A movie that clearly explains why allergies occur
Kurzgesagt - In a Nutshell
, a YouTube channel that uses animation to explain various things in an easy-to-understand way, has a video explaining why allergies occur and why they can be so deadly to the human body.How This Prawn Can Kill You - Allergies Explained - YouTube
Allergies are like finding a spider in your bedroom and detonating a nuclear bomb.
The spider may die, but it will cause serious damage to its surroundings.
The most common substance that causes allergies is pollen.
There are a wide variety of other substances that can cause allergies, including various foods, animal hair, dust, insect bites, rubber, and your own sweat.
You may suddenly develop an allergy to something you have eaten or touched many times in your life.
You may be going about your day as usual, but before you know it, you may find yourself being taken away in an ambulance.
The reason why the human body develops these allergies is deeply connected to the way humans lived in the past. In the past, humans drank unsanitary water.
Drinking dirty water often led to parasitic infections.
The parasites develop inside the human body and are then excreted in the faeces.
In the past, sewage and drinking water were not strictly separated, creating a loop in which people could become infected again by drinking water contaminated with parasites.
Because parasites have a detrimental effect on the human body, humans have developed immune systems to fight them off.
Parasites have a protective elastic layer on their bodies rather than skin, which acts as a barrier against stomach acid, so a strong attack is needed to do any damage to them.
In the human immune system,
dendritic cells
are the first to detect invading parasites.
Dendritic cells travel to lymph nodes and activate specialized antibody factories called B cells.
The B cells then produce special parasite-fighting weapons called
IgE antibodies
, which have special arms that allow them to attach to the parasite.
Once the IgE antibodies bind to
the mast cells,
which are responsible for the main attack, the body is ready to fight the parasites.
Mast cells store chemical messengers such as
histamine
.
Mast cells lie in wait for the parasites to invade.
When a parasite invades the body, the mast cells attach to it and begin their attack.
The way mast cells attack is by releasing chemical messengers that are stored within themselves.
These released chemicals cause inflammation in an attempt to expel the parasite from the body, and
the goblet cells
also secrete mucus that makes it difficult for the parasite to move.
In addition, some of the chemical messengers released by mast cells act as an 'alarm' to rally troops to defeat the parasite.
Eosinophils,
a type of white blood cell, hear the alarm and rush to the site of inflammation.
Eosinophils also have the ability to directly attack parasites, and in some cases, even kill them.
Basophils
also receive the alert and rush to the scene to coordinate efforts to keep the immune system functioning.
Some of the chemicals released in the fight against these parasites cause
smooth muscle
to contract rapidly.
The smooth muscles contract to expel the contents of the intestines.
In order to fight the parasites, your body will release large amounts of water to try to expel them, and if this happens under the skin, it will make your skin swollen, red, and itchy.
As we've seen, the human body has powerful tools to fight off parasites, but as time has passed and hygiene has improved, parasites have become much less of a problem.
In particular, the complete separation of drinking water and sewage systems, which has broken the loop of reinfection of parasites, has had a major impact.
Even after the parasites are gone, the body's immune system continues to prepare for future parasite invasion.
Even if it is not a reaction to a parasite, if a parasite-like entity invades the body, the immune system may suspect that the parasite is trying to deceive the immune system and sound an alarm.
This overreaction of the immune system causes allergies.
The body is packed with mast cells, which can be thought of as huge bombs.
Even if you are used to eating certain foods, if the food exceeds a certain 'threshold,' your immune system will overreact and explode like a bomb. The weapons that are meant to attack foreign invaders will end up attacking yourself.
If you're lucky, the only effect will be a stuffy nose.
But in the worst case scenario, it can be life-threatening.
Even a terrible disease like Ebola takes a while to kill, but an allergy can be deadly in an extremely short time, within a matter of minutes.
There are still many unknowns about the immune system. First, we don't know why antibodies are produced differently in different people.
It is also unclear why some people suddenly develop allergies or suddenly lose allergies in adulthood.
A change in the environment may also be the cause.
The number of people with allergies is increasing year by year, and some people say that this is due to the disappearance of parasites, but one thing is certain about future policy: 'I don't want to go back to a life with parasites again.' There is no doubt that bringing back parasites to deal with allergies would be like detonating a nuclear bomb because you're scared of the spiders that have appeared in your bedroom.
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