Your body has the ability to resist or overcome a disease by a process called immunity. Your body acquires this immunity in several ways.
For example, if you had a disease such as yellow fever and had recovered from it, you would never get it again. This is because your body has produced antibodies to fight the yellow fever virus, and these antibodies remain in your blood to give you immunity, or fight off the disease if you are ever exposed to it again.
But there are other diseases, such as influenza, which you can get many times. This is because the antibodies that fought it the first time don’t stay in your blood. However, you can become immune to a disease like influenza by getting a vaccination, which is simply an injection of the weakened influenza virus. Your body then produces antibodies to protect itself against influenza for a certain length of time. After that, booster shots, or additional injections, are given when the disease seems to be spreading in your particular area of the country.
Antibodies from a mother’s blood protect unborn and newborn babies from certain diseases for several months!
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What if we became affected, but not killed by disease. Is it possible that we are doing the wrong thing by fighting disease rather than accepting it for possible immunity? There must be a way to find find immunity for most diseases! Wouldn’t that mean that antibiotics which lower the immune system can be worse for you not better? What if we are looking at it with the wrong point of view. These things are all living organisims. Why can’t we adopt and live in harmony with them? I think we are looking at disease all wrong. Now I hope that some genius comes up with a way to allow these organisims to survive in us without damaging our system, but rather helping us become stronger. If we were as strong as a virus we would become rather strong… Don’t you think?
So, your non-specific disease defenses are strengthened when you have been given a vaccine and become immune to the particular disease, or are the defenses produced?
For many diseases any exposure would be fatal, hence the need for vaccination. Diseases like influenza contain varying degrees of intensity and so require vaccination to fight all forms, even if certain ones are not life-threatening. Our body is constantly creating immunogens for any outside bacteria, to be totally void of vaccination would overwhelm our system and lead to massive casualities.
what is vaccines all about