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One topic that’s extremely important to understand is how the immune system works. Every time your body encounters a new, potentially dangerous substance, your immune system works to protect you. And in more dangerous cases (i.e. with a virus or other pathogen), your immune system mounts a response to eliminate the threat and keep you safe.
Let’s dive deeper into how the immune system actually works.
What is immunity?
Immunity is the ability of any organism to resist infection. The human body has three general types of immunity: innate immunity, adaptive immunity, and passive immunity.
Innate immunity comprises the body’s nonspecific defenses, defenses like the skin (which acts as a physical barrier against most dangerous substances) and the mucous membranes (e.x in your nose, which traps harmful substances as they are inhaled).
Adaptive immunity is a little more complicated than the other two types of immunity. Adaptive immunity, as the name suggests, is the body’s flexible response to pathogenic attack. When a dangerous pathogen infects the body, the body’s adaptive immune response is activated and works to directly attack the pathogen on a larger scale. Vaccines take advantage of the body’s own adaptive immunity to prime it against subsequent infection by a certain pathogen.
Passive immunity is the type of immunity least commonly seen. Passive immunity is immunity acquired from a source outside the body, and usually doesn’t last very long. A common example of passive immunity is the antibody donation of a mother via breast milk to her baby.
How do vaccines work?
Without diving deeper into the specific mechanisms of the immune system (a topic that is often covered by an entire semester’s worth of a course), vaccines use the essential concept of adaptive immunity to prepare the body against a certain virus.
Vaccines can vary widely in their components. A vaccine can be a “detoxified” virus, a weakened (and living) virus, or a certain isolated part of a virus.
When a person receives vaccine treatment, the weakened pathogen is introduced to the immune system in a small, manageable amount. This activates the immune system and primes it to the new pathogen in a safe manner, and essentially gives the body a chance to prepare all of its defenses against the pathogen.
When the body is next introduced to the pathogen (for instance, if the pathogen is communicated by another person), the body will be ready to fight it with all of the tools it needs already prepared for it. Because the body has already prepared to fight the pathogen, symptoms likely won’t even appear, and it will be almost as if no infection occurred at all.
Vaccination can last for years depending on the pathogen being vaccinated against. For viruses like the flu, high mutation rates in the virus means that a new vaccine needs to be made every year to properly prepare people to fight the virus.
To keep things current, you can take a look at the July 25th blog for some information about vaccine trials during COVID and the COVID vaccine tracker.
If you’d like to learn some more specifics about immunity, feel free to take a look at the sources below; they’re a great place to get started.
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