If you ingest blood which has different antigens to your own, such as drinking B blood group when you are blood group A, will you get a haemolytic reaction similar to when you transfuse with the wrong blood? And if not why, since you have antibodies against these antigens?
In: Biology
No, because the blood is not entering your circulatory system. It’s going into your stomach and being digested/processed before it enters your system. This is why we do transfusions instead of just drinking blood. You would of course be susceptible to blood borne pathogens though.
>If you ingest blood which has different antigens to your own, such as drinking B blood group when you are blood group A, will you get a haemolytic reaction similar to when you transfuse with the wrong blood? And if not why, since you have antibodies against these antigens?
No, it would either be digested or vomited up.
Microbiology graduate here.
The digestive tract (That is, the entire pathway from mouth to anus) is a closed system – There’s no spaces large enough for anything bigger than small molecules (Like sugar) to exit the digestive tract and enter the body. Even then, our cells have ways to filter for the molecules they want only. Fungi and bacteria can’t enter our body without playing evolutionarily designed tricks to sneak in or brute force their way in – Otherwise the cell lining of our digestive tract keeps everything else out.
Blood has no tricks up its sleeve to get past this digestive system cellular lining. If it gets broken down, for example in the stomach via acid, then cells still prevent the smaller components from entering the body by filtering for only the things they do want.
There are other mechanisms that keep debris (like blood, or broken down components of blood) from even getting close to the cells of the digestive or intestinal tract. These two have been beaten through careful evolutionary design by microbes – Blood cells have not evolved that way.
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