Why You Need Your Immune System

With all of the information out there about swine flu and people being worried about whether they should get a flu shot or not, someone asked me about their immune system. Here's a layman's guide as to how the immune system works for viruses.

When a virus enters your body, your immune system recognizes the virus as NOT you, so it begins to attack the virus and kill it. In addition, the immune system is able to take an imprint of the virus so that is makes something called antibodies, which float around in the blood and attach themselves to that particular virus if it is found in a cell or in the blood stream. The virus is only able to thrive and multiply if it gets into the cells and is not killed by the immune system. Of course, the response depends upon the particular virus and your body.

Many people wonder if this is how it works how come I keep getting colds, isn't that a virus. The answer is yes, it is a virus, but the virus keeps mutating just slightly, so that your immune system does not recognize it when it first enters your system. That's why there are flu shots every year, because the viruses mutate and change.