My life as a white blood cell

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My life as a White blood cell!

Table of contents

Let me introduce myself  

Lines of Defenses

Specific, Active, Passive immunity

Koch’s rules

How diseases spread

STDs

HIV and your immune system

Word search

Let me introduce myself!

Hi, you all know who I am. Well, if you don’t, I’m a white blood cell. I’m always in your circulatory system. I surround and digest foreign organisms and chemicals. You can say I am a patrol officer because I constantly patrol your body by sweeping up and digesting those nasty bacteria that invade your body. I also can slip between cells of tiny blood vessels called capillaries. If I can’t destroy the bacteria fast enough, you could get a fever. Most pathogens are sensitive to temperature, so a slight change in body temperature slows their growth but increases your body defenses. Pathogens, probably a word you may not know but it’s just a big word for disease-causing bacteria.  

Lines of defenses

Imagine….Are you imagining? Ok. Imagine that you were going hiking and you come across a bee on your shirt. You stay still and you see the bee stick up his stinger and you get scared, so you try to flick it off. But it ends up stinging you. The bee was trying to protect itself. Its first-line defense is its position and its second-line defense is the stinger. Some of your first-line defenses are your skin and respiratory, digestive and circulatory system against pathogens. Think of a magic force field, most things can’t get through, but if there is a hole in your force field, things are able to get through. Just like your skin, most pathogens can’t get through unless there is a cut.

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Specific, Active, and Passive Immunity

I know what you’re thinking when you hear these words, “What do they mean??” Well it’s quite simple when you think about it. Specific immunity- you know when your body fights diseases, it’s fighting molecules that are not supposed to be there. Those are called antigens. They can be separate molecules or can be found on the surface of a pathogen. When your immune system detects molecules that are not supposed to be there, there is this signal and special lymphocytes called T cells respond. T cells are sort of like me but not ...

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