Immunity And Vaccination Flashcards
What is active immunity
This is the type of immunity you get when your immune system makes its own antibodies after being stimulated by an antigen.
what are the two different types of active immunity
Natural, this is when you become immune after catching a disease
Artificial - this is when you become immune after you’ve been given a vaccination containing a harmless dose of antigen
What is passive immunity
This is the type of immunity you get from being given antibodies made by a different organism - your immune system doesn’t produce any antibodies of its own.
The two types of passive immunity
Natural - this is when a baby becomes immune due to the antibodies it receives from its mother, through the placenta and in breast milk.
Artificial - this is when you become immune after being injected with antibodies from someone else.
what is the name of a disease resulting from an abnormal immune response
Sometimes, an organism’s immune system isn’t able to recognise self-antigens the antigens present on the organism’s own cells,
When this happens, the immune system treats the self-antigens as foreign antigens and launches an immune response against the organism’s own tissues.
A disease resulting from this abnormal immune response is known as an autoimmune disease.
Can Autoimmune diseases be cured
Autoimmune diseases are usually chronic (long-term). They can often be treated, but not cured.
What is vaccine
Vaccines contain antigens that cause your body to produce memory cells against a particular pathogen. without the pathogen causing disease. This means you become immune without getting any symptoms.
Vaccines always contain antigens - these may be free or attached to a dead or attenuated (weakened) pathogen.
Sometimes booster vaccines are given later on to make sure memory cells are produced.
difference between Vaccination and immunisation.
Vaccination is not the same as immunisation. Vaccination is the administration of antigens (in a vaccine) into the body. Immunisation is the process by which you develop immunity. Vaccination causes immunisation.
How vaccines help prevent epidemics
If most people in a community are vaccinated, the disease becomes extremely rare. This means that even people who haven’t been vaccinated are unlikely to get the disease, because there’s no one to catch fever.
This is called herd immunity. It helps to prevent epidemics - mass outbreaks of disease.
Routine vaccines are offered to everybody. They include:
the MMR - protects against measles, mumps and rubella. The MMR is usually given to children as an injection at around a year old, and again before they start school. It contains attenuated measles, mumps and rubella viruses.
• the Meningitis C vaccine - protects against the bacteria that cause Meningitis C. It is first given as an injection to babies at 3 months. Boosters are then given to 1-year-olds and teenagers.
Explain why a new influenza vaccine is made every year.
influenza (flu) vaccine changes every year, That’s because the antigens on the surface of the influenza virus change regularly, forming new strains of the virus.
Memory cells produced from vaccination with one strain of the flu will not recognise other strains with different antigens. The strains are immunologically distinct so Every year there are different strains of the influenza virus circulating in the population, so a different vaccine has to be made.
