Immune System

The immune system, with its innate part, constitutes our first line of Defense. Thus, our natural barriers and nonspecific mechanisms are responsible for stopping attackers seeking to invade our bodies. The skin and mucous membranes constitute the first barriers that the invaders should be overcome by attempting to enter. But within these structures there are also ancestral mechanisms that are responsible for eliminating pathogens, and that act as antibacterial natural. Even so, large numbers of microorganisms are able to finally penetrate the body and are capable of causing disease. Most of the time however, a competent immune system is capable of eliminating these incursions.

In cases in which our immune system is unable to do so, then it is when we are in trouble. Previously the result was almost always the same: death. However, since the discovery of penicillin in 1942, we were able to kill the microorganisms using exogenous substances. The advent of penicillin has allowed humans to succeed will survive infections than previously they were deadly by necessity in the majority of cases. However, the use of antibiotics has brought with it another serious problem for us: resistance to antibiotics. This phenomenon is given when some microorganisms survive antibiotics.

These survivors develop genetic mutations that allow them to evade the effect of antibiotics. What is serious is that this information may be shared with other microorganisms, even of different species, which allows antibiotic resistance appear among previously susceptible microorganisms. You must consider the indiscriminate use of antibiotics and fact that increasingly arise new antibiotics that seek to use new mechanisms of action, in order to avoid the phenomenon of resistance. So increasingly more and more in the world are finding strains of microorganisms that are now resistant to antibiotics that were previously considered first line. It comes even that at present there are already some microorganisms that are resistant to all antibiotics existing. Now, contrary to the popular belief that are antibiotics which kill the microorganisms, in reality is our own immune system which is responsible for deleting them. Thus, after a cycle of antimicrobials, what we actually do is reduce the bacterial load enough so that our immune system can kill the ones who left. This is how our immune system also becomes the last line of Defense. Before this, the question arises: would it not be perhaps better to try to boost the immune response rather than seeking new antibiotics? But is there any way to boost our immune response?