Microorganisms and Diseases

Microorganisms and Diseases
Your Name
Subject and Section
Professor’s Name
November 21, 2020
1.
Immune responses against the different antigens is perhaps one of the most important defense mechanisms within our body. This is because of the fact that such foreign organisms could cause a lot of danger for the individual’s body if it spreads throughout or affects the homeostasis of other organs. However, since the immune system’s primary response may take a week or two to develop whereas secondary response is much faster there is a lingering concern about whether clones of reactive cells could be maintained regardless of prior exposure to take advantage of this quick response. Although this is feasible, increasing the variety of clones of reactive cells has more risks compared to benefits.
It must be noted that maintaining such number of clones is not feasible for the body. Each cell (including immune cells) takes up a lot energy and using all of them to prevent almost all types of sickness would increase the number of cells that demand resources. This goes the same for their creation, operation, and termination (or disposal). This means that the body would always be exhausted since it has to provide significantly higher amount of energy for these new cells. In turn, this could lead to more serious complications in the future. Nonetheless, one effective way to strengthen the body’s immune system against a variety of illnesses is balancing between its own response time against antigens and the amount of resources that it dedicates for such process. One good example of this is maintaining clones to make sure that it increases the response time without needing too much resources.
2.
Organ transplants are one of the greatest innovations in the medical field that has saved countless of lives. It is through this procedure that patients who are in dire need of organs are able to survive through the donation of another. Despite this, however, organ transplants also have a high mortality rate especially when done incorrectly. This goes the same for skin if the damage is too extensive the factors surrounding the transplantation is not carefully thought about.
In the case at hand, it could be seen that Jill rejected the graft that was made from Jack’s skin. Although there are a lot of factors that could cause this, one with the highest probability is the mismatch between the Human Lymphocyte Antigen (HLA) haplotypes between them. Technically, the match should at least be 75% since it is rare that two persons have the same exact match for the HLA haplotype. Since there is a mismatch (or high difference) between their HLA haplotypes, Jill’s graft caused what an immune reaction that is commonly known as “transplant rejection”. Particularly, it is possible that this is an allograft (different genes), which is the reason for the difference in HLA. Otherwise, it should have been an autograft and Jill’s Major Histocompatibility Molecules (MHC) shouldn’t have reacted and caused the rejection.
Nonetheless, one of the ways to resolv...