I want to talk about the inflammatory response and infections, because with what is going on in the world, I think it is important to understand how the immune system works, how the immune system mounts a response to an infectious agent like a virus. Our immune system mounts a response to a virus in a very specific way.
White blood cells, circulate throughout the entire body and they are there to protect us. They are our body’s defence mechanism. They defend us and help to mount an immune response. We want our white blood cells to be working well in order for our defence systems to be strong.
There is a specific type of white blood cell called a macrophage. Macrophages will circulate throughout the body and it is looking for things that shouldn’t be there, like infectious agents. So if it sees an infected cells which is a human cell with a virus inside it. When the macrophage sees the infected cell, it eats the infected cell, like pac-man. Then it takes particles of the virus and puts it on the cell surface into cell receptors, which alerts to immune system what it needs to be looking for, what it needs to attack if it sees it.
We have these other immune cells called T-cells. These T-cells will go to the macrophages, they will attach to the viral receptor sites, they will grab the information about the virus, then they will make these viral receptor sites of their cell surface, then these T-cells will replicate, so your body has now created a large army of cells that are looking for this infectious agent throughout the body. These T-cells will travel throughout the body, throughout the lymphatic system, and they are specifically looking for this virus or infected cells and it knows exactly what it is looking for.
Now when the T-cells find the infected cells, they release cytokines. Cytokines are part of what is called an inflammatory response. The cytokines are working to kill the infectious agent by killing the infected cell. Then we have another set of cytokines that have anti-inflammatory properties and clean up after the inflammatory response. These cytokines need to be very targeted. The cytokines need to be able to decipher between a healthy human cell and an infected human cell. If we don’t have enough cytokines then our body cannot effectively kill off the infected cells. If the response is too high in our body, then we can have a cytokine storm or autoimmune disease, whereby it may kill off the infected cells but it may also kill some healthy cells, leading to a lot of cellular damage.
Therefore a properly functioning immune system has a targeted response and has a proper on-off switch.
