Immune system and Boogers

Immune system 15/02/2010
Immune system – a system of tissues, cells and organs that help your body fight off diseases and illnesses

The immune system is something that helps protect your body by fighting off diseases and illnesses. Our body has a few systems to help fend off the germs (listed below).
These are immune systems:

• Skin – like a shield that protects your body from pathogens entering
• Mucus – traps many of the pathogens we inhale
• Stomach acids – kill the pathogens that live on the food you eat
• White blood cells (leukocytes) – patrol your body to look for pathogens, and when they find germs they kill it before it makes us sick

Although we have these systems, sometimes if a leukocytes doesn’t recognize a germ it could make us sick. Which is why we use antibiotics and vaccines. We use antibiotics to get rid of bacteria infecting our body, antibiotics do this by attacking the cell wall of bacteria to make it ‘blow up’. But vaccines are more used to destroy viruses, viruses do not have a cell wall, therefore cannot be taken care of antibiotics, and vaccines put dead or weak germs into the body to make the body on alert, then the immune system take care of the rest. Also after the infection is treated the immune system will memorize the infection and are able to treat it easily the next time, an example of one would be chicken pox, most people have it only once in their life, because the immune system remembers it. Basically if you have a antibody for a certain germ you would become protected from it.

Boogers

Boogers are tissues and organs. Boogers in a more scientific said way would be mucus. And one fact I found really interesting but disgusting is that boogers turn green because of the things in the air, and are normally clear, as when you get a runny nose. Running noses happen when you get sick to push out all the bad microbes out of your body. Boogers are one of the immune systems, like I listed above as mucus. Boogers trap microbes in the nose, to prevent microbes from getting in through the nose to infect your body. And they can destroy bacteria from enzymes produced. Boogers aren’t only in your nose though, they are near your lungs, as well, because if you breathe through your nose it goes to your lungs. So mucus is really helpful in protecting the lungs.