How Does the Immune System Remember Diseases?

The immune system is like a detective who learns from every case. When you get sick, your body sends out special detectives called white blood cells to catch the disease. Once they’ve caught it and you recover, some of those detectives stay around to remember what the disease looked like, just in case it comes back.

Take the quiz →

Examples

When you get a cold once, your body remembers it so you don’t get it as badly next time.
Your immune system is like a teacher who learns from each student, the more diseases you fight, the better your immune system gets at fighting them.
If you’ve had chickenpox before, your memory cells know exactly what to do when the varicella-zoster virus comes back.

Ask a question

Discussion

Recent activity

Categories: Biology · Immune System,Memory Cells,Antibodies