of your mouth and nose, it is the border patrol. If invaders do get inside your body, it sends out lines of defense, whether in the blood, organs, muscles or bones.
This internal police force is vital to life, though sometimes it does get overzealous. When this happens, the immune system can work against us, causing allergic reactions or at its worst, autoimmune disorders, such as lupus and multiple sclerosis.
At other times, it weakens, fails and becomes ineffective.
When your immune system fails completely, you’re left without any natural protection against illness. This leaves you open to “opportunistic infections” — sicknesses that can even come from things that ordinarily wouldn’t harm you. These can include recurrent pneumonia, herpes simplex and tuberculosis among other infections.
People who are immunocompromised, such as those with HIV, fall into this last group. This makes certain types of cancer, such as lymphoma, more likely.
All living things are subject to attack from disease-causing agents. Even bacteria, so small that more than a million could fit on the head of a pin, have systems to defend against infection by viruses. This kind of protection gets more sophisticated as organisms become more complex.
Multicellular animals have dedicated cells or tissues to deal with the threat of infection. Some of these responses happen immediately so that an infecting agent can be quickly contained. Other responses are slower but are more tailored to the infecting agent. Collectively, these protections are known as the immune system. The human immune system is essential for our survival in a world full of potentially dangerous microbes, and serious impairment of even one arm of this system can predispose to severe, even life-threatening, infections.
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Your immune system is a fascinating, interconnected network. It protects you from millions of harmful bacteria, microbes, viruses, toxins and parasites, yet most people often don’t give it a second thought.
At the break of skin and the openings of your mouth and nose, it is the border patrol. If invaders do get inside your body, it sends out lines of defense, whether in the blood, organs, muscles or bones.
This internal police force is vital to life, though sometimes it does get overzealous. When this happens, the immune system can work against us, causing allergic reactions or at its worst, autoimmune disorders, such as lupus and multiple sclerosis.
At other times, it weakens, fails and becomes ineffective.
When your immune system fails completely, you’re left without any natural protection against illness. This leaves you open to “opportunistic infections” — sicknesses that can even come from things that ordinarily wouldn’t harm you. These can include recurrent pneumonia, herpes simplex and tuberculosis among other infections.
People who are immunocompromised, such as those with HIV, fall into this last group. This makes certain types of cancer, such as lymphoma, more likely.
Answer:
All living things are subject to attack from disease-causing agents. Even bacteria, so small that more than a million could fit on the head of a pin, have systems to defend against infection by viruses. This kind of protection gets more sophisticated as organisms become more complex.
Multicellular animals have dedicated cells or tissues to deal with the threat of infection. Some of these responses happen immediately so that an infecting agent can be quickly contained. Other responses are slower but are more tailored to the infecting agent. Collectively, these protections are known as the immune system. The human immune system is essential for our survival in a world full of potentially dangerous microbes, and serious impairment of even one arm of this system can predispose to severe, even life-threatening, infections.
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