allergies 101
kbonham | December 19, 2011I know this post has been a long time coming. In the first part of this series, I told you that allergies are the result of an immune response against an external, but normally not harmful substance. In part 2, I told you that allergies are the result of a specific type of immune response called "Th2," which leads to the production of IgE antibodies, and that this immune response is thought to have evolved to combat infections caused by worms. But what makes your immune system think it's supposed to be battling a worm?
The short answer to the questions is: we don't know. For other types of…
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…
kbonham | November 15, 2011One of my favorite places on the internet is r/askscience, a place on reddit where people come and ask questions, and a panel of scientists answer. People can ask follow-up questions, and there is often some great back-and forth (to be honest, part of the reason I haven't been writing as much here is because I'm using up all my time over there). Recently, an number of people have been asking questions about allergies - Can people grow out of allergies? Why is the incidence of allergies increasing? Can eating honey cure allergies?
You can check out those threads if you want answers to those…