My Daily Learning Lesson

I like learning. One of my truly bad habits is to go off on a link tangent when reading one story and usually end up reading something totally unrelated, but interesting. Most often I end up doing this while attempting to learn a little something new each and every day.

This morning, I had to go online to do medical research (my leg infection appears to possibly be flaring back up). As I'm going along trying to learn as much as I can about the particulars of what I had last time, I came across this interesting article from the National Institute of Health, which talks about how Group A Streptococcus can evade our natural immune system.

That was all well and interesting, but I've already learned about how some diseases will evolve into little superbugs that make life miserable for the infected.

What I did find interesting was the grossly simplified description of how the body actually fights these little viral terrorists:

During battle with most foreign microbes, PMNs successfully "eat" invading predators, a scientific process called phagocytosis. After microbes are engulfed, PMNs produce deadly oxygen radicals, such as hydrogen peroxide and hypoclorous acid (the active ingredient in household bleach), and release toxic granules to kill the enemy.

So the body essentially makes it's own hydrogen peroxide and bleach to kill off the little buggies.

Wierd little fact, but something that I just find to be kind of cool.