Your white blood cells are the source of lasting immunity. Please see picunurse’s post above - it’s right on the money.
But there is still a small chance that his immune system could be a little better since there were a few white blood cells tranfered over???
No. Your kid just got some good genes and has a good immune system, or he’s better at washing his hands, or doesn’t stick his fingers in his nose and mouth as much as his brother does. A blood transfusion in infancy will not make the recipient more likely to be able to fight off more colds when they grow up.
The life span of a WBC is 13-20 days.
Also, the baby’s T-lymphocytes would kill off any stray WBCs.
The thymus in an infant is huge. It’s job is to “teach” the initial T-cells that will later be reproduced in the bone marrow.
You can’t get chicken pox again because you already have it - present tense. Once you’ve been infected, it never goes away!
What happens is that toward the end of the initial illness the chicken pox virus takes up residence inside some of the cells in your nervous system. During the initial infection, some of your white blood cells learned to recognize the chicken pox virus as a foreign invader, and to produce antibodies that cal kill it. As long as the virus remains hidden within the nerve cells, those antibodies can’t touch it. But occasionally it will try to reproduce, and virus particles begin to spread out from the nerves; when that happens, the white cells can see the free-floating virus particles and start pumping out those antibodies, destroying the free-floating virus particles before they can infect other cells and preventing any obvious symptoms from occurring. This also stimulates those white cells to reproduce and stick around, which gives your immunity to chicken pox a boost; the next time the virus tries to escape its confinement again, the antibody response will be fast and strong.
If you immune system is weakened, or if it’s been a very long time since the virus tried to break out of your nerve cells and many of those specialized white cells have died from old age, the remaining white cells may not be able to react fast enough to completely suppress the virus’s breakout attempt. In that case, you get shingles.
If your white cells get exposed to a virus only once (say via a vaccine), they’ll learn to produce antibodies to that virus - but the individual white cells only have a lifespan of about 20 years. So unless your body sees the virus again within that 20 year interval, your immunity to the virus will slowly fade away completely as the educated white cells gradually die off. That’s why we give booster shots to people. In the old days before vaccines you were getting constant low-level exposure to many viruses by coming into frequent contact with infected people (who were shedding virus even though they may not yet have developed symptoms). Hence the seemingly “lifelong” immunity to those diseases; those low-level exposure events happened often enough to stimulate those white cells into reproducing and sticking around.
The op being answered allow me to chime in on the breast feeding asides.
The antibodies absorbed during breast feeding are usually not enough to completely prevent infections but they are custom formulated to what is around the kids (Mom’s system responds to what is around) and tags some of the bugs allowing for a brisker response thereby reducing the risk of a more severe infection from a first ever exposure to a bug. It does not prevent a child from having their own immune response as well.
Another lasting benefit of breast feeding is creating a healthier set of gut bacteria - the gut microbiota - which then tends to persist.
I never knew that. I thought the epigenetic effects were somehow transferred to the stem cells.
Great post. You learn something every day here.
That is wrong, or at least it doesn’t describe the life-span of lymphocytes and (the antibody producing) plasma cells, with the former, at least, living for years. Indeed, if the life-span was measured in days, how could vaccines work?
Twenty years, that’s more like it.
But, I’ll add that at least for some antigens (i.e. antibody inducing foreign substances), there may well be lifelong protection following exposure. This interesting article from a highly reputable source provides data that indicates immunity against a variety of common antigens lasts for several decades and quite possibly for life.