immunology - You Can Know Things

immunology

Kids don't need to get sick to be healthy

The 'Make America Healthy Again' movement is tapping into the commonly held belief that children in our modern era are less healthy than they used to be. Fueling this sentiment is the 'Hygiene Hypothesis' – an idea postulated in the 1980's that modern, overly sterile

COVID

Will the COVID vaccine sterilize women?

Yesterday someone sent me an article about an alleged side effect of the COVID vaccine: female sterilization. The argument goes like this: there is a protein expressed in the placenta (syncytin-1) that is similar to the coronavirus spike protein encoded by the vaccines. Because these proteins are allegedly so similar,

COVID

What is MIS-C, the weird post-COVID inflammatory thing in kids?

Hello! It’s been a little while since I’ve written a COVID-related post, as I have officially graduated with my PhD and am now back in medical school! (And thus am……. rather busy.) I am a third-year medical student now (if that’s confusing to you, check out this

COVID

Why is COVID different than the flu?

As the current pandemic continues to unfold, people have compared COVID to other diseases to help them evaluate the risks of the disease and to understand why the world’s top experts reacted the way they did to COVID-19. One theme that frequently arises among proponents of a more lax

COVID

Virology 101: Ask a Virologist!

Guest post from virologist Dr. Alex Chang-Graham! For those of you whose last biology class was decades ago, the differences between bacteria, viruses, and other microbes is probably a bit hazy. I asked my friend Dr. Alex Chang-Graham, who studied viruses for her PhD thesis, to give a refresher on

COVID

COVID-19 Antibody Tests – Do They Work, and What Do They Mean?

Guest post by Dr. Caitlin Miller, virologist and immunologist! This post is not intended to provide medical advice; if you have questions about health concerns please consult with your physician. In my last post, we talked about how the body develops immune responses to viruses. Now that we’ve tackled

COVID

How do we become Immune to viruses?

Guest post from Dr. Caitlin Miller, virologist and immunologist! There has been lots of talk about coronavirus antibody tests and immunity in the news, and if you’ve never studied immunology, all of this can be very confusing. Before we get into what the antibody tests mean, first it helps