Specific and nonspecific immunity. Enhance immunity or how to reliably protect yourself from viruses and diseases. Is there any hope of salvation from viruses and bacteria?

In this article, you want to get a little distracted from medicines and understand such concepts as specific and nonspecific immunity, as the main facets of the same process of protecting the human body from foreign viruses and bacteria. Also, let's talk about the factors that are currently contributing to the spread of new viruses and diseases (such as coronaviruses or SARS, Ebola fever and many others, including as yet unrecognized diseases). Is it possible to avoid the general infection of diseases or substantially improve the immune protection of a person from harmful infections.

What now provides the spread of new viruses, which up to this point have been marginal and were not on hearing.

First, population density. The planet is one, and the people on it every year becomes more and more. As a result, direct contact between people becomes more likely than 100-200 years ago. Hence the spread of viruses across the population is now happening faster and finding a weakened host to a malicious agent is not a problem.

Analogy can be done with a chicken coop. Suppose there is a hen house with 10 hens in the village. All is well, there are a lot of places and chicken live and do not enjoy life. Then naturally the population of hens increases and instead of 10 we have 50 hens on the same area. A diligent host builds a second coop and plants an extra litter there and thus Controls morbidity and mortality. In this plan, Planet Earth is the same huge chicken coop, only to plant an additional number of those born nowhere. Hence the disease, and mortality. To die became later, is born with each time more and more, but there is nowhere to live. Nature sends viruses to regulate the population. As if this statement did not sound anti-human, but it seems that this is happening now.

But there are poultry farms,where the chickens contain a great variety and they do not die, live and breed. And there is. Hence the second point - pharmacological provision. It's no secret that chicken is grown on an industrial scale on antibiotics, hormones and other additives and medicines. This makes it possible to preserve the population and grow birds on an industrial scale, but if the death and mass death at the poultry farm already begin, then it is almost impossible to stop this. And it happens regularly, despite the prevention and huge doses of drugs. Sterile in terms of foreign chicken agents can not cope with new diseases and viruses.

So people who have prolonged life with pharmacology have saved many diseases, but have pampered our immune system. Against new viruses, our untrained body passes and it takes time for the immune system to remember the forgotten connections in the evolution of the relationship and began actively resisting new infections.

Thus, we get both good and bad. This is a usual statement of fact. To say worse: to live and die without pills and medicines from traditional diseases or with medicines, but from new diseases,for the treatment of which there are no preparations yet - I can not say unequivocally. The truth is somewhere near and we want to believe in the global plan that humanity will find the answer to this question.

The author is a fatalist. We all die and there is no salvation?

This is a logical question that comes from my speculative conclusions above. But not everything is so simple. Any person can resist external diseases and even new viruses. To do this, we introduce the notion of immunity.

Immunity is the ability of an organism to be resistant to infections and invasions of foreign agents of the external environment, such as viruses and bacteria possessing antigenic properties. Simplified, immunity is the body's immunity to diseases.

Our immunity, if viewed in a simplified form, consists of two components - specific (immunity from specific diseases, bacteria, viruses) and nonspecific (immunity that allows a person to survive when encountering previously unknown diseases and successfully dealing with them).

At the moment, the main direction of pharmacology has become a bias toward specific immunity - mainly the development of vaccines against specific viruses and bacteria.Manufacturers create what they understand, and what can bring commercial benefits. On nonspecific immunity pay less attention and boast especially nothing - different kinds of interferons, which for some reason must be taken inside and which are destroyed in the stomach like any protein molecules, can not be taken into account, it's more like shamanism than an objective scientific approach to treatment and prevention of infections.

But even nonspecific immunity can be strengthened, for this it is necessary to make the most difficult effort for any person - to reconsider their way of life, their habitat and attitude to this environment.

It improves nonspecific immunity:

• food - sound, rational, balanced in caloric content and with a complete absence or minimum content of dyes, preservatives and other poison, rich in vitamins and dietary fiber;
• the mode of the day is the most difficult component, even I could not grind it to the ideal. Sleep at least 8 hours a day at night, meals at the set time, walk in the fresh air (smoking on the balcony is not the same,as well as breathe fresh air) - all these are simple and very difficult for modern man to create the right habitat, which make a serious contribution to the weakening or strengthening of our health;
• physical loads - metered (not rocking and other athletic issues that make people disabled), aerobic loads adequate for a particular person, with a gradual increase in loads to their personal limit.

I will not say that the fulfillment of all these principles guarantees 100% protection against morbidity, but there is no doubt that the percentage of your morbidity will be lower compared to weakened fellow citizens.

Consider an analogy with the same chicken coop. There are 5 chickens in it. 3 are practically healthy - eat well, walk a lot around the yard, are interested in cocks. One has recently suffered a serious illness, to the bowl with food to walk hard and not willingly, sits and reflects on the perch. Just like the last one, which you do not want to hang out at all, you do not want to walk, you sit in the hen house and play online games all night :) Suddenly, the owner brings a new disease to the chicken coop from the neighbor's chicken coop.Our chickens do not have specific immunity from this disease, it is at zero. But when the disease penetrates into the chicken society first of all it will devour two weakened laying hens, which are weakened one by their way of life, the other by its painful condition. Probably, healthy chicken will also fall ill, but the disease will go sluggishly and the interferons produced in the body will quickly sort out the foreign agents. And the immune system will remember the viruses that have penetrated into the body and develop stable immunity to them - it will put in its archive of diseases, in order to quickly reactivate components necessary for protection and confrontation when they meet again. It turns out that the disease will take away the initially defective units, since on a global scale, the individual person is nothing, the statistical error. It is possible that the disease will take several healthy organisms, and it's sad when it comes to a person, but their percentage compared to the sick and weakened individuals present in the population will be significantly less.

how our immunity works

So, we all die. This fact is beyond doubt. But the whole question, when it happens, today, tomorrow, in 20 years or 100.It depends entirely on the person. Many diseases can be cured, but from the many diseases, including those that will appear in the future, it is necessary to adequately conduct the person himself (to go to leper hospitals during epidemics without sufficient protective measures or hang out in places of mass gatherings of people is a crime against himself) , as well as a high level of nonspecific immunity. These two components will help to resist many diseases and viruses and be healthy for a long time, as long as the infections are dealt with weakened compatriots.

Here as in one ancient advertising sneakers: You do not run faster than a lion, but I run faster than you. Everything is also relevant to humanity. For a place under the sun it is necessary to fight. Someone is successful in business, and you are firm in protecting your health. Everything is in the hands of man. All good and health.