I’ve heard about antibodies, but how does your immune system physically attack or destroy a virus? Or in the case of someone with something like MS, how does your immune system physically attack your nervous system?
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I feel like you’re asking for a bit more advanced answer so here: viruses are a bit different than bacteria because they mostly stay hidden from the immune system by living inside your cells. Luckily the cells in your body have devised a system to detect hidden viruses. Basically, every cell in your body is constantly chopping up a small portion of the proteins inside and attaching the short chopped up pieces to other proteins called the “major histocompatability complex” or MHC. The MHC molecules move to the surface of the cell and leaves these chopped up pieces of proteins extended, sticking out of the cell. Here’s where the immune system comes in. There is a type of immune cell, a specialized T cell, called a cytotoxic T cell. These special cells float around throughout your body and test all the pieces of protein sticking out from cells on MHC molecules. This is getting hard to do ELI5 so I’ll just say there’s basically a system that trains these cells while they’re developing so that they will ignore pieces of protein from anything normally made in your body, but when they detect something abnormal – a piece of a viral or intracellular bacteria protein – they kill the cell which prevents the pathogen from replicating.
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