Why doesn’t illness start a cycle of illness that ends in death?
I am recovering from a head cold. In misery I wondered why my weakened immune system wasn’t attacked by some other virus or disease? With my immune system geared up to fight a particular cold virus, another virus would have an easier time invading while my immune system was busy?
The Immune System Explained I – Bacteria Infection - YouTube Video by Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
They have other video’s on the topic which may explain!
Well, first you have to be exposed to that new virus. Second, your immune system isn’t “weakened” while it is fighting a virus, with a limited number of immune response cells that are depleted by fighting the virus. One cell finds a solution to fighting the virus, that one cell is then mass-produced. If a new virus shows up, another individual cell finds the new solution and is then mass-produced. The real risk is when a virus comes along that targets the immune response cells themselves, such as HIV/AIDS. Those are the viruses that leave you at the mercy of whatever sniffle shows up that would normally be fought off.
It’s in the evolutionary interest of viruses (virii?) to not kill you, or do things that will make you more likely to die, as they need you alive in order to produce more viruses.
it can if your immune system isn’t functioning properly e.g. advanced HIV/AIDS, or if you’re on post-transplant immunosuppressants.
like Darren Garrison says, a cold (caused by a rhinovirus) doesn’t “weaken” your immune system. in fact, the miserable symptoms of a cold are caused almost entirely by your body’s immune response; most cold-causing rhinoviruses are more or less harmless. all they do is trigger a reaction which inflames your upper respiratory system; as far as viruses go it’s basically a troll*.
should another infection take hold, your immune system will identify it and generate antibodies to fight that as well. again, so long as you’re not immunocompromised.
Ohhhh! Got it! Thank you. That makes so much sense.
Yes, it’s often the attempts by your body to fight the disease that cause your discomfort.
For example, with a cold/flu illness, there is usually fever. This is uncomfortable for you – but it is deadly to many of the germs, that have a very restricted temperature range that they can survive. So the fever kills off many of them, while t=your immune system attacks the others.
(Which is why doctors often aren’t concerned about your fever, unless it gets too high. One old home remedy for colds was to put the patient in bed with a hot water bottle & a big pile of blankets, and let them ‘sweat it out’. This could actually have some good effect.)
Interesting sidenote. My brother had german measles (Rubella) and chicken pox at the same time and a very mild case of each. Our family doctor speculated that whichever one came first had somehow supercharged his immune system. That was 60 years ago. I wonder what modern doctors would think of that explanation.
That’s called opportunistic infection. I get them whenever I have a cold, I usually get bronchitis afterwards.
If people died from every infection they had, we wouldn’t be here to discuss it. We’ve evolved to fight and survive infections.
Or recently had measles. One thing that makes measles dangerous is that it causes a sort of “amnesia” in the immune system, causing it to forget previous immune responses and leaving the person vulnerable to a severe follow up illness.
A.Vogel’s Ivy-Thyme Complex works by stimulating the lungs to produce fluid that allows one to cough up the bugs before they get a chance to cause bronchitis. It really works.
Ingredients
Ivy, Thyme, Liquorice, Aniseed, and Eucalyptus.
It’s a problem with long hospital stays; one of the reasons to try and reduce length of stay is precisely to avoid “hospital-borne illnesses”, which people get from bugs they wouldn’t have encountered at home.
But in general yeah, most of the crappy feeling is actually your immune system gearing up for D-day whether it’s actually D-day or a catfight between kindergartners.
Now, is it true that “if your immune system suddenly vanished, you’d be dead in 12 hours” or is that an old wives’ exaggeration?
Depends on what you count as the immune system. The primary defense mechanism, the most effective and most frequently used, is the skin. There’s a reason doctors wipe your skin with alcohol or iodine before piercing it for shots or stiches. There’s a reason cuts gets infected quickly if not washed. There’s a reason we often get eye infections, ear infections, and throat infections, but not elbow infections.
Once it’s past the skin, there’s no telling what can happen. I lost a friend to a simple infection that got in his blood. He left early from work at 6 pm, feeling ill. At 3am, he was rushed to the hospital. He was dead by sunrise.
It can happen even with an immune system.
Evolutionarily speaking, it’s even more advantageous for microorganisms not to make you sick at all, so they can party and reproduce without sparking an immune system riot.
The commensals have a lot to lose if a hostile invader screws things up.
Can’t it be both? :rolleyes: