Immune System ‘Remember’ germs to which we’re never been exposed

Nisarg Joshi

Immunity

Vaccines are not necessary, admits mainstream study.

It’s established dogma that the immune system develops a “memory” of a microbial pathogen, with a correspondingly enhanced readiness to combat that microbe, only upon exposure to it — or to its components though a vaccine. But a discovery by Stanford University School of Medicine researchers casts doubt on that dogma.

“Mark Davis and his colleagues found that key immune cells in our bodies have “memories” of microbes they‘ve never encountered.”

Damn! Entire vaccine industry is running on false Dogma!

And when we talk about पितृ legacy, different from genes, and suggest पितृ तर्पण, we are fanatic superstitious morons! 😀

Remember one thing: We inherit many forms of inheritance. Genes are just one of them. Apart from genes, we inherit – memories, minding process, social patterns, विकृति (s), संस्कार (s), प्रकृति and the list goes on


Research


Immune systems of healthy adults ‘remember’ germs to which they’ve never been exposed, Stanford study finds

http://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2013/02/immune-systems-of-healthy-adults-remember-germs-to-which-theyve-never-been-exposed-stanford-study-finds.html

In a path-breaking study published online Feb. 7 in Immunity, the investigators found that over the course of our lives, CD4 cells — key players circulating in blood and lymph whose ability to kick-start the immune response to viral, bacterial, protozoan and fungal pathogens can spell the difference between life and death — somehow acquire memory of microbes that have never entered our bodies.

Several implications flow from this discovery, said the study’s senior author, Mark Davis, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology and director of Stanford’s Institute for Immunity, Transplantation and Infection. In the study, newborns’ blood showed no signs of this enhanced memory, which could explain why young children are so much more vulnerable to infectious diseases than adults. Moreover, the findings suggest a possible reason why vaccination against a single pathogen, measles, appears to have reduced overall mortality among African children more than can be attributed to the drop in measles deaths alone. And researchers may have to rethink the relevance of experiments conducted in squeaky-clean facilities on mice that have never been exposed to a single germ in their lives.

“It may even provide an evolutionary clue about why kids eat dirt,” said Davis. “The pre-existing immune memory of dangerous pathogens our immune systems have never seen before might stem from our constant exposure to ubiquitous, mostly harmless micro-organisms in soil and food and on our skin, our doorknobs, our telephones and our iPod earbuds.”

CD4 cells are members of the immune club known as T cells. CD4 cells hang out in our circulatory system, on the lookout for micro-organisms that have found their way into the blood or lymph tissue.

In order to be able to recognize and then coordinate a response to a particular pathogen without inciting a Midas-touch overreaction to anything a CD4 cell bumps into (including our own tissues), our bodies have to host immensely diverse inventories of CD4 cells, each with its own narrow capacity to recognize one single pathogenic “body part” or, to be more scientific, epitope — and, it’s been believed, only that epitope. Contact with that epitope can cause a CD4 to whirr into action, replicating rapidly and performing the immunological equivalent of posting bulletins, passing out bullets and bellowing attack orders through a bullhorn to other immune cells. This hyperactivity is vital to the immune response. (It is CD4 cells that are targeted and ultimately destroyed by HIV, the virus responsible for AIDS.)

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