🔄FROM THE ARCHIVE: Researchers are starting to learn how genes, environment and personal choices can make or break our immune health.
This originally appeared in the July/August issue ofFor years, Melanie Musson’s friends have marveled at her superpower: staying healthy no matter what germs are making the rounds. Colds and flu felled plenty of Musson’s dormmates in college, but the viruses always seemed to pass her by. “I never got sick once,” she says. “I got about five hours of sleep a night, I finished school in three years, and I worked 30 hours a week throughout. My best friends labeled me ‘the machine.
While the rest of us battle seasonal flu, chronic allergies and back-to-back wintertime colds, Musson and other immune masters glide through with scarcely a sniffle — somethingsees all the time. “People get exposed to the same virus, the same dose, even the same source. One gets very sick, and the other doesn’t.”
Like fingerprints, everyone’s HLA gene assortment is unique. Your HLA genes give you a broad repertoire of immune defense tactics, but “that repertoire may be great for some microorganisms and lousy for others,” Mellors says. “It’s not like there’s one HLA type that’s highly immune to everything.” This genetic variation helps explain why you might catch every cold virus going around but haven’t gotten a stomach bug in decades.
But your HLA genes aren’t the only ones that shape your immune resistance. The Human Genome Project has identified tens of thousands of gene variants that are more common in people who develop specific diseases and less common in people without these conditions.immunologist Pandurangan Vijayanand
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