Tuesday, December 07, 2010

When immune systems run amok

"...epidemiologist Thomas Reichert of the Entropy Research Institute in Lincoln, Massachusetts, finds Polack's hypothesis completely plausible. There's not much that could cause this kind of lung damage except an invasion of T lymphocytes (the immune system's "warrior cells"), he says, and Polack found no evidence of that. The immune system's overreaction, says Reichert, is "kind of a last-ditch way of handling something. ... If we can't identify you specifically enough, but we know there's a lot of you, we're just going to blow the whole damn place up."