Say you got some pathogen inside you, and it’s starting to replicate and your immune system isn’t prepped with the antibodies. Does it ever happen then that infection still gets nowhere because of reasons other than you consciously recognizing that you were exposed and taking some meds early on?
In: Biology
Yes of course.
Remember early COVID-19? There were loads of people who got infected without having any symptoms, especially young people.
Everyones immune system is different based on genetics, age, and pathogens you encountered in the past, so that your standard response can completely be enough to handle a new pathogen.
Also amount of exposure matters a lot. If you get lots of pathogens they basically have a head start over your immune system, while when you only get very few then your immune system can have antibodies ready long before the pathogens had a chance to multiply out of control
Every day. The innate immune system handles most exposures, only when it fails do you get sick and get to see the adaptive immune system in action.
You mean reasons like your immune system still doing it’s job (that it does incredible good even without prepped antibodies)?
Or reasons like the pathogen not multiplying faster than its lifespan?
It’s pretty safe to say that you are probably infected with something nearly every day just from basic exposure to the world. Your immune system stops most of it
Unless you are in a hospital or on prescription, the meds you’re taking are only there to make your symptoms more tolerable. They do nothing to cure the illness, that’s all done by your immune system.
Antibodies & the B cells that produce them, alongside T cells, make up adaptive immunity. These are more or less like an extra powerful second line of defense that takes time to start paying off, because it must be generated in response to any specific pathogen (that’s the adaptive part).
The first line of defense, *innate* immunity, protects you from all sorts of threats pretty much all the time. Neutrophils & other granulocytes, macrophages, NK cells, complement proteins — these all do a great job right out of the box.
In fact, part of adaptive immunity is about better directing that innate firepower. Antibodies can neutralize on their own, but they can also recruit complement and many different cells to whatever they’ve bound. Helper T cells boost the activity of particular cells to suit the occasion, e.g. a Th1 cell activated by viral infection will boost macrophage activity among others.
Yes. Your immune system has the perfect weapon for every disease ever.
It’s just some are the equivalent of being waaaay on the back shelf so take a while to find.
Getting a vaccine will essentially prep that weapon and bring it to a more accessible location for when you do get the disease.
It’s not quite that simple as the immune system is one of the most complex biological systems we know of, and we still don’t completely understand all the interaction.
Kurzgesagt did a good understandable overview of [how it works](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXfEK8G8CUI), and why its preped for anything.
Yes, in fact your immune system is actually capable of responding to viruses that don’t even exist yet. It is incredibly adaptive in ways that are hard to comprehend.
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