MICR 2537 Test 1 Notes - Immunology began as a branch of...

Immunology began as a branch of microbiology; it grew out of the study of infectious diseases and the
body responses to them.
Immunology = Study of the immune system
Immunity is originated from Latin word IMMUNIS
IMMUNITY = A state of protection from infection and disease
The word ‘Immunology’ first appeared in the index Medicuin 1910
A. Introduction to immunology
• Immune system is body defense system against pathogenic microbes
• Immune system is made up from the cells distributed throughout the body, and
predominantly in lymphoreticular organs.
• Immune system function is to :
1.
recognize and
2. respond
…To eliminate foreign invaders
History of Immunology
1. Thucydides
A historian from Peloponnesian who pointed out 2500 years ago, in a remarkable description of an
epidemic in Athens (of what might have been typhus fever or plague ), that those people that recovered
from the disease were never attacked a second time.
2. Middle Ages awareness
Led to attempts in China and Turkey to induce Immunity by inoculating well persons with materials
scraped from skin lesion (pustules) of persons suffering from small pox. The procedure called variolation
practice and was hazardous.
3. Variolation
Practice brought to England by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu for their positive effects, but later
outlawed because of hazardous effects.
4. Sir Edward Jenner
In the late 18 century, a safe related procedure was established by Jenner.
Jenner, a country doctor in England, noted in 1798 that a pustular disease of the horse called ‘the grease’
was frequently carried by farm worker to the nipples of cows, where it was picked up by milkmaids. Spots
then began to appear on the hands of the domestics employed in milking. But what render the cow pox
virus so extremely singular, was that the person who had been thus affected was for ever after secure from
the infection of small pox.
Since Jenner was unclear about the nature infectious agent of cow pox and its relation to small pox he
inserted matter taken from a sore on the hand of dairymaid into the arm of a 8 years boy by means of two
superficial incisions. Two month later, Jenner inoculated the same boy with matter from a small pox
patient. The boy exposure to the mild disease CowPox had made him immune to the deadly disease of
small pox.
It is remarkable that Jenner’s work was not extended until nearly 100 years later by Pasteur that exploit the
general principles underlying vaccination
5. Louis Pasteur
a. Fermentation was due to a living microorganism (1864)
b. Disproved the theory of spontaneous generation (1867)
c. Developed 3 attenuated vaccines (1880)
1. Cholera vaccine for chicken
2 . Anthrax vaccine for sheep

3. Rabies vaccine for human
6. Robert Koch
Anthrax was first transmitted from in vitro culture to animal and fulfilling Koch’s postulates, which were
required to prove that the bacteria caused the disease (1876)
7. Elie Metchinkoff
In 1883, Metchinkoff observed the phagocytosis of fungal spores by leukocytes ( phagocyt e) and
advanced the idea that immunity was primarily due to white blood cells.