Comments on: Is half of what is in immunology textbooks wrong?

By: Rodgel Ernest Ysean O. Ogena II

Rodgel Ernest Ysean O. Ogena II — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:01:07 +0000

the importance of immunization is that it plays a vital role in a human’s health. in the hospital, we nurses emphasize to the watchers the necessity of breastfeeding, as well as strictly following up the newborn’s first immunization. I learn much on this article like when it was said in the article the emphasis of the important role of the period before and shortly after birth in the development of the immune system. At the same time the suggestion that after an individual has been infected with a pathogen such as measles the antigen remains in the body in some form and continues to stimulate the immune system. for me, this is a quite fun to read as i can relate and very informational to many.

By: Donna

Donna — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:41:14 +0000

“He emphasized the important role of the period before and shortly after birth in the development of the immune system. In the first months children are protected by antibodies coming from the mother and the claim was that this has a determining influence on the way the immune system works.”

I believe that this is true. One of the reasons why some countries promote breast-feeding their infants because breast milk helps develop babies’ immune system. At the same time, vaccination on the first year of the baby should also be observed to help prevent certain diseases.

By: hydrobates

hydrobates — Sun, 05 Jun 2011 07:35:50 +0000

Thanks for the interesting information.

Alan

By: Uwe Brauer

Uwe Brauer — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 20:41:54 +0000

Hello

just some comments about your last post, especially about
“It may, however, be that before the invention of agriculture it was impossible to feed many children. ”

The issue is a little complicated:

Most peasant farmers and herders, who constitute the great majority of the world’s actual food producers, aren’t necessarily better off than hunter-gatherers. Time budget studies show that they may spend more rather than fewer hours per day at work than hunter-gatherers do. Archaeologists have demonstrated that the first farmers in many areas were smaller and less well nourished, suffered from more serious diseases, and died on the average at a younger age than the hunter-gatherers they replaced. If those first farmers could have foreseen the consequences of adopting food production, they might not have opted to do so. Why, unable to foresee the result, did they nevertheless make that choice?

One factor is the decline in the availability of wild foods. The lifestyle of hunter-gatherers has become increasingly less rewarding over the past 13,000 years, as resources on which they depended (especially animal resources) have become less abundant or even disappeared. A second factor is that, just as the depletion of wild game tended to make hunting-gathering less rewarding, an increased availability of domesticable wild plants made steps leading to plant domestication more rewarding.

A more indirect way involved the consequences of the sedentary lifestyle enforced by food production. People of many huntergatherer societies move frequently in search of wild foods, but farmers must remain near their fields and orchards. The resulting fixed abode contributes to denser human populations by permitting a shortened birth interval. A hunter-gatherer mother who is shifting camp can carry only one child, along with her few possessions. She cannot afford to bear her next child until the previous toddler can walk fast enough to keep up with the tribe and not hold it back. In practice, nomadic hunter-gatherers space their children about four years apart by means of lactational amenorrhea, sexual abstinence, infanticide, and abortion. By contrast, sedentary people, unconstrained by problems of carrying young children on treks, can bear and raise as many children as they can feed. The birth interval for many farm peoples is around two years, half that of hunter-gatherers. That higher birthrate of food producers, together with their ability to feed more people per acre, lets them achieve much higher population densities than hunter-gatherers.

Uwe Brauer