How Does Your Immune System York?
Wondering how our immune system works? Well, imagine this, if a mosquito lands on your skin. As it begins to feed, it also injects its chemicals into your skin. At first, you wouldn’t feel anything that was there. Unless you only noticed that red lump on your skin, swelling, and itching. This sign is already a reaction of our body fighting the chemicals, and the mosquito left when it bit you. Thus, this is how our immune system protects us against illnesses, infections, and even diseases.
Our body’s defenses coordinate with our immune system to fight against any foreign particles or threats that can affect our health. It would be easier for these threats such as toxins, bacteria, and viruses to penetrate if our immune system is not present. Even a small paper cut or seasonal cold can lead to severity because of our body’s defense’s absence.
How The Immune System Function?
Our immune system relies on our body’s defensive white blood cells or leukocytes that our bone marrow produces. These white blood cells travel into our bloodstream and network of vessels that clear wastes and toxins in our bodies. This network of vessels is also called the lymphatic system. Our body is composed of leukocytes in every microliter of blood, which ranges between 4,000 and 11,000. These leukocytes are like security personnel in our body. They move around and screen the blood, tissues, and organs constantly for these suspicious and unwanted threats. Thus, our immune system functions when there are antigens present in the body. As soon as the white blood cells or leukocytes detect these threats or antigens, our immune response will only take minutes to kick in.
Our immune response must be equally adaptable to threats that come in our body since these threats are hugely variable or changeable. Thus, this means that our immune system produces antibodies to fight threats in different ways.
Immune System: Leukocytes and Its Groups
Our leukocytes have two main cellular-group classifications that work a two-pronged attack. The first group is the phagocytes that trigger the immune response. It works by sending the dendritic cells and macrophages in the blood to circulate. Then, they destroy any foreign particles or threats they encounter and consume them. Hence, this allows the phagocytes to identify the antigens, then send the information to the second group – the lymphocytes. When grouped, these lymphocytes are called T-cells that go in search of the infected body cells and immediately kill these threats.
On the other hand, B-cells and helper T-cells start producing antibodies using the information gathered by the phagocytes from the antigens. These remarkable antibodies produced are unique and match each antigen like a lock and key, which then the invading cells are destroyed. The B-cells can produce millions of these antibodies that go cycling throughout the body and attack the threats until all are neutralized. While these antibodies are working inside of our body, symptoms can also be visible outside. These familiar symptoms are usually swelling and high temperature due to the reactions of our body’s immune response. It would be harder for these threats to reproduce and spread with warmer body temperature. Bacteria and viruses are temperature-sensitive and do not go well with high temperatures.
Immune System’s Main Job
If there are damaged body cells, they release chemicals. Then these chemicals make the cell fluid leak into the surrounding tissues that will cause swelling. This swelling attracts the phagocytes, which will then consume the invaders and damaged cells. Normally, it would take days for the immune response to eliminate the threats in our bodies. However, this does not stop us from getting ill. Our immune response main job is to stop the threat from escalating or spreading, leading to severity.
Another good side of our immune system is its constant surveillance, which provides us long-term immunity to these threats. Thanks to our B-cells and T-cells that identify antigens and use this information in recognizing future threats. These cells will then produce the right antibodies to tackle a revisiting antigen from reproducing and spreading, preventing it from affecting other healthy cells. Thus, this is how our body develops immunity to certain diseases like chickenpox. However, this does not always apply to some.
There are people that have autoimmune diseases that trick the immune system into attacking healthy cells in the body. These autoimmune diseases are disorders that disrupt the immune system to underlying problems and varying conditions like Type I diabetes, arthritis, and multiple sclerosis.
A healthy immune system for most individuals will fight off successfully innumerable other potential infections and an estimated of over 200 colds in a lifetime. Thus, this is how essential our immune system is and how it works. It would be difficult for our body to fight threats and may even escalate to far more dangerous if we don’t have our immune system.
The next time you get bitten by a mosquito or catch a cold, remember our immune system. Our health and our lives rely on it.
