• Question: after you catch a disease your immune system improves so to treat this disease more quickly. but is there a way to improve the immune system before you catch the disease?

    Asked by sloth-savior to Aaron, David, Elaine, Sarah, Zoe on 17 Nov 2014.
    • Photo: David Foley

      David Foley answered on 17 Nov 2014:

      The best example of exactly that is vaccination – which stimulates your immune system by “feeding” it examples of either parts of a virus or a dead virus so that it more quickly recognises a live one in the case of infection.

      Besides this, there is ongoing research into drugs that can stimulate the immune system to fight cancer. This is because cancers manage to evade and even harness the immune system to allow it to grow into a tumour. However, I am not aware of any drugs on the market that work in this way… yet.

    • Photo: Zoe Roberts

      Zoe Roberts answered on 18 Nov 2014:

      This is more or less what a vaccination does. You inject a little bit of the virus into your body which triggers your immune system to make antibodies to fight against the virus but there is not enough of the virus to make you ill. This means that if you come into contact with the virus again then you have a ‘head start’ in fighting it off as your body already has some antibodies ready to fight against it.

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