is there a limit to how many diseases you can gain immunity to?

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It seems like there would be a limit to how many antibodies you can have.

In: Biology

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s not a practical limit, no. Your immune system can develop immunity to most pathogens that don’t evade or dismantle the immune response.

We’re in a never-ending arms race with those pathogens. Part of the reason we get a new flu shot each year is that the flu virus mutates so quickly, effectively negating any immunity we had to the last strain that infected us. Bacteria also develop ways of circumventing our immune response, which is why some infections (staphylococcus) can be so serious.

So we can continue to gain immunity to most pathogens, but many of them continue to return as new strains and we’ll fight them all over again.