LogFAQs > #957363035

quick and dirty rundown on how your system acquires immunity.

when a white cell 'consumes' a pathogen, it breaks it up into chunks and takes those chunks and sticks them on receptors on the outside of the cell. then it goes to the lymph nodes and starts bumping into T-cells. eventually it finds one that activates when it touches a bit of pathogen particle that it can recognize. then it starts producing antibodies specific to that antigen, and that's how you get immunity.

now the difference between vaccine initiated and infection initiated immunity is that with an infection you dont know what portion of the pathogen the immune system will see first and start off the immune response from. with the vaccine they target a sprike protein, which is a common surface protein on the viral package and easily available for lots of antibodies to attach to. for an infection generated immune response your immune system might generate antibodies targeting some other protein that is much less common on the surface of the virus, or maybe only produced when the virus is within infected cells.

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Taarsidath-an halsaam.
Quando il gioco e finito, il re e il pedone vanno nella stessa scatola