After a trip to Africa during your intersession, you come back and are diagnosed

Question

After a trip to Africa during your intersession, you come back and are diagnosed with Sleeping Sickness. The parasite that causes sleeping sickness is the trypanosome. Trypanosoma, are protozoa transmitted to humans by tsetse flies. Every few weeks you go back to the doctor to check on how the disease is progressing and you and the doctor notice that there is a periodic rise and fall of in the number of parasites. Having taking immunology the semester before, you know why this phenomenon is occurring. Why do you see a rise and fall in the number of trypanosomes during the course of the disease?

Explanation / Answer

Whywe see a rise and fall in the number of trypanosomes during the course of the disease because trypanosomes having special mechanism of the ANTIGENIC SWITCHING.

tryp. are covered by a single monlayer of the glycoprotein in their membrane known as variant surface glycoprotein as VSG , they have millions of VSG in their cell that PREVENT theimmune system to act against the trypano.

our immune system form antibody and cell mediated immunity against the single type of VSG coded trypano. now when immune response act on organism then they show different variant of VSG to present immunologic response , so they hide from that speicific antibody of immune sytem, and due to million of copies of VSG they tend to do countinue ANTIGENIC switching so we see a rise and fall in the number of trypanosomes during the course of the disease.

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