Can being happy help me fight infection?
CrowdScience
00:00
The Importance of Fight or Flight
Antibodies are great at extracellular foes but antibodies can't get inside cells. Antibodies halt viruses when they're in the kind of intracellular virus factory mode and so you'd like to be able to shut those factories down. The way the immune system does that is by sampling material inside the cell and showing it to a different kind of combatant from the immune system called a T cell. If it recognizes a piece of debris that came from some foreign source particularly from a virus the T cell actually essentially activates a suicide signal on the infected cell and kills it. This is our primary way of fighting viruses - fight or flight. But this only works if your default state is
Transcript
Play full episode
