Andrei2

1. Describe the difference between leukocyte and white blood cells. There is no difference. "Leukocyte" is the more general and scientific term for white blood cells. Examples of which are, lymphocytes.

2. The term proteins are frequently used in the study of immunology. Explain the term/concept proteins. Proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids. Which is why the simplest form of a protein is amino acids. There are 20 amino acids in total, therefore there can be a lot of combinations.

3. Explain why the Black Death virus, which has caused millions of deaths, was deadly using concepts of immunology. The black death caused quite a lot of deaths. This is because at the time people didn't know a lot about things like antibiotics or how pathogens work. Many of the old medicines were pretty basic, sometime the cure just came from drinking tea or hot water, for example if you had a sore throat.

4. The recent bird flu virus, H7N9, has a 20% fatality rate if one is infected. a) what does it mean - 20% fatality rate? A smaller fatality rate means that the virus is less lethal, whereas if the fatality rate is higher the virus is more deadly. If there is a 20% fatality rate it means that every 20 in a hundred die, which means every 10 in 50 die, every 5 in 25 die and every 1 in 5 dies. Whether or not this is a good rate or not is determined by the death count.

b) How is this virus different from a common flu virus? This virus is different because it is a lot more deadly then a normal cold. Also this virus came from a virus that was usually found in birds. This is pretty interesting because it shows us how quickly viruses learn to adapt.

c) Are there ways to prepare our body immune system against such fatal, deadly virus? If possible then we can deactivate bits if the virus and use it in vaccines. Then when the virus attacks you, you should be pretty safe due to the fact that your body already recognised it and developed a strategy to fight it.

d) The bird flu virus wasn't infectious to humans before; explain why it could become viral and harmful to humans. One way the virus might have been able to become infectious to humans is because we tend to use a lot of antibiotics for pretty much everything. This allowed the virus to learn about the antibiotics and adapt to them, thus no longer allowing the antibiotics to have an effect on them.

e) Right now, the flu is unable to infect a person through human to human transmission; if it can infect through human to human transmissions, what could have changed in the virus? Most likely the DNA. This means that the virus managed to evolve/mutate so that it will be able to survive not in human bodies but also on everyday objects.