• Question: Do all people have the exact same immune system?

    Asked by PBB to Sian, Max, Lizzie, Francis, Ben on 12 Mar 2018. This question was also asked by Noraa.
    • Photo: Ben Mulhearn

      Ben Mulhearn answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Good question! The short answer is no – we don’t have exactly the same immune systems. They are all very similar though. The little tiny differences between us may be enough to make some people more susceptible to infections, and other people more susceptible to autoimmune diseases.

    • Photo: Max Jamilly

      Max Jamilly answered on 12 Mar 2018:

      Great question! I agree with Ben here.

      Maybe I’d add that, although everyone’s innate immune systems (which we are born with) are very, very similar, our adaptive immune system (which we develop during our lives) can vary a lot. The adaptive immune system depends on the infections that you encounter during your life. When you have a disease or get vaccinated for that disease, the adaptive immune system remembers the disease and learns how to fight it even more quickly the next time.

      You’ll hear people say that they are ‘immune’ to a certain disease. This means that their immune system has seen that disease before and probably remembers what to do.

      Say you visited a friend in a far-away country for the first time and encountered an infection, it is more likely that the infection would affect you than your friend because your friend may already be immune to the infection. Early explorers visiting continents like North America had very different immune systems to the people that they visited, which often led to big outbreaks of infectious disease. Allergies may also have something to do with differences in people’s adaptive immune systems due to what they experience as infants. So in that sense, everyone does have a different immune system.

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