Chapter three of Viruses, Plagues, and History is about immunology with specific focus on how the immune system responds to viral infection and the effect of HIV on the immune system. Building upon concepts of virology covered in the previous chapter, I found this chapter to be both interesting and easy to comprehend. Personally, I appreciated the reference to autoimmune diseases when the chapter was discussing how people with autoimmune disease who are treated with immunosuppressive therapy are at high risk for complications in vaccination because that is something that really interests me. I hope that somewhere in this course, or perhaps this book, there is opportunity to learn more about autoimmune diseases. However, I wish that this chapter went into a little bit more detail explaining or giving examples of immunosuppressive therapies because I think that would be very interesting and perhaps widen my …show more content…
Nevertheless, this chapter did an exceptional job of explaining the function of the immune system as well as the effect of HIV on the immune system.
The immune system has two main functions; to limit the amount of virus made then to clear the virus from the host. This process starts with the crucial ability to discriminate between foreign antigens and the body’s own proteins which is allows the immune system to only attack the virus that has infected the body. Initially upon infection, the immune system responds quickly in ways nonspecific to the particular virus at hand, employing natural killer lymphoid cells and phagocytic macrophages to surround then engulf the virus as well as proteins called complement factors that