Alas, this happy ending comes with an asterisk. The country scrambled to produce and disseminate the vaccine as quickly as possible.

Ta-da! It cut the risk of infection in half. But it was recognizable enough for the immune system to pick it up. His vaccine weakened the poliovirus with formaldehyde and mineral water. Three puzzling discoveries laid the foundation for the field of immunology.“The answer to the polio mystery, also well known, came from Jonas Salk, who was born in New York City of Russian Jewish immigrant parents and eventually was appointed director of the Virus Research Laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine (by way of New York University and Michigan). How did we beat back these pathogens? Well, you’re going to get the long answer, which is the story of the discovery of the immune system.

Compared with these earlier numbers, the current death rate is extremely low. Prior to 1900, influenza (a viral infection) and pneumonia (an inflammation that can be viral or bacterial) were major killers, responsible for more deaths out of every 100,000 patients than any other disease. coli and tetanus bacillus, while the long list of deadly viruses includes Ebola, HIV, smallpox, flu and rabies. Some other nasty bacteria include salmonella, E. It’s responsible for causing the Black Plague, which killed upward of 30 percent of Europe’s population in the fourteenth century. Just take the bacterium known as Yersinia pestis. So viruses and bacteria aren’t inherently bad – far from it. For instance, about eight percent of our genetic material was created by retroviruses, a special variety of virus that invades human cells and literally becomes part of our DNA. And as for viruses, some of them are crucial to our survival. In fact, a mere one percent of all bacteria are likely to cause illness. A few thousand would fit inside a single bacterium.īut a quick caveat: though some bacteria and viruses are pathogenic, most aren’t. You can fit a few thousand bacteria inside one human cell. In their most dangerous forms, you can think of them as tiny little killers. For the purposes of these blinks, we’ll be focusing only on the first two.

Pathogens are disease-causing agents, and they come in three main forms: bacteria, viruses and parasites. And they fight off malicious intruders known as pathogens. They attend to tissue damage and clean up toxins. This party is what the author calls the Festival of Life.Īt this festival, making sure everything runs smoothly, are janitors and handymen, security personnel and emergency responders – the cells that constitute your immune system. The merrymakers are your own cells, as well as billions of bacteria and viruses. Where is this wild, gargantuan bash with a guest list well over a hundred times larger than Earth’s human population? Imagine a huge party – a massive, rip-roaring carnival with hundreds of billions of attendees.

Matt richtel an elegant defense