Infection and Immunity Terms
Infectious agents, immune responses, vaccines, inflammation, and immune disorders. Browse definitions and meanings below.
What is immunity?
Immunity is the body's ability to resist or limit infection. It combines a fast, general response that treats most invaders alike with a slower, specific response that learns to recognize a particular pathogen and remembers it.
The vocabulary distinguishes things that are easily blurred. Infection means a pathogen has established itself, while disease means it is causing harm, and the two do not always occur together.
Terms in this topic
Alphabetical order-
The wall that keeps the infection contained also keeps antibiotics out, which is why most abscesses are settled by drainage rather than by medication alone.
-
Named for the tonsil like tissue it was first pulled from, this virus family now doubles as a delivery vehicle for engineered genes.
-
Living with HIV and having AIDS are not the same thing, and with effective treatment most people never reach the second.
-
Something harmless in itself that a particular immune system has learned to treat as a threat.
-
A hypersensitive immune reaction to a substance that normally is harmless or would not cause an immune response in most people.
-
A variant spelling of a transplant term, describing tissue from another person and therefore tissue the immune system can tell apart.
-
Anaphylactic shock is a severe, rapidly developing allergic reaction that can cause airway swelling, a sharp blood pressure drop, and circulatory collapse.
-
A vaccine made of antibodies that see other antibodies as the antigen and bind to it.
-
Five classes exist, and which one is present says a good deal about where an immune response is and how old it is.
-
A type of immune reaction in which a target cell or microbe is coated with antibodies and killed by certain types of white blood cells.
-
The immune system's way of using antibodies as handles, letting killer cells grip a marked target and destroy it.
-
An antigen is any substance the immune system recognizes as foreign, prompting it to mount a targeted immune response, including antibody production.
-
Cells that decide whether an immune response begins, by carrying a fragment of an intruder to a lymph node for T cells to inspect.
-
A vaccine made of antigens and antigen-presenting cells (APCs).
-
A vaccine made of antigens and antigen-presenting cells (APCs).
-
Nearly everyone inhales its spores daily, and whether anything follows depends almost entirely on the state of the person breathing them in.
-
A rare, inherited, progressive, degenerative disease of childhood that causes loss of muscle control, a weakened immune system, and an increased risk of cancer.
-
A type of laboratory mouse that is hairless, lacks a normal thymus gland, and has a defective immune system because of a genetic mutation.
-
An aggressive (fast-growing) type of T-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma caused by the human T-cell leukemia virus type 1 (HTLV-1).
-
Weakened deliberately: an organism bred until it can no longer cause illness but still looks threatening enough to train the body's defenses.