Infection and Immunity Terms

A substance from plants that is being studied together with vaccine therapy for its ability to improve the way the immune system responds to disease.

Tolerance is not the absence of an immune response but an actively maintained one, and this is the cell that maintains it.

RNA from a virus that is used to insert genetic material into cells.

An antiviral gene that is being studied in the treatment of cancer in patients who have HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Nearly every child meets it in the first years of life, and one infection gives only partial protection, so reinfection continues through adulthood.

A virus being studied in the treatment of neuroendocrine tumors and other types of cancer.

A vaccine composed of a substance that enhances immunity plus an antigen found on some tumors of the colon, breast, lung, ovary, pancreas, and stomach.

A virus that infects some types of monkeys.

Nearly every case starts as an ordinary cold, and the newer name rhinosinusitis records that the nose is inflamed too.

An immune cell such as a T or B lymphocyte that responds to a single, specific antigen.

Having to do with the spleen (an organ in the abdomen that makes immune cells, filters the blood, stores blood cells, and destroys old blood cells).

A T cell is an immune cell, matured in the thymus, that attacks infected or abnormal cells or helps direct the immune response.

White cells schooled in a gland behind the breastbone, and the reason a transplanted organ is recognized as belonging to somebody else.

The immune system's own restraint, written in shorthand: a cell whose entire purpose is stopping other cells from going too far.

Treatment to destroy T cells, which play an important role in the immune response.

A word-order variant of the same name, describing the cell that decides when an immune response has gone on long enough.

Infection and disease are not the same thing here, and most people who carry the bacteria never become ill or infectious.

A type of immune cell that can attack foreign cells, cancer cells, and cells infected with a virus.

White patches on inflamed tonsils are widely read as proof of a bacterial cause, though viruses produce them just as readily.

One of the commonest reasons for an antibiotic prescription, and a diagnosis that rests on symptoms rather than on a urine test alone.