There are several reasons including contaminated food, poor nutrition, an inadequate intake of antioxidant-rich vegetables, and a toxic environment. An intoxicated body, pollution, as well as oxidative stress promote inflammation and impair your immune system’s ability to fight infection. Indeed we can ask the same question concerning cancer and why cancer is still growing and killing people!
While we say that Covid-19 killed so far 2.6 million people worldwide, what about cancer with 12 million deaths worldwide? Yet this statistic seems to be normal for our medical community.
We have reason to believe that today we have exhausted our immune system, especially our NK cells. This is often caused by our lifestyle choices, bad food, industrial food, excess stress, pollution, excess intake of pharmaceutical drugs. Thus, we endure the increase of cancer disease and now our current pandemic.
In a recent article published in the September 2020 Scientist, “The Immune Hallmarks of COVI-19”, the question is raised is why some people die, while others recover? This is thought to depend in a large part on the condition of the body’s immune response, NK cells are also altered in chronic Covi-19 cases, compared to non-severe cases as per recent Swedish research. So again the immune system is a central part of our protection against a pandemic, especially considering the NK cell function.
I recently read an excellent article (2) that NK cells activate and function in the control of viral infections. This will help develop new NK Cell-based Therapies. Therefore this is not only a single opinion of Geer Vanden Bossche Ph.D., a vaccine specialist, but he is joined by a growing number coming into view of combating disease with more efficacy with no side effects or death from Covi-19. Or consider we even have much fewer infected people.
Why Natural Killer Cells?
One good reason is that NK cells can directly recognize and destroy both virus-infected and cancer cells without prior antigen exposure. This is why they are called Natural Killer cells. Scientists always thought that all cells need for immunity are antibodies to recognize intruders including T-B cells and NK cells.
For instance, the Pfizer vaccine, which is more of a gene therapy, injects a small piece of the virus, the spike protein. Then, the mRNA will produce the harmful protein that supposedly activates T cells and B cells to kill the virus, further keeping in memory in case of another infection. One team from the medical school at Harvard University, Boston has demonstrated that Natural Killer cells have their unique memory and can recognize the intruder.
N.K cells can send a response specifically against an antigen that they already have encountered, thus NK cells are participating in the strategy of the adaptive immune response, which provides a more efficient and rapid opportunity to combat the disease.
Another advantage of NK cells is that they produce various cytokines such IFN-y, TNFa, IL2, IL3, IL12, etc.... to stimulate other immune cells such as dendritic cells, macrophages, and T-cells, to generate a better immune response.
To be continued...
Dont miss PART 2 in the upcominmg June issue of Masters of Health Magazine.