I’ve heard of brain-eating amoeba which is some scary shit.
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Our immune system can deal with almost all infections, including amoeba, pretty well.
The problem is that the active cells in our adaptive immune system are amazingly powerful, and as a result incredibly dangerous. For example, Neutrophils are like hand grenades: when they are activated they start accumulating bubbles of Hydrogen Peroxide inside themselves, then when they locate what they think is a bad guy they literally explode and take out a good chunk of tissue. Macrophages are like Godzilla: when activated they grow to a huge size and rampage around swallowing and digesting almost anything they can find.
Letting monsters like this lose in the brain, full of extremely intricate and delicate nerve cells, would be a disaster, so there’s a special blood-brain barrier which keeps them completely out of the nervous system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood%E2%80%93brain_barrier
So the brain is now safe from accidental attack by your own immune system, but will clearly be very vulnerable to infection if some bad guy does somehow manage to slip in there.
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