T-cell differentiation
kbonham | November 17, 2011Earlier this week, I wrote a little bit about what causes allergic symptoms - your immune system confuses pollen (or some other allergen) for a worm, and then arms your granulocytic grenades to explode every time you come into contact with it. But why does this confusion happen? This is a bit more complicated.
As I mentioned in the first post, the immune system broadly speaking is geared for 3 types of infections:
1) Intracellular - these pathogens (all viruses and some bacteria like Listeria) live most or all of their life inside our own cells. In order to deal with them, the immune system…