Fighting disease

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  • Created by: Kelleigh
  • Created on: 09-06-12 18:20

Fighting disease

2 main types of pathogen:

- Bacteria

  • Very small living cells, which can reporduce rapidly inside your body
  • Make you feel ill by > Damaging your cells > Producing toxins (poisons)
  • Useful if they are in your digestive system

- Viruses

  • Are not cells
  • They're no more than just a coat of protein around some genetic material
  • They repeat themselves by invading you cells & using the cells' machinery to produce many copies of themselves, & then the cells will burst, releasing all the new viruses

Your skin, hairs, mucus in your respiratory tract try to prevent microorganisms getting into the body through cuts, small fragments of cells (platelets) help the blood to clot quickly to seal wound. If blood contains low numbers of platelets then it will clott more slowly.

But, if something does make it through then your immune system kicks in, the most important part of it is your white bloods cells

White blood cells travel around in your body & crawl into…

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