“Immunity: the essence of health” is a presentation that aims to bring to the public’s attention the importance of knowing your own body and how it defends itself against external aggressions, since today more than 90% of the diseases we face have as their substrate the imbalance, damage, destruction or deficiency of the immune response.
The subtleties of the mechanisms underlying immunocompetence and immunodeficiency are important for the clinician to tailor therapeutic options to the patient’s needs, and the future of treatments and prevention of various diseases lies in a more holistic understanding of what immunity, immune response and the ways in which they are regulated.
Immunity can be defined as the set of mechanisms by which organisms protect themselves against infection, whether it is caused by bacteria or viruses, fungal or parasitic.
However, in certain situations in which the components of this polyvalent system no longer function synergistically, various autoimmune pathologies may arise, in which the immune response is aggressive and directed against its own structures or, at the opposite pole, may fail, generating states of immunodeficiency or chronic inflammatory diseases. Furthermore, in transplant operations, success depends on the compatibility of the donor and recipient HLA genes, the clinical expression of which is the acceptance of the graft into the recipient’s body without generating an immune response that would damage the newly transplanted organ.
