Are there any human beings recorded to possess an exceptionally powerful immune system?
For example according to the following article, autoimmune disease is thought be a side effect of “too powerful” immune system:
That is not what I am talking about. I am curious if there exist some person or people whose immune system can react just “perfectly” and much much earlier (than average human’s) during the progression of the spread of the pathogen within the body.
The juvenile immune system is powerful as all hell. Lots of “childhood diseases” are pretty damn serious if one is inflicted as an adult. Mumps, Chickenpox etc. Kids brush them off.
I have occasionally wondered if my hay fever isn’t an indication of a really enthusiastic immune system - especially as I rarely get ill. I’ve never been able to chase up anything about it, one way or another. Probably, it’s too silly for any professional’s time. 
Remember, a really good immune system can kill you sometimes.
The 1918 flu outbreak was weird because it tended to kill the healthy young people and not the old and very young or infirm.
Turned out the problem was it produced such a vigorous immune response that those with really great immune systems kinda killed themselves.
I am NOT saying a good immune system is a bad thing. Far, far from it. Almost always it is a great thing to have! Everyone should want one. Just realize the issue can be a bit more complex than one might think.
It is. Allergies are an overreaction of your immune system to minor irritants.
More recently, the pneumonia that puts Covid-19 patients on respirators, and kills them, happens because the immune system overreacts, and starts attacking the patient’s own lung tissue.
That’s the rationale behind using anti-inflammatory drugs like hydroxychloroquine to treat it. The hope is, it will temper that autoimmune response, and keep the secondary symptoms from killing you, long enough for your body to deal with the primary infection.
Human, and indeed vertebrate immunology is a very complex subject. Here is a very simplified practical introduction by biochemist and pharma blogger Derek Lowe, and even this barely covers the content of an introductory chapter to basic immunology text.
Your immune system can literally kill you if it reacts to the wrong cues or goes into a positive feedback loop. There are some people who have particularly strong immune systems (either naturally responsive, because of good nutrition and controlled exposure, or other reasons not understood) but when contracting a novel pathogen any immune system is potentially vulnerable. How an individual will respond to a previously unexperienced virus or bacteria is as much luck of the genetic draw as it is nutritional or other environmental vulnerabilities, although having underlying conditions may make one more prone to co-infections or less able to endure the initial ravages of infection, e.g. if you already have a respiratory disorder like COPD it doesn’t take much to turn that condition from severe to critical.
Stranger
I will say without cites, that some allergies (and some asthma) as well as autoimmune diseases, seem to be more likely to arise when the immune system is not being sufficiently challenged. Basically, if the immune system is not getting enough stimulation from ‘foreign antigens’ in the environment, it gets into mischief and starts attacking its own host.
Some observations in this regard:
asthma is less likely to occur in kids who go to daycare or who live on farms, i.e. their immune systems are kept occupied by the environmental germs
mice/rats raised in germ-free environments develop autoimmune disease
and possibly
3) it might explain why autoimmune diseases like type I diabetes and multiple sclerosis are rarer in those parts of the world with ‘poor sanitation’
I thought the rationale was owning a chunk of stock in the only company that makes it.
But discussion of that would probably have to be in a different forum.
How would anybody know how good their immune system is since testing for antibodies is rarely done?
Logically, however, you could safely say that most people over 100 have extremely good immune systems. Getting to that age means living through any number of infectious outbreaks over several decades and that the numerous diseases that can prove fatal to the elderly haven’t had that effect.
Indeed. The only real measure is its success in the real world. There is no blood test, antibody assay, etc., that measures the ‘power’ of the immune system.
In my early twenties, I stupidly drank some bad water from a stream in Hawaii and came down with a severe case of Leptospirosis. The doctor said if I hadn’t been helicoptered out of the valley, I would have died. They had the ventilator set up next to my bed, but never had to use it. After about five days, I was released on the stipulation I check into a hotel few a few more days.
Over the last 45 years since this hospitalization, I haven’t so much as had a cold or flu. Sometimes I wonder if almost dying from the Leptospirosis, somehow super charged my immune system. (I know, probably not.)
It feels a bit like the best immune system would be one that doesn’t respond too much, but does respond sometimes.
I’m on immunosuppressants and haven’t had a cold since I started them, despite being in lots of vectors where colds get passed on. I once asked on the straight dope whether this was having some effect on my underlying health, because otherwise it seemed like the immunosuppressants were beneficial, so why were my doctors concerned about me coming contact with bugs? The universal response was well duh, you won’t get sick because your body isn’t fighting against the bug and producing symptoms, which is what I’d said myself in my OP, and not an answer at all.
Currently in the UK merely being on methotrexate doesn’t make you “vulnerable.” Being on two DMARDs does (like I am at the moment), as does being on biological drugs. So clearly they think there’s a threshhold where your immune system is more at risk. And AIDS patients die. No immune system at all means death.
So I guess an exceptionally powerful immune system would be one that fought bugs off, but didn’t kill you while doing it.
Genes also make some difference, though how much depends on the disease - we don’t know whether they do for Covid yet, and it seems unlikely, but white Northern Europeans descended from the survivors of the black death seem to have some immunity to AIDS. Smallpox seems to have passed down some resistance to disease too.
If this is for fiction, you could have someone whose ancestors happened to come from all different points across the globe and happened to pass down their disease-resistant genes from all the plagues that afflicted their ancestors. In reality, that’s not very likely.
I’m always a wee bit skeptical of folks who claim to never get sick. It’s a running joke in my family that my mom claims to never get sick, because in fact she gets hit hard about every 2 years with a bad cold or flu, which she promptly forgets ever happened, and at least twice per year on top of that she gets a milder cold, which she chalks up to allergies. Because allergies definitely come on suddenly, follow you everywhere you go for 3-7 days, and then slowly vanish.
I’ve wondered this for a while: if this is true, then why is it that old/debilitated people are the most likely ones to die from covid-19 infection? An overactive immune system would seem more likely to kill young adults like in the 1918 flu outbreak.
Me too. Every single person I’ve met who claims they’ve never been sick has to be on death’s door in order to consider themselves sick. By that standard, they’ll be “sick” only once in their lives, because they’re defining “sick” as “the state immediately before death”.
I don’t doubt that there are some people who get many fewer colds and similar illnesses than others. But as Margaret Thatcher said, “being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell someone you are, then you’re not.”
If someone’s immune system somehow prevents them from getting colds, fine. But if they’re that invested in telling other people about it, I have to wonder why.
There’s no reason you can’t have both effects in the same pandemic.
Older people and those with co-morbidity can be killed directly by covid-19 or in some cases secondary infections when severely weakened by the virus (or both. You could always die of both).
Younger people could have their immune systems triggered into cytokine storms and have their bodies self-destruct.
There’s reason to think both things were going on in the 1918 Pandemic (typical rates of older people dying, with the higher than normal death rate for younger people piled on top). No reason there can’t be both happening now.
As noted above, immunology is a complex thing.
I used to have chronic Hepatitis B.
When people get a Hepatitis B viral infection, they develop two antigens - one which is a surface antigen, and one which is a core antigen. With these two antigens, the body fights the infection and people get better.
But some people only develop a partial immune system response - they only develop the surface antigen. Without the assistance of the core antigen, the body can only fight the HepB virus to a standstill, with the liver as a long-term battleground. Over time, this causes more and more liver damage leading to cirrhosis and raising the risks of hepatic cancer. This is chronic Hepatitis B. Oh, and the virus may mutate over this time which makes it harder for the body to control.
One of the primary causes of chronic Hepatitis B is maternal infection - the mother has chronic Hepatitis B, and the baby also gets exposed to the virus during birth. In this case, the undeveloped immune system of the child also does not develop core antigens and so chronic Hepatitis B develops.
I know I did not get Hepatitis B via this route - my mother never had Hepatitis B. So I was exposed at some other time (maybe what they call playground exposure to a classmates blood). But however I was exposed, my immune system was sufficiently inactive at the time so as to not develop core antigens.
30-40 years later, and I have mild fibrosis of the liver, and I am given anti-virals to control the virus. In general, this does not help clear the virus, it just maintains a very low viral load. I happened to move countries, and my new specialist put me forward for a stage 1 drug trial.
This trial drug was manufactured by a genetically engineered yeast that expressed the Hepatitis B core protein, so as to stimulate the immune system to produce the required core antigens - exactly like a vaccine. I had one immunologist clearly tell me at the start of the trial that he didn’t think that the approach would work, so I shouldn’t get too excited. From the results after 18 months of treatments, there was a suitable immunological response, but not one that was sufficiently large enough or remained long enough to produce a cure.
So I joined a new trial. In this trial, we were not only given the vaccine, but also an immune system modulator to extend the time the T-cells expressing the core antigen were active (PD-1 modulation).
And it worked for me. I had a flare in my liver enzymes that could have been an autoimmune hepatitis from the PD-1 modulator, but it wasn’t - it was all the infected liver cells dying as my now supercharged immune system cleared the virus, and I was eventually discharged, free of Hepatitis B.
But I was the only subject in that phase of the trial to have that response.
Was my immune system stronger at that time than the other subjects - I doubt it.
Did the PD-1 modulator tweak my immune system just in the right way - maybe.
I don’t know. What I do know is that I had an immune system that went from not handling a particular pathogen as a child, to fighting a holding action for 40 years, to (with a couple of nudges in the right direction) kicking that pathogen to the curb in a medically unique way.
I don’t think the trial researchers know (yet). I let them take all the data they needed (blood mostly - so many tubes of blood).
I know they are still running trials to discover better ways of using those tools to get better and more consistent results so they can develop something that cures a disease, and not just contains it.
So I think the fact is that at any one time, you might have the worlds strongest immune system against a particular pathogen. You might even be exposed to that pathogen.
But yesterday, tomorrow, next week - it’s a different story.