Fun Fact: You don’t have an allergic reaction, to something you are allergic to, the first time you encounter it.
It’s true. You do not have an immediate allergic/immune reaction the 1st time you encounter something (stimulus) that you will later discover you react to. Your immune system doesn’t work that way.
Someone today told me they always have an immediate allergic/immune reaction to everything the very first time they try it. This baffled me because with all the hoopla around vaccines I thought everyone knew how the immune system worked and the big vaccine debate was over if the Covid vaccine actually worked and was safe because there hadn’t been ample time to study the virus. This is a good reason to be conservative about such things.
The first time you encounter a stimulus that you will react to, your body’s immune response is to make an antibody that encodes for that stimulus and produce a small number of white blood cells with this new antibody to have ready if you encounter the stimulus again. The 2nd time you encounter the stimulus, you will have an allergic/immune response using these new antibodies, which will immediately try to wipe-out the intruder. The time between the 1st encounter and the 2nd encounter can be very short and this might be where the confusion lies.
Children’s immune systems are actively making antibodies for hundreds of stimuli they come in contact with daily. They will hold onto all this encoding for the future. By the time they are a teenager, their body is intended to be fully immune established for its environment.
This is why we use vaccines against, let’s say Smallpox. So, if you are inoculated against Smallpox and you come in contact with it, you will have an immediate and strong defensive reaction to the virus and will kill it while its numbers are low in your body and it hasn’t had a chance to grow or cause damage. If you are not inoculated, your body’s first step is not attack and defend, it is to take time to analyse and develop an antibody. This time taken to develop the antibody allows an aggressive invader time to get established and grow or weaken the body. This is why so many native peoples died when settlers brought modern, quick developing viruses such as Smallpox to North America. They didn’t have the antibodies and the virus is so aggressive that by the time their bodies made the antibody it was too late. The virus had spread and only those with the fastest and the strongest immune systems survived.
Resources
1.National Institute for Health. Decoding the variety of human antibodies,
https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/decoding-variety-human-antibodies
2.Hopkins Medicine. Allergies and the Immune System,
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/allergies-and-the-immune-system
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