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Vaccines: The Innate Immune System

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Imagine waking up in the middle of the night to your child coughing, not just the normal cough either. Your child is coughing to the point he or she is unable to breathe and you must drive him or her to the hospital if she is to continue breathing. When you get to the hospital, you find out your dear child has whooping cough, a disease you were led to think that it was wiped out by vaccines. A vaccine is “a product that produces immunity from a disease and can be administered through needle injections, by mouth, or by aerosol” (vaccines.gov). Vaccinations lead to immunization, which is “the process by which a person or animal becomes protected from a disease” (vaccines.gov). Vaccines protect against the most dangerous diseases, such as small …show more content…

This learned defense system that it helps is known as the innate immune system and the adaptive immune system. The innate immune system is “a variety of protective measures which are continually functioning and provides a first-line of defense against pathogenic agents” (Clem). However, this section of our immune systems are not microbe specific, they are a generalized for all microorganisms that enter into our bodies. The innate system’s reaction includes skin, mucous membranes, normal body temperature, fever, inflammation, and a varying pH (Clem). On the other hand, the adaptive immune system is specific to pathogens, meaning the adaptive system has memory to rapidly respond to the pathogen if it invades the body a second time. The adaptive immune system includes B-cells, antibodies, and T-cells. The B-cells and antibodies are responsible for the humoral immunity, which is responsible to recognize the invasion, mark the invaders, and beginning attacking. B-cells make the antibodies (Clem). The T-cells are responsible for regulating the immune responses. Vaccinations are first recognized by the innate immune system and then stimulate the adaptive immune response by introducing dead pathogens, the bacteria or virus, so that it can be ingested by white blood cells. These white blood cells stimulate the creation of antibodies to stop the invasion and mark them for “clean-up” (Clem). The function for vaccines is to introduce the immune system to the deadly diseases in a weakened form, instead of them becoming infected the normal way. Vaccines are important to help the immune system, without them the system has to learn to protect itself from dangerous pathogens by itself, leaving it vulnerable to these pathogens (Herlily,

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