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Vaccines Teach Your Immune System to Fight Disease

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Vaccines: Teach Your Immune System to Fight Disease Novartis AG/Flickr

Did you get a flu shot? Is your tetanus shot up to date? Did you ever have chickenpox? If so, you might want to get vaccinated against shingles.

Vaccines are a common part of the modern medical arsenal to help keep us healthy. But you might be surprised to know that the earliest attempts at vaccination took place way back in the 1100s as doctors tried to find a way to protect children from smallpox.

Vaccination has come a long way since then, with strict standards to ensure the safety and purity of vaccines. But the basic theory behind vaccinations remains the same — safely convincing your body that it had a disease to make sure it can defend itself when the real thing comes along.

How the Immune System Works

The human immune system acts like a trained army to recognizes foreign or dangerous microbes, isolate them from healthy cells, and then destroy them before they can do more damage.

Each foreign microbe that can make you sick has a special pattern of molecules on its surface that can be recognized by the body’s immune system. To simplify this idea, you might think of microbes like a child’s ball covered with bumps.

One kind of microbe might have square bumps, another pyramid triangles, and another a combination of ovals and rectangles. The exact pattern for a particular kind of microbe is known as its antigen.

When your immune system encounters a new microbe, it has to figure out how to create a pattern that matches the antigen. The matching cell is called an antibody.

When an antibody finds the microbe it matches, it can lock onto the microbe and block the microbe from spreading. It also produces new cells that create many more matching antibodies to track down and block all the other matching microbes in your body to stop the infection.

The first time your body is attacked by a particular microbe, it doesn’t have a matching pattern of antibodies ready to fight back. This means the infection has more time to spread and make you sick.

Once the body creates an antibody to fight a particular disease, it saves a memory of the antigen pattern. This allows the body to quickly create an army of antibodies if that microbe comes back, so it can respond to a future threat of infection much more quickly.

How Vaccines Work

Vaccines are made from the actual microbes for a particular disease. Depending on the type of vaccine, the microbes may be dead, or may be severely weakened so they cannot reproduce well or make you sick.

Vaccines take advantage of the immune system’s ability to recognize foreign cells and remember their pattern or antigen.

When the vaccine is injected into your body, your immune system recognizes the foreign pattern on the microbes and quickly creates antibodies with the matching pattern. These antibodies destroy the weakened microbes in the vaccine, then save the pattern in case it is needed in the future.

In essence, the dead microbes in the vaccine teach your immune system to recognize the disease and be prepared to quickly defend against a future infection.

Adult Vaccines

You may be thinking that as an adult, you don’t need to worry about vaccines anymore. For some conditions, that may be true. A single vaccination early in life may be enough to protect you from that disease — assuming you know without any doubt that you actually got that vaccine.

Medical research continues to produce new vaccines, as well as improvements on the vaccines you may have received as a child. Research has also shown that the immunity from some vaccines, like the tetanus shot, may decline over time.

If you have any questions about vaccinations, or whether you need to be vaccinated, talk to your health care provider.

Sources:

Immunization Action Coalition. Vaccine Timeline. Web. July 31, 2015.
http://www.immunize.org/timeline

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. How Vaccines Work. Web. July 31, 2015.
http://www.niaid.nih.gov/topics/vaccines/understanding/pages/howwork.aspx

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Immunization Schedules for Adults in Easy-to-read Formats. Web. July 31, 2015.
http://www.cdc.gov/vaccines/schedules/easy-to-read/adult.html#vaccines

Reviewed August 4, 2015
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith

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EmpowHER Guest
Anonymous

OR.... being invaded by multiple viruses at once could actually overwhelm your immune system and cause chronic autoimmune issues, seizures, or brain damage. Before you get a vaccine, educate yourself and red the FULL vaccine inserts to know what you are getting yourself into. Vaccines are a pharmaceutical drug that has been put on a pedestal for too long. The only thing you hear about vaccines are the positives, because pharmaceutical companies spend billions of dollars on their marketing.

February 2, 2016 - 6:00pm
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We value and respect our HERWriters' experiences, but everyone is different. Many of our writers are speaking from personal experience, and what's worked for them may not work for you. Their articles are not a substitute for medical advice, although we hope you can gain knowledge from their insight.

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