Immune: A journey into the system that keeps you alive - the book from KURZGESAGT IN A NUTSHELL
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Disease is an unavoidable fact of life.
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For a microorganism you are an ecosystem waiting to be conquered.
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The total surface area of your skin is about two square yards (meters) (about half the size of a pool table)
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but on average there are about 200 square yards (meters) of mucous membranes in a healthy adult (about the same as a tennis court),
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Your immune system army has already killed billions of enemies and parasites in your life, and it is ready to kill billions or trillions more.
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every second at least one million of your body cells go through some form of controlled suicide.
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Every single second, you shed around 40,000 dead skin cells.
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A healthy individual’s skin holds up to forty different bacteria species, as different areas of your skin are drastically different environments with their own specific climates and temperatures.
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The complement system is one of the oldest parts of your immune system,
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Basically the complement system is an army of over thirty different proteins (not cells!)
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about FIFTEEN QUINTILLION complement proteins are saturating every fluid of your body right now.
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Helper T Cells are able to recognize an antigen only if it is presented in an MHC class II molecule.
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Antibodies and starts to vomit them out, so they can attack your enemies—up to 2,000 per second.
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And B Cells do not need an MHC molecule, they don’t need to get a presentation from another cell like T
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So complement proteins attached to an antigen makes it about 100 times easier to activate a B Cell than it would be to activate it without the complement.
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IgA is the most abundant antibody in your body and its main job is to serve as a cleanup mechanism for your mucosa.
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Dendritic Cells sample commensals, they order the local immune system to chill out and not be too annoyed by their antigens.
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According to some estimates, a single cell infected by influenza A, is, on average, able to produce enough viruses to successfully infect twenty-two new cells before the first