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LEARNING ABOUT IMMUNITY

admin — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:44:05 +0000

Immunity means the being free from the effects of something and, as generally used in medicine, this is freedom from infection by disease. The methods, with which the body works to accomplish this, affect other situations.
There is no doubt that many aspects of immunity are not understood by scientists; one well-known authority, in fact, says that our understanding of these matters is but that of children. It is self-evident that the writer of the treatise which you are reading cannot assimilate all the large amount of knowledge that these scientists have accumulated. By a sort of law of diminishing returns what is handed over to and taken in by you is bound to be sketchy, but it is believed and hoped that what you see as in a glass darkly is merely indistinct and not distorted.
Undoubtedly all persons are born with some, but varying, degrees of immunity to different diseases. For thousands of years their ancestors had been fighting disease in the body and if they had not developed an immunity they would have ceased to exist. This is called an inherent, or natural, immunity.
Then they acquire immunity in various ways. First is that which the mother passes on through the placenta. Thus measles, diphtheria, and chicken pox do not affect infants in the first few months of life. Their bodies are not making this immunity; it has been loaned to them by their mothers, and after a bit it disappears. This is called passive immunity. Other special immunities the mothers do not seem to pass on. It is notorious that infants do not get immunity to whooping cough.
Immunity refers to the ability which an individual possesses or acquires to resist or overcome infection. The body functions in several ways to secure the individual against invading bacteria. The blood carries with it at all times substances and special cells which help to combat bacteria and their poisons (toxins). If certain toxin-producing bacteria gain a foothold somewhere in the body and secrete their poison into the tissues, these poisons are absorbed and disseminated, by the blood and lymph, to bring death and destruction to certain body tissue cells; however, just as soon as this course of events begins, many factors operate to combat the invasion. The white cells gather about the invading bacteria and engulf and destroy them; in addition certain cells in the body respond to the toxin-producing bacteria (antigen) by producing antibodies which act in several ways to defend the body.
One kind of antibody (opsonin) affects bacteria in such a way that they are more readily picked up and destroyed by the white cells of the blood; another kind (antitoxin) neutralizes the specific kind of poison produced by the bacteria quite as an acid is neutralized by a base. A third kind of antibody (agglutinin) immobilizes the bacteria cells and clumps them so that they are more readily removed by the white cells. These substances and other antibodies are produced only when a foreign protein substance, as occurs in viruses, bacteria, and their toxins, gains entrance to the body.
The details of the ensuing skirmish or possibly great battle are complex. If the poison or bacteria win, the war is ended for that body. Fortunately most of us win innumerable skirmishes. These fighters which we enlist at short notice are so highly specialized that it will be necessary at this point to abandon the metaphor about a defending army. If a body is attacked by measles, the “antibodies,” as we call the resisting force, are of no value against pneumonia. Each kind of antibody defends against only one disease. But what a job some of them do in their narrow special line! You all know that there are a number of diseases, one attack of which gives immunity for life.
The enormous amount of antibodies that may be poured out in response to the poison of an infection is demonstrated in diphtheria. This was a terrific scourge a generation or so ago. Diphtheria localized itself on mucous membranes, usually in the throat, where a membrane formed; but it also produced a highly poisonous substance known as diphtheria toxin which circulated through the body. The antitoxin to combat it was obtained by injecting toxin into a horse; first a very small amount which the horse could stand. This dose was slowly increased until in six months the horse could take one thousand times the amount of toxin which would have killed him in the beginning. Then the antitoxin obtained from him, when injected into a child, proved a successful protection.
Years ago, when typhoid was still common, a friend of mine had an attack. Recently she planned to travel in Europe and she consulted me. Would her previous attack of typhoid make her immune to it? It has been generally understood that people did not have second attacks of certain diseases such as typhoid, smallpox, and measles. These surely did give long-lasting immunity. But now it has been found that second attacks may occur as the immunity weakens with time.
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IMMUNITY AND VACCINATION

admin — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 08:47:05 +0000

In the eighteenth century people deliberately caught smallpox from mild cases. It was a dangerous practice, for there was far from a certainty that a severe case would not result.
Then Edward Jenner in the last years of the eighteenth century investigated the belief, popular in the English countryside that an attack of cowpox protected from smallpox. He took matter from the hand of a dairy maid with cowpox and inoculated a small boy. Two months later he took matter from a smallpox pustule and put it into the same boy, who did not get the disease, thus demonstrating his immunity. Innumerable observations have proven to all logical minds that vaccination is an almost certain preventative of smallpox.
In my youth on Cape Cod pock-marked faces were not uncommon. A good-looking girl in my high-school class went to Boston and there got smallpox. She was no longer good looking. But today there is not much smallpox around and vaccination is going out of fashion. The immunity will drop way down in the population and some day smallpox, which has been building up its strength, may sneak up on us. We will be smart if we do not give up the habit of being vaccinated against smallpox.
Today we are finding that the heathen, dwelling in far parts of the earth where there is little hygiene and many infections, are doing better than we fortunate ones as regards poliomyelitis. It is now believed that it may be a common infection. We who keep fairly free of infection do not develop much immunity to it. The heathen are not much bothered with it for they have all had enough attacks to produce an immunity; but when we get an attack, we may be seriously stricken. Our extreme susceptibility makes a polio vaccine a dangerous thing.
The difficulties with the Salk vaccine rather parallel what occurred with Jenner’s smallpox vaccine about 1800. The best physicians were slow to accept vaccination until it had given evidence of its worth. It took some time for them to learn just how to handle it and there were a good many bad side results, such as septicemia and syphilis. Such great changes in medicine should be handled slowly and carefully. The first Salk vaccine caused deaths in California and Idaho because the government tests had not been perfected enough to make sure that there was no live virus in the first vaccine. This is no criticism of the ultimate worth of the vaccine but of the hurried way in which it was introduced.
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IMMUNITY AND INFECTION

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 08:45:05 +0000

Pain, rest, and inflammation, then, are protective devices, guarding our bodies against injuries. It seems certain that the greatest injuries sustained are the results of infection. Our chief infections are from bacteria, animal parasites, and viruses.
Probably most of you think of bacteria as little “bugs” causing disease. You are mostly wrong. In the first place they are plants; and secondly, the different kinds of bacteria in the world are as the sands of the sea, and only a few kinds cause disease. The others have useful jobs and animal life could not exist without them.
Somewhere about the time of our Civil War, Louis Pasteur, a French chemist, showed that fermentation and putrefaction always were caused by living organisms. If I remember rightly, the first disease that he showed to be produced in this way was a blight attacking silk worms. Quickly after that, many diseases attacking human beings were shown to be due to bacteria, a particular kind producing each disease.
These latter bacteria are called pathogenic, which means disease producing and they attack only living tissue. They have been well advertised. Probably less well known to you are the saprophytic, which work only on dead organic matter, that is, plants and animals, and break it up. If it were not for them, the whole world would soon be buried in dead matter.
Innumerable are the good deeds done by bacteria. Collecting nitrogen is one of the chief of these. The animal body is largely protein, and the distinctive thing about protein is that it contains nitrogen. The supplies of nitrogen on the earth are limited but the air is mostly nitrogen. Certain bacteria collect this air nitrogen for the plants and then it comes automatically to us.
Even in the body there are many bacteria that do us no harm but are actually necessary for our health. One of the bad things about the modern antibiotic treatment is that not only the disease-producing bacteria are killed off but also the helpful ones suffer at times the same fate with bad results for us. One unfortunate fellow that I know was given penicillin and for some weeks was miserable with a sore throat and cough. After a heavy steel instrument was put through his mouth and throat and a piece cut out of a vocal cord, it was found that, the normal bacteria having been killed off, the yeast took that opportunity to grow in abundance and irritate him.
So you see that you must be careful how you condemn and chastise whole groups, either of people or bacteria.
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HOW YOU MIGHT HELP TURN OFF DRUG ABUSE

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 08:44:05 +0000

When you first think about it, it looks hopeless: 50 million Americans snorting, popping, smoking, and injecting powerful mind- and mood-changing drugs.
Many of them are your children. Many of them are hooked.
Until recently and for more than two decades, Americans – particularly young people – have “turned on” in increasing numbers to illegal substances. The drugs include marijuana, cocaine, heroin, amphetamines, barbiturates, tranquilizers, hallucinogens, and legal substances like alcohol and tobacco.
By any medical standard, this widespread abuse is an epidemic. And for a while it looked unstoppable as drug abuse spread from person to person. Friend turned on friend to drugs; brother turned on brother; and often, unwittingly, parents introduced their children to drugs.
We are still a nation deeply dependent on chemicals to make ourselves feel better emotionally. Among our young people between the ages of 12 and 17, about one in three plays around with these substances in any month. One in three used alcohol, and one in eight has tried marijuana, or “pot.” The use of both substances is illegal for this age group.
Illicit drug use is so widespread that it hits every American in unexpected ways. Two of my very best friends each have lost a son to drug overdose. The family was devastated, as were their circle of friends. For those of us touched in this way, we cannot imagine what “went wrong.”
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, widespread drug use by Americans has exacted an annual cost of at least 100 billion dollars in criminal activity, medical and legal services, and lost productivity. Officials at the Drug Enforcement Administration have estimated that by 1980 we had spawned a 70 billion dollars- a-year illegal industry with wads of cash to bribe and subvert local and state officials.
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HOSTILITY AS DEADLY EMOTION TEST STEPS TO ACQUIRE FEELING OF TRUST

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 08:43:05 +0000

Do You Have a Hostile Heart?
It takes a long, probing examination to determine whether you are a hostile person (people do hide such truths, from others and themselves), but Dr. Redford Williams of Duke University has three questions that will raise a warning flag for you. In edited form, they are given here. Circle the word that best describes your behavior:
1. When anybody slows down or stops what I want to do, I think they are selfish, mean, and inconsiderate.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___

2. When anybody does something that seems incompetent, messy, selfish, or inconsiderate to me, I quickly feel angry or enraged. At the same time, my heart races, my breath comes quickly, and my palms sweat.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___

3. When I have such thoughts or feelings, I let fly with words, gestures, a raised voice, and frowns.
Never___ Sometimes___
Often___ Always___
If you answer “often” or “always” to two of these questions, you are in a high-risk group. You have a hostile heart.

How to Have a Trusting Heart
The key to reducing hostility may be a trusting heart, says Dr. Redford Williams.
Hostility begins when you mistrust others. Dr. Williams suggests these 12 steps for acquiring such feelings of trust:
1. Monitor your cynical thoughts by recognizing them.
2. Confess your hostility and seek support for change.
3. Stop cynical thought.
4. Reason with yourself.
5. Put yourself in the other person’s shoes.
6. Laugh at yourself.
7. Practice relaxing.
8. Try trusting others.
9. Force yourself to listen more.
10. Substitute assertiveness (firmness) for aggression.
11. Pretend today is your last day.
12. Practice forgiveness.
If you cannot do it on your own, seek help from a psychologist, psychiatrist, or member of the clergy.
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GENERAL PROTECTIVE MEASURES AGAINST TOXIC ENVIRONMENT

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:42:05 +0000

The protective measures suggested so far in this section are for specific poisons and toxic or harmful substances in your environment. When you know that you are, or will be, subjected to these specific poisons or health-destroying influences, the suggested measures can help you to protect your health against their damaging effect. The information on these specific, harmless vitamin and food substances that you can use to minimize or neutralize the effect of poisons in your environment, can be of great value if you are subjected, or expect to be subjected, to these specific sources of toxic or health-damaging assault.
But the most serious problem, for most of us, most of the time, is not the isolated poisons but the continuous total toxic assault from all directions. We are all subjected to radioactive substances and hundreds of poisons and toxic chemicals every day of our lives. The air we breath, the foods we eat, the water we drink – even the clothes we wear and the beds we sleep on – all are filled with poisons that none of us can possibly avoid. Even those who most conscientiously and meticulously attempt to live poison-free lives and eat only organically grown foods, are nevertheless subjected to many poisons. Even organically grown foods are grown in polluted air and are watered with polluted, chemicalized water. And the air, just about anywhere in the United States, is now seriously contaminated.
We can also be sure that the poisons in our environment are here to stay for a long time. Even if not a speck of new pollutants were added to our soil, air or water beginning from today, the existing pollutants would be here for decades to come, some for centuries.
Therefore, those of us who are aware of the graveness of the situation, should make an everyday effort to do everything there possibly can be done to protect us against the killing environmental poisons, which none of us can actually avoid.

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DEADLY EMOTIONS HOSTILITY AND ITS STAGES

admin — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:41:05 +0000

Dr. Williams says hostility has three stages, and he gives this example: You are in an express line at the supermarket checkout with a sign saying, “No more than 10 items.”
Stage 1: You distrust others. You count the items in the baskets of the people in front of you. You expect somebody to cheat and thereby take advantage of you.
Stage 2: You feel angry when you find somebody cheating. The guy in front of you has 12 items.
Stage 3: You show the anger by saying something nasty to the “cheater.”
According to Dr. Williams, all three stages can damage you. In one study, high levels of hostility found in healthy men at age 25 were seen as predictors that they were up to seven times more likely to get heart disease or die by age 50.
In another test, young men with and without high hostility levels worked on a complex mental task. Blood pressure in both groups rose at about the same rate. At one point, a psychologist began to harass the test takers. In the non-hostile men, blood pressure remained steady. In the hostile men, however, the pressure went through the roof.
Other studies show that hostility can spur the release of a hormone called epinephrine, which makes your heart beat fast and your blood pressure rise. High blood pressure leads to damaged arteries and heart attack.
Dr. Williams says those who cynically mistrust other people are most at risk. Dr. Friedman says hostility comes from unbridled greed, low self-esteem, or insecurity – feelings that you will be hurt, might fail, or won’t be loved. Whatever its source, doctors agree that hostility is a factor in heart attack.
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DEADLY EMOTIONS CAN SHORTEN YOUR LIFE

admin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 08:40:05 +0000

We all know the type-the person who stands at the elevator door and jabs at the button three, four, even five times when the car fails to arrive quickly enough. In conversation, this individual finishes your sentences for you or glances constantly at the time. People like this feel that they’ve got the world to conquer. And you’re very cautious about what you do or say with them, because they can ignite like firecrackers into anger.
Thirty years ago, scientists first identified such individuals as exhibiting “Type A” behavior: in a hurry, impatient, often angry. They also found persons with “Type B” behavior: laid-back, calm, slow to anger, good listeners.
The researchers found that Type A’s more often fell victim to heart attacks; Type B’s less so. But the researchers could not figure out how the personality connected with biology. What was there about Type A behavior that killed you? They had no answer, then.
“We have strong evidence now that hostility alone damages the heart,” says Dr. Redford Williams. One of the researchers who helped pinpoint the destructive effects of hatred, Dr. Williams is a professor of psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.
“It isn’t the impatience, the ambition, or the work drive,” Dr. Williams says. “It’s the anger. It sends your blood pressure skyrocketing. It provokes your body to create unhealthy chemicals. For hostile people, anger is a poison.”
Psychologists and psychiatrists have always told their patients to “let anger out” because, they said, if you hold it in, you can become depressed or develop ulcers. Dr. Williams gives quite another prescription: Avoid feeling angry in the first place, and you won’t need to suppress your anger.
Bruce T. Bowling, publisher of Fire-house magazine in New York City, clearly exhibited Type A behavior.
“I couldn’t catch up,” Mr. Bowling says. “I’d walk into my house, the Chinese food in one hand, mail in the other, scanning it as I went to the bathroom. I felt if I could do four things at the same time, I’d save time.”
Mr. Bowling meted out large doses of hostility to those around him. “Waitresses were never fast enough,” he says. “Taxi drivers drove me crazy. I would purposely under-tip them. New York City, I used to think, will do me in.”
In 1988, all his hostility took its toll. Just back from a firefighters’ convention, Mr. Bowling felt the classic pains in his shoulders, arms, and neck. At the hospital emergency room at 3 A.M., they told him: heart attack. He was lucky. He survived. Each year, half a million Americans don’t.
Dr. Meyer Friedman is a cardiologist at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco and one of the co-discoverers of Type A behavior. He contends that hostility, impatience, and anger powerfully affect your body. Dr. Williams, on the other hand, says you can be impatient with impunity, so long as it doesn’t lead to anger. It’s the anger that gets you. The issue is not settled, but more and more experts agree that both anger and hostility can be hazardous to your health.
Originally, Dr. Friedman and his collaborator, Dr. Ray Rosenman, identified three parts of the Type A behavior:
1. Intense striving toward many poorly defined goals
2. Preoccupation with time and an obsession with getting things done faster
3. Free-floating hostility
To be hostile means that you want to hurt or punish somebody. Anger, Dr. Friedman says, can be the same thing or less – a feeling of displeasure toward yourself. Both hostility and anger rile your heart and body. To have “free-floating hostility” means that you are angry, or on the point of anger, much of the time, with or without major cause.
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BACTERIA AS A CAUSE OF INFECTION

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:49:05 +0000

The disease-producing bacteria are not as the sea sands, but I think that almost everybody will agree that there are too many of them. It would be futile to try even to mention them all. My medical dictionary takes about four pages to list them. What I should say are the most common, or at least best-known, ones are the staphylococci and streptococci. The first are so called because they are found in clusters like bunches of grapes; and the second, in strings. As a working rule the first may be expected to form local lesions such as abscesses, and the second are more likely to spread rapidly. This distinction is not to be relied upon, however; any of them may run wild at times. If we see pus collecting about a fingernail we presume that it is due to staphylococci. If a surgeon pricks his finger with a needle while operating and a few hours later little or nothing is to be seen where the needle point went in, but red streaks are running up his arm and tender swellings are to be felt at his elbow or armpit, we fear that he has streptococci infection. The red streaks are due to infection and inflammation along the lymphatic vessels and the tender lumps are the lymph nodes attempting to stop the infection there. The first abscess may be opened and pus freed, with relief. Surgery will probably accomplish nothing in the latter case.
But all the infectious organisms have their own characteristic ways of attacking us. Typhoid goes at our intestines; pneumococci usually settle in the lungs; and diphtheria causes a membrane to form in the throat. All these villains cause acute conditions, but others, such as tuberculosis or syphilis, go slowly about their evil ways. We may not even know when they first attack us, but later, when fully established, they reveal themselves as difficult or even impossible to banish.
Nowadays these diseases are treated often with considerable efficiency; and many of the treaters talk much of curing them, for probably the most popular idea about overcoming infection in the human body is that the giving of some medicine will kill the infection. If there are potato bugs on your vines you sprinkle on Paris green and this kills the bugs. If there is infection in the human body you give medicine and this kills the bacteria. There are many troubles about this latter procedure.
Medicines which are supposed to kill off bacteria often do not do too much good to the life of the body. Many diseases are insidious in onset and do much harm before we realize what we are fighting. There are many bacteria and they do not all respond to the same antibiotics. Even different strains of the same kind of bacteria are affected by different antibiotics. Now we are finding out that the bacteria are learning how to resist the antibiotics and we are not always so successful in killing them off as at first.
It is not at all certain that any of these wonder drugs kill off infection by hitting the bugs on the head, as it were. The forces of the body itself probably do the actual destruction. According to this theory, all that penicillin does to the streptococci is to make them more digestible so that the body devours them more successfully. The best chance for man to survive disease is to have an immunity. We are not so smart as we thought we were in licking disease after it has been established in our bodies.
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WILD FRUITS AND BERRIES SEA BUCKTHORN HIPPOPHAE RHAMNOIDES INTRODUCTION

admin — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 08:46:27 +0000

There is hardly another shrub with edible berries that is so widely distributed as sea buckthorn. It can be found growing from the north of Portugal to the Pyrenees, across the Alps, then south in the Balkans, over in Turkey, and to the east in central Russia, Mongolia, Korea and Japan. If all the berries could be gathered and processed, they would be more than enough to cater for the vitamin ? requirement of all humankind.
Once our bodies have become deficient in vitamin C, we are much more liable to succumb to infectious diseases. That is why we should see to it that the deficiency is rectified, especially in springtime. Although barberrry and rose hip purees no doubt play an important part in correcting vitamin ? deficiencies, sea buckthorn berries are no less valuable in terms of their extremely high content of vitamin C. During the time of year when a wide selection of fresh vegetables are difficult to obtain, or very expensive, and fruits have lost part of their vitamin content because of long storage, the need for vitamins is even greater and many people like to tide themselves over the vitamin-poor period by eating Bio-Buckthorn-Conserve.
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