Innate immunity

Innate (=’inborn’) immunity is the first line of defence and non-specific. That is, the responses are the same for all potential pathogens, no matter how different they may be and irrespective of whether the same pathogen may have been encountered before.

This includes physical barriers (for instance the skin or saliva) and cells such as macrophages and neutrophils who gobble up bacteria and other foreign objects and destroy them. 👾

These innate components are ‘ready to go’ and protect us for the first few days of a new infection.

Often, this is enough to clear the pathogen.

But in other cases the first defence may become overwhelmed, and a second line of defence, the so-called adaptive immunity, needs to kick in.