Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Reader Question #6

Question: What are allergies?

Answer: Simply put, and allergy is an inappropriate immune response to a normally benign stimulus. An allergen, such as pollen or a foodstuff of some kind, enters your system and the immune system, which should be off doing other things, attacks it. The inflammatory response associates with this immune attack is what causes most of the allergic reaction symptoms.

Immunology starts next quarter, I post a more complete answer sometime in the next few months.

2 comments:

Kurt Pankau said...

Why do we itch?

This is fun.

Anonymous said...

Simple solution to allergies then. Keep the immune system busy doing other things, so it doesn't have time to do the wrong thing. Those guys need strict scheduling and heavy workloads to keep themselves out of trouble.

In other words, drink as much as possible!