Problem and Solution, featuring the Immune system.

     You’re out playing with your friends, when you trip and scrape a hand or a knee and it starts to bleed. You go home and clean it, then put a bandage with some neosporin over the cut. Now it's time for your immune system to go to work. 

You just cut your knee or hand, and now bacteria is in your bloodstream. The bacteria starts to attack cells and parts of your body. This is a problem because your cells have jobs to do, and if they can’t do their jobs, things can get out of hand. Your body’s solution to this is to activate one of your immune systems, the innate immune system. The innate immune system is a network of defenses and attacks. These only attack to keep out anything bad. Things like sneezing and coughing along with some white blood cells are all meant for this purpose. The white blood cells are Neutrophils, Monocytes, Basophils, Eosinophil, and small amounts of NK cells (natural killer cells). These are most of the things in the innate immune system. So when the innate system is activated (almost instantly), the Neutrophils come and start fighting all the invasive bacteria. Then the rest of the cells and defenses are activated and put to use. Eventually, your body fights off all the bacteria.    

    Bacteria keeps coming in, spread through your bloodstream, and hurting your body! Don’t fear the Platelets are here! The platelets are small cells that clog blood flow and create scabs. What happens is when the cut first opens the platelets clot the cut so you lose less blood. Then the innate immune system starts to do its work clearing out all the bad stuff. The platelets start making a cell-by-cell cover or shell over the opening. By the time it has started you probably have put the bandage on with neosopheren. The neosopheren helps the platelets by killing the surrounding bacteria on the skin, so the scab forms faster. Which means no more bacteria is entering the bloodstream! 

                          

But what happens when a virus enters the bloodstream? Viruses are sneaky and can bypass Neutrophils and the innate immune system. When this happens they hide and multiply. Then when the virus is developed enough it comes out. This is when they start fighting the adaptive immune system. This system has specialized attacks, and adapt to the type of virus. B-cells or (B-Lymphocyte) produce things, called antibodies. B-cells get memories from viruses and create antibodies faster or time. Antibodies are a specialized type of protein.  Antibodies can do two things, they can get rid of the virus altogether or they latch on and make a target on the virus particles. The target they create tells the T-cells (T-Lymphocyte) and some of the innate immune system cells to attack the particle they’re on. The adaptive immune system has T-cells and B-cells, they are trained to do what they do. But T-cells and B-cells don’t go in fighting immediately. T-cells wait and see how to fight and B-cells create the right antibodies. 

This why there’s the innate immune system and why the Neutrophils come to the battle first. The adaptive immune system gets help from the innate immune system cells and takes time to come up with the right solutions. Together the immune systems can solve any invasion!

Bibliography:

Newsela | Immune cells work overtime to protect against illness. (2017, April 4). Newsela.com. https://newsela.com/read/lib-convo-how-immune-system-works/id/28392/?collection_id=2000000192

The Immune System and Primary Immunodeficiency | Immune Deficiency Foundation. (2016). Primaryimmune.org. https://primaryimmune.org/immune-system-and-primary-immunodeficiency

Humphrey, J. (2001, February 16). immune system | Description, Function, & Facts. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/immune-system#ref215534

Kim Ann Zimmermann. (2018b, October 17). Immune System: Diseases, Disorders & Function. Live Science; Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/26579-immune-system.html

Images:

Blood cell diagram: Quizzlet.com