Conventional wisdom long held that the human
immune system was no match for cancer. Born of
native cells, the logic went, cancer fooled the
immune system into concluding it was harmless.
Thus protected from attack, cancer easily thrived until its host died.
A deeper understanding of our biological defenses
has changed that. The human immune system does
battle cancer. But we could better optimize our
defenses to fend off malignant disease. That's
clear from cancer treatments attempted in New
York City and Germany as early as the 19th
century. Those experiments and other undervalued
evidence from the medical literature suggest that
acute infectionâin contrast to chronic
infection, which sometimes causes cancerâcan help a body fight tumors.
It's not the pathogens that do the good work. But
the way our bodies respond to the pathogens is
key. Infection events, especially those that
produce fever, appear to shift the innate human
immune system into higher gear. That ultimately
improves the performance of crucial biological
machinery in the adaptive immune system. This
lesson comes, partly, from doctors who risked
making patients sicker to try to make them better.
<http://www.americanscientist.org/issues/id.5439,y.2009,no.1,content.true,page.2,css.print/issue.aspx>Link
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Posted By johannes to
<http://www.monochrom.at/english/2009/02/fever-vs-cancer.htm>monochrom
at 2/15/2009 01:47:00 PM
