Vaccinations

• What are vaccinations?

  Introducing small quantities of dead or inactive forms of pathogen into the body
• Vaccination process

  • Cannot lead to the disease in the patient
  • Stimulate white blood cells to produce antibodies against the dead or inactive pathogen
  • White blood cells can divide by mitosis to produce lots of copies of themselves
  • Copies of white blood cells can stay in the blood for decades
  • Can produce the correct antibodies quickly if the same pathogen enters the body even years later
• Vaccination

  Directly protects us from infection by pathogens
• Antibody level

  Increases very quickly to a very high level when the real pathogen invades the body, due to the vaccination
• It is really important that a very large number of people are vaccinated against pathogens
• Herd immunity


  When enough people are vaccinated, it also protects unvaccinated people because the pathogen cannot be passed on